Quit stalling.
Can I tell you something? Raymer asked.
Anything.
I’m so tired of being everybody’s fool.
He expected to be laughed at, but he wasn’t. I’m here to help.
Raymer regarded the card, thinking about the choice he was being given. When I know, will things be different?
Let’s find out.
What if they’re even worse?
Turn the fucking card over.
Raymer did. There was just one word, scripted in what Raymer guessed must’ve been an elegant hand before the ink ran. There looked to be five or six letters. The first was clearly an A, the second, most likely, an l. Alfred? Alton? No, the other legible letter — second from the last — seemed to be a y. Allen, but spelled with a y? Finally it came to him. It wasn’t a man’s name at all, just the word Always.
Well, said Dougie. I don’t know about you, but I find that very disappointing.
And then the buzzing was back.
Grave Doings
WHEN SULLY ARRIVED HOME, a car he didn’t recognize was parked at the curb. There were no lights on in Miss Beryl’s house, at least none that was visible from the street. Standing on the front seat, his paws on the dash, Rub had also noted the unfamiliar vehicle, barked at it, then turned to regard Sully. “I see it,” Sully told him. “Shut up before I whack you one.” The dog cocked his head, puzzled. Sully’d never laid a hand on him, but his threats, always delivered with conviction, were hard to ignore completely. The strain of not barking caused him to let loose a short burst of urine on the glove box.
“Let’s go,” Sully said, getting out, but Rub had already scrabbled past him.
Strange that after so many years Sully still thought of the house as Miss Beryl’s. He’d lived in the apartment upstairs so long that he still forgot sometimes and went up the back stairs only to find the door locked. If Carl, who lived there now, was home and heard his approach, he’d holler, You don’t fucking live up here, you idiot. And though Peter and Will had been living in the downstairs flat for the last seven years, at times Sully was still surprised to see one of them emerge instead of his former landlady. Lately, the house filled him with unease, and that was even stranger. It was a fine property, one of the best on the street, which in turn was one of the best streets in Bath. Had he any wish to sell it, the place was worth a small fortune. This was in part due to his grandson, who kept the lawn mowed and edged, the hedges neatly trimmed. Since moving in, he and his father had painted the place twice and undertaken repairs and improvements in return for reduced rent. Sully hadn’t wanted to charge them anything at all, but Peter wouldn’t hear of it. As a result, the house looked better now than when Miss Beryl was alive and depending on Sully to keep it spruced up.
If he’d had any inkling of her intention to leave him the house, he’d have done his best to talk her out of it. He’d never before owned anything more valuable than a motor vehicle, and that suited him to a T. The old woman must’ve known he had little desire to become a property owner so late in the overall scheme of things, that it might well prove a burden. Had she hoped it would force him to accept a long-overdue and entirely unwelcome new role as a responsible adult? Possibly. More likely, though, she’d just meant to thank him for the moral support he’d offered when her son, Clive Jr., skipped town in the wake of the Ultimate Escape Fun Park fiasco. His unseemly departure, together with the small strokes she was suffering, had left her fragile, ashamed and disengaged, as well as increasingly housebound. Hearing Sully’s footfalls upstairs had comforted her. She also knew Sully’s son and grandson had unexpectedly returned to his life and that down the road the house might provide them with a place to live. Which meant that in due course the house would become Peter’s. It probably pleased her to think that Sully, who would have had nothing to leave his son, now had something tangible to pass on. She could never have predicted Peter’s disinterest in any such inheritance or that eventually Sully would see her gift as a regrettable psychic turning point.
Though to be fair, Sully’s luck had already begun to turn before this inheritance. It was Peter who bet that first winning triple. Until his son’s arrival, things had been going more or less according to form. Badly, in other words. In fact, Sully had been in the middle of one of those exhilarating stupid streaks that had characterized so much of his adult life. This one had culminated with a straight right hand, delivered right on the button, to then officer Raymer’s nose, dropping him like a sack of potatoes in the middle of Main Street and resulting in a warrant for Sully’s arrest. He’d spent most of that holiday season in jail. While he was incarcerated, the 1-2-3 trifecta he’d been playing every day for decades — what Carl Roebuck called his bonehead triple — had finally run. Missing out on it would have been about par for Sully’s course, but Peter, on Sully’s drunken instructions, had continued to make the wager at the OTB, so the winnings were waiting for him when he got out. Not exactly a fortune, but enough to return him to the economic knife edge he’d been teetering on for as long as he could remember, the most he could reasonably hope for. But then a month later the same trifecta hit again, its payoff even bigger, and at age sixty-one Sully had done something so completely out of character that he’d wondered, even at the time, if cosmic repercussions might follow: he’d opened a savings account. After all, he had a grandson now (three, actually, though the other two lived with their mother, Peter’s ex-wife, in West Virginia), and one day Will would need money for college. Sully hadn’t contributed a penny to Peter’s own education, so this was the least he could do.
Even after that second windfall, he’d continued to cling stubbornly to his conviction that his newfound luck couldn’t last. After all, his stupid streaks had always run with the regularity of European trains. Another was bound to heave into view momentarily, after which he’d be back in the soup, broke and busted up and without prospects, his natural condition. But no. Later that year, his landlady died and left him the house.
Nor was even this the end. The final stroke of good fortune — or at least Sully had hoped it would be — was more unnerving than all the others combined, because its ultimate source was Big Jim Sullivan, Sully’s drunk, abusive, long-dead father. As a final fuck you to the old man, Sully had intentionally let the family house on Bowdon Street, the scene of so many painful memories, fall into ruin until the town finally had no choice but to condemn and raze it; that, Sully had imagined, would finish things off. He’d given exactly no thought to the weedy, unattractive half acre the house sat on, assuming the land itself, awkwardly situated, would be next to worthless. But one of Gus Moynihan’s campaign promises had been to build a bike path through the town of Bath and out through sprawling Sans Souci Park, on the other side of which it would hook up with the Schuyler Springs path, the idea being to link their unlucky community to Schuyler’s historically more fortunate one. The proposed route, the only one that made any sense, ran straight through Sully’s half acre, which the town planned to spruce up with park benches and a marble water fountain. Sensing Sully’s reluctance to sell, but not its source, the mayor had sweetened the deal by promising Rub Squeers a custodial job out at Hilldale. And when even that didn’t produce the desired effect, he offered to void all of Sully’s parking violations, which he’d been collecting for years and which were now the equivalent of a small line item in the town’s annual budget.