As, in a way, they had been. The one place where the two stories differed completely was in the matter of the title. They both fit, but now Mort found that he had a question to ask Shooter which was very similar to the one Shooter had already asked him: How did you happen by that title, Mr Shooter? That’s what I really want to know. How did you happen to know that, twelve hundred miles away from your shitsplat town in Mississippi . ‘ the wife of a writer you claim you never heard of before this year had her own secret window, looking down on her own secret garden?
Well, there was only one way to find out, of course. When Greg ran Shooter down Mort would have to ask him.
20
Mort passed on the cup of coffee Ted offered and asked if he had a Coke or a Pepsi. Ted did, and after Mort had drunk it, his stomach settled. He had expected that just being here, here where Ted and Amy played house now that they no longer had to bother with the cheap little town-line motels, would make him angry
and restless. It didn’t. It was just a house, one where every room seemed to proclaim that the owner was a Swinging Young Bachelor Who Was Making It. Mort found that he could deal with that quite easily, although it made him feel a little nervous for Amy all over again. He thought of her little office with its clear, sane light and the soporific drone of the drier coming through the wall, her little office with its secret window, the only one in the whole place which looked down into the tight little angle of space formed by the house and the ell, and thought how much she had belonged there and how little she seemed to belong here. But that was something she would have to deal with herself, and he thought, after a few minutes in this other house which was not a dreaded den of iniquity at all but only a house, that he could live with that
… that he could even be content with it.
She asked him if he would be staying in Derry overnight.
‘Uh-uh. I’ll be going back as soon as we finish with the insurance adjustors. If something else pops, they can get in touch with me … or you can.’
He smiled at her. She smiled back and touched his hand briefly. Ted didn’t like it. He frowned out the window and fingered his pipe.
21
They were on time for their meeting with the representatives of the insurance company, which undoubtedly relieved Ted Milner’s mind. Mort was not particularly crazy about having Ted in attendance; it had never been Ted’s house, after all, not even after the divorce. Still, it seemed to ease Amy’s mind to have him there, and so Mort left it alone.
Don Strick, the Consolidated Assurance Company agent with whom they had done business, conducted the meeting at his office, where they went after another brief tour of ‘the site.’ At the office, they met a man named Fred Evans, a Consolidated field investigator specializing in arson. The reason Evans hadn’t been with Wickersham and Bradley that morning or at ‘the site’ when Strick met them there at noon became obvious very quickly: he had spent most of the previous night poking through the ruins with a ten-cell flashlight and a Polaroid camera. He had gone back to his motel room, he said, to catch a few winks before meeting the Raineys.
Mort liked Evans very much. He seemed to really care about the loss he and Amy had suffered, while everyone else, including Mr Teddy Makes Three, seemed to have only mouthed the traditional words of sympathy before going on to whatever they considered the business at hand (and in Ted Milner’s case, Mort thought, the business at hand was getting him out of Derry and back to Tashmore Lake as soon as possible).
Fred Evans did not refer to 92 Kansas Street as ‘the site.’ He referred to it as ‘the house.’
His questions, while essentially the same as those asked by Wickersham and Bradley, were gentler, more detailed, and more probing. Although he’d had four hours’ sleep at most, his eyes were bright, his speech quick and clear. After speaking with him for twenty minutes, Mort decided that he would deal with a company other than Consolidated Assurance if he ever decided to burn down a house for the insurance money. Or wait until this man retired.
When he had finished his questions, Evans smiled at them. ‘You’ve been very helpful, and I want to thank you again, both for your thoughtful answers and for your kind treatment of me. In a lot of cases, people’s feathers get ruffled the second they hear the words “insurance investigator.” They’re already upset, understandably so, and quite often they take the presence of an investigator on the scene as an accusation that they torched their own property.’
‘Given the circumstances, I don’t think we could have asked for better treatment,’ Amy said, and Ted Milner nodded so violently that his head might have been on a string – one controlled by a puppeteer with a bad case of nerves.
‘This next part is hard,’ Evans said. He nodded to Strick, who opened a desk drawer and produced a clipboard with a computer printout on it. ‘When an investigator ascertains that a fire was as serious as this one clearly was, we have to show the clients a list of claimed insurable property. You look it over, then sign an affidavit swearing that the items listed still belong to you, and that they were still in the house when the fire occurred. You should put a check mark beside any item or items you’ve sold since your last insurance overhaul with Mr Strick here, and any insured property which was not in the house at the time of the fire.’
Evans put a fist to his lips and cleared his throat before going on. ‘I’m told that there has been a separation of residence recently, so that last bit may be particularly important.’
‘We’re divorced,’ Mort said bluntly. ‘I’m living in our place on Tashmore Lake. We only used it during the summers, but it’s got a furnace and is livable during the cold months. Unfortunately, I hadn’t got around to moving the bulk of my things out of the house up here. I’d been putting it off.’
Don Strick nodded sympathetically. Ted crossed his legs, fiddled with his pipe, and generally gave the impression of a man who is trying not to look as deeply bored as he is.
‘Do the best you can with the list,’ Evans said. He took the clipboard from Strick and handed it across the desk to Amy. ‘This can be a bit unpleasant – it’s a little like a treasure hunt in reverse.’
Ted had put his pipe down and was craning at the list, his boredom gone’ at least for the time being; his eyes were as avid as those of any bystander gleeping the aftermath of a bad accident. Amy saw him looking and obligingly tipped the form his way. Mort, who was sitting on the other side of her, tipped it back the other way.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked Ted. He was angry, really angry, and they all heard it in his voice.
‘Mort – ‘ Amy said.
‘I’m not going to make a big deal of this,’ Mort said to her, ‘but this was our stuff, Amy. Ours.’
‘I hardly think – ‘Ted began indignantly.
‘No, he’s perfectly right, Mr Milner,’ Fred Evans said with a mildness Mort felt might have been deceptive.
‘The law says you have no right to be looking at the listed items at all. We wink at something like that if nobody minds … but I think Mr Rainey does.’
‘You’re damned tooting Mr Rainey does,’ Mort said. His hands were tightly clenched in his lap; he could feel his fingernails biting smile-shapes into the soft meat of his palms.
Amy switched her look of unhappy appeal from Mort to Ted. Mort expected Ted to huff and puff and try to blow somebody’s house down, but Ted did not. Mort supposed it was a measure of his own hostile feeling toward the man that he’d made such an assumption; he didn’t know Ted very well (although he did know he looked a bit like Alfalfa when you woke him up suddenly in a no-tell motel), but he knew Amy. If Ted had been a blowhard, she would have left him already.
Smiling a little, speaking to her and ignoring Mort and the others completely, Ted said: ‘Would it help matters if I took a walk around the block?’
Mort tried to restrain himself and couldn’t quite do it. ‘Why not make it two?’ he asked Ted with bogus amiability.