Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (13 page)

“In a moment,” said the ghost, and went on talking.

Five minutes later, Milton decided that he would have to be firm. “I have a test at eight. I must be going now.”

The great man frowned. “I haven’t finished yet,” he said peevishly.

“Really, I have to leave.”

“Well … I suppose I’ll come along. We can talk on the way.”

Milton got ready to leave, idly wondering whether the rest of the class would be able to see the visitor. Would he be invited to address the class? Perhaps the test could be postponed in his honor. Milton grabbed for his coat, scarf, and briefcase while the ghost continued to lecture steadily; in his present spectral state, it was no longer necessary for him to pause for breath. They left the room together, nodding and gesturing about various political details.

“… Registered Retirement Savings Plan …”

“Yes! Yes! I’ll make a note of it!” Milton scribbled furiously.

“… Temporary Wheat Reserves Act …”

“Of course!”

They continued down the hall, the ghost orating happily, while Milton nodded and noted, until they arrived at the end of the corridor, where a left turn would take them to the stairs. The deceased prime minister, deep in a monologue about taxable income, continued to walk straight ahead, passing gracefully through the brick wall. Milton, attempting to follow, slammed face-first into cold, solid reality. As the last strains of the voice reached him from some great beyond, Milton dabbed at his profusely bleeding nose, and reflected that Professor Paulsen had been right after all: you could follow Mackenzie King just so far.…

H
E STOOD FOR
a long while staring up at the house, but all was quiet. There was one light on in an upstairs window, but he saw no shadows flickering on the shades.
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse
, Louis smirked to himself. Christmas wasn’t so hot if you were in his line of work. People tended to stay home with the family: the one night a year when everybody wishes they were the Waltons. But all that togetherness wore off in a week. By now everybody had cabin fever, and they were dying to get away from the in-laws and the rug rats. That’s how it was in his family, anyway. By New Year’s Eve his ma had recovered from the thrill of receiving candy from Anthony, bubble bath from Michael, and a bottle of perfume from Louis, and she had started nagging again. Louis always gave her a bottle of perfume. He preferred small, lightweight gifts that could be slipped easily and unobtrusively into one’s pocket.

He also preferred not to have endless discussions with his nearest and dearest over whether he was going to get a job or enroll in the auto mechanics program at the community college. Neither idea appealed to Louis. He liked his schedule: sleeping until eleven, a quick burger for brunch, and a few hours of volunteer work at the animal shelter.

Nobody at the shelter thought Louis was lazy or unmotivated. He was their star helper. He didn’t mind hosing down the pens and cleaning the food dishes, but what he really enjoyed was playing with the dogs, and brushing down the shaggy ones. They didn’t have a lot of money at the shelter, so they couldn’t afford to pay him. It took all their funds to keep the animals fed and healthy; the shelter refused to put a healthy animal to sleep. Louis heartily approved of this policy, and thus he didn’t mind working for free; in fact, sometimes when the shelter’s funds were low, he gave them a donation from the proceeds of his night’s work. Louis thought that rich people should support local charities; he saw himself as the middleman, except that his share of the take was ninety percent. Louis also believed that charity begins at home.

Christmas was good for the shelter. Lots of people high on the Christmas spirit adopted kittens and puppies, or gave them as gifts, and the shelter saw to it that they got a donation for each adoptee. So their budget was doing okay, but Louis’s personal funds were running short. Christmas is not a good time of year for a burglar. Sometimes he’d find an empty house whose occupants were spending Christmas out of town, but usually the neighborhood was packed with nosy people, eyeballing every car that went by. You’d think they were looking for Santa Claus.

If Christmas was bad for business, New Year’s Eve made up for it. Lots of people went out to parties that night, and did not plan on coming home until well after midnight. Being out for just the evening made them less security conscious than the Christmas people who went out of town: New Year’s party-goers were less likely to hide valuables, activate alarms, or ask the police to keep an eye on the premises. Louis had had a busy evening. He’d started around nine o’clock, when even the tardiest guests would have left for the party, and he had hit four houses, passing on one because of a Doberman pinscher
in the backyard. Louis had nothing against the breed, but he found them very unreasonable, and not inclined to give strangers the benefit of the doubt.

The other four houses had been satisfactory, though. The first one was “guarded” by a haughty white Persian whose owners had forgotten to feed it. Louis put down some canned mackerel for the cat, and charged its owners one portable television, one 35mm. camera, three pairs of earrings, a CD player, and a collection of compact discs. The other houses had been equally rewarding. After a day’s visit to various flea markets and pawnshops, his financial standing should be greatly improved. This was much better than auto mechanics. Louis realized that larceny and auto mechanics are almost never mutually exclusive, but he felt that the hours were better in freelance burglary.

He glanced at his watch. A little after midnight. This would be his last job of the evening. Louis wanted to be home before the drunks got out on the highway. His New Year’s resolution was to campaign for gun control and for tougher drunk driving laws. He turned his attention back to the small white house with the boxwood hedge and the garden gnome next to the birdbath. No danger of Louis stealing
that
. He thought people ought to have to pay to have garden gnomes stolen. A promising sideline—he would have to consider it. But now to the business at hand.

The hedge seemed high enough to prevent the neighbors from seeing into the yard. The house across the street was vacant, with a big yellow
FOR SALE
sign stuck in the yard. The brick split-level next door was dark, but they had a chain-link fence, and their front yard was floodlit like the exercise yard of a penitentiary. Louis shook his head: paranoia
and
bad taste.

There was no car in the driveway—a promising sign that no one was home. He liked the look of the rectangular kitchen window. It was partly hidden by a big azalea
bush, and it looked like the kind of window that opened out at the bottom, with a catch to keep it from opening too far. It was about six feet off the ground. Louis was tempted to look under the garden gnome for a spare house key, but he decided to have a look at the window instead. Using a key was unsporting; besides, the exercise would be good for him. If you are a burglar, your physique is your fortune.

He walked a lot, too. Tonight Louis had parked his old Volkswagen a couple of streets away, not so much for the exercise as for the fact that later no one would remember seeing a strange car in the vicinity. The long walk back to the car limited Louis’s take to the contents of a pillowcase or two, also from the burgled home, but he felt that most worthwhile burglary items were small and lightweight, anyway. The pillowcases he gave as baby gifts to new parents of his acquaintance, explaining that they were the perfect size to use as a cover for a bassinet mattress. Even better than a fitted crib sheet, he insisted, because after the kid grows up, you can use the pillowcases yourself. Louis was nothing if not resourceful.

He stayed close to the boxwood hedge as he edged closer to the house. With a final glance to see that no one was driving past, he darted for the azalea bush, and ended up crouched behind it, just under the rectangular window. Perfect. Fortunately it wasn’t too cold tonight—temperature in the mid-thirties, about average for the Virginia Christmas season. When it got colder than that, his dexterity was impaired, making it hard to jimmy locks and tamper with windows. It was an occupational hazard. Tonight would be no problem, though, unless the window had some kind of inside lock.

It didn’t. He was able to chin himself on the windowsill and pull the window outward enough to get a hand inside and slip the catch. With that accomplished, another twenty seconds of wriggling got him through the window and onto the Formica countertop next to the sink. There
had been a plant on the windowsill, but he managed to ease that onto the counter before sliding himself all the way through. The only sound he made was a slight thump as he went from countertop to floor; no problem if the house was unoccupied.

Taking out his pen-sized flashlight, Louis checked out the kitchen. It was squeaky clean. He could even smell the lemon floor cleaner. He shined the light on the gleaming white refrigerator. Some people actually put their valuables in the freezer compartment. He always checked that last, though. In the corner next to the back door was a small washing machine and an electric dryer, with clean clothes stacked neatly on the top. Louis eased his way across the room and inspected the laundry. Women’s clothes—small sizes—towels, dishcloths … ah, there they were! Pillowcases. He helped himself to the two linen cases, sniffing them appreciatively. Fabric softener.
Very
nice. Now he was all set. Time to shop around.

He slipped into the dining room and flashed the light on the round oak table and the ladder-back chairs. Two places laid for breakfast. Weren’t they the early birds, though? The salt and pepper shakers looked silver. They were in the shape of pheasants. Louis slid them into his pillowcase and examined the rest of the room. The glass of the china cabinet flashed his light back at him. Bunch of flowery plates. No chance that he’d be taking those. He looked around for a silver chest, but didn’t see one. He’d check on it later. He wanted to examine the living room first.

Louis flashed an exploratory light at the fireplace, the chintz couch covered with throw pillows, and the glass-fronted bookcase. There were some candlesticks on the mantelpiece that looked promising. As he crept forward to inspect them, the room was flooded with light.

Squinting at the sudden brightness, Louis turned toward the stairs and saw that he wasn’t alone. The overhead lights had been switched on by a sweet-faced old woman
in a green velvet bathrobe. Louis braced himself for the scream, but the old lady was smiling. She kept coming daintily down the stairs. Smiling. Louis stared, trying to think up a plausible story. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and her blue eyes sparkled from a wrinkled but pleasant face. She patted her white permed hair into place. She looked delighted. Probably senile, Louis thought.

“Well, I’m glad to see you!” the woman said brightly. “I was afraid it was going to be my daughter Doris.”

Definitely senile
, thought Louis. “No, it’s just me,” he said, deciding to play along. He held the pillowcase behind his back.

“Just after midnight, too, isn’t it? That’s grand, that is. Otherwise I’d have to ask you to go out and come in again, you know.”

Louis noticed her accent now. It was sort of English, he thought. But she wasn’t making any sense. “Come in again?”

“Ah, well, being an American you wouldn’t know the custom, would you? Well, you’re welcome all the same. Now, what can I get for you?”

Louis realized just in time that she meant food or drink, rather than jewelry and savings bonds. “Nothing for me, thanks,” he said, giving her a little wave, and trying to edge for the front door.

Her face fell. “Oh, no. Please! You must let me fix you something. Otherwise, you’ll be taking the luck away with you. How about a piece of cake? I made it today. And a bit of strong drink? It’s New Year’s, after all.”

She still didn’t look in the least perturbed. And she wasn’t trying to get to the telephone or to trip an alarm. Louis decided that he could definitely use a drink.

The old lady beamed happily up at him, and motioned for him to follow her into the kitchen. “I’ve been baking for two days,” she confided. “Now, let’s see, what will you have?”

She rummaged around in a cupboard, bringing out an assortment of baked goods on glass plates, which she proceeded to spread out on the kitchen table. She handed Louis a blue-flowered plate, and motioned for him to sit down. When she went in to the dining room to get some cloth napkins, Louis stuffed the pillowcase under his coat, making sure that the salt and pepper shakers didn’t clink together. Finally, he decided that the least suspicious thing to do would be to play along. He sat.

“Now,” she announced, “we have Dundee cake with dried fruit, black bun with almonds, shortbread, petticoat tails …”

Louis picked up a flat yellow cookie, and nibbled at it, as his hostess babbled on.

“When I was a girl in Dundee—”

“Where?”

“Dundee. Scotland. My mother used to bake an oat bannock—you know, a wee cake—for each one of us children. The bannocks had a hole in the middle, and they were nipped in about the edges for decoration. She flavored them with carvey—caraway seed. And we ate them on New Year’s morning. They used to say that if your bannock broke while it was baking, you’d be taken ill or die in the New Year. So I never baked one for my daughter Doris. Oh, but they were good!”