Jan’s voice said, “Dave?”
“Oh. Jan. Sorry, didn’t mean to yell at you.”
“Any luck with the lockbox?”
“No false bottom, no loose flooring. But I just had an adventure. You were right, who needs ’em? I tried to make peace with Mrs. Howard so I could ask her how come my grandfather told her about the box, found myself ogling the business end of a shotgun held by young Virg. Scared me stupid. It turns out the old guy hired Mrs. Howard to clean up his basement, she said something about I bet you got a lot of treasures down here, and he said no, all my treasures are in a lockbox. Sounds offhand enough to be true. She said something else earlier. I told her my grandfather’s lawyer hadn’t found any lockbox. She said have some tough cop question him, suggesting maybe he lied. And what about Tom Hastings?”
“Who’s Tom Hastings?”
“The chess-club member who found my grandfather on the basement steps.”
“... I thought you suspected the Howard kids.”
“I think maybe their mom does, too, that’s why she’s so defensive about them. Or maybe it really was an accident after all. There are still questions I don’t think anyone’s been asking.”
“Go to the police tomorrow and ask them what questions they did ask. And...”
She paused, then went on in a different, more tentative voice. “Dave, I know this is off the subject, but something’s been going through my head. What you told me about Mrs. Howard and your grandfather talking about ‘treasures’ sort of confirms it. It could mean the box you found was the lockbox.”
“No treasures in it.”
“Redefine treasures.”
His patience snapped. “Make your point.”
“What did you call what you found in the box?”
“Mementoes? Doesn’t mean that’s what he kept them for.”
“What did he keep them for?”
“How the hell should I know? He meant to throw them out but he was old, he forgot.”
“Was he old when he kept the oldest of them? What about the photographs you thought were your mother? I never saw a picture of her. Did you even have one?”
Through clenched teeth he said again, “Make your point!”
“Maybe we gave your granddad too superficial a reading. He was shy and lonely. He’d lost a wife, a daughter, and who knows what else? Living in his heart hurt too much. So he moved out and lived in his head.”
“So?”
“And he thought the greatest gift he could give his grandson was teach him to do the same.”
Dave said, “That it?”
“Yes”
“Why’d he hold onto any mementoes at all?”
“Maybe a few reminders of some good times were a comfort, no matter how infrequently he looked at them, or maybe he scorned himself for the weakness they represented.”
He said abruptly, “A lot of maybes. You’ve been in therapy and learned some of that shamanistic thinking.”
“Yes, well, maybe that’s true.” She became more assertive. “All in the interest of solving your lockbox puzzle, and humanizing your granddad, and explaining why you’re such a pain in the ass. Don’t take it personally.”
“Try explaining the missing front-door key, the missing checkbook.”
“You never told me about—”
“I’m telling you now!”
“Do they have anything to do with how he died?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Suddenly he had trouble finding words. A numbing exhaustion had crept up like brigand with bludgeon and caught him by surprise. He’d had a long lousy day. A funeral was a downer even without the depressing convention of deep grief, and the details and questions and conflicting personalities crammed into the rest of the day had improved nothing. This house had improved nothing. The disconnected wires of the furnace remote, the grimy basement windows, the weather, ceiling zero, visibility two blocks, the inexhaustible whispering rain, had all improved nothing, not to mention the missing checkbook and key, and young Virg and his shotgun...
He said awkwardly, “They’re just facts that have turned up.”
“I understand,” Jan said. “I presumed too much, didn’t I?”
“Just forget it, okay?”
“I’m sorry, Dave.”
“Yeah. Good night.”
He hung up.
And damn you, Jan Tarquin.
He had wet string for muscles and water for blood and noticed for the first time how much muddy water he had tracked across the hardwood floor from the front door. He needed a drink. He’d been dumb to give that six-pack to the Howards, it hadn’t done any good anyway. Could there be something in the liquor cabinet...? The old man had rarely drunk anything but tea or coffee but had usually kept something around to serve his infrequent guests...
The liquor cabinet, which Dave hadn’t raided in his quest for lunch, stood in a corner of the dining room. For an irritating second it resisted opening. A second was enough. Irritation, and the insistent background goad of distant anger, focused down to a small point of red light at the base of his brain.
Which, without warning, throbbed briefly and burst.
Revelation.
The old man had been wrong.
Between one heartbeat and the next, the germ of anger that had been drumming its fingers back at the edge of awareness became a raging, sizzling intoxicant scouring his arteries, a drug that vanquished lethargy and cleared vision. He was sharp as a scalpel.
Damn Jan Tarquin. Damn her for being here. For being a victim. For turning her neurotic isolation into a vengeful distortion lens to see him through, for reeling him into her shallow, self-absorbed frame of understanding and reducing him to another mere victim. Another two-bit actor in a narcissistic farce-drama with no aim but a sentimental pig-wallow in false pathos and emotional garbage.
Anger was good. Anger was useful. And don’t get in my face, old man, I’ve listened to you too long.
Anger crested, began an inch-by-inch retreat, leaving him almost panting, fists clenched, his whole body galvanized into combat readiness. Not needed now. No enemies present. He could use that drink not to hide bad feelings but to celebrate new freedom.
This time the liquor cabinet opened without argument. The bottom shelf held a row of glasses on a folded white towel. On the shelf above stood a lone half-full bottle of an Islay Island single-malt scotch whiskey.
He splashed some into one of the glasses and sampled it. He had never tasted a single malt before. This was smoky, smooth, probably intensely celebratory. He took a deep breath and heard rain suddenly loud as a shower of pebbles on the roof.
Damn the rain. Damn the old man for dying in Oregon in November. Okay, and what was the old man’s grandson doing here? Trying to appear normally familial to the old man’s “friends,” all to repay the debt he owed the old man for feeding and clothing him, seeing he got an education. All he really wanted was to get the details seen to so he could leave wet Oregon and the disaster Jan Tarquin had become and all the irritations of his early life behind him. For good.
He had taken the bottle and the glass into the living room. He chose his grandfather’s armchair. It looked comfortable. It wasn’t. The springs were dead, the whole chair molded to the old man’s taller, skinny frame. Hell, the discomfort of the chair was a symbol for the whole dumb situation he’d walked into. He should stay in it and overcome the chair as chair and as symbol and thereby conquer all. If you beat the symbol, didn’t you beat what it stood for? Wasn’t that what Jan would say?
He poured more of the whiskey. From the coffee table, chessmen studied him with disquietingly blank-eyed stares. The rain hammered down overhead. Where was that goddamn lockbox? Was it possible Jan could have guessed right about— No, ridiculous, didn’t bear thinking about, all part of her silly campaign to diminish him... Why did she keep coming to his mind at fifteen instead of grown-up and manipulative and bitchy?