Skull Session (5 page)

He hedged: "There is a genetic factor, an inherited predisposition, but Mark hasn't shown any symptoms." Not of Tourette's anyway.

Mark's condition wasn't anybody's business but his parents'—he'd be damned if he was going to elaborate for the sake of Vivien's morbid curiosity.

"Well, I'm sure the family is very glad." Vivien's voice had a smile in it, as if his hesitation had revealed something to her.

"What about you? I'm amazed to hear you're in San Francisco."

"No more than myself, I assure you. Every day I am astonished to find myself here. I'm living in a hotel now, a lovely suite. Everything is so convenient, after Highwood. It's quite delightful, Paulie. Or perhaps you'd like me to call you Paul, now that you're grown up?"

"Either one. Family calls me Paulie, everyone else Paul."

"Which leaves me to decide just how 'family' you and I are. You're very clever. Tell me—do you take after your mother or your father? Did you get the Skoglund nose?"

"After my mother, I guess." She'd turned the questions around again, revealing nothing of herself. He felt the familiar pressure building. He camouflaged a bark by turning it into a cough.

"Well, you're lucky. Your mother's a very handsome woman. How I envied her figure—those nice delicate bones. And me built like a Morgan horse."

It was true. Vivien was one of those disconcertingly large women, nearly six feet tall, like the women you saw in photos of the more obscure branches of the British royal family—the large-boned, patrician, fox-hunting type, that tribe of lady big-game hunters, aviatrixes, Channel swimmers. Even as a child, he'd noticed how dissimilar the half sisters were, in size as well as temperament. He hadn't been surprised when his mother explained that they had had different mothers.

"Anyway—" he said.

"Time for business? Very well. I take it Kay has explained my predicament."

"She said the house had been broken into and that there was some vandalism, yes."

"The Lewisboro police called me. I understand there are windows broken, and perhaps some things taken." For the first time, her voice showed signs of sincere concern. "And I left everything I own at the house. You see, my California adventure was just going to be a vacation. Then I fell in love with it here, and I simply haven't had the time or energy it takes to go pack the place up."

"So why not have Dempsey do it?"

"Among other reasons, dear Dempsey is too old. Also, I'd feel better if a family member helped me with this." She paused and then continued as if choosing her words carefully: "You see, Paulie, I did leave
everything
there. My family photos, papers, financial records. Private things. And valuable things, as you may recall. Obviously, I need someone I can . . .
trust
to help me. People one can trust seem to be in increasingly scarce supply."

Paul went back upstairs. On the surface, the conversation with Vivien had gone well. She'd been more than receptive to his working on the place and hadn't blinked at his fee. He'd agreed to go down on Wednesday, when Lia had the day off, so the whole deal could commence almost immediately.

He'd get eighteen an hour just to look the place over and for any repairs she agreed to based on his estimates. The idea of pulling in eighteen bucks an hour for a while was very agreeable.

And yet Vivien gave him the creeps: the intrusive questions, the amused, ironic tone, as if she already knew the answers to every question. Bringing up his childhood neurological problems, fishing for something on Mark.

Or maybe he was just tired, a little down after talking to Aster, being unnecessarily negative. Bad habit, time to change it.

The lights were off upstairs. Turning into the dark bedroom, he could just make out Lia, the white bedspread vaguely outlining the rise pf her hips. It smelled good where Lia was: the scent of fresh laundry, sweet sweat, a faint pastiche of perfumes and smells from the mysterious alchemical pharmacy of cosmetics on her bureau.

He took off his clothes and slipped into bed beside her, avoiding touching her with his chilled skin. But she put one hand out behind her and pulled him up tightly against her, the top of his feet against her soles, his knees in the crook of hers, chest to back, every possible inch of skin contact attained. Her heat seemed to scald him.

His dark mood evaporated. Lia's presence was sweet, silky, luminous. Balm that soothed the jagged, ticcish energy the day had stirred up. He smiled into her hair.
Life hath its rewards, and none greater than this.
Sleep came over him almost instantly, as if he'd caught it from her unconscious body.

5

T
HEIR FIRST STOP IN WESTCHESTER was Dempsey's. Paul had forgotten exactly where Highwood was, and the old man had agreed to come along to show them, look over the lodge, offer his perspective on any repairs it might need.

Turning into the familiar driveway, Paul found he couldn't enumerate all things Dempsey Corrigan was to him. More than father figure, more than friend. At seventy-two, Dempsey was living proof that you could make your own way in life, making no concessions to conventions or passing trends. He'd fought in World War II and afterward spent several years as a professional boxer. In 1949 he'd settled in Lewisboro, where he'd supported himself doing odd jobs, carpentering, museum-quality furniture restoration, all the while pursuing his real love—painting brilliant abstract canvases—and caring nothing for his lack of commercial success. An animated and tireless raconteur, a vehement gesturer. A gruff, gentle, skeptical, funny, joyful man. It was no wonder he'd been Ben's closest friend.

He was also proof that living true to yourself helped you stay young. Though his bald head was marked by age spots, and the stubble that grizzled his cheeks was white, he lived an active life and had kept the wiry, sturdy build of the young middleweight fighter, sleek and corded, that Paul saw in the little gallery of posters and fight bills Dempsey kept.

Dempsey's house and grounds reflected his personality completely. From the driveway, the house looked like a medieval structure, with eaves close to the earth, small windows, a mossy shingle roof sweeping up steeply. Dempsey had built it himself with rock he'd dug out of his twelve acres. Inside, the ceiling rose with the roofline to a high raftered peak, and the downhill side of the house was all glass, revealing a view of the Corrigans' land. Sculpted by the paths and terraced gardens they'd built, the hill sloped down to a stream at the bottom, a tangle of woods. It still looked like the old Westchester County, rugged and viney, that Paul greatly preferred to the other images that had overlaid it—highways, shopping centers, boutiques and antique shops in the old buildings, mushrooming developments. Now just the smell of the house—rock, concrete, woodsmoke, turpentine, garlic—gave Paul a sense of continuity with his own past. Dempsey was a point of reference, enduring. Somebody you could count on. Being somebody you could count on, Paul decided, was a good person to be.

Paul pulled the parking brake, Lia stretched mightily. They had barely gotten out of the car when the old man emerged from his front door.

"Welcome!" Dempsey cried, saluting them hugely with both arms—he'd never been able to resist adding a touch of ceremony to arrivals and departures. Now he wore a blue-and-white Mexican poncho, thick as a rug, and carried a gnarled walking stick. With his big head and wise-chimpanzee face, he looked like Pablo Picasso in his later years. He hugged Lia and shook Paul's hand with the rough grip of the fellow carpenter. "You want coffee, something to eat before we go up?"

Paul checked his watch. "Nah, not for me, thanks. It's two o'clock— we should get up the hill while there's still light. I wouldn't mind saying hello to Elaine, though."

"Not here. She's off volunteering." Elaine did almost everything: She was a superb gardener, an excellent cook, a sculptor, a substitute grade-school teacher, a fighter for various causes. "She'll be back around five, and we're planning on you two for dinner."

Paul pointed to Dempsey's heavy stick. "Expecting trouble?"

"I was talking to one of the Lewisboro cops. Said the place was so banged up it wasn't likely local kids. Maybe gangs from the city." Dempsey smiled reassuringly at Lia. "Not that I think we'll encounter anyone up there. My own guess is, kids were goofing around there all summer—it'd be a great party spot. No one's going to bother now that it's cold out. I'm bringing my shillelagh because it's a long driveway and we can't drive up. At my age, I need a third leg."

They drove for a few minutes. At two o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, there was little traffic: The trains had not yet returned the commuters to the legions of parked cars that surrounded every town in Westchester County.

"Right on 22," Dempsey told Paul, gesturing. "So. Highwood! I'll be curious to see the old place."

"Were you and Elaine close to Vivien?" Lia asked.

"Not like the Skoglunds. Mainly I went up there to fix things. At some point I got sick of trying to be both friend and hireling, and referred her to another contractor. Veer left here, then right at the dam." Dempsey pointed the way. "Can't say I missed going up there, either, except maybe the occasional hand of cards with Freda. Do you remember Freda?"

"Sure," Paul said.

"Vivien's old mother," Dempsey explained to Lia. He shook his head. "Terrible story."

"We must be getting close," Paul said. "This seems familiar." They had come to the rocky edge of the Lewisboro Reservoir. The road folio wed the irregular shore, overhung by large oaks that still held their leaves, now a dark ocher after the first frosts. To his surprise, his right hand reached out and drummed quickly on the dash. A little rising anxiety.

"Just stay on the shore road. Yes, poor old Freda. You know what happened to her, don't you, Paul?"

"I can't really remember."

"Got hit by the train, just outside the village. Vivien came home, couldn't find Freda anywhere, went outside and called—no Freda. Then she went into town to ask the police if anyone had seen her. They had seen her, all right—spread out over sixty feet of track. She'd gone all to pieces, you might say." He turned to Lia. "I'm sorry. Not funny."

"I'd never heard the details," Paul said. "I was only six. I do remember something weird or scary about it—the kind of thing when you're a kid you're told not to talk about."

Dempsey nodded. "Closed-casket funeral, believe me. Nobody was clear how she'd gotten down there. But Freda was getting pretty senile by then. And deaf. Apparently she'd wandered down the hill and onto the tracks, three miles from the house. Vivien was deeply upset."

They drove in silence for another half mile. "It's along here somewhere," Paul said. "Here." He swung the car onto the shoulder. He remembered it so distinctly: the gravel drive coming down steeply through the trees, the moss-stained rock pillars on either side. Between the pillars sat a battered brown Pontiac without wheels, closing off the driveway to cars.

"Typical of Vivien," Dempsey grumbled. "Blocks the driveway effectively, but also announces to all and sundry that the place is empty. Might as well put up a god damned sign."

They got out, and Paul belted on the waist pack he'd loaded earlier with the camera and a few tools.

"It's very beautiful here," Lia said. She looked around, inhaling deeply. "We never see big old oaks like this in Vermont."

"That's the way these old parcels are," Dempsey told her. "This land has been in a single estate for a long time. The Morgans didn't take any timber down, and neither did Vivien. Oho! Take a look at this." He had stopped at the glassless driver's side window of the Pontiac. When Paul and Lia looked inside, they saw a human head grinning up at them from the seat.

Paul jerked back involuntarily. Dempsey chuckled, set aside his cane, and reached inside to pick up the chipped marble head. "Too bad. I always found Vivien's garden statuary rather charming." He held up the head—a smiling Greek youth, his nose broken off, ears and curls chipped. "These screwball kids. Well. On that note—" Dempsey faced the hill.

Lia was already crunching up the drive.

The afternoon sun rode above the hills, slender cirrus clouds trailed at the zenith of a clear sky. A thin dusting of snow made the woods seem bright and open.

"No, Vivien and I didn't always get along," Dempsey went on, puffing, "and I always considered her a bit fetched.' But she was a smart woman, complicated, tough. You had to admire her. The one I really didn't care for was Royce—Vivien's son."

"Why not?" Lia asked.

"He liked to play mind games, even as a little kid. Once I was up there with my tool kit, planing a door while Royce watched. I set the plane down to do something else, and when I reached for it, it was gone.'What did you do with my plane?' I ask him. He says, 'What plane?' 'You know what I'm talking about,' I tell him, 'give it here, I've got work to do.' He just smiled his little smile, enjoying watching the hired-handyman- cum-family-friend cope with the ambiguities of his role. And this was when he was about six years old.

"On the bright side," Dempsey continued, "he hasn't been around for twenty, thirty years. Never kept in touch with Vivien after he went off to school. I think it broke her heart, but I say good riddance."

The driveway turned again, lined by lichen-covered boulders. The land sloping away on either side was rugged, corrugated by ravines. Explosions of white birch trees, growing in clusters, alternated with the darker trunks of old oaks and maples. Through the bare branches they could see a vista of hills and the far end of the reservoir, an uneven line where the land met the plane of water.

They rounded a last, steep turn and suddenly the lodge was there, incongruous in the heavy forest, like an ocean liner beached on the hill. Most windows were broken, but a few remained, the diamond-shaped mullioned panes Paul remembered. The gaping windows gave the house a forlorn look, and yet it still struck Paul as a well-proportioned structure, set nicely near the crest of the hill, big trees grown close on two sides. Out of the massive stone foundation rose three chimneys, one at each gable end and a huge main hearth in the center of the long wall. Just uphill, a terraced garden with marble statuary lay beneath a patch of bright sky.

"Has it changed much since you were a kid?" Lia asked Paul.

"Well, it didn't have its windows broken out. As I recall, the statues used to have heads." Set at bends in the garden path were statues of Greek youths and maids, some fallen, all headless.

Paul felt a wave of revulsion overtake him. Oddly, it was only partly the yawning windows, the headless statuary, the sense of abandonment. There was something else, too, as if the emptiness had always been there, not far beneath the surface of the dinners and gatherings they'd had. His hands checked the zipper of his jacket, then came to his face, tugged his nose, touched each eyebrow.

The driveway curled into a circle between the lodge and a small carriage house, also brown-shingled. Paul led them up the short, broad steps to the flagstone terrace that ran the length of the lodge. The main entrance was at the center of the terrace, a tall oak door with an iron-barred window, but when Paul tried the handle it wouldn't budge.

"Locked. Well, we never came in this way anyway—Vivien always had us come in the kitchen door. This way." He headed to the left, down the terrace.

"You too?" Dempsey snorted. "I thought she reserved the rear-entrance crap for us tradesmen."

They walked the length of the terrace, crunching on broken glass from the windows above. The terrace wrapped around the far end of the house and ended at another short flight of steps leading to the kitchen entrance. The door there hung open, off the top hinge and canted back into the room.

"Make a note to Vivien," Dempsey joked grimly. "Next time you leave, shut the damn door." He paused and hammered the slanted door with his stick, as if even with the house abandoned it deserved some ceremony of admittance. They listened to the echoes die away inside and to total silence afterward. "Better we don't surprise anybody in here," Dempsey said.