Skull Session

  Paul fumbled distractedly in his toolbox. "It was his, I don't know, his tone that got me as much as anything else."

  "I don't think you can complain about tone, Paul. It's too subjective.

  You called it sardonic—I doubt the word can be found in any police manuals. 'Avoid a sardonic tone when dealing with suspects or the general public.'"

  It was hopeless to argue with Lia when she was in such a good mood. She had loved the carriage house rooms and was happy at having a few days' break from school, excited at the prospect of poking through the house, no doubt stimulated by the scent of danger here. She was dressed in a heavy red-checked wool jacket, jeans, rubber-soled boots. The bulky jacket and boots only enhanced the trim lines of her buttocks and thighs, the suppleness of her movements. With her black wool stocking cap rolled to reveal tangled hair and two incongruous gold hoop earrings, it was all Paul could do to keep his hands off her.

  "I keep feeling he knew exactly who I was. I've talked to dozens of people, buying stuff, getting people to fix this and that. The whole town knows I'm up here. Rizal must have known too."

  "He may not have been privy to the same gossip as the clerk in the hardware store," Lia said. "Look. You know that time we came up with the exact percentage of assholes in the world? What'd we figure—twenty-five percent?"

  "I believe the precise number was twenty-eight percent."

  "Okay. So twenty-eight percent of the people you meet are going to be assholes. Cops are no different—same ratio as the general population.

  You ran into one today, that's all."

  It was hard not to laugh. They'd cracked each other up that night, after Lia had come home bitterly angry at the stupidity and pettiness rampant in the graduate division at school. Paul had soothed her by opening a bottle of wine, taking her to bed, and then giving her the same argument she was giving him now.

  "God, I'm glad you're here." He grabbed her, wrapping around her, inhaling her scent, relieved to have her safe and alive and nearby. They kissed, taking their time, before getting back to work.

  "Paul, there's some interesting stuff in here. No letters from your father yet, but what do you make of this?" She handed him a pair of photographs.

  It was now three o'clock, the sun still shining brightly through a thin overcast. A wan light spilled through the milky plastic over the west-facing windows. They had gone to the library and scooped papers and photos into two file boxes, and now Lia sat cross-legged on the smoking room floor, a circle of papers all around her. Paul had rooted in the rubble until he managed to find a pink wall phone, undamaged, which he plugged into the wall bracket in the kitchen. No dial tone yet. Then he filled another box of papers from the library and rejoined Lia.

  He sat next to her and took the photographs, black-and-white eight-by-tens. The first showed an interior nearly as disordered as the hpuse they sat in: a floor-standing vase, its top shattered, some clothes strewn on the floor, a broken and overturned table. The second showed a section of wall and the corner of a mullioned window with shattered panes, a broken wooden chair crumpled into the baseboard. Scrawled crudely on the white wall were the letters KKK.

  "KKK? What the hell?" Paul turned the photos over. There was nothing written on the backs. But the black-and-white was faded, taking on a slight sepia tone, the corners were frayed—clearly they weren't recent photos. "How old do you think these are?"

  "Twenty years? Maybe more? The real question is, where were they taken? That, I think I know."

  Lia led him back to the library, where they compared the photos to the east wall of the room. There could be no doubt: The baseboard molding, the window frame, the mullion pattern were the same. Only the rubble was different.

  "So," Paul said. He held the photo up and squinted as it. "So, Sherlock. What have we got here?"

  "Well, it's hard to escape the assumption that something like this has happened before. We don't know how long ago, but almost certainly since the Hoffmanns have been here. And 'KKK.' All kinds of lovely possibilities there."

  "I don't think the Ku Klux Klan has ever been active in this area."

  "But they may have visited."

  "Revenge on Vivien? She's always been mildly racist herself. And neither her husband nor Royce could be considered civil rights activists. Old Hoffmann made his fortune offthe backs ofhis little brown brothers in the Philippines, and his son and grandson seem to have followed in his exploitative footsteps. Not a family that's likely to run afoul of the Klan."

  "You never know. It could also be a completely bogus piece of graffiti."

  "Sure," Paul conceded, "but whichever, there's another point.

  Vivien took these photos, or at least she's been keeping them in her files all these years. Which means she knows there's some precedent for what happened here this summer—and she hasn't bothered to tell us." Paul scuffed his foot in the litter of papers. "Which pisses me off."

  "False inferences and hasty conclusions," Lia said. She had her forensic look—face animated, eyes glowing. Mind in overdrive, processing ideas and discarding them, constructing a logical equation. "These photos may show the entire extent of damage. We can't tell, from these alone, that there was ever the widespread vandalism we see now. As far as the graffiti goes, we haven't seen any here now, which means the style of vandalism, the MO, is different. Different psychology, different motives. We can't really tell whether it has any bearing on this situation at all."

  "In any case," he said, "you're forgetting that we're here to fix the place, not figure out who did this." There was anger building in him—the unrelenting anxiety the house seemed to induce in him, the visit from Rizal, the sense that Vivien wasn't telling them everything. And he couldn't even see asking Vivien about it: She'd give him a lecture on respecting her privacy. Or fire him. He strode out of the library.

  Lia caught up to him in the big room, grabbed his arm. "Look, Paul, I'm not the only one who's fascinated with this. You feel a sort of guilty, voyeuristic pleasure in this, just as I do. Even more, you're dying to find letters from your father, maybe sort out your own puzzles on that score. I wish you'd admit to the urge, not deny it." She saw the admission in his face and went on. "The nice thing about it is the answers are probably right here."

  She gestured around her: A carved wooden shield tangled in some panty hose. A great hammered brass bowl, covered with flowing Arabic designs in low relief, containing an uprooted, dried houseplant and a shattered pocket calculator. Several balls of heavy burgundy yarn, one still pierced with an ivory-tipped knitting needle, trailing a wild snarl of wool that included in its tangle an office stapler, a toothbrush, a small pewter pitcher. And over it all, the drifts of papers.

  Lia let him absorb the scene and then went on. "I've sorted exactly one quarter of one box of papers from the library, one of maybe three dozen there. There are another six or eight boxes' worth in Vivien's room. Who knows what else we'll discover?"

  "I shudder to think."

  "Oh, come on! Don't be a stick in the mud!" She looked at him closely. "What's bothering you?"

  Paul looked around the room, carrying on an internal debate. Yes, he was drawn to the mystery. Part of it was the chance to find out more about Ben, maybe some suggestion about what had made him jump. And maybe there was a chance of finding something in his letters that would be helpful in the quest for a workable therapy for Mark. And, deeper, he was attracted to the idea of the release, the catharsis he'd glimpsed when he'd thrown the finial. A secret yearning. Maybe something like Lia's hunger for danger.

  But another part of him just wanted to get into the car and drive the hell away from the relentless apprehension, the disturbing fragments of memory. He wondered if it would be wise to tell Lia everything he was feeling.

  "Let me show you something," he said at last.

  He led her to Royce's old room, pointed out the broken harp of the piano. "The harp is trussed steel, designed to resist many tons of tension. Now it's bent, broken."

  S
he nodded, letting him make his case.

  Then he took her to the stairs, showed her the neck of the post where the finial had been broken loose, and explained his thoughts. He showed her the finial itself and the imprint of its leaf pattern on the plaster wall fifty feet away.

  "Still think we should stay at it?" he said.

  Lia listened closely, eyes moving quickly as she inspected the banister post, the finial, the wall, the distances between.

  "I think you're being a bit paranoid," she said gently. "At the very least, you're being a lousy detective. I agree that Babe Ruth couldn't hit that ball hard enough to break it loose and send it that far with enough force to dent the wall. But if that's the only scenario you accept, you've ruled out everything but, basically, supernatural forces."

  "So what did happen? How else could it have worked?"

  She took the finial and stepped over the rubble to the wall where Paul had found it. Suddenly she drew it back and with both hands swung it like a wrecking ball. The thump of impact made Paul jump and echoed through the house. When she brought the finial back to Paul, a new bruise of paint marked the wood next to the first. And on the wall, another print of its scales was pressed into the plaster.

  "For starters, I wouldn't assume that the act of breaking the ball loose over there and its leaving a mark here were causally related," she said. "I've just demonstrated that you can make the imprint pretty easily."

  "Okay. Point taken. But how would you knock it off the post without leaving a dent in the wood?"

  Lia thought for a moment, straight-faced, and then the corners of her mouth drew up. "Hit it with a couch," she said. She laughed and he had to laugh with her. She took his belt in her hands and tugged him forward and back. "I'm glad I can always make you laugh."

  Paul checked his watch. "Three-thirty. Let's get some more work done while the light holds." He'd gotten a whiff of the thought that had eluded him the day before, but then Lia had distracted him. Something to do with one of the books he'd read when trying to figure out Mark.

  That and the idea of swinging a couch like a baseball bat. He shook his head to jar the thought loose again, but it wouldn't come.

  26

  OUTSIDE THE CARRIAGE HOUSE, the night woods were silent. Inside, the only sound was Lia's gentle snore and the scutter of mice in the walls. Paul lay listening for a time, trying and failing to quell the tension in his body. He wished his ears would stop straining against the silence.

  It had been a productive if disturbing day. They'd worked until ten by the glaring light of the kerosene lantern, sorting papers. Most were trivial: receipts for plumbing work, car repairs, a toaster, heating oil, dating back many years. An owner's manual for a Sears lawnmower, a faded pamphlet entitled "Caring for Your Goldfish," a warranty for a Philco television. It was hard to believe Vivien wanted to save these things, but without explicit instructions to the contrary they decided it best to sort them into general categories, let her decide later what to keep. Paul found some doctors' bills from the fifties and wondered briefly at a blank psychological inventory test, the Reiss Screen for Maladaptive Behavior, then started a new box, which he labeled "Medical."

  "There are veins of material," Lia had said at one point. "Like seams of ore in a mine. I've been hitting a lot of stuff related to the Philippines. Account statements. Bills of lading, shipping manifests. Port of Manila. Old, though—look at the dates."

  Paul leaned to look over the sheaf of papers she held in her lap, pulling aside a curl of red-blond hair. The papers were old, several from 1902 and one from 1903. The bills were specific to weight but didn't mention contents.

  "It makes sense—old Hoffmann Senior made his bucks in the Philippines. He lived there on and off for most of his life."

  "I wonder why Vivien has these? That's a long time ago. And you'd think if there was anything important about these papers they'd have stayed with Hoffmann after their divorce."

  "My mother told me Vivien kept files. I thought she was speaking figuratively."

  Paul found a few more photos, some showing Filipino men in suits, standing and posing unsmiling for the camera; one was of a two-tone, two-door sedan in front of a low-roofed house and bamboo stockade hedge.

  "These are more recent," Paul said. "I seem to recall that Hoffmann Junior and Vivien lived there for a while too, when they were first married."

  Lia handed him another photo. "Here's the little boy again—the one we saw in the photo of Vivien beneath the airplane. I wonder who he is?"

  The photo showed a boy of three or four, with pale skin and almost white hair, sitting with legs splayed. At the angle the camera had caught him, the boy's forehead seemed too large, his eyes too wide apart.

  "Maybe some relative on the Hoffmann side? Seems like there's some resemblance."

  She showed him another photo, of a young woman in a loose cotton dress, smiling, holding a broad-brimmed, conical reed hat. "And this is Vivien, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "She's pretty!"

  "What did you think? Have I made her out to be such a monster? I think she married Hoffmann when she was only eighteen—she was probably in her early twenties when that was taken. Everybody's young once."

  "I know. I guess this just . . . it reminds me of photos of my own parents. When they were first married. They always seemed so happy, so exuberant. This is the same sort of photo, isn't it? A happy young woman. Something she looks at sometimes, thinking, T looked like that once.

  That was just after sunset, when Lia had begun to flag. A smudge of blue had appeared under each eye, and she looked suddenly fragile.

  Light from the bloody western sky came through the plastic-covered windows, casting blurred shadows from the trees that rocked in a slight breeze, eerily alive.

  "You just tired, or is it something else?" Paul asked.

  "Both. You know what I'm feeling? I miss my mom." Lia gave a weary, wry laugh. She'd always been more her father's child, maintaining an uneven and difficult relationship with her mother.

  "The photo?"

  "Yeah. I guess. Also winter coming on. I guess I've got a case of existential angst. Low blood sugar. Time on the wing. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Et cetera."

  "You too? I've been wondering if it's something you catch from being at Highwood."

  They drove into Brewster for a late dinner of burgers and fries. It was almost eleven o'clock by the time they came into the driveway and saw the dark house again. In the glare of the headlights, the blank, shck sheets of plastic over its windows looked like cataract-covered eyes. The few garden statues still upright seemed to move as the lights swung—decapitated disco dancers. When Paul cut the lights, the sudden darkness was absolute.

  "Home sweet home," he said lamely. His lungs convulsed with a tic and he caught the air in his throat.

  Lia's voice came out of the darkness: "Do we really have to stay here?"

  "Only until I get a gate up—a few more days. I hope. What, this isn't your idea of a good time? A stylish sort of risk?"

  She didn't rise to it. "You know, I didn't bring Ted's .38 with me. But right now I almost wish I had."

  "I know what you mean," Paul said. In Philadelphia the idea of keeping a gun with them had seemed crazy. Now it seemed more than reasonable.

  They'd gone upstairs and slipped into their down bags, each thinking private thoughts and not saying much, as if they feared to disturb the silence around them.

  Paul was startled out of his near-sleep by an unexpected sound, faint, shrill, stopping and starting again in measured intervals. He opened his eyes, not believing he'd heard it, but then it came again, faint but insistent, demanding. The phone was ringing in the big house.

  Instinctively, he began to get out of bed, hurry to answer it, but then thought of the time it would take to pull on clothes and shoes, find his way downstairs, across the drive, down the terrace, into the kitchen. No one would ring that long. And the idea of entering the huge dark house seemed suddenly terrify
ing.

  He lay, counting the rings, wondering who could be calling, his heart pounding. After thirty-five rings it stopped, leaving the silent aftermath oddly chilled.

  27

  RICHARD SLOWED HIS LIMPING run to a trot, unable to take enough air into his burning lungs. The trees above him were dark with the dense R foliage of August, but ahead he could see a faint brightness where a break in the canopy opened to the night sky. Almost to the highway, he told himself maybe there'll be cars, he could tell someone, they could save him, they could get the police. Somebody has to know. Somebody has to do something.

  The old road ended, and he turned left onto the paved highway and began to run fiat out despite the pain. The only sound was his feet slapping the asphalt and the little keening he made when he breathed, the high, thin noise beyond crying that came from his throat. Shattered images of the nightmare on the hill replayed in his mind: the person or thing that came out of the darkness and tossed him aside like a dirty sock and did something terrible to Essie, something indescribable. In the dark he'd heard it more than seen it, the noises her body made and the pain sounds she uttered involuntarily and the things she said. Essie! Yes, and the scraping or sawing sound that had been their firstclue that everything had gone wrong.

  They'd made love just like the times before, beautiful Essie in the fine bed upstairs in the big abandoned house, beautiful Essie giving him everything he'd ever wanted, her love welling up from inside her. And then when they were just starting down, the sound had startled them. His first thought had been that Heather hadfollowed them and was making the weird noise as some strange joke.

  But when they turned, suddenly the darkness congealed into a shaperightthere and Essie was ten feet away, tumbling on the ground.

  Overhead the trees closed in again, and he ran into the blackness. The images refreshed the panic that sparked in every cell, the blind urge to run, no thoughts but one: Somebody has to know.