— ‘
‘What happened the day you came down here? Tell me.’
‘I was at the printshop in Sanford. Jo called me from . . . I don’t remember, I think a rest area on the turnpike.’
‘Between Derry and the TR?’
‘Yeah. She was on her way to Sara Laughs and wanted me to meet her there. She told me to park in the driveway if I got there first, not to go in the house . . . which I could have; I know where you keep the spare key.’
Sure he did, in a Sucrets tin under the deck. I had shown him myself. ‘Did she say why she didn’t want you to go inside?’
‘It’ll sound crazy.’
‘No it won’t. Believe me.’
‘She said the house was dangerous.’
For a moment the words just hung there. Then I asked, ‘ Did you get here first?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And waited outside?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see or sense anything dangerous?’
There was a long pause. At last he said, ‘There were lots of people out on the lake —
speedboaters, water-skiers, you know how it is — but all the engine-noise and the laughter seemed to kind of . . . stop dead when it got near the house. Have you ever noticed that it seems quiet there even when it’s not?’
Of course I had; Sara seemed to exist in its own zone of silence. ‘Did it feel dangerous, though?’
‘No,’ he said, almost reluctantly. ‘Not to me, anyway. But it didn’t feel exactly empty, either. I felt
. . . fuck, I felt watched. I sat on one of those railroad-tie steps and waited for my sis. Finally she came. She parked behind my car and hugged me . . . but she never took her eyes off the house. I asked her what she was up to and she said she couldn’t tell me, and that I couldn’t tell you we’d been there. She said something like, “If he finds out on his own, then it’s meant to be. I’ll have to tell him sooner or later, anyway. But I can’t now, because I need his whole attention. I can’t get that while he’s working.”‘
I felt a flush crawl across my skin. ‘She said that, huh?’
‘Yeah. Then she said she had to go in the house and do something. She wanted me to wait outside. She said if she called, I should come on the run. Otherwise I should just stay where I was.’
‘She wanted someone there in case she got in trouble.’
‘Yeah, but it had to be someone who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions she didn’t want to answer.
That was me. I guess that was always me.’
‘And?’
‘She went inside. I sat on the hood of my car, smoking cigarettes. I was still smoking then. And you know, I did start to feel something then that wasn’t right. As if there might be someone in the house who’d been waiting for her, someone who didn’t like her. Maybe someone who wanted to hurt her. Probably I just picked that up from Jo — the way her nerves seemed all strung up, the way she kept looking over my shoulder at the house even while she was hugging me — but it seemed like something else. Like a . . . I don’t know . . . ‘
‘Like a vibe.’
‘Yes!’ he almost shouted. ‘A vibration. But not a good vibration, like in the Beach Boys song. A bad vibration.’
‘What happened?’
‘I sat and waited. I only smoked two cigarettes so I don’t guess it could have been longer than twenty minutes or half an hour, but it seemed longer. I kept noticing how the sounds from the lake seemed to make it most of the way up the hill and then just kind of . . . quit. And how there didn’t seem to be any birds, except far off in the distance.
‘Once, she came out. I heard the deck door bang, and then her footsteps on the stairs over on that side. I called to her, asked if she was okay, and she said fine. She said for me to stay where I was.
She sounded a little short of breath, as if she was carrying something or had been doing some chore.’
‘Did she go to her studio or down to the lake?’
‘I don’t know. She was gone another fifteen minutes or so — time enough for me to smoke another butt — and then she came back out the front door. She checked to make sure it was locked, and then she came up to me. She looked a lot better. Relieved. The way people look when they do some dirty job they’ve been putting off, finally get it behind them. She suggested we walk down that path she called The Street to the resort that’s down there — ‘
‘Warrington’s.’
‘Right, right. She said she’d buy me a beer and a sandwich. Which she did, out at the end of this long floating dock.’
The Sunset Bar, where I had first glimpsed Rogette.
‘Then you went to have a look at the softball game.’
‘That was Jo’s idea. She had three beers to my one, and she insisted. Said someone was going to hit a longshot homer into the trees, she just knew it.’
Now I had a clear picture of the part Mattie had seen and told me about. Whatever Jo had done, it had left her almost giddy with relief. She had ventured into the house, for one thing. Had dared the spirits in order to do her business and survived. She’d had three beers to celebrate and her discretion had slipped . . . not that she had behaved with any great stealth on her previous trips down to the TR. Frank remembered her saying if I found out on my own then it was meant to be — que será, será. It wasn’t the attitude of someone hiding an affair, and I realized now that all her behavior suggested a woman keeping a short-term secret. She would have told me when I finished my stupid book, if she had lived. If.
‘You watched the game for awhile, then went back to the house along The Street.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Did either of you go in?’
‘No. By the time we got there, her buzz had worn off and I trusted her to drive. She was laughing while we were at the softball game, but she wasn’t laughing by the time we got back to the house.
She looked at it and said, “I’m done with her. I’ll never go through that door again, Frank.”‘
My skin first chilled, then prickled.
‘I asked her what was wrong, what she’d found out. I knew she was writing something, she’d told me that much — ‘
‘She told everyone but me,’ I said . . . but without much bitterness. I knew who the man in the brown sportcoat had been, and any bitterness or anger — anger at Jo, anger at myself — paled before the relief of that. I hadn’t realized how much that fellow had been on my mind until now.
‘She must have had her reasons,’ Frank said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘But she didn’t tell you what they were.’
‘All I know is that it started — whatever it was — with her doing research for an article. It was a lark, Jo playing Nancy Drew. I’m pretty sure that at first not telling you was just to keep it a surprise. She read books but mostly she talked to people — listened to their stories of the old days and teased them into looking for old letters . . . diaries . . . she was good at that part of it, I think.
Damned good. You don’t know any of this?’
‘No,’ I said heavily. Jo hadn’t been having an affair, but she could have had one, if she’d wanted.
She could have had an. affair with Tom Selleck and been written up in Inside View and I would have gone on tapping away at the keys of my Powerbook, blissfully unaware.
‘Whatever she found out,’ Frank said, ‘I think she just stumbled over it.’
‘And you never told me. Four years and you never told me any of it.’
‘That was the last time I was with her,’ Frank said, and now he didn’t sound apologetic or embarrassed at all. ‘And the last thing she asked of me was that I not tell you we’d been to the lake house. She said she’d tell you everything when she was ready, but then she died. After that I didn’t think it mattered. Mike, she was my sister. She was my sister and I promised.’
‘All right. I understand.’ And I did — just not enough. What had Jo discovered? That Normal Auster had drowned his infant son under a handpump? That back around the turn of the century an animal trap had been left in a place where a young Negro boy would be apt to come along and step