The Book of Old Houses (6 page)

For one thing, nobody ate much around here anymore. Mostly we drank, and Sam snorted or shot up.

“Hi,” the naked girl said blearily. Apparently those wineglasses had gotten a workout.

“Scram,” I replied, and something in my voice must've clued her, or possibly it was the great big butcher knife I looked down and suddenly discovered I was gripping.

“Now,” I said, whereupon she appeared to remember where the apartment door was located, and scampered away to put it hastily between her towel-wrapped self and the knife.

Which I thought was a wise move. Still, it left her in the hallway without any clothes on except for a borrowed bath towel, and after a few moments I heard her weeping out there.

Serves you right,
I thought bitterly at her, stomping into the bedroom to strip the sheets off the bed.

I knew what had happened, of course. Stunned by wine and my husband's take-no-prisoners approach to the art of lovemaking—Victor's other nickname around the hospital was Vlad the Impaler—the girl had fallen asleep.

Gulping from my own glass of wine with one hand, I stuffed sheets furiously into the hamper with the other. Once the deed was done he'd been called back urgently to the hospital, I could only suppose, and after that he had forgotten all about her.

Which sounds unlikely until you recall that he was a brain surgeon, and thus utterly unfamiliar with the mundane realities of life. Only where his patients were concerned was he as focused as a ruby laser.

The girl in the hall wept wretchedly. I grabbed her clothes off the bedroom floor and strode to the apartment door with them, intending to shove them at her.

It was hard enough to get a cab around here at this hour even when you were dressed. Also, if Sam came home all lit up like a Christmas tree and found a nude girl in the hallway, I didn't know what he might do.

“Here,” I snarled, yanking the door open to thrust the blue scrub shirt and pants out.

A surgical nurse, I gathered from the clothes I was throwing at her; I tossed a pair of white sneakers out after the scrub suit. But I also made the mistake of looking at her.

Tear-stained and sorrowful, blonde hair tangled and makeup melted into a sad pair of raccoon eyes, she snatched up the shirt and pants and began yanking them on without even looking at me.

She was shivering, partly from cold but mostly, I supposed, from distress. “Oh, get in here,” I snapped.

“Go to hell,” she replied, and peered around the hall carpet miserably. “I can't . . .Where are my damned socks?”

I went to find them, leaving the apartment door open. When I returned with a pair of white knee-highs, she was standing inside.

“Thank you,” she muttered when I handed them to her. “I'm so sorry. Victor didn't tell me he was . . .”

Married. Of course not. Probably he'd forgotten that, too; I told myself he must have. With Victor, it was not impossible.

She put the socks on, and after that I told her to wash her face while I made coffee and called a cab. While we waited for the doorman to buzz from downstairs, she drank some of the coffee and told me again that she was sorry, she was new at the hospital and hadn't known, and I told her the truth:

That it wasn't her fault, that it didn't really matter, and as far as I was concerned, she hadn't even done anything wrong.

That she should just chalk it up to experience. “It was the shock of seeing you there, mostly,” I said.

“No kidding,” she replied, and started to laugh, then saw my face and decided to shut up.

After she'd gone Sam came home and slammed into his room, locking the door and turning his music up so brain-thumpingly loud that even if I'd wanted to talk to him, I couldn't.

I never even mentioned the girl to Victor. And it was months afterward that I drove to New Brunswick, Canada, for a stockholders' meeting of a company I'd set up to launder more extortion money.

But on the way home through Maine I took a side trip to a little place called Eastport, on a tiny scrap of rock called Moose Island. And the very first thing that happened was that halfway across the causeway I felt all the stored-up anger, betrayal, and grief draining from me, as if the sparkling blue salt water on both sides of the curving road were sucking it out of me by osmosis.

Next, on the island itself I found a quaint seaside village with city amenities—streetlights, sidewalks, a public library, and even a Mexican restaurant—yet so far from the madding crowd that by eight in the evening you could roll a bowling ball down the main drag and not hit anyone.

Also, Eastport having long ago been a boom town but being one no longer, it contained a lot of big old vacant houses, many of them in shattering states of disrepair, whose windows once blazed with domestic light but now gazed emptily, yearning only for someone to love and care for them again.

Here,
I thought, staring at the biggest, most ramshackle one of all. In particular, I thought the antique wooden shutters flanking the forty-eight old double-hung windows would be simple to take down and paint.

They weren't.

Chapter
4

M
y father was a lean, clean old man in faded overalls
, a flannel shirt, and battered work boots, who wore his long gray hair tied back into a ponytail with a leather thong. A red stone that I was pretty sure was a real ruby gleamed in his earlobe.

“You know, when you decide to do something so drastic to an important thing like a bathroom, it's good to have a plan,” he observed, already knee-deep in porcelain shards and plaster rubble.

I had no plan other than to bash a big hole in the side of the house with a wrecking ball and have Bad Bathtub hauled out through it. But from the look on my dad's face now, I guessed I'd better revamp that part of the program, too.

“You start,” he added severely, “by finding out which way the beams run.” He gestured overhead.

Uh-oh. I hadn't done that, either. “Because?”

“Because if you don't, and you knock out a supporting wall, the house comes down on your head.”

Well, well,
I thought.
In the old-house fix-up department, you learn something new every day.

Or to put it more bluntly,
Ye gods.

Standing amidst the wreckage, my dad looked like a cross between an aging hippie and the kind of self-taught explosives expert who ends up having to go on the run for thirty years. Both of which he was, because when your wife—my mother—dies in a bomb blast and you—an actual self-taught explosives expert—drop out of sight at the exact same moment, it doesn't take a rocket scientist—which he also looked like, especially around the eyes—to figure out whodunit.

Or who the cops will think dunnit, anyway; local, state,
and
federal.

“Oh,” I said softly, noticing that besides pulling down what remained of the plaster—
Sayonara, swans,
I thought, glimpsing the silvery bits of them still swimming in Pepto pink—he'd also taken down the antique wooden lath behind the plaster.

Which I didn't understand at all. Because when you redo a wall, you smoosh the first layer of new plaster in between the lath strips, so when it dries it hangs securely there like a key sticking out of a lock. Then you add the next layer, and the next, and . . .

“No more plaster, huh?” I said. That had to be the answer: Sheetrock. Meanwhile, I noticed also that the wall the bathtub butted up against looked very solid indeed, even without plaster.

And there was a beam running across the top of it. My dad looked up from scooping the last shreds of swan out of the tub.

“Don't get ahead of yourself. Plaster's the least of your problems, Jake. And forget about the Sheetrock, too.”

Double uh-oh.
“Okay. Um, maybe concrete board?”

Because of course behind the new tub and shower, we'd want to put in something that wouldn't (a) soak up lots of water and (b) transfer it directly and without impediment to the rooms below.

My father rolled his eyes. “Now, I can see you've got your heart set on expanding this room.”

Correct. And due to the shape of my old house, there was no other way to do it unless we wanted to start taking showers on a platform sticking out over the street.

“But,” my father said, “that tub's not your problem.”

Oh goodie,
I thought,
whose problem is it?

“The problem is how to hold up the ceiling once the wall's gone. See, that beam isn't there for decoration. That beam . . .”

Just then Bella appeared in the doorway. Or what was left of it; in retrospect, even I thought maybe I'd gone a little too far with the sledgehammer.

The first swing I'd taken, actually, might've been the too-far one.

“Oh,” Bella said, seeing my father. “I didn't know you were still here.” She gave the
you
a faint, unwelcoming emphasis.

“Yes,” he replied evenly. “Well, now you do know.”

The look she shot him could've scoured the rest of the old porcelain off the bathtub, peeled the paint off the woodwork, and sanded the floor clean of old varnish all in one swell foop, as Sam would've put it; on top of everything else my son was also quite severely dyslexic.

My father pulled out a tape measure and applied it to the beam over the tub as Bella turned to me. “Missus, could you come downstairs? We need to discuss something.”

Yes, we surely did. Up until this morning, my father and my housekeeper had been the sort of sweethearts who think no one else notices that they are flat-out crazy about each other.

Now, though, a chill more appropriate to the Arctic Circle had descended between these two. And I intended to find out why, if only to keep Bella from getting into a cleaning bout so frenzied, it could reduce the place to toothpicks.

But there was one more thing I needed to check out with my father, first. “Dad?” I said.

He straightened, tucking the tape measure into his pocket. Looking at him, it struck me that there aren't too many men who can carry off a ruby stud in the earlobe, senior citizen or no.

“Yes, Jacobia?” His voice, tinged with the wry, long-suffering humor that I imagined kept him sane for all those years as a fugitive, also held the kind of stolid patience that a man whose daughter demolished bathrooms without warning can develop.

Must develop, actually, unless he wants to go on the run again. Meanwhile through the now trimless and sill-less bathroom window I could see Dave DiMaio's red Saab still in the driveway.

And it was making me nervous. “Listen, if a stranger shows up at your house . . .”

He looked up, his eyes suddenly displaying lazy alertness; see
years as a fugitive,
above. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“And the stranger has a gun.”

“You've taken it away from him, though.”

He knew my opinion: the only handgun I feel safe around is the one in my own hand, or in my husband Wade's.

“So what's the problem?” asked my father.

“The problem is that when people with weapons show up here, I always feel like it's the beginning of something.”

“That,” said my father, “is because it so often is.”

“Mm. He has information about the old book,” I added.

His bushy eyebrows rose. “Does he, now? So he's associated with the fellow who got murdered?”

Horace Robotham, my father meant. He'd hadn't believed the tragic mugging story for a minute.

I nodded unhappily. “Friends. Good friends, I'd say.”

“I see,” my father said thoughtfully. “You're wondering what the firearm's the beginning
of,
then.”

“Exactly. I've locked his gun in the lockbox. So he can't
do
anything with it even if he wanted to, but—”

But in my experience people who bring a gun into a situation are different in a single, very important way from the people who don't: they've accepted the idea of using one. And it's that internal notion, not the presence or absence of the actual weapon itself, that ends up making them dangerous.

“So anyway, I just thought I'd run it by you,” I finished.

“Mm-hmm.” Head tilted back as if praying to some gods of old-house carpentry that only he knew about—and considering the amount of damage I'd done, I hoped that was true—he studied the exposed beam once more.

“You know,” I told him, beginning to feel guilty—

When he wasn't working on my house, he was the kind of mason who had a long waiting list of paying customers wanting work from him.

—“I should be doing this, myself.”

The bathroom, I meant. Because even as a do-it-yourself home-fix-it enthusiast—buying a huge old house without being one of these is like buying a rocket launcher and then leaving the fuse-lighting to somebody else; sooner or later you end up wanting your own pack of matches—bashing out walls was the kind of thing I'd always said I'd leave to the people who knew how. But that old bathroom had overwhelmed my better judgment.

Such as it was. And I thought it was only right that I should deal with the result. But my father didn't.

“You going to do the wiring?” my dad asked. “Snake the conduits down through the walls, put a new circuit in the system, down in the circuit box?”

“Well, no,” I replied uncertainly. “But I—”

“How about the plumbing? Pull out the old lead stuff, solder in the copper where you need it.” He eyed the floor. “Going to have to move that drain, too, I guess. You going to do all that?”

“Oh, of course not,” I replied a little impatiently. “I'm not a plumber or an electrician. But I see no reason why I couldn't do the rest of the tear-out, and—”

“Jacobia.” My dad put a hand on my shoulder. “That's fine, but if I don't find a way to do what that beam is doing”—in order to make it do it about five feet to the south of where the beam was located now, he meant—“then you're going to have to put this wall back again.” He gestured at the torn-down lath, demolished plaster, and tattered swans now heaped in the tub.

“Right where it was,” he added. “My point is, just
wanting
to do it yourself isn't going to cut it in the holding-the-house-up department. For that you need engineering.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean like how big a beam is, and how far it has to span, and—”

I'd heard of the mathematics and so on that architects use when specifying what size the building materials for any project will need to be, and what exactly they're made of.

Wooden beams, for instance, versus steel. But the bathroom was so small I hadn't thought I'd need to worry about any of that.

“Right,” he said. By which he meant I'd been wrong. “The longer the beam is, the bigger around you've got to have it, unless you support it at intervals.”

He looked at me. “Specific,” he emphasized, “intervals.”

In other words you couldn't just wing it; damn.

I took a deep breath. “So maybe I could take the rest of the plaster down, though?” I ventured. “Since even if we have to put the room back the way it was—”

Ghastly thought; I plunged on. “—I still want to replace the bathtub. So I could get
that
out of here, and—”

My father sighed. “All right,” he said finally. “If you got the tub removed, it would make it easier to—”

“Excellent,” I interrupted. “I'll get a bunch of guys to do it right away.”

My son, Sam, for instance, was always looking to earn money; probably his friends would pitch in as well. Some of them were even reasonably Hulk-like.

“If I had better access, then maybe I could run a couple of shorties out perpendicular,” my father mused aloud.

“But,” he cautioned, “if you can't get a crew,
don't
try to take that tub out yourself.”

I assured him that despite my rash starting of an enormous, complex project that I didn't know how to finish—how was I to know that adding twenty-five square feet to a bathroom could bring a three-thousand-square-foot two-hundred-year-old house down on my head?—I promised that I would absolutely not try to haul a huge, million-pound bathtub down a flight of stairs all by myself.

Heck, now that I thought about it, just getting it unhooked from the outflow drain might be an interesting trick.

Finally I left him there figuring out how to keep the attic from falling annoyingly onto bathers, assuming we were ever even able to bathe again in the house at all. But as I reached the hall stairs he spoke.

“Jacobia?”

I paused on the landing. “Yes?”

“Don't give that guy his gun back.”

A couple of
hours later when Bella had begun making curried crab for dinner, starting with crabmeat so fresh the tiny claws could practically hop from their container and pinch you, Ellie arrived.

“Oh! Curried crab,” she breathed happily, coming in just as I was beginning to toast a blueberry scone.

So I put one in for her, too. “I see Dave DiMaio's car is still sitting outside in the driveway,” she said.

“So?” She hadn't mentioned Merrie Fargeorge's party again. But her voice had that
better pay attention
sound that I'd learned never to ignore. Suddenly I was all ears.

“He was still downtown when I walked home from the library with Lee,” Ellie went on.

At the stove, Bella stirred flour into the butter-and-onion mixture. I set the toasted scones on the table; Ellie got up and snagged some butter from Bella for hers.

Ellie was so slender that she could've applied butter directly to her hips every day for a year without visible effect. I had mine plain.

“When I saw him he was coming out of Wadsworth's,” she continued.

The hardware store, she meant. “And?”

A small crumb of scone fell to the tablecloth; I plucked it up and ate it while Bella poured milk into the bubbling flour-and- butter mixture. Meanwhile over our heads my father's footsteps moved with a metallic grating sound; he was standing in the tub.

“And I wondered what he was up to,” said Ellie. “So I went into the Moose Island General Store and started a conversation with Skippy. He says DiMaio was asking all kinds of questions. About,” Ellie added meaningfully, “Bert Merkle.”

Bella turned. “
That
crackpot,” she uttered disdainfully.

“Really?” I began. But just then Sam came in with a fishing rod over his shoulder and a pailful of freshly caught mackerel in his hand. He stood the rod in the hall and set the pail of fish on the kitchen table.

“Look!” he said triumphantly. “We can have them for . . .”

Dinner,
he would've finished, only Bella had already grabbed the pail, hustled it out onto the back porch, and returned with an outraged expression.

“Fish come into this kitchen already cleaned, or they don't come in at all,” she instructed him, but then her face softened.