“Come in,” Mickelsson said, and laughed at the buon giorno, hardly knowing why. In all this time, he’d never gotten a clearer image of Lawler as brilliant, frightened fat boy, ready to turn at the slightest hint of scorn or danger and flee. His galoshes were so perfectly buckled, below the flaring, tucked-in pantlegs, it looked as if his mother had done them.
“I hope you’re not in the middle of something,” Lawler said. His voice had such refinement you almost didn’t notice. Years ago he’d studied in Cambridge, in the days of Russell.
“Heavens no, do come in!” Mickelsson said. He reached out, took Lawler’s left hand, and drew him a little toward the door, nodding encouragement. “What a pleasant surprise!”
Lawler smiled like a fat girl unexpectedly complimented, started through the door, then remembered his galoshes and, looking horrified by what he’d almost done, stopped to bend over and take them off. It was difficult work, on account of all that bulk, and in the end, sheepishly grinning, he straightened up again and unbuckled one of his galoshes with the heel of the other—at which point Mickelsson at last overcame his fear of offending and bent down with a laugh, saying, “Here, let me help you with that.” Lawler accepted his assistance gratefully, breathing “Thank you, thank you!” slightly winded by his efforts. Then Mickelsson led him into the house and took his coat, hat, scarf, and gloves. As he carried them to the closet, Lawler stood beaming, admiring the wallpaper in the livingroom—it was through the livingroom door that he’d entered—or perhaps gazing through the wallpaper, lost in ironic thought.
Mickelsson asked, dusting his hands as he returned, “What brings you way out to Susquehanna, Edward?” and then added, before Lawler could answer, “Can I get you something? Coffee? Glass of wine?”
“No, no. No thank you,” Lawler said with a laugh and a wave, then apologetically patted his belly. “I’m afraid my stomach’s all acid, today.”
“Let me offer you a Di-Gel, then,” Mickelsson said, and reached into his pocket. “I eat them like candy, myself. Acid stomach all the time. I suppose it’s the gin.”
“Gin will do that, alas,” Lawler said, and nodded, as if distressed to find Mickelsson a fellow sufferer. “I never touch it anymore.” He held out his small, plump hand, cupped to receive the Di-Gel, looked at it for a moment as if uncertain what to do with it, then popped it, as if greedily, into his mouth. He looked admiringly at the Christmas tree Mickelsson had not yet taken down, then for a place to sit, half his mind elsewhere; at last it came to Mickelsson that the man was afraid none of the furniture would bear his weight.
“Here, have a seat,” he said, crossing to Lawler and indicating the couch. “Sit here by the fire, where it’s warm.”
“Good, thank you,” Lawler said, his face lighting up with exaggerated relief. He moved obediently to the couch, turned around, taking several steps in place—like a hippopotamus, Mickelsson thought—then carefully lowered himself, his left hand on the arm of the couch. “There!” he said, and beamed like an Oriental. He folded his small hands in his lap. Mickelsson drew up a chair and sat, then got out his pipe.
“So,” Lawler said, as if something were now resolved. “I’m glad to see you’re well.” When Mickelsson raised his eyebrows, Lawler explained, rather bashfully, almost prissily, evading Mickelsson’s eyes, “You weren’t in school, you see, and considering everything that’s been … in the papers, all the trouble in the world—well, I’m a nervous man anyway, as I’m sure you know. When your phone didn’t seem to be working I just … thought I’d come out.”
“How good of you!” Mickelsson said, slightly puzzled. “I thank you for your concern.” He grinned, shaking his head. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way for nothing.” He poked tobacco into his pipe.
Beaming, eyes closed, Lawler slowly passed his right hand through an arc in front of his chest—a little like the blessing of a Buddha. “Don’t mention it! I must say, it’s a pleasure to see your arrangements.”
The cat appeared at the kitchen door, wide head tipped, then decided to come and settle, sulky, not far from Mickelsson, between him and the fire.
“I’ve been putting too much time into it,” Mickelsson said, “but it’s refreshing, working with your hands now and then.”
“You did all this?” Lawler asked, tilting his head. For an instant something like panic showed in his eyes, no doubt the book man’s horror before the mysteries of artisanry.
“The painting and wallpapering, yes, and the sanding and staining of the floors,” Mickelsson said, as modestly as he could manage. “Did that for the whole house. You should’ve seen the place when I moved in! The diningroom was the worst“—he pointed toward the closed diningroom door—”I had to tear out the walls in there, put up sheetrock.”
“My goodness,” Lawler said. He shook his head, looking around.the room with interest, running his eyes along the moleboard, the window casements, the moulding that framed the ceiling. “Goodness,” he said again, shaking his head, tapping his fingertips together on his belly. “I take it it must not bother you, then, living way out here. Well, I’m a coward, of course, myself. I read about fires, murders, mysterious goings-on. … But I suppose it’s no safer in Binghamton—that chemistry man you mentioned, murdered right there in his Ziiingroom. …” He got out a large white handkerchief and patted his forehead.
“Yes. Professor Warren,” Mickelsson said. For some reason he added, perhaps with unconscious sadism, given Lawler’s timidity—or with that same evil luck that turns conversation repeatedly to noses in the presence of a man with a long nose—“It’s an odd coincidence. Professor Warren was investigating something involving this very house at the time he was murdered.”
If it was sadism, Mickelsson couldn’t have hoped for a better reaction. Lawler jumped a foot and, with the quick, cunning look of a rabbit, glanced left and right. “This house?” he exclaimed. “What was he looking into?”
“I’m not sure,” Mickelsson said, putting on an expression of unconcern. To heighten the effect of safe domesticity, he smiled fondly at the stray cat he had in fact not yet dared touch. “Some legend, I think.”
“Legend?” Lawler echoed. His eyebrows were raised as if permanently above his spectacle-rims.
“It’s said the house has ghosts,” Mickelsson said, and chuckled. “I suppose it was that that Professor Warren was looking into. I must say, I’ve thought of consulting a chemist myself, now and then. Sometimes the house gets a strange cooking smell.” He chuckled again.
Lawler’s mind was elsewhere, his hands busy laying out the white handkerchief like a napkin in his lap. “It can’t have been the ghosts he was interested in,” he said. “I talked with our student”—he glanced at the floor, then continued—“our late student Michael Nugent, about this Warren. The man was an atheist, or claimed to be.” The mention of Nugent made Mickelsson suddenly awkward; even so, he registered with distant amusement Lawler’s use of the word atheist as opposed to non-theist. The man was, of course, a medievalist.
Lawler was saying, “Warren would hardly be interested in ghosts for their own sake, and I doubt very much that he’d be interested in folklore either. That just doesn’t seem to fit.” He sank into thought, then raised his right hand, pointing upward. “Suppose, just for the sake of argument—” He was squinting now, compressing his lips. His pudgy hands smoothed the hankie in his lap. Mickelsson smiled, then puffed at his pipe and waited. “Suppose the legend was created as a cloak for something—to keep people away from the house. But what? That’s the question. What were people not to find out?”
“I don’t know,” Mickelsson said, keeping his tone deferential. “Who’d be kept away from a house by stories that it was haunted?”
“Perhaps not nowadays,” Lawler admitted, “though I’m told this is rather odd country, full of superstitions, even covens of—witches? At any rate, such a thing might once have worked—twenty years ago, say. Something must lie behind these ghost stories.”
??
?Maybe the house really is haunted,” Mickelsson suggested.
Lawler laughed, a sudden chortle that made his feet jump, and seemed not even to consider the possibility that the remark might be in earnest. He sat forward a little, so that the couch cushion sagged beneath him, ready to topple and drop him to the floor. For the first time he met Mickelsson’s eyes squarely. Lawler was excited, engaged, like a child playing cops and robbers. “What do you know about the house, Pete?”
Mickelsson shrugged, but thoughtfully. It struck him that, though probably nothing would come of it, it might be a good idea, in fact, to run through the whole thing with Lawler. Who knew? Perhaps the man’s famous intelligence might throw light on the whole strange business. “Not much,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I can.” He pulled at the pipe, considering where to start, then began, “I know the house was owned, before I bought it, by a woman doctor named Bauer, and I know that for years she had a feud of sorts with a man named Thomas Sprague. He was a relative of the Spragues who lived here before the doctor; in fact he claimed he was their heir. I think it’s the Spragues who lived here who are supposed to be the ghosts.” He glanced at Lawler. “The feud between the doctor and Thomas Sprague flared up in earnest when Sprague’s daughter died in an operation performed by Dr. Bauer—something about an anesthesia reaction. The feud went on—malpractice suit and so on—until Sprague himself died a little while ago … two weeks, maybe; I’ve completely lost track.” He looked down, suddenly troubled about something, but he couldn’t identify it. He gave up the search and told Lawler about the fire and how Sprague had not been in it, how the walls had been torn up, according to Owen Thomas, and how Sprague had been found days later (or weeks?) in a snowbank, cuts all over his body, one of them the cause of death. Lawler listened with his eyes closed, his large, squat body tilted forward, motionless except for his breathing. “I also know,” Mickelsson said, “that there’s a legend—I don’t know if it’s true—that the house was once owned, long ago, by Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism.”
Lawler’s eyes opened wide. “Interesting!” he said. “Warren was a Mormon apostate. I assume you knew that?”
“No,” Mickelsson said. His scalp prickled.
Lawler nodded, closing his eyes again. “Interesting. I don’t suppose … going over the house as you’ve done … you found anything?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I’m not sure myself, of course,” Lawler said. “But it might be a ‘lead,’ as they say. If there were something here that the Mormons would not want the world at large to be aware of—”
“I see what you mean.” Odd that he hadn’t thought of it himself. But of course he’d been thrown off by the fact that the ghosts were real—if they were, if they were not more tricks of a diseased mind. He backed off from the thought, then leaned forward, frowning hard, resting his elbows on his knees, and told Lawler of the night visitors, the people who’d torn his house apart, thrown out the cigarettes and liquor. “They could have been Mormons,” he said, “though on the other hand—”
Lawler sat tapping his fingertips together. “Suppose it was something like this,” he said, nodding thoughtfully to himself. “Suppose Warren was on to something. Suppose, for example, he was close to discovering clear proof of the fraudulence of the Mormons’ sacred texts.” He chuckled rather grimly.
“They must have found whatever it was, then,” Mickelsson said. “Anyway, I haven’t found it.”
“Mmm,” Lawler said, nodding, closing his eyes again. “The trouble with that is the fire up at the Thomas Sprague house. If I haven’t misunderstood you, that took place after the search of your house.”
“I don’t follow,” Mickelsson said.
Lawler remained motionless except that his arms went out to the sides in a gesture of something like impatience. “It may have been just a coincidence, that’s possible,” he said. “But first your house is searched, and then, it seems, this Thomas Sprague’s house is searched: searched so thoroughly—torn apart, as you say—that it had to be burned, presumably in the hope that the evidence of its having been torn apart would be destroyed. Or perhaps burned to hide evidence that the old woman had been murdered, as no doubt Sprague himself was murdered—possibly tortured first—before or afterward.”
Mickelsson shuddered.
Lawler too seemed uneasy, shifting restlessly, furtively scratching himself, as if mere thought might bring the murderers nearer. “What it suggests would seem to be this,” he said, grimacing, closing his eyes again. “They could find nothing here, when they searched your house, and it occurred to them that whatever it was they were looking for—whatever Professor Warren had been looking for, in his attempt to discredit the religion he’d turned against—might have been found by the Spragues who lived here before the doctor and given by them to the man who was supposed to be their heir, the man whose house burned.” He opened his eyes part way to judge Mickelsson’s reaction.
Mickelsson shook his head, thinking of the two humble Mormons who’d come to his house, then of the horde of gentle, horse-faced people he’d seen baptized in the river. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem—”
Lawler tilted slightly forward. “Then why was Thomas Sprague’s house burned? Who cut his throat?”
Mickelsson started, his blood turning to ice. “Wait a minute!” he said. He stood up, needing to pace. “Michael Nugent was found with his throat cut.” He shot a look at Lawler. “Does anyone know it was suicide? Was there a note? I don’t think I heard of one.” His next words came more quickly, and he paced again, pushing his hands down into his pockets, the pipe in his right fist. “He was a friend of Professor Warren’s. If whoever killed Warren got the idea that Warren had talked with Nugent … And listen to this.” His strides became longer, more purposeful. “Nugent’s friend Randy was run into on his bike, almost killed.” He felt a tingling sensation, a faint dizziness like rising fear as he told Lawler about the black kids at the house where Randy Wilson lived, or had once lived. If Nugent had in fact been murdered, no wonder they hadn’t been eager to tell Mickelsson where he’d find Randy.
Suddenly Mickelsson stopped in his tracks, his stomach knotting, acid filling it as if poured from a bottle. He remembered the old car in his vision of the bicycle accident, the same well-kept old car he’d seen parked in front of Donnie’s the night he’d killed the fat man—the same car now parked in front of Mickelsson’s house. He stood perfectly still, heart slamming. That was why the fat man had been there in his apartment when it seemed he couldn’t be; it was another fat man he’d looked down on from Donnie’s window and seen getting out of the car that night—another fat man whom Warren, as his wife had heard him say on the phone, was afraid of. Mickelsson’s mind shied back and he looked again at Lawler, childlike in his black suit, his eyes closed to slits. There could be no doubt. He himself had told Lawler that Nugent was Warren’s friend. He himself, he saw in increasing horror, had guided Lawler to Randy Wilson.
His face, he knew, had gone ashen. Lawler studied him, then sighed and, with evident reluctance—the hands moving slowly, like an underwater movement—drew something from his pocket. It was Mickelsson’s watch, his gift to the boy in the hospital. Lawler dropped it gently on the glass-topped table and, in answer to the shocked question on Mickelsson’s face, just perceptibly nodded, like Brahman when he grants a request. Mickelsson looked at the shotgun beside the door, but too late. In his right hand, as if he’d had it there all along—no doubt he’d slipped it from under the handkerchief—Edward Lawler held a snub-nosed pistol.
“End of preliminary inquisition,” Lawler said gently, faintly smiling. “Yes, your surmise is correct. I am a Son of Dan.”
“You son of a bitch!” Mickelsson whispered. A blush shot up into his face and adrenaline made his brain crackle. His lips felt puffy. He almost rushed the man, indifferent to the toy-like gun, but confusion checked him, a bundle of stupid doubts and questions that stopped
him more effectively than a bullet could have done. He doubted that all this was real: he’d had psychotic episodes, he occasionally saw ghosts; so perhaps in fact he was imagining all this, or twisting actuality signals into something surreal; fantastic gloss. He had other questions too, dozens, but one stood out: he could not remember for sure whether or not it was the case that a Son of Dan was what he’d thought at first, a member of the old assassination squad of the Mormons. It was a ridiculous question, he saw when his mind cleared—of course they were—but by then the confusion had stopped his initial impulse. If he were to rush Lawler now, he would have to do it by courage, and that was not so easy. As if on its own, independent of his will, his brain began to calculate odds, seek out the ways of cunning. He remembered the lesson of a hundred cheap movies. Stall, let the murderer in his monstrous pride tell his story, and at the last minute, with a sudden blast of stereo trumpets and frenetic violins, some rescuer would come crashing through the window, pistols blazing, karate-boots flying. He knew it was absurd, no rescuer would come, but his wisdom ran behind his brain: he was already stalling.
His chief emotion, strange to say—and even as he felt it he recognized its strangeness—was not fear for his life or horror at life’s bleakness or even disgust that a man could so completely seem one thing and in fact be another, could to that degree despise all other people’s values—but sorrow at the waste. Michael Nugent’s fine, eager mind had been thrown away like a thing of no worth, a dead mouse from a trap; and then gentle, strikingly beautiful Randy Wilson. (He remembered how the boy would fade back, looking at walls and doors, giving Nugent and Mickelsson privacy; he remembered the shine of tears in the black boy’s eyes when Mickelsson had seen him at Binghamton General.) And before that, Professor Warren had been wasted—a man Mickelsson had never known, but surely a creature of some worth in the world, a chemist who’d been bright enough and earnest enough to get Nugent’s attention, and newly married to a woman who had evidently loved him. How could one do such things? Mickelsson checked himself, drawing his elbows in like a man rebuked. He himself was perhaps no different, really, from the fat black adder on the couch. What did he know of the ex-thief he’d killed, some mother’s son, anyway, his head crammed with the same two billion neurons (or whatever it was) as anybody else’s. So he told himself, but Nugent’s face rose before him and Mickelsson’s stomach jerked. He clenched his teeth and fists.