“I’ll come over,” I said.
Despite her disclaimer-They don’t sound like animal noises to me- I thought that Marlinchen had probably heard whatever had killed Snowball. If it had hunted on their grounds before, there was no reason it wouldn’t come back. But it was quite dark as I got close to the Hennessy home, and I didn’t blame Marlinchen for being afraid.
She met me at the door, Colm and Liam not far behind her. “Thank you for coming out,” she said quickly.
“You’re welcome. I’m going to make a quick check of the house, then the grounds,” I told her.
“The house?” Marlinchen said, startled. “The noises were outside.”
“Are you sure all the doors have been locked all night long?”
“I think… I guess…,” Marlinchen tried to answer, but she wasn’t quite sure, and her two brothers remained silent.
“Better to check,” I said. “Where’s Donal, by the way?”
“Sleeping,” Marlinchen said. “I sent him to bed a half hour ago.”
I checked on him first, and his chest rose and fell evenly in the light that spilled across his bed when I opened the door. Moving inside, I checked the closets as quietly as possible, and under both the beds. Nothing.
I went through the darkened upstairs rooms, then the downstairs. A door in the kitchen led down to a basement, and I shone my flashlight into its shadowy corners. There was some old furniture stored down there, and two mattresses. A smell of dust and concrete hung in the air. It wasn’t orderly, but I found nothing that suggested a recent intruder.
When I’d finished with the house, I went out into the garage, where Hugh’s Suburban stood. There was no one hiding under it, and the closets held only canned food and camping equipment, and a few dusty old bottles of wine.
Outside, I went to the broad back porch and dropped to my hands and knees, looking between a wide gap in the boards through which a human might easily have squeezed. Underneath was nothing but an expanse of dust and small nondescript rocks. I walked out to the fence line on either side of the house, poked around the bushes at the property’s edge, looked under the small wooden dock at the lake’s edge. No broken branches, no footprints to be seen. The only thing that was out of place was the little rise of overturned-and-smoothed soil near the willow tree, the resting place of the late Snowball.
Last, I went to the detached garage. The door was unlocked. Stepping inside, I pointed the flashlight beam into the darkness, and jumped.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. At first glance, it had looked like a body hanging from the rafters: a heavy bag. To the right of it was a weight bench. Colm’s gym, as the other kids called it.
The rest of the building was taken up by a car, an early-eighties BMW. Underneath a layer of dust, the paint seemed to be a deep bottle green. Its windows were likewise filmed with dust, like a corpse’s eyes, and all four tires were flat. It wasn’t damaged in any other way, but it had clearly been years since it was driven. I pointed the flashlight at a window, and the beam pierced the light layer of dust to show nothing out of the ordinary: pale-brown leather seats, all empty. Spiders had gotten inside, their webs threaded across the bars of the headrests and dangled loosely from the ceiling handgrips.
“Everything looks fine,” I told Marlinchen when she answered my knock at the door. “I think you probably heard an animal of some kind.”
Marlinchen looked sheepish. “Maybe what happened to Snowball has me on edge,” she said.
“That’s understandable,” I told her. “In fact, I was thinking I might as well just stay out here with you guys tonight.”
“Really?” she said. “That’s not necessary, honest.”
I’d expected that this would startle her, and said, “Well, it is late, and it’s a long drive back…”
“Oh,” Marlinchen said, falling back immediately into her good manners. “I understand. I didn’t mean-”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Look, I need to ask you another favor, if I’m going to stay out here all night. Can I run my shoes through your washing machine?”
The washer and dryer were both in the garage where Hugh kept his Suburban. I threw in both my Nikes and my socks, poured in detergent, and set the temperature control to the hot-water setting. As the first cycle started with a muted sound of rushing water, I crossed to the cabinet I’d checked out before, the one where the old wine lived.
Back in the house, the family room was unlit, the TV off. The kids had gone upstairs, and the whole downstairs was dark, except for the kitchen. I walked over and set the wine bottle down.
Footsteps told me Marlinchen was coming down the stairs. “Sarah? I was just on my way to bed. One thing I need to tell you-”
“Come down a second,” I said, interrupting her. “I need to ask you something, too.”
Marlinchen leaned out a little, over the stairway railing. I tilted the wine for her to see. “I found this in your garage. Liam said your father doesn’t drink anymore; I think it must be left over.” In fact, the year on the bottle was about eight years past. “There’s no sense in letting it go to vinegar. Do you mind?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said. “Listen-”
“Good,” I said. “Come join me.” I fished a corkscrew from a drawer.
“You mean, drink some?” Marlinchen’s voice, from the stairs, sounded both scandalized and tantalized.
I took down two oversized goblets from a high shelf. “Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t make a habit of it, but you’re running a whole household. I think a glass of wine isn’t out of order.”
Outside the kitchen window, all was inky black, except for the lights of a pleasure boat drifting on the lake. I killed the main kitchen light, so that two overhead recessed lamps isolated the counter in a long pool of illumination, and pulled the cork from the wine. I didn’t say anything more to Marlinchen. She was intrigued. She’d come.
I can’t say I felt totally comfortable with what I was doing. But I wanted to speak freely to Marlinchen, and for her to speak as freely to me, and from what I’d seen, her armature wasn’t going to come down unaided.
When I sat down at the counter, I heard her footsteps again, descending. She slipped onto the stool next to mine, and I poured until her glass was nearly full. Her eyes widened.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “That’s not so much, for wine.” I pushed the glass over to her. “If anyone ever tries to serve you that much vodka, question their motives.”
We drank. Marlinchen winced.
“I know,” I said, “but stick with it. Its charms will become more apparent as time goes by.” I held up my own glass, watching the way the light pierced the ruby liquid. “One of the Puritans, like Cotton or Increase Mather, said this great thing about wine. He called it ‘a good creature of God.’ ”
“That’s lovely,” said Marlinchen.
Shiloh had told me that, Shiloh with his love-hate relationship with the Christian faith and his eclectic but vast knowledge of its followers and teachings.
“The thing I was trying to say earlier,” Marlinchen said, “is that you can’t close the door in Dad’s bedroom. The knob is virtually useless. People have been known to get stuck in there.”
“That’s probably not hard to fix,” I said.
“I know, but Dad’s hopeless about things like that,” Marlinchen said. “Not only is he hopeless with tools, I mean, he’s fundamentally incapable of caring about stuff like that. He’d rather just keep the door cracked all the time.” She smiled, rueful.
“To each his own.” I poured myself a splash more wine. “If memory serves,” I said, “you should be studying for final exams right about now, right?”
Marlinchen nodded.
“You never mentioned,” I said, “where you’ve applied to college and if you’ve been accepted anywhere yet.”