The Book of Old Houses Read online

  “A vanity cabinet,” I fantasized aloud, turning back to the demolished room and imagining where I would put one of these exotic items.

  Pedestal sinks are meant to conserve space but in my opinion consume it; the only way you can put anything beneath a pedestal sink is if you attach one of those awful little gingham skirts to its rim, whereupon it will look spiffy for ten minutes.

  “And baseboard heating,” I said optimistically. Taking out an old cast-iron radiator is nearly as difficult as bashing up a bathtub. “Plus maybe a towel warmer?”

  My arms were still vibrating from the impact of the hammer. Still, I hadn’t gone completely crazy; I’d left the commode in place, for instance, figuring I could remove it last and install a new one as an early part of the remodeling process.

  Strategy: in a very old house you may think you need books on remodeling, but what you really need is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. That radiator might’ve looked harmless just standing there in the bathroom corner, but I knew it intended to resist its own removal by the heating-system equivalent of nuclear winter.

  And speaking of conflict, please don’t talk to me about how I was destroying venerable antiques. Because first of all, 1930s plumbing isn’t venerable; it’s intolerable.

  On top of which, do you know how much it costs to get an antique tub out of a house, transported to the place where they promise they will put a brand-new, sort-of-porcelain-ish surface on it, and then get it back in again and up a flight of stairs to your bathroom once more?

  Enough to put that disgusting old object on the moon, that’s how much. And afterward you can only clean it by wiping it very tenderly with the same kind of extremely soft cloth you’re supposed to use for polishing your eyeglasses.

  Which never would’ve worked with Bella around. She was the kind of housekeeper who believed dirt was a manifestation of moral rottenness; her daily cleaning tools included a wire brush and a jug of carbolic acid.

  Although at the moment she wasn’t cleaning anything at all. Instead, while I caught my breath from my exertions and regarded the mess I’d made, she gazed past me into the mirror on what was left of the wall above where the sink had been.

  Amazing, that her reflection didn’t break the mirror. Bella was smart, honest, hardworking, and funny as hell. But she was also so ugly, people around town said she probably had to sneak up on a pail of water to get a drink.

  Now, in preparation for cleaning that god-awful bathroom one last time, she took her henna-red hair out of its rubber band and twisted it in again, skinning it back even more tightly from her long, pallid-complexioned face.

  “All right,” she pronounced ominously, brandishing the whisk broom.

  Her grin of anticipation exposed big, bad teeth, and the look in her bulging grape-green eyes was one I’d seen once in an old science-fiction movie, just before the team of intergalactic space warriors cranked up their flamethrowers to exterminate the giant radioactive bugs.

  “Now, Bella,” I said, hoping she wasn’t planning to bring a flamethrower in here.

  I didn’t own one but I did have a heat gun for removing the thick layers of paint that clung to nearly every surface in my old house. And behind all the plaster walls, the ancient wood was so feathery-dry that you could light it with a match.

  “Don’t go too wild,” I cautioned, glancing past her at my own reflection: lean, narrow face, stubborn chin, and large eyes with dark eyebrows that other people called wing-shaped.

  Not gorgeous, but at least my looks didn’t cause small children to hide behind their mothers. I shoved a dark straggle of plaster-dusted hair behind my ear with a grimy finger.

  “Bella, what were you and my dad arguing about down in the kitchen this morning?” Their voices had woken me.

  “Your father couldn’t find his own backside with both hands and a flashlight.”

  Which was not exactly an answer. I squinted into the mirror. Bits of sink wreckage clung in my hair with the plaster dust, and the elastic-strapped safety glasses I’d worn while swinging the sledgehammer had left deep grooves in my face.

  Also it occurred to me suddenly that I’d just destroyed the only shower-taking apparatus in the house. Not deliberately, mind you, but a couple of times that sledgehammer had zigged when it should’ve zagged. If you turned on the water now, the resulting flood would probably drown all the mice in the basement.

  “Yes, but . . .” I began.

  My father, an explosives expert and ex-federal-fugitive who was for many years suspected of murdering my mother—he hadn’t—lived alone in his own small cottage a few blocks from here on Octagon Street.

  But lately he’d been spending most of his time at my place, where he made himself useful at a variety of old-house chores while at the same time alternately annoying Bella and making her laugh so hard that she had to sit down.

  “Your father thinks he knows what’s best for everybody,” spat Bella, wiping furiously at a spot on the old pine beadboard paneling that went halfway up the bathroom walls.

  The rest of the walls—what remained of them, anyway—were brightly papered in a long-outdated design featuring silver swans swimming tranquilly on a background of Pepto-Bismol pink.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Bella that the beadboard was bound for glory, too, along with the old wallpaper, which I didn’t even plan to bother steaming off the rest of the plaster before I got rid of it. Crash, bash, gone in a flash was my plan.

  But just then a car pulled into the driveway. I left Bella rubbing her knobby hands together in über-hygienic glee at the prospect of never having to scour that bathtub again—by the end she’d been employing a product called Kapow! that was so strong, in a pinch you could use it to loosen the mortar between chimney bricks—and went downstairs to find out who the visitor was.

  The car in my driveway was an older red Saab I’d never seen before, with Rhode Island plates, a pleasant-looking middle-aged man behind the wheel, and a duffel bag on the backseat. He got out, blinking behind his horn-rims in the bright late-August morning.

  His blue button-down shirt was open at the collar, the knot of his striped tie loosened, and his sleeves rolled up over his forearms. Stretching gratefully in the onshore breeze, he brushed thinning brown hair off his forehead with a tired gesture.

  “Hello,” I said. He looked up, surprised.

  “Hello. Are you Jacobia Tiptree?”

  Might be, I felt like replying as another car tore by. It was a snazzy red Mazda Miata with a young blonde woman behind the wheel. The blue scarf tied around her head let her pale hair show prettily, and the movie-star-style sunglasses she wore increased the overall impression of glamour.

  And money; this was not the kind of person we generally saw a whole lot of around Eastport, even in summer. But she was gone before I could wonder much about her.

  My visitor approached the porch steps. If the Miata driver’s looks shouted cash, his yelled brains. And something else; smart, dark eyes, pale skin with a bluish hint of five o’clock shadow, a drawn expression that hinted strongly at grief . . .

  “I’m Dave DiMaio,” he said, and at my blank look he went on, “I was a friend of Horace Robotham.”

  “Oh. Oh, my.” I descended the porch steps and took the hand he offered.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. The obituary had been in the Bangor Daily News.

  He smiled warmly. In his forties, I guessed, but with the lean build some very fortunate men keep throughout their lives. “Thanks. Horace and I corresponded about you before he . . .”

  Horace Robotham had been a Maine-based rare-book expert and I’d sent him a volume my father had unearthed in the cellar of my house. But I hadn’t heard much back from him except a few brief notes to say he was working on it, and then he’d died suddenly, murdered by someone who had apparently attacked him while he was out on his evening walk.

  A random mugging, the police called it. That had been three weeks earlier.

  “I’m very s
orry about your friend,” I repeated. “Won’t you come in? You must have had a long drive.”

  Not that I knew where he’d come from but getting to Eastport at all—a town of about two thousand on Moose Island in downeast Maine, three hours from Bangor and light-years, it often seemed, from anywhere else—nearly always involved serious travel times.

  Dave DiMaio followed me inside to the big old high-ceilinged kitchen with its tall bare windows, pine wainscoting, and hardwood floor. “This is beautiful,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I replied. His gaze took in the built-in pine cabinets, linoleum-topped counters, woodstove-equipped fireplace hearth, and the antique soapstone sink, all bathed in the watery sunlight pouring in through the windows’ rippled panes.

  From her usual perch atop the refrigerator our cross-eyed Siamese cat, Cat Dancing, opened one piercing blue eye while twitching her tail in irritation, then went to sleep again.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” I invited. And tell me why you’ve come, I wanted to add.

  But the poor man looked exhausted so I gave him a glass of lemonade and set a paper plate of oatmeal lace cookies in front of him instead.

  “Oh,” he breathed when he’d drunk down half the lemonade in a swig. “Oh, that hits the spot.”

  He was trying his first cookie when the dogs pelted in, Monday the black Labrador wagging ecstactically at the sight of company, Prill the red Doberman hanging back, her amber eyes alert.

  “It’s okay, Prill,” I said a little nervously.

  Prill was a rescue dog with some terrible history that I was better off not knowing. Fine with the family and with anyone else to whom she’d been introduced, she still thought s-t-r-a-n-g-e-r spelled trouble.

  Dave DiMaio got up. “Hello, girl,” he said conversationally to the dog, crouching before her.

  Prill’s ears flattened. “Really,” I told Dave, trying to keep calm in the face of imminent disaster, “you shouldn’t . . .”

  “Hello,” he repeated to the unhappy dog, who dropped into a crouch of her own and crept forward, lip curled ominously.

  But when she got near enough, DiMaio reached out fearlessly and ruffled her ears, as casually as if she didn’t weigh over a hundred pounds and possess nearly as many teeth. I just stared as under his caress her suspicions melted.

  Then she rolled onto her side, her stubby tail tattooing the floor. “Dogs seem to like me,” DiMaio explained with a shrug.

  Prill yawned happily and let out a whimper of joy.

  “Yes, so I see,” I said. “This one should’ve liked you with a little barbeque sauce and maybe a side of fries. How did you do that?”

  The big red dog got to her feet and wandered unconcernedly away into the dining room where I heard her drop into her doggy bed with a soft thump. Monday followed.

  “I don’t know. Good vibes?” DiMaio smiled briefly as he straightened. “But listen, I’m sorry to barge in here. I’ve obviously interrupted you in a project.”

  Bathroom wreckage, I realized with embarrassment, remained in my hair, and although I’d washed my hands before putting out the refreshments, the rest of me looked fit for digging ditches.

  Meanwhile Bella was still upstairs, dropping big chunks of sink into, apparently, a metal bucket: clunk! clank! thunk!

  “I have been a little busy,” I admitted, all at once keenly aware of my costume: tattered jeans, a paint-smeared shirt, loafers with most of the stitching torn out.

  But then I managed a smile of my own as something about this guy—the set of his jaw, or the odd, brooding darkness that lurked behind the friendliness in his eyes—suggested he’d seen worse.

  Much worse. “Have you by any chance brought me back the book your friend had?” I asked.

  After reading in the paper about Horace Robotham’s death I’d tried writing to the address I had for him, hoping someone might be clearing up the rare-book dealer’s affairs. But I’d gotten no answer. I’d just about decided I might have to drive to Orono, Maine, where he’d lived and had an old-book business, to try locating my volume.

  DiMaio shook his head. “No. I’m sorry to say I don’t know where your book is. Horace’s partner, Lang Cabell, looked for it. But it wasn’t there. I just talked to Lang last night,” he added. “I’d been . . . away.”

  The light dawned suddenly: my old book, a sudden death, and now this stranger, arriving without warning. . . .

  “So that’s why you’re here,” I said. “You want it, too. You’ve just found out he died, and that the book is gone. And you think maybe someone—”

  “No, no,” he interrupted, putting his hands up in a warding-off gesture. “Nothing like that. Really, I don’t know there’s any connection at all between . . .”

  Protesting too much. And at my skeptical look he gave in. “All right. It’s your book, after all. I guess you’ve got a right to a few answers. The few I have.”

  He let his hands fall to his sides. “Long story, though. Do you want to take a walk with me while I tell it?”

  What popped into my mind immediately was a walk-and-talk, the kind of stroll people take to discuss something confidential when they suspect their current location might be bugged. Back in the big city where I worked as a money manager to the rich and dreadful, many of my clients were so paranoid about eavesdropping that the only place I ever saw them was out on the street.

  But DiMaio’s explanation was less paranoid. “I started out before daybreak this morning from Providence, Rhode Island,” he told me. “I teach at a small college you’ve never heard of, special topics in late-nineteenth-century American literature.”

  “Really,” I said evenly. Heard about a death just last night and hopped into his car bright and early; fascinating.

  “Anyway,” he added, “I’ve been on the road for hours, and I want some exercise if I can get it.”

  He wanted more than that, I felt certain. But by now I was curious, and it was a beautiful day. Pausing only to brush a few larger shards of pedestal sink out of my hair, I grabbed the dogs’ collars from their hook in the hall, which brought them running.

  “You’re on,” I told Dave DiMaio. “I’ll give you the fifty-cent Eastport tour and while we’re out, you can also explain to me why my old book’s so important to you,” I said, bending to leash the animals.

  Still assuming that the book was the only thing behind his visit. But when we got outside, DiMaio paused. “Um, listen,” he began, with an uncertain glance back at his car.

  “What?” I asked, peering up at the window through which the entire bathroom would soon be exiting. Once that was finished, we were in for approximately the same amount of construction that it took to complete the Brooklyn Bridge.

  And bathroom work wasn’t the only thing I had on my plate this fine August morning. The quarrel between Bella and my dad had sounded serious, and her remarks weren’t reassuring.

  A rift between those two could throw all of our reasonably tranquil domestic arrangements into a cocked hat, so I supposed I would have to do something about it.

  Also my just-past-teenaged son, Sam, had recently returned from alcohol rehab. And while I’d realized at last that it wasn’t my job to keep him sober, I still couldn’t help trying.

  There was something else, too, that I ought to remember but couldn’t, I thought distractedly. I knew one thing, though: I had no intention of getting involved with murder.

  If that was even what it was; if Horace Robotham’s death wasn’t just a mugging gone tragically wrong, as the police seemed to believe.

  “Well,” Dave began, “I just wondered if in your house—”

  “Yes?” The dogs yanked mercilessly, Prill west and Monday east.

  “In your house,” Dave DiMaio said seriously to me, “would there by any chance be a good place to hide a gun?”

  Half an hour after he pulled into my driveway we’d stashed Dave DiMaio’s horrid little firearm in the cellar lockbox where I kept my own collection of weaponry.

  The best of
the bunch was the Bisley six-shot revolver my husband, Wade Sorenson, had given me before we got married. With its long, blued steel barrel, checkered walnut grip, and general air of being able to stop anything including a charging rhinoceros, the Italian reproduction of the gun that won the West was my favorite, even aside from the sentimental attachment I felt for it.

  With the Bisley was a small, gray .38 Police Special, the carrying of which I tried hard to avoid, since if I did it meant I was in way more trouble than I could handle. High among its virtues, though, was the fact that the Police Special was concealable, a big plus in any situation whose successful outcome depends at least in part on your looking like a dumb-bunny.

  An appearance, by the way, that I am able to achieve with no difficulty whatsoever. But back to the lockbox and my third gun, a .22 Beretta Model 87 target pistol with an extended barrel.

  Dave looked uneasy. “You struck me more as the anti-gun type,” he said as I examined the target gun, then locked the box again after putting his weapon into it.

  “Mm. Watch out for first impressions,” I replied.

  The gun he’d handed me was a .22 revolver. It was a cheap, evil-looking piece of junk perfect for dropping down a sewer grate after you’d used it in a convenience-store robbery, but not for much else.

  “My husband repairs high-quality firearms when he’s not out being a harbor pilot, and he’s a good shot,” I told DiMaio.

  Which was putting it mildly. Wade guided freighters into our harbor, through the wild tides, vicious currents, and treacherous granite outcroppings with which our local waters were plentifully furnished. Also, he could stand flat-footed and shoot the eye out of a gnat.

  “He taught me to shoot,” I added, “and I discovered I liked it.”

  Back then I’d thought guns were for guys with broken washing machines on their porches and mean dogs tied in their yards. But to get closer to Wade I’d have fixed all the washing machines and made friends with every one of those dogs, and after quite a while of his slow, patient instruction I found out that shooting was fun.