He wanted to do some research on his great-uncle, but found himself drawn first to the murders at his mother's house. It wasn't hard to find information in the San Francisco Chronicle, since it was a scary and so far inexplicable murder in a quiet neighborhood. It had even made the front page the first day, although only a couple of paragraphs actually showed up below the fold, with most of the article buried deep in the front section.
The pictures of the unfortunate Marsh couple jogged his memory. They were younger than he had remembered, in their late twenties. She had been the pretty one with the short skirt, and now he remembered her husband, too, although the man hadn't said much, had mostly checked messages on his cell phone while the agent led them around. In fact, the only thing he really remembered anyone saying was the real estate agent talking about what a lovely "starter house" it would be. And apparently they had agreed, since he had their money in the bank right now.
Starter house. Ending house.
He pushed away the unpleasant thought, suddenly struck by something else. Was there some way the deal could be rescinded, by their parents or something? Who would own it now? They couldn't make him pay the money back, could they? It was a petty thought, perhaps, but the two hundred thousand wasn't petty to him, and it was already less than that because he'd put down the first and last on the cabin, not to mention other living expenses.
Nothing he could do now. Maybe he'd call the real estate company later, check with them.
The articles talked a lot about what the neighbors thought — Mrs. Kraley was even quoted as saying, "This neighborhood is going downhill. You just don't know what kind of people are around," which Theo took with a sort of sour pride as referring almost as much to himself as to the actual murderers. Of the killings themselves very little was said, except that they were characterized as "brutal" and "senseless." Mrs. Kraley, with a keen eye for what was really important, also complained that the murderer had apparently thrown garbage all over the lawn and front porch. The police had not offered any possible motive beyond robbery, but it didn't say in the article if anything had been stolen.
The newspapers had nothing more to offer, and Theo was beginning to feel like a bit of a ghoul. He moved over to the microfiche machine and decided he might as well see if they had anything about his great-uncle.
He found two newspaper articles, which was more success than he'd really expected. One seemed to be a character piece from the Examiner, written in the early Seventies, the other was Dowd's obituary. As Theo browsed through the longer piece, struggling a bit with the machine's white-on-black text, he was surprised by how sad he was to know that Eamonn Dowd was really dead. It would have been very surprising if he hadn't been — the article confirmed his earlier guess that Dowd had been born at the end of the nineteenth century, so he would have been over a hundred by now — but in the past weeks Theo had come to feel very closely connected to him. The article, which seemed to be little more than one of those interesting-local-old-person puff pieces, was accompanied by a picture of his great-uncle in what the caption called his "study," but because of the microfiche it was essentially a photographic negative and Theo could make little of it. Eamonn Dowd seemed to have been slender and dapper at the time the picture was taken, and perhaps a bit younger-looking than his seventy years of age would have suggested, but it was impossible to be sure about any of it.
The obituary had no photograph — Great-Uncle Eamonn hadn't been important enough for that. It was also terse. Theo wondered who'd written it, and why. Had it been a kind of guilt-gesture from his mother after receiving the money? She was mentioned.
Eamonn A. Dowd, 76
adventurer and world traveler
Eamonn Albert Dowd, who spent much of his early life traveling the world, and much of his later life sharing his stories with others, died April 30th at his home in San Francisco. He was 76.
Mr. Dowd, who contributed to travel magazines and the travel section of this newspaper, and also spoke at libraries and schools, first went to sea at age 15 and never lost his love of exotic places.
The obituary continued with an abbreviated version of what Great-Uncle Eamonn had described in the notebook, and ended with the information that he was survived by "his niece Anna Dowd Vilmos of San Francisco, and other family in the Chicago area."
Theo sat back, staring at the screen without really seeing it any more. "Anna Dowd Vilmos of San Francisco" — it made his mother sound like someone from a famous family, like one of the old Nob Hill socialite crowd or something.
So old Uncle Eamonn was definitely dead. The obituary didn't specify, but since he'd died at his home it must have been a stroke or heart attack or something.
Feeling a bit unsatisfied, although he should have been delighted to find anything at all — it wasn't like they really were a famous family or anything — Theo located an open computer and did some searching on the Internet. He wasn't hunting more information on his great-uncle, since there wasn't any, but on some of the more obscure things and places mentioned in the notebook. He lost himself for a while in the realm of online fairy information, land of both the scholarly and the stunningly credulous, but mostly just of dippy unicorn-poets with too much time on their hands.
When he pulled himself away from the computer at last he discovered that the woman at the reference desk had gone to lunch or gone home; in either case, she'd been replaced by a glowering man with a hearing aid, so asking her out was going to have to be a long-term process whether he wanted it to be or not.
He stopped for lunch at a café near a bookstore on the El Camino, purchased copies of Graves' The White Goddess, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and a book about the Beatles, then stopped at a mall and prowled around the L. L. Bean store. He bought himself a Coleman lantern and a good flashlight in case the power went out up on the hill, and briefly considered an expensive parka — it would get cold up there when the winter came — but it was impossible to manufacture enthusiasm in summery early September for buying an expensive, heavy parka. After all, he had his trusty leather jacket, companion on many an adventure. Well, on many an excursion, anyway, some of them embarrassingly stupid when you'd reached thirty and thought back on things.
Theo realized he was stalling. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a six-pack of Heineken, then rode back up the hill in a slanting afternoon glare.
He sat with the book across his lap and three beers under his belt, tired and still heavy with the sense of impending… not doom, that was too strong a word, but impending something. It was cold in the cabin, but he didn't have the energy to get up and turn on the heater. He lifted his motorcycle jacket off the floor and pulled it on.
He was losing patience with his great-uncle's book. The descriptions were interesting, even fascinating: whatever other faults Dowd might have had as a writer, he definitely had an imagination. But the tales of his life in the fairy-city were just as anecdotal and, ultimately, pointless as his stories of real-life adventure. The book was a strange and probably hopelessly uncommercial mixture of fantasy-without-adventure (not real adventure anyway, the kind the Dungeons-and-Dragons kids wanted) and authoritative traveler's guide to a place no one could ever actually visit.
He was only fifty or sixty close-written pages from the ending now, and found himself skipping ahead, distracted by thoughts of what other people would be doing on a beautiful Thursday night like this — getting ready to go out, see a movie, go to a bar. What if he had just asked out the woman at the library? She hadn't had a name tag, so he couldn't even construct an imaginary dialogue. What would someone like her be called? Eleanor? Elizabeth?