Now, apparently, his house. John Lowndes, the lawyer who’d called, had said the grandson was the sole beneficiary of the old man’s will. He had grinned and wondered why. The voice on the phone, sounding offended, had said, “You are the sole surviving family member,” as though that explained anything. It only emphasized that Professor Emeritus Davis McLaren had been a chilly old relic with hardly any friends — whatever value he’d given the word.
“When did it happen?”
“Wednesday night. First big rain of the season getting started,” the elderly lawyer had explained. “He complained of a headache and left his chess club early. I took him home. Then we found he’d left his zipper-notebook at the club. Tom Hastings tried to take it to him — he’s another retired prof. Lights on in the house but no answer, front door locked but not the back. So he went in and... found him.”
Simple, really. A fragile old man had fallen down his basement stairs and hit his head, not been found for an hour, and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
The few other details David North learned after the brief graveside service. In the ambulance, the old man had recovered consciousness long enough to mutter a few words but only one — “lockbox” — was intelligible.
Also cryptic, annoying.
“I thought he might have meant his safe-deposit box,” the lawyer told him, “so I checked at his bank. Old legal papers, insurance policies, birth certificates, things like that. Nothing you could imagine being on his mind in the ambulance. So of course we checked the house. No lockbox. Didn’t tear the house apart, we thought that perhaps when you got here...” And David had nodded like a dutiful grandson. He’d play their game, maintain the facade, as though he gave a damn...
It stopped raining as he turned into the short wet driveway, taking the Tercel to within a foot of the garage door. The garage was a wooden building set back from the sidewalk, painted green with a white trim some twenty years ago. The double doors sagged in the middle, held shut by the same padlock he remembered from longer ago than that.
David North was thirty-one, dark, lean, compact.
He got out of the car. Cold air. He smelled wet grass, wet leaves. Moisture hung in the air as thick as smoke and almost as visible.
He closed the car door. A yard away three wooden steps went up to a tiny porch and the house’s side entrance. The door looked secure as a bank vault.
Between the garage and the rear comer of the house he could see part of the backyard. Rain still dropped audibly from twig to branch before hitting the ground under the cherry and walnut trees. All around, the sound of water falling from shrubs and trees, from roofs and eaves, blended into the wet pervasive rustle of winter, a half-heard spiderweb of sound that trapped the world in a net of deprivation.
He had no key for the side door but he had two for the front door. He felt in his pocket for them as he walked toward the sidewalk, passing uncurtained windows with yellowed blinds pulled down behind them and dust visible on the frames behind the glass. The place looked unlived-in. Not just for three days. Months.
In front of the house a lamentable elm grew out of the parking strip. Across the street the houses looked better cared-for than his grandfather’s but just as lifeless. The heavy shrubbery had been cut back around the second house down the street, the old Tarquin house, and the roof trim and window frames were freshly painted; so there had been changes, though not enough to disguise a middle-class neighborhood past its prime on a gray wet November day in Eugene, Oregon. Which he’d last seen more than five years ago.
He turned and looked across the weary lawn at his grandfather’s house.
Yard untended. Blinds drawn. The green scalloping over the porch beginning to peel. Same old porch furniture. Rust spots showing through the white paint on the glider were visible even from the sidewalk. The cane chair’s legs were splayed and fraying.
In the elm, the sporadic slap of water sliding off a high leaf onto a lower one was suddenly lost in the rattle of fresh rain. He turned up the collar of his quilted nylon jacket.
To go away is to die a little. To come back is to know what it’s like to be a ghost. Whoever’d said that was wrong. He didn’t feel like a ghost. He didn’t feel anything. Just irritated? What the hell was he doing here anyway? Repaying a debt, he supposed. Not even much of one.
He started up the cracked concrete walk dividing the lawn. Abandon hope all you who enter here wasn’t actually incised over the front door, but, for all that the old man had run it like a sensory-deprivation tank, the house was just a house. Quite grand in its day, now going to hell in a hearse because the old man hadn’t been able to take care of it. Nothing intimidating about the house.
Nor about the old man, actually. All he’d ever been was distant. Apparently shy and reserved from birth, he had astonished faculty colleagues at the university by marrying, at thirty-six, a woman only slightly younger and fathering a daughter, outliving the wife by decades, the daughter too: the daughter having married, it was said, too young and unsuitably, returning to the sanctuary of her father’s house with a month-old baby, only to die in a hit-and-run accident five years later; the distant grandfather withdrawing more deeply into himself but undertaking, with chilly resolution, the single-handed upbringing and education of a bewildered little boy. Neither kind nor cruel, not intuitive but thoughtful, evidently without a single memory of what it was like to be a child, Davis McLaren had done this with no evident motive beyond the conviction that it was his duty.
And now he was dead, at eighty-seven. Had the old buzzard expected to be mourned out of duty?
The little boy of five hadn’t taken long to realize that you had to be more like Grandfather if you wanted him to like you. And then, gradually, after coming to think he was getting a lot like him, realizing that if you still wanted Grandfather to like you, then you really hadn’t managed to become much like him at all. Maybe men weren’t supposed to like people the way his dead mother used to, with laughter and hugs and warmth. Grandfather had few friends, who seldom visited. His calm, measured enthusiasms were reserved for music and chess. His collection of classical recordings, slanted heavily toward the most intellectually demanding works — he had no time for the facile emotionalism of Mozart, the Beethoven of the symphonies and concertos — would have excited envy in any classical radio station, and his playback equipment was superb. Otherwise he lived frugally, playing chess by mail against opponents on three continents, and relaxing solving chess problems in books and newspapers.
So young David learned to be calm, focused. And not to lose his temper. Grandfather said it prevented thought, betrayed immaturity. Grandfather never lost his temper. Or cried. He said emotions were untrustworthy. Ignorable. Deniable. Devoted to the solace of the intellect, he had taught David to play chess after his mother died, to take his mind off his loss...
He crossed the porch. One key slid back the dead bolt, the other opened the latch. The heavy door swung into dim familiarity. He stepped inside, closed the door, reached for the switch just beyond the door frame.
Reluctant wan yellow light came on in a bowl fixture in the ceiling.
The front room ran the width of the house. Beyond a low, wide arch was the dining room. A staircase curved down out of darkness, narrow and uncarpeted. Booklined, worn, sparsely and indifferently furnished, the room was the monotony of browns and grays he had known most of his life. The stereo equipment in the front corner, with speakers high on a wall, was an abrupt intrusion. On the desk under the corner window, on the wide, low coffee table in front of the sagging arm chair — on every available flat surface — chess games in progress waited for someone to make the next move.