The Book of Old Houses

by Sarah Graves

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” I said. And then as if summoned by my thought Ann herself walked in, wearing skinny black jeans, a white silk shirt, and a good leather jacket. On her feet were a pair of high black-leather boots with toes so sharp you could’ve skewered a shish kebab on them. She’d exchanged her hoop earrings for bright tube-shaped danglers the size of bass-fishing lures, and her red lipstick for orange; otherwise, with that head of black hair gelled into daggerish spikes and eye makeup so exotic that it probably glowed in the dark, it was the same old Ann.

  The words I want were practically tattooed on her forehead. She at least had manners enough to take a table by herself rather than intrude right away, but I knew by the way her eyes narrowed when she spotted me that I was getting a delayed sentence, not a pardon.

  “Go on,” I told Dave, “and don’t dawdle, please.” The rest of our group would be here soon, too.

  He nodded. “I’ve already told you Horace and I used to go on book-hunting trips together. I’d just gotten out of college, and he was . . .”

  “Never mind that. Cut to the chase.” More people were coming in, gathering at the tables and ordering drinks.

  “Dangerous old books,” Dave said flatly. “Books like that, even fragments of them, are in high demand in certain circles. They contain information that people believe they might use. Or misuse, more to the point.”

  “You think that’s why Bert wants it? The book’s collectible, so it’s valuable?”

  DiMaio shook his head. “Bert’s not a collector. I’ve known him a long time, and I doubt he’s changed much from the kind of fellow he was when we were in school.”

  “Why, then?” Tapping her foot impatiently, Ann Talbert sat drinking a wine cooler and waiting for her chance at me. The triumphant gleam in her eye didn’t bode well.

  “Merkle wants your book for the simplest of all reasons,” Dave said. “He wants to use it himself.”

  Oh, please. A mental picture of Merkle dressed in wizard’s garb, a pointy hat and a shiny robe with stars on it, maybe, rose in my mind.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” I objected. “It’s just a list of names.”

  Written in blood, said an unpleasant voice in my head. Names no one could possibly have known, back when the list was compiled.

  But someone had. “Right,” said DiMaio . “But think about it; an object that can’t exist. Yet it does. How could such a thing be created?”

  He eyed me levelly, waiting for my answer as if he were back at his school once more and I were his student.

  “Well,” I replied slowly. “Not that I believe in any such thing myself, mind you . . .”

  Oh, no? sniped the voice in my head. “. . . but if it isn’t just a clever, complicated hoax . . . then I suppose it would have to be done by . . . magic?”

  I wanted him to laugh at this idea, but I knew he wouldn’t. And he didn’t.

  “Magic,” he repeated. “And given that the ink in the book is exactly what you guessed it must be . . .”

  Human blood. “. . . I’d say it must be black magic. Wouldn’t you?

  “So now imagine you’re Merkle, who’s spent his life trying not to cleanse the earth of evil stuff, but to gather it to himself and use it.”

  “Oh, please,” I began, but his gesture stopped me.

  “No, hear me out, Jake. Short of a spellbook that tells how to do it, what else would you want more than an object created by it?” His eyes held mine. “Drenched in the power you covet, and whose very existence proves that the power must be real?”

  “Oh,” I breathed, convinced—for a moment—that everything he’d said was true. No doubt he really was an excellent teacher.

  But then I remembered the missing gun, Jason Riverton’s poisoned body, and Horace Robotham’s crushed skull, none of which had a single damned thing to do with magic.

  They had to do with murder. “All right, you had me going there,” I told him. “But your explanation fails to cover a few important details.”

  Dave looked impatient. “Look, I realize it sounds crazy. But I didn’t take my gun back. I didn’t kill the Riverton boy.”

  Sure, like he’d have admitted it to me. He went on, “I think there’s a good chance Merkle took the book from Horace, with the boy’s help or not. I think Bert has it, and he mustn’t be allowed to—”

  “Wrong,” Ann Talbert interrupted. Apparently she’d gotten tired of waiting. “So, Jacobia,” she went on, “I hear Jason Riverton’s computer had initials typed on the screen. DD,” she added to DiMaio, as if daring him to comment.

  She was slurring her words a little; that wine cooler, or whatever it was, clearly wasn’t her first drink of the evening.

  “Good news travels fast,” I replied. “Trust you to be tactful and sensitive about the whole thing, though.”

  Right then if I could have lifted Ann bodily and dumped her over the dock rail outside, I would have. But she didn’t care.

  “As for the book, I don’t know who you were talking about but whoever it is, he doesn’t have it. I do,” she said.

  She smirked, having dropped what she knew was a news bomb. “And,” she declared with a wriggle of glee, “I intend to keep it.”

  • • •

  Upstairs from the bar, the Lime Tree dining room was all pale polished wood, white tablecloths, and tall windows running along the water side of the building. Our table sported a lavish bunch of greenish-white hydrangeas as its centerpiece.

  By the time we were all seated my complexion was probably pretty green, too, and Dave’s was worse. “But . . .” he’d spluttered at Ann’s announcement minutes earlier, then blurted: “How?”

  “Someone mailed the book to me,” she’d said. “Anonymously. Someone who must’ve known I deserve it, I appreciate it, I—”

  “Ai-yi-yi,” Ellie murmured to me now at the table; I’d told her about Ann’s surprising claim, on our way upstairs.

  With us were Bella, Wade, George Valentine, and my father, seated beside Bella Diamond despite her best efforts to shoo him away. At least they weren’t openly squabbling; I guessed he must’ve postponed the ring-presenting project.

  And Dave DiMaio was with us, of course, sitting on my left.

  Sam had been invited, too, but said that until further notice, he wouldn’t be coming to any places that served liquor.

  “What’s Ann mean, make use of it ?” Ellie asked, still in a whisper.

  Apparently in an effort to raise her annoyance quotient right up to the shriek level, Ann had taken a table near ours. So on top of everything else I got to watch soup getting spooned into her face.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She went through her usual spiel, all about how she’s an artist so she has special feelings that we all need to respect. Only this time, she’s loaded.”

  Ann started on a chef’s salad; we had barely put our orders in. I gathered the waitstaff liked her as well as I did, and wanted to get rid of her quickly.

  “I’ll give her a feeling,” I added grimly. “When I told her it belonged to me and she should return it, she practically stuck her tongue out at me.”

  “Hey. You okay?” Wade looked handsome in good gray slacks, pale-blue broadcloth shirt, and a blazer.

  “Now that you’re here, I am. Want to beat somebody up for me?”

  “Anytime. Twice on Sundays.” His mouth formed a quick kiss in my direction; then the waitress returned, and soon we were all eating and chatting cheerfully enough, under the circumstances.

  But as the plates were being cleared I began noticing other faces, people leaving their tables and moving out onto the deck to await the fireworks. Bob Arnold was here with the pair of state cops I’d seen earlier; apparently their opinion of his first-on-scene work hadn’t been as negative as he expected.

  Ann Talbert still lurked nearby, too; any nearer and she could’ve reached out to take food off my plate. I sort of wished she would, so I could slap her hand away. And I spotted Merrie Fargeorge with tw
o women whom I recognized as Eastport Historical Society members.

  “Don’t look now,” Ellie said quietly. “Table for one, near the kitchen door.”

  “Criminy.” Bert Merkle hunched protectively over his food as if fearing someone might steal it, casting dark glances between forkfuls of bloody prime rib. Catching my eye, he grinned, raised a glass to his grease-stained lips, then resumed devouring rare beef.

  “Enough,” I snapped, getting up. “He’s spoiling my appetite retroactively.”

  You, too, I felt like telling Ann Talbert. But when I turned to where she’d been sitting, Ann was gone.

  A band had set up under the lights near the outdoor bar and begun playing waltzes. Night had fallen; George jumped down onto the fireworks barge, its running lights moving smoothly away into the darkness on the water.

  Wade swung me into his arms and onto the dance floor, his hand between my shoulder blades warming through my skin and into my bones.

  As he whirled me around and drew me near again a breathless laugh escaped me. “There’s my girl,” he said. “I was starting to think I might not hear that laugh today at all.”

  I can’t dance a lick except in Wade’s arms. “And that,” he added as the fireworks began, “would’ve been a shame.”

  A boom! shook the dock and a bright-white chrysanthemum erupted over the water. With a whizzing sound, a twisty-purple sizzler with a flaring red tail spiraled up.

  “That DiMaio guy giving you problems?” Wade asked. “Because if you want, I can drop-kick him off the end of the pier.”

  I laughed again, mostly from knowing that if I asked him to, he would. The pleasant feeling didn’t last long, though, as over Wade’s shoulder I spotted Bert Merkle coming out onto the dock.

  With his wolfish profile and a calculating expression on his unshaven face, he looked like a predator casually easing into the henhouse. Scram, I thought, then lost sight of him in the crowd as Bob Arnold made his way over to us.

  “State guys’d like to talk to you, Jacobia,” he told me. “Just routine stuff. How Jason seemed to you and so on. Tomorrow?”

  I nodded. He went on to find Ellie, to tell her, I supposed, the same thing. Wade and I moved to the edge of the floor. A barrage of fireworks went off all at once, like fiery confetti overhead.

  “Oohh,” said the voices of the people on the dock. “Ahhh.”

  Then came the scream, sounding at first like an outburst of hilarity. But when it came again, fainter, an uneasy ripple moved through the crowd.

  People quit dancing. The music stopped. The dock lights came on; we all blinked in the sudden glare.

  “Somebody fell,” a woman said. “Off the dock, someone . . .”

  I counted heads; Ellie, Bella, my father, and Wade were all visible. But where was Dave DiMaio ?

  Then I spotted him. He’d climbed up onto the dock railing.

  “Hey, get down from there!” Bob Arnold roared, trying to see out into the water and to move the anxious crowd back.

  Dave’s hand shielded his eyes from the overhead lights. From the fireworks barge, a barrage went up, heavy blasts dumping pools of colored illumination onto the black waves.

  Another scream came from the water, fainter still. An outboard engine fired up nearby but if they couldn’t find her in the dark—it was a woman’s voice, I was pretty certain—a boat wouldn’t be much help.

  I pushed through the crowds to the dock railing. “Where?” Bob Arnold demanded of DiMaio , struggling meanwhile to release an orange life ring from the safety line tied to the rail-post.

  “I don’t know,” DiMaio replied, squinting into the darkness. “I thought I saw something, but . . .”

  Bob pulled a utility knife from the clutch of equipment on his duty belt and freed the life ring. But he still didn’t know where to throw it. Just then a fourth scream came, the sound of a last gasp if I ever heard one.

  The fireworks barge turned its searchlight on. The fat white beam strobed the water, tipping the waves with its icy glow.

  “Wade,” I began urgently.

  Grimly he eyed the proceedings. “Nothing we can do.”

  Another low rumble approached from the south, a much bigger beam on the water ahead of it. The Coast Guard, I realized with momentary relief; they practiced this stuff all the time.

  But by now, minutes had gone by. And in fifty-degree water, that was time enough.

  Still on the rail, Dave DiMaio scanned the waves as the searchlights crosshatched. How he managed to keep his balance up there I had no idea, especially when he began kicking his shoes off.

  “No,” I whispered, aghast. Because maybe he was a swimmer and maybe he wasn’t, but either way he had no idea how strong the currents were here.

  Bob Arnold stuck a hand out to snatch the foolhardy wouldbe rescuer down from his perch. But as he did so, Dave jumped.

  And swam straight out. “He’s a goner,” I heard someone say.

  “DiMaio!” Bob shouted. “Stop! Tread water and wait!”

  “Attention, you in the water!” came an amplified voice from the Coast Guard’s vessel. Its deck lit up brightly, it maneuvered to where DiMaio swam.

  “Stand by!” the voice ordered as the crew members took their rescue stations.

  DiMaio ’s face was a tiny, intermittent dot of white in the floodlit water. Then it vanished. Two Coast Guard rescue swimmers went over the orange craft’s side as in the distance the low whap-whap of a helicopter’s rotor grew louder.

  “Where is he?” I whispered to Wade. But I was afraid I knew.

  “Come on,” Wade said, tightening his arm around my shoulder. “You don’t have to see any more of this.”

  Still I resisted as George Valentine leapt from the docking barge and came toward us. “Why the hell did that idiot jump in?” he demanded. “Didn’t he think one drowning was enough?”

  Scanning the far side of the dance area, he spotted Ellie and hurried to wrap her in an embrace. Over by the outdoor bar I spotted my father and Bella, she with a hand to her lips and he with an arm around her; for once, she wasn’t trying to shake him off.

  The helicopter arrived with its own set of lights. Crisscrossing the waves, the beams moved like fingers pointing at nothing. “Who was it?” one of the busboys asked Wade.

  “Some woman,” answered the band’s guitarist, coming out to start packing up his stuff.

  Because the party was over. “One guy in the bar said he was right there when it happened. Said he saw her go by on the way up and over, and then she was gone.”

  He closed the snaps on his guitar case. “Guy said she had on these huge earrings.”

  A horrid suspicion struck me. “Wade,” I began just as Ellie hurried over to me. “You don’t suppose . . .”

  “George talked to Bob Arnold,” she broke in. “Bob says Ann Talbert’s things are still upstairs in the coat room. Jacket with ID in the pocket. And nobody can find her.”

  The helicopter rose and swung away, then steadied to resume the search. “Tide’s turned,” Wade observed.

  “She wouldn’t leave without her things,” Ellie said.

  “No.” I looked out to where the Coast Guard’s Zodiac had paused in its own search pattern, its strobe motionless. Suddenly a line flew out from the craft, briefly shining.

  “Hey!” A shout went up from the local men still clustered at the end of the dock. “They’ve found someone!”

  “I’ve got to go,” said Ellie. “George is picking me up out front.”

  Her face was pale with anxiety and dampened by mist; her red hair, escaped from the combs she’d pushed into it, clung wetly in tendrils on her white forehead. She gave me a quick hug, her eyes conveying what we both knew: that Dave DiMaio had been there when Ann Talbert bragged to me about having the old book.

  And that he’d been out here somewhere when she went over the rail. Not that it couldn’t have been an accident. The rail was high and extremely sturdy, as it had to be for the public, but she’d been under the
influence. She could’ve climbed up partway onto it, then leaned over too far. Or maybe somebody helped her, pointing something out to her—something that wasn’t there—and giving her a shove.

  As Ellie departed, I thought about how easily it could have been done, at night in a crowd with everyone watching fireworks.

  “They’re pulling someone in. Looks like . . . alive.” Bob Arnold came back with the state cops. One carried a pair of field glasses, peered through them.

  Even without the glasses I could make out a motionless shape being hauled over the Zodiac’s transom. “I don’t know,” I began doubtfully. “I can see a person, but . . .”

  But then the shape moved. More of the vessel’s deck lamps came on: dark hair. White shirt. And . . . a striped tie.

  Suddenly the figure clambered up, staggered to the rail.

  “Dave DiMaio ,” I said. “You’re right, he looks okay.”

  As for Ann Talbert . . . I’ve got that book . . . and I’m keeping it. God, why hadn’t she just kept her mouth shut?

  “Looks like they’ve got another one.” Bob had taken the field glasses from the state guy. “Black pants, white shirt.”

  “That’s what Ann Talbert was wearing. Is she . . . ?”

  “They’re doing CPR.”

  But she’d been in the water half an hour, wearing leather boots too heavy to swim in. They’d have filled up fast and hauled her down like a couple of anchors.

  Wade put his arm around me; I leaned against him sorrowfully. As medical first responders, Ann’s rescuers couldn’t pronounce her dead or quit trying to revive her.

  Not without a licensed physician’s okay. So she couldn’t be officially drowned until she reached dry land. But then . . .

  Then she would be.

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  Fancy meeting you here.”

  Dave DiMaio looked up, startled by my voice and blinded by the flashlight I aimed at his face. It was just past midnight, and when I surprised him he’d been trying unsuccessfully to remove a window screen from Ann Talbert’s Lyon Street house.