Part 47 (1/2)
After he's had a minute to consider all that he's just been told, Andrew asks: ”Why didn't you mention any of this when we spoke to you on the phone two years ago?”
”Well, I did try to talk to you about what had happened to Horace, but you were pretty determined to avoid the subject.”
”I know we didn't want to talk about him,” Andrew says, ”but -- the part about Dr. Kroft, and our having escaped from the Psychiatric Center -- you didn't bring that up at all.” He pauses. ”Is that. . .
am I a fugitive, because of that?”
”Well,” Chief Bradley says, ”I wouldn't recommend you getting pulled over for a traffic stop in Ann Arbor -- or anywhere else in the state, for that matter. But no one's actively searching for you, and I'm not going to make any calls. I did check with the Was.h.i.+ngton state police two years ago, to see whether you'd gotten into any more trouble out there. But you hadn't, and you sounded sane enough to me on the phone, so I decided to let that matter rest. You had enough to concern you, I thought, with your mother pa.s.sing. As for your 'multiple personality disorder' -- I won't pretend to believe in that, but if you feel a need to playact at being someone else, I guess that's understandable.” His expression becomes grave. ”I am very sorry, you know, not to have caught on to Horace's nature a whole lot sooner. Not seeing the truth in time to protect you -- that's got to be one of my biggest failures. I can't tell you how much I regret it.” This apology sounds heartfelt, but somehow it also strikes Mouse as perfunctory.
Maybe it's just the speed with which the chief, having uttered it, moves on to another topic: ”So. . . have you been up to your old house yet?”
”Yes,” Andrew says. ”Briefly.”
”That's another thing I have to apologize for. I've tried to keep the condition of the property up since your mother died, on the chance you'd change your mind about wanting it, but there's a limit to what I could do. That foundation was in trouble for years, and during the big rains we had last fall. . .”
”You should have just let it fall over.”
”Don't talk that way,” Chief Bradley says, chagrined. ”Your mother loved that house.”
”Well I don't love it,” Andrew replies. ”I appreciate you trying to keep it for me, Chief Bradley, but I still don't want it. I never will.”
”Well that's fine, Andrea, but in that case you should sell it, not just abandon it. . .” Andrew starts to shake his head and the chief adds: ”Hey, I'd buy it if the price was right.”
”Why would you want to buy a house that's falling down?”
”Parts of it are still salvageable. And the land is worth something.” Chief Bradley shrugs, as if it's not that big a deal to him, but Mouse gets the feeling that it actually is a big deal, and the chief just doesn't want Andrew jacking up the price. ”Something for you to think about, maybe,” he says. ”Now that you've had your questions answered, do you plan on staying in town for a while?”
”I don't know,” Andrew says. ”I don't really have a plan.”
”Constance McCloy just opened a bed-and-breakfast up on Two Seasons Lake. The rates are very reasonable.”
Andrew shakes his head. ”If we do stay in the area, I won't be sleeping here in town. Muskegon is close enough.”
”Suit yourself,” says the chief. ”Maybe. . . if you like, you could come to dinner at my house one night. We could discuss a fair price for the property. You remember Oscar Reyes?”
”I. . . know who he is.”
”He's on vacation right now, but he owes me a few favors. He could help arrange the t.i.tle transfer.”
”I'll think about it,” Andrew says. ”I guess I know where to reach you.”
Chief Bradley smiles for the first time in the entire conversation. ”The job has its privileges.” He stands up and offers his hand. Andrew shakes with him. The chief doesn't bother to say good-bye to Mouse.
”I didn't like him,” Mouse says, when they are back in the Centurion.
”Oh, I don't know,” says Andrew. ”He seemed like a nice enough person.”
”He was sorrier about the condition of the house than he was about what your stepfather did to you.”
”Maybe he's afraid to feel too sorry about that. If he admits to himself how bad it really was, it makes it harder to live with not having put a stop to it.”
”Maybe,” says Mouse. ”I still think it was rude, asking to buy the house from you that way. And the way he was acting, pretending like he wasn't really interested -- is it possible the house has some hidden value that you don't know about?”
”You mean like gold deposits under the backyard?” Andrew is politely skeptical. ”I doubt it, Penny.”
”Are you going to sell it to him?”
”I might. I definitely don't want to keep it.”
”Well you shouldn't just give it away,” Mouse argues. ”Don't sell it too cheaply.”
”I'm not going to sell it at all, just yet. . . what I'd like to do now, if you're up for it, is go back out to the property and finish looking around.”
”You still have questions?”
”Nothing specific,” Andrew says. ”I'm off the hook for the stepfather's death, and that's the most important thing, but. . . something still feels unsettled. Whatever it is, I want to figure it out, and set it right, so I don't ever have to come back to Seven Lakes again.”
”I understand,” says Mouse, and starts the car.
27.
The replacement coffee table that Andy Gage's mother had bought after the stepfather's death had a top made of wood, not gla.s.s. That's no big surprise, I guess, although when I first lifted up the sheet that covered it, there was a part of me that was expecting to find, not just a gla.s.s coffee table, but the gla.s.s coffee table, either painstakingly pieced back together or magically restored. Even after recognizing that the table was new, I still had to run my hand over its surface, checking for cracks and bloodstains. Of course I found nothing, and the rug underneath the coffee table was likewise unblemished; I resisted an urge to examine the floorboards.
”Well. . .” I said, dropping the dust cover back in place. ”Let's look around.”
The living room took up roughly a quarter of the cottage's ground floor, its inside corner dominated by a big brick fireplace. As I've already mentioned, the wall opposite the vestibule had an open doorway that led into the kitchen; but if you turned right from the vestibule, you encountered another door, one that was held closed by the cottage's leftward tilt.
”That was their bedroom,” my father told me. The way he said it didn't make me anxious to look inside, but I was still determined to be bold, or at least act bold, so I stepped to the door and opened it before I had a chance to get scared.
The air in the bedroom was close and musty, though not as much as I would have expected after two and a half years. I wondered if Chief Bradley, as part of his effort to keep the place up, had aired it out occasionally. The bed was only a full-size, which bothered me for some reason; maybe it was the thought of anyone, even a bad mother, being forced to lie in such close proximity to a monster like the stepfather. Besides the bed, there was a dresser, a small vanity table, a nightstand supporting a lamp with a dented shade, and a TV set balanced precariously on a wicker pedestal. Beneath the sheets that covered them, I could make out the shapes of standing photo frames and other personal effects on both the dresser top and the vanity; those would probably warrant further investigation later, but for now I turned left and crossed to another pair of doors. One door opened on a closet, the other on a bathroom.
The bathroom was cramped but managed to contain both a toilet and a tub.
”Is this. . . ?” I started to ask, and my father finished for me: ”The only bathroom in the house?
Yes.”
So any time Andy Gage had wanted to take a bath or use the toilet, he'd have had to come through Horace Rollins's bedroom. And -- I checked -- the door had no lock. All at once Adam's and Aunt Sam's fanaticism about shower privileges -- not to mention my father's great pleasure at being able to take a private s.h.i.+t in his own bathroom -- made perfect sense.
”Andrew?” Penny called. Hanging back, she'd only come a few steps into the bedroom. ”What is it?”
”Just another reason not to like this house.”
We went back out to the living room and moved on into the kitchen. This was the brightest and technically the cheeriest room in the cottage, although I found it cold. It was an eat-in kitchen, with a round table and four chairs. The table and three of the chairs had been draped in a sheet, but the fourth chair had been pulled out into the middle of the room and left uncovered. Curious, I ran a finger over the seat; it was clean, not dusty.
I went over to the back door, and looked out into the yard behind the cottage. Like the front yard, it had been mowed. There were more garden plots, roughly outlined with borders of flagstone, but unlike the flower beds out front, these plots had not been planted recently, and contained only weeds.