The Hundred-Year House (16 page)

He said, “I’ll drive you.”

Case said, “No, man, I’m good.” Then he looked at Miriam, a terrible look, and said, “You can have it, Mir.”

Miriam sat on the floor and put her head in her hands. Her shoulders started moving up and down.

Doug said, “What? She can have what?”

Case walked right past Doug, right past Zee, and out of the hospital.

In the big window at the end of the corridor, the sun was coming up on the twenty-first century. New nurses were starting the morning shift.

40

T
hough Case came back to town for the funeral and posted himself next to Miriam in the church, he wasn’t staying in the coach house. Doug was reminded of Hamlet, skulking back to the graveside before heading into more tragedy. Doug didn’t understand what had happened that night at the hospital, or the next day, when Miriam shut herself in the sunporch and Case packed things into duffel bags and headed off in a cab. He worried it was his fault, that something he’d said in the hospital hallway—what had he even said?—had broken their marriage in two.

Zee implied there was more to it, that she’d seen this coming. But Zee was always seeing things he wasn’t.

Miriam moved slowly in the next weeks, fragile and unfocused—but she didn’t have that wild look of someone who’s reliving a shock again and again. Whatever it was that had gone bad, she’d already figured it out ages back. There were purple circles under her eyes, but Doug never heard her crying.

She worked only occasionally on the kitchen mosaic they’d come to call the Happensack, and spent most of her time on a series of Gothic mansions, cross-sectioned like dollhouses. She used bigger scraps and tiles, creating flaps that lifted to show secret rooms beneath. Sometimes there would be a second, smaller door behind the first. One piece was based on
Jane Eyre
: a mad face painted on a button, peering from an attic window. Another
was
The Secret Garden
, another was
Rebecca
, and a fourth was Laurelfield itself, the big house and coach house, built from symbols of luck both good and bad: clovers, acorns, rabbit’s foot keychains, broken mirrors, pennies, toy ladders, and—most disturbingly to Doug—hundreds of ladybugs she’d swept from the floor, their faded bodies forming the borders between the rooms.

Doug cooked dinner for all three of them every night, and Zee would take her pasta or soup back to her desk. She wasn’t comfortable with grief. Doug ate with Miriam at the kitchen table, and when they talked it was about music or celebrities or
Seinfeld
.

They watched
Bluebeard
again together, and she pointed out the scenes where Marceline Horn looked sick. They paused the movie to study her face, then fast-forwarded. At double speed, the two sisters ran to the tower to lock themselves away from Bluebeard. At double speed, Bluebeard beat down the door.

—

Both Gracie’s story and the subject of the colony files had been put on ice for now. Nor could Doug claim the attic key yet. Gracie was barraged with a stream of visitors and fruit baskets and hadn’t emerged much from the big house. And to bring up the story with Miriam would be to bring up New Year’s Eve, the night that her world did, after all, come to a halt, even as the rest of the planet kept spinning. Doug promised Leland he’d fill him in when things settled, when he had time to digest the bizarre changes of fortune that had befallen everyone in the house. Everyone but Zee, really. She was the only one whose life wasn’t massively altered for better or worse. But Zee had always been above the sways of fortune.

And so it was three weeks later that Leland finally came for dinner, and the Bloodhound Gang reunited. Zee was at a conference in New York, and Doug made flatbreads. As they opened the second bottle of wine, Miriam brought her materials up to work on the Happensack, and the men sat watching her and discussing Gracie’s story. Doug had made sure this time to tell it slowly and
accurately, hoping he could get Miriam to understand what it was he’d heard that was so persuasive. But when he finished, it was Leland who spoke. “What an amazing load of bullshit! Did Scooby-Doo pop out and rip off her mask?”

“I’m just saying it was convincing, the way she told it. At least she
thinks
it’s true.”

Leland took a long sip of wine. “She hears the wheelbarrows ‘going off’ to the big house, right? Meaning she was
here
, in the coach house. So she’s what, a maid or something?” He hit the table. “Can you imagine Gracie in a maid outfit? Can you imagine her
cleaning
? Okay, and we have this Max, and we have a gardener. And Max has something to do with the car. And the phone. If it’s 1955, how old is Gracie? If she’s really sixty-two right now.”

Doug calculated. “Eighteen.”

Leland was having fun, it was clear. And possibly showing off for Miriam. She was inscrutable, though, focused on her tessellations. “And then there’s Grace Devohr and George Grant. They’re married, they’ve just moved here, right?”

“The colony closed at the end of ’54,” Doug said. “So it fits.”

“And no one in the entire town knows them. And they get in a car crash.”

“Somewhere close, I think,” Doug said. “Like, on the property.”

“So Max and the gardener roll their bodies away in wheelbarrows, and bury them under the greenhouse.”

“Oh,
God
,” Miriam said. “Can we not?”

“I’m just sorting the bullshit from the baloney here. And then follows the most brilliant identity theft of all time. Max and Gracie—whatever her real name is, Molly the Maid—become the Grants. So Zee’s parents—Zee’s the daughter of some maid and butler. Not a Devohr at all. I love it! And no one suspects anything for
forty-four years
. Eleven presidential terms.”

Doug said, “Well, yeah. Yeah. But honestly, why
would
they
suspect? Look, it doesn’t have to be
likely
. It just has to be
possible
. I mean, we think it’s hard to get away with crimes because we only ever know the stories where someone gets caught. So we think everyone gets caught. But we have no idea how much never comes to light.”

“
Maybe
,” Leland said, pointing a finger at him, and for a moment Doug thought he was serious, “maybe Gracie is really Marianne Moore. She’d only be about a hundred ten.”

Doug said, “Look. Look around this town. You think
all
the millionaires in this town came by their money honestly? You think there were no Cayman accounts, no fraud? I’m just saying weirder things happen every day. And why would she make up a lie that’s self-incriminating? When you lie, you make yourself sound
good
. Not like a felon.”

“God,” Leland said. “Suddenly you’re a Baptist preacher.”

They looked to Miriam for a verdict. She turned from the Happensack to face them, balanced in a squat. “I’ve been thinking about it. A lot. And no, I don’t believe her. Because people don’t reveal everything the first time you push them. If you think you’re caught, you only tell
half
the story. Right? But that means whatever she’s covering is
worse
, or more embarrassing. Something about the colony, maybe. Because that’s the one thing she won’t even talk about.”

Leland said, “Who wants to bet the colony was a front for a sex club!”

“Sex club, arts colony,” Doug said. “What’s the difference.”

But Miriam didn’t laugh. She went back to her mosaic, and they watched in silence as she arranged a two-inch square section on a cookie sheet, using tweezers, and pressed a sheet of sticky contact paper to the top. She spread the mortar quickly on a new patch of board, then pushed the sheet of tiles into it, holding it in place a minute. When she peeled the contact paper away, the pieces were embedded. It was hypnotic: both the way she worked
and the Happensack itself. Doug grew dizzy if he stared too long at the unending pathways, the shapes that were clear one second and dissolved the next into chaos. She had incorporated Zee’s pistol cylinder into the bottom right corner, sticking a piece of glass in each compartment. It looked like a flower.

Miriam finally said, “For instance. Let’s say the real Grants truly died. How do we know their deaths were accidents? It’s much more likely the servants killed them.”

Leland said, “Don’t eat any food she cooks.”

Miriam told him to stop.

—

Down on the sunporch, they turned on Miriam’s computer. They were hoping for a wedding photo of Grace Devohr and George Grant, or any adult photo at all, really, but they had no luck. Doug had brought down the photo from Zee’s dresser, the one of her reading with her father, its frame still showing the cracks he’d fixed back in grad school. But there was nothing to compare this picture with. She was about five, so George Grant (based on the marriage license) should have been forty-seven. This man looked closer to sixty—his hair gray, his face well carved. Even Leland and Miriam had to admit it. But then he had those puckish features that can make a man look either older or younger than he is.

Doug had always been drawn to his face, this father-in-law he’d never met. It was his wife’s face, sharp and quick. Small eyes, round ears. He’d always felt he could picture George Grant moving, could hear his voice. Now, Doug tried to imagine this man starting life as someone named Max, someone in charge of the cars. The same driver he’d pictured so many times as he sat in the old Morris chair, the man dreaming of faraway lands. So perhaps Max had reached those lands, ending his days as master of the mansion, critic of the arts, father of a golden child. Doug wanted to believe that life could be like that.

Something had occurred to him: Zee’s middle name was Devohr. It might have been a way to cement Zee’s inheritance, if any questions arose later. It might have been a joke or homage or apology. But Leland and Miriam would only have used this information as proof of Gracie’s lying—and he surprised himself by saying nothing, protecting the story as if it were his own.

“So what’s next?” Leland said as he left. It was funny how they all assumed they’d reunite immediately. But it felt as natural as if these had been Doug’s college roommates, back when “Where are we going tonight?” was not a presumptuous question.

Miriam rubbed her hands together. “Tomorrow’s the day Doug gets the rest of the files,” she said. “It’s time.”

—

With Leland gone, with the kitchen quiet, Doug was antsy. The little house was a boat in icy water. As he helped Miriam put away her tiles, she said, “I have to admit I’m a little freaked out.”

“Don’t let Leland get to you.”

“It’s not—it’s just everything.” She looked a little shaky. “Would it be weird if we camped here, in the kitchen? I’ve got sleeping bags. You could leave once I’m asleep. I mean, like, far apart sleeping bags, not—”

“It wouldn’t be weird.”

Miriam brought out the two shiny blue mummy bags she and Case used for camping back in Texas. They put one on each side of the kitchen table, separated by a little forest of chair legs. Lying there, the finished bits of the Happensack glowing in the light from the window, they talked for another hour.

“I think part of my skepticism,” Miriam said, “a
small
part, is Gracie’s sense of entitlement. Some of the things she
says
! Remember what she said about my teeth?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes the people who think they deserve stuff are the ones who started life deprived. And then when they’re lucky they feel they earned it.”

“And all the things she’d have to have gotten away with! I just can’t wrap my mind around someone having
that much
good luck.”

“But can you imagine the same amount of bad luck?”

It was a mistake. He shouldn’t have said it.

“Yes,” she said.

“You look like a caterpillar in there.”

“Good night, caterpillar.”

“Good night, caterpillar.”

41

Z
ee was a fraction of herself, a vertical fraction, and another sliver of her was still back in New York at the interviews, and another was in the mirror that spat her decaying face back at her, and another had curled up and died.

There was no one home in the coach house, and she left the door open to the wind. The bed, yes, she checked twice, was still short-sheeted. The jackass hadn’t even made an effort to rumple the covers. Two wine bottles in the recycling.

All she’d needed, in the end, was physical proof. There had always been the possibility, however remote, that those words on Miriam’s work had been about some other man with scarred knees. That they’d been wishful thinking. That nothing had happened yet, as thick as the air was with inevitability.

In the last weeks, their private jokes had grown more flagrant. “This is the greatest soup of the millennium!” Miriam had said, and Zee could only assume it had to do with the night they stayed back at the house, the night of the heart attack, when Doug would have stooped to kiss her at midnight, and Miriam would have tucked her head under his arm and said, “That was the greatest kiss of the millennium.”

She threw things into two suitcases. Clothes and jewelry and shoes, medicine and family photos. Sofia could pack the books up later, could send them to New York.

She’d felt clearheaded in New York, but back here she was underwater again. She had to leave. Obviously, she had to leave. The only question had been whether to take Doug with her. They could have waited till summer. If she’d come home and found no evidence, that’s what she’d have done. Broken the news slowly, convinced him he wanted to live in New York, and they’d be away from her mother and Miriam and Laurelfield, horrible Laurelfield, by July. But here was the evidence, and there was a spare room waiting for her in New York, and Doug was a stranger.

Or maybe it was as simple as this: She’d never been a hard-boiled egg but a raw one—and Doug, Doug’s solid devotion, had been the shell keeping her in. When that shell cracked, what else could a raw egg do but run?