The Dark House

by John Sedgwick

  THE DARK HOUSE

  A NOVEL

  JOHN SEDGWICK

  For Josie

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T. S. Eliot

  from “Little Gidding”

  in FOUR QUARTETS

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  One

  “Eleven thirty-eight P.M,” Rollins said quietly into the tiny Panasonic…

  Two

  “Well, you’re getting a lot of work done, I see.”

  Three

  It was past eleven when he returned to his own…

  Four

  Rollins kept the tapes of his pursuits, filed by date…

  Five

  The more they talked, the more certain Rollins became that…

  Six

  The house was a two-story Cape, somewhat run-down, with cracked…

  Seven

  Someone was banging on Rollins’ front door. At first, the…

  Eight

  Rollins felt feverish that night. He was afraid that he’d…

  Nine

  It kept raining, off and on, the next day, too.

  Ten

  Schecter’s card in Rollins’ Rolodex was slightly yellowed. It had…

  Eleven

  Back in the Nissan, Rollins continued on down the road…

  Twelve

  “I should have all these locks,” Marj said as Rollins…

  Thirteen

  Marj was silent, hand to mouth, waiting.

  Fourteen

  That night, Rollins was certain he’d never felt so hot,…

  Fifteen

  There was a pounding from somewhere far away, then a…

  Sixteen

  Joey’s was an old-fashioned fish place on Atlantic Avenue, a…

  Seventeen

  At the hotel that night, Rollins and Marj cuddled together…

  Eighteen

  It was well after three when Rollins and Marj reached…

  Nineteen

  Rollins turned away from Marj to face the wall, where…

  Twenty

  Rollins called Schecter from the pay phone near the pizza…

  Twenty-one

  They went into the Burger King on 102, hardly Rollins’…

  Twenty-two

  Outside the restaurant, the night sky seemed deeper now, the…

  Twenty-three

  The stately Maple Hill retirement center glowed yellow amid its…

  Twenty-four

  She landed on her side, her head and shoulder on…

  Twenty-five

  Rollins stood there for several minutes, staring at his father’s…

  Twenty-six

  “Hey—you okay?”

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  “Eleven thirty-eight P.M.,” Rollins said quietly into the tiny Panasonic in his palm. “North on 93, just past Exit 32. The Audi’s two ccars up, holding steady at”—he glanced down at the speedometer—“about fifty-seven, fifty-eight miles an hour.” The Audi was navy blue, or possibly black, with green-on-white Massachusetts plates. Rollins put the tape recorder down by the newspaper on the passenger seat of his Nissan. As far as he could tell, the Audi was occupied only by the driver, who was thin and fiftyish and had a look of concentration that was unusual for this time of night. Because the man was wearing a suit coat and unfashionable glasses, Rollins at first had guessed banking. Then he spotted an umbrella on the rear dash, and he reconsidered. Insurance? After all, the forecast had said nothing of rain, just the endless steam heat so typical for Boston in late July.

  The trees were set well back from the raised highway, opening up a wide night sky. A blurry moon rose through the glass by his left shoulder. Before him, the asphalt gleamed like open water. As Rollins followed along, he knew enough to keep out of the Audi’s rearview mirrors, both center and side. He was sensitive that way, almost as if his skin were allergic to another’s sight. He stayed well back, and one lane over, to make it clear that he just happened to be traveling this road tonight. His slim hands curled lightly on the wheel, Rollins was ready to move when the Audi moved. It was a kind of dance, Rollins supposed. A dance with a shadow.

  On a pursuit, Rollins never flipped on talk radio or whistled, as he might do at other times—when he was staring at the stock prices floating across the bottom of his computer screen at the office, say, or sitting in the big chair by the phone in his apartment. He didn’t want to break the mood of the evening by cutting the white noise that enveloped him. He was comforted by the steady drone of his engine, the wavelike rush of passing cars, the buzz of the tires on the asphalt, the whoosh of humid air from the vents. Inside the Nissan, he felt snug as an astronaut, tidily enclosed in his bubble of glass and steel. But keyed up, too, on the cusp of a new adventure.

  Rollins couldn’t know where the driver of the Audi had been before their paths first crossed in front of the Mid-Nite Convenient newsstand, with its red awning, in Somerville’s Union Square some miles back. The man’s past was a blank, and the car bore no SOCCER MOM bumper sticker, no Northeastern University parking pass to help fill out a history. Only his future could be known. So different from the way life generally worked, Rollins mused with a shake of the head. The only thing noteworthy about the Audi’s exterior was a slight dent on the housing of the left rear wheel. “The kind of ding you get in a parking lot,” he told the recorder. “Nothing major.”

  In Rollins’ experience, people rarely went anywhere just once. Rather, their lives were an endless loop of going, coming back, and going again. Most likely, where the man in the Audi was going was where he had come from. He was returning to his source. By now, Rollins was something of an expert on Boston’s greater metropolitan area, its thoroughfares, one-way streets and cul-de-sacs. He knew precisely where one town ended and another began; and he grasped the subtle differences between exclusive Wellesley, say, and reclusive Weston, which lay right beside it. And of course, it meant even more to see the exact neighborhood within the town, and still more to see which street.

  And what sort of house? A gated estate in Beverly Farms, on Massachusetts’s gilded North Shore, where the driveways are a half mile long? Rollins had had a comfortable childhood in a big house on a private road in upper-class Brookline, and he was always on the lookout for one of his own, just to see how that person had managed it. Or would it be a more traditional suburban home—with a tight yard, neighbors pressing in on either side? Were there kids in the picture? Would a voice call down to him from an upstairs window when Rollins’s man came home? If so, would it be accented? With luck, Rollins might spot other revealing details—some Spanish artwork in the bedroom, or a projection TV in the paneled den, or antique doll furniture arrayed on the living room mantelpiece. Small points, but telling ones to him.

  He clicked on the tape recorder again. “Eleven forty-seven. Passing Exit 33, no change in speed.” So his subject was not the Exit 33 type after all. That is, not one to take the Fellsway up to Stoneham, with its tract houses, its drab Redstone Shopping Center, its tiny zoo, seventeen baseball fields (Rollins had once passed a slow evening counting them), mediocre schools, three cemeteries, and Empire Bowl-a-drome, so favored by overweight smokers. Likewise exits 34, 35, 36, 37A and B, 38, and 39.

  Past Exit 39, however, twenty miles north of Boston, where signs of roadside activity finally started to thin, the Audi signaled for a right turn, its blinker impatient, Germanic. (Rollins could write an interesting monograph on
taillights: their flame-colored stripes, circles, dots, and wraparound curves were so much more variable and expressive than those tedious twin orbs of white up front.) After an interval that affirmed his man’s deliberate nature, the Audi moved gently to the right lane and slowed to fifty. Rollins, in the far left, eased off the gas and shifted two lanes over. He could feel a film of sweat where his fingers touched the steering wheel. He was closing in. The Audi turned at Exit 40, eastbound on Route 62. “Twelve oh-three,” Rollins said, glancing at the dashboard clock. “East on 62. The Audi seems to be slowing a little, so I think I’ll stay back.”

  Route 62 led past a sand and gravel supply yard, its great mounds of earth dark except for a few security lights, then wound around through several ill-landscaped subdevelopments. The Audi’s turn signal flashed again, and the car made a quick left, then—this time without signaling—a right, and another right, finally turning onto a tree-lined street.

  “Something’s a little off here,” Rollins whispered into the Panasonic. He didn’t like that last flurry of turns. Plus, he’d cast his man as a homecoming father. But he could tell when an individual was driving into a neighborhood as a visitor or as a resident: Visitors grope their way along, while residents steam through as if they know every turn in the road. The driver of the Audi was definitely groping. More perplexing still, the car halted in front of a split-level ranch that had some ersatz grillwork over the windows and faux medieval paneling on the front door. It couldn’t go for more than $175,000, well below the price range suggested by the Audi. It seemed to be the residence of an aspiring middle-manager, or a department supervisor with a single income. Rollins stopped several houses back on the other side of the street, cut the engine, and killed the headlights.

  The dome light inside the Audi flashed on for a moment as the driver opened the car door. He was more gaunt than Rollins expected, with thinning hair and a wispy mustache he had not noticed before. His suit wasn’t badly cut. Rollins upped his salary estimate into the eighty-to ninety-thousand-dollar range. The gaunt man took a quick, nervous look around as he stepped out of the car—another unexpected move for a homecoming father. He paused momentarily as he surveyed Rollins’ car. Rollins stopped breathing. But the man turned back to the Audi, closed the door, and made his way up the limestone walkway to the front steps. At the door, he fished in his pocket and pulled out a single key. He slid it into the lock, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.

  There is a rhythm to such entries. Rollins had seen hundreds. At this hour, he typically would wait no more than three seconds for the lights to come on. But three seconds passed, then ten, then thirty. A full minute went by, and still no light burned in the house. That got Rollins’ pulse going. It was conceivable that his man had somehow gone straight to bed in the dark. It was also possible that he had walked to the back of the house, or down into the basement, where he might have flipped on a light that did not shine onto the street.

  A more alarming thought formed in Rollins’ mind: that the man was fully aware of his presence, and had been for some time. And that the driver was, at this very moment, staring out at Rollins from the darkness, performing his own evaluation, for his own ends. Light was everything at night. One saw from the darkness into the light. The lighter environment was the one observed. If the house remained dark, Rollins could be the subject. His intestines turned watery, and his skin felt flushed and prickly. He was being watched. He could feel it.

  Five minutes flickered past on the dashboard clock; it felt like an hour, or a day. His arm heavy, Rollins flipped the switch on the interior light so that it wouldn’t shine when he opened the door and slowly released the door handle to step out of his car. He went around to the sidewalk and strode away from the house to give his man, if he was indeed watching, the impression that he, Rollins, wasn’t interested in that house at all. No, sir, not at all! Once he was out of sight, he crossed the street and walked around the house’s block to view the back of the dark house through the rustling trees. It was completely black against the gauzy night sky. Circling the block to return to the dark house from the other direction, he put his hands in his khaki pockets to convey casualness while he peered as far around to the back as he could out of the corner of his eye without actually turning his head. The neighboring houses screened off some of his view, but, again, every window in the house that he could see was pitch black.

  Rollins returned to his Nissan. “No lights on in the house,” he told the tape recorder somewhat breathlessly. “I just looked around from the back. Not one light. Jesus.” He watched the house through the driver’s-side window. A few cars went by, and a jogger in a reflecting vest chugged along the sidewalk, but otherwise nothing changed. “All right,” he said, starting the car. “Twelve fifty-three. I need a toilet.” It was the night’s last entry.

  Two

  “Well, you’re getting a lot of work done, I see.”

  Rollins swiveled around in his chair. It was Marj, the new girl in an adjacent cubicle. She had two earrings in each ear, auburn hair that Rollins was pretty sure was not her natural color, and, apparently, a hunger for attention. She was twenty-seven, he knew from her job application, and, to judge by the unadorned ring finger, single. And, for reasons he wasn’t quite clear about, she seemed to have been trying, from the moment she arrived two months ago, to befriend him. At present, she was wearing a black skirt slit a couple of inches up the side, a tight green blouse and matching eyeliner, which, for a man like Rollins, was probably not the right way to go about it.

  “You’ve been staring out the window for, like, the last half hour.” Marj leaned up against the edge of his desk and plucked a pencil out of the pencil holder to drum against his desktop. “What’s the matter, out late last night?”

  “Not terribly.” Every tap on the desktop pounded directly on Rollins’ brain.

  Marj chewed her lip. A fold of her skirt slanted across her pelvis. One of her high heels tipped sideways.

  “Mind if I ask you a question?” Rollins asked finally.

  Marj brightened. “Shoot.”

  “When you come home at night, do you turn on the lights?”

  Marj crossed her arms in front of her chest, a gesture seemingly designed to protect her from a man she may have wildly misjudged. “Usually.”

  “I’m serious—do you?”

  “Yeah, I turn on the lights.” Marj looked at him warily, her blondish eyebrows furled in horizontal S’s.

  “Even if you’re going straight to bed?”

  “Sure.”

  “Always?”

  “Yeah, always,” she replied, her voice rising. “Or I might bump into something. I’m not a freaking bat.” She gave out a little crackle of a laugh, as if to discharge some accumulated voltage. “Why all the crazy questions?”

  “Oh, just research. You’ve been most helpful.” He smiled. “Thanks.”

  Marj remained where she was. “Research? What kind?”

  “General.”

  Normally, Rollins would have taken Marj’s puzzled look as a perverse kind of compliment and let it go at that. He liked being secretive, even a little squirrelly, at times. But the possibility of having been watched last night had sobered him. He took a breath while he contemplated the matter. “Okay, I saw someone go into a house last night without turning on the lights. I was thinking about it just now. I thought it was odd.”

  “That the sort of thing you think about?”

  “Sometimes.”

  There was a pause in the conversation as Marj pondered that. “Which house?”

  Rollins told Marj the full story that afternoon over lunch at a soup-and-salad place named Georgio’s. He hadn’t meant to tell her—or anyone. He’d planned to file away the night’s tape with all the others on the long row over his bed. A subject for future review, perhaps, but not active concern. Yet the sight of the dark house—as he’d come to think of it—had stayed with him. More than that, it seemed to grow in his memory, like a plant that had acciden
tally been released in a new, more favorable environment. What was, in fact, a stubby suburban ranch house had now taken on some of the characteristics of a towering Gothic. The whole business seemed somehow momentous, and he wasn’t sure where to go with it. He spoke to his brother in Indianapolis on occasion, but never about anything like this. There were other, more distant, relatives around, like Aunt Eleanor and Uncle George out in the western suburbs, but they were hardly confidants. He’d had his crowd at Williams (fellow classics majors and black-and-white film buffs mostly), plus a few holdovers from prep school. But the gang had drifted to New York since college, and the truth was, he found himself a little short on genuine friends at present.

  That decided it. She was right there, and, despite her quasi-punk appearance, she seemed genuinely curious. Plus, the fact that he barely knew the first thing about her (and, presumably, vice versa) made him think she might be a harmless recipient of his news. Some history was operating here: He’d once confided in a young woman on a train to New York City, revealing to her a few details of his driving life that he attributed to a nameless friend. The woman seemed mildly intrigued, especially once Rollins made it clear that his friend was not some scuzzy peeping tom, but rather a kind of cultural anthropologist. She said that Rollins’ friend reminded her of a distant cousin in Washington state who used a radio scanner to monitor police reports. “Kind of an interesting guy, actually,” the woman said. Rollins had been so encouraged, he thought that he might try to get together with the woman for a drink in the city, but it turned out she was continuing on to Philadelphia. He never did get her name. Still, he left the train whistling; it had been so wonderful to unburden himself.