Joey saw me looking at these, so I asked what they were.
His eyes got wide as he told me, “King-things!”
“Huh?”
“Watch this,” he told me, walking over to one of the wooden plants—they looked sort of like pineapples, but without the leaves on top. He took hold of it, and, to my surprise, it lifted right off the railing. Attached to the bottom of the plant was a round wooden stick, maybe a couple of feet long, that slipped out of a hole drilled in the top of the banister. “They’re all this way,” Joey explained, then lifted it in the air, kind of like a drum major. “See?” he said. “It’s a king-thing.” He started marching around the room with it, waving at unseen crowds with his other hand, and you could practically see some big furry cape hanging from his neck. I have to admit, it was pretty funny, and he liked it when I laughed, but he himself couldn’t laugh—he was the king, and I guess kings have to be serious.
He kept this up for a while, but as far as I was concerned, the game was over. (It was sort of babyish, if you ask me.) So I ambled around the room looking at things, touching things, and I decided it was the most beautiful room I’d ever seen. I hoped that someday I could live in a place like this, which didn’t look anything like the house where Mom and I lived at home in Illinois.
Like the kitchen, the big room was clean and tidy, but clearly not lived in. The rooms were kept this way for a reason, I figured, but I had no idea why. It was as if someone had gone away, and these rooms—separate from the rest of the house, a home in and of themselves—were being kept presentable so that they might be rented or something. I asked Joey, “Who lived here?”
He stopped marching around and thought for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s always been this way. Hazel comes up and cleans now and then, and Hank fixes things that need fixing. I like to come up and look around or snoop out the window or play king, but otherwise”—he slipped the king-thing back into its hole—“no one’s ever up here.”
“They’re artichokes,” I heard Neil telling the crowd, and I snapped out of my thoughts. I’d been so wrapped up in my recollection of first seeing the upstairs great room, I could not now remember climbing the front stairs with the others—but there I was. Neil had his hand on one of the banister’s carved wooden finials. “They were a common motif,” he explained, “at the time the house was built, but it’s not typical of the Prairie School. Interesting. And the Palladian window—really just a huge, simple lunette—is out of character for Prairie-style residences, though these were sometimes used in commercial structures.”
I reminded him, “When Professor Tawkin bought the house three years ago, it was the window that intrigued him most. He saw it as a key selling point.”
“To each his own,” Neil conceded. “It’s a stunning view, though.”
It was. The panorama that day looked much as it had on the afternoon when I first saw it with Joey, except that there were no longer fields on the horizon—Dumont had grown. We all stood facing the window, cooing at the vista, save Thad, who’d have walked on coals before showing the slightest sign of enthusiasm.
Roxanne and Carl, who were seeing the third floor for the first time, were genuinely awed by the space, bringing to mind my own reactions as a child. “My God, Mark,” said Roxanne, “this is fabulous. You could practically live up here.”
I told her, “That’s exactly what Mrs. Tawkin said when we showed her the house before she and the professor bought it. They’re the ones who reopened the front staircase—it had been closed off for years.”
“Really? Why?”
I hesitated. “That’s a long story. Maybe later.”
Suzanne rescued me. “As I recall, you practically did live up here when you visited the family as a boy. Remember, Joey?”
“Yeah,” he said with an ardent nod. “Mark spent all his afternoons up here. I let him use my typewriter.”
Roxanne eyed me askance. “How old were you?”
“Nine,” I answered. “I had just gotten interested in creative writing, and I tried my hand at a few short stories that week. That was a formative period for me, and this space had an influence on it.”
Parker asked, “Did you ever stop to think that there’s a similarity between this space and your loft in Chicago? I mean, the decorating is all different, but the volume of the space is about the same, with the feeling of—what?—an aerie.”
Neil and I chuckled. I told Parker, “As a matter of fact, we’ve discussed that.”
While our conversation continued, Carl wandered about the room, exploring some of its features. From the fireplace he called to us, “Jeez, look at these magnificent andirons.”
The group crossed the room toward him. Roxanne added, “And those tools!” An array of wrought-iron pokers, brushes, shovels, and log forks—each with a long handle topped by a brightly polished heavy brass ball—stood at the ready, warmed in the glow of a picture-perfect fire that burned behind an oversize mesh curtain. She continued. “Those things look like medieval weapons. What a perfect setting this would be for some dastardly crime.”
We all laughed. I admitted, “That’s crossed my mind more than once. Even as a child, I thought of this room as highly ‘mysterious,’ and the little stories I wrote up here were mostly about the room itself: What was it for? Who lived here? What happened up here? And why was the stairway closed off?”
Everyone looked expectantly at me. “Well?” asked Roxanne. “The answers?”
Again I hesitated, and this time I enjoyed tantalizing my audience. Coyly, I informed her, “Maybe later.”
“You turkey,” she told me amid the others’ laughter. “Speaking of which,” she added, “I smell dinner.”
We all did by now, and I realized that I had grown hungry for our midafternoon meal. Checking my watch, I told the others, “It’s not quite time to sit down, but I’ll bet Hazel could use some last-minute help pulling things together. Neil? Could you check downstairs with me?”
“Natch,” he agreed. And Parker joined us, descending the back stairs to the kitchen. As I left the great room, I said to the others, “Please make yourselves at home—you’ve got the run of the house.”
Joey didn’t need further prompting and shot down the front stairs, presumably to spend some time in his old bedroom. Thad went after him. Suzanne hesitated a moment—I think she wanted to visit with Roxanne—then decided she’d better look after Joey and Thad, so she, too, went down the front stairs. Roxanne and Carl remained in the great room, browsing among the books, the busts, and other artifacts.
A short while later, Neil was settled in the kitchen, mastering his technique with a potato slicer. I delivered some serving dishes to the dining room and was arranging them on the table. Parker had just brought more wood from the outdoor shed and was replenishing the dining room fireplace when Suzanne appeared, framed in the portal from the hall. “Anything I can do to help?” she asked.
The offer seemed genuine enough, but I didn’t think that the town’s richest woman (possibly the town’s richest citizen, period) would actually enjoy any form of kitchen duty, so I assured her, “Everything’s under control.” I pulled one of the dining chairs sideways for her so we could chat while I fussed with the table. “I hope you’re enjoying the day.”
She sat. “Truly, I am. It’s good to spend some time in the house again, and I’m glad it’s back within the family—you may have built your fame as a Manning, but remember, Mark, you’re half Quatrain.”
“How could I forget—especially here in Dumont?” I’d intended the comment as a meaningless throwaway, but then I realized that it carried a deeper truth. “Actually,” I told Suzanne, “the Quatrains were the only extended family I ever had. I never knew my father’s side of the family.”
She rested back in the chair, thinking. “When did Mark senior die?”
(Yes, there were three men in my family who shared the name Mark: myself, my father, and my cousin.)
“I was only three,” I t
old her. “I barely remember him.”
“What a shame. I’m sorry I never met him.”
Joey burst into the room. “Guess what Thad and I found!” Joey’s appearance startled Parker, who had been methodically stoking the fireplace, his back to Suzanne and me. (As usual, Parker wore khaki that day, and his squatting at the hearth made it difficult for me to concentrate on Suzanne.) At the sound of Joey’s voice, Parker lost his balance momentarily, but he caught himself before toppling. Standing, he clapped the grime of logs from his hands.
Suzanne obligingly asked Joey, “What did you find, dear?”
“A box of my old toys. The Etch A Sketch was broke, but all the model cars are fine. Look.” He held forth a sixties vintage Riviera for her inspection.
Before Suzanne could comment, Hazel entered from the kitchen bearing a stack of small dishes, muttering, “We forgot to set bread plates—what would people think of us?” And she began setting them above the dinner plates.
Joey followed her around the table, sticking the car in front of her face, yammering about the various treasures he had unearthed from the mess in his room. “We even found my typewriter, and I wrote Mark a Christmas card!”
Hazel showed motherly restraint in dealing with the retarded man she had helped rear. “That’s very exciting, Joey,” she told him, placing the eighth plate on the table. “I don’t suppose you found the baby books as well?”
“I’m not real sure what they look—”
Parker interrupted. “Baby books?”
Hazel told him, “The previous owners ran across the three Quatrain children’s baby books. They left them behind, but we’re not sure where. I’d love to have a look at them—sentimental me.” And she fluttered off to the kitchen.
“Oh,” said Parker, and he returned to stoking the fire.
Roxanne and Carl then strolled into the room, and Joey bounded out again, heading upstairs in search of old toys. Carl said to everyone, “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a Christmas more. This charming house, the perfect company”—he hugged Roxanne’s waist—“the wonderful smells coming from that kitchen. Mark, this bodes as a propitious beginning to your new life in Dumont.”
I was about to concur when Roxanne reminded him, and me, “Don’t forget the hate mail.”
“Well, yes,” he granted, “but Marks aid the sheriff dismissed it as…”
“What?” asked Suzanne. She had appeared lost in thought since Hazel left the room, but the talk of hate mail caught her attention. “What happened?”
I told her about the mail that had arrived the day before and about my morning meeting with Sheriff Pierce. “The letters did contain some vague threats, but Pierce felt certain they were groundless.”
“Get this,” said Roxanne, picking up the story. “The mail came from some wacko feminist group.” At that moment I realized that while I had conveyed much of Pierce’s information to Roxanne, I had not told her about the bad blood between Suzanne Quatrain and Miriam Westerman. I hoped that Roxanne wouldn’t take this any further. But she did: “From what Mark tells me, they’re a bunch of lesbian Communists who call themselves Fem-Snach—can you imagine? Their fearless leader is some burned-out hippie named Miriam Westerman.” Then Roxanne thought of something. She asked Suzanne, “Do you happen to know her?”
I held my breath, not knowing what reaction to expect.
Suzanne sat perfectly rigid at the edge of her chair. With a flat inflection, she said through pinched lips, “Never heard of her.”
And that was that. Suzanne again drifted into her thoughts—an almost trancelike state—as Roxanne, Carl, and Parker matched wits in a search for puns regarding Fem-Snach. At a particularly crude juncture in their quipping, Roxanne lowered her voice and said as an aside, “I hope the kid’s not listening,” referring to Thad—but he was somewhere else in the house.
Then their gabbing was interrupted by Suzanne. “Excuse me,” she said, standing. She did not seem upset, merely preoccupied. “Do we still have a few minutes before dinner, Mark?”
“I think so, yes.”
“If you don’t mind,” she said, sidestepping out of the room, “I’d like to go back upstairs.” She was already moving toward the front hall as she explained, “I want to see if I can find something.” And she was gone.
The rest of us exchanged a puzzled shrug; then each set about some last-minute tasks before the official call to dinner. The exact sequence of what happened next is impossible to reconstruct, as the entire household was by then in a state of merry confusion. Hazel, Neil, and I tried to whisk hot food to the table, but countless forgotten details sent us scurrying in different directions for a packed-away platter, a better corkscrew, more peppercorns for an empty mill. Parker was in and out of the house for kindling, fresh holly sprigs for the table, a special lightbulb for the chandelier. Roxanne and Carl had procrastinated wrapping some presents, and they were rushing to secret these under the tree in time for the later festivities. Joey and Thad were all over the house playing hide-and-seek or engaged in some other equally annoying antics. And Suzanne was upstairs in the great room trying to find something.
I must have passed everyone in the halls at one point or another, and there was a procession of people up and down both stairways, with a steady stream of questions asked over disappearing shoulders: Where’s Mom? Where’s Hazel? Where’s Joey? Where’s Thad? Where’s Mark? Where’s Mom?
“Where’s Mom?” asked Thad as we all finally gathered around the table. Hazel had outperformed my most optimistic expectations, delivering a holiday meal that would have sent Norman Rockwell scampering for his brushes. She hovered proudly near the kitchen doorway as we began to settle into our chairs, one of which remained conspicuously empty. Neil asked, “Where is Suzanne?”
“She went upstairs,” I told him, “to see if she could find something.”
Thad sprang from his chair and leaned through the portal into the main hall, yelling, “Hey, Mom!”
The obliging host, I stood, dropped my napkin onto the seat, and told the others, “I’ll get her.” Neil began pouring wine for the others as I left the room and climbed the stairs.
Arriving at the second-floor landing, I leaned on the banister, stretching toward the third-floor great room, and called, “Suzanne? Dinner is served.” But there was no response.
So I climbed the last flight of stairs. I laughed as I emerged into the lofty space above, asking, “Hey, Suzanne, what’s so interes—”
I stopped. Gaped. Caught my breath. At the far side of the room, on the floor near the fireplace, Suzanne lay sprawled on a Persian rug in a syrupy pool of her own blood. “My God”—I inhaled the words unvoiced. Rushing to her side, I knelt and could feel her still-warm blood soaking through my pants to my knees. The side of her head was crushed, presumably bludgeoned by some classic “blunt instrument.” The room contained any number of possible weapons, and the immediate area was littered with several of them: The fireplace tools had been knocked askew. A pair of hefty candlesticks had toppled from a sideboard. A small alabaster bust of de Tocqueville stared at the ceiling, having fallen from nearby shelving amid a pile of other curios and books—there were books everywhere.
And then the shouting started. Wondering where I was, the others had left the dining room and now called to me from both the front and back stairways. They laughed and hooted that they were waiting for us, that dinner was getting cold, that Hazel was getting angry. I wanted to shout that something terrible had happened, that someone should get help, that Suzanne had been killed. But the words stuck in my throat as I stared at my cousin’s pallid, broken face.
An eyelid fluttered! Left for dead, she had willed herself to cling to some few moments of consciousness. Her eye opened and she saw me. Her lips parted. She positioned her tongue between her teeth, preparing to speak, but she was unable to summon the breath for it. I leaned close to her face and cradled her head in my hands, lifting her neck an inch to help her get air. I said, “Tell me, Suzanne.�
�� As the commotion downstairs intensified, she swallowed. Footsteps were bounding up the front stairs when she managed to speak a single word into my ear: “Thad.” Her head went limp, and I knew that her assailant’s work was now finished.
In that same instant, into the room bounded Parker Trent, followed closely by Thad Quatrain. “Hey, Mark,” began Parker. Then, seeing me, he stopped in his tracks, rear-ended by Thad.
I rose and faced them. There was blood on my hands. “I found her,” I explained. “I’m so sorry, Thad.”
With swollen, feral eyes, the boy looked from me, to his mother, then back at me. He freaked, and for the first time in his life he spoke to me, screaming, “You fucking, lying queer!” Then he bolted downstairs to sound the general alarm.
Dumbfounded, I mumbled to Parker, “I heard her dying word. It was ‘Thad.’ But she couldn’t have been accusing him, could she?”
With a purposeful stride, Parker crossed the room toward me. Facing me squarely, he grasped my shoulders and said, “Don’t worry, Mark. I’m here for you. Count on me to say or do whatever it takes to help you solve this.”
Within an hour, Sheriff Douglas Pierce was back at the house. Ironic. That very morning, I’d wrestled with whether to invite him to return later in the day for Christmas dinner. Though I’d decided against it, here he was again, bringing with him not a bottle of wine for our table, but a couple of deputies, a lieutenant detective, and the county coroner.
With his crew busy taking away Suzanne’s body and photographing the crime scene in the upstairs great room, Pierce called the entire household into the living room to discuss what had happened. All eight of us—Neil and me, Roxanne and Carl, Joey and Thad, Parker and Hazel—were assembled on sofas in a semicircle facing the fireplace, where Pierce stood asking questions, taking notes.
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