Skull Session
"I'd never heard the details," Paul said. "I was only six. I do remember something weird or scary about it—the kind of thing when you're a kid you're told not to talk about."
Dempsey nodded. "Closed-casket funeral, believe me. Nobody was clear how she'd gotten down there. But Freda was getting pretty senile by then. And deaf. Apparently she'd wandered down the hill and onto the tracks, three miles from the house. Vivien was deeply upset."
They drove in silence for another half mile. "It's along here somewhere," Paul said. "Here." He swung the car onto the shoulder. He remembered it so distinctly: the gravel drive coming down steeply through the trees, the moss-stained rock pillars on either side. Between the pillars sat a battered brown Pontiac without wheels, closing off the driveway to cars.
"Typical of Vivien," Dempsey grumbled. "Blocks the driveway effectively, but also announces to all and sundry that the place is empty. Might as well put up a god damned sign."
They got out, and Paul belted on the waist pack he'd loaded earlier with the camera and a few tools.
"It's very beautiful here," Lia said. She looked around, inhaling deeply. "We never see big old oaks like this in Vermont."
"That's the way these old parcels are," Dempsey told her. "This land has been in a single estate for a long time. The Morgans didn't take any timber down, and neither did Vivien. Oho! Take a look at this." He had stopped at the glassless driver's side window of the Pontiac. When Paul and Lia looked inside, they saw a human head grinning up at them from the seat.
Paul jerked back involuntarily. Dempsey chuckled, set aside his cane, and reached inside to pick up the chipped marble head. "Too bad. I always found Vivien's garden statuary rather charming." He held up the head—a smiling Greek youth, his nose broken off, ears and curls chipped. "These screwball kids. Well. On that note—" Dempsey faced the hill.
Lia was already crunching up the drive.
The afternoon sun rode above the hills, slender cirrus clouds trailed at the zenith of a clear sky. A thin dusting of snow made the woods seem bright and open.
"No, Vivien and I didn't always get along," Dempsey went on, puffing, "and I always considered her a bit fetched.' But she was a smart woman, complicated, tough. You had to admire her. The one I really didn't care for was Royce—Vivien's son."
"Why not?" Lia asked.
"He liked to play mind games, even as a little kid. Once I was up there with my tool kit, planing a door while Royce watched. I set the plane down to do something else, and when I reached for it, it was gone.'What did you do with my plane?' I ask him. He says, 'What plane?' 'You know what I'm talking about,' I tell him, 'give it here, I've got work to do.' He just smiled his little smile, enjoying watching the hired-handyman- cum-family-friend cope with the ambiguities of his role. And this was when he was about six years old.
"On the bright side," Dempsey continued, "he hasn't been around for twenty, thirty years. Never kept in touch with Vivien after he went off to school. I think it broke her heart, but I say good riddance."
The driveway turned again, lined by lichen-covered boulders. The land sloping away on either side was rugged, corrugated by ravines. Explosions of white birch trees, growing in clusters, alternated with the darker trunks of old oaks and maples. Through the bare branches they could see a vista of hills and the far end of the reservoir, an uneven line where the land met the plane of water.
They rounded a last, steep turn and suddenly the lodge was there, incongruous in the heavy forest, like an ocean liner beached on the hill. Most windows were broken, but a few remained, the diamond-shaped mullioned panes Paul remembered. The gaping windows gave the house a forlorn look, and yet it still struck Paul as a well-proportioned structure, set nicely near the crest of the hill, big trees grown close on two sides. Out of the massive stone foundation rose three chimneys, one at each gable end and a huge main hearth in the center of the long wall. Just uphill, a terraced garden with marble statuary lay beneath a patch of bright sky.
"Has it changed much since you were a kid?" Lia asked Paul.
"Well, it didn't have its windows broken out. As I recall, the statues used to have heads." Set at bends in the garden path were statues of Greek youths and maids, some fallen, all headless.
Paul felt a wave of revulsion overtake him. Oddly, it was only partly the yawning windows, the headless statuary, the sense of abandonment. There was something else, too, as if the emptiness had always been there, not far beneath the surface of the dinners and gatherings they'd had. His hands checked the zipper of his jacket, then came to his face, tugged his nose, touched each eyebrow.
The driveway curled into a circle between the lodge and a small carriage house, also brown-shingled. Paul led them up the short, broad steps to the flagstone terrace that ran the length of the lodge. The main entrance was at the center of the terrace, a tall oak door with an iron-barred window, but when Paul tried the handle it wouldn't budge.
"Locked. Well, we never came in this way anyway—Vivien always had us come in the kitchen door. This way." He headed to the left, down the terrace.
"You too?" Dempsey snorted. "I thought she reserved the rear-entrance crap for us tradesmen."
They walked the length of the terrace, crunching on broken glass from the windows above. The terrace wrapped around the far end of the house and ended at another short flight of steps leading to the kitchen entrance. The door there hung open, off the top hinge and canted back into the room.
"Make a note to Vivien," Dempsey joked grimly. "Next time you leave, shut the damn door." He paused and hammered the slanted door with his stick, as if even with the house abandoned it deserved some ceremony of admittance. They listened to the echoes die away inside and to total silence afterward. "Better we don't surprise anybody in here," Dempsey said.
6
THE KITCHEN WAS A LARGE ROOM divided into two aisles by a row of three sturdy iron gas stoves. Along the right wall, beneath the windows, were two double aluminum sinks and the deep soapstone sink, the size of a small bathtub, that Paul had marveled at as a boy.
Now, all the surfaces were covered with splinters of broken china, curved shards littering the floor like seashells on a beach. Dented pots lay scattered, and a copper baking pan, big enough to roast a boar, had been flung at one of the north windows, where it hung, caught in the mullions.
" A-ka-theee-zha" Paul said involuntarily, feeling it rising in him. They picked their way down the aisle, stepping over domed copper lids and a tangle of drawers that had been yanked from cabinets, then through a wide door into a dining room. The table there had been broken into two halves, making a V where an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner lay tangled in its own hose. Beyond, the main room opened, full of light from windows on both sides.
Lia walked out into the big room with her hands held out from her sides, turning left and right as if savoring the light and spaciousness. The room was as impressive as Paul remembered: fifty feet square, three stories high at the peak of the raftered ceiling. Around three walls ran a second-floor balcony, oak-railed, with doors to the upstairs rooms.
Paul's first impression was of disorder on the scale of an airplane crash, like the television news clips of scattered chunks of twisted metal, seats, clothing, unrecognizable tangles, humped bodies. Furniture was overturned, flung, dismembered. Antlers of deer and elk stuck up from a tangle of clothes mixed with broken furniture, papers, books, tools, appliances. A jumble of whitened, dried vegetation and shattered pots. A cheetah's head, leaking sawdust from an empty eye socket, raged from the innards of a disemboweled, upended couch. An old-fashioned bathroom sink was embedded at head height in the wall opposite the kitchen door.
A breeze blowing in through the blasted windows lifted the pages of magazines and eddied among drifts of canceled checks, letters, receipts. Far above, three circular iron chandeliers hung from dust-frosted chains, but now the back of an overstuffed chair was tangled in the spokes of one, dangling shreds of stuffing and cloth. Paul spotted several conical straw ha
ts in the rubble, which he remembered Vivien had brought from the Philippines. A refrigerator door was shoved through the railing of the staircase that rose to the balcony. In places the debris had drifted, mounded, several feet deep.
The three of them stood silently, momentarily paralyzed. Then Lia bent to pick up an inverted umbrella that seemed to proffer its handle. "On the bright side, you're going to make a lot of money putting this back together."
"Weeks of work," Dempsey said. "Just to close the place off and pick things up. Months and months ifyou repair anything. " H e bent and pulled a heavy, carved table leg from the rubble and disengaged a woman's slip from the splintered fretwork at the end. "Look at this. George III period—intact it'd be worth maybe twenty Gs. Very much worth restoring."
"Lots of goodies, actually." Lia had found a broad-brimmed maroon silk hat, dusted it off, and settled it on her head. "Where's a mirror?"
"Look, this isn't a rummage sale," Paul reminded her. "This is Vivien's stuff." This had been here too, he thought, the violence and disorder. Somehow always just beneath the surface.
The smoking room, surprisingly, was comparatively intact, although they found another of the garden statues' heads, which had apparently been used to shatter the large mirror above the fireplace mantel. Royce's old room was guarded at the door by a dead raccoon, its head mashed to a pulp. A glance inside was enough: more heaped debris, knee deep, covered with a drifting layer of goosedown.
The library was as bad or worse. "Vivien didn't want us in here," Paul said. "Once we pulled about half the books out of the shelves and built walls out of them. 'Forts.' Vivien hit the roof." It had always been a warm, bright room, especially in the late morning when its tall windows caught the eastern sun. The brown backs of leather volumes and the bright spines of paperbacks had filled two walls, floor to ceiling.
Now it was a shambles. No book remained on the shelves. The floor was covered with them, splayed open, spines broken, pages torn. A garden shovel had been pushed through the screen and out the back of a big Motorola television. Vivien's desk and big wingback chairs were smashed and gutted. There were a number of file cabinets too, drawers gone and contents heaped and scattered among the drifts of books.
Lia stooped to pick up a photograph. "Who is this?"
The photo showed a young, dark-haired woman, stylishly dressed in the fashion of the fifties. She was standing with a baby in one arm and holding the hand of another boy of two or three who stood beside her. Behind them were the landing gear and riveted undercarriage of an airplane. The woman was making a forced-looking smile, while the little boy, wearing shorts and dressed in a suit jacket and tie, stared vacantly off to the left with wide-set eyes.
"It's Vivien," Dempsey told her. He turned the photo over, where a date was written. "Nineteen fifty-one. They must have been off on one of their jaunts. The baby would be Royce."
"Who's the little boy?" Lia asked.
Dempsey shrugged and handed the photo back to her. Paul could see other photos in the rubble—Vivien, an older Royce, Erik Hoffmann, groups of people he didn't recognize, parties, babies, weddings. There were letters on translucent air-mail paper, envelopes with exotic stamps, yellowed newspaper clippings, receipts for trivial purchases. Poor Vivien: sixty-two years old, her past in tatters and exposed to the world.
Dempsey voiced it for him. "This is what gets me the most. This stuff—the family papers. Photographs, letters, bills. I don't know. It's so . . . intrusive. That someone would throw this stuff around. It's Vivien's whole god damned life."
Lia had picked up another piece of paper and was looking it over closely. "Look at this," she said. Dempsey and Paul went to her side to read over her shoulder. The letter was undated, typewritten.
Dear Vivien,
Aster and I would like to thank you for the lovely evening on Tuesday. It was such a pleasure to have an adult dinner without the children running amok; we'll have to do it again soon.
I confess that until Mr. Vincentero brought it up I had no idea Erik's father was acquainted with such luminaries of Philippine history as Aguinaldo and Bonifacio. I'd enjoy hearing more from you about Hoffmann Senior's connection with them.
Yes, I disagreed with Mr. Vincentero about the Huks and other collectivist movements. Sorry, but I thoroughly enjoyed offending your guests with my vociferousness; I hope what I said sticks in their craws and chokes them. I hope, however, that my contentiousness didn't spoil your enjoyment of the evening.
You were oddly silent on the issue; is it far-fetched to assume you didn't entirely agree with Mr. Vincentero's version of "let them eat cake"? I would be curious to know your opinion.
Ben
"From your father, right?"
"That's Ben," Dempsey said. "You can just see him ambushing some stuffy upper-class type at a formal dinner." He grinned bitterly and passed the letter to Paul. "He was always a big letter writer."
Paul looked it over again, folded it, and put it in his pocket. A memento of the past. He was entitled.
Finding Ben's letter seemed to darken Dempsey's mood still further. His face glowered with disapproval as they toured the rest of the house.
Paul was surprised at how well he remembered the lodge. Main room at the center, a single open space rising to the full height of the roof and running the full width of the building from east to west, smaller rooms arranged on the north and south walls of both floors. Downstairs, the north rooms were the kitchen, dining room, and library; on the south were the smoking room and a pair of bedrooms. Upstairs, accessed by doors leading from the balcony, were two bedroom suites on the north end and Vivien's bedroom on the south.
They went up the broad oak steps at the northwest corner of the balcony. On the second floor, the story was the same—drawers pulled from bureaus, papers and toiletries strewn, furniture dismembered, mirrors shattered, sections of the interior wall broken open, moldings smashed away from door frames.
Dempsey began to trail behind as they moved from room to room. By the time they reached the door to Vivien's bedroom, he'd apparently had enough. "This stirs up a bunch of stuff for me," he said. "The photos, Ben's letter—all the things a person accumulates. When you get old, your junk takes on significance. A way to remember who you were. You try to honor your own life for what it is. Seeing it all spread out, ripped up—it trivializes everything." He shook his head, then seemed to make an effort to rally. "Let me check my pulse. No, not dead yet. Okay, that's my morose quota for the day." He didn't quite manage a smile, and Lia moved to his side and took his arm.
"Anyway," Dempsey went on, "I think I'm going to go outside, sit on a rock, and ponder fate. Paulie—don't forget to take snapshots of this. You'll have a hard time getting Vivien to believe it. You're going to need weeks here, and substantial cash up front for expenses. Take the photos. And don't forget to check the pipes." He stepped over a fallen coat tree and left, walking the length of the balcony erect and dignified, as if consciously holding himself aloof from the surroundings.
"How about you? How're you doing?" Lia asked. With her eyes she followed his hand as it checked the zipper of his jacket, top to bottom. The hand had been up and down a hundred times, like a spider, since they'd entered the house.
"I've got some of the same feelings Dempsey has. Finding the letter from Ben really brought it home to me. It's complicated." He turned and started through the door, then paused to lean against the door frame. He was glad to feel Lia's hand on his back. "Anyway," he said, "this is Vivien's bedroom. She didn't like us to play in here, either. I seem to remember her keeping it locked."
"After what you told me about the library, I don't blame her."
Paul's first response upon stepping into the room was surprise: Vivien's bedroom was no bigger than those on the north end. He'd assumed it would be larger because there was no other door on the balcony's south wall.
The room was flooded with light from the lowering sun, streaming in through the empty windows on the west wall. Here the dest
ruction was thorough—it reminded Paul of television news scenes of shops devastated by terrorist bombings in Ireland. Mattress ripped and gutted, cotton batting tossed in heaps like entrails. Clothes, books, jewelry, curios, cosmetics, lamps, broken legs and boards of furniture covering the entire floor. Interior wall punched open, broken lath showing in the gaps like ribs. A red high-heeled shoe, hammered against the wall so that the spike heel had penetrated the plaster, leaving it pinned alone on the white stucco.
"Good God," Lia said softly.
All the little items of a life were there, jumbled and broken: prescription pill bottles, a pair of glasses, a clock radio, a hot-water bottle, small photographs in frames, a felt slipper, a scattering of pens, pantyhose, a woman's watch. And papers everywhere. A large armoire had been smashed into splinters by a thick slab of marble—the pried-loose mantel of the fireplace. Through the gaping south window, Paul could see a bureau that had been flung outside and had exploded against a boulder downslope.
From the bedroom they went into a large windowless room, without as much debris as the other rooms. In the dim light, they could see metal shelves along two of the walls, bent and twisted, emptied cardboard boxes, and piles of clothes on the floor. Paul snapped a photo, and they went back into the bedroom.
Lia lifted a fox stole from the rubble, her cheeks red, eyes flashing. Catching fire.
Of course, Paul thought. The cop's daughter, who liked a mystery so much that she had for a time considered a career in criminology. Plus she had to feel the buzz of danger here—for Lia, irresistible. "You're getting that forensic look," he told her.
"This is interesting. It's like a riddle, a crossword puzzle."
"What's there to figure out? A bunch of teenagers have been having a good time up here for the last six months."