When Gore got out of his truck, the Moores waved and started down the hill, Hildie and Lassie trotting ahead.
“What’s he after now?” John muttered.
“Got to tell you how his blessed auction went.” Mim laughed. “He should of been the town crier instead of the town cop.”
Ma had heard the truck too and was rapping on the window, beckoning furiously, her image faded to gray by the weathered plastic tacked over the glass for insulation.
Inside, the house was faintly pungent with woodsmoke. Over the years the stoves had deposited a crust of dull black on the ceilings and sifted soot into the crevices between the scrubbed floorboards. It was a house that had been lived in for generations by the same family, and treasures from various eras cluttered every surface. Even on top of the television set, a kerosene lamp with a fluted base and a tall etched chimney jostled wax flowers under a dusty dome, three Hummel figurines, and a plastic replica of the Statue of Liberty. There was a light rhythm of clocks ticking against each other—the cuckoo clock, the eight-day clock with columbine painted on the glass, and the grandfather clock in the hall. The various chimes and the chirp of the cuckoo were no longer synchronized, and the house was filled with random sounds the Moores barely heard, a counterpoint to the birdsong that filtered in from outside.
In the front room, Ma sat bolt upright in the precise center of a bright slipcovered couch. She seemed to have shrunk since her clothes were put on. The collar of her flannel bathrobe stood out like a monk’s cowl around her drawn neck, and her fuzzy pink bedroom slippers seemed four sizes larger than the feet that held them so carefully side by side on the bleached floor. She seemed more like a child than a grandmother.
Gore stood, enormous and grinning, in the center of the room, dwarfing his surroundings. Ma held out her hands to him with the force of a command until he took his own hands out of his pockets and leaned over to grasp hers. “How are you, Mrs. Moore? he asked.
“Not so good,” sighed Ma. “I ain’t got the go I used to.” Her weary voice contrasted with her small hazel eyes—sharp as a bobcat’s—watching Bob Gore from under her tangle of gray hair.
Hildie sprang onto the couch and curled up against Ma. Without taking her eyes off Gore, Ma reached out a knobby hand and, with a few pats, straightened Hildie around until she quieted down and folded her hands in her lap.
Mim perched on the edge of a straight chair near the door and John took the piano bench.
“And you, Bobby,” Ma was saying. “What’s new? Anything you can hope to tell us in less than a day or two?
“Perly Dunsmore’s what’s new, Mrs. Moore,” Gore said, settling his broad self comfortably in the rocking chair. “He’s the newest thing Harlowe’s seen in years.” He beamed, as if the auctioneer were a glistening new possession, a special find, a bargain worthy of the envy of any neighbor who knew value when he saw it.
“Who?” Ma said, raising her brows. “You mean that crazy fool moved into the Fawkes place all by hisself?”
Gore lit a cigarette, located a flowerpot by his left elbow to flick the ashes into, and seemed to expand just slightly. He took a breath.
“Don’t wear us plumb out now, Bobby,’ Ma said, but her voice was no longer weary.
“Good turnout?” John asked.
“Wonderful,” Gore said, taking a deep breath. “It was one absolutely wonderful auction.” He chuckled. You wouldn’t believe how that Perly Dunsmore gets the most for everything. What an auctioneer! I never saw nothin’ to beat it. He gets up there on that bandstand and I don’t know him, hardly. He’s like one of them fish can puff itself up to four times its ordinary size. Sharp as a whip, he is. And what a talker! Makes me seem like the silent type.”
“They talk different,” John said, “these city dudes. They drink crankcase oil for breakfast.”
“Oh, but Perly’s a New Hampshire boy,” Gore said. “From Elvira, up to the Canadian border. Ain’t much we can tell him about the country.”
“Thought he was some big-deal consultant,” John said. “That’s what Arthur Stinson says. And he ought to know after all the time he spent paintin’ and scrapin’ that place.”
“Well, Perly ain’t ordinary,” Gore said. “Fact, there’s a man could do any damn thing he set his mind to. But he growed up on a New Hampshire farm like all the rest of us. It’s just that he lit out when he weren’t much more than a chicken. Made his way everywhere you can think of. Mexico, Alaska, Vegas, Venezuela. All over. And all over America too. Once in a while he’d run an auction, I guess, but most of the time he was some kind of consultant that tells people how to manage their land. He just kept wanderin’. Must of thought he’d find somethin’ better.”
Ma snorted.
“Seems like he didn’t, ma’am,” Gore said. “Because here he is, ready to settle right back where he started from. Fact, that’s how he knew about the Fawkes place. He stayed there once about a year back, when Amelia was rentin’ out rooms. And he was smart enough to see Harlowe’s as good a place as any.”
“They say the Fawkes place was quite a bargain,” John said. “Still, he’s a bit on the odd side, you ask me,” Mim said. “Movin’ into that big house all alone with just that dog. Specially after all this time no one’d even cut the grass.”
“Guess murders in the night don’t mean nothin’ to him,” Ma said.
Gore shrugged. “He knows it don’t mean nothin’ one way or the other about what Harlowe’s really like.”
“So why Harlowe?” John asked. “Instead of Powlton, say, or over Peterborough way where it’s so much fancier?”
“Oh, Perly’s got ideas,” Gore said. “You should hear him talk.”
“You ought to bring him out,” Ma said.
“You’d like him,” Gore said. “He’s got that way about him women like. And he’d see the value of a well-kept farm like this.”
“That’s ’cause he don’t have to do the keepin’,” John said. “Is it him you’re plannin’ on for deputy?”
“I asked, but he ain’t interested,” Gore said.
“He’s just after tellin’ you what to do. He ain’t interested in the actual labor,” John said.
Gore frowned. “Red Mudgett’s back,” he said. “He’s lookin’ for somethin’, and you remember he was always so smart?”
“Bobby,” cried Ma. “You ain’t gone and hired Red Mudgett? Why you ain’t got no more sense than the rest of the Gores.”
“Perly thought he’d be good,” Gore said, fishing in his pocket for a cigarette.
Hildie had wiggled to the floor in front of Gore and sat with her arm around Lassie. She watched entranced as he lit a second cigarette from the end of the first.
“Why he’s the rottenest egg this town’s turned out since I was big enough to hear tell,” Ma said. “And if anyone knows, it’s me. I had him in my Sunday School class a good three years.”
“I figure Mudgett’s a reformed character,” Gore said.
“You figure, or this Dunsmore fellow figures?” John said.
“Well, he’s got a wife now,” Gore said. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Some wife too.” He gave Mim an appraising look. She smiled, a trace of color coming through the light freckles on the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know, Johnny, ’ he said. “If you and him can do so well, maybe there’s even hope for me.”
“Funny,” John said. “I pegged Red as one would never marry. Nor was I thinkin’, the way he always talked, he’d ever want to see the likes of Harlowe again.”
“Speakin’ of which,” Ma said, “don’t you think it a mite peculiar that this new auctioneer’d come here instead of back to his own town where everybody knows him?”
Gore let the question hang fire a moment. “It’s a pretty depressed area right now, northern New Hampshire,” he said.