It could be that my father had embraced DVD as the dawn of a long-awaited new age in home entertainment, declared the videotape dead, and held a bonfire in the garden. I didn't think so. Dyersburg doubtless had a dump somewhere, but I couldn't see that scenario either. Even if he'd found as the years went on that there was less and less he wanted to watch, he wasn't going to throw all the old favourites away. I started to wonder whether creating an absence of something unremarkable might be a subtle way of attracting the attention of someone who knew you well, who had an understanding of the things that should be in your environment.
Either that, or I was losing objectivity, running too far and fast with a meaningless ball. I'd already searched the house. It didn't matter that I now had an idea — however spurious — of what to look for. I already hadn't found it. I was getting hungry, and also angry. If there had been something they had thought I needed telling, why the subterfuge? Why not just tell me on the phone? Leave a letter with Davids? Send an email? It made no sense.
But I knew by then that when I left the house, it would be for good. It was better to be sure. You want that scar tissue as tough as it can be.
I turned the outside lights on and went and had a look around the porch. None of the boards in the decking was loose, and I couldn't see how there could be much of a crawl space underneath. There was a large wooden box around one side, but a tiring couple of minutes established it held nothing but firewood and spiders. I walked down the couple of steps to the yard, took a few paces back, and stared irritably up at the house.
Chimney, horizontal boards, windowpanes. The upper rooms. Their bedroom. The guest room.
I went back inside. As I passed my father's study, something caught the corner of my eye. I stopped, took a pace back, and looked in, not certain what I had seen. I got it after a second or two: the VCR.
Like an idiot, I hadn't actually looked inside either of the tape machines. I checked the one in the living room first. It was empty. Then I walked into the study, bent down and peered at the machine until I found the Eject button. I pressed it and there was an irritable whirring sound, but nothing happened. Then I realized this was because there was black duct tape across the slot.
As a warning not to put a tape in, or to prevent my father from doing so accidentally? Hardly — if the machine was screwed, he'd just replace it.
I tried pulling the tape off, but it was of a strength sufficient to bond planets together. I got my knife out of my jacket pocket. It has two blades. One is large and sharp and designed for cutting things. The other is a screwdriver. It's surprising how often you need one right after the other. I flipped the sharp blade out and sliced through the centre of the tape.
There was something inside the slot. I cut and pulled at the remaining obstruction until the Eject button
worked. The machine whirred aggressively, and popped its slot.
It ejected a videotape, a standard VHS. I took it out and stared at it for a long time.
As I was slowly straightening up, my father called from the stairs.
'Ward? Is that you?' he said.
After a moment of light-headed shock, my body tried to move quickly toward a safe place it evidently believed existed somewhere else. It wanted to be some other place altogether. It didn't know where. Perhaps Alabama. It tried every direction at once, to be on the safe side.
I leapt backward, dropping the tape and coming close to sprawling full-length on the floor. I snatched the tape up from the ground and stuffed it in my pocket, doing so barely consciously, feeling caught and guilty and in danger. Footsteps made their way up the last few stairs, paused for a moment, and then headed toward the study door. I didn't want to see who made them.
It hadn't been my father, of course. Just a voice that wasn't entirely dissimilar, coming out of nowhere in a quiet house. The person I saw on the landing was Harold Davids, looking old and nervous and bad-tempered.
'Goodness,' he said. 'You scared the life out of me.'
I breathed out like a cough. 'Tell me about it.'
Davids's eyes drifted down to my hands, and I realized that I was still holding my knife. I flipped the
blade back in, started to drop it in my pocket, realized the tape was there.
'What are you doing here?' I asked, trying to sound polite.
'I got your message from this afternoon,' he said, slowly raising his eyes back up to look at my face. 'I
called the hotel. You weren't in your room, so I wondered if you might be here.'
'I didn't hear the doorbell.'
'The front door was ajar,' he said, somewhat testily. 'I became concerned that someone might have
heard the house was unoccupied, and broken in.'
'No,' I said. 'It's just me.'
'So I see. I shall consider the crisis over.' He raised a good-humoured eyebrow, and my heartbeat
slowly returned to normal.
Back in the hall he asked why I'd called. I said it was nothing, a minor point in the will's legalese that I'd subsequently puzzled out for myself. He nodded distantly and wandered through into the sitting room.
'Such a lovely room,' he said, after a moment. 'I shall miss it. I'll stop by every now and then, if I may, for any residual mail.'
'Great.' I didn't bear him any ill will, but I didn't want to spend any more time in the house. I went back up to my father's study to turn off the computer. I'd noticed earlier that he had a ffiz! drive, and on impulse I dumped a backup onto the disk in the machine.
By the time I'd turned it all off and gone back out, Davids was standing at the front door, looking brisk once again.
I walked with him down the path. He seemed in no hurry to get back to his business, and asked about my plans for the house. I told him I didn't know whether I'd be keeping or selling it, and accepted the implied offer of his services in either event. We stood by his big black car for a further five minutes, talking about something or other. I think he might have been giving me restaurant recommendations. I wasn't feeling hungry any more.
In the end he lowered himself into the driver's seat and strapped in with the thoroughness of a man who had no intention of dying, ever. He took a last look up at the dark shape of the house, and then nodded gravely at me. I suspected that something between us had changed, and wondered whether Davids had filed for later consideration the question of what Don Hopkins's son might be doing with a
knife that was so clearly not ornamental. I waited until he was safely round the corner, and then ran to my car and drove the other way.
6
A small amount of money and only a little flattery got me a VCR in my room. Either the hotel was better than I'd thought, or my stunt in the bar had convinced the management that I was a guest whose needs were worth meeting. I waited with increasing impatience while a monumentally stupid youth made a mess of a very simple cabling job, and then shooed him out.
I took the tape from my pocket, and carefully inspected it. There was no writing on it anywhere. From the amount of videotape on the spool, it looked like it would run to about fifteen or twenty minutes, half an hour at the most.
I waited until my room-service coffee arrived. I wanted my environment just so. Eventually it came, still fairly warm. Miraculously, there were no fries with it.
I put the tape in the machine.
Four seconds of data hash, the white noise of null information.
Then the sound of wind, and a view of a high mountain pasture. In the distance, a postcard view of snow-covered peaks across a range — seen too briefly to identify. The foreground was a gentle slope covered in snow, cut off by a stern-looking building: no obvious coffee shop, or ski-wear emporium. There was no one around, no cars in the small lot. Out of season. The camera panned to show another administrative-looking structure, and severe grey clouds above. This view was held for a few seconds, the sound of a sleeve flapping in the wind discernible in the background.