The Dark House (14 page)

“Oh, that's all right.” She smiled at him. “I'm sure she's fine.”

He swung the door shut behind him, and it clicked with a finality that gave him a pang of guilt, as if he had committed an irrevocable sin. When he turned back to follow her into the room, she was standing by his leather chair, trailing a finger idly along one chair arm. “Look, I just wanted to thank you,” she told him. “It was nice of you the other night—and this morning, looking after Heather.”

“Glad to help.” Rollins watched her, fascinated. It had been ages since he'd had a woman alone in his apartment. Seeing the shapely Tina now, that fact seemed incredible to him. It left him not knowing what to do or say. It was as though he had been frozen and was just now beginning to thaw. He was overwhelmed by the very sight of her.

They eyed each other for a long moment, then Tina turned to study a framed illustration showing a pair of dragons, a sword, and a book. “Wow,” Tina said. “All these things of yours, they're so interesting.”

“That's just a family crest,” Rollins said.

Tina moved closer to it, scrutinized the calligraphy at the bottom. “Blanchard?” she asked.

“That's right. On my mother's side of the family.”

Tina dragged her finger meditatively across her lip as she moved to
a group photo by the window. “Who are all these?” When Rollins didn't answer right away, Tina turned back to him. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't be asking all these questions. I don't get out all that much anymore, with Heather. I forget how to talk to grown-ups sometimes.”

“It's no big secret. That's the film society I started at Williams.”

“Oh, I love movies.” Tina's eyes continued to rove around his place.

“We concentrated on older ones, black and whites mostly.”

She asked what Rollins did now, and he told her about his work at Johnson in what he termed the “back room.” As usual, he kept the details vague. He assumed that Tina wouldn't have much patience for the minutiae. But he also wasn't ready to get into genuine confidences with her. And he didn't want to be disloyal to Marj.

“You seem to do all right,” Tina told him.

His eyes flared. From where she was standing, Tina could see through his open bedroom door to the tapes on their shelf over his bed, and she was starting to take a few steps in that direction.

Rollins rushed past her and drew the bedroom door shut. “Excuse me, but I'd rather you didn't go in there.”

Tina acted startled. “Oh, I'm sorry. I just wanted to see which way you put your bed. The layout is the same as mine.”

“Well, yes, but it's a mess. A terrible mess. Really.”

“Oh listen, don't talk to me about mess. I must have unpacked twenty boxes today.” She reached back with one hand to massage her own shoulder, inadvertently giving Rollins an exciting glimpse of her décolletage. “Kitchen stuff is the worst. All those tiny little things—tea strainers, my God!—and no good place to put them.” She didn't move from the door, though. “Not even a quick peek?” She held her fingers an inch apart.

“I'm sorry. I'd really rather not.” No one was to see his tapes until he chose to allow it.

“Look—I understand completely,” she told him.

Rollins felt as if some threat had passed. “You must be thirsty,” he told her. “I have some Pellegrino in the fridge.” Rollins led her into the kitchen, where he brought down a couple of glasses from the cupboard,
then poured out the fizzy water for both of them. “Please, sit.”

She was standing by the table. Her eyes had turned to his little pile of papers related to the fax number, if that's what it was. Another mental alarm sounded, but more faintly. “Let me get that out of your way,” Rollins said, reaching to clear away the papers.

She raised a glass. “To you,” she said, clinking it against his. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

“Any time.”

She finished the glass, then set it back down. “Look, it's late. I should be getting back.”

He followed her to his door.

Before she left, she gave him a light kiss on the cheek, the barest brush of her lips against his skin. “If you ever get lonely, come knock on my door. Okay?” Then she went back down the hall.

I
t kept raining, off and on, the next day, too. Rollins left his apartment only to pick up the
Sunday Globe
, some bagels, a carton of fresh milk, and a bag of French roast at a convenience store down Hanover Street. Despite the revelations from Leeann about the gaunt man, Rollins had started to wonder if he had imagined such a tormentor, just dreamed him and Sloane up out of nothing. He actually tried to determine how he might reassure himself that he truly had followed that Audi out to the dark house, for example. Thinking this way, he was too distraught to read much of the paper, but he downed a whole pot of coffee and was brewing a second when he heard some heavy thumping on his door.

Rollins went to the door and peeked out his fisheye lens. Heather, in bright red shorts, was out in the hall with a rubber ball in her hand.
She looked up at his door plaintively. “Can you come out and play, mister? I'm bored.”

“Sorry, I'm making coffee.”

“I'm really, really bored.”

“What about your mother?”

“She's sleeping.”

Rollins checked his watch again. “But it's the middle of the afternoon. She sick?”

“She was up late.” There was another thump against the door. “Talking on the phone.”

“Would you quit that, please?”

“You never played Old Maid.”

Possibly, children were not always a total delight.

“Please? I've got the cards.”

“Oh, all right.” Rollins unlocked the door. “But quickly. We'll just sit down right here, okay?” Rollins ushered her inside and settled himself on the rug.

“Okeydokey.” Heather dropped down beside him. She fished the cards out of her pocket, and slowly dealt them with her pudgy little hands, laying out the cards in two sloppy piles between them. The tip of her tongue protruded from between her lips. It wasn't long before she had a question for him.

“What's a whore?” she asked.

“Goodness, what a word.”

“But what's it mean?”

Rollins thought for a moment. “It's a woman who needs money.”

“Yeah, I guess that's my mom.”

“Someone really called her a whore?” Terrible to think that such words were used around five-year-olds. Such an awful word, too.

“Yeah, Timmy.”

Rollins asked who Timmy was, but Heather was busy scooping up her cards and sorting them in her hand. She set down a couple of matching pairs, then held up her hand toward Rollins, who looked at her, puzzled.

“You're supposed to pick a card,” Heather explained. “Put down
any pairs. Whoever gets stuck with the Old Maid loses.” She looked at him. “Don't you know anything?”

“It's been a long time.” Solitaire had been more his line. He picked a card from her hand. It was the Old Maid, but Rollins tried not to let on.

“Hah-hah,” Heather said.

Rollins ignored her. “Who's Timmy?” he repeated.

“This kid I met. When I was sick, remember?” Heather took one of Rollins' cards. “A match!” She waved the pair triumphantly in the air, then set it down.

“Where?”

“I don't know.” A singsong voice.

“Was it where you went in the taxi?” Rollins pressed.

“Yup.” She held out her hand to him, but Rollins didn't quite register.

“You didn't go to the hospital, did you?”

“Nope.” She pushed her hand closer to Rollins' face.
“Your turn.”

Rollins picked. No match. “Timmy's house—was it a nice place?”

“Kind of. It was by some water.”

“That sounds nice.”

“But my mom's friend was mean. He kept saying it was ‘very inconvenient' for us to come. I think she was talking to him last night, but I'm not sure. She talks to lots of people.”

There was a noise out in the hall, and Heather looked over Rollins' shoulder, and Rollins' eyes followed. Tina stood in Rollins' doorway. Her hair was mussed, and she wore a bathrobe. “Well, good morning,” she told Rollins with a smile.

Heather gathered up her cards and her ball. “I better go,” she whispered to Rollins. “Bye.”

“Don't stop,” Tina said.

Rollins stood up. “I'm not much good at Old Maid anyway.”

Heather returned to the hallway.

“She's quite a girl,” Rollins said.

“Till you get to know her.” Tina rolled her eyes. “Thanks for last night. I can really use adult company sometimes.”

“Any time.”

Rollins turned back toward his door, then stopped and faced her again. “So you didn't go to the hospital after all?”

A funny expression came over Tina's face. “Did Heather tell you that?”

Rollins nodded.

“That girl. No, I went to a friend's place instead. I can't afford a hospital. My friend's wife's a nurse. I figured they'd know what to do. But I'll pay you back for the taxi real soon. I promise.”

Rollins dismissed the notion with a wave. “I'm just glad Heather's okay.”

 

At Johnson the next morning, Rollins found a note from his boss, Dell Henderson, in his in-box.
Please see me,
it said.

With some foreboding, Rollins went straight down the hall to Henderson's corner office. He glanced in Marj's cubicle on the way, but she wasn't in yet.

Henderson's secretary, elderly Betty Marie, sent him right on in without any of the usual pleasantries. Henderson was at his desk, staring at his computer screen; the sky was a bright blue out the big window behind. Henderson was late twenties, balding, with the glossy, pink skin Rollins associated with the overpaid. He was in suspenders today—to add a little extra managerial gravitas, Rollins figured. It took Henderson a moment to realize that he had a visitor. “Ah, Rollins,” Henderson said, rolling his chair away from the screen. “Take a seat, why don't you.” Henderson pointed toward a slender, gray chair. “Spoke to Eberhardt Friday.” He referred to Moe Eberhardt, the head of general accounting up on 22, the man to whom Rollins reported his daily figures. “I gather there was a problem in the paper numbers.” That meant the Paper and Forest Products Select Fund.

“Nothing major,” Rollins replied, trying not to sound defensive. “We worked it out.” Rollins' tally of the offering price had been off by approximately three-hundredths of a cent. He'd neglected to check to see if the computer had included the day's results from a tiny firm called Evergreen National, which had temporarily been off the ticker because the share price had plummeted after a management shake-up.
Rollins' lapse could have cost Johnson a quarter-million or so, but Eberhardt had caught the mistake and messaged him. Rollins had fixed things up before the share price went out over the wire. He had made similar goofs a couple of times before, and he hadn't thought twice about this one. After all, no harm had been done.

“Just want you to know, they're getting sticky about such errors upstairs. Word to the wise.”

“Right. I'll be more careful. Sorry.” Rollins got up to go.

Henderson looked over at him. “Oh, and another thing.”

Rollins sat back down in his chair a little heavily.

“I heard about an incident in the men's.” Henderson paused significantly. “You and that new gal, Simmons?” He fixed Rollins with a penetrating stare that was all the more irksome coming from a lad ten years his junior. “Look but don't touch—know what I mean? Like a museum in here. No joke—we've had a ton of very tedious meetings on this.”

“It's not the way it looks.” Rollins was horrified to think that Marj had complained about him.

“You know how it works. Let's just say that I heard it might be more, all right?”

“She was just giving me an aspirin.”

Henderson waved a hand in the air. “Whatever. Do me a favor and keep it zipped.”

“Absolutely.” Rollins stood up and crossed to the door.

Henderson stopped him again. “I was looking through your file.” This was never a good sign. “I didn't know your old man was friends with Mr. Johnson.”

“Mr. Johnson?” Rollins' mind went blank.

“
The
Mr. Johnson, the one for whom you work,” Henderson said impatiently, referring to the owner and CEO of Johnson Investments, Inc.

Any connection between his father and Mr. Johnson was certainly news to Rollins. He hadn't thought his father was in that league. Henry Rollins had not gotten anywhere near developing the company that he had dreamed of at the Harvard Club. The closest he'd come was to
start a small investment firm, Henry Rollins and Co., in the early eighties, bankrolled by a portion of his wife's inheritance. He'd done one deal with a former secretary of the treasury and a retired chairman of Kaufman & Smith, but the firm finally dissolved in 1992 amid whispers of an SEC investigation that never materialized.

“Through T. J. Lambert, apparently,” Henderson went on. Lambert was one of the old warhorses of Boston finance and a founder of the fabled Boston brokerage house, Lambert, Delaney and Starr, which had ultimately been folded into the Tedesco financial empire. Henderson plucked Rollins' file from the holder on his desk and flipped it open. He sifted through Rollins' annual job reports. “Not a bad record here, you know,” he said in passing. “Punctual, accurate, reliable. A little uncommunicative at times, maybe.” He looked up at Rollins and delivered an artificial smile. “But so what?” He continued to dig through the papers in the file. “Yeah, here it is.” He handed Rollins the letter on Lambert's thick, nicely embossed stationery. “Take a look.”

It was a To Whom It May Concern endorsement, filled with high praise of the generic variety, but one sentence in particular caught Rollins' attention:
I've known his parents, Henry and Jane, for years, of course.

Both
his parents. Named in a letter written over two decades after their divorce, no less. Puzzling. Rollins had never told either of them that he was looking for a job. At that point, in 1995, Rollins hadn't seen his father for three years. He was in closer contact with his mother, but he hadn't breathed a word to her about his firing. He hadn't wanted to give her the pleasure of knowing that the story about Neely's disappearance had caused him grief, too.

Could his mother have dropped a line to T. J. Lambert about him? So she had been aware of his being fired from the
Beacon
? Might her networking have been—what?—her way of making up to him for her many acts of coldness through the years? It was certainly her style to work completely behind the scenes. And, even if Rollins' father's name had been invoked, he saw only his mother's hand. She'd always had the sounder business sense. Even when his father was trying to start up his investment company, his mother never trusted him with any of her
investment decisions over her family money. On those many trips out to Brookline, Mr. Grove spoke only to her.

Whichever parent was responsible, the ploy worked. And it explained the great mystery of how Rollins had secured his Johnson job with such limited financial experience. He had been accepted in a matter of days, after only the most cursory interview. He'd only even thought to apply because his brother had happened to mention that Johnson was expanding.

In the lower left-hand corner, Rollins noticed a pencil notation.
Whatever Henry wants. F. P. J.

Rollins drew Henderson's attention to the initials.

“Yep, that's Mr. Johnson,” Henderson said. “That's what I'm talking about. Caught my eye, too.” Henderson looked hard at Rollins, as if he were a sum that didn't quite tally. “Look, I'll be blunt. You got some powerful friends here. Do me a favor: Don't screw up.”

“I'll do my best.” Rollins stood up, glad for the opportunity to look down at Henderson, the man's bald head reflecting the fluorescent light.

Henderson looked up at him. “You're not on any sort of medication, are you?”

“No.”

He waved his hand again, as if dispelling smoke. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”

 

Marj's light blue raincoat was on her chair when Rollins went back up the corridor to his desk, but there was no other sign of her. When he returned to his little office, he found a manila envelope on his desk. His name was handwritten on it, along with the word
personal
, underlined twice, in red ink. Rollins stared at it for some time. Judging by the loopiness of the
l'
s and
o'
s, he thought—no, hoped—he recognized Marj's handwriting. The letters seemed to have air pockets in them. He experienced a keenness, a quickening. He shut the door behind him, then flipped up the metal clasps. In peeling open the envelope's lip, he sliced the tip of his right index finger, which nearly made him cry out. He sucked the tiny wound, savoring the saltiness of his blood, then
carefully held that finger away from the others as he tipped out the package's contents.

The package contained blurry microfilm copies of a
Beacon
newspaper article headlined
THE WOMAN WHO WASN'T THERE
. It was the story he'd written about Neely. He set it down on the table and spread it out flat with both hands. It was like being able to touch a memory. He was amazed to have it right there at his fingertips. It brought so much back—not just the story itself, but the long days spent digging out the facts behind the mystery of Neely's disappearance, and then the longer nights spent trying to make sense of what he'd learned. Seeing the story again was like seeing a photo of the big brick house where he had grown up, or a birthday letter from his father, the few years he'd remembered to send one. It was still urgently familiar, no matter how far past it might have become. This tale would never leave him.

He scanned the lead paragraphs.

 

THE WOMAN WHO WASN'T THERE
By E. A. Rollins