The Dark House (27 page)

Rollins checked his watch. “It's only a little past ten.” He climbed out. Dark leaves rustled in the slight breeze, some kids were gathered around a pounding boom box, and a few pedestrians hurried along the lit pathways that crisscrossed the park. He grasped the phone and pressed 411 for information in Weston. When the operator came on, she had to ask him which number he wanted for Dr. and Mrs. Blanchard. (Only Rollins' uncle would make such a big deal of a Ph.D.) “There's one for The Barn, another for The Pond, and Main House.” Rollins settled on the last and pressed in the numbers. A cultivated voice answered on the fourth ring.

“Aunt Eleanor?” Rollins asked. “It's Rollins.” He waited a moment. “Your nephew.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Rollins. I'm sorry. I keep thinking of you as Edward.”

They discussed the health of Rollins' mother and the whereabouts of his brother for a few minutes before Rollins was able to get to the point. “I was hoping to come see you,” he said. “Something has come up.”

“Oh?” Her voice seemed to catch. “You haven't heard anything—?”

“No, no. Nothing about Cornelia. Not directly, anyway. It's just that I've learned a few things about the case that I'd rather not discuss on the phone.”

“Well, George is down in Pennsylvania.”

“Actually, I was hoping to see you.” Rollins had never gotten along very well with his blustery Uncle George. Aunt Ellie could be stiff, but at least she listened.

“I'm not doing too much tomorrow.”

“How about now?”

She hesitated a moment. “It's awfully late.”

“We'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

 

The Blanchard place was a solid colonial, set well back from the road, with a fenced-in paddock and a big barn beside it. The light was on under the side portico, and, when Rollins pressed the buzzer, what sounded like a small pack of dogs came scampering to the door. After a few moments, a weary voice cried out “Coming, coming, coming.” And then the door opened to reveal Rollins' Aunt Eleanor in a monogrammed bathrobe, her white hair down to her shoulders, restraining three or four collies with her hands. She looked older than Rollins had remembered, thinner, with dark bags under her eyes, but it had been years since he'd last seen her.

She seemed a little startled to see Marj there, and she brought a hand up to her robe. “I wasn't expecting you'd bring anyone.”

Rollins introduced them. “This is my friend Marj,” Rollins said.

Eleanor showed a half-smile. “Oh? Well, your mother will be pleased. Come on in.” With a shout, Eleanor ordered the dogs to back off while she opened the door to let Rollins and Marj pass into the spacious kitchen with sparkling marble countertops and brilliant tiles, and every cabinet brimming with crystal and flatware. “We'll go into the dining room.”

Rollins passed through the swinging kitchen door to a high-ceilinged, dark-paneled room where a silver tea tray had been set out on the mahogany table, and a few Pepperidge Farm cookies were arranged artfully on a Chinese plate beside it. “I asked Ginger to put out a little something for us,” Eleanor said.

“Very kind of you.” Rollins took a seat on one of the heavy, Sheraton chairs, and Marj pulled out another one beside him.

Eleanor sat at the head, then leaned forward to Rollins and clutched his arm with a bony hand. “Please. I have to know. I'm sitting down now. Have they found her?”

“No. It's nothing like that. I'm sorry. I thought I'd explained.”

Eleanor slumped back into her chair. “Oh, God. You did. But I couldn't think why else you'd come.” She balled up her linen napkin
and looked away for a moment. Then she looked across to Marj. “It's such a terrible situation.” Eleanor blew her nose into the napkin, then steadied herself and poured out some tea for the two of them into beautiful Wedgewood cups. “Go on,” she urged Rollins and Marj. “It's herbal. It won't keep you up.”

Rollins set his cup down in front of him. “Look, Aunt Ellie, I went to see Cornelia's old house.” He looked at her carefully. “It's been sold.”

She dropped a lump of sugar into her tea and swirled it around with a silver spoon.

“You don't seem surprised.”

“Why should I? Your uncle George and I put it up for sale ourselves.”

“But you didn't own it.”

Eleanor set her spoon down in her saucer with a clink. “Of course we did. It just wasn't something we wanted everyone to know.”

“When I was doing—that story, I spoke to a private investigator on the case, who told me that the deed was in her name.”

“So?”

“So you couldn't have sold the house. It wasn't yours.”

“That's ridiculous.” The words bore the sound of something breaking. “Of course it was ours. Look at the deed, you'll see that George signed it over to the new people. I was there at the closing. I saw the whole thing.”

“The Stantons, you mean?”

“Yes. That's it. Quite good people, I thought. We were so happy that house ended up in good hands.”

“And not Elizabeth Payzen's?”

Eleanor fixed Rollins with an icy look. “Whoever said anything about her?”

“Neely left her everything, didn't she?” Rollins could sense Marj staring at him hard.

A shot in the dark, but a hit.

Eleanor brought her hands from her lap to the tabletop, a gesture that seemed somehow aggressive. “That detestable lawyer of Neely's, Mr. Eliot, wouldn't breathe a word about that. Not even to her parents!
Oh, he was vile. You should write an article about
him
.”

“That's why you turned to Jerry?”

“Do I know a Jerry?” The voice was lofty, contemptuous.

“Your realtor, Jerry Sloane.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Mr. Sloane.” A slight smile crept over her features. “He seemed to know things. Yes, he was very…helpful.”

“Wasn't that a little risky, Aunt Eleanor?”

“Whatever do you mean?” Her eyebrows raised.

“I wouldn't have thought that Jerry Sloane was your type.”

“Oh, but he came very highly recommended.”

“Really?”

“Yes, by your mother.” She said this airily, as if discussing trifles. “She seemed to know him quite well.”

Rollins glanced at Marj, who met his eyes with a startled look of her own.

Aunt Eleanor gave out a delicate laugh. “You seem so surprised! But your mother—she knows lots of people, you know.”

“I wonder how you happened to ask her.”

“We talk occasionally, your mother and I.”

Rollins replied quickly: “Anything to keep Elizabeth from getting the house, and all her things, is that what you mean?”

Mrs. Blanchard set down her teacup. “She was our only child.” Rollins braced himself for a furious outburst. Instead, she reached to enclose Rollins' hand in hers.

 

Paper beats rock, Neely always told him. And rock beats scissors.

 

“Your family suffered a terrible tragedy of your own when your darling little sister died. I know that. But at least you could put a headstone on her grave.” Mrs. Blanchard dabbed at her eyes again. “Oh this is terrible,” she muttered to herself. “I vowed I would not let this happen.”

“It's okay, Mrs. Blanchard,” Marj told her.

Eleanor's lips quivered. “Neely was under a cloud there for so many years. She took the death of your sister so hard. She blamed herself. It took her years to recover. She had nightmares. She had to take
another year off before college. And she spent a long while trying to find herself afterward. I just wish she'd never gone to Londonderry. A mother can tell—this wasn't her way.”

“Lesbianism, you mean?” Rollins asked.

Eleanor put down her napkin. “I suppose that's the word for it. I'd always loved her early poems. Not that nonsense about vaginas. Nature was her subject. That second volume…Well, you saw who it was dedicated to.”

“Elizabeth.”

“Neely was trying to free herself when she died. She told me so. I went to see Elizabeth once in Londonderry after the disappearance—perhaps you heard?”

“No.” Rollins was surprised he hadn't.

“I wanted to meet the woman who'd had such a powerful effect on my daughter. I never had met her, you see. I sometimes think that Neely had deliberately kept me away. So I went there, and I knocked on her door and told her who I was, and, to my surprise, she invited me in. We had coffee there on the deck behind the house. You know what she asked me?”

Rollins shook his head.

“She asked me about Stephanie. She asked me if Neely really had had a cousin who died in the bathtub. I said, yes, that happened. She said that was good to know. Neely had talked about it, often. It had weighed on her. I knew that, of course. But the thing was, Elizabeth said she could never be sure that it really had happened, or whether it wasn't cover for something else. That was her word, ‘cover.' I asked her, ‘Whatever do you mean?' She said she didn't know, exactly. She just thought that the dead baby was some sort of emblem.” Eleanor lay down the napkin. Her eyes were red. “I don't know what I was expecting from her that day. A confession, perhaps, or maybe an explanation. I didn't get anything like that. When I'd finished my coffee, she walked me back to my car. As I was leaving, she said she was sorry. I said, ‘For what?' And she said, ‘For everything.' And then I drove off. And that was the only time I ever saw her.”

A
t the hotel that night, Rollins and Marj cuddled together under a sheet, listening to the AC hum as the shadows from the street below played across the ceiling. The air-conditioning had been Marj's idea. They'd left their clothes out to be laundered overnight and gone to bed naked. It was wonderful to feel her skin on him—a bare arm, a hip, sometimes a leg thrown over his, but Rollins must have finally drifted off because he woke up to find Marj on top of him. “I thought you were awake,” she whispered as she eased herself down on him, sliding his erection deep inside her. “You're hard as a rock.”

Afterward, they drowsed again until dawn, when Rollins let his fingers stray down to her pelvis, and they went at it once more. “It's been a while for you, hasn't it?” she asked him when they were done. “I
mean, before me.” When Rollins nodded, she kissed him. “Poor baby.”

Rollins played with her nipple. “Do I have to go through hell to get you?” he asked. “Is that how it works?”

Marj pressed a fingertip down on his nose, just as Neely had. “If you do get me.”

The words frightened him, but they were quickly dispelled by her hand, which reached down to encircle him once more.

 

They were both sound asleep when the telephone rang at nine. It was Schecter. He'd gone out to Wayne Jeffries' house in Somerville, a piece of information that Rollins had trouble processing right then. “I thought if I had a talk with him,” Schecter went on, “I might be able to clear this whole thing up.” Unfortunately, Jeffries had driven off the exact moment Schecter pulled up, and Schecter had followed him to a small two-family in Melrose. The detective was parked outside there now, talking to Rollins from his cell phone. Rollins realized he could hear the street noises in the background.

“But get this,” Schecter told him. “I checked the name on the mailbox. It's Mancuso. No first name, but I figured it's got to be that neighbor of yours.”

Rollins was horrified to think that a temptress like Tina and the frightening Jeffries had formed such a tight alliance against him.

“I can't see if she's inside there, too, and I'd like to know what I'm dealing with.” Schecter wanted Rollins to find out if Tina was in her North End apartment. “I tried to call, but the number was unlisted, and I don't have time to hustle it down. Check on her, would you please? Because if she's not there, I bet she's here with loverboy.”

Rollins leaned back against the headboard, thrust a hand into his hair. As Marj eyed him uneasily from the other side of the bed, he tried to calm the panic that was rising in his chest.

“Al, are you sure this is the way to go?” he asked. “Jeffries seems a little wild to me.” Schecter was going right at Rollins' pursuers, when every instinct told him that it was better to keep quiet, to watch and wait.

“I can handle wild,” Schecter said. “Crazy, now that's something else.”

Rollins pointedly didn't ask what Schecter had in mind. With the detective, he'd always sensed there were certain aspects to his investigations that he'd just as soon not know about. All he knew for sure was that Schecter got results. “All right,” Rollins told him. “I'll go right over, and I'll call you back.”

“Be quick about it.”

Marj did not like the idea of paying Tina a surprise visit, but she didn't want to stay behind, either. The two of them pulled on their clothes—Rollins in his Californian outfit, and Marj in her running clothes, all of them cleaned and pressed by the Ritz. And they tidied themselves up as much as they could. Then they grabbed a couple of pastries from the continental breakfast buffet downstairs and climbed into the Nissan the moment the valet brought it around.

It gave Rollins a strange feeling to be behind the wheel again. The car seemed a little tighter than he remembered, and older, too. He'd had it only six years, and it still ran fine, but there were 350,000 miles on it, and he realized the engine sounded rougher than it used to, impeding conversation, and the clutch point was lower than it should be. Of course, it was wonderful to see Marj in the passenger seat beside him, her slim bare legs making sticky sounds on the vinyl, her hair fluttering in the breeze of the open window. But it was odd, too, inexpressibly so, as if her presence required a different car altogether—a larger one perhaps, or possibly a different model, something more in a family line than this tiny Nissan.

It was a lovely summer morning, the rising sun beginning to burn off the moist coolness that had settled in overnight. Rollins drove up over Beacon Hill and around the back of Government Center to the North End. He pulled up on a side street around the corner from his Hanover Street apartment; the Nissan would be less conspicuous there. He told Marj to wait in the car and lock the doors. She did so, glumly. He was beginning to sense that she resented being told to do things, even if they were obviously for her protection. She also lowered the visors, and slumped down low in her seat.

Rollins walked up Hanover, the street glowing a peach color in the morning light, and unlocked the front door to his apartment building.
He stood for a moment in the hall, listening for any sounds from the second floor. Then he quietly climbed the stairs. At the top, he checked to make sure his own door was still securely locked. Then he made his way down to the Mancusos'. His plan was simply to listen at the door, then slip away the moment he heard Tina's voice. He was cautiously inclining his ear toward the door when it flew open with a shout. “Boo!”

Rollins recoiled and shot his hands up in the air. But it was only Heather. She leaped onto him and clung to him like a monkey. “Hi, mister!” she said. “Scared you, huh?”

“Sssh.” Rollins whispered, quickly setting her down behind him. “Is your mother inside?”

Heather shook her head. “Nope. She went out.”

“She say where?”

“I think she went back to our house.”

“You have a house somewhere?”

“Yup.” She wrinkled her nose. “I wasn't supposed to tell you that.”

“And she just left you here?”

“Yup,” Heather said again, pouting. “
After
she promised to take me to the beach.”

Rollins could see now that she was wearing her bathing suit, a bright blue one with green stars.

“Can you take me, mister?” She folded her hands in prayer. “Please?”

His mind formed several excellent reasons why he couldn't, but before he could voice any of them, Heather had dashed inside. In another moment, she was standing in front of him again, towel and teddy bear in hand. “I'm ready.”

Rollins groaned inwardly and told her to wait a moment while he went to call Schecter from his apartment. Heather followed him in, anyway, and made straight for his refrigerator. This time, he shut the door behind her.

On the phone, Schecter thanked Rollins for the information. He'd wait there at the house until he could catch either Jeffries or Tina alone. “Him or her, I don't care.”

Rollins hoped it wouldn't be Tina, but he was in no position to tell Schecter that. “Just to find out why they've been following me?” he asked.

“To figure out what they know about what happened to Cornelia. That's what this is about, Rollins. I spoke to Rose Glieberman yesterday night. Took me ten phone calls, and I woke up half the city. But I got her. She's split up now with that douche-bag husband of hers. That's why they're selling. She'd known your dad out in Oregon, years back. I guess they'd had something going out there.”

Rollins had heard more than he wanted to know about his father's love life, as Schecter must have sensed because he switched back to Cornelia. “I don't like the fact that she was mixed up with these lowlifes. That Jeffries is an animal. He could have killed her and never given it a thought.”

Rollins closed his eyes. He couldn't believe he'd ever taken Jeffries for an insurance agent. He had been watching so carefully all those years, making such shrewd deductions about the strangers he pursued, and yet he hadn't grasped the first thing about them. It was jarring to think how much he had missed, how much time he had wasted with his absurd suppositions.

“And get this,” Schecter went on. “Rose had the impression that Cornelia had come into some more dough
after
her disappearance.”

“She did,” Rollins replied. “From her grandmother. Might be as much as eight or ten million by now.”

Schecter was silent a moment. “Are you kidding me? Are you
kidding
me? Maybe ten million bucks and you didn't think this might have been worth mentioning? You got shit for brains or what?”

It wasn't good to talk about money. The numbers commanded attention they didn't deserve. “I didn't think anybody would know about it. The family's kept it pretty quiet.”

“They obviously didn't keep it too quiet if the fucking Gliebermans know!”

“That money doesn't have anything to do with me,” Rollins insisted.

“That's what you think.”

Once again, Rollins resented his superior tone. “So you tell me—what's the link?”

“To you? I don't know, but I'll pull it out of 'em, don't worry.”

When Rollins hung up the phone, Heather was standing right in front of him. “Ready?”

 

Marj was slumped down deep in her seat when he returned. “Took you a while,” she said as he opened the door. Then, seeing Heather, she added, “Well, look who we have here.”

Rollins explained to her about Tina's absence, and then, more hesitantly, about the beach plan.

“I don't think we're dressed for it, Rolo,” Marj replied, and she set her mouth in a sulky expression that Rollins had learned to watch out for.

“I am,” Heather said. “See?”

“I don't believe this,” Marj mumbled, turning away.

“So I thought Heather would like to get out of the house for a while,” Rollins wound up. “Have a little fun. Besides, I think we could all use a break.”

Marj turned to him again. “You might have asked me first, all right? Not told. Asked. I'm in on this, too, you know.”

Heather piped up from the backseat. “Is everything okay, mister?”

Rollins glanced back at her. She'd fastened her seat belt over the hump, and she'd belted in her teddy on the seat beside her. “We still going to the beach?” she asked.

“Sure,” Rollins said.

“Yay!” She clapped her hands.

Marj glanced back at Heather for the first time. “Hi, honey, I guess we're going to the beach.”

 

In Rollins' estimation, the only beach worth visiting was the one by his grandmother's big house in Gloucester. After crossing the Charles, he veered off 93 onto Route 1, where he pointed out to Heather all the cartoonish highlights along the roadside: the bright orange dinosaur on the miniature golf place, the giant cows at the Hilltop Steak House,
the forty-foot Leaning Tower of Pizza. Rollins was pleased with himself. Maybe he had a way with children, after all.

It took about forty minutes to get to Gloucester, which was out Cape Ann on the North Shore at the very end of route 128. The center of town was a seedy fishing village, its air thick with noisy seagulls scavenging for garbage and heavy with a briny sea smell. But his grandmother's was away from all that, by Coffin's Beach, well to the north. Along the way, Rollins told her what Schecter had in mind, although he had to do it obliquely since Heather had perched herself on the armrest between the two rear seats and was watching the two of them very intently. Rollins didn't think that Heather should hear too much about the possibility of Schecter grilling her mother.

As Rollins pulled into the driveway, its shattered clamshells crunching under the Nissan's tires, he could see a few cars with New York license plates parked by the barn. Some of his Arnold cousins must be visiting, children of his mother's brother, Lloyd, a big New York investor and his second wife, a pretty Parisian named Marie.

Rollins had filled Marj in about the greater family on the way up. And he'd tried to impress her with the scale of the house itself, which was commensurate with the size of the family. As a child, he'd always been delighted that it afforded him so many places to hide. It probably wasn't much bigger than the Brookline house, but it had an entirely different feeling. The Brookline house was filled mostly with empty space, but the Gloucester place was crammed with adventure. There were over fifteen bedrooms, each one seemingly filled with a cousin or two, and any number of sitting rooms, parlors, pantries, nooks, and intriguing back halls. There was even a bowling alley in an annex off the barn, where hammerhead sharks and barracudas were mounted on the walls. And all of it was commanded by Rollins' late grandmother, invariably enthusiastic and carefree and not at all the stiflingly proper society matron that her daughter, Rollins' mother, became. Neely had visited with them once, that last, lovely summer before Stephanie died, and, with Rollins' grandmother leading her on, she'd led many a game of Capture the Flag on the sand flats at low tide. But the gloom that had enveloped the family after Stephanie's death had extended even to
here, and Rollins had never had anywhere near as good a time afterward. The family continued to come for a few years, but finally stopped after the divorce when everything seemed to become such an effort for his mother.

“It
is
big,” Marj said as she stepped out of the car. “It's like the Ritz.”

Heather said nothing, merely craned her head up at an extreme angle to take in the whole structure.

A stiff breeze was blowing. Some flags flapped on their high pole out front, and Rollins' shirtsleeves fluttered as he stepped onto the wide wraparound porch to the front door. “Anybody home?” he shouted. When no one answered, he pulled open the screen door and stepped inside. The big front hall was cool and dark, with musty air that seemed to have been preserved for generations like everything else. All around, there were red and blue winners' pennants, crisscrossed tennis rackets, water-stained prints of yachts, and other testaments of the active summer life hanging off the high pine walls.