A Thief in the House of Memory

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Interesting,” said Ezra. He punched Print. The printer buzzed and beeped and, a moment later, spat out a single sheet. Ezra looked it over and then handed it to Dec.

  Dec wasn’t sure what he was looking at. “Web Magician Wizard’s Realm? Is this an online game?”

  “It’s a full moon calculator,” said Ezra. “You enter the year and month, and the calculator tells you the full moon for any date between 1600 and 2199. Like for instance, November 1997.”

  Dec looked down at the printout. The moon was full November fourteenth. “At 14: 13,” he said. “That’s like two in the afternoon.”

  Ezra nodded slowly but made no comment.

  “And that would mean…” said Dec. But he wasn’t sure what it meant. Except that November first was almost two weeks earlier. He looked at Ezra again. “There wouldn’t have been any moon at all the night Lindy left.”

  Ezra returned his gaze with a sober expression Dec didn’t entirely like. He looked at the printout again. “It would have been pitch-black the night of her party,” he said. He looked at his friend. Behind him, the computer went to a screen saver of flying toasters.

  “Dec,” said Ezra quietly. “You knew it yourself. You said you stood at the hallway window waiting for your mother to come home, worrying about how dark it was.”

  Dec was too stunned to nod.

  Ezra shrugged. “It just seemed odd to me,” he said. He scratched his head, averting his eyes. And in the gesture, Dec was suddenly struck by the enormity of what Ezra was telling him. His father’s elaborately detailed story wasn’t true. It was a lie.

  He didn’t go home that night. He needed time to think. When he phoned Camelot, he was glad it was Birdie who answered.

  “Ezra’s helping me with my physics,” he said. “Tell me another one,” she said.

  “Actually, we scored some crack and we’re just about to do up.”

  “That’s more like it,” said Birdie. “You want to talk to your dad?”

  Dec could hear the TV on, some show they were watching from their side-by-side matching chairs. It seemed as far away as the moon.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  Dec sat with a popcorn bowl in his lap, picking through the kernels for edible remnants. The TV was on, Saturday Night Live. Lots of laughs, but only from the studio audience. Ezra sat beside Dec, stretched out, his feet up on the coffee table.

  There’s probably a totally rational explanation,” he said.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” said Dec. “Like he murdered her and buried her in the basement.” Ezra groaned. “Not this again.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to think?” Dec stared at the tube, daring the actors to make him laugh. “He’s a fake. Everything he does is fake. He fights fake wars. He tells fake stories. Maybe he’s not even my real father.”

  Ezra picked up the remote and pressed Mute. The laughter stopped.

  “Want to run that by me again?” he said.

  Dec gave up on the popcorn. “I was thinking about Denny Runyon,” he said. “About what happened when he dropped me off that day.”

  “The Look,” said Ezra.

  “Maybe what it meant was, ‘Hey, kid, you are looking at your daddy.’”

  Ezra peered at Dec. “Maybe you are on crack.”

  Dec shoved him away. “Think about it. Runyon and my mom were together at the spring prom. My birthday’s in March.”

  “Yeah, which means that you were conceived in July. We’ve done the math. Runyon was out of town by then.”

  “According to who?

  “Your father,” said Ezra.

  “I rest my case.”

  Ezra leaned in very close. “I don’t want to rain on your paranoid parade, Dec, but you really look like Bernard Steeple.”

  “Thanks a million.”

  Ezra leaned close again. “It wasn’t an insult.”

  “Mr. Rogers the Second.”

  “The new improved version. Better sneakers.”

  Dec clammed up. There was no real question in his mind that Bernard was his father. That was why the whole thing was so infuriating. He thought of his father’s long face, his sincere face.

  And that was it. That sincere face had lied to him. Outright.

  Dec reached for the remote and punched the Mute button again. The show burst back into life. More laughs. Mindless. Perfect.

  Ezra fell asleep curled up on the couch. Dec turned off the tube, threw a blanket over his friend and headed upstairs to Ezra’s room. Mrs. Harlow had changed the sheets for him.

  He stripped down to his boxers and crawled into the coolness, snuggled under the comforter. He was exhausted. Way too tired to sleep. He kept going over his father’s story, again and again, drifting through the no man’s land between wakefulness and sleep so gradually that he didn’t notice when he crossed the border.

  His father is still talking, still telling his story, but suddenly the account of Lindy’s last night at the big house has a laugh track. Some of the biggest laughs come from Lindy herself. And when that doesn’t get enough attention, she blows on her toy whistle, which drowns out everything that Bernard is trying to say. Dec wishes she would stop. It is impossible to think straight with her around.

  Suddenly, his father loses his patience and turns on her.

  “You’re driving me around the bend,” he says.

  “That would make for a change,” says Lindy. “Around the bend is farther than we’ve been in years.”

  More laughter.

  A comedy sketch, except that it isn’t funny.

  “Please, Mom,” Dec cries, grabbing at her arm, but she is made of dream material and he can’t hold her.

  “I’m going crazy,” says Bernard, covering his ears.

  “That makes two of us,” says Lindy. Then she blows her whistle — loud— and marches around the room. Bernard grabs for her but he can’t hold her, either.

  “Give that thing to me, or else!” he shouts.

  “Or else what?” she shouts back.

  The shout woke him. He looked around and for a moment had no idea where he was. Then he saw the shadowy shape of Ezra’s egg.

  Just a dream, he told himself, as he gathered his comforter back off the floor. Was it a dream? Had there been a scene like that, so horrible he had repressed it? You heard stories about such things. Maybe it had happened like that. Maybe his father had snapped. Was that what he was covering up?

  Dec tried to summon up such a memory, but it wasn’t there. You had to go with what you knew — what you knew in your heart. You had to distinguish between what was real and what was imaginary, separate the data from the interpretation. So what did he know?

  He lay there quietly, calmly, going over it all again, turning over every stone, trying to find the missing piece of the puzzle. And then he dreamed again.

  A small house in a dark forest. He knocks on the door. It opens on the smiling face of Denny Runyon. There is an arrogance behind his smile that Dec hasn’t noticed before.

  “You know who I am,” says Runyon. “Think back, amigo. Back. Remember?”

  The Lie of the Room

  IN THE OLD days the Steeples had kept a boat or two down on the river. There were photographs in the drawing room of ancient relatives sailing around dressed in formal attire, a lady in a rowboat with a parasol, someone dressed up like a coureur de bois kneeling in a birchbark canoe. You could sail all the way to Ladybank in those days.

  Now the river was not so high and Bernard had let the dock slip into decay. There was more of it below the water-line than above it. Dec tossed a stone and watched it sink until it lay on the slimy surface of the old dock. He looked at his watch. Four o’clock.

  It had rained again Sunday night. All around him was the sound of dripping leaves. He picked up another stone. He hurled it, and when it sank, he watched the ripples spread out until they came back to him in ever-diminishing size, so that what finally reached him was little more than a memory of a splash.
>
  His father had driven Sunny to her ear specialist’s appointment in Ottawa. Enticements were needed to get her to go: supper at a fast food place at the very least, perhaps a trip to Mrs. Tiggy Winkle’s Toy Store. Monday was Birdie’s day off and she had gone with them. Dec had taken the bus home. He had the place all to himself. But not for long. Through the thick bush along the riverbank, he heard the sound of someone approaching on the old road. He climbed to his feet, dusting the dirt from his hands. Ezra appeared.

  “Come on,” said Dec, and Ezra followed without a word. They scrambled up the hill, crossed the lawn and entered the big house, where they sat on the pew in the vestibule to take off their sopping sneakers.

  At the landing they turned towards Dec’s old room. He closed the door behind them and went directly to his desk, opened the drawer and took out the postcards from his mother. He handed them to Ezra.

  “Is this all there is?”

  Dec shrugged. “That’s all she wrote.”

  Ezra examined the postcards minutely. “Not exactly chosen for their sentimental value,” he said, looking at the pictures. He glanced at Dec.

  “Keep looking.”

  Ezra returned his attention to the cards. “They look like maybe they got dropped in a puddle or something,” he said at last. He compared the cards. “Two puddles. One in Winnipeg and one in Edmonton.”

  “You’re getting warm,” said Dec drily.

  The message on each card was legible, and so was the address, but the cards were both smeared in the upper right-hand corner, where the postmarks were. Ezra looked up at Dec again.

  “They could have been mailed anywhere.”

  “Bingo,” said Dec, but there was no elation in his voice. He took the cards from Ezra and stared at them. “Right here in Ladybank, for instance.”

  Ezra adjusted his glasses. “Lead on,” he said. They left the room and headed down the corridor to his father’s childhood room. Cowboys on the bedspread, cowboys on the curtains, model airplanes in the air. Battleships and destroyers, corvettes and minesweepers patrolling the shelves nearby. A book open on the bedside table: Tom Swift and his Ultrasonic Cycloplane. And, standing in the corner, the Super Excavator. It looked menacing to Dec now, as if it might spring to life of its own accord. And who knew what it might dig up.

  From under the cowboy-covered bed, Dec wheeled out a wooden drawer. He took out a fat scrapbook, laid it on the carpet and, on his knees, opened it.

  Ezra knelt beside him. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “When my father was little, he and his folks travelled across the country by train.” Dec turned the pages of the scrapbook. Little Bernard had kept everything: the kiddie menus from the dining car, the sightseeing pamphlets, snapshots with crinkly edges, and postcards. All kinds of postcards. Some of the postcards were pasted in. But there was a small collection of them loose in the back. There were lots of cards, scenic sites: Halifax, Moncton, Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton…

  Dec watched Ezra shuffle through the cards once, then again. Waited to see the exact moment when the truth dawned on him. “These are the same vintage as your mother’s postcards.”

  Dec nodded. He closed the book and carefully replaced it in the drawer.

  “Weird,” said Ezra, sticking his hands in his back pockets.

  “One more stop,” said Dec.

  They went to Lindy’s room. He took one of the three remaining yearbooks and opened it to the front where Lindy had signed her name and scribbled out her address.

  Ezra didn’t need to be told what he was looking at. He shook his head. “The writing’s nothing like on the postcards,” he said.

  “Oh, a little bit,” said Dec. “Enough to fool a ten-year-old.”

  ***

  They walked together down the earthen stairs back to the dock. Dec stopped.

  “This is where I was building the raft that time when Lindy and I saw the deer.” He pointed to where the old road started into the woods. “Except it wasn’t a deer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was a man.”

  Ezra stared at him. “A man dressed as a deer? Two men, perhaps?”

  Dec smiled but it didn’t last. “I’m not sure what it was. It was just a glimpse. What I remember most is how hard Lindy tried to convince me it was a deer. But when I try to remember it, I don’t see any antlers.”

  Ezra cocked an eyebrow. “Runyon?” Dec nodded. Then Ezra stared back towards the woods, as if waiting for the creature — man or beast — to appear again. “Are you sure?”

  Dec shook his head. “Do I look like I’m sure? But he was around. That much I know.”

  Ezra didn’t look so certain.

  “I finally realized what the look on his face was when he dropped me off that day. It wasn’t that he was trying to tell me something. That’s where I went wrong. His smile made a big impression on me because I had seen it before. The time I took Sunny to the creek to look at the tadpoles. I saw Lindy come down the hill from the big house and throw out her thumb to hitch a ride. When the guy stopped he reached over to open the passenger door. He was facing me, although he didn’t see me. He was smiling at her. That’s where I saw that smile before.”

  ***

  They walked in silence along the old rutted road towards Ezra’s car. The undergrowth pressed in on them. They had to walk in single file. More than once, Ezra looked back.

  “I feel like we’re being followed,” he whispered to Dec.

  Dec stopped and looked back along the muddy path.

  They waited, heard nothing.

  “Maybe I just feel like somebody should be following us,” said Ezra.

  They moved on. There were puddles to ford and fallen trees to clamber over. Every now and then there were glimpses of the river on their left. Every now and then there were shrieks and skitterings in the dense bush to their right where the hill climbed steeply to the grounds of the hall.

  Ezra had backed Ran down over the culvert, then parked it out of view of County Road 10 behind a wall of greenery. It had been Dec’s idea. He wasn’t certain when his folks would get home, and he didn’t want the car sitting in the driveway and the two boys not around.

  Ezra climbed behind the wheel, closed his door and rolled down the window. He gazed at Dec’s face as if he was inspecting it for cracks.

  “At least there’s one good thing,” he said. “Runyon must have already known about this back road. So you’re off the hook there.”

  “I guess I should feel relieved,” said Dec.

  Ezra looked ahead, his hands curling and uncurling on the wheel. He looked up at Dec again. “You want to come home with me?”

  Dec kicked at a hardened clump of earth with the muddy toe of his shoe. “No,” he said. “I can’t run away from this.”

  Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Then Ezra put his key in the ignition. “Are you scared?”

  Dec thought for a moment and nodded. “But I think what scares me most is that he might lie to me again. Every time I uncover a little bit more he feeds me just enough story to fit the facts. I want to get to the end if it.”

  Ezra nodded. “There’s another option,” he said. “Don’t say anything.”

  “You mean forget it?”

  Ezra shrugged. “Maybe the truth is overrated?” he said. Dec snorted. “No, seriously,” said Ezra. “Your father treats you right. Before this happened, your biggest complaint about him was that he was uninspiring. That’s not a capital offence.”

  “Yeah, but what if there was a capital offence? That’s what it looks like.”

  “I know what it looks like, but — and don’t get me wrong here — your mother sounds like a complete fruitcake.”

  Dec bit his lip. “You don’t need to tell me.”

  “Maybe the past is better left where it is. You’re going to blow this pop stand soon enough. Do you need to take him down? Is that what this is about?”

  Dec thought about it,
then slowly shook his head. “It’s weird what you forget. She was so much fun. I guess that’s what I wanted to remember.” He pounded lightly on the door with both his fists. “The thing is, now that I know this much, I can’t not know the rest.”

  Ezra nodded. “Toss me a pound,” he said, and their fists bumped together. Then Ezra rolled up the window. He turned on the ignition. He sat far back in his seat, like a racecar driver, his arms locked at the elbows, revving the motor a couple of times. Dec ran ahead, ducking under the low boughs until he came to the road. It was clear both ways. He waved the okay signal to Ezra, who put his foot down on the gas, and then came slipping and sliding through the wall of green, fishtailing in the mud.

  He almost made it.

  Home to Roost

  DEC WAS IN his room when the family arrived back at Camelot. He crossed the hall to the master bedroom and from the window watched his father carry Sunny, asleep on his shoulder, into the house, while Birdie collected shopping bags from the hatch of the Rendezvous. She noticed him at the window and waved, but she raised her eyebrows in a way that made him nervous. He was back at his desk when his father poked his head in at the door a few minutes later. With books all around him, it looked like he was hard at it.

  “How goes the battle?” said his father.

  Dec looked at the array of work before him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it’s Homework three, Dec no score.”

  His father smiled. “Know the feeling.” He looked weary and a little worried.

  “Is Sunny okay?”

  “She may need a hearing aid,” his father said. “They’re going to do some more tests.” He paused. “How about you, Dec? Are you okay?”

  Dec shifted in his seat. “No,” he said.

  His father stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. Dec swivelled in his chair to face him. His father leaned against the wall. He cleared his throat.

  “Just as we were coming through Cupar we passed a tow truck,” said his father. “It looked like he was hauling your friend’s Toyota.”

  “Right,” said Dec. “Ezra was over.”