Mr. X (73 page)

“What was her name?”

I told him. He bounced the keys in his hand and debated with himself. “Just keep your hands off Mr. Ward’s belongings.”

Sawyer opened the door of number 1 onto a musty, charcoal-colored space shining with ghostly shapes. He slipped away to the left, and I heard the clicking of a switch. An overhead fixture shed reluctant light over the contents of Edward Rinehart’s living room. Empty bookshelves covered the wall to my right. A Fisher amplifier, a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder, and an A.R. turntable, stereo components that would have knocked your eyes out in 1957, lined a shelf on the near side of the fireplace. A Spanish bullfight poster and a reproduction of Picasso’s
Three Musicians
hung over the sound equipment. A shelf lined with LP records bracketed the fireplace on its far side, and past the records was a narrow door. A sofa and three chairs draped in languorous-looking sheets accounted for the ghostly shapes I had seen from the entrance.

“The door goes into Number Two,” Sawyer told me.

Here, Rinehart had conducted his parties and unofficial seminars. He had posed in front of the fireplace and read passages of his work. He had draped himself across the sofa and murmured provocations. Albertus students, poor damned Erwin “Pipey” Leake, and people like Donald Messmer had streamed up Buxton Place and brought their various passions through the front door.

Earl Sawyer walked to the far end of the room and into the kitchen, where garbage overflowed from a metal washtub. We went upstairs and looked into a room with a bare double bed, an oak dresser and table. “Any of this interest you?” Sawyer asked.

“All of it interests me,” I said. I had probably been conceived on that bed. Robert seemed to flicker into being alongside me—I felt his demanding presence—and disappeared without having been any more than an illusion.

“What?”

“I thought I heard something.”

“These places make noises by themselves,” Sawyer said.

Downstairs, he opened the door beside the record shelf. The room beyond gaped like the mouth of an abandoned mine. “Wait a second. I’ll get the lights.”

Sawyer walked into the darkness and became a thick shadow. I heard a thump and the sound of wood sliding over wood, then another thump, like the opening and closing of a drawer. “I always hit that damn table.”

He turned on a lamp atop a side table. A book-lined wall came into view. Sawyer moved to a larger table in the middle of the room and switched on a lamp surrounded by mounds of yellowed newspapers and empty food containers. Tall bookshelves took shape on all sides. “Come on in.”

Rinehart had turned the cottage into a library. The shelves extended upward to the roof and all the way to the back of the house. An iron ladder curved up to a railed catwalk. There were thousands of books in that room. I looked at the spines: H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft. I moved to the ladder and went up a couple of rungs. Multiple copies of every edition of each of Lovecraft’s books lined the shelves, followed by their translations into what looked like every possible foreign language. First editions, paperbacks, trade paperbacks, collections, library editions. Some of the books looked almost new, others as though they had been picked up in paperback exchange stores. Rinehart had spent time and money buying rare copies, but he had also purchased almost every Lovecraft volume he had seen, whether or not he already owned it. “I think I know the name of his favorite writer,” I said.

“Mr. Ward thinks H. P. Lovecraft was the greatest writer who ever lived.” Sawyer scanned the shelves with mute, secondhand pride. “Years back, I started reading a couple stories when I finished my job. Mr. Lovecraft put a lot in them, but not everything he knew. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this subject.”

This was the source of his pride—his theories about Lovecraft.

“You know what a parable is, I hope.”

“I went to Sunday school,” I said.

His smile vanished before the significance of what he had to say. “A parable is a story with a concealed meaning. You might not see it, but it’s there.”

“Some parables seem to have lots of meanings,” I said. “The
more you think about them, the less you can be sure what they say.”

“No, you’re reading them all wrong, they wouldn’t be any
good
that way. A parable has only one meaning, but the trick is, you have to look for it. Mr. Lovecraft’s stories are the same. They can teach you a lot, if you’re strong enough to accept the truth.”

I had seen the same kind of pleasure in the faces of men devoted to theoretical, Hydra-headed conspiracies that connected the Kennedy assassinations, the FBI, organized crime, the military-industrial complex, and Satanic cabals. The stink of craziness always enveloped these people.

“Look there.” Sawyer pointed at a shelf filled with copies of
From Beyond
. “A friend of his wrote that book. Mr. Ward said it ought to be famous, and he’s right. It’s a great book. Maybe my favorite.”

His eyes met mine. “So were you telling me that Mr. Ward and Edward Rinehart are the same? Rinehart is what they call a pseudonym?”

He wanted to display his knowledge of the word.

“So is Charles Ward.”

Sawyer’s unhealthy face turned sullen.

I moved down rows of books and saw lodged at the end of a shelf what looked like a first edition of
The Dunwich Horror
. I pulled it out and saw penciled on the flyleaf
W. Wilson Fletcher, Fortress Military Academy, Owlsburg, Pennsylvania, 1941
.

Earl Sawyer materialized at my side like an angry djinn and snatched the book from my hands. “I’m sorry, I should have said.” He nudged the book back into place. “Mr. Ward told me not to touch that particular book. It’s sacred, you could say.”

Sawyer cut off my apology. “You have to leave. I made a mistake.”

104

A tingling like the piercing by needles too small to be seen came over my hands when I drove through the southern fringe of
College Park. I looked down and saw the steering wheel waver beneath two hand-shaped blurs.

A voice from the backseat said, “How do you do that?”

“You do it!” I yelled.

“Don’t be paranoid,” Robert said. “It’s over. Look.”

My utterly visible hands gripped the wheel.

“I could explain it, but you wouldn’t understand.” He patted my shoulder. “What were you up to in College Park? And what’s the latest on the Joe Staggers front?”

“You don’t know?”

“I can’t keep up with
everything
.” Robert folded his arms on top of the passenger seat. “Talk to me.”

“You can forget about Joe Staggers,” I said, and described going through the Buxton Place cottages with Earl Sawyer.

“That gives me an idea. In the meantime, point us toward Ellendale. I think Stewart Hatch is hiding something we want.”

The mystery of Robert’s limitations faded before the suggestion that Hatch himself had walked off with his family photographs.

“He isn’t at home,” Robert said. “Stewart had troubling news today. He and Grenville Milton are deep in conference with their lawyer.”

“I’m not going to break into his house.”

“You won’t have to. I’ll go in and open the door.”

“You don’t need me to ransack Hatch’s house,” I said.

“Who knows? You might learn something about Laurie. In the meantime, explain why I should forget about Joe Staggers.”

I told him that he wouldn’t understand.

105

One leg planted on the driveway, a knee bent into the Mountaineer, Posy Fairbrother was leaning through the rear door to strap Cobbie into his seat. She looked like an idealized figure on a frieze.

Robert sighed. “Pity that Posy’s too straitlaced to mess around with her employer’s lover. Turn left, here’s Bayberry.”

Stewart’s angular, contemporary house stood on two treeless acres at the end of the first street off Blueberry. I drove past it and parked around the corner on Loganberry.

In a hot, green emptiness, Robert and I cut across the lawn and climbed the steps to the gray wooden deck.
“Momentito,”
Robert said. He glided through the back door and, after a pause longer than I had expected, opened it. “Stewart didn’t install an alarm system. I guess there’s nothing worth stealing.”

I looked around at the kitchen. “Not unless you have a forklift.” A gas range faced a twelve-foot marble counter that extended past a double-doored refrigerator and a glass-fronted wine vault. On the shelves beside the wine vault were ranked a half dozen bottles of single-malt Scotch and a couple bottles of Belvedere vodka, undoubtedly awaiting their turn in the freezer.

A partition separated the dining room from what people like Stewart Hatch called a “great room.” The furniture marooned in the vast space had been picked up at a Scandinavian furniture outlet in the local mall.

Upstairs in the master bedroom, a monumental television set faced the bottom of an unmade king-sized bed. Polo shirts and khaki trousers were strewn across a sofa. Robert opened the closet doors. I went through a rolltop desk and found boxes of canceled checks, flyers from Caribbean resorts, and two videotapes, labeled
Kinky Bondage, USA
and
Love in Chains
.

A book titled
Management Secrets of the Ancient Chinese Warlords
lay on the bedside table; in the drawer underneath was a box of steel-tipped cartridges and a nine-millimeter pistol. The next drawer down contained a jumble of handcuffs, leather thongs and straps, lengths of rope, metal-studded wristbands, and a couple of things I neither recognized nor wanted to think about.

I looked under the bed, saw only the carpet, and joined Robert in a space about the size of Star’s old room at Nettie’s house. Something like fifty suits and jackets, at least a hundred neckties, and dozens of belts and suspenders hung beneath yards of open shelves with sweaters and shirts sorted by color and shade. Robert reached up to a stack of Brooks Brothers boxes, chose one, and opened it to reveal a striped, button-down shirt in a plastic wrapper. I thought of Gatsby.

“Let’s look at the office downstairs,” I said.

Robert roamed through a file cabinet. The closet was empty, except for an unopened case of Belvedere. Just above eye level, a carton from Bear, Stearns tilted at an almost unnoticeable angle on the narrow shelf. I pushed back the carton and uncovered a legal-sized manila envelope. I pulled it off the shelf. “The green light at the end of the dock.”