Death's Savage Passion (26 page)

O
N ANY OTHER DAY
of my life, I would have spent whatever time I had alone with Phoebe going over and over the story of the death of Old Will Marsh. It was just the kind of thing I liked, in life and in books. It even had a tinge of the bizarre to it, like a story by John Dickson Carr. On this day, I had my mother on my mind—and when I have my mother on my mind, I can never think of anything else. I had forgotten all about Old Will and the Deverton place, and even about Damon Rask, by the time we were out of the Chestnut Tree’s parking lot and on the road again. By the time we got to the Old Canfield Road, I was positively morose. I am always morose when I think about my mother. She makes me feel like a wimp.

To do Phoebe credit, she hadn’t gotten so strange she’d forgotten about me. She had started making clucking noises while we were still on 42. Then we got to the turnoff, and the landscape changed, and she got wound up tight. So did I. Back in the 1700s—when the McKennas were farmers, and the house they lived in was a four-room shack with barn attached—the Old Canfield Road was our driveway. Now it only looks like our driveway. It seems to run through our gate, except that our gate is always locked. That’s the price of no longer living in a four-room shack. Over the decades, and the centuries, bits and pieces had been added to the original house. What we have now is thirty-two rooms, twenty-four thousand square feet, and a floor plan that looks as if it had been drawn by a schizophrenic on angel dust.

Of course, everybody else on the Old Canfield Road has a very large house, too. This is the part of Waverly where Really Old Families live, rich or not. Restlessness and eccentricity had touched every one of them. In the days before historical preservation societies, what you did with your own house was your own business. The families on the Old Canfield Road had done a lot with theirs. Additions had been tacked to the backs and sides of graceful Federals. Porches had been wrapped around the corners of saltboxes. Third and sometimes fourth floors had been added piecemeal. Nobody could complain that the houses all looked alike—except that they did. In a strange and not quite definable way.

If Phoebe’s concerns about money and class had been rational, this was the part of town that would have bothered her most. Instead, it was the part that bothered her least. She recognized it. Since it’s the only route to my parents’ place, my mother drove her through it at least once a month.

She leaned forward, squinted out the windshield, and pretended to be looking at something. She was really just trying to calm me down—but that was such a normal thing for Phoebe to do, I didn’t want to stop her.

“You’d think,” she said, “the way that Susanna person was talking, that that old Debenture place would be out here.”

“Deverton,” I said.

“Whatever. It sounded like just the sort of house—”

“It is. It’s just not on Old Canfield directly.” I gestured vaguely toward the trees at my left. “It’s back behind George’s place, too. Or to the side of it. Anyway, it’s up there.”

“Is it haunted?”

“What?”

“Is it
haunted
?”

I shot her a look. I’m not as good at “looks” as she is, but I can do a fair job when I really put my mind to it.

“You’re just trying to change the subject,” I said. “And don’t tell me we weren’t talking about anything. We didn’t have to be. You’re just trying to take my mind off Mother.”

“Somebody ought to take your mind off your mother,” Phoebe said. “You can’t think straight when you think about her. You get paranoid. You don’t make sense.”

“Well, that’s something you couldn’t accuse Mother of doing. Not making sense, I mean.”

“Patience.”

I got my cigarettes off the dashboard. “Okay,” I said. “I’m not babbling about the Deverton place, because I know about the Deverton place. Everybody up here does. And for God’s sake, it’s not haunted.”

Phoebe shrugged. “New England. Big old house. Deserted site in the woods—”

I shook my head. “In the first place, it’s not that big. It’s just a medium-sized farmhouse with a barn, and it’s all falling down. It’s got maybe eight, nine acres of land—it had more, but I think the old man sold it off after World War II. Deverton, I mean. That old man.”

“And?”

“Well,” I said, “one day about thirty years ago, he died. And he left a will, and the will said something about ‘I leave all my property to my wife and daughter.’ The only thing was, he didn’t give the names of his wife and daughter.”

“So?”

I smiled a little. “Well, everybody had heard his wife had left him and moved down to Darien. I think that was where she came from. She wasn’t local, and she’d left him eons ago, and nobody remembered her name. So the town put a notice in the Darien paper, and
then
—”

“Then? Are you going to do a drum roll?”

“I should. What happened was that two women showed up, but not the wife and the daughter. It was two women both claiming to be the daughter. Their mothers were dead. And then it turned out that old Deverton had gotten married some time back in 1916,
twice in the same day.”

“What?”

“Pretty good, isn’t it? The thing is, they couldn’t prove who’d gotten married earlier in the day, so they couldn’t prove who was the legal wife, so they couldn’t prove who the estate belonged to. So they went to court.”

“And they’re still in court, thirty years later?”

“Actually, they’re both dead. Their children are in court.”

“Good lord,” Phoebe said.

“Nice, isn’t it?” I said. “And the really funny thing is, the land isn’t worth that much anymore. I mean, it wouldn’t be cheap, if you wanted to buy it, but it isn’t the fifties anymore. We’ve got zoning here. The town wouldn’t let that land be broken up for a development, and the historical society wouldn’t let the house be torn down and replaced with a contemporary palace. And there was a little money, but it’s been used to pay the taxes, so there can’t be much left. Whoever wins in court is going to end up with a ratty old house they can’t do anything with and a lot of unimproved land they won’t even be able to farm. It’s just like Nick says. Litigation is an addiction.”

“It has to be good for something,” Phoebe said.

“I don’t see what. You’d have to do major renovations just to live in the place. And the historical people would probably insist on a reconstruction, which costs an arm and a leg. And what you get when you’re done isn’t exactly comfortable, either. Give me redwood modern every time.”

Phoebe considered this. “Maybe it’s something else,” she said. “Maybe there’s oil on the property—”

“In Waverly, Connecticut?”

“Or something. Maybe Deb—Deverton buried money in his basement. You know what I mean.”

“I know, and I know you’re wrong. When we were kids, we used to go out there on Halloween. The hoodier element did a lot of damage. The place has been ripped to shreds, Phoebe.”

“Maybe whatever it is is buried on the property somewhere.”

“Why? Why would somebody do that?”

Phoebe snorted. “Why would somebody get married twice in the same day? The man was a nut, Patience.”

“His descendants are bigger nuts. Phoebe, trust me. It’s just one of those things. Everybody got all worked up, and now nobody knows how to back down.”

“Do they want to?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I think you’re sick,” Phoebe said. “I never saw you so-so-I don’t know what to call it. So not curious. And about something like this. I mean, for heaven’s sake. When Susanna started in about all this, I thought we’d been saved.”

“Saved from neuroses about my mother?”

“Exactly.”

We had come to that place in the Old Canfield Road where the houses disappear and the gate is in sight. Knowing I would have to get out of the car to unlock, I began to slow up. The last thing I wanted was to go crashing through my mother’s split rail fence.

Ahead of me, I could see not only the gate but the long, low lines of the house and the fuzzy-gray surface of the screened porch that stretched across the front of it. Phoebe was right. Odd as it was, the place said
money money money
. Self-confident money.

My mother has always been a very self-confident woman.

I made a face. “Phoebe?” I said.

“I can’t get out and open up, Patience. Not unless you help me.”

“I don’t want you to get out and open up. I just—” I sighed. “Look,” I said. “There’s another reason I wasn’t blithering on and on about what Susanna said. I mean a real reason.”

Phoebe looked curious. “You’re related to the Devertons? Your Great-Aunt Somebody was one of the daughters?”

“Don’t be asinine.” We were at the gate. In fact, we were practically through it. I made the Jeep stop, by what seemed like force of will, and said, “Just a minute, I’ll be right back.”

I got out, opened up, got back into the Jeep, drove through, got out, and locked up again. It felt like one of those rituals I’d endured in Mrs. De Rham’s dancing classes. I made myself stop thinking about Mrs. De Rham’s dancing classes. They’d been held twice a week at a country club in Greenwich. I’d been carpooled to them. I’d hated every minute of every trip, down and back, and every second of every class.

I got back into the Jeep and told my mind to shut up. This was really nonsense. I must have been all of eight years old at the time.

Of course, after Mrs. De Rham’s there had been the “subscription dances”—elaborate parties held twice a year in Manhattan hotels, with everyone present in full formal dress. I must have been fourteen, then.

I got my cigarette, saw it had gone out, and lit it up again. “Just a minute,” I said. “Let me catch my breath.”

“Concentrate on remembering how to get started again,” Phoebe said. “And try to remember, your mother isn’t going to kill you.”

“Believe it or not, I wasn’t thinking about Mother.” I fussed with the gears, bucked us a few times, and got us rolling. Slowly. “Look,” I said. “Have you ever met Damon Rask?”

“Of course I haven’t. I’d never heard of him until today.”

“Yeah. Well. I’ve met him. He’s published by AST. I’m published by AST. I’ve seen him around the halls a few times.”

“And?”

I tried to think of a good way to go about this. No use. “Tempesta Stewart wrote me a letter about him,” I said, “saying he was in league with the devil—”

“You can hardly go by that,” Phoebe said. “Tempesta is always saying things like that. She thinks
The Wizard of Oz
is full of secret infernal messages.”

“I know,” I said, “but that’s the point. When I got that letter, what really struck me was that for once I almost believed her. Damon Rask is—”

“If you tell me he has horns and a tail, I’m going to get out and walk.”

“He doesn’t have horns and a tail. He looks more normal than we do. Nice suits. Narrow ties. Good shirts. Wing-tips. He could be, I don’t know, somebody’s broker. The kind of broker that doesn’t get indicted.”

“So?”

“So he’s strange, Phoebe. He’s really strange. Scary strange.”

“It must be the air up here,” Phoebe said. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

We’d gotten to the curve in the drive. I swung us around, heading for the garages and my Gold Coast relatives’ collection of odd vehicles. It had started to snow again.

“I’m not going to tell you he did anything,” I said, “because he didn’t. I’m not going to tell you he said anything, either, at least not anything out of the ordinary. It’s not anything I could describe so it makes sense. But let me tell you something. I’d like to know what he did with his life before he became a trance channeler.”

“Isn’t it in his author bio?”

“You can put anything you want in an author bio, Phoebe. Remember Tiffany Baxter.”

We both remembered Tiffany Baxter. Her real name was Corinne Patalevski, and she wrote historical romances about Tibet. For her author bio, she’d invented not only her name, but a college, a graduate school, a house in Palm Beach and an entire island.

I cut the engine and looked out at Uncle Robert’s tank. It wasn’t really a tank any more. He’d had the treads removed. The state of Connecticut hadn’t been happy with the idea of those treads on its roads. He’d had the metal wheels replaced with oversized radials, too, so the thing was a little like a military hot rod. The effect was just like Robert’s own: happy, confused, and completely irrational.

It occurred to me that everyone in my family was crazy, except my mother. She was something else again.

Phoebe poked me in the ribs. “So?” she said.

“So what?”

“So what about Damon Rask?”

I put my cigarette out. “Look,” I said, “I won’t say he’s the kind of person you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, because he’s nothing like a thug. But I
wouldn’t
want to meet him in a dark alley. He’s—cold, I guess. You just get the feeling that he could do anything and not give a shit about it afterward.”

“Stop swearing. That’s your mother coming down the porch steps.”

“Sorry. Remember when Myrra Agenworth died and we decided—well, we decided that the woman who killed her must be a psychopath? But she didn’t come off like a psychopath. She just came off normal. Well, Damon Rask comes off like a psychopath. Or a sociopath. Or whatever we call them nowadays.”

“Help me out of this seat belt.”

I popped the lock for her. “You know I like murder mysteries,” I said, “and you know I’ve never thought twice in my life when I’ve had a chance to get involved in one. But I wouldn’t want to be involved in a tea party if Damon Rask was part of it.”

“Then you’d better elope, Patience. You invited that Delia Grantham person to your wedding. I saw the list.”

I stared at her, startled. She was right. Delia
had
been invited to the wedding. And where Delia went, her husband would undoubtedly follow.

I started to say something inane—like how I should have eloped to begin with—when I heard a heavy pounding at my side. I looked out my window to find my mother kicking at my door, her salt-and-pepper hair bouncing in the stiff wind. I pounded back until I got her attention and made shooing motions until she got far enough away from the Jeep to allow me to open up. Then I realized I’d completely forgotten about her all the time Phoebe and I had been talking about Damon Rask, and I was startled all over again. I’d always thought Armageddon wouldn’t be enough to distract me from brooding about my mother.