Set This House in Order (47 page)

“I mulled all this over for a day or so, and decided I'd better go talk to Horace about it. Your mother was out of town at the time, visiting her sister, so it seemed like a good opportunity. But when I got up to the house, Horace was drunk. He didn't want to talk—and when I insisted he let me in, and explained what I'd come about, he got very agitated. He started pacing, all up and down the house, and that's when he had his accident. He was crossing the living room, and he tripped over your mother's glass coffee table.” Chief Bradley points to the scar above Andrew's eye. “The same table you got that on, as I recall…only in Horace's case, being a two-hundred-fifty-pound man, and falling square on it, he shattered the glass, and cut himself in a dozen places. I did what I could to help him, but by the time the ambulance arrived he'd bled to death.”

As the chief finishes his account, Andrew's shoulders slump in relief. “So it wasn't me,” he says.

“No,” Chief Bradley confirms. “You've been carrying that around with you?” Andrew nods. “Well,” says the chief, “I'm glad to finally set your mind at ease.”

All this time they've been standing. Now the chief sits down behind his desk, and indicates that Andrew and Mouse should help themselves to a pair of folding chairs that are leaning against the wall. But Andrew stays on his feet, and Mouse, still feeling like an outsider here, does the same.

After he's had a minute to consider all that he's just been told, Andrew asks: “Why didn't you mention any of this when we spoke to you on the phone two years ago?”

“Well, I did
try
to talk to you about what had happened to Horace, but you were pretty determined to avoid the subject.”

“I know we didn't want to talk about him,” Andrew says, “but—the part about Dr. Kroft, and our having escaped from the Psychiatric Center—you didn't bring that up at all.” He pauses. “Is that…am I a fugitive, because of that?”

“Well,” Chief Bradley says, “I wouldn't recommend you getting pulled over for a traffic stop in Ann Arbor—or anywhere else in the state, for that matter. But no one's actively searching for you, and I'm not going to make
any calls. I
did
check with the Washington state police two years ago, to see whether you'd gotten into any more trouble out there. But you hadn't, and you sounded sane enough to me on the phone, so I decided to let that matter rest. You had enough to concern you, I thought, with your mother passing. As for your ‘multiple personality disorder'—I won't pretend to believe in that, but if you feel a need to playact at being someone else, I guess that's understandable.” His expression becomes grave. “I am very sorry, you know, not to have caught on to Horace's nature a whole lot sooner. Not seeing the truth in time to protect you—that's got to be one of my biggest failures. I can't tell you how much I regret it.” This apology sounds heartfelt, but somehow it also strikes Mouse as perfunctory. Maybe it's just the speed with which the chief, having uttered it, moves on to another topic: “So…have you been up to your old house yet?”

“Yes,” Andrew says. “Briefly.”

“That's another thing I have to apologize for. I've tried to keep the condition of the property up since your mother died, on the chance you'd change your mind about wanting it, but there's a limit to what I could do. That foundation was in trouble for years, and during the big rains we had last fall…”

“You should have just let it fall over.”

“Don't talk that way,” Chief Bradley says, chagrined. “Your mother loved that house.”

“Well I
don't
love it,” Andrew replies. “I appreciate you trying to keep it for me, Chief Bradley, but I still don't want it. I never will.”

“Well that's fine, Andrea, but in that case you should sell it, not just abandon it…” Andrew starts to shake his head and the chief adds: “Hey,
I'd
buy it if the price was right.”

“Why would you want to buy a house that's falling down?”

“Parts of it are still salvageable. And the land is worth something.” Chief Bradley shrugs, as if it's not that big a deal to him, but Mouse gets the feeling that it actually is a big deal, and the chief just doesn't want Andrew jacking up the price. “Something for you to think about, maybe,” he says. “Now that you've had your questions answered, do you plan on staying in town for a while?”

“I don't know,” Andrew says. “I don't really have a plan.”

“Constance McCloy just opened a bed-and-breakfast up on Two Seasons Lake. The rates are very reasonable.”

Andrew shakes his head. “If we do stay in the area, I won't be sleeping here in town. Muskegon is close enough.”

“Suit yourself,” says the chief. “Maybe…if you like, you could come to dinner at my house one night. We could discuss a fair price for the property. You remember Oscar Reyes?”

“I…know who he is.”

“He's on vacation right now, but he owes me a few favors. He could help arrange the title transfer.”

“I'll think about it,” Andrew says. “I guess I know where to reach you.”

Chief Bradley smiles for the first time in the entire conversation. “The job has its privileges.” He stands up and offers his hand. Andrew shakes with him. The chief doesn't bother to say good-bye to Mouse.

“I didn't like him,” Mouse says, when they are back in the Centurion.

“Oh, I don't know,” says Andrew. “He seemed like a nice enough person.”

“He was sorrier about the condition of the house than he was about what your stepfather did to you.”

“Maybe he's afraid to feel too sorry about that. If he admits to himself how bad it really was, it makes it harder to live with not having put a stop to it.”

“Maybe,” says Mouse. “I still think it was rude, asking to buy the house from you that way. And the way he was acting, pretending like he wasn't
really
interested—is it possible the house has some hidden value that you don't know about?”

“You mean like gold deposits under the backyard?” Andrew is politely skeptical. “I doubt it, Penny.”

“Are you going to sell it to him?”

“I might. I definitely don't want to keep it.”

“Well you shouldn't just give it away,” Mouse argues. “Don't sell it too cheaply.”

“I'm not going to sell it at all, just yet…what I'd like to do now, if you're up for it, is go back out to the property and finish looking around.”

“You still have questions?”

“Nothing specific,” Andrew says. “I'm off the hook for the stepfather's death, and that's the most important thing, but…something still feels unsettled. Whatever it is, I want to figure it out, and set it right, so I don't ever have to come back to Seven Lakes again.”

“I understand,” says Mouse, and starts the car.

The replacement coffee table that Andy Gage's mother had bought after the stepfather's death had a top made of wood, not glass. That's no big surprise, I guess, although when I first lifted up the sheet that covered it, there was a part of me that was expecting to find, not just
a
glass coffee table, but
the
glass coffee table, either painstakingly pieced back together or magically restored. Even after recognizing that the table was new, I still had to run my hand over its surface, checking for cracks and bloodstains. Of course I found nothing, and the rug underneath the coffee table was likewise unblemished; I resisted an urge to examine the floorboards.

“Well…” I said, dropping the dust cover back in place. “Let's look around.”

The living room took up roughly a quarter of the cottage's ground floor, its inside corner dominated by a big brick fireplace. As I've already mentioned, the wall opposite the vestibule had an open doorway that led into the kitchen; but if you turned right from the vestibule, you encountered another door, one that was held closed by the cottage's leftward tilt.

“That was their bedroom,” my father told me. The way he said it didn't make me anxious to look inside, but I was still determined to be bold, or at least
act
bold, so I stepped to the door and opened it before I had a chance to get scared.

The air in the bedroom was close and musty, though not as much as I would have expected after two and a half years. I wondered if Chief Bradley, as part of his effort to keep the place up, had aired it out occasionally. The bed was only a full-size, which bothered me for some reason; maybe it was the thought of anyone, even a bad mother, being forced to lie in such close proximity to a monster like the stepfather. Besides the bed, there was a dresser, a small vanity table, a nightstand supporting a lamp with a dented
shade, and a TV set balanced precariously on a wicker pedestal. Beneath the sheets that covered them, I could make out the shapes of standing photo frames and other personal effects on both the dresser top and the vanity; those would probably warrant further investigation later, but for now I turned left and crossed to another pair of doors. One door opened on a closet, the other on a bathroom. The bathroom was cramped but managed to contain both a toilet and a tub.

“Is this…?” I started to ask, and my father finished for me: “The only bathroom in the house? Yes.”

So any time Andy Gage had wanted to take a bath or use the toilet, he'd have had to come through Horace Rollins's bedroom. And—I checked—the door had no lock. All at once Adam's and Aunt Sam's fanaticism about shower privileges—not to mention my father's great pleasure at being able to take a private shit in his own bathroom—made perfect sense.

“Andrew?” Penny called. Hanging back, she'd only come a few steps into the bedroom. “What is it?”

“Just another reason not to like this house.”

We went back out to the living room and moved on into the kitchen. This was the brightest and technically the cheeriest room in the cottage, although I found it cold. It was an eat-in kitchen, with a round table and four chairs. The table and three of the chairs had been draped in a sheet, but the fourth chair had been pulled out into the middle of the room and left uncovered. Curious, I ran a finger over the seat; it was clean, not dusty.

I went over to the back door, and looked out into the yard behind the cottage. Like the front yard, it had been mowed. There were more garden plots, roughly outlined with borders of flagstone, but unlike the flower beds out front, these plots had not been planted recently, and contained only weeds.

My father drew my attention to the line of thornbushes that ran all around the edges of the backyard, forming a natural barrier between it and the woods. “Blackberry bushes, mostly,” he said. “There were some roses, too, along the sides of the house, but they never did well.” The barrier was unbroken except in one place, where a gated footpath led off into the woods. A small shed stood just inside and to the right of this gate; it had probably been used for storing garden tools, but its size and location suggested a tollbooth.

“What's out that way?” I asked my father.

“Quarry Lake,” my father said, and I sensed there was a story there, maybe a lot of stories. “It's about half a mile, if you stick to the path. Longer if you're sneaking through the trees.”

I noticed Penny was staring at the path as well. “What is it?”

Penny just shook her head, but then Maledicta came out: “That fucking toolshed. Verna would have fucking loved it—perfect spot for an ambush, coming or going. And fucking
woods
to creep around in, like the big bad wolf…”

She turned away from the yard and went to inspect the pantry that branched off the kitchen. It doubled as a laundry room; a niche held a washer and dryer. Maledicta looked this over, then examined the pantry shelves, which were still well-stocked with spider-webbed cans and jars. “Thousand-fucking-year-old preserves,” she said. “Yum.” She stepped back out into the kitchen proper, patted herself down in search of cigarettes, got frustrated, and gave way to Penny again.

“Andrew,” Penny wanted to know, “where did you sleep? If there's only one bedroom…”

I'd been wondering that myself, but the answer was right in front of us: between the back door and the pantry, there was one other door, that opened on a narrow flight of stairs leading up.

“God,” said Penny. The attic staircase looked like it would have been treacherous even when the cottage was perfectly level. Now, with the risers on a backward tilt, it was a positive hazard.

“You can wait down here,” I told Penny. “I'll just go up for a really quick look around.”

“No,” Penny said unhappily. “I'll come up with you.”

I led the way, holding tight to the stairway railing—a series of unfinished two-by-fours secured to the inside wall with metal brackets. Partway up the stairs turned right, then right again, coming out under a low ceiling.

As I reached the top, I heard Penny stumble behind me; Maledicta cursed. “Are you all right?” I said. I looked back; Penny was down on one knee at the last turn in the stairway. I thought of the stepfather, drunk, going up and down these same stairs, and it occurred to me that my father had been right: we must have been too intimidated to kill him, or he would never have survived as long as he had.

“I'm OK,” Penny said, getting back to her feet.

The attic reminded me of the Reality Factory. The space was smaller, of course, but it was a single large room beneath a questionable roof, with a crumbling brick column—the fireplace chimney—rising up like a support post in the middle. There wasn't much light; the attic had windows at either end, but they were small and the glass was grimy, Chief Bradley's mainte
nance efforts having apparently overlooked this part of the cottage. And he wasn't the only one who'd neglected it—as I walked across the attic floor, my feet kicked up clouds of dust, long years' worth. Althea Gage hadn't done much cleaning up here either after her only child left home. But then, I thought bitterly, why would she? It's not like you'd expect her to be nostalgic or anything.

The half of the attic closest to the stairs had been Andy Gage's bedroom. The actual furnishings weren't familiar to me, but something in their configuration was; I could imagine my father, Adam, Aunt Sam, and the others—at best only vaguely aware of each other then—arranging and rearranging the layout in a never-ending roommates' squabble. There by the window was the folding cot—not a real bed, a cot—where they had slept, maybe looking out at the back garden as they drifted off each night; there by the chimney column was a desk, set up defensively with a clear view of the stairs; there and there, along the sides of the room where the roof sloped down towards the attic floor, were low shelves of the cinderblock-and-plank variety, filled with books and toys and general clutter. I was amazed by how much had been left behind, but I suppose there had been a limit to how much junk my father could take with him to college. The last days of packing must have been especially chaotic, with every half-aware soul trying to steal time to make sure their favorite possessions were included.

The other half of the attic, the part on the far side of the chimney, was given over to storage. Actually, the division wasn't as clear-cut as that; as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I realized that a lot of the “storage” was really just more clutter. It looked like we'd always had a space-allocation problem.

I hunched down by one of the shelves, brushing dust and dead silverfish from a line of books. I didn't recognize all the titles, but once again there was a more general sense of familiarity: these books had belonged to someone—a collection of someones—whose tastes I knew. One volume in particular caught my eye:
Tales of the Greek Heroes,
by William Seferis. I picked it up; on the cover, a princess cowered behind Hercules as he prepared to lop the heads off a menacing hydra.

I turned to show the book to Penny and found her staring again, this time at the piles of stuff in the storage end of the attic.

“Too many shadows, huh?” I said.

“Thank God,” replied Penny, “thank God our house in Willow Grove didn't have an attic. My mother…I would have gone crazy in a room like this.”

I thought of joking that I
had
gone crazy in a room like this, but decided my father might not appreciate the humor. Instead I said: “Do you really think your mother would have put you in an attic room, even if she had one? I mean, from what you've told me about her, it seems like that'd be too much like—”

“Poverty?” Penny shrugged. “Maybe.” Trying for a joke of her own: “She would have insisted on better stairs, at least.”

“Let me guess: marble steps?”

Penny nodded. “With gold banisters. And velvet carpeting, so you couldn't hear her coming.” She smiled, more at her own daring than at the joke itself, I think. I smiled too, and then the dust, which had been tickling my nose since we'd gotten up here, made me sneeze. Something jumped in the shadows on the other side of the chimney column; a box fell off a stack and crashed to the floor. Penny let out a terrified squeak.

“It's all right,” I said, fighting back another sneeze, “it's OK, I think—it's too small to be a ghost…” I saw a pair of eyes glittering in the darkness, and a bushy tail that swished indignantly. “It's a squirrel! It's all right, Penny, it's just a squirrel…” The squirrel chittered at me, working its jaw like a little old man whose dentures had slipped; then it bolted, exiting the attic through whatever hole it had come in by.

I went to the box that the squirrel had knocked over. It was full of windup alarm clocks. I took one out and held it up to look at it. “Were these yours?” I started to ask my father, but before I could finish the question I saw, reflected in the crystal, the face of someone standing behind me, peering over my shoulder. Not Penny; it was a young girl.

A Witness.
The
Witness, I should say: the same one who'd come up behind me in the house when I was searching under the bed in my father's room.

Of course, she wasn't really looking over my shoulder. The reflection was only an illusion, that faded even as I noticed it—but even after it had faded, I could still feel the Witness's presence.

A funny idea popped into my head. I turned around.

“Penny,” I said, “could you step aside for a second?”

“W-what?” Penny said, still reacting to the squirrel.

“Just move over a little.” I gestured with one hand. “I want to try something.”

Penny stepped aside, and I tossed the alarm clock underhand towards the stairs. The clock dropped out of sight into the stairwell, and went banging down the steps, caroming off the walls, all the way down into the kitchen,
where it finally came apart. We could hear the crystal breaking, and individual gears and springs scattering across the linoleum.

We could hear it very clearly. It wasn't just that the door at the bottom of the stairs was open; the sound carried easily through the attic floor itself. If I arranged to have another alarm clock smashed in the living room or the bedroom, I thought, it would come through almost as clearly.

“What do you think, Penny? If a little kid yelled for help up here, would you be able to hear it downstairs?”

Penny blinked nervously, as if wondering whether I was still myself. “I guess so,” she said.

“I guess so too,” I agreed, and felt the Witness again, like a phantom tugging at my shirtsleeve for attention.

I went over to the cot. A couple of dresses in my size had been laid out on the mattress as if for comparison and then left to gather dust. Holes had been chewed in the dress fabric, and when I moved the dresses aside I saw that something had been at the blanket, sheets, and mattress ticking too; and all of it was filthy. The cot's frame still seemed sturdy, though. I tested it with my hands, then sat down carefully.

“Penny,” I said, “can you do me a favor?”

“Oh God…you want to go inside again?
Here?
”

“I think somebody wants to show me something. I'll try not to be gone long.”

Penny's jaw moved, in a fair imitation of the squirrel—but unlike the squirrel, she didn't run away. “All right,” she said. “Only please hurry. I don't like it up here.”

The Witness was waiting for me as I appeared on the hilltop beside the column of light. She didn't greet me or wave hello; her sole acknowledgment of my arrival was the look she gave me.

My father, who was also there, was a bit more expressive.

“What the hell are you doing, Andrew?”

The question was rhetorical, but I answered it anyway, my reply edged with an irony that I didn't fully intend: “I'm learning.”