This Must Be the Place: A Novel (6 page)

It was a question she couldn’t answer, so she slapped the encyclopedia shut, rolled on her side, and watched the rain pour down. Wind filled the porch screens like sails, and Oneida shivered in the light mist. It was barely four o’clock but it was dark, and the darkness made her feel tired and worn out. She closed her eyes. She didn’t see the yellow taxi rolling up the Darby-Jones driveway until it was close enough for her to hear the tires crackling in the loose gravel, popping like corn beneath the rain. At first she thought she was dreaming. She had never seen a taxi outside of television; there were no taxis in Ruby Falls. You could walk the entire length of downtown, past the convenience mart, post office, dry cleaner, gas station, library, Milky Way Bar and Grill, and town hall, in about fifteen minutes. The car had a checkered stripe running from hood to trunk. Gingerly, she craned her neck, still sore after flinching from Wendy, to watch the car disappear around the front
of the house. Barely five minutes later she heard her mother unlatch the main door and welcome the passenger into the hall.

Oh, great
, she thought.
Another stupid mystery
.

She sat still on the porch. She heard her mother’s scratchy alto welcoming the new tenant, asking for his coat, telling him to leave his bags at the foot of the stairs. Then Mona launched into her standard tour of the Darby-Jones, her voice drifting nearer as she made her way through the main communal rooms—the front hall, the dining room where Eleanor Roosevelt once drank a milk shake, the TV in the den, and the library; past the rear study (off limits to tenants, reserved as her daughter’s study space) and the kitchen.

Her mother’s bare feet slapped against the original antique tile as she described how the right side of the pantry was divided into equal spaces for each tenant but the left was strictly for Mona’s personal use and house dinners. Had she mentioned that, for an extra two hundred a month, he could be included in the meals she cooked six days a week, excluding Fridays, when tenants pooled their money for take-out? The stove was gas; the left rear burner was finicky and needed to be lit frequently. The pots and pans were to be treated as though they were children, and if he was ever discovered using a metal scouring pad on anything Teflon, he would be lashed to a snowblower and dragged through town. Mona had a dry delivery, and when the mysterious new tenant didn’t laugh or even chuckle awkwardly, Oneida wondered if he or she thought her mother was actually serious.

“And this,” Mona said, stepping onto the porch, “is the side porch. Where we keep the lawn darts, watering cans, and my daughter.” She smiled at Oneida and gestured for her to join them, which Oneida did, crossing her bony arms over her chest and leaning in as Mona hugged her shoulders. Her mother always smelled of flour and frosting, the result of years of mixing, baking, stacking, and piping sugar onto wedding cakes, and Oneida inhaled deeply. “Oneida,” Mona Jones said, gesturing to the man standing in the kitchen, “this is Arthur Rook. He’s taking the rooms over the garage.”

Arthur Rook looked lost. He was very tall and thin, not skeletal like the tall boys at school, who had stretched the same amount of skin over bodies that grew half a foot taller in the space of a summer, but she
could picture him as one of those stretched-skin boys in the not-too-distant past. He was far younger than any of the other tenants, and she wondered what he was doing in Ruby Falls. He had dark hair and really needed a shave. His eyes were very dark and very bright, and he didn’t blink. He was looking at everything—no, he was studying. He traced the outlines of all the vague, inanimate lumps on the porch, as if he were searching for something he’d left there years ago but would only remember once he saw it again. Arthur Rook’s gaze finally made its way to Oneida, and when their eyes met she felt a strange tickle in her throat, like she was supposed to say something to this stranger, or he had something to say to her. He acted as though he knew something she didn’t, which, as always, annoyed her.

A crack of thunder snapped Arthur from his trance. He shuffled forward and offered Oneida his hand, which she shook.

“Nice to meet you.” His voice was uneven, as though he hadn’t used it in a while.

“Where did you say you were from, Mr. Rook?” Mona asked.

“Los . . . Angeles.” Arthur Rook shrugged, anticipating Oneida’s knee-jerk response, she realized, of
So what the hell are you doing here?
“I had to leave,” he said. “I was tired of it.” He shook his head. “You need a decoder ring to order a hamburger.”

“Oh, come on,” said Mona. “Everybody knows about the secret menu at In-n-Out.”

At that, Arthur Rook’s face turned ashen and his eyes lost their intense focus, flicked back and forth, shone. In the awkward silence that followed, Mona offered to show him his room and he agreed—a little too quickly, Oneida thought, for a man who claimed he was just tired. She wasn’t sure which mystery bothered her more: what Arthur Rook was doing in Ruby Falls, or what her mother had said to make him look like he wanted to cry.

3
Will and Testament

Stepping into the Darby-Jones was like walking into a movie. Arthur had occasionally visited Amy on set, and each time he’d been struck by how unconsciously discomfited he became around Hollywood people. Even the crew seemed hyper-real and hyper-constructed: the grips too muscled, the PAs too loud and neurotic, and the effects team—of which Amy was an utterly devoted member—too wild-eyed and berserk. The air would thicken and spark with anticipation as the crew waited for scenes to be set up, for directors to be happy with camera angles, for stand-ins to be lit, and for stars to be made up. Arthur, the observing husband, would hover on the periphery, grateful for the insulation of his camera. The telephoto distance granted him immunity from the shared delusion that keeps a movie set pulsing: the conviction that all involved are creating something that is, in any way, real.

Ruby Falls also felt like a shared delusion and Arthur, again, immune. It was too atmospheric to have occurred naturally: the shadows too deep, the clouds calculated, too puffy and too perfectly slate-gray. The roadside forest was aggressively bucolic out the window of his taxi. The town center, anchored by a single blinking red light at a single intersection, spiraled out into the requisite townie bar and grill, small convenience mart, and post office with photogenically fluttering American flag. It was Mayberry. It was Stars Hollow. There would be irascible widows who solved clever murders. He had traded the alien terrain of Los Angeles for a land that was no less imaginary—absolutely unreal and cute as hell.

The town was nothing compared to the Darby-Jones itself. The house loomed out of the leafy darkness, four stories tall, wide and rambling
and tucked into the woods like the haunted Victorian mansion it probably was. Arthur blinked as his taxi driver pulled around to the front. There’s nothing inside, he thought: nothing but bare timber and studs holding up magnificently ominous exteriors. All interiors would be shot in a featureless concrete box in Studio City or Burbank. Real people didn’t live in places like this, because real places like this didn’t exist.

And Amy had grown up here? No wonder she believed in make-believe.

Amy had told him very little about her childhood. He knew she’d watched hundreds of movies. Her father, who died when she was very small, had introduced her to the Saturday afternoon matinee, to Toho International pictures,
The Seven Voyages of Sinbad
—and to the works of her idol, Ray Harryhausen. He knew she spent her earliest years dreaming of making monsters and had started small—with modeling clay and toothpicks—before finding an erector set at a flea market and discovering the beauty of the hinge, the joint, the electricity that would one day kill her. Arthur had met her grandfather, a quiet man who wore green suspenders and sock garters at all times, even with shorts, when he came out to California—only once—to visit. He flew in to San Francisco and they all drove to Monterey for the day, where the old man was overwhelmed by every public place they went. It was the first time in his life he’d ever been in crowds that large, and they flustered him; he spent his last two days in town watching the PGA Open from the safety of his hotel room. He’d raised Amy after her parents were killed in a car accident and died himself shortly after Amy and Arthur were married. Amy didn’t fly east for the funeral because, she said, “He doesn’t care. He’s dead.” She had never given any indication that this place—this
Ruby Falls
; even the name sounded made-up—was a storybook of a town or that visiting it would be anything other than boring and unnecessary; that it was anything other than the place where she’d dreamed of so many imaginary creatures, the place she’d had to escape.

Arthur inhaled. The air smelled like home. The trees—their leaves were beginning to turn.

He’d missed these trees.

He handed the cabdriver two hundred of the dollars he’d pumped
out of an ATM at LaGuardia (he’d emptied as much of his accounts as the ATM would allow) and felt lucky for remembering, in his haste, to bring the emergency cash Amy kept in the freezer.
Brilliant, right?
she’d said, folding fifties and hundreds into origami stars and wrapping them in tinfoil.
So they look like hamburger patties.

Last night he’d stuffed them down the side of his backpack, fresh from the freezer, and they’d cooled the space between his shoulder blades as he waited in line at LAX for a ticket on the first flight east, which turned out to be a half-empty red-eye to New York. He hadn’t used the backpack—a beast of a bag that Amy, when she was drunk one night, succeeded in climbing all the way inside—since he took it to Europe as a senior in high school, on his Spanish club’s trip to Spain. He’d imagined slinging it from breathtaking site to breathtaking site, hostel to hostel, but in reality had only unpacked it once in a Marriott in Madrid, which depressed him. It was built for adventure, for spontaneity, for a night like the night Amy died: a night where Arthur crammed whatever clothes his hands closed upon into it. A pair of sneakers, two cans of cat food. The book on Amy’s nightstand, which he’d lent her.

The big pink shoebox that he’d seen in the dark closet.

In the cab in the driveway of the Darby-Jones, Arthur had removed the shoebox and replaced it with a cat. He’d been able to bring Harryhausen, in the little cat crate that Amy called his hibernation pod, aboard the plane as carry-on luggage, but now he worried that the Darby-Jones would be pet-unfriendly. So Arthur maneuvered Ray Harryhausen out of his pod and into the top of his backpack. Harry was fast asleep, which was the only reason Arthur was not killed instantly.

It had never occurred to him to leave Harry behind in LA or in the care of Max and Manny, even. It had never occurred to him to call Mona Jones. Or to call—anyone. At all.

He thanked the cabbie and opened the door and stepped sideways into the dream Amy told him to run to.

Arthur stood on the porch of the Darby-Jones—an enormous porch, from what he could see—that wrapped around the house on all sides and was full of rocking chairs and had a hammock at one end, swaying in the breeze. He adjusted the pack on his shoulders and heard his furry
passenger sigh. The pink box he held under one arm. The strap of his camera case bit into his shoulder.

There was a neat hand-printed sign in the window.
ROOMS TO LET
, it said.
M. Jones, Prop
.

He pressed the white button beneath the house number and heard a round low chime, muted by the closed door.

Mona Jones opened it.

She was not what Arthur expected. He had assumed she was Amy’s age, his age—thirty or thereabouts—but she looked much younger than he felt. Her hair and her eyes were dark and she wore a black T-shirt dusted around the hips with flour in the shape of hands. Her face and arms were similarly dusted with freckles. She was warm and smelled of vanilla, and Arthur couldn’t begin to understand why Amy had never sent that postcard. Why she hadn’t kept in touch. Mona Jones looked like a best friend.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was deep. “Here about a room?”

Arthur cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said.

His backpack grunted.

She held out her hand. As Arthur shook it, studying her face, her brown eyes, he was stupefied by her presence in this strange movie set of a world: she was warm and she was not acting. She was real. She was another person, another person like himself, who had known Amy. Had loved Amy.

If the postcard was to be believed, she was Amy’s only heir.