An old, old farmhouse stood there, with hollyhocks around it and purple morning glories climbing up the front porch. The house was two stories high, with turrets that didn’t match and a steep roof that was green with moss; the rest had been white once, but so much paint was gone that it was pale gray.
“I bet it’s haunted,” I said.
“It is,” Blue admitted as he climbed out of the car. “If you were to stay overnight, we’d find out whether the ghosts liked you. They’re rather a nice crowd, really. Good country people.”
“Dead country people.” I wasn’t sure he was kidding me.
“Aren’t we all.” He helped me get out, and I thought of the time I’d helped him get up into the CW&N car. A guy about twenty, with a tangled beard and hair to match, was standing in the doorway like he was waiting for us. I didn’t know his name, but I remembered having seen him around Barton. “This is Muddy Brooks,” Blue said. “Muddy, this is Holly.”
Muddy nodded and smiled; he’d lost a couple of teeth. I looked at Blue, and Blue said, “Mrs. Maas. Muddy does most of our cooking and keeps the place swept out.”
“I see.”
“Muddy, Holly will be here until about dark. Do we have anything to eat?”
“Bread,” Muddy said. “I baked today. Coffee. There’s some of that apple butter left, and I could check the snares.”
“Do it, please, and ask Tick to bring in some firewood, if you see him. We’ll have a fire tonight.”
We went on into what I guess had been the parlor in the old days. It was a big room with windows pretty near solid around two sides, so that there was a lot of light in spite of the morning glories. There was a fireplace in it with lots of ashes, an old flattop desk that might have been a teacher’s once, with a radio on it and a swivel chair behind it, and about six other chairs; as far as I could see, the swivel was the only chair that wasn’t busted some way. Blue put me in a nice carved-oak morris that was perfectly okay except that the cushions didn’t belong to it and the stick that was supposed to let you move the back up and down was gone and a three-foot piece of copper tubing was doing the job instead.
“Do you want your foot up on something?” Blue asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.”
He shoved over a green plastic hassock that had sprung a leak, and Muddy came in carrying chipped white mugs that looked like they’d been ripped off from a diner. The coffee was hot and black, very strong and very, very bad.
“You said you wanted to get your head straight,” Blue told me. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Listen, I guess, if I feel like talking.”
“I can’t stay around—I have errands to run. I’ll be back this evening, though, and I’ll listen then. All right?”
“All right.”
“You’ll be safe here; I don’t want you worry about that. If you need anything, yell. Muddy or Tick will get it if we have it.”
“All right,” I said again. “Who’s Tick?”
“Tick is Bill. He’s crabby, but don’t worry about it. You won’t be able to make friends with him, so don’t bother to try; but his meanness is all talk, and he doesn’t talk much.”
“These guys work for you? Tick and Muddy?”
Blue shrugged. “You can put it that way if you want. Or you could just say they live with me; legally I own this place, and a lot of the Hollander Safe and Lock Company’s five thousand is going to take care of back taxes on it. Or you can say we’re a commune of three; when you don’t have money, it doesn’t matter what your economic system is. Now I have to go.”
Only he didn’t—at least, not right away. He went farther back in the house somewhere. I could hear, faintly but clearly (because that house was one of the quietest places I’ve ever been in), his dialing a phone. I couldn’t make out what he said; there was another phone over on the flattop desk, and I had to fight the temptation to hobble over and listen.
After a while he came back, and I asked, “Something you didn’t want me to hear?”
Blue shook his head. “When I deal with people, I’m often forced to promise that what they say—even their communicating with me at all—will be held confidential. I try to keep that promise.”
“That’s what I said,” I told him, but I had to say it to his back.
After that I sat and thought. Outside you could hear the wind in the trees maybe once every five minutes, but that was all. There was somebody else in the house moving around, mostly upstairs, but there was nothing scary about it—he sounded like he must have been working because he moved too much for loafing, but it wasn’t restless pacing up and down either, just somebody walking when he needed to get something. Eventually I heard him come downstairs for maybe the third or fourth time, and he stuck his head in to look at me. He stayed long enough to let me ask for something if I wanted it, and when I didn’t he went away; he had been a big fat sour-faced man who wore moleskin work pants, construction boots, and no shirt.
When things are bad, I always figure that if only I could spend all day thinking about them I could get them straightened out in my mind. But when I really have the time—like then—either I find out it doesn’t take nearly that long, or I just can’t do anything with them and they chase their tails through my brain until they wear me out. This time it was the second one, and finally I knew I’d have to find something else to do or go nuts, so I got up on my crutches and started poking around.
Blue’s desk had a file drawer, and the folders were full of letters. The first one that I read was from somebody who’d been in the slammer with him (black by the sound of it, although you couldn’t be sure) who wanted help when he got outside. The next was from a woman who was answering some kind of ad he’d run and wanted to know if a criminologist could talk sense into her son. The third was from a woman he must not have been seeing anymore who wanted him back. I didn’t know any of the people, and after the last one I got ashamed of what I was doing and stopped.
The drawer above had a little good white bond paper and a lot of cheap yellow paper, a supply of business cards like the one he’d given me on the train, the Greater Chicago White Pages, and a pencil that somebody had chewed. When I saw the paper, I remembered the letter somebody had sent to the Trib; but it had been done on an electric typewriter, and an electric typewriter wouldn’t have fit in here. Anyway, there wasn’t any. The flat drawer in the middle had more pencils, a couple of Bics, rubber bands, and some other junk.
The next drawer was the upper right, and that was where my father had kept that little Gestapo gun in his desk. It had hit me already how much this was like his study at home—I couldn’t have missed it after what Blue had said in the car—and I was a little scared of what I’d find there. I’d already noticed Blue was a lefty (his watch was on his right wrist, which practically advertised it) but just the same …
I could have saved my sweat. A box half full of tapes for one of those little minirecorders, a booze bottle half full of milky stuff that was probably moonshine, and—I am not kidding—a magnifying glass. The lens was in a solid brass frame that looked old enough to qualify for the Barton Antique Fair and Art Festival easy, and I tried to think of something witty along the lines of the difference between rich people and poor people was that rich people had new glasses and old whisky, but magnifying was too long and kept screwing it up.
Just one drawer left, and it was full of big envelopes, a lot of them recycled junk mail; they had clippings inside, and they weren’t labeled, so I couldn’t understand for the life of me how Blue knew what went where. I still can’t. The top one had two pieces on diet (maybe for the fat man, Tick?), one on the social difficulties of obese women, one about the cigarette industry, and one about a guy who stuck radio telltales on sea turtles. Nuts.