A Thief in the House of Memory

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “What was that all about?” murmured Ezra.

  Dec stared at him, his eyes filled with foreboding.

  “I’m almost afraid to find out,” he said.

  Shut Out

  BUT HE WAST’T about to find out anything.

  “Clarence Mahood is a slug,” said Birdie.

  “You know him?”

  She turned to Dec in the back seat of the Rendezvous, one pencil-thin painted-on eyebrow raised. “It’s a small town, kiddo. I’ve known Clare since kindergarten.”

  Dec was suddenly struck by the implication of what Birdie had said. “So you knew Runyon, too!”

  “Never said I didn’t.”

  But that wasn’t the point. She had never said she did! Dec was too flabbergasted to speak.

  “It’s no big deal,” she said. “It has nothing to do with anything.”

  “If it’s no big deal, why did you keep it a secret?”

  “Pipe down. It was not a secret. Like I said, it’s a small town.”

  Bernard cleared his throat. “To tell you the truth, Dec, we tried not to talk about the incident at all, for Sunny’s sake, especially. And for you as well.”

  “Thanks a lot. But I’m not six, okay?”

  His father sighed and shook his head. “Please, Dec,” he said. “It has been a very long day. What is it you want to know?”

  Dec made eye contact with his father in the rearview mirror. “I want to know what happened in there.”

  Bernard sighed again. “It’s nothing, really. Just an endlessly detailed account of what everybody already knows.”

  “Mostly legal mumbo jumbo,” said Birdie.

  “And it’ll be over soon,” said Bernard. “Probably tomorrow.”

  Dec stared at the back of his father’s head, unable to believe what they were doing to him — the two of them, together.

  “It’s been three days,” he said. “How long can you talk about a guy falling over?”

  His father glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “A man died, Declan. Show a little respect.”

  “A smart man,” said Declan, “doing a really stupid thing.”

  Birdie laughed. “Smart. I like that.”

  “I just meant he wasn’t dumb enough to waste his time stealing a piece of junk like the Plato bust.”

  Bernard held up his hand. “Excuse me, Son, but that bust is not a piece of junk. To a common burglar it might easily have seemed more valuable than it was.”

  Dec stared out the window. “Common burglar,” he muttered. “Runyon sure didn’t seem common to me.”

  The comment was met with stony silence, but Dec turned to see a glance pass between Birdie and his father. Then Birdie turned again, a long-suffering look in her eye. “As your dad said, it’s been a real tiring day. How ‘bout you just give it a rest, okay?”

  Dec crossed his arms. “Sure,” he said. “For now.”

  Again he met his father’s reflected gaze. “When there’s something to tell you, we’ll tell you,” he said. But his eyes said something else. His eyes said, What has come over you? His eyes said, Why all this acting out? His eyes said, I hope this is not a foretaste of things to come.

  The Wildcat

  ON THE FOURTH DAY, as Bernard Steeple had predicted, the inquest came to an end with the coroner finding no cause to consider Runyon’s death as suspicious. The case was closed without so much as a single line in the Ladybank Expositor. Things settled down at home. Camelot breathed again, but to Declan Steeple, nothing seemed the same any more.

  The rains came. April showers a month late. Dec stopped looking for excuses to go to the big house. He just went. She wasn’t always there. Sometimes he saw her outside the mansion but never far from it, as if she were a moon held in a tight orbit by its gravity.

  She liked to surprise him. Shock the wits out of him. She would jump out and then disappear, giggling like a little girl.

  One time they had a tea party in the dining room with real bone china and imaginary scones. He asked her why Daddy said scone so that it rhymed with gone and she said scone so that it rhymed with stone.

  “We say lots of things different, your dad and me,” she said. “He likes to say, ‘You’ll never grow up, Lindy Polk.’ And I like to say, ‘Bernard Steeple, you’re growed up enough for both of us.’“

  Another time she wanted to bowl in the drawing room, using Encyclopaedia Britannicas for pins and a bowling ball she had dug up from who knew where.

  Then there was the time they played catch in the conservatory.

  “Bernard Steeple won’t like this,” she said, hurling the ball just over Dec’s outstretched hands. It bounced against the glass wall — only a tennis ball, harmless. But when sixteen-year-old Dec watched the trajectory of the ball that his younger self could not catch, he saw the glass wobble in its dried-up and crumbling putty.

  He was two people in one these days. He was a child and a teenager, a participant and a watcher, a son and an intruder. He had thought the past was something that was over. Apparently, he was wrong.

  Late one afternoon, he ventured out back to where the sweeping driveway came to an end. The rain had let up for a bit and everything smelled alive. There were two garages, each with four bays. He rolled up the first door of the older building. Only three of the bays were occupied; the empty space was where his father’s very first car used to sit. Now Dec saw it again, waxed to a glossy shine, the Wildcat. It was a black convertible with white interior. The top was down. He doubted his father had left it that way.

  “Wish I’d known him when he was young,” said Lindy. Dec looked up. She had been standing in the shadows at the back of the garage, in a black raincoat with her collar up and the belt cinched tight. She looked like a spy.

  “I was just out of school,” she said. “He was thirty by then. Not so old, I guess, but some people age real fast.”

  She ran her hand admiringly along the chrome that stretched the length of the car and then leaned over to see her reflection in the hood.

  “Think of it, Dec. Your daddy, just a boy, eighteen, away at college and — Pow! — both parents dead in a car crash.” Her eyes flashed. “Suddenly he’s a millionaire. Just like that! And the best part is, no meddling relatives to tell him what to do with his money.”

  She laughed out loud.

  “I’d have said to hell with university if I’d been him, but not your dad, oh, no.” She scowled. “He was too busy majoring in boredom.”

  “Daddy’s nice,” Dec said.

  “Oh, he’s nice, all right,” said Lindy. “Nice and handsome, nice and rich. Why else do you think a girl would marry a guy a dozen years older than her?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dec, shoving his hands into his pockets. Adults all seemed about the same age to him.

  Lindy scruffled his hair. “Bernard is so nice a girl could just die.”

  Dec wrapped his fists tightly around the Micro-Machines in his pockets — a pick-up in the left, an ambulance in the right.

  “Ah, Skipper,” she said, seeing the trouble in his eyes. “It’s just that sometimes it seems like he’s got his feet stuck in two big fat pails of concrete.”

  Dec laughed.

  Then Lindy bent down so that they were eye to eye. “Do you ever ask yourself why?” she said, her voice a throaty whisper.

  “Why what?”

  “Why a guy like that would buy a car like this?”

  Dec had never thought about it before. The Wildcat wasn’t like any of his father’s other cars, that was for sure.

  She opened the driver’s door and peered inside. “You know what I think? His folks dying like that so sudden must have scared some life into him.” She made a face. “He sure got over it fast.” She rubbed her hand over the leather of the driver’s seat, shaking her head in wonder.

  Then she looked at Dec, a wicked grin on her face. “You think maybe he stole it?”

  Dec laughed out loud. What a joke that was! “Oh, ho!” she said. “You think your daddy
never stole anything?” Her voice had changed. He couldn’t tell any more if she was fooling.

  He kicked at the white-walled tire. “Daddy’s not a crook.”

  “Don’t you be so sure,” she said, wagging a finger at him.

  She held onto the car door and leaned way back.

  “The man who bought this car was young and daring. When he showed it to me, I thought, Hey, girl, he may seem like a pussycat, driving his beige Le Sabre with the cruise control set right on the speed limit, but there’s a Wildcat in there somewhere.” Then she exploded with laughter. “Crazy mama,” she said.

  She grew quiet again and he watched, not sure what she would do next. Then the grin was back and she gave Dec a hurry-up wave.

  “Hop in, Big Stuff,” she said. “Come on, quick now.” He crawled in behind the steering wheel. She clambered over him and lounged in the passenger’s seat. “Take me somewhere,” she said.

  “Where?” asked Dec, both hands on the wheel, only wishing that his foot could reach the pedal.

  “California,” said Lindy. “I need a little sun in my life. How ‘bout you?”

  He drove a bit. She made loud driving noises. She joked about him running over a cow. “Careful you don’t put us in the river!” she said. “Hey, is that Las Vegas up ahead? I think it just might be. Viva Las Vegas.”

  Then they sat quietly with only the sparkling green lawns of Steeple Hall before them. “You don’t think your daddy was a crook?” she said, her voice tetchy now. “Well, I used to have a life. Where’d that go, huh?”

  Dec sat staring at her, her bare feet up on the seat, her knees supporting her chin, her sad face, her puffy eyes. He didn’t like it when she got sad. He crawled up on his knees, leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She wrapped her arms around him.

  “Get me out of here, Declan,” she whispered between smooches. “Get me out of here. Before it’s too late.”

  Thunder rumbled a long way off.

  Dec opened his eyes. How old had he been? The memories came back to him willy-nilly. He had no control over them. Sometimes he was eight or nine, sometimes he was little more than a baby. But he never seemed to get too close in age to the time she left. That time was a blank. She had left in the fall, just a few months after Sunny was born. He had been ten.

  He looked back towards the house. His ten-year-old self was walking around in there somewhere, lost to him.

  Lightning crackled across the southern sky. He shuddered. He should go inside. He closed the door on the empty bay. The rain would be back; the Wildcat wouldn’t. One night she drove it away, all by herself.

  Psycho

  DEC HAD written about half his essay on Frank Lloyd Wright.

  “Architecture as frozen music. I like that,” said Ezra. “Is it about that place called Falling Water?”

  “The Edgar j. Kaufman η house,” said Dec. “How do you know?”

  “It’s in Pennsylvania, right?” said Ezra. “I love it. All the angles and the way it sort of hangs out over the stream like that and…” He stopped. They had been making slow passage through the knot at the entrance to the cafeteria, but Ezra, who was taller than Dec, had his eyes on their table. “What’s going on?” he said.

  In truth, nothing was going on. Not the usual kind of thing, anyway. Melody and Martin weren’t at the blackboard solving the mysteries of the physical universe. Langston’s chessboard was all set up but no one was playing. Arianna wasn’t doing her crossword and Vivien, back to regular clothing — if overalls and a fluorescent blue wig could be considered normal — was not composing in her journal. She looked anything but composed. She was tugging absent-mindedly at her eyebrow ring.

  They were all crowded around something, their heads pressed together.

  Vivien was the first to see the boys arrive. “Have you seen this?” she said to Dec.

  The others cleared a path. What Dec saw was Steeple Hall. The image filled the top of half of a page in some newspaper. The story filled the rest of the page. Under the picture in large black letters was the headline, “A Thief in the House of Memory.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s the Ottawa Citizen” said Langston, hitching up his pants. “I went out to get a copy because I wrote this letter to the editor protesting the education cuts and it was supposed to be in today.”

  Speechless, Dec started to read the article.

  In the countryside not far from the pretty town of Ladybank, a man died three weeks ago. He was a small-town crook crushed in his last act of larceny. He had tried to rob the House of Memory.

  Dec tried to go on but the words began to swim before his eyes.

  “You didn’t know about this?” asked Vivien. He shook his head. “Bummer,” she said.

  The house was shot from a distance but it still looked grotesquely tall, a lurid house of horrors. The image was grainy and distorted and they had used some kind of eerie effect to lend an artificial twilight to the scene.

  “Ghost Central,” said Richard.

  Dec groaned. “Oh, perfect. This is just perfect.”

  “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Arianna. She was sitting with the article in front of her and a yellow highlighter in her hand. “I’ve counted three typos so far.” Dec stared at her vacantly. “Well, who is going to believe such shoddy journal-ism?”

  “It’s mostly about your grandfather,” said Martin. “I didn’t know he was a senator.”

  “That was his great-grandfather,” said Melody.

  “Oh, right. Your grandfather was the business guy.”

  “Steeple Industries,” said Richard grandly, stretching out his arm as if pointing to a huge neon sign.

  “Steeple Enterprises” corrected Langston. He turned to Dec. “Your family used to own half of Ladybank.”

  Dec had a sour taste in his mouth. “What’s your point?” he snapped.

  Langston shrugged. “I don’t have a point.”

  “I read the article this morning,” said Vivien hurriedly. “It’s actually kind of inspiring.”

  Dec looked at her skeptically. “Really?”

  “Really. It talks about how your dad has kind of appointed himself as the family historian, how committed he is, and how much work he puts into upkeep — that kind of thing.”

  Dec looked at the article and then back at Vivien hopefully.

  “It’s true,” she said. “I even started writing a poem.” She plunked her journal down on the table and started leafing through the pages. “It made me think of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ It’s got this kind of Poe feel to it,” she said. “So I call it a Poe-em.”

  As the journal pages flipped by, something caught Dec’s eye, and he stopped her hand. A sketch — a good one — and it looked remarkably like him.

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Just a doodle.” She snatched up the journal and held it to her chest. She pushed a strand of neon blue hair from her face and cleared her throat.

  “The Poe-em is written in trochaic octameter,” she said.

  “Is that some kind of dinosaur?” said Richard. But before Vivien could reply, Arianna made another mark with her yellow highlighter.

  “Four!” she said triumphantly. “Can you believe they left out the “h” in psycho.”

  “Psycho?” said Dec, looking at her in shock. “Psycho?”

  “It’s okay,” said Vivien, seeing the look of panic on Dec’s face. “The journalist was just sort of saying something about the contrast between the… Here it is.” She pointed to the passage and Dec read it for himself.

  A lonely stretch of highway, a modest roadside dwelling at the foot of a steep hill leading, by a ragged pathway to an imposing Victorian mansion. One might almost be describing the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psyco.

  Dec smacked his forehead. “The setting for Psycho!”

  “Keep reading,” said Vivien.

  But Dec’s face was buried in his hands. “My father is going to freak.”

  “He must have
known about it,” said Martin.

  “But he didn’t,” said Melody. “The journalist says that every attempt to contact Steeple was turned down.”

  “Then the guy was trespassing,” said Martin. “You can sue!

  “Yeah, right,” said Dec.

  “It’s defamation of character,” said Richard. “Slander!”

  “You mean libel,” said Arianna. “When you actually publish a false statement, it’s libel.”

  “Stop!” said Vivien with such passion that, remarkably, everybody did. “You have to read the whole thing, Dec. In the very next sentence he says… where is it… yeah, listen, ‘Nothing could be further from the truth.’ Then he goes on to say that your dad’s this real family-minded guy who likes to live the quiet life and nice stuff like that.”

  Richard looked disappointed. “So your dad’s not a psychotic killer?”

  Dec looked at Richard wearily. “Richard, sometimes…”

  “Hold on,” said Ezra, interrupting. He stared at Dec, a glint in his eye. “He asked you a question, Dec. Answer the guy.”

  Dec gaped at Ezra. And Ezra smiled back at him, but would not withdraw the challenge.

  Dec swallowed hard. They were all looking at him now and waiting, as if the question hadn’t been a joke.

  “Is my dad a psychotic killer?” He fixed his eyes on Ezra.

  “The jury is still out.”

  The Price of Fame

  A TELEVISION VAN, with splashy call letters on its sides and a satellite dish on the roof, was parked outside Camelot. As the school bus pulled to a stop, the students went wild. Dec pushed his way through the crowd and down the steps.

  The bus door closed behind him. The noise died to a dull roar and then was lost entirely under the din of the vehicle pulling away. It was raining lightly. A lady reporter headed towards Dec with a newspaper over her head for protection and a cameraman in tow. Bernard Steeple was trying to stop them.

  “Get to the house,” he yelled. Dec froze.

  “Just a word,” said the reporter, bearing down on him. The gravel of the soft shoulder was hard going for her in heels.