Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

Homecoming by Gerald Pearce

© 1998 by Gerald Pearce

Born in England and raised in the Middle East, Gerald Pearce has lived in the U.S. since 1948. He worked as a television writer early in his career, creating more than 250 half-hour documentaries and travelogues, and later served as a staff writer for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. These days Mr. Pearce is almost exclusively a fiction writer, who publishes in magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction and EQMM.

An hour ago David North had been on a plane. Then at a funeral — had buried the old man just before the rain began. Now he was in the rented Tercel again.

He rounded the last corner. Through the wet windshield the old MacDonald house looked even more rundown, its empty garage door-less and disconsolate. Beyond it the double empty lot was still overgrown, bedraggled. Then, at the end of the block, where the blight hadn’t quite reached, his grandfather’s house.

Now, apparently, his house. John Lowndes, the lawyer who’d called, had said the grandson was the sole beneficiary of the old man’s will. He had grinned and wondered why. The voice on the phone, sounding offended, had said, “You are the sole surviving family member,” as though that explained anything. It only emphasized that Professor Emeritus Davis McLaren had been a chilly old relic with hardly any friends — whatever value he’d given the word.

“When did it happen?”

“Wednesday night. First big rain of the season getting started,” the elderly lawyer had explained. “He complained of a headache and left his chess club early. I took him home. Then we found he’d left his zipper-notebook at the club. Tom Hastings tried to take it to him — he’s another retired prof. Lights on in the house but no answer, front door locked but not the back. So he went in and... found him.”

Simple, really. A fragile old man had fallen down his basement stairs and hit his head, not been found for an hour, and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

The few other details David North learned after the brief graveside service. In the ambulance, the old man had recovered consciousness long enough to mutter a few words but only one — “lockbox” — was intelligible.

Also cryptic, annoying.

“I thought he might have meant his safe-deposit box,” the lawyer told him, “so I checked at his bank. Old legal papers, insurance policies, birth certificates, things like that. Nothing you could imagine being on his mind in the ambulance. So of course we checked the house. No lockbox. Didn’t tear the house apart, we thought that perhaps when you got here...” And David had nodded like a dutiful grandson. He’d play their game, maintain the facade, as though he gave a damn...

It stopped raining as he turned into the short wet driveway, taking the Tercel to within a foot of the garage door. The garage was a wooden building set back from the sidewalk, painted green with a white trim some twenty years ago. The double doors sagged in the middle, held shut by the same padlock he remembered from longer ago than that.

David North was thirty-one, dark, lean, compact.

He got out of the car. Cold air. He smelled wet grass, wet leaves. Moisture hung in the air as thick as smoke and almost as visible.

He closed the car door. A yard away three wooden steps went up to a tiny porch and the house’s side entrance. The door looked secure as a bank vault.

Between the garage and the rear comer of the house he could see part of the backyard. Rain still dropped audibly from twig to branch before hitting the ground under the cherry and walnut trees. All around, the sound of water falling from shrubs and trees, from roofs and eaves, blended into the wet pervasive rustle of winter, a half-heard spiderweb of sound that trapped the world in a net of deprivation.

He had no key for the side door but he had two for the front door. He felt in his pocket for them as he walked toward the sidewalk, passing uncurtained windows with yellowed blinds pulled down behind them and dust visible on the frames behind the glass. The place looked unlived-in. Not just for three days. Months.

In front of the house a lamentable elm grew out of the parking strip. Across the street the houses looked better cared-for than his grandfather’s but just as lifeless. The heavy shrubbery had been cut back around the second house down the street, the old Tarquin house, and the roof trim and window frames were freshly painted; so there had been changes, though not enough to disguise a middle-class neighborhood past its prime on a gray wet November day in Eugene, Oregon. Which he’d last seen more than five years ago.

He turned and looked across the weary lawn at his grandfather’s house.

Yard untended. Blinds drawn. The green scalloping over the porch beginning to peel. Same old porch furniture. Rust spots showing through the white paint on the glider were visible even from the sidewalk. The cane chair’s legs were splayed and fraying.

In the elm, the sporadic slap of water sliding off a high leaf onto a lower one was suddenly lost in the rattle of fresh rain. He turned up the collar of his quilted nylon jacket.

To go away is to die a little. To come back is to know what it’s like to be a ghost. Whoever’d said that was wrong. He didn’t feel like a ghost. He didn’t feel anything. Just irritated? What the hell was he doing here anyway? Repaying a debt, he supposed. Not even much of one.

He started up the cracked concrete walk dividing the lawn. Abandon hope all you who enter here wasn’t actually incised over the front door, but, for all that the old man had run it like a sensory-deprivation tank, the house was just a house. Quite grand in its day, now going to hell in a hearse because the old man hadn’t been able to take care of it. Nothing intimidating about the house.

Nor about the old man, actually. All he’d ever been was distant. Apparently shy and reserved from birth, he had astonished faculty colleagues at the university by marrying, at thirty-six, a woman only slightly younger and fathering a daughter, outliving the wife by decades, the daughter too: the daughter having married, it was said, too young and unsuitably, returning to the sanctuary of her father’s house with a month-old baby, only to die in a hit-and-run accident five years later; the distant grandfather withdrawing more deeply into himself but undertaking, with chilly resolution, the single-handed upbringing and education of a bewildered little boy. Neither kind nor cruel, not intuitive but thoughtful, evidently without a single memory of what it was like to be a child, Davis McLaren had done this with no evident motive beyond the conviction that it was his duty.

And now he was dead, at eighty-seven. Had the old buzzard expected to be mourned out of duty?

The little boy of five hadn’t taken long to realize that you had to be more like Grandfather if you wanted him to like you. And then, gradually, after coming to think he was getting a lot like him, realizing that if you still wanted Grandfather to like you, then you really hadn’t managed to become much like him at all. Maybe men weren’t supposed to like people the way his dead mother used to, with laughter and hugs and warmth. Grandfather had few friends, who seldom visited. His calm, measured enthusiasms were reserved for music and chess. His collection of classical recordings, slanted heavily toward the most intellectually demanding works — he had no time for the facile emotionalism of Mozart, the Beethoven of the symphonies and concertos — would have excited envy in any classical radio station, and his playback equipment was superb. Otherwise he lived frugally, playing chess by mail against opponents on three continents, and relaxing solving chess problems in books and newspapers.

So young David learned to be calm, focused. And not to lose his temper. Grandfather said it prevented thought, betrayed immaturity. Grandfather never lost his temper. Or cried. He said emotions were untrustworthy. Ignorable. Deniable. Devoted to the solace of the intellect, he had taught David to play chess after his mother died, to take his mind off his loss...

He crossed the porch. One key slid back the dead bolt, the other opened the latch. The heavy door swung into dim familiarity. He stepped inside, closed the door, reached for the switch just beyond the door frame.

Reluctant wan yellow light came on in a bowl fixture in the ceiling.

The front room ran the width of the house. Beyond a low, wide arch was the dining room. A staircase curved down out of darkness, narrow and uncarpeted. Booklined, worn, sparsely and indifferently furnished, the room was the monotony of browns and grays he had known most of his life. The stereo equipment in the front corner, with speakers high on a wall, was an abrupt intrusion. On the desk under the corner window, on the wide, low coffee table in front of the sagging arm chair — on every available flat surface — chess games in progress waited for someone to make the next move.

His breath silvered the air. Indoors was as cold as out.

A tarnished brass faceplate set into the wall by the stairs marked the control unit governing the gas furnace in the basement. All the little lights were off. He punched the button under one of them. Nothing happened. He tried another. Same result. The remote wasn’t working. He’d have to visit the basement and turn the furnace on manually.

Was that why the old man was heading for the basement that night...?

He went through the dining room, turning on more lights. All the woodwork — floor, dining table and chairs, noble old sideboard — needed polishing. Blinds hid the windows. A door took him to the back of the house.

Old-fashioned kitchen on his left. Opposite it, the downstairs bedroom. Then the utility porch, with the back door that had been open to admit Tom what’s-his-name, Hastings. Of course, someone else could have come in that way to make sure the old man had his accident, or maybe left by the back door. He or she or they could always have come in by the front door. Sure. Or dropped down the chimney. Inventing comic-book scenarios was dumb.

Just before the utility porch, bare concrete steps led downward. He took them. They angled left halfway down, then he was on the basement floor. Weak gray light filtered through grimy ground-level windows.

He reached up for the string that tripped the switch that lit the naked sixty-watt ceiling light.

Despite the cold, the deep jutting shadows, the basement was more welcoming than the upstairs had been. Heavy wooden shelving held cardboard packing boxes, contents listed on labels. Less dust than he remembered. Old leather suitcases. A steamer trunk. The old daybed in the corner hadn’t been moved since he’d first come to live here. Under the furnace, the pilot light made a faint glow. Ancient wires from a conduit snaked to the switch box but didn’t quite make it, hanging loosely near their contacts.

He turned the furnace on high. It came alight with a whoosh, settled into a quiet roar. He began to feel a spreading warmth, took a deep breath.

The basement was the one place where the old man’s deprivation scheme had sometimes broken down. It had been here, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, that he had first got Jan Tarquin’s panties down. She lived across the street.

He had never seen a real live naked girl before, much less fondled one, and had chosen her to advance his education because she was new to Eugene and hadn’t many friends and was quite appealing. He’d caught her watching him a few times, her face thoughtful, speculative. He suspected her of harboring improbably romantic yearnings, or perhaps a sexual curiosity as lively as his own. A classmate, she was slender and dark-haired and almost as tall as he was, with thick arching eyebrows and big eyes and, undressed, a sleek fragile-seeming young body that wasn’t at all fragile and that evoked astonished delight and dispassionate objective study. He wanted to learn fast.

Perhaps she had too, because she had soon signaled her willingness to return to the basement with him, and their increasingly rewarding gropings and grapplings had continued until summer vacation had taken her to visit relatives in Arizona. When she returned to start the new school year he was already involved with another girl, Jan Tarquin’s opposite, a practiced voluptuary of sixteen who found his seriousness amusing but no bar to carnal enjoyment. He had, for a while, been strongly attracted to her body, and intrigued by the depths underlying her cheerful sexuality until forced to conclude that there weren’t any. By then she was becoming involved with someone else, and he and Jan had become little more than distant acquaintances.

He went back upstairs.

The rest of the house was simply the place where he had grown up through untold hours of boredom. From grade school onward, his drive for academic success had goaded him, before every scheduled exam, to commit the contents of his fanatically maintained notebooks, plus a lot of textbook pages, to memory. Better be safe than sorry. Not knowing an answer meant more than embarrassment, it meant betraying his essential identity and left him quivering and defenseless. He’d hardly ever let it happen.

...Well, once more unto the breach, one more bout of deep boredom while he looked for that possibly imaginary lockbox, cleared the house of junk, and got everything ready for sale or donation as soon as the house and its contents were declared legally his.

He checked the service porch. The back door was bolted and locked with an old-fashioned skeleton key: no automatic spring latch here. Windows shut, bolted. The downstairs bedroom, which the old man had moved into when climbing stairs got difficult, was spare as a cell and as secure. The walk-in closet had clothes on hangers and storage boxes neatly crammed onto upper shelves. More storage boxes were visible under the bed, behind the nearly floor-length drape of the bedspread. In the adjacent bathroom, with its clawfooted tub, the window had been painted shut.

He returned to the front room — in time to catch movement just outside the front window, a flicker of deeper darkness visible at the edge of the blind.

He turned sharply to the front door and jerked it open.

A startled young man stood a foot away. He was tall and thin and wore a lumberjack’s hat with the earflaps down, a scuffed leather jacket, and threadbare jeans. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of the jacket. His eyes were blue and his face was long and pale. His mouth hung open.

Dave North snapped, “Yes?” and became aware of a girl in a hooded rain slicker off to his left near the window.

The young man closed his mouth and said in a thready voice, “Uh... who the hell are you?”

“I belong here. You don’t. What do you want?”

“I w-wanna know who you are ’n’ what you’re doing here.”

“None of your business and none of your business,” Dave said. “Get lost.”

“Guess we need the cops.” The young lip curled. Truculence had been quickly achieved.

“Call them.”

The girl’s voice said, through a congested nose, “Bet he was lookin’ for that lockbox.”

“Yeah.” The tall, thin guy took his hands out of his pockets. He had big hands. “Start talkin’, bud.”

“Sure.” Dave stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut. Without warning he hit the young guy in the chest, hard and fast, with the heel of his right hand, sending him reeling backwards. He reached the steps and kept going and hit the wet concrete pathway flat on his back.

The girl squealed, “Virg!” She ran down the steps and knelt beside him while a squad car glided to the curb under the elm with a brief growl from its siren. Virg struggled to sit up, grabbing his ankle and making noises like a hurt kid.

Two cops, in no hurry at all, got out of the squad car and crossed the parking strip. One was young, the other not so young. Both wore the obligatory cop look of stone indifference. The young one said, “Well, look who’s here: Virg and Kathy,” and stayed with them.

The other came up onto the porch. The nametag on his chest said Kraniak.

Somewhere along the line the rain had stopped again.

Dave said, “Did you guys just happen along by accident?”

“The lady in sixteen-fourteen called in,” Kraniak said. “Mrs. Ford. She said a couple of prowlers were acting suspicious around the old prof’s house. Didn’t say anything about you, though. Can I see some ID?”

“We buried the ‘old prof’ this morning.” Dave showed his driver’s license. “I’m his grandson. I’ll be staying here a few days, doing whatever needs doing — I’m not sure of the legalities yet.”

Kraniak pointed to the Tercel. “Yours?”

“A rental.”

“Why’d you hit the kid?”

“He was talking tough. When he took his hands out of his pockets I thought he was getting physical.”

“Yeah,” Kraniak said meaninglessly, and went down the porch steps. Dave followed him.

Virg was on his feet now, favoring the left, his mouth twisted with pain, leaning on the girl. She had an uninteresting face and a lot of stringy hair poking out from under the hood of the slicker. She looked mad.

“That man hit my brother!” She pointed dramatically to Dave. “For no reason! Just up and hit him and threw him off the porch—”

“We saw, so calm down. Mr. North, meet Virg and Kathy Howard.” Kraniak pointed to the MacDonald house. “They live down at the end of the block.”

“Virg is seventeen and a high-school dropout.” The younger officer’s nametag said Haddad. “His sister’s fifteen and got a head cold so she stayed home from school. So she could go out and play in the nice sunny weather.”

Virg waved a free hand at Dave. “We saw this guy drive up in a rented car and go into the old guy’s place to rip it off.”

“Yeah,” Kathy said, pausing to blow her nose on a damp tissue. “Prob’ly going after that lockbox.”

“What lockbox?” Kraniak said.

“The one the paper talked about,” the girl said impatiently.

Both officers looked at Dave.

“I never saw the paper,” Dave said. “I just flew in from San Diego. My grandfather’s lawyer told me the old man tried to speak in the ambulance. The only word anyone could get was ‘lockbox.’ Then he died.”

“He’s dyin’, it’s the last thing on his mind!” Virg insisted. “That makes it important.”

“Who to?” Kraniak said. “Meet Mr. North, the old professor’s grandson. He’s got legitimate business in that house and you don’t. Get it through your heads, you guys. You can’t afford to get one inch out of line.”

“But it’s okay for him to attack me?” Virg protested. “We were just worried about the old man’s property.”

“File a complaint,” Kraniak said. “Then he’ll file a cross complaint — you don’t need the grief. No more dumb junk, huh? Next time we take you in. Want a ride home, Virg?”

“Not in no cop car,” Virg said.

His sister fidgeted under his arm.

“Well, I ain’t gonna carry you!”

Virg took his arm off Kathy’s shoulder, stood tall. His grin was sly and triumphant.

“Fine thing. A guy gets beat up on and the cops give the other guy a medal. Let’s go home, kid.”

They started for home, Virg barely favoring his left foot.

The squad car disappeared. Dave turned back to the house. Work to be done in there. First he’d better check around outside, see if the Howard kids had left any surprises.

Cramming his hands into the pockets of his nylon jacket, he went to the end of the block, turned right, walked along the side of the house. The windows were high, visibly latched. The ground-level windows into the basement were as dirty outside as in. He tried opening them. They were painted shut with old paint. There were no footprints in the muddy uncared-for flowerbeds between the sidewalk and the house.

From the corner of the house, he surveyed the bedraggled backyard with its cherry and walnut trees. A narrow cement path took him to the back porch. From inside, the door had seemed secure. From outside it repelled, rejected. With its blind pulled down, the grimy window was as private as death and no more communicative.

He left the porch for the next corner. The Tercel gleamed wetly. The little peak-roofed porch sheltering the side entrance offered a squat, ironic challenge. He climbed the steps, grasped the darkly corroded doorknob. The latch withdrew. The door wouldn’t budge.

He was halfway back to the sidewalk when he saw the low opening to the crawl space under the house. It was closed off by a wire-mesh screen in a heavy wooden frame. The ground in front of it was crisscrossed by heavy fresh footprints the weather hadn’t had time to obliterate.

Virg Howard’s?

Maybe he’d thought the crawl space would let him into the house where the old man had hidden the lockbox. But the screen proved immovable, the wood swollen shut, the paint flaking. No one had gotten under the house this way for years.

Maybe he should go ask the lady in the house across the street exactly what she’d seen. Mrs. Ford, Kraniak had said, in 1614.

It felt weird, approaching 1614, which had been the Tarquin house sixteen years ago. He had always done so cautiously, tension hidden behind a casual, respectful facade. What Jan’s folks didn’t know was important, and it was important to keep them not knowing it.

The house looked younger now. The neat front yard suggested a professional gardener. The sagging old front porch had been replaced by a trim new one with a composition roof and a row of big earthenware flowerpots decorating a low brick wall.

The doorway was a Gothic arch, the door iron-bound wood with a heavy brass knocker. He used it twice, lightly. In a few seconds the door swung inward the length of the security chain. Half revealed in the narrow opening was a woman with short dark hair and a neatly chiseled face who wore a bulky oatmeal-colored sweater and a full, mid-calf tweed skirt.

He said, “Mrs. Ford?” and felt suddenly — incomprehensibly — ill-at-ease.

“Yes?” Calm but cautious. A faint line appeared between her eyebrows. Her voice was suddenly tentative. “Dave?... David North?”

His mouth had fallen open. He closed it hurriedly. “Dave North, plain as day.”

The security chain rattled. The woman in the doorway pushed something into the pocket of her skirt and opened the door a bit wider.

“Hi. Remember me? Jan Ford, used to be Tarquin. What a nice surprise!”

“My God,” Dave said. “The cops said Mrs. Ford and I never... The place looks so new and...” Damn. He never floundered. He took a deep smiling breath, acknowledging the depth of his surprise. “I’d heard you moved East.”

“Went to Princeton, married a master’s candidate, American lit. He taught at NYCC for a while. New York got pretty scary so he applied to the University of Oregon. About the time he was accepted, my dad retired and he and Mom moved to Arizona permanently, so they gave us the house. Look, I’m declaring a coffee break. Won’t you join me?”

“Thank you.”

She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath before opening the door the rest of the way. He stepped into warm, dry air. The little entrance hall was hardly changed, with a hat-and-coat rack with a mirror set into it and a little shelf for gloves and things under the mirror. A small red bike was propped up on its kickstand.

“You’ve got a kid,” he said. Which was dumb. Jan was almost his age. Married for years. Of course she had a kid.

“Barbara, age seven, in the third grade.” Jan Ford closed the front door. “How about you?”

“Still single.”

“Avoiding entangling alliances.” He saw a brief smile. She went through the arch into the kitchen, switching on an overhead light. He followed, remembering the kitchen as dark and cozy, but found himself in a room as sunny and light as was possible on a cold gray day in November. The walls were a yellow so soft it was almost white.

Jan put a filter into the top of a hand-thrown pottery coffee maker. “I’m sorry about your granddad, Dave.” She switched on an electric kettle. “Why don’t you take off that wet coat and hang it in the hall?”

He did so. When he got back she was spooning dark pungent coffee into the filter. Her hair was short, soft around her face. Little gold-mounted cat’s-eye studs winked from her ears. When she rolled the coffee bag closed and put it in the refrigerator, the full tweed skirt swayed as she walked. She looked totally gorgeous. Always graceful, she had a new calm stillness. New to him anyway. She had filled out a little, but maybe only in her face. It would be fun to talk this Jan out of these clothes and find out... Of course, a kid and a husband complicated things.

He said, “My plane was late. I barely got to the funeral in time.”

“I wanted to go,” Jan said. “I mean, we lived just across the street, and I’d known him since high school, though I don’t suppose we even said hello more than twice a year.” She set out cups and saucers while he took a seat in the breakfast nook. “But I couldn’t. Otherwise we’d have met earlier. I’d have recognized you at once. You’ve hardly changed.”

“You have. You’re not wearing jeans.” He grinned. “You’re in control. You’ve lost that air of adventure.”

“Adventure,” she said dismissively. “Who needs it? What are you doing these days?”

“I took a master’s in library science. I’m assistant librarian at John Muir Junior College in San Diego.”

“That’s no surprise. Books don’t talk back.”

Again the briefest smile. The kettle had been growling and now began to bubble. She switched it off, poured water onto the coffee in the filter section. “I saw your little car in the driveway but I’d no idea whose it was. I thought maybe John Lowndes, your granddad’s lawyer, or maybe a service man of some sort. And then those two showed up, the neighborhood’s resident semi-delinquents. I didn’t want to tackle them myself. So I called the police.”

“I’m very glad you did. What had they been doing?”

“Prowling, looking furtive, looking into windows, trying to get into the crawl space under the house.”

“They told the cops they thought someone had broken in.”

“Then they should’ve called the cops themselves. I’m afraid they haven’t got too much going for them. Virg does what he can, but there’s not much work for unskilled labor around here except in summer, when the cannery’s open. He was a suspect in a couple of robberies a few months back but nothing was ever proved.”

“How long have they been neighbors?”

“They arrived with their mother from God knows where and rented the MacDonald house about eighteen months ago. Old Mac died and Mrs. Mac’s in a home but apparently quite competent. She has an agent rent the place for her and handle the upkeep. Either she’s tight with the upkeep money or he’s a bandit. I guess the rent’s pretty low; Rosie Howard can’t make much. She’s a freelance domestic, scrubbing floors and bathrooms and doing vacuuming and laundry for university faculty members. Who say she’s painfully honest. She works awfully hard for those kids.”

“Did my grandfather ever mention a lockbox to you?”

“Goodness, no. I was hardly a friend. But I read that lockbox story in the paper. His mind could’ve been a thousand miles and seventy years away when he spoke of it. A fall, severe head trauma... and he was eighty-seven.”

He nodded. The coffee had filtered through by now. Jan took the top section off and set it down in the sink over the drain, put the regular lid on the pot, and brought it to the dinette table.

“Do you take cream and sugar these days?”

“No indeed. Same old me.”

“A lot of brandy to keep out the Oregon chill?”

He smiled evenly. “Nice idea!” But his mind pounced. A friendly gesture to someone from a warmer climate — or a confession? Did being a faculty wife lead to boredom and boozing? Maybe being a faculty wife explained those little smiling digs about no entangling alliances and books not talking back. A readiness with those might serve to remind amorous undergraduates that a faculty wife was utterly unavailable; to anyone else they were simply irritating. And just how unavailable was she?

She reached into a tall cupboard and produced a small flat bottle, then sat across from him, filling two coffee cups. One she set in front of him with the brandy bottle. He spiked his cup, slid the bottle back. She recapped it. Okay: One point to her.

“I’d almost forgotten how cold it gets up here.” He inhaled the fragrance rising with the steam from his cup. “The old house was like a meat locker. But the weird thing was how little anything’d changed, as though I’d been away for the weekend, not five years. No feeling of homecoming, or of much else either, until I went down into the basement to light the furnace. Just a cold place of angles and shadows — but a lot friendlier than anywhere upstairs.”

Bingo.

Her cup hit the rim of the saucer. For a long moment she concentrated on not spilling coffee, then raised the cup to chin level, balancing it with the fingertips of the other hand. Wide dark eyes looked at him without changing expression. Two points to me. At least. Don’t play games with me, kid.

The outer corners of her eyes lifted fractionally.

“We accomplished a few nice breaks in routine down there. I’m flattered you remember them.”

“Oh, sure. You were my first.”

“You were mine, too.” She tried her coffee. Still too hot. “My hormones had been doing weird things to me for a couple of years, and I was impossibly romantic. You made quite an impression on me. You were so fiercely alone. Took me awhile to realize you were simply alienated. Still are, aren’t you?”

“I’ll have to ask a shrink.” But feint-and-parry wasn’t the way to get this Jan out of these clothes. Abruptly he shifted gears, smiled and said mildly, “Is there something in the rules that says we have to snipe at each other? We were friends once.”

“Goodness! Is that Dave North asking for quarter?”

“I didn’t think it was, but okay.”

He tried his coffee now. He liked it hot. It reached his stomach with an explosion of benevolent warmth. He’d have to be careful. He didn’t want to lose his edge. She made a small nod, as though graciously accepting his surrender though unconvinced it was real. He went on, in the same easy tone, “I suppose I ought to talk to Virg and Kathy’s mom sometime today.”

Not that he had anything to say to her — he’d just said that as a conversational filler. But it might not be a bad idea. Dotting the last i and crossing the final t had always meant the security of completion. The unturned stone could always hide the guffaw of derision, the unanswerable question, the fatal booby trap.

Jan asked, “You’ll be staying on at the house?”

“For a day or two. I inherit the whole thing but I guess I can only do so much until the formalities are completed. Then I’ll turn it over to Mr. Lowndes for sale. There’s nothing for me up here.”

For a moment she looked relieved. Then she put her cup down. Too deliberately. Minutes ago he had admired her poised calm but now he began to feel that there was something too controlled about it, almost rigid, and it had been there from the moment she had opened the front door. She was afraid. But what of?

He had to calm that fear if he was ever going to get her out of these clothes. Maybe reminding her of their basement frolics of sixteen years ago had been mistimed. Well, all the more challenge.

He grinned and said, “So you’ll have me for a neighbor for a few days, but don’t worry, I’m quite tame.”

He reached across the table and touched her hand. He wasn’t ready for what happened.

Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. She snatched her hand away with a force that sent her coffee cup flying, kicking over her chair and stumbling backwards over it into the kitchen. Her knees sagged and she fumbled in her skirt pocket while her throat strained on a hardly human noise. Her hand came out of her pocket and swept up toward him, holding a small canister. The noise from her throat cut off abruptly but her mouth stayed open. She stood half-crouched, graceless and uncoordinated, like a terrified child.

Had she invited him in after deciding he was — probably — safe as long as she kept insurance in her pocket? Mace? Pepper spray?

Did she ever open the door without it in her hand?

He felt utterly at a loss, which made him feel stupid and vulnerable.

The coffee cup had shattered somewhere. Half its contents were spreading across the table, beginning to drip into his lap. Reflexively he squirmed.

“Don’t move!” High, thin, a voice like a wind through wire. Her face was the color of bleached bone, her eyes dark caves of nightmare.

He said in an uncomprehending whisper, “What...” and then forgot what he’d been going to say. For a long time neither moved or said anything.

And then at last her lips began to quiver. A little at a time she even got her mouth closed. Fear began draining out of her eyes, leaving them bereft.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice was bodiless, hopeless. “I’m so sorry.” She lowered her can of safety.

He said cautiously, “Maybe you could use a little jolt of brandy yourself...”

But she was already talking before he got the words out.

“... I thought it was... getting better. I mean, I thought I’d soon be able to... shake hands, things like that, with a little warning, time to get ready. Some people are afraid of heights. Open spaces. With me it’s... touching. Being touched. By anyone.”

He thought automatically, Since when? and then realized with a feeling of deflation that her clothes would have to stay on after all.

She went on in the same hopeless voice, “Except Barbara. No one else. Not even Jeff. Poor Jeff. I’m a terrible, hopeless, hopeless wife. Because I got raped. Four guys broke in and raped me on my kitchen floor and all I could think of was Barbara, watching cartoons on TV next-door with the little neighbor girl, all I could think of was, God, sweetheart, don’t come home, don’t, stay away—!”

When she stopped, he said woodenly, “Here? In Eugene?”

Her head shook, hardly more than a tremor. The stiff half-crouch began to ease.

“New York. Now even Jeff stays away most of the time, in a little apartment close to the campus. Our excuse is his work. Maybe only Barbara believes that.”

She looked down at the canister in her hand, with a grimace of revulsion threw it into the sink. Then stood looking at it, and after a while, looking embarrassed, scooped it back into her pocket.

Dave heard himself say, “Hang onto that. All I can promise is that around me you’ll never need it.”

The words echoed weirdly in his head. He hoped they were the right ones. He was rather surprised to find that he meant them.

She was standing almost straight now. She tried to smile. Her lips jerked and flopped like spastic butterflies. She put hands over her mouth and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be.” Was that the right thing to say? He was awkward at giving sympathy. He could fake real feeling better with the help of a clasped hand, a gentle hug. He made his face relax. “Is it okay if I move now?”

“Oh yes. Please. Do.”

“You’ll have to tell me what next. Do you want me to go, and will you be all right?”

“... This is awful... but yes, would you? I’ll be fine. Is there a phone over there?”

“There is.”

“I’ll call you. Or you call me. Please.”

Outside, through the thickness of the door, he heard Jan slide the security chain into place.

It had rained again and the fog had closed in. An ordinary wet day looked like it could turn dramatic. The wet patch of spilled coffee on his jeans leg was cold and clammy.

He crossed the street at a diagonal. The elm tree sounded its irregular rattle. The untended lawn was a green swamp and the house was unwelcoming. The shaded windows had the flat shine of dead eyes.

He crossed the porch and let himself into pleasant warmth. He’d also left the overhead light on. Heat and light made the front room less forbidding, but it was still a room from another era presided over in Professor McLaren’s absence by stern, immobile chessmen, on duty till the old guy returned to make the next move in one of his games-by-mail.

Dave thought suddenly, How do I tell the chessmen that their vigil is over, that all they’re doing is collecting dust?

Surprised, he sneered inwardly. Sentimentalizing inanimate objects wasn’t his style. Getting mawkish over his grandfather’s chess pieces, for God’s sake! He must have been jarred off course by what had happened to Jan in New York, and by her response to the casual touch of his hand. Which was absurd. Jan hadn’t been important to him since he was fifteen. Her problems were her own, but obviously involved a lot of pain. He didn’t know much about pain. He’d spent most of his life avoiding it.

What he had to endure now was boredom.

The desk in the corner didn’t take long. He had found a bunch of keys on a plain ring — no spare front-door key among them — in the shallow belly-drawer, along with a couple of ballpoint pens, a pencil, a box of rubber bands, and a pocket pencil sharpener he recognized as his own from grade school. The topmost of the tier of drawers was devoted to neat bundles of chess correspondence. The two drawers below it were empty except for dust.

He looked up the old man’s lawyer’s number and called him on the phone.

“Law office, John Lowndes.”

“Hi, Mr. Lowndes. David North here, calling from my grandfather’s house.”

“Oh yes, David, good, I’m glad you called.” Amazing how the brisk professional telephone voice could drop into that of the bereaved fellow-mourner so fast. “I tried to reach you earlier, just to make sure you had heat and light and the roof wasn’t leaking.”

“Everything’s fine. I was over at a neighbor’s I hadn’t seen in years. Now I’m going through where my grandfather used to keep his household accounts...”

“Got all that,” the old lawyer said. “That’s one of the things an executor does, makes sure the financial affairs are in order. One thing that wasn’t in the desk, though, was his checkbook. Canceled checks and bank statements through to the middle of October, but no record of checks written since that time.”

“It will probably turn up somewhere around the house. I’ll look,” Dave said.

“Bills were all paid around the end of the month. Gas, power, phone, the housekeeping team that came in every two weeks to keep the place civilized... Then of course he had a few small but nice investments, and a quite surprising amount in savings.”

“Did you take the spare key from the keyring in the desk?”

“No. I have the set he had in his pocket. Incidentally, when you said you’d be staying there I cleaned out the refrigerator and left you half a dozen eggs and some bacon. I’m pretty sure there are some cans of soup in the cupboard over the sink.”

“If I can find coffee, too, I’ll be in pig heaven.”

“I think I saw some. And tea. Your granddad was a bear for good tea — especially first-flush Darjeeling.”

“I remember,” Dave said, politely faking fond enthusiasm. How to get John Lowndes to shut up? Of course: abruptly. He said firmly, “Thank you, Mr. Lowndes.”

“Uh, sure, you’re welcome,” Lowndes said, as though taken aback. “Any more questions, you call.”

Dave promised, and hung up.

He massaged his face roughly. It was stiff from the effort of keeping a smile in his voice. He was definitely on edge. It was this place, these people, his grandfather’s friends — or “friends” — who expected him to be bereaved and to act in a certain way when all he wanted was a brisk settling of accounts. And it was Jan, too, of course, whose clothes he couldn’t even try to get off, and the quiet narrow little streets and the cold and the low clouds and the enveloping fog and the unsettling sense of ghosts muttering invisibly of forgotten crimes and derelictions...

Oh hell. Are there ghosts I have to exorcise around here, too? But he didn’t believe in ghosts, even of the metaphorical kind. The problems of here and now were enough.

And, he suddenly realized, his most immediate problem was hunger.

The kitchen was so unchanged that he felt, uncomfortably, as though time had folded him back to his early youth. He heated a can of mushroom Soup-for-One and ate it with a few stale crackers and a hunk of Cheddar cheese he found wrapped in plastic at the back of the refrigerator, and drank coffee made in his grandfather’s small glass percolator.

Then he washed the dishes and left them drying in the rack he’d found under the sink and went back to work.

First, the garage. He took the key ring from the desk and went outside in a lull in the rain. One of the keys unlocked the garage door — for obviously the first time in an age. The garage was empty.

Back indoors, he checked the closet at the foot of the stairs, once home to hats and coats, rain gear, umbrellas. No lockbox. No checkbook. Under the old man’s bed in the downstairs bedroom were storage boxes containing spare sheets and blankets, packed tight. In the walk-in closet he first went through the pockets of all the clothes on hangers, then ransacked and repacked the drawers of shirts, socks, and underwear in the cramped built-in chest. The overhead shelf held only outdated philosophy textbooks. Nothing he was looking for.

He drew in a deep breath, blew it at the ceiling, let his mind wander for a few seconds...

When it returned to the here-and-now he found he was looking at a shoetree in a corner of the walk-in, and wondered why. Then he realized that what he was interested in was neither the shoes nor the tree but what they were standing on.

Of course. No wonder they hadn’t found it. They’d been looking for a real lockbox, metal, compact, probably fire resistant, with a good lock — maybe several. What the shoetree was standing on looked like flimsy gray-painted wood, a box about ten by fourteen inches and four inches deep. It had a small hasp and staple held to the wood with little Phillips-head screws. Locked, it might keep a mouse out. But there was no lock in sight.

He moved the shoetree and picked up the box. It was light, not very sturdy. Whatever was in it was packed loosely. He set it down on the old man’s bed — and stood looking at it, suddenly reluctant.

A box, contents unknown. Worth something, or nothing. Either way it might change his life beyond recognition.

The box was the stone unturned.

The page unread.

The old anxiety, unfelt for years, spread through his gut like a poisonous cold liquid.

Come on, for Christs sake! The missing checkbook might be in there.

If it was, it would still be there after he’d checked the rest of the house.

So he undertook a meticulous examination of every room, every cupboard and shelf and possible hiding place in the rest of the house, upstairs and down, even in the basement. He found neither the checkbook nor a more likely lockbox, and by the time he was done his resignation at the prospect of an extended bout of boredom had become a hammering impatience.

He marched into his grandfather’s room and snapped on the overhead light.

The gray box sat where he had left it, smugly unaware of its vulnerability, callously indifferent to his.

He sat down beside it and before he could change his mind flipped up the hasp, threw open the lid.

In the silence of the bedroom, with the rush of his bloodstream in his ears, he went through the disorganized layers of mix-and-match envelopes he found in the box. They ranged from small personal letter-size to regular business-size to nine-by-twelve manila mailers. All were dull with age and wear. No checkbook.

There were a few photographs. One showed a slender middle-aged woman he didn’t recognize. Another was of a smiling adolescent girl, another the same girl a little older holding the hand of a toddler wearing what looked like his first pair of jeans. The girl’s face tugged at his memory. Presumably his mother. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a picture of his mother. A few snapshots were of people he didn’t know. There were a couple of newspaper clippings, a few concert programs from fifty years ago, his own high-school and college graduation programs...

No heirloom gems, no documents locating a hidden bank account or real-estate holdings in downtown San Francisco. Just a few dusty out-of-character memories.

In the whispering silence, the front doorbell chimed.

Who in hell...? He could ignore it, but...

He closed the box, stood up, turned off the light. It was only four o’clock but might as well have been midnight. He marched through the house, turning on lights. At the front door he turned on the porch light, unlatched the door, and pulled it open.

Inches beyond it stood a woman in a raincoat and an incongruous beret. Her straggly gray hair looked self-barbered.

“You the grandson?” Her voice was unmusical. Her face was tired, square, bony except where the jawline sagged. Her eyes were flat brown pebbles, her mouth oddly childlike, stubborn.

“I’m Professor McLaren’s grandson, yes,” Dave said. “You must be Virg and Kathy’s mom. Keep those two under control, lady. The cops can’t wait to drop something heavy on them.”

The childlike mouth tightened.

She said, “You beat up on my son, you fondle my girl’s tits, you talking cop is a joke.”

“Who dreamed that one up? I wouldn’t have thought either of them had that much imagination. Did you know Professor McLaren?”

The question seemed to derail her aggressive momentum. She stared blankly into his face.

Then she said stolidly, “Sure. We were neighbors.”

“He ever invite you or the kids into the house?”

“Naah. Not like we were friends or anything.”

“You never worked for him?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Look, Mrs. Howard. I asked because Virg and Kathy were very interested in this house this morning. As to whether you ever worked for him, normally we’d look at his checkbook register to see if he wrote you any checks. But the checkbook is missing. So we have to wait till we close out his bank account and get access to the last few weeks of canceled checks. No big deal, unless you want to make it one.”

She shrugged. “Sure. Some housework one afternoon less’n two weeks ago.”

“Didn’t he have a housekeeping team come in every two weeks?”

“Yeah, but they weren’t contracted to do the basement. He said he could use me for half a day to clean up and put the basement in order.”

“Pay you by check?”

“Stuck in an envelope and taped to the front door.”

“Why not give it to you in person?”

“Did the work on Wednesday.” Her lip curled. She was explaining an eccentric to a half-wit. She pointed past him to the chess set on the coffee table.

“Wednesdays he went to his chess club. Some guy came and took him. I was still working. Enough questions. I gotta go fix dinner for my kids.”

“How come they’re so interested in the old man’s lockbox?”

Under the beret and the chopped-off gray hair poking out around it, the tired square face congealed.

“It was on the news, and in the paper, the last thing the old guy talked about. People are interested. You’re interested.”

“Maybe the news got it wrong. His lawyer couldn’t find any lockbox.”

“Get some tough cop to question that lawyer. I know there was a lockbox ’cause the old man told me.”

The old man told me.

Unexpected news. Pause to regroup.

Dave said, “Ever tell anyone that?”

“Nobody never asked me. Why would they? The poor old guy fell down his basement steps and died.”

“Maybe he had help.”

“You think maybe my kids...?” A stubby forefinger jabbed toward his face. “They were at the movies, mister. You remember that and you lay off my kids.”

“If I see them hanging around this end of the block again I’m calling the police.”

“Not... one... word... against my kids.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Howard.”

He backed away and closed the door.

He got the Fords’ number from Information and called Jan. She answered the phone on the second ring, her voice reserved but willing to be friendly.

He said abruptly, “I thought I’d found that damn lockbox. Don’t know why. Doesn’t even have a lock.”

It took her a moment to recognize his voice.

“... Oh. Dave.”

“And I talked with Mrs. Howard. She did an afternoon’s work for my grandfather the week before he died. She says he told her he had a lockbox. Odd thing to tell a near-stranger.”

Jan said, “Was there anything in the box you found?”

“A few mementoes, I guess. I’m surprised the old man kept them. Maybe he thought I’d want them someday, though I can’t think why. Couple of snapshots I think are of my mother.”

She said after a pause, “That’s a worthwhile find.”

“Am I interrupting dinner or anything?”

“Oh no. I was just about to mash the potatoes.”

“Could I invite you and your little girl out to dinner tomorrow? Somewhere with no dress code. I didn’t bring a tie.”

A longer pause this time. Then she said, “Um, I don’t...” and gave up. The silence resumed.

He said slowly, “Jan, are you housebound?”

He heard her release her breath with a rush.

“Not... quite. I can go down to the little market... and down to the school-bus stop to see Barbara safely aboard or pick her up... but anywhere else is... difficult.” Her voice became hurried, confidential. “It’s not just housebound. I’m irrationally afraid of people — strangers. Inviting you in for coffee was a sort of spur-of-the-moment experiment. You know how that turned out.”

He said awkwardly, “Inviting me in took guts. After all this time I’m at least a semi-stranger. It’s none of my business but I’ll ask anyway. Are you in therapy?”

“I was. That dimwit said I couldn’t stand to be touched because it would remind me how much I’d enjoyed being raped. He was afraid I might try to get raped again so I could enjoy it again and at the same time be punished for enjoying it. I couldn’t see it that way, so he said I was resisting him. I couldn’t see it that way even under drugs and hypnosis, so I told him to find work he might be good at. I guess I’m between therapists.”

“Don’t give up on it.” Was that good advice? — or just boilerplate encouragement? Could anything make therapy work? “Look, not to put pressure on you, but could we consider that dinner invitation open? In case you get experimental again.”

“Okay. Thanks.” She didn’t sound hopeful.

“Where could that lockbox be?”

“Buried in the basement? Maybe the box you found has a false bottom.”

“I’ll check. Talk to you later.”

The gray wooden box had no false bottom. The cement slabs of the basement floor were slightly uneven but looked untouched since the house was built.

He reset the gas furnace to low and went back upstairs and put on his jacket. Outside the fog had lifted and the evening had a vicious chill. He got into the Tercel and drove to a restaurant near the campus, had dinner, then found an open market where he bought a six-pack of good beer, half a pound of coffee, and a box of imported cookies.

Back on his grandfather’s block he parked in front of the MacDonald house. The doorless garage now sheltered a Ford clunker. Dim light came through curtained ground-floor windows. He got out with his sack of goodies and navigated the soggy parking strip and the broken cement walk to the front porch. No porch light. He couldn’t find a doorbell. He knocked. The front door rattled loosely under his knuckles.

He was ready to knock again when footsteps shuffled behind the door.

“Who is it?” A crabbed, uncongested female voice.

“David North from up the street, Mrs. Howard. Professor McLaren’s grandson.”

“Leave us alone!”

“Please, Mrs. Howard. I just need to ask one question.”

Vague whisperings inside. He waited. The door was snatched open and he stared into the muzzle of a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun. Held by Virg, of course, with a John Wayne air of careless confidence.

Dave’s skin crawled. His mouth and throat were dry as Death Valley and his insides felt loose. For long moments the gun was all he could see. Then a girl giggled and he became aware of Kathy and Mrs. Howard a step behind Virg in the hallway, and that Virg was wearing jeans and a ratty sweater the color of machine oil and the cocky grin of someone who likes being top dog.

Dave said, trying for nonchalance but almost stammering, “What’s the gun for?” Christ, I sound like a frightened kid. “I brought over a peace offering.”

Kathy giggled again.

Virg said, “Ask your question and get lost.”

“My question for you is, is that thing loaded?”

Virg’s grin widened. “Only one way you’ll ever find out.” He held the grin a moment longer, then his eyes peeled skin off Dave’s face. “Ask your question!”

Murmuring something, Mrs. Howard pushed past her son and stepped down onto the porch, put a hand on the shotgun, and eased it aside.

Without her beret and raincoat she was a squat, shapeless woman with a tired face and a stubborn child’s mouth. She waited.

Dave said, “My grandfather never told his friends he had a lockbox. How come he told you?”

Mrs. Howard shrugged. “He just did, when he was showing me that basement, all them packing crates and stuff. I said, just to be talking, ‘Boy, I bet you got some real old treasures down here,’ and he gave me that dumb old-man’s smile and said, ‘Naah, got all my treasures in a lockbox.’ All there was to it.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

Dave thanked her and held out the paper sack. Kathy came and took it, retreating quickly to open the sack and peer into it.

On impulse, Dave said, “The old man’s checkbook’s missing. So’s the spare front-door key.”

Virg said, “We ain’t got ’em.” The shotgun swung back into threatening position. “Get lost.”

Dave tried to grin. His facial muscles only clenched.

“I just want to know all about how my grandfather died, is all,” he said. “Good night.”

He turned back to the Tercel. Slow and easy. He couldn’t let them think they’d chased him off.

He got into the car and drove it up the block to his grandfather’s house.

He parked in the driveway and got out and braced himself against the car’s roof and trembled like a leaf. Of course they had chased him off. Virg Howard with a gun was pure nightmare. Dave felt impermanent, hanging by a thread.

Rain began falling, and he became aware of the tickle of distant anger. Its unfamiliarity braced him. Pushing away from the car, he found he could stand unaided. He slammed and locked the car door. He still hadn’t taken in his suitcase but it could wait.

He ran for the porch, let himself in, and snapped on the light as the desk phone began ringing. He snatched it up and barked, “Yes?”

Jan’s voice said, “Dave?”

“Oh. Jan. Sorry, didn’t mean to yell at you.”

“Any luck with the lockbox?”

“No false bottom, no loose flooring. But I just had an adventure. You were right, who needs ’em? I tried to make peace with Mrs. Howard so I could ask her how come my grandfather told her about the box, found myself ogling the business end of a shotgun held by young Virg. Scared me stupid. It turns out the old guy hired Mrs. Howard to clean up his basement, she said something about I bet you got a lot of treasures down here, and he said no, all my treasures are in a lockbox. Sounds offhand enough to be true. She said something else earlier. I told her my grandfather’s lawyer hadn’t found any lockbox. She said have some tough cop question him, suggesting maybe he lied. And what about Tom Hastings?”

“Who’s Tom Hastings?”

“The chess-club member who found my grandfather on the basement steps.”

“... I thought you suspected the Howard kids.”

“I think maybe their mom does, too, that’s why she’s so defensive about them. Or maybe it really was an accident after all. There are still questions I don’t think anyone’s been asking.”

“Go to the police tomorrow and ask them what questions they did ask. And...”

She paused, then went on in a different, more tentative voice. “Dave, I know this is off the subject, but something’s been going through my head. What you told me about Mrs. Howard and your grandfather talking about ‘treasures’ sort of confirms it. It could mean the box you found was the lockbox.”

“No treasures in it.”

“Redefine treasures.”

His patience snapped. “Make your point.”

“What did you call what you found in the box?”

“Mementoes? Doesn’t mean that’s what he kept them for.”

“What did he keep them for?”

“How the hell should I know? He meant to throw them out but he was old, he forgot.”

“Was he old when he kept the oldest of them? What about the photographs you thought were your mother? I never saw a picture of her. Did you even have one?”

Through clenched teeth he said again, “Make your point!”

“Maybe we gave your granddad too superficial a reading. He was shy and lonely. He’d lost a wife, a daughter, and who knows what else? Living in his heart hurt too much. So he moved out and lived in his head.”

“So?”

“And he thought the greatest gift he could give his grandson was teach him to do the same.”

Dave said, “That it?”

“Yes”

“Why’d he hold onto any mementoes at all?”

“Maybe a few reminders of some good times were a comfort, no matter how infrequently he looked at them, or maybe he scorned himself for the weakness they represented.”

He said abruptly, “A lot of maybes. You’ve been in therapy and learned some of that shamanistic thinking.”

“Yes, well, maybe that’s true.” She became more assertive. “All in the interest of solving your lockbox puzzle, and humanizing your granddad, and explaining why you’re such a pain in the ass. Don’t take it personally.”

“Try explaining the missing front-door key, the missing checkbook.”

“You never told me about—”

“I’m telling you now!”

“Do they have anything to do with how he died?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Suddenly he had trouble finding words. A numbing exhaustion had crept up like brigand with bludgeon and caught him by surprise. He’d had a long lousy day. A funeral was a downer even without the depressing convention of deep grief, and the details and questions and conflicting personalities crammed into the rest of the day had improved nothing. This house had improved nothing. The disconnected wires of the furnace remote, the grimy basement windows, the weather, ceiling zero, visibility two blocks, the inexhaustible whispering rain, had all improved nothing, not to mention the missing checkbook and key, and young Virg and his shotgun...

He said awkwardly, “They’re just facts that have turned up.”

“I understand,” Jan said. “I presumed too much, didn’t I?”

“Just forget it, okay?”

“I’m sorry, Dave.”

“Yeah. Good night.”

He hung up.

And damn you, Jan Tarquin.

He had wet string for muscles and water for blood and noticed for the first time how much muddy water he had tracked across the hardwood floor from the front door. He needed a drink. He’d been dumb to give that six-pack to the Howards, it hadn’t done any good anyway. Could there be something in the liquor cabinet...? The old man had rarely drunk anything but tea or coffee but had usually kept something around to serve his infrequent guests...

The liquor cabinet, which Dave hadn’t raided in his quest for lunch, stood in a corner of the dining room. For an irritating second it resisted opening. A second was enough. Irritation, and the insistent background goad of distant anger, focused down to a small point of red light at the base of his brain.

Which, without warning, throbbed briefly and burst.

Revelation.

The old man had been wrong.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the germ of anger that had been drumming its fingers back at the edge of awareness became a raging, sizzling intoxicant scouring his arteries, a drug that vanquished lethargy and cleared vision. He was sharp as a scalpel.

Damn Jan Tarquin. Damn her for being here. For being a victim. For turning her neurotic isolation into a vengeful distortion lens to see him through, for reeling him into her shallow, self-absorbed frame of understanding and reducing him to another mere victim. Another two-bit actor in a narcissistic farce-drama with no aim but a sentimental pig-wallow in false pathos and emotional garbage.

Anger was good. Anger was useful. And don’t get in my face, old man, I’ve listened to you too long.

Anger crested, began an inch-by-inch retreat, leaving him almost panting, fists clenched, his whole body galvanized into combat readiness. Not needed now. No enemies present. He could use that drink not to hide bad feelings but to celebrate new freedom.

This time the liquor cabinet opened without argument. The bottom shelf held a row of glasses on a folded white towel. On the shelf above stood a lone half-full bottle of an Islay Island single-malt scotch whiskey.

He splashed some into one of the glasses and sampled it. He had never tasted a single malt before. This was smoky, smooth, probably intensely celebratory. He took a deep breath and heard rain suddenly loud as a shower of pebbles on the roof.

Damn the rain. Damn the old man for dying in Oregon in November. Okay, and what was the old man’s grandson doing here? Trying to appear normally familial to the old man’s “friends,” all to repay the debt he owed the old man for feeding and clothing him, seeing he got an education. All he really wanted was to get the details seen to so he could leave wet Oregon and the disaster Jan Tarquin had become and all the irritations of his early life behind him. For good.

He had taken the bottle and the glass into the living room. He chose his grandfather’s armchair. It looked comfortable. It wasn’t. The springs were dead, the whole chair molded to the old man’s taller, skinny frame. Hell, the discomfort of the chair was a symbol for the whole dumb situation he’d walked into. He should stay in it and overcome the chair as chair and as symbol and thereby conquer all. If you beat the symbol, didn’t you beat what it stood for? Wasn’t that what Jan would say?

He poured more of the whiskey. From the coffee table, chessmen studied him with disquietingly blank-eyed stares. The rain hammered down overhead. Where was that goddamn lockbox? Was it possible Jan could have guessed right about— No, ridiculous, didn’t bear thinking about, all part of her silly campaign to diminish him... Why did she keep coming to his mind at fifteen instead of grown-up and manipulative and bitchy?

He never really knew when his thoughts lost all coherence, merging with troubled dreams of puzzlement and loss, and then suddenly he started awake, cramped and uncomfortable in his grandfather’s chair, to discover that it was almost one o’clock, that he had drunk at least half the whiskey, and had to talk to Jan.

Getting out of the chair hurt. So did standing straight. The small of his back felt run over by a tractor and he had forgotten what his knees were for. The captive glowworm in the light fixture overhead poked angry fingers into his eyes.

He stumbled across the room to the desk phone. He had written her number on the cover of the directory. He dialed it clumsily. She took a long time to answer.

At last she said sleepily, “Hello?”

He’d been going to ask something about Mrs. Howard but suddenly wasn’t sure just what. He surprised himself by saying instead, “Does it really matter?”

He listened to her breathing, gathering her wits.

He explained impatiently, “Whether my grandfather was or was not the unfeeling old bastard he always seemed.”

“Oh. Dave. What time is it?”

“Twelve fifty-eight.”

“Oh.” Her voice was faint but behind it connections to the real world were being made. “No, I guess not. It might make a difference to how you think of him. What makes this so important at twelve fifty-eight?”

“... Nothing, I guess. Listen. Right after we talked before, something weird happened. I got mad. Real red fury, first time in my life. I thought I was mad at you, now I’m not so sure. I poured me a little drink and swallowed the whole distillery. Fell asleep in a merciless armchair, woke up with a broken back. I think someone’s been tramping through my head replugging half the wiring. Nothing makes much sense.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re not mad at me. Who’re you mad at? Your granddad?”

“Why bother?”

“Your getting mad is quite a breakthrough. Getting mad at him would be a bigger one. You’ve been mad at him most of your life. Isn’t that why you worked so hard to be like him, beat him at his own game, replace him?”

“You’ve been reading tea leaves again.”

“If you’re finally getting mad at your grandfather, maybe it’s because you’ve started seeing him as a failure at loving instead of a success at tyranny.”

“Why’re you so hung up on my grandfather?”

“I didn’t make this call, the agenda’s yours, you brought him up. If there’s something else can it please wait till I put Barbara on the school bus at ten past eight?”

“... I guess so.”

“I’ll bet what we did talk about was more important. Good night.”

The disconnection came a heartbeat after the last word. She didn’t want any smart replies. Or any thoughtful or analytic ones. Not that he could think of any. Maybe he was still half drunk or hungover.

The nearest bed was in his grandfather’s room.

This time the dreams were goading, thwarting. They played against a dim roaring background that touched everything with the anxiety of developing nightmare.

His grandfather was alive and wouldn’t say where his checkbook was and knew all about Dave and Jan in the basement and in a voice like setting ice warned against the flow of hormones and emotions, regretting his failure to instill in David a due appreciation of the joys of intellection until Dave burst out, feeling insignificant against the grandeur of the Heavens and the old man’s glacial certainty, “God damn it, I’m thirty-one and I’ll screw whom I like,” and naked teenage Jan was recoiling from him like grown-up Jan, eyes huge and dark in a pale pointy face and his grandfather, all thoughtful calm, was trying to throttle him with a hand that felt like a bundle of dry twigs but was amazingly strong—

He struggled to sit up, coughing. His eyes stung. Through smoke that filled the room he saw a lurid red line under the bedroom door. He smelled gasoline.

He had slept in his clothes under a heavy quilt. He kicked free of it, stepped into his shoes, and blundered to the door. It was too hot to touch. The light switch didn’t work. His mind skipped around like water on a hot skillet, the rest of him beginning to fumble along after it in the hope of guidance. It’s called panic, son. Don’t think. Just get your ass out of here.

He felt his way along the footboard of the bed to the window. The chest of drawers blocked his way. He hooked both hands around its rear edge and hauled. It scraped across the floor like a rusty gate until it hit the bed — but had given him access to the window. He tripped the shade. It rattled up. He grabbed the sash lock but couldn’t move it.

Beginning to cough in earnest, he pulled a narrow top drawer from the chest of drawers and drove it through the window. Broken glass flew and cold air hit him in the face and the drawer stuck halfway through the flyscreen. He sawed it violently in and out, glass flying, until the screen gave way and the drawer fell to the ground. Someone outside was shrieking something but he had no time to listen. Something to get — no! — two things.

He got his quilted jacket from the bedside chair, put it on, and zipped it up against self-inflicted abdominal surgery when he shoved himself through the window. Then he felt for the walk-in closet door and opened it. Fire was already eating through the wall from the middle of the house. He scooped up the luckless gray lockbox and carried it to the window and threw it out. Then, ignoring the remaining spikes of glass still in the frame, he reached beyond the window to the sill and hauled himself through the opening.

A three-point landing — hands and forehead hitting the cement walk at the same time — knocked him silly. He was vaguely aware of struggling to get up until someone turned him over on his back, grabbed his wrists, and dragged him away from the house. The godawful roaring, grinding noise was the first fire truck arriving.

The cops questioned Jan first, and then the paramedics gave her a blanket to wrap around her dressing gown and told her to go home and get into a hot bath. She tucked Dave’s gray wooden box under the blanket and left. With Dave the paramedics were brisk and professionally sympathetic and stuck a big Band-Aid at an angle above one eye. The cops were noncommittal and very interested in how much drinking he’d done and when. His head had begun aching badly by the time they let him go. The firemen were still busy.

Dave crossed the street to the Tarquin house — the Ford house. The front door was locked, of course: Her kid was there and paranoid habits were compulsive. He knocked briefly. She opened the door at once. She had cranked up the heat but was still wrapped in the blanket. Her shadowed eyes looked bruised. He smelled coffee.

“You don’t have to invite me in,” Dave said, “I can—”

Her response was sharp, impatient, with a tendency to stutter.

“Oh, for Christ’s s-sake, don’t g-give me that crap, you’re as cold as I am. There’s coffee. Warm up while I soak in the tub.”

He followed her into the kitchen. She stopped suddenly, irresolutely, in the middle of the floor, eyes focused somewhere else. She hugged the blanket tightly about her. A red dressing gown and two pajama-pants legs poked out below it, and feet in wet muddy bedroom slippers.

She waved vaguely at the breakfast nook. The coffee pot and cups and saucers and the brandy bottle waited on the table. The gray box sat on one of the chairs.

“When I came squirting out of that window and landed on my head,” Dave said, “you didn’t waste any time dragging me away from the house. Pretty good, for someone who hates touching and being touched.”

“Yes. Well.” A small intake of breath, something between a sigh and a sob. “It just... happened.” She looked down at her toes.

Dave said, “I owe you a new pair of slippers.”

A small shrug under the blanket. Then she kicked off the muddy slippers and walked barefoot out of the kitchen and disappeared up the stairs.

He wasn’t sure what she had to be emotional about, but he was grateful to her. Unable to get back to sleep after his one o’clock phone call, she had got up and brewed some herbal tea and read for a while, and then, wondering about some half-heard sound, had looked out her front window and seen the fire. She had called 911 and grabbed her house keys and run across the street. Unable to break in, she had stood yelling for him to get up and get out. When he did get out, she had hauled him to greater safety. He couldn’t have asked more of anyone.

But it was he who should be emotional, if he were given to it. Well, he wasn’t. The house was just a place he had once known, full of things the old man must have valued, not he. That someone had tried to kill him was different. He was quite prepared to get emotional about that — full of controlled cold anger at the right time.

He poured himself a cup of coffee, ignoring the brandy; it might make him sleepy. The paramedics had told him to stay awake for at least a couple of hours.

When Jan came back downstairs, in jeans and boots and a heavy turtle-neck sweater the color of oatmeal, he was finishing his second cup of coffee and going through the contents of the box again.

Dave asked, “How’s the little girl?”

“Oh, fine. She slept through everything.” Jan moved like someone dreaming, and spoke as though nothing mattered much. “Everything stay dry in there?”

“Yes — luckily, since the box was pretty shaky even before I threw it out the window.”

“Ready to admit it’s the mysterious lockbox?”

He shook his head, turned to the window as a car or van started up somewhere outside. He moved the curtain aside, swiped fingers across the moisture-frosted glass.

She said behind him, “I thought you might have changed your mind, since you brought that box out with you...”

“That’s the ambulance just left,” Dave said. “There’s a light on at the Howards’.”

He let the curtain fall back into place. She poured the last of the coffee into her cup.

“I wish I’d seen something useful, when I first saw the fire.” She still didn’t sound really interested. “You know, someone running away, someone recognizable.”

Dave said slowly, “You suppose Virg and Kathy are on their way to see if I got barbequed?”

He stood up. She blinked, shrugged, took a deep slow breath and released it.

“Trying to prove how tough you are? What do you think you can do?”

He admitted he had no idea. She dug a key ring out of her pocket and slid it across the table.

“Lock the front door after yourself. And don’t do anything dumb.”

Night air went up his nose like ice daggers. Light from the fire equipment made the street gleam wetly.

His grandfather’s house was a blackened shell. Smoke and steam crawled out of broken windows and burned-through patches of wall. Firemen in helmets and waterproof gear dealt with hidden sparks and hot spots.

The squad car was parked behind the fire trucks. The two uniformed cops stood on the sidewalk, watching the firemen. There wasn’t much else to watch. It was too early and too cold for a crowd to have gathered.

Dave took a long look at the ruin of the house. Unexpectedly his own voice in his mind said, Sorry, Grandfather. At least I got your lockbox out, and he felt a disorienting lurch as the implications staggered him. He was suddenly sharply nauseated. He clamped his eyes shut. Behind his eyelids parallel lines converged and crossed, parameters and paradigms melted and merged. He was adrift in a swirling current. If the old guy had been just a shy recluse, then his guidelines were only the demarcations of a prison, not principles to live by.

He opened his eyes. The cops were turning to look at him. God damn. He couldn’t throw up. Breathe slow. Relax.

Nausea retreated, though the sense of disorientation still rocked him and his head ached. Okay. Tonight’s challenge: Act natural.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, aimed for an easy tone. “Any sign of arson yet?”

They were older than the cops this morning. Sundahl was big and gray; Crossen was thin, dark, with a face like a hatchet. They had annoyed him before, being calm and meticulously polite. Now they managed to look disinterested and watchful at the same time.

“Mr. North.” Sundahl gave him a nod. “The firemen reported smelling gasoline, same as you.”

Officer Crossen smiled guardedly. “Nothing to justify arresting the Howard kids, though.”

“What kind of evidence survives a fire like this one?”

“Sometimes you’d be surprised,” Sundahl said. “Was there something in particular?”

“Just curious about the house I grew up in, and I have to get my suitcase from the car.”

“What’s in the suitcase, sir?” Sundahl asked too casually, without rising inflection.

“Nothing to justify your thinking I set the fire myself. Just clothes, toilet articles. Want to look?”

Sundahl looked at him stonily. “That won’t be necessary, sir.”

“Do I annoy you, Officer?”

A muscle in Sundahl’s jaw twitched once.

“You couldn’t annoy me if you tried.”

“What, no ‘sir’ this time around?”

A door closed down the street. Dave looked, saw Virg Howard shambling across the porch of the old MacDonald house.

Dave said to Crossen, “Go ask young Virg why he isn’t curled up in bed with his sister.”

“No call to do that, sir.”

Virg was approaching. Dave’s headache throbbed. He started down to meet Virg.

Crossen said quietly, “Stay cool, Mr. North.”

Virg, in his flaps-down lumberjack’s hat and ratty coat and jeans, had his eyes on the ruin of the house. His mouth hung partway open.

Dave said, “Hi, Virg.”

Virg stopped. He refocused on Dave.

“... Uh. Hi. You got out okay, huh?”

“Oh sure. Disappointed?”

“Disa—?” He looked bewildered. “Huh?”

Dave said, “You tried to scare me with that shotgun earlier. Think you could do it better with a match and a can of gasoline?”

“Jesus, man. The shotgun was a gag. Weren’t no shells in it. All day you been trying to pin something on me and my sis and we ain’t done nothin’—”

“Not me. Maybe your mom’s been trying to pin something on you.” It was the idea he’d wanted to try out on Jan at one o’clock. “Always jumping to your defense, even when no one’s accused you, like maybe she’s trying to make people think she’s protesting too much...”

Virg’s head was shaking violently. “No... no. Why’d she do that?”

“She’s tired of having you around to take care of.” Virg’s head went on shaking. “Or maybe she suspects you, or, even worse, knows you did it.”

“Did what, for Chrissakes?”

“Threw the old man down the stairs. Set fire to my house.”

Virg’s head stopped shaking. He stood bent over, like someone who’s had the wind knocked out of him, a gangling kid out of his depth, shocked beyond imagining.

Officer Crossen said behind Dave, “Any suspicions you have, Mr. North, better take ’em to the police department in the morning.”

“But I ain’t done nothin’,” Virg protested in a little kid’s voice.

The sound down the block was a stuck window being forced open.

A girl’s voice called, “Hey, Virg! Who you talkin’ to? Mom wants you back inside.”

“I ain’t done nothin’,” Virg said again.

“Mom’s calling,” Dave said. “Let’s go talk to her.”

Virg summoned a spark of pale venom.

“What makes you think she’ll talk to you?”

“Tell her I found the lockbox,” Dave said.

When they were halfway down the block a recent-model car came around the corner and went by in the opposite direction. Virg broke into an ungainly run. He reached his home, blundered up onto the porch, and disappeared inside.

Dave blew on his hands, crammed them back into his pockets. Behind him Officer Crossen said, “Playing kinda rough, aren’t you?”

“You’re letting me.”

“That bit about the shotgun needed some follow-up. You really think he’s guilty?”

“Look,” Dave said, “I had a lousy day and then it got worse and I’ve got this headache. Don’t know what I think from minute to minute.” The wiring in his head was still being replugged. Unfamiliar thoughts were trying to find form and coherence.

Kathy appeared in the upstairs window.

“Where’d you find it?” she asked eagerly.

“Downstairs bedroom closet,” Dave said.

“Good stuff in it?”

The front door opened. Mrs. Howard marched out in her raincoat and a heavy muffler. She left the porch and came to the sidewalk and looked back up at Kathy.

“I told you, don’t talk to nobody. Close the window. Go back to bed.”

Kathy closed the window with difficulty. The light in the room went out, leaving Mrs. Howard’s face almost invisible when she turned on Dave.

“I told you, stop spreading lies about my kids.”

“I’ve been learning about how much evidence can survive a fire like that one,” Dave said.

“You won’t find any evidence against my kids!”

“There never was much of an investigation when the old man died,” Dave said. “No reason there should be. Old people have accidents all the time. But you heard me say I wanted to find out just how it happened. You know they’re not guilty but you thought I might make trouble for Virg and Kathy, so tonight you tried to burn down the house — with me in it.”

“What’re you talking about, mister?”

“You went a bit far over my grandfather’s lockbox. What did you think you’d find in it, something that’d bring you a little cash, enough for something for the kids, who’ve never really had anything? After a lifetime of honesty, you’d bend the rules a bit and the old guy would never know, where’s the harm, right? The afternoon you worked for him you couldn’t find the lockbox, but you found and swiped the spare front-door key—”

“I never swiped nothing. Do I have to listen to this crap, Officer?”

“No, ma’am.” Crossen said.

“I found the lockbox,” Dave said. “Only things in it were family treasures — old pictures, old memories, stuff like that. Not worth a dime to anyone else.”

He wished he could see her face.

She said, “... So?”

“So you killed him for nothing.”

He heard her intake of breath. It began raining again, gently, straight down, freezing. She turned abruptly and stumbled back onto the porch and through the front door.

“Evidence?” Officer Crossen said patiently.

Dave shook his head. His headache had almost gone and he felt numb with astonishment that he’d thought and said any of that. No anger, though. Just a sense of futility.

“Evidence is cop’s work. And it’s surprising how much evidence survives a fire.”

“Sometimes. Proving she set the fire don’t prove she murdered anyone.”

“It’d be a start,” Dave said. “Actually, I don’t think she meant to. A week after she stole the key — last Wednesday — she let herself into the house to look for that lockbox again. The old man came home early. Maybe she tried to get away unrecognized but wound up shoving him down the basement steps. She thought she’d killed him. He may have recognized her anyway, since he connected his attacker with the lockbox and tried to explain, or else in the end the box and everything in it were all that mattered. Anyway, she went down past him to the furnace. If it was on, she shut it off. Then she pulled a few wires loose from the remote connection. It was a cold rainy evening. A nonworking furnace would explain what he was doing on the stairs — going down to light it manually. Then — and this is pure guesswork — she remembered seeing his checkbook in the desk where she’d found the key. She took that too because it had her name in the register as a recent payee and she didn’t want anyone knowing she’d ever been in the house. If she’d been really smart she’d have returned the key, but then wouldn’t have had it to let herself in tonight.

“Anyway, she heard Tom Hastings at the front door, trying to return the old guy’s notebook, so she ducked out the back. Old-fashioned lock, no automatic latch, so she couldn’t lock it. Hastings found it unlocked and went in. Mrs. Howard walked home through the rain and waited for her kids to get home from the movies.”

Crossen sighed.

Yeah,” he admitted. “And maybe no. Evidence, Mr. North. You haven’t said anything to convince me, much less a judge and jury.”

“But if she loads the kids into that old Ford and splits, it could start you guys thinking, especially if she runs out on light or gas bills, things like that. And who knows what the arson investigation is going to turn up.”

Crossen’s throat made an unhopeful noise.

“Well, anyway,” Dave said. “I’m cold and wet and to hell with it. Good night, if it’s still night.”

He turned up the block. The firemen were packing their equipment. The house was surrounded by a crime-scene tape.

Well, Grandfather, at least it’s a down payment on that debt. Or will be, if the cops find anything.

The car he’d seen going up the block was parked in the driveway of number 1614. He crossed the street. He had the house key in his pocket but using it might seem presumptuous.

He knocked. He knew before it opened who would open it.

At least he wasn’t a giant Viking. A bit taller then Dave, lean, dark, with rimless glasses.

“I’ll bet you’re Dave.”

“That’s me.”

“Hi, I’m Jeff Ford.” He stuck out a hand. He had a good handshake that didn’t have to prove it could crush granite. Dave stepped through the door into dry warmth as Jan came out of the kitchen. Jeff Ford closed the door.

Jan said, “My God, you look drowned. I made another pot of coffee and the heater’s on in the bathroom so it’s nice and warm. I left some dry clothes there for you to try on.”

A gesture invited him into the kitchen. He dug the key ring out of his pocket and laid it on the shelf under the mirror in the coatrack. He went past her into the kitchen and they followed him, Jan lacing her fingers through her husband’s and hanging on as though his arm were a lifeline.

Dave met her eyes, which were carefully blank. He smiled to hide a stab of disappointment that almost floored him.

He heard himself say, “I’ve been enough of a nuisance for one day, I just came to pick up the lockbox. Yes, you were right about that” — he pointed to the gray box on the dinette chair — “but the idea took some getting used to. I’ll go find a motel.”

“We’ve got a spare room,” Jeff Ford said reasonably.

“Hell, I couldn’t impose. I have to get a few hours’ sleep and then go talk to the cops. I’ve got a suspect for them. Murder and arson. Mrs. Howard.”

Jeff Ford said, “Rosie Howard? Why on earth—?”

“I know, she’s honest and reliable. I guess too many years of working your buns off for two desperately ordinary kids and getting nowhere gets you to the point where you’re ready to trade a lot of that good karma for a little something nice. She thought she’d find it in the lockbox. Unfortunately, my grandfather came home early. Tonight she tried to turn me into a crispy critter because I’d said I wanted to find out all about the old guy’s death and she was afraid I was going to accuse Virg and Kathy.”

Jeff Ford said, “Can you prove any of this?”

“None of it. I’m hoping the cops’ll be able to. Or that Mrs. Howard does something to give herself away.” Dave dredged up a painful grin, pointed to where Jan was hanging onto her husband. “You’re going to cut off the circulation in that poor man’s arm. If you can let go long enough to lend me a plastic trash sack I can carry my treasure box in...”

“Oh. Sure.”

She let go of Jeff’s arm and found Dave what he needed in a kitchen drawer.

Jeff asked, “Any chance you’ll move back into the neighborhood?”

“No chance at all.” Be too hard. I think I’ve been in love with your wife since I was fifteen and never knew it. “I can’t take the weather.”

Jan held the plastic sack open while he slid the lockbox into it.

“I’m sorry about your house, Dave.”

“Thank you. Yeah. Me too.” And all the chessmen and the music and the memories, even the bad ones. He headed for the front door.

Jeff Ford opened it for him. It was still raining. The trucks were gone, but there were now two cop cars in front of his grandfather’s house. They weren’t wasting any time.

Jan said, “Let us know where you’re staying.”

“Call you first thing.”

“Drive carefully. Good night.”

The door closed behind him. He felt terribly alone. He didn’t feel like a ghost, or like someone who’d come comfortably home, but like someone who finds himself in an inexplicably alien country.

For a few moments he stood and watched the rain and breathed the smell of wet charcoal coming from what was left of his grandfather’s house.

Yesterday he wouldn’t have been able to care less.

Maybe he was going to get nostalgic about yesterday. Or was that just his grandfather being disapproving?

Knock it off, Grandfather.

He stepped out into the rain and crossed the street toward his car.