“I’d be happy to.”
The jar opened for him right away. It wasn’t easy, but wasn’t that hard either.
“Bless you!” she exclaimed gratefully. “It is so nice to have a man around sometimes. I’ve been terribly remiss in not inviting you over for a drink. We must do that some evening.”
They sat there in silence a moment, watching Weems work. He did nothing to acknowledge their presence there.
“You haven’t done much entertaining since you’ve been here,” Dolly mentioned, glancing at Mitch with a raised eyebrow. “That’s not to say I’ve been studying your every move out my window with binoculars, but do you not find yourself terribly lonely?”
“Not terribly, no.”
“But it is hard, is it not?” she persisted. “Adjusting to the absence of joy in one’s life. When one has grown used to it, I mean.”
“Yes, it’s very hard.”
She nodded to herself. “I don’t believe it’s humanly possible to experience joy by oneself. It takes two. I suppose one does come to appreciate the smaller pleasures. And to accept them. But there are so many nights I just cry myself to sleep asking myself why.” She broke off into silence. “You probably understand this better than most people.”
“I’m sorry to say I do.”
Her eyes locked on to his imploringly. There was tremendous strain in hers. She seemed very tightly wound. In fact, she seemed as if she were on the verge of cracking. “No one has ever told me he didn’t want me anymore. I suppose that’s a silly thing for a person my age to say
… To go all these years without ever being rejected by anyone. I-I’d been very lucky, you see. I just didn’t know how lucky. Now I do. That’s what I keep telling myself-you were very lucky, Dolly. Take comfort in that.” She broke off, her small breasts rising and falling. “Oh, dear, I shouldn’t be going on like this. You must be sorry you ever met me.”
“Not at all. In fact, I was just thinking how glad I am.”
“You’re a very sweet man. Are you wanting for anything, Mitch? Is there anything you need?”
“Just some answers, I guess. I met Trooper Bliss today…”
“Yes, I know. He told me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was a long time ago, Mitch. I didn’t think it would matter anymore. Particularly to someone who wasn’t here at the time. Why, does it…?”
“I don’t know, to be truthful,” Mitch answered. “Does it bother him that you’ve rented the place out?” Referring to Weems.
“One can never tell with Tuck,” she replied. “He’s rather closed off that way. When I informed him of my intentions, he simply nodded and walked away.” She gazed across the lawn at him, her face softening. “That’s Tuck. He’s been this way since we were small children.”
Mitch wondered about that first kiss Dolly had told him about. He wondered if the boy had been Tuck. “Exactly where in the house did it happen?”
“Upstairs,” she replied, her voice hollow and distant. “I found them in bed together, dead. It was… quite awful.” Abruptly, Dolly climbed to her feet, her eyes avoiding his now. “If you wish to leave, Mitch, I’ll understand. But I sincerely hope you will not.”
And with that she marched back to her house with her jar of pimientos.
Mitch went inside and hung his horseshoe over the door.
He liked it here. He wanted to stay. He was going to stay. This was home now.
The only real problem with the little house was the strong, persistent smell of mildew downstairs. Mitch had a detailed online chat with his newspaper’s home repairs columnist on the subject. She felt his trouble was poor air circulation down in the crawl space, and recommended two courses of action. Mitch rolled up his sleeves and got to work.
First, he located the air vents in the little house’s foundation. There were four of them, each approximately one-foot square. Sure enough, they’d been boarded shut to keep cold air and small animals out. Mitch pried the boards out with a pry bar-instantly unleashing a dank, dungeony odor-and installed breathable wire mesh in their place.
The next step was to roll out a vapor barrier of 6-mil plastic over the moist, exposed earth down in that dark crawl space. Since there was only about eighteen inches of clearance down there, this meant Mitch had to spend most of a day slithering around on his belly with a flashlight in what he quickly discovered was the preferred habitat of mice, black snakes and large, curious spiders. In some areas, such as over by the fireplace, the space was so shallow that his head would whack into the floor joists if he tried to raise his nose up out of the dirt. Mitch was not especially claustrophobic-he was not, say, Charles Bronson in The Great Escape. But it was not pleasant to be facedown in that confined, filthy space, rolling out the plastic, cutting it to fit, securing it in place with rocks and bricks. It was not pleasant to have a living rodent scurry over him, lose its footing on his head and scrabble around in his hair, screeching. It was not comforting to know that his only way in and out of there, the kitchen trap door, was a good twenty-foot slither away. It was slow, tedious work. But Mitch did have nearly half of the house done when he heard footsteps outside on the gravel path, coming toward the house.
They entered the house, clomping slowly and heavily on the wood flooring directly over Mitch’s head.
“I’m down here!” he called out. “The crawl space! Hello…?!”
The footsteps moved over toward the kitchen, more determinedly now. And Mitch heard a sharp noise. Something slamming shut-the trap door.
Instantly, it got even darker down there.
“Hey, what’s going on!?” he cried out as the footsteps rapidly retreated, running from the house on the gravel path. “Hey, come back!”
Mitch wriggled his way furiously back around the main water lines to the trap door and tested it. No good. The brass transom catch was like an old refrigerator door-self-locking. And the mechanism was topside. So were the hinges. All that faced him was the door itself. He tried prying the door open with his scissors. He shoved at it with all of his might. No use. It was good and locked.
His next response was to slither his way over to the nearest of the air vents, thinking maybe he could kick out the wire mesh and escape that way. No use either. The air vent was way too small for him to squeeze through.
Now the realization hit Mitch-he was trapped down there. Briefly, panic seized him. His pulse quickened. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. But he steadied himself. Breathed in and out slowly and deeply, reciting the words: I must not panic. I cannot panic.
He recalled that he could see Dolly’s garage from one of the vents. He would call to her from there. That’s what he’d do. He slithered his way across the length of the house toward it, the beam from his flashlight growing feebler by the minute, only to discover that her car was gone. She was out. Damn. The other houses? They were too far away to be within earshot over the steady rippling of the receding tide.
He determined this by screaming “HELP!” at the top of his lungs until he was hoarse.
He finally gave up. Lay there on his stomach, enraged. Why had someone done this to him? What manner of asshole would find this funny? He would like to meet and strangle said asshole.
Mitch stayed there by the air vent. He remained calm. There was nothing to be afraid of. When the black snake slithered its way over toward him and coiled itself between his legs, he did not freak out. Black snakes were not poisonous. He knew this from Camp Tacaloma. Still, he lay there tensed and motionless, until finally it decided to move on.
He had been locked in down there for more than three hours when at last he heard the rattle of Dolly’s Mercedes diesel drawing near. He had never been so glad to hear an engine in his life. She pulled into her garage with a splatter of gravel and shut it off. He raised his face to the wire mesh and called out to her.
She was removing shopping bags from the trunk. She turned around at the sound of his voice, smiling. And then frowning. Clearly, she was
baffled to discover she could not see him. He called out “Crawl space!” to her several times before she finally started her way toward the carriage house, her face a mask of confusion.
“Good heavens!” she cried out when she located his semi-contorted face pressed up against the wire. “What are you doing down there, you silly man?”
“I’m locked in, Dolly.”
“You most certainly are not,” she said, with utter conviction.
“I assure you I am.”
“Why, how absurd!”
“I could not agree more. Will you please let me out?”
She came in at once and unlatched the trap door, bathing the area under the kitchen in light.
“It must have blown shut,” she called to him as he slithered his way toward her.
“Not a chance,” he groaned as he climbed back up into the kitchen, his muscles aching, his face and hair caked with earth. Spiders and a host of other insects fell from his clothes. “Someone deliberately did it.”
“Who?”
“Someone with a sick sense of humor. I couldn’t tell you who.”
“How do you know this?”
“I heard footsteps.”
Dolly immediately froze, all color draining from her face. Briefly, Mitch thought she might faint. “Y-You heard what?” she gasped, her voice scarcely more than a whisper.
“I heard footsteps,” Mitch repeated, watching her curiously.
“No, you didn’t!” she snapped with sudden vehemence. “That can’t be. It must have been your imagination. It must.” And with that Dolly Seymour turned on her heel and darted out the door to her own house, leaving him utterly confused.
It was not his imagination. Someone had purposely locked him in down there. He’d heard the footsteps. This was a fact. But who, some kid? There were no kids on Big Sister. So who, then-Tuck Weems? Was this his way of telling Mitch he wasn’t happy to have him living there? Why had Dolly gotten so upset when he mentioned hearing footsteps? What was up with that?
Mitch didn’t know. But he did have his first nightmare that night.
He dreamt that he was down there in the crawl space, only now it felt as if the whole weight of the carriage house was pressing down on his chest. Pressing down on him so hard that he could barely breathe. He was all wet, too. Water was seeping down through the floorboards onto him. Only when he tried to wipe it from his eyes he discovered it wasn’t water. It was the blood of Roy and Louisa Weems. And it was all over him. In his mouth. In his nose. In his…
He awoke with a yelp, heart racing, his body drenched with sweat. As he lay there, panting, Mitch heard something-the crunch of footsteps outside on the gravel path. And he wasn’t dreaming now. This was real. Someone was out there… Mitch tiptoed over to the staircase. Slowly, he descended into his moonlit living room. He paused, listening. Hearing the blood rushing in his ears. Hearing the waters of the Sound lap against the rocks. Hearing more footsteps. There was an outdoor light over the front door. He flicked it on. He threw open the door…
And he came face to face with two deer who were munching on the azaleas planted next to the house. Startled, they went galloping off, hooves clip-clopping on the gravel.
Mitch let out a huge laugh and shut the door and went back to bed. He lay there, breathing in and out. Through the skylight over his head, the moon was full, with a pearly ring around like in The Wolfman. As he lay there gazing up at it, Mitch ached for Maisie’s presence next to him in the bed. A person wasn’t gone if she lived on inside of you. And Maisie did live on inside of Mitch. He could still hear her. He could still see her.
The only thing Mitch could not do was hold her.
In the morning, he decided he simply could not put it off any longer. The house was in decent shape. It was time to tackle his book. He had a ton of good material. A collection of hidden treasures like Silver Lode, the much-overlooked 1954 Allan Dwan Western in which John Payne uttered the immortal lines: “If you can kill one man the second one’s not so hard. The third one’s easy.” He had a salute to the largely forgotten exploits of the Three Mesquiteers, a trio of thirties Republic Pictures sagebrush cutups-dim-witted Ray Corrigan, daffy Max Terhune (a ventriloquist who rode around on horseback with a dummy) and handsome young John Wayne. Not many fans knew about this particular chapter in the Duke’s early film career-his Three Mesquiteers roles were usually not included in his filmography. Just the sort of thing Mitch loved to unearth and write about. He made himself a fresh pot of coffee. He sat down at his desk in front of the windows. He juiced up his computer. He got started.
And he got somewhere. He was focused. He was passionate. He was in the groove again. As Mitch’s fingers flew over the keyboard, his brain leaping from one sharp observation to the next, he came to the happy realization that it was finally happening:
He was healing.
After a couple of good, productive hours he got up and punched the power button on his stack, feeling the blue Stratocaster come to life in his hands, its six silver strings humming. He closed his eyes. He played. Good hard chops first, laying down Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “I’m Crying.” Then, when he was in there, Mitch started riffing off of it, bending it, soaring way, way up there where it was sweet and fine. Fingers squeezing out the notes. One set of toes curled around the wa-wa pedal, the other around the tube screamer. Mitch Berger was not gifted. He knew this. But he had the love and the hurt and the power. Oh, God, he had the power.
He didn’t realize he had company, too, until he opened his eyes and discovered Dolly standing there, looking positively pie-eyed. “My Lord,” she exclaimed. “I could not imagine what that noise was.”
“I’m sorry if I bothered you,” Mitch apologized. “I’ll turn it down.”
“No, no. It’s quite all right. That’s not why I’ve come,” she said hurriedly. She was in a dither of some sort. Positively rattled. “Oh, dear, I do hope I am not annoying you, because I know how you writers need your privacy and ordinarily I would not intrude. But, you see, there’s this fox in my rose garden. And it’s, well, quite dead. And I simply don’t know what to do about it. I tried phoning Tuck but he’s not answering his phone and every other man on island is gone for the day so I was wondering if you would be so kind as to…”
“Yes, of course,” Mitch said quickly. “I’ll take care of it right away.” He put on his shoes and grabbed his work gloves and followed her back to her garden, stopping to fetch a shovel from the barn.
Dolly had a lovely garden. There were peonies and foxgloves, wild geranium, irises, bleeding heart. Everything was in bloom at once. It was an explosion of controlled chaos. Her rose garden was set apart by low, carefully cropped boxwood hedges. A brick path crisscrossed it and a copper birdbath anchored its center. Next to the birdbath lay the dead fox. It was red. It was staring right at him. Flies were buzzing around it, but it did not smell too bad yet.
“It must have been searching for water, poor thing,” Dolly said hoarsely. “It’s probably been living in our woods.”
That was where Mitch buried it-in the wooded area between her place and the big summer house. He dug two feet down in the soft soil and slid it in and covered it over, tamping the soil down with his feet and laying a flat, heavy stone over it to keep other animals out.
Dolly was so grateful she invited Mitch over for a drink that very evening to meet his fellow islanders. “It’s the very least I can do,” she said. “It would be terribly impolite of me not to.”
Mitch politely declined. He ranked among the socially lost even when he was at his best. Right now he was far from his best.
But Dolly would not take no for an answer. “You must get out and meet people, Mitch,” she clucked. “It’s not healthy to spend so much time alone. You will come. I insist. It’s casual.”
Casual, on Big Sister, turned out to mean blazer and no socks. Mitch got it backwards-he wore socks and no blazer. He was also, seemingly, the only guest who arrived at Dolly’s cocktail party sober.
&nbs
p; He had not been inside her house before, aside from the laundry room off of the garage. He’d been expecting an interior to match the old house’s immaculately restored exterior-a house filled with cherished antiques and family heirlooms, floors of wide-planked oak, walls lined with oil portraits of departed pilgrim ancestors. Such was not the case at all. Dolly’s parents had rebelled and gone contemporary in the fifties. Laid down harvest-gold shag carpeting over the old plank floors. Thrown coat upon coat of paint over the paneled walls. Converted the fireplaces to gas logs. Hung gold lame drapes over the old casement windows. Installed a breakfast nook in the kitchen of avocado-colored vinyl. Most of the furniture, which was newish, was covered in persimmon-colored chintz.
Dolly, who was drinking martinis, seemed as giddy as a little girl on roller-skates. Bud Havenhurst was downright jolly, too. It was Bud who tended the bar, which was set up on a sideboard in the study, complete with ice bucket and tongs. It was Bud who made the introductions.
The first islander Mitch met was Bud’s tall, young tennis-playing wife, Mandy. Mitch found her to be even more striking upon close encounter. Mandy Havenhurst had long, creamy blond hair, big blue eyes, lusciously plump lips and a dazzling smile. Her short, sleeveless white linen dress handsomely offset her tanned, toned arms and legs. She was not fashion-model pretty. Her jaw was a shade mannish, her nose rather broad and flat. But she was a very attractive woman, and certainly no older than thirty.
Her handshake was firm, her manner direct. “You’re the heavy metal guitarist?”
“Blues, actually. Just loud.”
“And you have a place in New York?”
“Yes, I do,” he replied, sipping his Bushmill on the rocks.
“So do we. Nothing fancy-just a little pied-a-terre.” She spoke in rushed bursts and didn’t move her mouth when she talked. “I’d be lost without it. I spend as much time there as I can. The city is so alive. But I don’t have to tell you that. I read your reviews regularly. I almost never agree with you. But you write so well.”
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