7

I heard low voices. Hannah and Frank Belknap were sitting on their porch, looking out at nothing. From the sidewalk, I could just make out the porch of the Bandolier place. The Belknaps' voices came through the fog as clearly as voices on a radio that had been dialed low. They were talking about going to northern Wisconsin later in the summer, and Hannah was complaining about having to spend all day in a boat.

"You always catch more fish than I do, you know you do," Frank said.

"That doesn't mean it's all I want to do," said Hannah's disembodied voice.

John and I began walking slowly and softly across the lawn, making as little noise as possible.

The side of the house cut off Frank's reply. John and I walked over wet brown grass, keeping close to the building. At the corner we turned into the backyard. At the far end, barely visible in the fog, a low wooden fence with a gate stood along a narrow alley. We came up to the back door, set on a concrete slab a little larger than a welcome mat.

John bent down to look at the lock, whispered, "No problem," and hauled the big ball of keys out of his pants pocket. He riffled through them, singled out one, and tried it in the lock. It went a little way in and stopped. He pulled it out, flicked through the keys again, and tried another one that looked identical to the first. That didn't work, either. He turned to me, shrugged and smiled, and singled out another. This one slid into the lock as if it had been made for it. The lock mechanism clicked, and the door opened. John made an after you, Alfonse gesture, and I slid inside behind his back while he turned to close the door behind us.

I knew where everything was. It was the kitchen of the house where I had grown up, a little dusty and battered, but entirely familiar. A rectangular table with a scarred top stood a few feet from the door. In the dim light, I could make out the names BETHY JANEY BILLY scratched into the wood, along with a lot of random squiggles. Ransom took a couple of steps forward on the cracked yellow linoleum. "What are you waiting for?" he said.

"Decompression," I said. A section of wallpaper with images of shepherds and shepherdesses holding crooks drooped away from the wall. Someone, probably Bethy, Janey, and Billy, had scribbled over the images, and ancient yellow grease spots spattered the wall behind the little electric stove. An enormous cock and balls, imperfectly covered with a palimpsest of scrawled lines, sprouted from one of the shepherds near the loose seam of wallpaper. The Dumkys had left plenty of signs of their brief residence.

John said, "You should be used to a life of crime by now," and walked through the kitchen into the hallway. "What are there, three or four rooms?"

"Three, not counting the kitchen," I said. I came into thedark little hallway and put my hand on a doorknob. "The boy's bedroom would have been here," I said, and opened the door.

The narrow rectangle of Fee's old bedroom matched mine exactly. There was a narrow bed with a dark green army surplus blanket and a single wooden chair. A small chest of drawers, stained so dark it was almost black, stood against the wall. At the far end, a narrow window exposed a moving layer of fog. I stepped inside, and my heart shrank. John knelt to look under the bed. "Cooties." A frieze of stick figures, round suns with rays, and cartoon houses all interconnected by a road map of scribbled lines, covered the walls to the level of my waist. The light blue paint above the graffiti had turned dingy and mottled.

"This Fee kid got away with a lot of crap," John said.

"The tenants did this," I said. I went to the bed and pulled down the blanket. There were no sheets, just an ancient buttoned mattress covered in dirty stripes.

John gave me a curious look and began opening the drawers. "Nothing," he said. "Where would he stash the boxes?"

I shook my head and escaped the bedroom. The three windows at the front of the living room were identical to those in my old house, and the whole long rectangular room brought me back to childhood as surely as the bedroom. An air of leftover misery and rage seemed to intensify the musty air. I knew this room—I had written it.

I had placed two tables in front of the windows—the place where our davenport had stood—and there they were, more ornate than I had imagined, but the same height, and of the same dark wood. A telephone sat on the table to the left, beside a worn overstuffed chair—Bob Bandolier's throne. The long couch I had described stood against the far wall, green, not yellow, but with the same curved arms I had described.

And yet, I thought, it was more unlike than like the room I had imagined. I had thought that Bob Bandolier would provide his family with devotional pictures, the Sermon on the Mount or the Feeding of the Multitude, but there were no reproductions or chromographs on the walls, only wallpaper. I had imagined a small shelf of books with the Bible and paperback Westerns and mysteries, but the only shelves in the living room were shallow, glass, and rimmed with black metal piping—once they had held china figurines. A high-backed brocade chair with rolled arms stood beside the telephone table, and another matching chair without arms faced into the room from beside the other, empty table. His and hers.

"It's like a—like a museum of 1945," John said, turning to me with an incredulous smile.

"That's what it is," I said.

I sat down on the chaise and looked sideways. Through a window in the unadorned wall, I could just about make out the side of the Belknap house. Through a matching window in her own living room, Hannah had seen the adult Fee sitting just where I was now. John was looking behind the chairs and beneath the couch. Fee came at night and used only a flashlight, so he had never noticed the grease spots on the brocade chairs or the rim of grime along the edges of the couch cushions.

John opened the door opposite that into the common entry. I stood up and followed him into the bedroom where Anna Bandolier had died of starvation and neglect.

A rusty black stain wavered down the middle of the bare mattress on the double bed. John looked under the bed, and I opened Bob Bandolier's walnut clothing press. Two wire hangers hung from a metal rail, and a third lay deep in forty-year-old dust on the bottom of the press. "The drawers," John said, and we both opened one of the big drawers on either side of the little mirrored vanity table against the wall. Mine was empty. John pushed.his drawer closed and looked at me with both impatience and exasperation.

"Okay," he said. "Where are they?"

"After Bob Bandolier got rid of the Sunchanas, there were no more upstairs tenants. So he might have put the boxes there." Then I remembered something else. "And there's a basement, where they used to do the washing."

"I'll look upstairs." He brushed the dust off his knees and gave me another tight-mouthed look. "Let's get out of here as soon as we can. I don't trust this fog."

I could almost see little Fee Bandolier standing on the side of the bed on a cold night in November of 1950, holding onto his dying mother's arm while his father lay unconscious on the floor, surrounded by empty beer bottles.

"All right?" John asked.

I nodded, and he left the bedroom. I turned my back on the boy and walked out through the mists and vapors that emanated from everything I thought about him and went back through the living room toward the kitchen.

As in my old house, the basement door was next to the stove. I went down the wooden steps in the dark, letting my eyes adjust.

A long wooden workbench stood across the gray concrete floor from the bottom of the stairs. Against the wall above the back of the bench hung a row of coffee cans and jam jars filled with nails and screws. Soon I made out the shapes of boxes beneath the bench, and I exhaled with mingled relief and triumph and went to the bench and bent down and pulled the nearest box toward me.

It was about the size of a case of whiskey, and the top of the box had been folded, not taped, shut. I wrestled with the interlocking cardboard panels before all four of them sprang free at once, revealing a layer of dark fabric. Fee had wrapped his notes in cloth after seeing what the rats had done to them in the Green Woman. I grabbed a loose handful of cloth and pulled up. The cloth came out of the box without resistance. Sleeves flopped out of the bundle. It was a suit jacket. I dropped it on the floor and put my hands back into the box. This time I pulled out the trousers to the suit. Beneath the trousers, carelessly folded, were two more suits, one dark blue, the other dark gray. I stuffed the first suit back into the box, pushed it back under the workbench, and pulled another carton toward me. When I got the top open, I found a pile of white shirts with Arrow labels. They were grimy from the dust sifting down from the workbench and stiff with starch.

The next box held three more suits folded onto a layer of wrinkled boxer shorts and balled-up undershirts, the next a jumble of black shoes, and the final one at least a hundred wide, late-forties neckties tangled together like snakes. My knees creaked when I stood up.

Fee Bandolier had expelled the Dumkys, cleaned up what was important to him, and turned the lock on the door, sealing the past inside a bell jar.

A wide gray spiderweb hung between the wringer of the old washing machine and the slanting ledge of the small rectangular basement window in the wall behind it. I walked slowly down the length of the basement. A black bicycle the size of a Shetland pony leaned against the wall. I turned toward the bulky furnace in the center of the basement, seeing another row of boxes in the darkness. I moved forward, and the row of boxes mutated into the long rectangular dish of a coaster wagon. I pushed it with my foot, and it rolled backward on squeaking wheels, dragging its wooden handle with it. When it moved, I saw another box hidden between the coaster and the furnace.

"There," I said, and bent down to get my hands on it. Wisps and tatters of old spiderwebs hung from the box. It had been moved recently. I braced my muscles and jerked the box off the ground. It was nearly weightless. Whatever it contained was not hundreds of handwritten pages. I carried the box around the furnace toward the foot of the stairs and heard John walking across the kitchen floor.

I set the box down and opened the four flaps on its top. There was another box inside it. "Damn it," I said, and jumped up to go to the front of the furnace.

"Find anything?" John was at the top of the stairs.

"I don't know," I said. I pulled down the handle and swung open the door.

"There's nothing upstairs. Just bare rooms." Every other stair groaned beneath his weight. "What are you doing?"

"Checking the furnace," I said. "I just found two empty boxes."

The interior of the furnace was about the size of a baby carriage. Fine white ash lay across the bottom of the furnace, and black soot coated the grate. John came up beside me.

"I think we lost them," I said.

"Hold on," John said. "He didn't burn anything here. See that stuff?" He pointed at a nearly invisible area on the furnace wall, a section slightly lighter in color than the rest of the interior that I had taken for some kind of stain. John reached into the furnace and dragged it down with his fingers—the ancient spiderweb pulled toward him, then broke and collapsed into a single dirty gray rope.

The boxes lay where I had left them, the flaps of the outer box open on the smooth side of the one inside it. When I shook them, something rattled. "Let's pull them a," I said.

John came forward and flattened his hands on the box. I thrust my fingers inside and tugged. The inner box slid smoothly out. The brown tape across its top flaps had been slit down the middle. I bent up the flaps. Another, smaller box was inside it. I pulled out the third box. About the size of a toaster, it too had been cut open before being inserted into the nest. When I shook it, a papery, slithery sound came from inside the box.

"Guess you found the easter egg," John said.

I righted the box on the floor and opened it. A square white envelope lay in the bottom of the carton. I picked it up. The envelope was thicker and heavier than I expected. I carried it to the light at the head of the stairs. John watched me open the flap.

"Pictures," he said.

The old square, white-bordered photographs looked tiny by contemporary standards. I took them out of the envelope and stared at the first one. Some Dumky child had scribbled over its surface. Beneath the crazy lines, the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn was still visible. I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and looked at the next. At first, it looked like a copy of the photograph I had just seen. There were fewer scribbles on this one. Then I saw that the photographer had moved a few feet nearer the opening of the tunnel, and the fan of vertical bricks at the top of the arch showed more clearly through the overlay of scribbles. The next one showed a neatly made bed beneath a framed painting invisible behind the mirrored explosion of the flash. Beside the bed, half of a door filled the frame. A little Dumky had scratched XXXXXXXXXXX across the door and the wall. He had run out of patience before he got to the bed, and the X's broke down into scrawls and loops. "What's that?" John asked.

The next photograph was of the same bed and door taken from an angle that included the corner of a dressing table. The details of the room lay buried under a lot more scribbled ink.

"A picture of room 218 at the St. Alwyn," I said, and looked up at Ransom's face. "Bob Bandolier took pictures of the sites before he did the murders."

I uncovered the next image, scarcely touched by the little Dumkys. Here, rendered in soft brown tones, was the Livermore Avenue side of the Idle Hour, where Monty Leland had been murdered. The photograph beneath had been taken from a spot nearer the corner of South Sixth and showed more of the tavern's side. A zigzag of ink ran across the wooden boards like a bolt of lightning.

"The guy was an obsessive's obsessive. It was planned out, like a campaign."

I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and found myself looking at a photograph almost unreadable beneath inky loops and scratches. I lifted it nearer my face. It had to be a picture of Heinz Stenmitz's butcher shop, but something about the size or shape of the building buried beneath the ink bothered me.

The next was nearly as bad. The edge of a building that might equally have been the Taj Mahal, the White House, or the place where I lived on Grand Street dove beneath a hedge of scribbles.

"They worked that one over," John said.

I peered down at the picture, trying to figure out what troubled me about it. I could only barely remember the front of Stenmitz's shop. One side of the sign that projected out in a big V above the window read HOME-MADE SAUSAGES; the other side, QUALITY MEATS. Something like that seemed visible underneath the scrawls, but the proportions of the building seemed wrong.

"It must be the butcher shop, right?"

"I guess," I said.

"How come they're squirreled away in these boxes?"

"Fee must have found them in a drawer—wherever his father kept them. He put them down here to protect them—he must have thought that no one would ever find them."

"What do we do with them?"

I already had an idea about that.

I sorted through the photographs and chose the clearest of each pair. John took the envelope, and I passed him the others. He slid them into the envelope and tucked in the flap. Then he turned over the envelope and held it up close to his face, as I had done with the last photograph. "Well, well."

"What?"

"Take a look." He pointed to faint, spidery pencil marks on its top left-hand corner.

In faint, almost ladylike thin gray letters, the words blue rose appeared on the yellowing paper.

"Let's leave these here," I said, and put the envelope in the smallest box, folded the top shut, and slid the box into the next, and then inserted this one into the largest box, folded its flaps shut, and pushed if back behind the furnace.

"Why?" John asked.

"Because we know they're here." He frowned and pushed his eyebrows together, trying to figure it out. I said, "Someday, we might want to show that Bob Bandolier was Blue Rose. So we leave the envelope here."

"Okay, but where are the notes?"

I raised my shoulders. "They have to be somewhere."

"Great." John walked to the end of the basement, as if trying to make the boxes of notes materialize out of the shadows and concrete blocks. After he passed out of sight behind the furnace, I heard him coming up on the far side of the basement. "Maybe he hid them under the furnace grate."

We went back around to the front of the furnace. John opened the door and stuck his head inside. "Ugh." He reached inside and tried to pick up the grate. "Stuck." He withdrew his hand, which was streaked with gray and black on the back and completely blackened on the palm. The sleeve of the blue silk jacket had a vertical black stripe just below the elbow. John grimaced at the mess on his hand. "Well, I don't think they're in here."

"No," I said. "They're probably still in the boxes. He doesn't know that we know they exist."

I took another, pointless look around the basement.

John said, "What the hell, let's go home."

We went upstairs and back out into the fog. John locked the door behind us.

I got lost somewhere north of the valley and nearly ran into a car backing out of a driveway. It took me nearly two hours to get back to Ely Place, and when we pulled up in front of his house, John said, "Got any other great ideas?"

I didn't remind him that the idea had been his.