Bellewether

  I stopped, and the noises stopped, too, and I realized that was probably because they had been echoes. Old houses could be good at playing tricks with sound, and this house was older than many I’d been in. I wasn’t about to become like Frank’s grandmother, jumping at every stray sound and imagining ghosts.

  Whatever the cause of the echo, it seemed to be confined to that first corner of the room because as I crossed the rest of it, there were no sounds above me. The shadowed front lobby was quiet, too, thanks to the nondescript carpet that some former Wilde had seen fit to install here between the front door and the stairs—a grey carpet, much weathered, that never looked clean. We’d be tearing it up in the new renovations, restoring the floor underneath, but for now it was working to soften my footsteps.

  And that was a problem. Because when the creaking began again, over my head, I could not put it down to an echo. Especially when I stopped dead in my tracks and the sounds on the floor above didn’t break stride, moving onto the staircase, taking the few short steps down to the first narrow landing, and turning . . .

  In that moment my mind spun wildly. There wasn’t anything here anybody would want to steal, unless you counted my office computer and the somewhat obstinate coffee machine in the kitchen, and—

  Now there were visible boots on the stairs. A man’s work boots, attached to legs encased in faded jeans, that in their turn a few steps down were joined by a grey T-shirt and the chest and shoulders of the man who owned it.

  One of the workmen, I thought in relief. He was halfway down the stairs now so I saw him full in profile, enough to see that he was not much older than myself, with the tanned skin of a man who worked outdoors and the imprint of a hardhat still compressing his short-clipped dark hair, the wires of earbud headphones trailing down to one front pocket of his jeans.

  At the bottom landing of the staircase he made the ninety-degree turn to come down the final three steps and he noticed me then, with an equal surprise. His recovery, though, was more fluid than mine. “Oh, hey,” he said, tugging the headphones from his ears and releasing a faint burst of wailing guitar before moving his hand to his pocket to switch off whatever device he’d been playing. “I thought everyone was gone. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  In spite of the fact the umbrella was still tightly grasped in my hand like a weapon, I chose to pretend that I hadn’t been scared. That I wasn’t still nervous. But, as was my habit when facing a male stranger, I kept an eye on my possible exits and cautiously tried to establish if he posed a risk.

  He was taller than me, broad and muscular, but not aggressive. He wasn’t invading my personal space. He had stopped when he’d noticed me, and hadn’t tried to advance.

  “That’s okay,” I said, standing as straight as I could in a businesslike posture. “You’re one of the construction guys, I take it?”

  “Kind of.” He had a slow smile that seemed genuine. Friendly. Extending his hand for a handshake, he said, “I’m Sam Abrams.”

  I did relax then. “The contractor?”

  “That’s right.”

  Accepting the handshake I told him, “I’m Charlotte Van Hoek. Everyone calls me Charley.”

  “What do you like to be called?”

  “Charley, actually.” I was surprised he would ask me. No one ever had before. It made me take a better look at him.

  Up close it was clear that his tan was not really a tan, but his natural skin tone. He had a nice face—dark eyes, straight nose, strong jawline. More handsome than ordinary, but not so handsome you couldn’t look straight at it.

  He had a nice handshake, too. Brief, firm, and self-assured.

  Turning his left hand a little he showed me the bright orange tape measure held in his square palm. “Just checking the width of a window. I’m done now. You locking up?”

  “Yes.” Since I’d already locked all the doors it was obvious he had his own key. “Which door did you come in?”

  “This one.”

  The front door, behind me. Meaning all the others were still safely locked. I gave a nod and started to unfasten my umbrella.

  “That’s not going to be much help to you out there,” he warned me. “Where’s your car parked?”

  “Over by the barn.”

  “I’ll drive you over.”

  Under normal circumstances I’d have never gotten in a car with someone I’d just met, no matter how nice and harmless they seemed, but I knew Malaika spoke highly of Sam Abrams and since I trusted Malaika, I told him, “Okay.” I was glad that I had, when we opened the door to discover the rain pelting down with a vengeance.

  He’d parked his black pickup truck two steps away from the door, where the overhang sheltered the front stoop a bit, which explained why he hadn’t been soaked coming into the house in the first place. And he’d been right: my pink umbrella didn’t help me much at all as I sprinted around to the passenger side. I hadn’t had to climb into a pickup truck since high school, so I wasn’t very graceful as I hoisted myself up onto the seat. To my relief, he didn’t seem to notice.

  He was studying the windshield as he put the truck in gear. “What kind of tires do you have on your car?”

  Once again, not a question I’d ever been asked before. “All-season radials. Why?”

  “Old or new?”

  “New last summer.”

  “You should be all right, then.” He steered the truck around to slowly roll across the narrow gravel parking lot towards the farther end. “I wouldn’t take the main road, though. It never drains right when there’s this much water, and you don’t want someone hydroplaning into you. I’d go the back way, down the shore road.”

  He sounded like Niels, looking out for my safety. You sound like my brother, I wanted to tell him. Instead I cleared my throat of the small lump that had just blocked it and said, “Okay.”

  “Have you driven on the shore road?”

  “Once or twice.” It wasn’t a straightforward route. It had some twists and turnings, like the footpaths in the forest, and changed names at least once on its way down into Millbank.

  I must have looked uncertain when he glanced at me because he said, “Well, that’s the way I’m going. You can follow me.”

  He stopped alongside my blue Honda Accord and I thanked him and made the short dash to my driver’s seat, happy to hear my car’s engine behave when I started it. By the time I’d backed out of my spot, Sam had moved his truck into position to take the lead.

  I wasn’t nervous of driving in bad weather, but I was happy to have him in front of me as we rounded the two western corners of the large Wilde property, approached the grid of residential streets, and turned instead to take the sloping road that led us back towards the bay. We were within the trees again, and sometimes they closed over us, but every now and then they opened up to let the rain sweep in and made me grateful for the truck’s red taillights.

  He drove a little slower than he had to, putting his turn signals on well ahead of the corners we came to, and when we came to the place where the shore road—or whatever it was called here at the edge of town—passed underneath the shelter of the elevated highway that ran right across this north shore of Long Island, he pulled over to the shoulder, rolled his window down, and waved me up beside him to the stop sign.

  I braked as I drew level with his truck and put my window down as well.

  “Okay now?” Sam called over.

  “Yes,” I told him. “Thank you.”

  With a brief thumbs-up and nod he rolled his window up again and let me travel on ahead of him.

  I didn’t have too far to go. But once I left the underpass my full attention focused on the windshield and the road, and so it wasn’t till I’d turned off and was halfway down the steep drive to the house and heard the friendly honk behind me as the pickup truck swished past that I discovered he had stayed behind me. Following me, possibly, to make sure I got safely home.

  And because that was another thing my brother would have done, I fo
und I had to sit outside a moment in my car, just by myself, until my cheeks were dry enough that I could blame their dampness on the rain.

  Only a month ago, just walking into the house had been difficult. I’d almost conquered that now. It had helped that my brother had only been here for a year, and that I’d only been down one time for a visit at Christmas, so I didn’t have many memories of him in this place, and the house itself hadn’t absorbed very much of his character. Nor did it really have much of its own.

  Niels had never been fond of old houses. He’d inherited that from our mother, most likely, since she had been born and brought up in the same old stone farmhouse outside Quebec City where her family had lived for a hundred and seventy years. By her reckoning, six generations had weathered the same winter drafts in that house and she’d left it as soon as the chance had presented itself, taking a job at a bank in Montreal, where she had met my father. The first house they’d lived in as newlyweds, at Mom’s insistence, had been clean and modern with no stone in sight. We’d always had new houses. Dad was no handyman, so when the gleam had worn off one house and things started needing repair, we’d moved on to the next. I’d enjoyed having new rooms to decorate, but to be honest I’d secretly loved that old stone farmhouse my French Canadian grandparents had never left, and my visits there had, I felt sure, been the start of my love of museums.

  My brother had, by contrast, carried on just as my parents had and never bought a house if it was more than ten years old. Unlike Dad, though, Niels had never learned his limits when it came to wielding tools. He’d watched the home improvement programs on TV, and every home he’d lived in showed the scars of it.

  The house he’d chosen here, in Millbank, was a plain two-storey house with horizontal siding freshly painted the colour of caramel fudge with lighter yellow trim framing the neat rows of windows, the peak of the roof, and the flight of broad steps leading up to the wraparound porch. The porch, in my view, was its finest feature, unless you were counting its setting, because that was fine, too—it sat in a hollow behind and below the main street leading into the town, with tall trees to each side of it and a sloping backyard that was half filled with reeds from the edge of the water where the mill stream widened into Messaquamik Bay.

  The front yard had been gravelled over when he’d bought it, which had suited Niels because he’d hated mowing lawns and it had made a perfect parking place for clients. I’d parked tonight where I always did, under the huge sycamore that sheltered the front porch, my headlights shining into the more lush back garden of his only neighbour, Mrs. Bonetti. Behind me, on the far side of a tall and tidy myrtle hedge that ran the length of the front yard, was nothing but a wide expanse of parking lot belonging to a restaurant that, in all the time I’d been here, had been under renovation, so the lot was always empty.

  Sometimes the emptiness spooked me a little, especially since my apartment in Albany had been one of five in a big old house right in the centre of town, so there’d always been someone close by.

  But tonight I was glad of the fact there was no one to notice me wiping the tears from my face one last time as I dashed from my car to the porch in the furious rain.

  Niels had “improved” the porch railing, which meant that it wobbled a bit as I raced up the steps and along to the side entrance, where he had added a fancy screen door that was fussy to open and took its time closing again, but I came through those obstacles without a mishap and, safely inside, took my coat off and shook it and added it to the collection that hung from the freestanding coat rack.

  I turned to find Rachel, my niece, standing two steps in front of me. Though she was barely nineteen and petite, fully half a head shorter than I was, she still stared me down as though I was attempting to sneak in past curfew. She lifted one hand. She was holding my cell phone.

  “You left this again.”

  “I know.” I’d been at the museum before I had missed it, and by then there’d seemed no point in driving back here just to fetch it when I could as easily use the museum’s phone. “Sorry, I thought—”

  “I was trying to call you for over an hour before I found this on your dresser,” she cut me off. “Gianni said there’d been an accident because of all the rain, and I heard sirens, and—”

  I interrupted in my turn, but gently, because now I understood the reason for her irritation. She’d been worried. I was touched by that, and made a mental note to be more careful, more considerate. “I’m really sorry.” I’d have given her a hug, but Rachel wasn’t much for hugging.

  She had always been an independent kid. She’d been a tiny thing, just seven, when I’d first moved down from Toronto to live with Niels in Saratoga Springs. He’d fixed up an apartment for me over the garage, and I had driven the half hour down and back to university at Albany, and in the evenings and on weekends I had paid him back, in lieu of proper rent, by babysitting Rachel.

  I would never have won prizes for my babysitting. Usually we’d spent the time together sitting on my thrift-store sofa watching movies on TV. She’d liked the scary ones the best, back then. She’d take whatever blanket I had thrown across the sofa back and wrap herself up tightly in it so that she could hide her eyes if things got too intense, and she would do the same thing if we watched sad movies, so that she could cry without my seeing her.

  She hadn’t let me see her cry at all since Niels’s death, not in the whole time I had been here, but I sometimes caught a brief glimpse of that kid beneath the blanket, trying hard to keep it all together.

  Reaching out, I took my cell phone from her hand. “I’ll try not to do it again.”

  “Okay.”

  This little tiled area between the side door and the kitchen functioned as a mudroom and I left my wet shoes here as well, before I followed Rachel the few steps into the kitchen. Something smelled so good that, even if she hadn’t mentioned Gianni, I’d have known that he’d been over.

  “Ziti?” I guessed.

  “No, lasagne.”

  Our neighbours were kind. At least once a week, Mrs. Bonetti made meals for us and sent them over with Gianni, her son, who at twenty-two still lived at home with her, working by day in the town’s main street deli. If I’d been my niece, I’d have fallen for Gianni the minute I’d met him—he was stunningly good-looking with nice manners and a cocky sense of humour—but it all seemed lost on Rachel.

  “Have you eaten yet?” I asked.

  “Not yet. I wasn’t really hungry.”

  But she’d set our places at the table with the fancy cutlery and wineglasses and place mats, and I found that touching, too, because I knew her well enough to know that meant she wanted company. I switched my phone off, washed up, and took over, dishing the lasagne out and opening the bottle of red wine she’d chosen from her father’s stash down in the basement.

  We hardly ever sat down at the table for a meal. It was partly a practical thing. There were only the two of us, and we were usually eating at different times, so it was simpler to pull up a stool at the breakfast bar and toss things right into the dishwasher afterwards. And partly it came from us both being far too aware of the chair at the head of the table, and why it was empty, and who should be sitting there.

  Missing my brother, for me, was a physical pain. Three months on, it still felt as though some vital organ inside me had been ripped away and the wound stitched up badly, the edges too ragged to heal; but I hid that wound under my everyday clothing, and because I looked, on the outside, the same as I always had, nobody saw I was no longer whole. If my mother were here, she’d have probably noticed, but we hadn’t been in the same room since I’d gone up to Canada for the memorial service in May. And my parents, like Rachel, were dealing with wounds of their own. I’d be no help at all to them if I gave way to my grief.

  So I angled my chair now to face it a little away from the head of the table, and smiled at Rachel. “So, how was your day?”

  “Okay.”

  “You applied for that course?”

/>   She corrected me. “Seminar. And yeah, I emailed the instructor, so I’ll have to wait and see if she has room for me.”

  “And what was it about, again?”

  “Transgressive women in eighteenth-century British fiction.”

  Which put an end to that, because there wasn’t much that I could bring to conversations about English literature. My own degree had been in history, and while I loved reading I read differently than Rachel did. She revelled in identifying themes and analyzing structures, and wrote papers that examined Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic style, on which I couldn’t offer an opinion.

  We ate our lasagne in silence a moment, but I could still tell that she didn’t want silence. I’d always had an easy time interpreting her body language because she’d inherited so much of it from Niels. She didn’t look like him. She took more after her mother, who’d been Niels’s girlfriend and lived with him all through the years he was going to law school, before deciding she was not cut out for motherhood. She’d left them shortly after Rachel started kindergarten, and apart from Christmas cards from the West Coast the first few years, she’d dropped out of their lives completely.

  I would have had trouble remembering what she looked like if it hadn’t been for the fact she’d gifted Rachel with the same rich auburn hair, pale skin, and petite frame.

  But the shrug and partial eye-roll Rachel gave me, when I asked what else she’d done today, was pure Van Hoek. And I guessed who had earned the eye-roll even before she said, “Tyler called.”

  She’d never had a high opinion of my boyfriend. It was mutual. Whenever they were in the same room, I felt like an arbitrator.

  “Really? When was that?”

  “At lunchtime. He ‘forgot’ today was your big thing at the museum.”