It was late afternoon when I landed at the small airport outside of town, so I took a cab directly to City Hall to see what luck I would have in chasing down anyone named Pendergast.
Forty minutes later, thanks to both the rarity of the name and the willingness of the various personnel who passed me from office to office with a familiar small-town eagerness to please, I ended up back on the sidewalk with the address of Lucius and Pamela Pendergast, deceased, parents of David, Susan, Elizabeth, and Megan.
The address was northeast of downtown, on a ridge of older buildings overlooking the deep-water port and the imposing, almost quarter-mile-long ore-loading dock to the south. It was a view at once muscular and utilitarian.
The house had been titled to Agnes and Bernard Nilsson in the mid-sixties. It was one of the older, more statuesque buildings on the street. But while built in a quasi-Victorian style of faded dark wood, it had exchanged whatever splendor it once had for a brooding, neglected, weather-stained misery. The paint was half gone, the roof haphazardly patched, the steps leading to the precarious porch rotten and sagging, and one of the bay windows was propped up on an endangered-looking sawhorse.
Still, it retained a grip on its former glory-the gap-toothed gingerbread, the fancy molding, the leaded windows and stained glass, the solid oak door with the heavy brass knocker-all bygone clarions to wealth and status and social propriety.
The woman who eventually opened that heavy door shared many of the same qualities. She was very old-white-haired, bent, skinny as a stick, supporting herself on two metal half crutches whose upper bands encircled her bony forearms. She was nevertheless bright-eyed, clear-spoken, and obviously in full control of her faculties.
“May I help you?” she asked.
I smiled instinctively at her lively face, as full of hopeful anticipation as her house was not. “Mrs. Nilsson? I’m Lieutenant Gunther, from Brattleboro, Vermont.” I showed her my credentials, which she peered at with great interest.
“All the way from Vermont. It must be very important.”
“We think so, but I don’t wish to alarm you. I’m here because this house once belonged to the Pendergasts. They’re the ones I’m actually interested in.”
She opened the door wider and motioned me inside. “That’s quite right. This was their house-their son, David, gave it to my husband and me many years ago.”
“Gave it to you?” I stepped into a large dark-walled foyer.
My hostess shuffled toward one of two glass inner doors leading off to opposite corners of the house, speaking over her shoulder. “That’s right. It was a gift. The most extraordinary thing. My husband and I worked for the Pendergasts. I was David’s nanny.”
She opened the door and led the way down a gloomy hallway to a huge living room at the far end. The air smelled sour-of cooking, mustiness, and decay.
“Where are his parents?”
“Long dead-thirty years or more. They died in a boating accident, right out there.” We had reached the living room-long, low, wood-paneled, and crammed with heavy, ornate overstuffed furniture, none of which looked like it had been touched in years. The entire place felt like an abandoned museum-left to rot in mildew under layers of fine dust. Through the dim bay windows, I could see the leaden mass of the lake, undulating ever so gently, like the belly of something fast asleep and inconceivably gigantic.
“So the children were left in your care?”
“Oh, no. Megan died as a young child, Beth has been institutionalized almost since birth, and Susan ran away to Alaska when she was fourteen and hasn’t been seen since. Only David was left by the time their parents died, and he was twenty-two and already in college.”
She was standing in the middle of the room, looking a little uneasy. I sensed she’d led me here for social reasons-to receive me properly-but that she actually spent so little time here, surrounded by all this musty, forgotten elegance, that she was now at a loss as to what to do next.
“And your husband has also passed away?”
She nodded, her eyes on the floor, where she’d left tracks in the dust across the rug.
I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Nilsson, I appreciate your showing me the view, and it’s a lovely room, but to be honest, I was wondering if we could sit in the kitchen or someplace a little less formal?”
She looked up then and smiled, patting my forearm. “Like a funeral parlor, isn’t it? I never liked it, even when the place was full of people. This was Colonel Pendergast’s room. Follow me.”
She took the lead once more, through another door, down another hallway, closer to the smell of cooking I’d noticed earlier. “What was he a colonel of?”
“Marines-retired.”
“He didn’t work?”
She pushed open a swinging door and the smell overtook us both-sauerkraut, cheap sausage, and overboiled potatoes, bathed in vinegar. But it was a familiar odor, and not unappealing.
“No. Mrs. Pendergast came from a wealthy family. Her parents built this house when she was very little. The Colonel ‘managed’ the money, although he obviously didn’t do it very well. The will consisted of this house and nothing else. Would you like to stay for supper?”
I stopped my visual inspection of the ancient, massive kitchen and stared at her back as she checked the pot on the World War II-vintage gas stove. Normally, I would have passed on such an invitation out of professional habit. But I was hungry, and she’d been open and cooperative from the start. I didn’t see any point in refusing.
“Thank you-only if you have enough.”
She smiled at me with those perfect yellow store-bought teeth. “I’ve got plenty. Sit down.” She motioned to the metal, enamel-topped table in the middle of the room.
I pulled out a chair and watched her as she puttered around the room, fetching bowls, glasses, and a limp plastic-wrapped log of white bread. She filled a bowl from the stovetop and placed it before me.
“It was nice of David to give you the house,” I said.
She laughed. “It only happened because he wanted to wash his hands of it. He didn’t remove a single item from it, either, not even his own things.”
“What was he like?”
“As a little boy, before the others were born, he could be wonderful. I often wished later I could have stolen him then and taken him away and given him the love and support he needed. I think he would have turned into a fine man. But I didn’t, and he didn’t, which I suppose was inevitable. It probably wouldn’t have worked out, anyway. Bernie used to say it was in the genes, and maybe he was right.”
“I take it David didn’t turn out to be a model citizen.”
She chuckled again. Despite her long-standing ties to the family, she obviously suffered from no sentimental delusions. “Oh, my goodness, no. He could charm you out of your socks, of course, and as a little boy, that was real. But after he grew up, it didn’t mean a thing. He became his father, in a way-a modern version. Just as cold and calculating and manipulative.”
“How did father and son get along?”
“They hated each other, but David was better at it than his father, and eventually he got the Colonel to think he loved him. That’s how David got the house, and why he didn’t want it later.”
She paused in her eating and placed her thin blue-veined hand to her cheek. “Bernie kept wanting us to leave-let them murder each other in peace, he’d say-but I couldn’t do it.”
“Where was David’s mother in all this?”
“Mrs. Pendergast stayed in her garden or in her own bedroom, listening to music and reading, barely speaking to anyone, taking her meals alone, always dressed in her Sunday best. For all intents and purposes, none of the rest of us existed for her.”