The Book of Old Houses (8 page)

And that it was hopeless. Oh, I'd still do it; I'd promised Ellie, whose own house was too small, while the church halls and other usable gathering-rooms in Eastport were already booked at this time of the year, months or even years in advance.

But as for gaining Merrie's approval, I could entertain at the White House and not get that. Decades of confronting rowdy schoolchildren had made her about as personally vulnerable as a cargo freighter, and about as likely to change course easily.

And she'd already formed her opinion of me. Which on the plus side meant that now I knew just what to say to her, too.

“Merrie, I can't help you. As I told you, I don't know Dave DiMaio personally, and I have no reason to pursue an acquaintance with him.”

Other than the old book,
I remembered, but I had little expectation he'd be able to come up with that. I met Merrie's gaze.

“So if you've got something to say to him, you're just going to have to find him and tell him about it, yourself,” I added, offering a polite if not particularly friendly smile as an olive branch. Whether she took it or not was her affair.

She didn't. “Oh, yes, you can do something,” she retorted, not backing down. “And you should. When you're as old as I am, Jacobia, you'll realize it's much better to be
proactive
about these things.”

Punctuating this with a look that could've sizzled all the paint off my old woodwork, she gave her grocery cart a shove and hurried away from me.

Criminy,
I thought with a sinking heart, watching her go; never mind his dratted gun. Dave DiMaio was apparently quite capable of wreaking havoc just with his mouth.

“Why do people
even care?” I wondered aloud when I got home.

“Because their past is all they've got, some of them,” Bella replied.

True enough; nowadays ownership of a big old house was more likely to mean you were poor than the opposite, what with taxes, heat, insurance, and—a huge, echoing crash came from the bathroom above, followed by a string of curses—maintenance. “Or the history they do have isn't what they want on display for the world to see,” Bella added.

Also true; Eastport's past was so full of spies, smugglers, traitors, pirates, and—more recently—clients of the federal government's witness-protection program, it was a wonder any of the locals ever spoke to anyone outside their immediate families.

Which some didn't. “Anyway, Merrie is the closest thing Eastport has to an opinion-maker,” my housekeeper added. “If she says he's causing you trouble around town, then he is.”

She stopped scrubbing the oven just long enough to accept the biscuit ingredients I'd brought home. The grim set of her jaw as she put them away in the cupboard suggested she'd had yet another talk with my father, and that it hadn't gone well.

Just then he came downstairs, covered with plaster dust. “I got the tub loosened up off the floor,” he reported, wiping his face on the blue paisley bandanna he kept stuffed in his overalls pocket.

Bella stuck her head in the oven. From her scowl I gathered she wished it were full of gas.

“Coupla' days, I can gather up enough help to haul it out of there,” my father said, ignoring her.

“Fine,” I said resignedly. “In the meantime Wade can take his shower at the terminal building before he comes home, and—”

“Hey, Mom!” Sam interrupted, bursting in through the back door. “Mom, do we have somebody staying here who's an FBI guy? Or homeland security? Because I was just downtown and I heard . . .”

The dogs jumped up to greet him. “No, we don't have anyone staying here,” I said. “As of now, we don't even have a working bathroom, so I don't see how we
could
have anyone—”

My father went out, the screen door slamming hard. Bella straightened and shot a look after him; my heart fell at the sight of it.

Then the phone rang and it was Nina from Wadsworth's hardware store calling to say my houseguest was quite the conversationalist, wasn't he, and did I know just how inquisitive he was being? Since sometimes people got off on the wrong foot in Eastport, she said gently.

As if I didn't know. When I first got here I'd tried paying a bird-hunting neighbor who brought me a brace of partridges, their breast feathers darkly bloodstained and heads lolling helplessly. Surely I could give him something for the birds, I'd said, pulling money from my wallet while attempting unsuccessfully to conceal my revulsion, and it took weeks to recover my credibility with that one guy alone, never mind all the other people he told about it.

After Nina's call the phone rang again several times more, and it was the volunteer in the historical-society gift shop, the clerk at the soda shop, the billing-department lady at the water company, and somebody from the pizza place.

Finally I heard from the guy at the Mobil station who always took good care of me when I went in there, asking if I wanted him to go ahead and service the red Saab that Dave DiMaio had driven into town—it needed a new tail light—or should the service-station fellow just let all the air out of the tires? The latter, he confided, was his inclination.

“Man's a worse snoop than you,” the gas-station guy added.

Ignoring this, I thanked him, and requested that he please not harm Dave DiMaio's car in any way, since Dave might be a pain but I saw no reason to take it out on an innocent vehicle. Besides, he'd need the car to get out of town, I pointed out.

When I hung up, Sam had finished heaping the laundry basket with, apparently, every clothing item he owned, and was rummaging the kitchen cabinets for, apparently, every food item I owned.

“See ya,” he called, carrying a plate piled high with Oreos, gingersnaps, cake slices, sweet pickles, a bottle of apple juice, and a bag of grapes into the parlor, where I heard the television go on.

His evening shift at the fish-packing plant started soon—being a drunk had ruined his other job opportunities in Eastport—and since eight hours per night of fish-innards removal (not counting those mackerel) was enough to spoil even his appetite, he needed to eat early.

I didn't think the heavy-on-the-sugar part of my son's diet was necessarily a good sign, but at least it wasn't heavy on bourbon. Bella, meanwhile, had finished returning the oven to a state that was cleaner than new and begun on the kitchen woodwork, which was already so spotless, it glowed in the dark.

“Togetherness,” she muttered while she rubbed it. “Highly overrated,
if
you ask me.
Which
of course no one has.”

And I understood perfectly, because it suddenly occurred to me that no one had asked me, either: I mean, whether I wanted a mysterious gun-stealing visitor, an obsessive-compulsive housekeeper trying to repel a persistent suitor who happened to be my father, a newly recovering (I hoped) alcoholic son with a sugar addiction, a demolished bathroom that wouldn't have been if I hadn't taken such a wild notion, or an imminent party for a highly esteemed Eastport lady who apparently enjoyed my company almost as thoroughly as I did hers.

That is, not. So while Bella washed woodwork with a sponge soaked in bleach-water and Sam devoured Oreos while watching a ball game and the dogs snored beside him on the best chairs in the parlor, I called Ellie. I told her that if she cared about my welfare even a little bit she'd stop whatever she was doing and come right back over here again, pronto.

And she arrived
in about three minutes; I met her out on the porch.

“So all I'm saying is, whatever DiMaio's doing, maybe we should try getting out in front of it, that's all. Don't you agree? And afterward we don't have to—”

Ellie tactfully refrained from remarking that this was exactly what she'd suggested only a few hours ago. “Why do you suppose he wants to know about Eastport history?” she wondered. “People's families, houses, and ancestors and so on.”

Because what could that have to do with Horace Robotham's death? “Well, the history stuff could be book-related somehow,” I guessed. “But if that's why he's here—”

“Precisely.” Her green eyes narrowed. “If it's the book and not the death that interests him, why bring a
gun
?”

From the maple tree in the yard a single leaf twirled down innocently onto the lawn; the first of many. Soon we wouldn't only be wanting to take showers; we'd be wanting
hot
showers.

“On the other hand, if you go somewhere meaning to use a gun, why advertise that you've got one?” she went on. “That whole business of him wanting you to lock it up . . .”

“Maybe it was just his way of letting me know he had it,” I mused aloud. “Some kind of warning, maybe. But in that case why
give
it to me?
He
was the one who suggested . . .”

Sam spoke suddenly from the other side of the screen door. “I used to put cherry brandy in bottles of cherry Coke.”

“As a cover-up,” Ellie said instantly, turning to him. She was quick on the uptake.

“Uh-huh. Funny thing was,” Sam said, “it didn't fool anyone else. But it did me. I actually got so I could pretend there wasn't any booze in it at all.”

“Your point being?” I asked, bewildered.

Don't coddle him,
all the counselors at the rehab place had instructed me.
Don't condescend.

He squinted through the screen at us. “My point is, when I drank it, it was like I really
didn't
know what I was doing.”

He took a breath. “So maybe this guy doesn't know what he's doing, either. Maybe the one he's really trying to fool is . . .”

“Himself,” concluded Ellie. “Half the time he does want to do something with the gun, and the other half . . .”

“Thanks, Sam,” I said as he went back to deal with more of his laundry. Since coming home he added detergent with the studious care of someone measuring out substances in a chemistry laboratory.

“What do you think?” I asked Ellie when he was gone. “If Dave DiMaio just found out about his friend's death last night, he might still be too upset to think clearly.”

“Mmm, so Sam could be right about a confusion factor. Maybe even DiMaio doesn't know for sure what he's doing, yet. Maybe he just got in the car and . . .”

“And bringing the gun along could be a part of that,” I said.

But I didn't really think so. Our visitor's mild-mannered, absent-minded-professor act was convincing for the most part. Still, something about him reminded me of another guy I'd known, back in the city. The way, for instance, that Dave DiMaio hadn't flinched when that dump-truck tailgate banged shut.

The guy I'd known hadn't flinched, either, at dump trucks or anything else. Whistler, everyone who knew him called him, and mostly he was the nicest fellow you'd ever want to meet: polite, well-spoken, and punctual.

Especially if you owed him money, and even then he'd give you thirty days to pay up. But on day thirty-one he'd shoot you, cut your body into manageable pieces, and wrap the pieces in butcher paper for storage in the walk-in freezer in his basement.

Whistling while he worked. And if Dave DiMaio was feeling like that even half the time, we were in trouble.

Chapter
6

S
o tell me, Dave, how do you know for sure if an old
book's really written in blood?” Ellie asked at dinner that night after we'd all had our plates filled with curried crab.

There were seven of us at the table: me, Wade, my father, Ellie and George, Dave, and Sam, whose shift at the fish plant had been canceled due to a fellow with more seniority showing up for work unexpectedly.

Such was life when you'd spent a couple of years viewing the world through the bottom of a glass. I hadn't been sure Dave DiMaio would agree to come, either, but when I'd called him at the Motel East he accepted without hesitation.

Now he thought over his reply with apparent seriousness while he passed a china platter of fresh sliced garden tomatoes across the table to my father.

“Well,” he began, pausing again for a sip of the really quite lovely nonalcoholic wine he'd brought; I gathered mine was one of the many Eastport families he'd learned a lot about on his fact-finding mission along Water Street.

On the other hand, it could also have been that Dave didn't drink. Not that I'd ask him about that. I'd decided not to ask him about the gun, either, at least for the time being.

Never ask a question you don't know the answer to
is a piece of advice that works badly when applied to old-house repair. But I thought it might be handy for dealing with mysterious strangers. And since his gun wasn't loaded—by now, the bullets I'd taken from it reposed in my top dresser drawer—I figured I had time.

“The best way,” he replied at last, “is laser spectrometry.”

He ate some curried crab on rice, pantomimed fainting in gastronomic delight, and continued.

“You pass a laser light through whatever you're testing. The light turns color. Each substance has its own color.”

He thought again. “So if you see a certain color, you know what substance is producing it. Doing it's not quite so simple as that, of course,” he added. “For one thing, you need a laser.”

He ate more casserole, drank some faux wine, dabbed with his napkin. Outside the dining-room windows long shafts of golden light slanted onto the flower beds Ellie had planted earlier that year, turning the zinnia blooms to blazing red gems.

“But the result is simple,” he went on. “Dating an old book, though,” he said, shaking his head. “Finding out its age, that's—”

“A corpse of a different color,” said Sam, mangling his metaphors as usual. As a child his speech and even his thoughts were all so bass-ackwards, as he'd have put it, that for a long time he thought we were supposed to pray to dogs.

Dave shot him a wry smile and I remembered he'd said he was a university professor somewhere. His look at Sam made me think he was probably good at it.

“Exactly,” he agreed kindly. Then, to the rest of us: “Books are made of many different substances; even so, it's possible to learn what they are. But what if they're all different ages?”

My father listened carefully. “Old paper, new binding. Or some such combination?”

Dave nodded. “Forgers go to great lengths to make their own creations appear genuine.”

Which I didn't like at all; it was the first time anyone had even hinted that my old book might not be the real thing.

“Like the Greenland map,” said Ellie's husband, George Valentine, unexpectedly. He was a compactly built man with dark hair, milky-white skin, and a bluish five o'clock shadow always present on his stubborn jaw.

“Yes,” Dave said, again looking gratified.

Around here, George was your man if you needed a trench dug, a skunk trapped, a chimney repaired, or crows discouraged from having a noisy confab outside your bedroom window at the crack of dawn every morning.

But nothing about his looks suggested that he might also be interested in antique manuscripts; I glanced at him, surprised.

“The Greenland map,” Dave explained for the benefit of the rest of us, “purported to demonstrate that the Vikings reached our shores from Europe, decades before Columbus.”

“They did,” said George, his jaw jutting out stubbornly. “A whole settlement of 'em. In Newfoundland.”

“Indeed,” replied Dave energetically. His enthusiasm was clearly rising now that he'd identified a fellow history buff. “But that doesn't authenticate the map. In fact . . .”

While the two argued amiably I stole looks at Sam, still eating his dinner. He wanted a drink, I could tell by his face, which wore the expression of a man crossing a river by creeping along an extremely slippery log. He caught me watching and in reply gave me the first fully adult look of comprehension I'd ever seen on him.

“. . . so that in the end, the Greenland map did indeed turn out to be ancient parchment,” Dave DiMaio was saying.

He, too, was watching Sam. “But with a modern surface put on it,” he continued, casually meeting my own gaze.

“Someone had acquired parchment from Viking times. You can't buy it on eBay , but it's not that hard to get hold of if you know how to look for it,” he added. “They took off the old surface. You don't write directly on parchment, you see. And they put a fake map onto a new surface. Not a particularly difficult trick, either, if you know how.”

George looked reluctantly convinced; facts trump feelings, he always maintained, which was why he believed that not only my old bathroom but also the whole inside of my house ought to be torn out and Sheetrocked, and all the windows replaced. But it made him a fine handyman, that lack of sentimentality.

Meanwhile my husband, Wade Sorenson, put his fork down, murmuring thanks to Bella for filling his coffee cup. He was a tall, solidly built man with blue eyes in a square-jawed face, brush-cut blond hair, and the kind of easy smile that when I first saw it, I thought I couldn't possibly be so lucky.

But I had been. We'd been married for a couple of years, now.

“How'd you know Horace Robotham didn't have Jake's old book anymore?” Wade asked.

A shadow crossed Dave's face. “Well, it's like this. When I got home last night, there was a call on my machine. I'd been out of touch for a couple of weeks after the summer term,” he added with another glance at Sam, whose answering look was unreadable.

Bella filled the rest of the cups and brought out the cobbler. She was wearing a flowered housedress, a frilly apron, and an enormous amount of natural dignity, her usual ensemble when we had guests.

“Lovely,” I whispered to her, and her lips twitched in a tiny smile of domestic pride. But the smile vanished as her gaze fell on my father, who studied his hands.

“The call was from Horace's longtime partner, Lang Cabell,” Dave DiMaio explained. “Lang's in Minnesota now, caring for some elderly aunts of his. He and Horace had been extremely close to them for years—it's all the family either of them had.”

“So Lang Cabell told you the book had been stolen?” Ellie asked.

Sam excused himself and took his plate to the kitchen, where I heard him bantering with Bella. But I hadn't missed his wordless glance at DiMaio as he went.

Later,
it said, and DiMaio had nodded in reply. I turned back to what he was saying now.

“. . . not clear the book
was
stolen. Lang says he thinks it was in the house the night Horace died. But in the confusion, the police and so many other people going in and out . . .”

DiMaio spread his hands helplessly. “Or maybe it wasn't. I know Horace had letters from someone, asking to see the book, and he'd refused. I wish he'd kept them.”

Ellie's eyes met mine:
Who?
I moved my shoulders minutely:
No idea.

“The book was your property,” Dave told me, “so Horace didn't think it was right to show it nonprofessionally. But if he sent it out to another laboratory or some other consultant before he died, I'm not aware of it. And Horace usually kept me up-to-date on things like that.”

He looked around the table. “You see, in our younger days Horace and I were old-book-hunters together.”

The candles flickered briefly. “But not just any old books,” Dave added. “We were after the bad ones, ones that shouldn't be out contaminating decent literature.”

Uh-oh. Our new pal was about to reveal himself as an even worse crackpot than Bert Merkle. A gun-carrying crackpot . . .

Dave glanced at me and seemed to read my thought, or part of it. “Oh, no,” he assured me. “Not that kind of book. I'm no fan of book-banning. We were looking for ones that are hundreds of years old, most of them. Or older; books of evil spells, recipes for magical potions, incantations to summon the devil . . . or worse.”

He actually sounded serious. I had a moment to consider simply demanding that he give me the gun back. Or telephoning Eastport's police chief, Bob Arnold, to come and do it for me.

But then my father spoke. “I've seen books like that. Ones I've run into were usually for bomb-making. Nine times out of ten a guy tries following the recipe, blows himself up. Sometimes,” he added with a look at me, “right along with the whole neighborhood.”

It was what had happened to my mother all those years ago.

“Correct,” Dave said, nodding. “Just enough information to be dangerous,” he added, and seemed about to say more.

By now the candles had burned to nubbins, though; George and Ellie got up reluctantly. They'd managed to get Leonora settled with a nonparent babysitter long enough to come out for dinner.

But a second cup of coffee was pushing it. “I'm not sure what all that has to do with Jake's book,” said Ellie.

Carrying plates and cups, George went on out to join Sam and Bella in the kitchen. His opinion of magic was that it was all well and good for sitting around scaring yourself with, late in the evening. But if you really wanted to know whether or not something worked, try cleaning a sewer pipe with it.

“Probably nothing,” DiMaio said in answer to Ellie's question. “Because I'm sorry to have to say that most likely your old volume is a forgery of some kind, Jake,” he went on, turning to me. “Not a deliberate hoax, maybe, but like the Greenland map the result of coincidences that ended up producing the same effect.”

I must've looked puzzled; he went on. “Scholars now think the map was created by a European monk, for his own amusement. In World War II the Nazis looted his monastery, stole anything that looked valuable.”

“The Greenland map would've been a big prize,” said George, looking in from the doorway.

“Exactly. To the Nazis,” Dave said, “it seemed to show that their ancestors—they fancied they were descended from Vikings, remember—well. The map said
they'd
been the first Europeans to reach the Americas. That gave them the perfect excuse to claim Canada, the U.S., all the way to the Pacific—for themselves.”

He went on, “You see, it had been at the monastery a long time by then. And that's one of the things experts look for when beginning to assess a volume's possible authenticity.”

“Like mine was,” I said. “In the cellar for two centuries.”

“Yes,” he replied. “If in fact it
was
there all that time.”

As we got up from the table the candles guttered out, leaving only the fire's red glow until Wade reached over to turn on the sideboard lamps. In that instant of darkness it was on the tip of my tongue again to ask about the weapon. Only the memory of the many times I'd learned more by keeping my mouth shut than by opening it restrained me.

When the light returned, DiMaio stood just inches from me. I drew in a startled breath; something about his story, finished by leaping firelight in a two-hundred-year-old room, had unexpectedly unnerved me.

That and what he hadn't said. “But if it was? If it's
not
a forgery?” I asked quietly as the others went on into the kitchen.

“My old book,” I said to DiMaio . “What if it's not a fake? What if it's as old as the house, and written in—”

I stopped, swallowing hard. Somehow in the dim-lit old room with the fire glowing red and the candles dead stubs, the idea seemed much worse than it had in the daylight.

Worse, and more possible. “Written in blood?” Dave DiMaio finished for me.

He continued. “Horace had already sent it out to several places. As I said, a laser spectrometer isn't the kind of tool he kept in his own old-book-and-manuscript shop.”

What about guns,
I wanted to ask,
did he keep those?

But before I could, Dave was speaking again. “Horace had reports on the ink, paper, and the threads used for sewing the pages. The ink,” he told me gently, “was indeed blood.”

He was looking levelly at me, the low light throwing his eyes into shadow and the fire's flames reflecting in them. “Human blood,” he added tactfully as if informing me of a disease I'd unfortunately gotten.

“Oh.” My mouth went dry. “And what about the binding? Oh, please tell me it's not . . .”

As I spoke I could practically feel the book's smooth old leather cover under my fingers. Too smooth, as if . . .

A book written in blood,
I thought.
Why shouldn't it also be covered in—

“No,” he said firmly, and I let my breath out. “Ordinary cowhide. Very fine, but nothing else.”

Nothing worse,
he meant, and that knowledge should have been a comfort. But his face said more.

His face expressed doubt, as if perhaps he weren't quite as sure as he'd sounded about the thing being a forgery. And if it wasn't a forgery—

If it wasn't, Dave DiMaio 's expression said clearly, then even without human skin for a cover the old book was bad enough.

Later that night,
upstairs with Wade in our big bed in the dark: “Of course it's fake,” I declared, wide awake. “How could it not be?”