A Thief in the House of Memory

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Daddy must have put it back on Thursday,” he said.

  But Sunny wasn’t listening any more. Making all kinds of concerned mommy noises, she began digging for Barbie.

  Dec’s gaze wandered up the hillside to see his father coming down from the old house. He had on his work clothes, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and he was carrying his red toolbox. There was a streak of paint on his arm. He seemed lost in thought, his chin on his chest, his hair falling across his brow —just like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. That’s what Birdie liked to say. Bernard was her very own Atticus Finch. He was lanky like Peck and strong through the shoulders, but he didn’t look so noble to Dec. There was a worried look in his eye. The forensic unit had been at Steeple Hall all week. They were finished now and Bernard had been putting things to right, making everything the way it was.

  He didn’t look too happy about it.

  Hide and Seek

  DEC STOOD before a room with his name on the door: Declan Shaughnessy Steeple, 1987-1999. That was what was etched on the brass plate, as if he had died young.

  He opened the door and scanned the room. It was decked out like something from a magazine. The bed shaped like a sneaker, his favourite baby blanket neatly folded on a pirate play chest, a Lego skyscraper on the low yellow table, a large Teddy sitting in a small wicker chair, wearing goggles and a scarf. It was Dec’s young life laid out for some imagined audience of curiosity seekers. It had nothing to do with him any more.

  He walked into the room and shut the door behind him. There was a book beside his bed, The Phantom Tollbooth. He opened it and smiled at his homemade bookmark at chapter eleven, “Dischord and Dynne.” He remembered liking the book, but for some reason he had never finished it. Maybe it was because they had left the house so quickly, as soon as Camelot was built. Fled from it like refugees.

  There was an alcove as large as his real bedroom down the hill in Camelot. There were drawers built right into the wall and a walk-in closet, where every pair of sneakers he had ever owned sat on the floor in neat rows. On the rod hung every pair of pants, every jacket, every coat. He found the cat costume he had worn for his first Halloween and the Green Lantern costume he had worn for his last. They had both been superheroes, he and his mother. They had gone to town together that night — Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. “There’s so much more candy in town,” she had said.

  He closed the closet and sat down at his desk. There was a lamp his grandfather had made for his father. It was shaped like a flying saucer. He clicked it on and light shone through mica portholes, greenish yellow. Alien light. He opened the drawer and stared at what lay there — a crumpled package of Player’s Plains.

  There was a bearded sailor on the front and three unfiltered cigarettes inside. Dec sniffed, made a face. He closed the package again. The top third of the cover was printed with stats about the number of deaths in a year from murder, alcohol, car accidents, suicide and smoking. Smoking won hands down.

  There was nothing there about dying under a pile of law books.

  They found Dennis Runyon’s old panel truck hidden on the back road.

  “You feel guilty that you told him about the road,’ Ezra had said to Dec, taking on the role of shrink, Herr Doktor Sigmund Cling Wrap.

  “I don’t.”

  “Sure you do. But that’s like a girl who gets her purse snatched, feeling guilty when the snatcher gets himself run over.”

  “It’s not that…not exactly…”

  There was something about Runyon he couldn’t quite pin down.

  “I have this snapshot of a dead man in my brain.”

  “We may have to operate,” said Cling Wrap. “Fix you up with a few more megabytes of RAM while we’re at it.”

  The image of the bruised and battered corpse had faded, lost some of its sting. But with this cigarette package in his hand, Dec could see beyond the dead man to the joker in the water-haulage truck, to the expression on his face when he said goodbye. Dec remembered the tattoo, the movie-star teeth and the terrible sideburns that looked like someone had pasted a couple of dead mice onto his cheeks. But mostly what he could see was the odd smile in Runyon’s eyes.

  A putting-two-and-two-together smile? The criminal sees the elaborate mailbox and recalls the mansion glimpsed at the top of the hill. Was that it? Was it an I-know-who-you-are smile? Because of course people in town did know about the Steeple mansion.

  Dec had tried to explain to Ezra about how Runyon’s expression haunted him. “His face lit up,” he said. “He looked at me differently.” “There was something behind his smile.” “Suddenly there was this twinkle in his eye.”

  “Are we talking about Peter Pan?”

  “That’s my point,” Dec had replied. “I can’t find the words. Language is so lame.”

  But Ezra Harlow, among his many talents, was an intrepid discoverer of mysterious facts.

  “Take a look at this,” he said a few days later, handing Dec a magazine article. “Researchers have found that the muscles of a face can create ten thousand facial configurations, of which three thousand are meaningful.”

  So the look Dennis Runyon had given him was one of those other seven thousand unmeaningful expressions. That narrowed it down. Now, when he thought about him, the grinning mug seemed to be saying, “I’ve got a secret, kid. Can you guess what it is?”

  It was May but still chilly in the big house. Dec had avoided the place for so long. But you could cut the air with a knife back at Camelot. His father liked the quiet life and Denny Runyon had made short work of that. There had been reporters phoning at all hours for interviews — all of them denied. His father was as jittery as a jaybird. Birdie was just as bad. They wanted Dec to see a real shrink to help with the nightmares. As far as he was concerned, they were the ones who needed help.

  But that wasn’t the only reason he had come here. The place seemed alive again, somehow. Seeing her — seeing Lindy — however briefly had brought her back.

  He was about to put the cigarette package back in the drawer when a postcard caught his eye: The Fort Garry Hotel, Winnipeg. He picked it up, looked at the scrawl on the back.

  It was from his mother. There was another one under it. He had almost forgotten. And yet there had been a time when he read these two cards every day.

  Dec 7/97

  Darling Declan, There isn’t a minute goes by I don’t think of you. I know I’m the world’s worst Mom. I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going but I do know I LOVE LOVE LOVE you to bits and pieces and don’t YOU forget it. One day I’ll be able to explain but for now I’d better not make any promises I can’t keep. I’m already up to my eyeballs in those!!! Help your dad look after our little Sunshine. XOX Lindymom.

  The second postcard showed a panoramic view of Edmonton with the North Saskatchewan River snaking through it.

  March 8/98

  Darling Declan, It’s been the longest winter of my life and the coldest. I found some work here. Temp work in an office. I play a bit at a little coffee house sometimes. Your mommy the folk singer. My head’s a bit cooler now. Maybe because it’s just so damned cold. I hope you don’t hate me. Hah! Bet you’ve forgotten your crazy mom by now, eh? Maybe it’s all for the best. I’ll try to write more soon XOX Lindymom

  Sunny was wheeling a baby carriage around the upstairs hall. “My Babies are Fussing,” she announced. You could walk the whole way around the wide stairwell, which is what Sunny was doing, as if she were on her own private merry-go-round. She was pushing a full-sized regal blue British pram containing seven or eight dolls. “I ‘splained to them they Can’t, Can’t, Can’t be on Television.”

  Little pitchers have big ears, thought Dec.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” he said. He didn’t mind that she had tagged along. She could amuse herself for hours up here, and he had a feeling she needed the break as much as he did.

  He made his way to the study at the end of the front hall. It was a gentleman’s room pane
lled in walnut; a room of globes and framed antique maps, of masks from exotic places. It had been his grandfather’s office and his grandfather’s father’s before him and so on back five generations. They had all been judges and magistrates, members of parliament or captains of industry.

  All except Bernard. Bernard was a man of leisure, a putterer and handyman, an amateur historian and wager of tabletop wars. Whatever spark had ignited the Steeple clan had sputtered and gone out in Dec’s father.

  A mammoth mahogany desk dominated the room. On its expansive surface there was a brass lamp, an old black telephone and a faded red leather blotter. Dec’s laptop sat on the blotter looking particularly incongruous — an Apple iBook with a tangerine-coloured plastic top. Dec had some writing to do: an essay on Frank Lloyd Wright for art history.

  He made himself comfortable in the cracked leather chair, wheeled himself in close and opened the laptop. He flexed his fingers like a pianist. He had found a quotation he liked.

  “‘I call architecture frozen music,’”he wrote. But that was as far as he got.

  “Pssst.”

  It was like air escaping from a pierced tire. Dec sat back in his chair, surprised but not frightened.

  “Pssst!”

  How old had he been? Three or four. He wheeled himself back a step or two and stared at the shadowy darkness of the recess under the desk.

  She was curled up there. Lindy. She held a finger to her lips.

  “SHHHHH,” she whispered.

  She had a rascally grin on her face. She motioned for him to join her, as if some urgent business was afoot. His four-year-old self obeyed, scampering under the desk and into her waiting arms. She pressed her finger to his lips. He could smell the nicotine.

  “Why are we hiding?” he whispered, cuddling in close.

  “Daddy,” she whispered back, kissing him on the forehead.

  Daddy? “Why?”

  “To make him pay,” she said, holding back a giggling fit. But before she could explain, he heard Daddy’s voice calling for them.

  “Lindy, Declan, where are you?” He remembered how his mother pulled him closer, placed her hand gently over his mouth. And Dec could remember her body shaking with suppressed laughter.

  Then his father came to the door of the study and walked in.

  “Are you two in here?” he asked.

  Silence.

  “Aw, come on now, guys,” he said.

  Silence.

  “I swear, Lindy, I don’t know who’s the bigger kid.”

  He didn’t sound angry, thought Dec. Just left out. He remembered waiting on pins and needles for his father to find them. But his father never did.

  “Why did we hide from Daddy?” he asked, when the door to the study had clicked shut. Lindy, sitting up cross-legged now, smoothed his hair back with her hands.

  “It’s good for him,’ she said.

  “Good for him?”

  “Yeah,” she said, licking her finger and smoothing out Dec’s eyebrows. “It’s good for him to know how easy a person could get lost in this drafty old dump.”

  The whole episode came back to him as clear as a movie. He touched his eyebrows. They felt wet.

  The door to the study clicked open. Dec caught his breath. He half wondered if it was his father, still looking after all these years.

  “Deckly?”

  He waited silently. Then Sunny was at the desk, bending down, her chubby hands on her knees, squinting at him sitting there cross-legged in the dark. She smiled with a rascally grin all her own.

  “Who’s It?” she asked.

  I-Less

  DEC STEEPLE waited for Ezra, his lunch before him on the cafeteria table looking even more miserable than Dec himself. It was uneaten but not untouched. He had constructed an edifice of limp carrot sticks and celery stalks, a bagel and three olives. A monument to waiting.

  He wore Roy Orbison dark glasses. They were almost ugly enough to be cool, but not if you were wearing a Green Eggs and Hamlet T-shirt that said:

  I would not, could not kill the king,

  I could not murder anything.

  Dec was tired. He’d been up half the night again, staring from his window towards the big house, drawn to it and afraid of it at the same time. He had to talk to someone about what was happening to him. Where was Cling Wrap when you needed him?

  He sat at the only table in the cafeteria with its own blackboard. Melody Fong and Martin McNair were using it to argue over an equation that proved the universe was a giant Twinkie. Arianna Osmanli was doing the New York Times crossword behind a veil of blue-black hair. Langston Parchment was silently destroying Richard Pergolesi at chess. And directly across the table from Dec, Vivien Ulman was busily writing in her journal. Dec became absorbed with the crown of her blonde head. Hair, pale as a whisper.

  “What are you writing?” he asked.

  She looked up. “An ode. Well, a mock ode. Want to read a mock ode?”

  “No, thanks,” said Dec, staring at her jade eyebrow ring.

  It was the same colour as her eyes. “Maybe some other time.”

  Vivien flashed a quick smile and returned to her writing. She looked particularly poetic today, in an Indian silk scarf and a faux-leather jacket over a smocked dress that she might have worn when she was six. Underneath it she wore a black leotard and baggy gold corduroy pants. She glanced up and noticed Dec staring at her. “We call the ode Valley of the Dweebs.”

  “We?” he said. “I didn’t know poetry was a team sport.”

  Vivien tapped herself on the chest with the end of her pencil. “Just me,” she said. “But there’s one letter of the alphabet we do not care to use today. So we are forced to say we.”

  Right, thought Dec. With Vivien there was always something interesting going on. “You’re not using the letter I?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re going I-less?” he said, just to be perfectly sure.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “You’re going blind?” asked Richard.

  “Not the organ, the letter,” said Vivien. “A poet must learn to expand her vocabulary.”

  Martin McNair cleaned his glasses on his sweater. “To expand your vocabulary by reducing the number of letters you can utilize is a contradiction in terms.”

  “No, she has a point,” said Melody, who never agreed with Martin on anything. “A handicap makes you find new ways of doing things, right? So Viv is going to have to find new ways of expressing herself — words that don’t have an I in them. That’s got to be good for a poet.”

  Meanwhile, Vivien had dug an old book out of her backpack — a novel with a torn cover. “We found a remarkable book at a second-hand store,” she said. She opened it to the first page and handed the book to Dec. “Please,” she said. The crowd drew in close. He read the name on the cover, Gadsby, by Ernest Wright. He opened it to the first page and cleared his throat.

  “Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy individuality —”

  “That’s full of I’s,” interrupted Richard.

  “But no E’s,” said Arianna, without looking up from her crossword.

  “Exactly,” said Vivien triumphantly. She took the book from Dec, turned to the front cover flap and pointed at the part she wanted him to read. “It’s called a lipogram,” he announced. “A composition which contains no instances of a particular letter of the alphabet.”

  The others looked interested. “That whole novel has no E’s in it?”

  “Not a one,” said Vivien.

  “Lipogram,” said Arianna, writing it down on the margin of her newspaper. “Kind of like liposuction, except that you’re sucking out a letter instead of subcutaneous fat.”

  Only Richard Pergolesi was still eating. He stopped.

  “How long are you going to keep this up?” asked Melody.

  “I mean, you can’t even say your own n
ame!”

  “Just today,” said Vivien. “Tomorrow shall be an O-less day, the next day we shall go A-less, as we work our way up to the greatest challenge of all, E-lessness.”

  Nobody spoke for a moment. Everyone seemed to be trying to imagine an E-less day. No “the,” no “he,” no “she.” But then, as if by unspoken agreement, everyone returned to what he or she was doing. Melody wrote something on the blackboard that Martin immediately erased. Arianna filled in a long word Down. And Langston with a chortle took Richard’s queen.

  Dec rested his chin on the table. “How about U?” he said.

  “What about me?”

  “I mean the letter U. And how about ‘sometimes Y’?”

  “Been there, done that,” said Vivien. “Yesterday and the day before.”

  Dec looked impressed. “I didn’t even notice,” he said.

  Vivien leaned towards him, smiling sadly. “You don’t observe a lot these days, Declan Steeple.”

  Dec didn’t know what to say. Suddenly he felt as if all the vowels had been sucked right out of him.

  Luckily, at that moment, Ezra breezed through the door. The mighty doctor himself, all in black, as usual, with hair like a deserted crow’s nest and tiny round spectacles that gave his narrow face a distinctly crowish look. The lenses were no larger than dimes and the frames were made of real tortoise-shell.

  “Where were you?”

  “Ah,” said Ezra. “A good question but in need of some refinement. I assume my state of being is not in question and therefore what you really want to know is, what place have I most recently occupied and why for such an extended period.”

  With that Ezra sat down. Vivien moved along to give him some room.

  “That was totally heavy,” she said and returned to her journal writing with great vigour.

  “So?” said Dec.

  “Urgent meeting with Marlborough.” Marlborough was the head of guidance.

  “What about?” asked Dec.