A Thief in the House of Memory (8 page)

Then there was the time they played catch in the conservatory.

“Bernard Steeple won't like this,” she said, hurling the ball just over Dec's outstretched hands. It bounced against the glass wall — only a tennis ball, harmless. But when sixteen-year-old Dec watched the trajectory of the ball that his younger self could not catch, he saw the glass wobble in its dried-up and crumbling putty.

He was two people in one these days. He was a child and a teenager, a participant and a watcher, a son and an intruder. He had thought the past was something that was over. Apparently, he was wrong.

Late one afternoon, he ventured out back to where the sweeping driveway came to an end. The rain had let up for a bit and everything smelled alive. There were two garages, each with four bays. He rolled up the first door of the older building. Only three of the bays were occupied; the empty space was where his father's very first car used to sit. Now Dec saw it again, waxed to a glossy shine, the Wildcat. It was a black convertible with white interior. The top was down. He doubted his father had left it that way.

“Wish I'd known him when he was young,” said Lindy. Dec looked up. She had been standing in the shadows at the back of the garage, in a black raincoat with her collar up and the belt cinched tight. She looked like a spy.

“I was just out of school,” she said. “He was thirty by then. Not so old, I guess, but some people age real fast.”

She ran her hand admiringly along the chrome that stretched the length of the car and then leaned over to see her reflection in the hood.

“Think of it, Dec. Your daddy, just a boy, eighteen, away at college and — Pow! — both parents dead in a car crash.” Her eyes flashed. “Suddenly he's a millionaire. Just like that! And the best part is, no meddling relatives to tell him what to do with his money.”

She laughed out loud.

“I'd have said to hell with university if I'd been him, but not your dad, oh, no.” She scowled. “He was too busy majoring in boredom.”

“Daddy's nice,” Dec said.

“Oh, he's nice, all right,” said Lindy. “Nice and handsome, nice and rich. Why else do you think a girl would marry a guy a dozen years older than her?”

“I don't know,” said Dec, shoving his hands into his pockets. Adults all seemed about the same age to him.

Lindy scruffled his hair. “Bernard is so nice a girl could just die.”

Dec wrapped his fists tightly around the Micro-Machines
in his pockets — a pick-up in the left, an ambulance in the right.

“Ah, Skipper,” she said, seeing the trouble in his eyes. “It's just that sometimes it seems like he's got his feet stuck in two big fat pails of concrete.”

Dec laughed.

Then Lindy bent down so that they were eye to eye. “Do you ever ask yourself why?” she said, her voice a throaty whisper.

“Why what?”

“Why a guy like that would buy a car like this?”

Dec had never thought about it before. The Wildcat wasn't like any of his father's other cars, that was for sure.

She opened the driver's door and peered inside. “You know what I think? His folks dying like that so sudden must have scared some life into him.” She made a face. “He sure got over it fast.” She rubbed her hand over the leather of the driver's seat, shaking her head in wonder.

Then she looked at Dec, a wicked grin on her face. “You think maybe he stole it?”

Dec laughed out loud. What a joke that was! “Oh, ho!” she said. “You think your daddy never stole anything?” Her voice had changed. He couldn't tell any more if she was fooling.

He kicked at the white-walled tire. “Daddy's not a crook.”

“Don't you be so sure,” she said, wagging a finger at him.

She held onto the car door and leaned way back.

“The man who bought this car was young and daring. When he showed it to me, I thought, Hey, girl, he may
seem
like a pussycat, driving his beige Le Sabre with the cruise control set right on the speed limit, but there's a
Wildcat
in there somewhere.” Then she exploded with laughter. “Crazy mama,” she said.

She grew quiet again and he watched, not sure what she would do next. Then the grin was back and she gave Dec a hurry-up wave.

“Hop in, Big Stuff,” she said. “Come on, quick now.” He crawled in behind the steering wheel. She clambered over him and lounged in the passenger's seat. “Take me somewhere,” she said.

“Where?” asked Dec, both hands on the wheel, only wishing that his foot could reach the pedal.

“California,” said Lindy. “I need a little sun in my life. How ‘bout you?”

He drove a bit. She made loud driving noises. She joked about him running over a cow. “Careful you don't put us in the river!” she said. “Hey, is that Las Vegas up ahead? I think it just might be. Viva Las Vegas.”

Then they sat quietly with only the sparkling green lawns of Steeple Hall before them. “You don't think your daddy was a crook?” she said, her voice tetchy now. “Well, I used to have a life. Where'd that go, huh?”

Dec sat staring at her, her bare feet up on the seat, her knees supporting her chin, her sad face, her puffy eyes. He
didn't like it when she got sad. He crawled up on his knees, leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She wrapped her arms around him.

“Get me out of here, Declan,” she whispered between smooches. “Get me out of here. Before it's too late.”

Thunder rumbled a long way off.

Dec opened his eyes. How old had he been? The memories came back to him willy-nilly. He had no control over them. Sometimes he was eight or nine, sometimes he was little more than a baby. But he never seemed to get too close in age to the time she left. That time was a blank. She had left in the fall, just a few months after Sunny was born. He had been ten.

He looked back towards the house. His ten-year-old self was walking around in there somewhere, lost to him.

Lightning crackled across the southern sky. He shuddered. He should go inside. He closed the door on the empty bay. The rain would be back; the Wildcat wouldn't. One night she drove it away, all by herself.

D
EC HAD
written about half his essay on Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Architecture as frozen music. I like that,” said Ezra. “Is it about that place called Falling Water?”

“The Edgar j. Kaufman η house,” said Dec. “How do you know?”

“It's in Pennsylvania, right?” said Ezra. “I love it. All the angles and the way it sort of hangs out over the stream like that and…” He stopped. They had been making slow passage through the knot at the entrance to the cafeteria, but Ezra, who was taller than Dec, had his eyes on their table. “What's going on?” he said.

In truth, nothing was going on. Not the usual kind of thing, anyway. Melody and Martin weren't at the blackboard solving the mysteries of the physical universe. Langston's chessboard was all set up but no one was playing. Arianna wasn't doing her crossword and Vivien, back to regular clothing — if overalls and a fluorescent blue wig could be considered
normal — was not composing in her journal. She looked anything but composed. She was tugging absent-mindedly at her eyebrow ring.

They were all crowded around something, their heads pressed together.

Vivien was the first to see the boys arrive. “Have you seen this?” she said to Dec.

The others cleared a path. What Dec saw was Steeple Hall. The image filled the top of half of a page in some newspaper. The story filled the rest of the page. Under the picture in large black letters was the headline, “A Thief in the House of Memory.”

“Shit.”

“It's the
Ottawa Citizen”
said Langston, hitching up his pants. “I went out to get a copy because I wrote this letter to the editor protesting the education cuts and it was supposed to be in today.”

Speechless, Dec started to read the article.

In the countryside not far from the pretty town of Ladybank, a man died three weeks ago. He was a small-town crook crushed in his last act of larceny. He had tried to rob the House of Memory.

Dec tried to go on but the words began to swim before his eyes.

“You didn't know about this?” asked Vivien. He shook his head. “Bummer,” she said.

The house was shot from a distance but it still looked grotesquely tall, a lurid house of horrors. The image was grainy and distorted and they had used some kind of eerie effect to lend an artificial twilight to the scene.

“Ghost Central,” said Richard.

Dec groaned. “Oh, perfect. This is just perfect.”

“I wouldn't lose any sleep over it,” said Arianna. She was sitting with the article in front of her and a yellow highlighter in her hand. “I've counted three typos so far.” Dec stared at her vacantly. “Well, who is going to believe such shoddy journal-ism?”

“It's mostly about your grandfather,” said Martin. “I didn't know he was a senator.”

“That was his great-grandfather,” said Melody.

“Oh, right. Your grandfather was the business guy.”

“Steeple Industries,” said Richard grandly, stretching out his arm as if pointing to a huge neon sign.

“Steeple
Enterprises”
corrected Langston. He turned to Dec. “Your family used to own half of Ladybank.”

Dec had a sour taste in his mouth. “What's your point?” he snapped.

Langston shrugged. “I don't have a point.”

“I read the article this morning,” said Vivien hurriedly. “It's actually kind of inspiring.”

Dec looked at her skeptically. “Really?”

“Really. It talks about how your dad has kind of appointed himself as the family historian, how committed
he is, and how much work he puts into upkeep — that kind of thing.”

Dec looked at the article and then back at Vivien hopefully.

“It's true,” she said. “I even started writing a poem.” She plunked her journal down on the table and started leafing through the pages. “It made me think of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.' It's got this kind of Poe feel to it,” she said. “So I call it a Poe-em.”

As the journal pages flipped by, something caught Dec's eye, and he stopped her hand. A sketch — a good one — and it looked remarkably like him.

“Oh, that,” she said. “Just a doodle.” She snatched up the journal and held it to her chest. She pushed a strand of neon blue hair from her face and cleared her throat.

“The Poe-em is written in trochaic octameter,” she said.

“Is that some kind of dinosaur?” said Richard. But before Vivien could reply, Arianna made another mark with her yellow highlighter.

“Four!” she said triumphantly. “Can you believe they left out the “h” in psycho.”

“Psycho?” said Dec, looking at her in shock.
“Psycho?”

“It's okay,” said Vivien, seeing the look of panic on Dec's face. “The journalist was just sort of saying something about the contrast between the… Here it is.” She pointed to the passage and Dec read it for himself.

A lonely stretch of highway, a modest roadside dwelling at the foot of a steep hill leading, by a ragged pathway to an imposing Victorian mansion. One might almost be describing the setting for Alfred Hitchcock's Psyco.

Dec smacked his forehead. “The setting for Psycho!”

“Keep reading,” said Vivien.

But Dec's face was buried in his hands. “My father is going to freak.”

“He must have known about it,” said Martin.

“But he didn't,” said Melody. “The journalist says that every attempt to contact Steeple was turned down.”

“Then the guy was trespassing,” said Martin. “You can sue!

“Yeah, right,” said Dec.

“It's defamation of character,” said Richard. “Slander!”

“You mean libel,” said Arianna. “When you actually publish a false statement, it's libel.”

“Stop!” said Vivien with such passion that, remarkably, everybody did. “You have to read the whole thing, Dec. In the very next sentence he says… where is it… yeah, listen, ‘Nothing could be further from the truth.' Then he goes on to say that your dad's this real family-minded guy who likes to live the quiet life and nice stuff like that.”

Richard looked disappointed. “So your dad's not a psychotic killer?”

Dec looked at Richard wearily. “Richard, sometimes…”

“Hold on,” said Ezra, interrupting. He stared at Dec, a glint in his eye. “He asked you a question, Dec. Answer the guy.”

Dec gaped at Ezra. And Ezra smiled back at him, but would not withdraw the challenge.

Dec swallowed hard. They were all looking at him now and waiting, as if the question hadn't been a joke.

“Is my dad a psychotic killer?” He fixed his eyes on Ezra.

“The jury is still out.”

A
TELEVISION VAN
, with splashy call letters on its sides and a satellite dish on the roof, was parked outside Camelot. As the school bus pulled to a stop, the students went wild. Dec pushed his way through the crowd and down the steps.

The bus door closed behind him. The noise died to a dull roar and then was lost entirely under the din of the vehicle pulling away. It was raining lightly. A lady reporter headed towards Dec with a newspaper over her head for protection and a cameraman in tow. Bernard Steeple was trying to stop them.

“Get to the house,” he yelled. Dec froze.

“Just a word,” said the reporter, bearing down on him. The gravel of the soft shoulder was hard going for her in heels.

“Don't say a thing!” Bernard yelled again. He grabbed the cameraman, who shook him off.

Dec had never seen his father like this.

“Move!”

Dec ran across the lawn towards the house. He glanced back. The cameraman was filming him. Dec stopped. This was ridiculous. He felt like a criminal. Worse, he felt like some freak. What was he supposed to be running from?