A Thief in the House of Memory

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “I’m going to have to retire,” he said, “or get me some more shelves.”

  Dec thanked him and was about to take the book, when something occurred to him.

  “Do you remember my mother?” he asked. “Lindy Polk?”

  The counsellor seemed to thumb through a Rolodex in his head. “Nope,” he said finally. “Sadly, my memory is dominated by those students who gave me the most work.” He indicated his ageing face. “Every one of these wrinkles has a name.”

  “What about Dennis Runyon?”

  Marlborough grimaced and pulled down the flesh beside his left eye. “See those crow’s feet? That’s Denny Runyon territory.”

  “That bad, eh?”

  Marlborough looked thoughtful. “Yes, that bad. But you’ll notice I’m pointing at what are commonly called laugh lines.” He shook his head. “I remember Runyon convincing his whole class to walk clear through home room and out onto the roof of the tech wing.”

  The boys looked at each other in frank approval.

  “Denny Runyon could convince a rabbit to jump into a stewing pot,” said Marlborough. He laughed and then frowned again. “He convinced more than one instructor to find employment elsewhere.”

  Dec pictured the wired up, fast-talking water-haulage man, a con artist from an early age.

  “What made you think of him?” asked Marlborough. Then he stopped himself. “Oh, right! The accident. Sorry. That must have been a shock. Well, if it’s any consolation, there are a lot of people who’d tell you he had it coming. Which is sad, because he was a smart cookie.”

  Back in the hallway, Dec and Ezra sat side by side and flipped open the yearbook. Lindy Polk was all over the place: “Hangin’ with the Chick Brigade,” “Home on the Range,” “The Queen of the Pumpkin Patch.” Here she was riding on a football player’s shoulders, his helmet in her raised hands. There she was in the quad with a math book lying open on her chest, her eyes shut, “Catchin’ Sum Rays.” And there she was in her grad photo, her wild hair tamed for the occasion and her lipstick glistening.

  Lindy Polk (Reddi Wip)

  Who can forget Home Ec with BV, Geog with BV, Book keeping

  with BV. “Mamma Mia, let me go!” How about that trip to

  Mont Tremblant…so many hommes so little temps. Reddi Wip

  is off to St. Lawrence College for Accounting if Richy Rich

  doesn’t make his move and whip her off to Shangri La.

  Whatever, wherever… Go get ’em Polkeroo!

  “BV is Birdie?” asked Ezra. Dec nodded. “And Richy Rich?”

  “My dad. I guess she did a co-op placement at Steeple Enterprises.”

  “That was how they met?”

  Dec nodded. “As far as I know. He does actually go into the office sometimes. He’s on the board of directors.”

  Ezra wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “And what better time to drop in than when there’s a fox on co-op placement.” He looked at her picture and barked admiringly.

  “That’s my mother you’re barking at,” said Dec.

  “Sorry.”

  “And, in case you’d forgotten, my dad is hardly the lecherous type.” Dec looked at his mother’s grad picture again. The wicked smile. “It’s hard to imagine him coming on to her. He’s so…” Dec couldn’t think what.

  “So unlecherous?”

  “So… boring.”

  There was an awkward exchange of glances. Then they both turned back to the yearbook. The pages flipped past, one year in the life of a small-town high school.

  What was he looking for? It was like looking through Where’s Waldo, except Dec had no idea what Waldo was. All he knew was that the yearbook was missing from Lindy’s bookshelf and nothing was supposed to go missing from the House of Memory. All he could think was that somebody didn’t want it lying around.

  They were near the end of the book before they found anything of interest. Two boys were poised over the open hood of a car in the auto mechanics shop. They were mugging for the camera, one of them with a sledgehammer, the other holding his face in mock horror. The “victim” was Clarence Mahood.

  Ezra whistled. “Pre-bald days,” he said. “But you’d know that gut anywhere. Not to mention the car. It’s the Duster, isn’t it?”

  But Dec was too busy staring at the boy with the sledgehammer. He sported a very bad shag, and a wild man’s grin. Dec recognized him right away.

  With a high performance V-8 and 340 horses under the hood,

  this Duster can take anything in town,” says Clarence the hood

  Mahood. Wanna bet, Clare? That’s Denny Runyon fixing to do

  some surgery!!!

  “Hey!” said Ezra, who had just read the caption. “That’s Runyon?”

  Dec nodded.

  Then it came to him.

  The time he had gone to Lindy in her room when she was playing the guitar. A yearbook had been open on the loveseat beside her. He tried to see the page again in his mind’s eye. A dance — that was it. Immediately, he began to flip back through the yearbook, his tongue between his teeth. He stopped at a two-page spread, a collage of the spring prom, “Nights in the Kasbah.”

  “Yes!” he said, stabbing at one of the pictures with his finger. It was Runyon all right, although it was easy to see why he hadn’t noticed him earlier. He was in some kind of an Arabian get-up with a fez perched on his head. He was flexing his biceps for the camera. A girl wearing harem pants, a halter-top and veil, like a genie from some corny Arabian Nights movie, was draped over his shoulders, her arms tight around his neck.

  Lindy Polk.

  The Super Excavator

  THEY HAD GONE to the spring prom together in ‘86. By July, Denny Runyon had left town and Lindy was married to Bernard Steeple and pregnant with Declan. She lived for more than ten years in a house that became a prison to her with a man she grew to despise. Then she flew the coop, with only two postcards to indicate the direction of her flight. Five years later, Denny Runyon died in that same house.

  “It explains one thing,” said Dec.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why they didn’t want me at the inquest.”

  He waited for Ezra to refute what he had said with some implacable logic. But Ezra only nodded.

  “You’re right. It would have had to come up. Probably that’s why Mahood was at the inquest.”

  Dec looked stonily at the table. First bell had come and gone. Second bell as well. They were all alone at the table outside guidance and no one seemed to care. The yearbook still lay open in front of them. Dec felt numb.

  Finally, Ezra patted him on the arm. “The coroner obviously reached the conclusion that there was no connection between Lindy and Runyon’s relationship and Runyon’s death.”

  “How can you say that?”

  Ezra shrugged. “If there was even a hint of foul play, the case would have gone to court for a proper trial. That’s what an inquest is all about.”

  The news did little to relieve Dec of the niggling doubt he felt, or of his resentment. It stuck in his craw. Why all the secrecy? Why had they treated him like a child? He felt his mother at his ear whispering to him, cajoling him.

  Ezra took off his tiny thick glasses and cleaned them on the tail of his shirt.

  “You know,” he said, “they might have had a good reason for not telling you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it would make the accident seem worse.”

  Dec scoffed. “The guy died. How much worse could it get?”

  “Look at it from their point of view,” said Ezra. “They figure, hey, this kid is traumatized enough. If he finds out Runyon wasn’t just any old stranger, maybe it’s going to plunge him into despair.”

  Dec grinned. “Plunge me into despair?”

  Ezra placed his specs back on his nose. “A sensitive guy like you,” he said. “Who knows?”

  Dec felt foolish. He was sensitive — too sensitive for his own good. He looked at the picture of his mother,
the smile in her eyes. He looked at the boy whose neck her arms were draped around. There was no tattoo there, not yet.

  Ezra closed the yearbook. “Talk to your dad, Dec,” he said. “The truth shall set you free.”

  And that was what he planned to do. But his dad wasn’t home. He was in Kingston, according to Mary, Sunny’s babysitter. Wouldn’t be back until that night sometime. Dec wasn’t about to ask Birdie. They weren’t fighting, exactly, but their communications had reached the pass-the-butter stage. Sometimes when their eyes met he saw a reflection of his own resentment. And sometimes he thought he saw something like fear.

  Sunny’s ear was still bothering her. She kept whining and wanting him to read to her. By dinner he was Sunnied out, so, ignoring his apprehensions about the place, he grabbed his backpack and his computer and headed once more to the big house. He had a ninety percent average he planned to keep come hell or high water, and exams were just around the corner. Getting out of here had never seemed more important.

  Steeple Hall loomed before him. He had lost his mother there and found her again, but not the mother he had expected. He wasn’t sure if his memory was betraying him or enlightening him, but either way, he didn’t think he could take much more of it.

  He set up his iBook in his grandfather’s study and stared at the screen, trying not to listen for a voice in every creak and groan of the wind-shifting night. His imagination wanted to wander off up the spiral stairs or drift down into the cellar. He tried not to think of the cellar at all.

  He finished “Frozen Music,” ending the paper with a quote by Frank Lloyd Wright. “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” It was a good quotation. It made him think of the fairytale in which briars grew up around the castle where the princess lay in a dead sleep. It made him think of how the briars, sharp as razors, grew so thickly that they completely consumed the castle until it was lost to view.

  He closed his laptop. It was after nine. He knew he should go, but he stayed another moment. He wasn’t sure why.

  There was a telephone on the desk. It was a homely black article with the number PAcific 2-3039 typed on a little circle of yellowing paper in the centre of the dial. He picked up the receiver. It had been disconnected a long time ago. The new phone line would only service the security system. There was no way to call out of the House of Memory. He put down the receiver and imagined a telephone that connected you to the past.

  The wind was picking up. It rattled the windows in their sockets. He pushed himself free of the desk, glancing below it, glad to see the space empty. Opening the door, he stepped into the hall. He reached back to turn off the study lights, and she was on him like a shot.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded.

  He cringed. “Leave me alone!”

  “Oh, don’t be such a wimp,” she said. “You are so like your father sometimes.” Then she took him by the hand and started dragging him upstairs.

  “You’re hurting me,” he cried. His hand was so small, her pull so large. He felt her fingernails dig into his skin.

  “Mommy,” he said, pleading.

  She wasn’t listening. She was agitated about something, wanted to show him something. He fell on the stairs and she dragged him back up to his feet as if he were a dog on a leash. She led him to his father’s childhood room and slammed the door behind them.

  “There,” she said triumphantly, her body pressed against the door.

  “I don’t want to play hiding on Daddy,” whined Dec.

  “Then you haven’t been paying attention,” she hissed. She returned to the door, listening intently, as if someone was after them. When she was satisfied that no one was coming, she turned to him. “Time for a history lesson,” she said.

  She looked old. There were bags under her eyes and her skin looked as pale as bread dough. She was wearing raggedy jeans and a pink T-shirt with a kitten on it. Her hair was tied back in a scruffy ponytail. There was a slur to her speech, as if she’d been drinking. She liked to burn the candle at both ends, she had told him once. He had wondered how you did that, where you held the thing.

  She led him to a corner of the room where a magnificent construction sat. It was made of Meccano pieces. The Super Excavator.

  “Look,” she demanded.

  The Excavator stood on its own small stand. She turned on the light above it.

  “I want to tell you a story,” she said.

  “About Daddy’s excavator? I know that story.”

  “Not all of it,” she said sharply. “It required one hundred and fifteen parts to make this thing, Dec.”

  “I know, Daddy told me. The Master Engineer’s set. He got it for Christmas.”

  “One hundred and fifteen parts,” she said again, as if trying to find her place in the story. “But that wasn’t all the parts in the Master Engineer’s set. When he was done, there was a handful of stuff left in the box.”

  Dec was quiet now. This was new territory. His father hadn’t told him about spare parts.

  She knelt behind him, steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder. She reached out to turn the crank, make the bucket go up and down, up and down. Then she leaned close to whisper in his ear, so close that the smell of alcohol made him feel woozy.

  “I asked myself what he did with the leftovers.”

  Dec didn’t understand. He was mesmerized by the bucket going up, going down.

  “What do you think, huh?”

  Dec bit the inside of his mouth.

  She laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you then. He chucked them.”

  He reached out to try the crank himself.

  “He threw them away, Dec.”

  She pulled his hand away from the crank. “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “Think of it,” she said. “The set was brand new that very day, a Christmas present. And he just threw out what he couldn’t use.”

  Then Dec felt her wrap her arms around his chest and lay her head against his back. He felt the weight of her on him. He felt her voice more than heard it, felt it resonate through his torso, her voice journeying back to him through so many years.

  “You see, he doesn’t really keep everything” she said. “Whatever doesn’t fit, he gets rid of.”

  A Full Moon Night

  HE SAT IN the gloom of his own small room in Camelot. He sat holding himself until the darkness settled down around him and he could see his clothes on the floor, his books on the shelves, his clutter on the desk. Far away, in the TV room, Birdie was watching a sitcom alone. He could hear the laugh track. It helped, somehow.

  Without turning on the light, he sat at his desk, plugged his iBook into the wall jack and went on line. He worked in a darkness diminished only by the light glowing on the screen.

  It was just after ten when his father knocked quietly and poked his head in the door. Dec swiveled around in his chair, instinctively shifting to hide the screen from his father’s eyes.

  “Hi,” said his father softly. His face was in shadows. “You wanted to see me?”

  Dec recovered his composure. “Uh, yeah. Give me a minute.”

  There was a beat before his father nodded. “Is anything wrong?”

  “I’ll close up,” said Dec abruptly. His voice was shaky.

  “What is it, Son?” asked his father, stepping into the room.

  “For Christ’s sake,” said Dec, closing the cover of his laptop.

  But not fast enough.

  “What is that?” his father asked, straining to see the disappearing screen. And Dec slowly pushed the lid open again and slumped back in his chair so his father had a clear view of where Dec had been travelling.

  He had scanned two images into the computer. They were both of Lindy. One was a wedding picture. She was all in white with yellow flowers woven into her red hair. Her cheeks were flushed, as if maybe she had drunk a fair bit of Champagne. In the other pic
ture, her face was in profile, her hair pulled back. She was playing her guitar, bending over it, sitting on the edge of the loveseat.

  “I posted them in a missing person’s cyber-centre,” said Dec.

  “Missing persons?” His father looked at him incredulously.

  “Yeah, well…”

  His father wiped his face with his large hand. He looked around kind of numbly, then made his way in the semi-dark to Dec’s bed, where he sat. Dec switched on his desk lamp, logged off and closed down the computer.

  “I tried to tell you,” he said. “She’s been on my mind lately.”

  “So I gather. And this is, presumably, because of Birdie and me.”

  Dec cleared his throat, or tried to. “That’s part of it,” he said. “But other stuff, too.” He rubbed his eyes, pressed hard on the lids. “The dead guy, for instance,” he said, without looking at his father.

  “Dennis Runyon.”

  Dec glanced up at his dad, made eye contact, nodded. “Weird how I didn’t know who he was.”

  His father regarded him steadily. “And what is it you think you do know?”

  Dec swallowed hard but could not dislodge the lump in his throat. “They went out together. Mom and Denny.”

  “So? Your mother went out with a lot of boys.”

  “Okay,” said Dec, “but as far as I know, only one of them ended up dead in our house.”

  Bernard stared at him, his large hands on his knees, his whole body as still as a sphinx. “What exactly is that supposed to mean, Declan?”

  Dec turned back to his desk, unable to take the sphinx’s gaze and unable to answer the riddle it posed him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s what I really wish someone would tell me.”

  He glanced at his father. Bernard was looking down at the rug. “It doesn’t mean anything.” Then he looked up. “They were all friends, Son. Your mother and Birdie, Denny and Clare Mahood.”

  Dec folded his hands on his laptop. “Then why is everything so hush-hush?”

  His father sighed. “You’re making too much of things.”

  “I’m not the one making too much of things. You lie to me about not knowing who Runyon was, you stop me from going to the inquest, you even remove the yearbook with Mom and Runyon in it so that I won’t see it.”