Nocturnes

“You see the hand of God?”

He laughed, and tapped his cheekbone with his finger.

“Cop’s eyes: I see his fingerprints. I see patterns on the glass. You get older, you start thinking about these things. If there is a God, then you and He are going to be having a serious talk in the near future, so you start thinking about what you might say. Mostly, you figure you’re going to be saying ‘Sorry.’ A lot.”

Clem seemed to remember what he was doing here.

“I’m rambling. You say Grass is looking into this thing?”

“He’s skeptical. He says he wants to be discreet, in case he freaks out some family for no good reason, or starts a panic among parents.”

“Grass is a straight arrow. He was a young man when the Grady thing happened but, like me, he was there at the end. I don’t think it will ever leave him. From what I hear, he takes his stewardship of the place pretty personally. He doesn’t want to remind people of what happened there, and I suppose he’s right to take that view. Next thing you know, it’s on a death trip tourist trail, or somebody takes it into his head to torch the place. No bad thing, if you ask me. I don’t understood why Matheson wanted to keep the house to begin with. But, like I said, the Grady house is now Grass’s patch. He’s taken on the burden of it.”

I wondered if Clem was right. Grass, De

“Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

“There’s not much more to tell,” he said. “Grady was a blank slate. I don’t even know if that was his real name. His fingerprints weren’t on record, and nobody came forward after his death to claim his body. He cost the state a funeral and a cheap cross.”

He pushed the bottle of beer away from him.

“Don’t know why I ordered this. I drink more than one bottle in the afternoon and I’m napping for the rest of the day. I’m already finding it hard to think of details that might be helpful to you. I suppose the only thing I can add is that we took some material from the house-books, mostly-that was kind of odd.”

“Odd how?”

“It was woo-woo stuff. You know: witchcraft, dæmons, pictures of those star things.”

“Pentagrams.”

“Yeah, trust you to know the name for them. It wasn’t low-end stuff, either. Some of those books were pretty old. I hear they made some money for the widows and orphans when they were sold.”

“They were sold off?”

“Well, there was no reason to hold on to them in the first place, since Grady was dead, and it wasn’t like there was going to be a trial or anything. Someone put them to one side and forgot about them, and they lay around in a basement for twenty years. Then there was that big clearout last fall. I went over to take a look, just in case there was anything worth holding on to as a souvenir. Those books turned up, and someone decided to get a valuation on them. The word went out to some of the dealers in the state, and literally the next day a guy showed up to take a look at them. He offered a thousand dollars for the lot, and walked out with them five minutes later.”

“Do you know who bought them?”

“I can find out for you right now, if you want.”

He took out his cell and tapped in a phone number.

“See, I did have a use for this after all,” he said, as his call was answered. “Hi, can you put me through to Detective Brian Harrison, please?”

I didn’t know Harrison. He came on the line and he and Clem exchanged greetings for a while and caught up on news of mutual friends. Eventually, Clem asked him about the sale of the Grady books. After a lot of “uh-huhs” he thanked Harrison, promised to meet him for a drink, then hung up.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” he said. “There had to be a woo-woo angle. The guy who bought the books claimed to be working for Bowe amp; Heinrich. He said he was Milton Bowe’s nephew.”

Bowe amp; Heinrich was a well-known firm of rare-book dealers based in Bangor.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Bowe amp; Heinrich never heard of him.”

“Milton Bowe arrived at state police headquarters a day later to take a look at the books himself, but they were already gone by then. He was pretty pissed at what happened. He didn’t like the idea of some weirdo impersonating his nephew, or stealing books from under his nose.”

“Weirdo?”

“He looked like a tramp. Some of these collector types do, I hear. They spend more money on books and antiques than they do on clothes. This guy had an old coat and a shoe that was speaking to him. He paid in cash, though: ten hundred-dollar bills, which was probably more than Bowe would have paid, the cheap bastard. If this guy committed a crime, it was a victimless one.”

I didn’t need to ask Clem any more about the buyer. I knew who he was.

“You decided how you’re going to handle this thing?” Clem asked.

I gave a noncommittal reply. I wasn’t sure yet what I could do, other than dig up old memories and watch as the dust they raised settled itself on the Grady house.

“Well, you need help, you let me know,” said Clem.

We stood to leave. I picked up the check, despite ribbing Clem earlier about his wealth.

“It’s taken care of,” he said. “I left my credit card behind the bar.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Hey, it was good to see you. I don’t get to talk to someone thirty years younger than me so often now. Makes me feel like less of an old fart.”

The weather had turned chill. My breath hung like an unfulfilled promise in the afternoon air.

“Have you ever been back to the Grady house?” I asked Clem, as we walked to our cars.

“Nope. No cause to go there. Even if I had to go back, I wouldn’t stay too long. There’s something unhealthy in the atmosphere of the place. You’ve been there; you know what I’m talking about. I didn’t know better, I’d say that there were chemicals in the walls and the floors. In the days after Grady killed himself, most of the men who spent time in the house complained of nausea and vomiting. I had headaches for weeks afterward. That was more than twenty years ago. It could be that it’s not as strong now, but I don’t doubt that it’s still there.”

His words brought back my own disorientation after spending a little time in the Grady house. Clem was right. Whatever had infected the house was still present, engaged in a process of slow decay like the half-life of radioactive waste.

We parted on Commercial. Clem gripped my hand tightly in both of his.

“No ‘if onlys,’ ” he said. “Remember that. Don’t let anything happen to that little girl. There are too many lost children. You know that better than anyone else. There are just too many lost children…”