Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  A few hundred feet past this “lake,” there was another bend in the road, and a sign that said ENTERING SEVEN LAKES. We rounded the curve, and found ourselves on the main street of Andy Gage’s hometown.

  My father and Adam had been out on the pulpit the whole way from Muskegon; now, despite their apprehension—in some cases, terror—other souls began to come forward. Many of them only stepped onto the pulpit long enough for a quick peek before darting back inside the house; the sounds of their coming and going formed a constant shuffle at the back of my mind.

  Penny slowed the car to a crawl, and I examined each building and storefront we passed in turn, waiting on a glimmer of recognition that never came: there was a one-engine firehouse with a sleepy bulldog lazing in the driveway; an Exxon station; a bakery; a diner named Winchell’s; a CD, record, and book exchange; a tiny post office; a barber shop; a clothing store, a tailor’s, and a Laundromat, all in a row in the same brick building; the Seven Lakes police station; a video rental shop; a grocery store; a hardware store; a beauty salon; a couple of shabby-looking antique stores; and a boarded-up, partially dismantled fast-food restaurant that, judging by the outline and the color scheme, had probably been a Kentucky Fried Chicken. All this on the main street; and looking down the cross streets as we passed them, I also saw a pair of churches, a bar, a school, and what was either a library or the town hall.

  I didn’t recognize any of it. Of course there was no reason why I should, but still I’d been expecting something, some sense of familiarity. It seemed like I should know this town, although I’d never been here. But the only recollections I had were secondhand, from the pulpit, where the shuffling of the souls was punctuated by whispers and exclamations about this or that landmark.

  “Which way now?” asked Penny, after we passed the defunct KFC.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Why don’t we—wait! Stop here!”

  The Centurion jerked to a halt in front of what looked like a private house. A wooden shingle hung from the eaves above the front porch; it read “Oscar Reyes, Esq.—Attorney At Law.”

  “A lawyer?” I said, speaking to my father. “I thought you told me he was an exterminator.”

  “He was both,” my father replied. “A lot of people in Seven Lakes have more than one job. His law practice must have picked up a lot since we left, though—this house is new.”

  I turned to Penny: “Can you park here and come inside with me?”

  “You want to hire a lawyer?”

  “No,” I said. “At least, not yet. This may sound a little strange, but I’d like to see if this man reminds you of Xavier at all.”

  “All right…”

  When we got up on the porch, though, there was a note on the front door that said Mr. Reyes was vacationing in Canada and wouldn’t be back until June 1st. Frustrated, I tried to look in through the front windows—looking for what, I can’t say—but the curtains and shades were drawn.

  As Penny and I returned to the car, I noticed a couple of passersby casting glances in our direction from across the street. At first I assumed they were curious because they’d seen us nosing around Mr. Reyes’s house; then I realized that it could be because they thought they knew me. I wasn’t ready to deal with that, so I climbed hurriedly into the car and asked my father for directions to the Gage house.

  I relayed his instructions to Penny: “Straight down this road another three miles. Then we turn left onto a dirt trail, and go another mile and a half through the woods.” The first part went smoothly enough, but when we got to the trail it had been widened and blacktopped, and Penny drove right by it. After my father caught the mistake and we made a U-turn, we discovered that large sections of the woods had been cut down and cleared to make room for new houses. “Huh,” I said; not having seen what it was like before, I couldn’t fully appreciate the extent of the changes, but I got a general sense from my father’s reaction. “Not so isolated anymore.”

  For the final half mile the trail reverted to dirt and the woods came back, pressing in close on both sides. And then, without fanfare, we were there, pulling into the front yard of the house where Andy Gage had lived and died. Penny set the Buick’s parking brake and switched off the engine; we sat there in the sudden stillness—the pulpit had gone dead quiet, too—staring at the house as though it were the bones of a dragon, or some other thing out of myth.

  It was smaller than I’d expected. Not that I’d given it much thought, but I guess, extrapolating from the two houses I was most familiar with—the house in Andy Gage’s head, and Mrs. Winslow’s Victorian—I’d been picturing something fairly substantial, with two or even three floors, and lots of rooms. Instead, the Gage house was what a realtor would optimistically describe as “cozy”: a cottage, basically, with just one story, plus a low-ceilinged attic tucked beneath a shallow-peaked roof.

  The outside walls of the cottage were white, and looked to have been painted since Andy Gage’s mother’s death. And though it was immediately obvious—for a reason I will get to in a moment—that the cottage was not currently occupied, there were other signs of at least intermittent maintenance: the front yard had been mowed recently, and the narrow beds on either side of the front door had been planted with new spring flowers.

  “Do you want to go inside?” Penny asked.

  “No,” I said, meaning: I have to.

  “It might not be safe,” Penny suggested.

  “No,” I agreed.

  One other important fact about the cottage: it leaned. Soil erosion had undermined the foundation on one side, to the point where the house was visibly tilting, like a ship beginning to capsize. Someone—probably the same someone who’d been tending the grounds—had shored it up with a bunch of long wooden planks and a cut-down telephone pole. This emergency bracing appeared to have worked, for the moment, but it was only a temporary solution: most of the planks were bowing under the strain, and the telephone pole had developed a spiral crack around its midsection. While I had no general objections to the cottage collapsing, I didn’t want it to happen while Penny and I were inside.

  Best to get it over with quickly, then: I went up to the front door to see if the maintenance man had left it unlocked. He hadn’t. But then at Adam’s suggestion I checked around the threshold, and found a loose flagstone.

  The canting of the house had begun to warp the front doorframe, not enough to jam the door completely, but enough to make it stick; after wrestling the lock open, I had to shove hard to gain entry. The door swung in to a small vestibule. Beyond the vestibule was a living room full of ghosts.

  Not real ghosts. Not emotional ghosts, either—I still didn’t recognize any of the things I was seeing. The ghosts in the living room were furniture ghosts: a loveseat, a rocking chair, a coffee table, a tall skinny thing that turned out to be a grandfather clock, all of them draped in white sheets like dusty trick-or-treaters. Through an open doorway on the opposite wall I could see a kitchen where more ghosts were gathered.

  “Does it look safe to go in?” Penny asked, coming up behind me.

  “I guess so,” I said. I started to step forward into the living room, but then from outside came the sound of another car entering the yard. “Who’s that…?”

  My first thought, seeing the police car pull up beside Penny’s Buick, was that I’d walked into a trap. It was true: I had killed the stepfather, the Seven Lakes police knew it, and they’d had the house staked out all this time, just waiting for me to come back…

  “Don’t panic yet,” said Adam. “We passed this guy on the main road, right after we made the U-turn. He must have seen us turning onto the trail and gotten curious.”

  The driver had gotten out of the patrol car and was walking towards us. He had thick blond hair and a pencil moustache; I guessed he was about my age. “Hey there, folks,” he greeted us. “You have business on this property?”

  “Not official business,” I told him. “I used to live here.”

  Either because of what I’
d just said, or because he was close enough to get a good look at me, the patrol-car driver’s eyes suddenly widened in recognition. “Who is this man?” I asked urgently. “Do we know him?”

  “Yes,” my father said from the pulpit. “This is going to be awkward. He’s…”

  The patrol-car driver continued to walk towards us. As he came within conversational distance, I saw that the nameplate on his uniform read OFFICER CAHILL. His first name was James, although his friends—and his girlfriends—knew him as Jimmy.

  “Hey there, Sam,” he said.

  26

  Officer Cahill doesn’t get it.

  “Sam…” he says, in a wounded, wheedling tone.

  “I’m not Sam,” Andrew tells him, for the third time.

  “Look, I know you’re mad—”

  “I’m not mad; I’m just not who you think I am. My name’s not Sam, it’s Andrew…”

  “Sam…Andrea…please. I can understand you wanting to cut me dead after what I did, but—”

  “You don’t understand at all,” says Andrew, and Maledicta weighs in from the cave mouth: “That’s for fucking sure.” Andrew continues: “I’m not pretending to not know you to punish you for whatever it is you did to Sam; I really don’t know you. I’m not the person you think I am.”

  “I’m not the same person either, Sam,” the officer replies. “When I think about that selfish young kid who ran out on you—”

  “Officer Cahill—”

  “Sam—”

  “Is Gordon Bradley still in Seven Lakes?”

  Officer Cahill pauses, thrown off track by the question. “Chief Bradley? Yes, he’s still here.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  Starting up again: “Sam—”

  “I need to talk to him,” Andrew interrupts, “because I think I may have killed someone.”

  Another pause, longer this time. “What?”

  “I think I may have killed someone. I’m not sure I did, I hope not, but I need to talk to Chief Bradley about it.”

  “Killed who?” Officer Cahill says, incredulous.

  “Officer—”

  “Sam, if you’re in trouble—”

  “I’m not Sam,” Andrew says, losing his temper. “Maybe Sam will agree to talk to you later, but not until I talk to Chief Bradley. So could you take us to him? Please?”

  “All right,” Officer Cahill says, still with a look of disbelief on his face. “You want to ride back with me in the cruiser?”

  “No,” says Andrew. “We’ll follow you in our car.”

  “All right…” He starts to walk away, stops, turns back, says “Sam…” and then gives up. For the moment.

  Meanwhile Andrew tilts his head, and says angrily to someone inside: “What did you want me to tell him? I’m going to have to talk about it if I want to find out…You be quiet!”

  “Your Aunt Sam,” says Mouse, a few moments later in the car. “She and Officer Cahill had a…relationship?”

  “I don’t really know,” says Andrew. “Aunt Sam always talked about having a ‘sweetheart,’ and I guess this might be the guy. But I don’t know the story, and Sam’s not talking right now.”

  “He called you Andrea, too.”

  “Andrea Samantha Gage. That’s my legal name.”

  “Your mother named you Andrea?”

  “Yes,” Andrew tells her, his voice sullen. “The body is female.” He looks at her expectantly, but all Mouse can think to say is: “Oh…OK.”

  “OK?” says Andrew. “You’re not freaked out?”

  Mouse shakes her head. “I’m…surprised, I guess. But freaked out? No.” She waves an arm, trying to encompass, in a gesture, everything that has happened since she started work at the Reality Factory three weeks ago. “You know, at this point…”

  “Right!” Andrew says, as if he’s been waiting for someone to see things this way. “Right, exactly, it’s not that big a deal. I never thought it was. But Julie…” He stops and thrusts his hands out, as if pushing something away. “No…I’m not going to get going on that again.”

  The inside of the Seven Lakes police station looks more like a real estate office than a bastion of law enforcement. The front door opens into a veneer-paneled reception area, one wall of which is covered by an enormous surveyor’s map of the town, marked off into individual property lots. At the rear of the room, past a pair of messy desks, the barred door of the station’s main holding cell has been propped open, and partially concealed, by a big potted fern; the cell itself is being used to store stacks of brown-and-white file-folder boxes. Mouse deduces they do not see many felons in here; she wonders whether that bodes well or ill for Andrew’s situation.

  “Mortimer,” Officer Cahill says to a man sitting at one of the desks. “Is the chief around?”

  Mortimer shakes his head. “He should be in soon, though. He radioed a while ago and said he was just going to grab a slice of pie at Winchell’s.”

  “All right,” Officer Cahill says. “When he gets in, tell him I need to see him.” He looks around at Andrew and Mouse. “We’ll wait for him in the break room. This way.”

  Officer Cahill leads them to a kitchenette in a back corner of the building. Shutting the door, he starts in on Andrew again: “All right, Sam, what’s going on?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Listen, Sam: you may want to pretend that you don’t know me, but I do still care about you, and if this business about killing someone isn’t just a joke, you’re going to need someone who cares about you. So before the chief gets here and things go too far, why don’t you tell me what happened. Did you and”—he shoots a suspicious glance at Mouse—“your friend here get into some kind of trouble on the road?”

  “No.” Andrew shakes his head. “Penny had nothing to do with it. This is an old murder, if it was a murder. It’s the stepfather—my stepfather.”

  “Horace?”

  “Yes, Horace Rollins. Did he—”

  “Horace wasn’t murdered, Sam,” Officer Cahill says, sounding confused. “He killed himself.”

  “The stepfather committed suicide?”

  “Well, it was an accident…but everybody knows it was his own damn fault.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “You really don’t know?” the officer says, and then shrugs. “He was drunk. He tripped and fell on some kind of glass table. Cut himself really bad…You didn’t know this?”

  Andrew ignores the question. “Are you sure he tripped?”

  “Am I—”

  “You say everybody knows it was his fault. But did you investigate the accident personally?”

  “No,” Officer Cahill says. “No, I wasn’t on the force then…I was in West Virginia.” There’s a heavy note of shame in his voice as he makes the latter admission, as though living in West Virginia were some kind of sin.

  “What is it?” Andrew says.

  “I was married,” the officer blurts out. “Till just last year…After I got out of the service, I got married.” He gives Andrew the same expectant look that Andrew gave Mouse in the car.

  Andrew’s reaction is the same as Mouse’s was: he couldn’t care less. “Oh,” he says. “OK.”

  Then the room telescopes unexpectedly, as Maledicta yanks Mouse back into the cave mouth and storms forward to take her place. “You fucker!” she explodes. “After that line of bullshit you fed Sam about not wanting to be fucking tied down, you went and fucking got married? How long was this after you fucking dumped her, two days?”

  Officer Cahill flinches—he’d been braced for a rebuke, but not from this direction. He defends himself, speaking to Andrew but keeping his eyes on Maledicta: “Sam, it wasn’t like that—what I wrote you in that last letter, it was wrong of me, but I meant it at the time.”

  “I’m sorry, Officer Cahill,” Andrew says, “but I really don’t care about that. I—”

  “Well Sam’s going to fucking care,” Maledicta interrupts. “Let her out for a minute, I bet she takes
a fucking bat to this cocksucker…”

  “Maledicta!” says Andrew. “This isn’t helpful.” Ignoring him, Maledicta opens her mouth to say something else, and that’s when Mouse cuts back in, wrestles the body away from her.

  “Sorry,” Mouse apologizes. “This is none of my business, of course.”

  Officer Cahill just stands there, perplexed into speechlessness.

  “Getting back to the stepfather,” Andrew says. “Are you sure his death was an accident, or is it possible that someone else—”

  “Sam,” the officer sputters, “Sam, I don’t know what the heck is going on here, but—”

  The door opens, and another officer—an older man, with graying temples—enters the room. He is carrying a fishing pole, and has a wide-brimmed straw hat tucked under his arm. His ruddy face is fixed in a scowl. “What’s this now?” he demands of them, his voice loud enough to make Mouse jump.

  “Chief!” exclaims Officer Cahill. “Uh…this is”—he points to Andrew—“this is…”

  “Althea Gage’s daughter Andrea,” Chief Bradley says. “I know.” He glances at Mouse. “You I haven’t met.” Mouse can’t tell whether this is a simple statement of fact or a solicitation for an introduction; but before she can say anything, the chief shifts his gaze back to Officer Cahill. “Why are they here?”

  “Sam—Andrea—has some, uh, questions about her stepfather’s death.”

  “Does she.” Chief Bradley purses his lips. Then he says to Officer Cahill: “Coming in, I saw Dave Brierson had his truck blocking the hydrant out front of his store again. Why don’t you go talk to him about it—tell him if I have to warn him one more time I’m impounding the vehicle.”