Skull Session

"You're not noticing the same things I am. Look—a jewelry box, right? It's been thrown around and broken open, but what's the matter with this picture?"

  Paul took the box from her. It was made of ebony, inlaid with ivory and chased with silver, the lid cracked and dangling by one hinge. In its one remaining drawer lay an assortment of jewelry—a pearl necklace, several rings, an opal brooch.

  "You mean that it's still got jewelry in it. Prompting the question, Who's going to come up here, trash the place, but not make off with valuable, portable loot?" Looking around, Paul could see other things in the same light: another necklace hanging from the splintered windowsill, a tangle of silver earrings and bracelets, the fox stole. "So what's your explanation?"

  "I can think of several, but there's another thing I noticed that makes me think of one in particular. In the kitchen—did you notice the stoves?"

  "Not really. Lia, I need to get going on my damage assessment. Also, I don't like being in here. I want to get the fuck out of here. Tell me as we work our way back to the kitchen." He took a couple of photos of the bedroom, then went out to the balcony and snapped several overhead shots of the big room.

  Lia put her arm around his waist as they walked back around to the head of the stairs. "Here's what I was thinking. You probably did some vandalism when you were a teenager, right?"

  "Sure. When I was around twelve, thirteen. Loved it. There was an abandoned factory where we'd go have a free-for-all once in a while.

  One time we stole a shopping cart from the Grand Union and rolled it down a hill lined with parked cars."

  "I did too, a little—with my brothers. Why did you do it?"

  Paul thought as they descended the stairs. From the windows he could see Dempsey, sitting on the terrace steps, poking at the gravel with his cane. The sun was still above the tree line, but the light outside had started to pale as a high haze formed. It seemed to be getting cooler.

  "Same as any kid. Maximum effect for minimum effort. Throw a rock, get the reward of a loud smash, a hole in the window. And there was the thrill of danger—'What if we get caught?'"

  Lia steered him into the kitchen. "Exactly. Instant gratification. Maximum effect, minimum effort. Loud noises, something in pieces, run away convinced you're another Al Capone. That's why this doesn't fit." She brought him to the stoves. On all three, the knobs had been broken off, the steel shafts bent flat against the iron facing.

  Paul tried to straighten one of the finger-thick shafts, found it immovable. "Right. This was a lot of work."

  "Work? After the first few, this must have been downright tedious. There must be two dozen shafts here. How about the couches in the big room? They were slashed dozens of times. It's too systematic. Lacks the spontaneous touch of the vandal. And there's nobody around to hear any of it. What's the thrill?"

  "Point being?"

  "The motivation wasn't casual vandalism."

  "What then?"

  "Revenge, maybe? Someone who had a grudge against Vivien, wanting to make sure this place is really in ruins."

  "So why not just burn it down? Maximum effect, minimum effort, right?"

  Lia frowned. "I don't know. Maybe there's an aesthetic to revenge—something to draw out and savor, especially if you've waited a long time."

  While he thought about it, Paul took photos of the kitchen from the doorway. "I've got to take a look at the basement rooms," he said finally, "and see about the pipes and whatnot. But I'm a little worried about Dempsey. You don't want to go out and cheer him up, do you?"

  "Sure. But first—" Lia turned to him, took the camera out of his hands and set it on one of the dented stoves, unzipped her jacket and his, then placed his arms around her. She pulled their bellies together hard and leaned back to survey him. "Paul, this is fascinating. In a way what we'll be doing is archeology. Digging down through the layers."

  "What do you mean we? You're still in school. You've got a job."

  "All I'm really doing at school is my thesis and little end-of-semester errands, and my hours at work are flexible. Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss this for the world!"

  "If Vivien agrees to hire me," he said, trying to sound discouraging. "If she gets me money up front."

  "She will."

  Lia burrowed against him and he grudgingly succumbed to the warmth and softness of her. After a few moments she let go of him, waved, and stepped outside over the canted door. Paul got out his flashlight, a little Maglite with an adjustable beam.

  He sighed, checked his zipper, touched his nose, eyebrows, zipper again.

  When they were kids, they'd gone in and out of the basement through a flight of steps near the outside kitchen door, but there was also an inner stairway that ran down from the pantry. Now the door was open, black as a pit.

  As Paul remembered it, the basement was divided by a corridor that ran the length of the building and opened into a half dozen rooms, including a pitch-black coal room directly under the kitchen, the furnace room, and a workshop. He checked the furthest north of the rooms, which had been set up as a game-hanging closet with meat hooks in the ceiling beams. Vivien had kept her gardening equipment in there, and now it was a tangle of tools, broken shelving, exploded bags of potting soil, and manure, kinked garden hoses snaking in and out of the mess.

  The pipes had not been drained before Vivien left, judging by the icicles that hung from the joints. Ruptured pipes—another thing to take care of before he could turn on the heat. He snapped a photo, and after the flash was dogged by purple splotches in his vision. The flashlight seemed dim and yellow.

  He navigated the debris-choked hallway to the furnace room, where two huge oil furnaces gripped the ceiling with their ducts, spread like the arms of a galvanized-steel octopus. Paul played the flashlight beam over the scene, wishing he'd thought to bring a bigger and brighter light, or at least checked the batteries in this one.

  The furnaces hadn't been spared. The oil pumps had been ripped out of the floor, the sheet metal housing around the fireboxes dented and torn. The galvanized steel ducts were slashed, wide jagged rents two or three feet long, and he found one of the iron firebox doors broken off and stuffed through one of the rips.

  Lia was right. It wouldn't be any fun to vandalize a furnace. It'd be work.

  He located the fuse boxes and inspected them carefully: Getting power back would be an important first step. There were five boxes of different sizes and vintages, now buckled, doors gone or hanging awry, fuses smashed in their sockets, breaker switches pulverized and dangling on their wires. On the floor beneath them he found one of the oil pump motors, still on its mount, which had apparently been torn from the concrete and used to smash the fuse boxes. On impulse, he put the Maglite in his mouth and bent to lift the pump. A hundred pounds, he decided, maybe more.

  The light dimmed and brightened again, the batteries truly failing now. Not much of the basement remained: the corridor, a couple of miscellaneous rooms. And the workshop, where the slope left the foundation above ground and permitted an outside door and two windows—at least there'd be some light there.

  Paul followed the dark passage to the south end of the house, his lips moving soundlessly, fuckfuck!, a little song of anxiety, the rhythm of his heartbeat. Associative gibberish ran through his head: Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? He was relieved to emerge into the comparative brightness of the workshop, a large room lit by windows and a door that faced the sloping woods to the east. Along two walls stood workbenches, much as he remembered, but now sections of the four-inch-slab benches were cracked, splintered. Tools had been tossed around, and a Sears ShopVac had been flung through one of the windows, its gray hose trailing back through the opening like some groping plastic annelid.

  He'd always liked this room. Sometimes Dempsey had been here, fixing a broken window or lamp, planing some board. Paul had loved seeing the curl of raw wood coming up in the plane, spiraling in on itself until at last it dislodged and fell to the floor, arch, stiff, thin as paper.

>   And that's how your life works, Paul thought. You observe something, it makes an impression on you. Little Paulie had admired the curls in the plane and Dempsey's command and pleasure in his work, and years later had become a woodworker himself.

  Something fell and clanged in the corridor. A cold sound. His heart was suddenly racing, the muscles of his abdomen clenched. "Lia?" he called. No answer. He shined the flashlight down the hall, its feeble light revealing nothing.

  No one had brought it up, but there'd been a hidden tension this whole time: What if they found someone here? "Dempsey?" he called. But there would have been footprints in the snow. Unless they came up through the woods. Or unless they'd been here all along. A grisly thought. How easily nostalgia turns to nightmare.

  But there was no more noise. His heart stopped punching his chest. Just something falling over, something he himself had disturbed in passing. He took a photo of the workshop, then unlocked the outside door and stepped with relief into the open. The woods were still, reassuringly normal. He crunched his way around the outside of the house to the terrace, where Dempsey and Lia stood, swinging their arms, puffing steam, talking.

  He used the last of the film to snap the two of them. Dempsey appeared to have recovered. Another of Lia's many talents.

  On their way out, they stopped at the carriage house that faced the lodge across the circular drive. Paul quickly checked both floors and was pleased to find the building largely undamaged. The upstairs rooms were empty, and Paul made a mental note that they would make a good temporary staging area for the work, at least until the main house got straightened up a bit.

  The sun disappeared behind the hill as they went down the driveway, leaving the woods glowing a watery blue. Lia and Dempsey continued their conversation, but Paul couldn't get involved. Seeing the house had stirred up an odd mix of feelings, an upwelling of the past. Mainly family stuff—the brighter early years of living here in Westchester, then Ben's death and the dark years of grieving and poverty, moving away, Aster's withdrawal from the world. Lia could manage her ebullient mood because for her this had nothing to do with past, parents, death in the family. It had only to do with the future, a puzzle, a little morsel of danger to be savored. Paul doubted that he could find her point of view. "Fuck it," he said out loud.

  Dempsey turned to him. "Coprolalia, or just plain old regular profanity?"

  "Maybe a little of both," Paul told him.

  7

  PAUL DROVE ON THE FOUR-HOUR trip back to Vermont, Lia next to him in the dark car. They'd eaten an early dinner at the Corrigans' and promised to stay over when they came down again. Now Lia leaned against the seat back, talking about Dempsey and Elaine.

  Paul grunted replies.

  At last Lia took his hand off the gearshift knob and held it loosely on her thigh. "So," she said. "What's going on?"

  "I'm not sure." Paul tried to put his thoughts in any order that would make sense. The evening with the Corrigans had been pleasant—a fire in the Franklin woodstove casting a warm light on the room, Elaine's terrific scallops, a lot of laughs. But none of it had succeeded in dispelling the sense of unease that the visit to Highwood had brought on. "Maybe I shouldn't do this job," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "I don't know. It brings up a bunch of stuff for me."

  "Like?"

  "The old days. There was a sort of golden age—then my father died and it all got complicated." He drove without turning his face toward her. "Fuck. It sounds like I'm feeling sorry for myself. I guess going up there put me in one of those 'look at your past and wonder what you've done with your life' moods."

  Lia waited for him to continue. After a moment she carefully placed his hand palm-down on her thigh and traced his jaw with one finger.

  "You have a beautiful chin," she told him. "Look at this beautiful line.

  Brave. Like the bow of a fine ship." The sweet non sequitur that only the woman you love can pull off. He was grateful for her touch, circumventing words and logic to remind him of all that was good in his life. Lia waited expectantly, as if she knew there was something else.

  "And," he went on reluctantly, "it disturbs me to think of someone smashing the place up that way. Your revenge theory—what if the people who did it come back?"

  "While we're up there? With plumbers and furnace repairmen and electricians and Dempsey and you and me there? Not the perp's pattern, as my father would say. Let me ask you something—did you see the mouse turds in the mess? The mildew that was all over anything made of cloth?"

  "Yeah, I did. Another reason why Vivien had better hurry up and do something about it, if she wants to salvage anything."

  Lia nodded. "True. But you're missing the implication. If there's that much mouse and mildew damage, it means that stuff has been lying like that for some time. It's been too cold for mildew for at least a month. Whoever did it hasn't been back."

  "Maybe not. And maybe they'll get a hankering for that particular kinky thrill again. I can't believe you aren't more concerned."

  Lia was quiet for a long moment. "Once when I was eight," she said at last, "my father and I went to a shopping center to get me some shoes.

  My father was off duty, but while we were driving home he got a call on the radio that he was needed at a crime scene. When he parked the car, he told me absolutely not to get out. I sat there for a little while, watching the lights of five or six police cars and ambulances, and then got curious and wandered down there. It was a beat-up neighborhood.

  Everyone was clustered around a little white clapboard house with peeling paint. Someone had stabbed to death a woman and her two kids. The mother was still on the porch stairs. Head down, tangled in her own arms and legs. Every drop of her blood had drained out onto the stairs and sidewalk. The way she was lying—it was like she'd . . . she'd been wrestling with herself."

  "Christ, Lia."

  She took a moment to pull back from the memory. "My point is, after that I'm not going to be upset by some broken furniture."

  Paul imagined the little girl, trying to integrate the horrible scene into her world view. Somehow she'd miraculously emerged as the Lia he knew. In the long run, maybe it was something that strengthened her. Or maybe those images were part of what drove her, rode her. Because something was riding her, a desperation she revealed only very rarely.

  He'd seen it the first time they'd spoken to each other, a little over two years ago. For two months he'd been auditing a night class in Adolescent Psychology at Dartmouth and covertly admiring her from across the room. She was in her first term as a special student pursuing an independent project for her master's in social work.

  That Wednesday night, after class, he had stopped for a beer at Murphy's Pub. He was surprised to see Lia at a table alone: It had never occurred to him that a woman that pretty would ever be unaccompanied. Seeing her there was a revelation, like a window to some long and gorgeous vista opening in his mind. He got a beer from the bar, walked to her table, and asked if he could join her.

  Lia took his intrusion gracefully, made him feel welcome. They talked. She told him she was working twenty hours a week at a family advocacy organization where she investigated claims of spouse and child abuse, plus doing full-time graduate school work. Despite her vitality, he could see the fatigue in her.

  She'd been telling him amusing anecdotes about being a police detective's daughter. But at some point the tone of her stories had changed. "There were a lot of nights," she said, "when I'd be at home with my mother. My father would be at work. I knew he was a police detective, but I didn't know exactly what he did. My mother would clean the kitchen, and my brothers and I would stay up doing homework at the kitchen table. She kept a police scanner on the counter. I hated it—the sharp-voiced messages, all the static, once in a while my father's voice, sounding like a stranger. I see now she needed to know where my father was, what he was doing. Some nights I'd say something to her and she wouldn't answer. One night I figured out why. On the scanner,
there was some dangerous thing going on, calls for assistance, officers down at the scene. My mother had her back to me, not moving. I finally went up to her. When I saw her face, her eyes were glittery like a rabbit's, and it finally dawned on me: She's afraid my father might not come home."

  Lia stopped in her narrative to blow out a breath of air. "Until then it had never occurred to me that anything could happen to him. I didn't know that people could die. I didn't know that my mother couldn't control everything. After that, I hated those nights. I'd be good, helping her in the kitchen, cleaning my room, being extra nice to my brothers. As if that could help my mother feel better."

  She shook her head, adjusted the man's dress tie that held her lopsided fountain of hair, smiled a ragged and apologetic smile. "Wow. I must be tireder than I thought. I'm really sorry. I'm really not like this."

  Then she surprised him again, switching gears completely. "What's it like to have Tourette's syndrome?"

  Paul was taken aback. It was his first real glimpse of her observational powers. "And here I thought I was doing a pretty good job of keeping it under control," he said, laughing uneasily. This wasn't good first-date material.

  "You are. But I've been watching you in class for a while," she said. She grabbed her nose, stroked her upper lip and her eyebrows, one quick, practiced motion, a perfect imitation of Paul's most unconscious and persistent tic.

  Paul was a bit drunk by then, enough to plunge past the discomfort her mimicry brought on. "I've been observing you too," he told her. "But probably for different reasons." Why not? He had nothing to lose.

  "Oh, I don't know about that." She looked away, gorgeous in her embarrassment. It was a beautiful moment, the best, teetering on the brink of falling in love, letting it start to happen, letting the wild hopes run crazy in his heart. Suddenly he wanted her, more than he'd ever wanted anything.

  Later he often wondered about the side of her he'd glimpsed that night. She let it surface so seldom, yet he knew it was always there: those innumerable nights of feeling fear stalk the house, knowing that no one was safe from it. How had that affected her? And how did it tie in with her hunger for danger? He couldn't say. Maybe it had to do with people die: Lia jumped out of airplanes because she wanted to get all she could out of life. Or having hidden from fear then, she was driven now to face into it, master it, stare it down. Or maybe it was just Thanatos, the death wish.