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SEVEN
Islept with my light on that night. In the morning I called Brock Olsen to fix the window in my bedroom and he was at my door fifteen minutes later. He was short and broad and bearded. His face would have been handsome, but he must have had a bad case of acne when he was young that had left his skin rough and pitted. When I showed him the broken window he rocked back on his heels and stroked his beard as if he were contemplating theMona Lisa.
“It happened two nights ago when there was all that wind,” I said. “This wind chime blew against it and broke it.” I retrieved the metal ornament from the desk drawer where I’d stowed it away, as if it proved my story. Brock gave me a long considering look, as if I was a shelf hung crooked.
“Is that how you cut your hand?” he asked, looking down at my hand.
The scratch had almost healed so I’d taken the bandage off, but it had started to itch. I nodded and he took my hand in his own broad and calloused one. He studied the cut for so long I began to feel uncomfortable, but then he ran the tips of his fingers over the scratch, which should have made me feel even more uncomfortable. It had the opposite effect. As he stroked my hand a wave of comfort and well-being spread throughout my body. I thought of stories I’d read about faith healers, people whose touch could cure suffering. Brock Olsen’s hands looked as if they’d suffered a lot themselves; they were nicked and scarred and riddled with burn marks that stood out whiteagainst his dark skin. He was missing the top of his left ring finger. Maybe having been through so much pain himself gave him the power to ease the pain in others. When he released my hand the itching was gone.
“Best be more careful next time,” he said, fixing me with his warm brown eyes. He waited until I promised I would and then went to get his tools from his truck.
I spent the morning sorting through Dahlia LaMotte’s papers while Brock Olsen worked in the house, replaning all my doors and windows. I found the background noise of his hammering and sanding oddly companionable. I made a pot of coffee for us and heated up a plate of cinnamon rolls Diana Hart had left on my doorstep with a note saying they were leftovers from last night’s guests. The smells of coffee and cinnamon mingled cozily with the piney scent of sawdust. It felt good to have someone else in the house. Maybe Frank Delmarco was right. This was too big a house for one person—although maybe not one person with this many books.
I decided that there were too many boxes of papers to keep in my little turret office, so I hauled them into one of the empty bedrooms. Brock helped me when he saw what I was doing. I unpacked them all and started stacking them in piles on the floor, sorting by category and using the iron mice doorstops as paperweights.
There were notebooks—ledgers from her father’s shipping business bound in marbled paper and ruled with narrow horizontal lines and red vertical columns—in which Dahlia had apparently written her rough drafts; piles of typescript; and letters. I arranged the letters chronologically, making piles for each decade of her life, and the writing notebooks and typescripts by book.
At some point in the afternoon Brock brought me a plate with cheese, bread, and apple slices and a fresh cup of coffee.
“Oh, Brock!” I cried. “I should have gottenyoulunch.”
“I could see you were wrapped up in what you were doing,” he said, blood rising behind his ravaged skin. “Are these Dolly’s things?” he asked.
“Dolly?”
“That’s what we called her here in Fairwick. To the world she was Dahlia LaMotte.”
“There are people who remember her?” I asked, amazed that the town’s memory went back that far.
He smiled. “It’s a small town and the local families have been here a long time. My people have been here for over a hundred years.”
“Really? Did they come from somewhere in Scandinavia?”
“Sort of,” he replied. “We made some other stops along the way. Dolly’s people, they came later, and overland.”
“Overland?” I repeated, wondering what on earth he meant. Fairwick was a landlocked village in the Catskill Mountains. How else could anyone approach it? “You mean by train or carriage?”
A vivid red streak rose up on the right side of Brock’s face, highlighting a welt on his cheekbone. It looked like he’d been bitten by an insect there.
“Ya, they came by carriage, how else? I only meant some didn’t have fine carriages or train fare. My people came on foot, through the woods, through hardship and danger.” He rubbed at the welt on his face with the back of his scarred hand. He looked angry, but not at me, or even at the town. He looked angry at himself for not being able to express himself better. I wondered if the marks on his face were the vestiges of some childhood illness—chicken pox? measles?—that had scarred his brain as well as his skin.
“Your ancestors must have struggled hard to find a safe place to live and raise their children,” I said gently. “That’s something to be proud of.”
He nodded, the red streak subsiding. He pointed at the stacks of notebooks. “Dolly understood that. She helped us…my great-uncles, I mean, start the gardening shop when there weren’t no call for blacksmiths no more, and always had them come do what work needed doing in the house. She liked hearing the old stories.”
“Really?” I said, looking down at the ledgers. Had she used the stories she’d heard in her books? “That’s interesting. Perhaps you can help me by identifying where some of her stories came from.”
He smiled. It transformed his face from ugly to handsome. “Ya, I’ll be happy to. I am here to help you.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon making an inventory of Dahlia LaMotte’s notebooks and letters. The letters I found, to my disappointment, were all of a business nature, either to her publisher in New York or her lawyer in Boston. No clandestine love affairs or dark family secrets were likely to be lurking there, but the letters to her publisher could establish a timeline of her writing process. A glimpse of one showed that she reported progress on her novels dutifully.I finished the handwritten draft ofDark Destinytoday and will begin typing it tomorrow, one letter read.
It was curious that she didn’t employ a typist. Was she such a hermit that she couldn’t stand the human interaction? But then, Brock had said that she enjoyed talking to the locals and hearing their stories. If I could find accounts of those conversations it would be fascinating to compare the references to boggarts and fairies, witches and demons that Dahlia sprinkled throughout her books to local folklore.
Only when I had a complete list of all the notebooks—numbered with dates and the titles of which novels she had been working on in each—and a list of typescripts, did I allowmyself a peek at one of the notebooks. I choseThe Dark Stranger, my favorite of her books and her best known novel. I read the familiar first lines with a frisson of excitement.
The moment I set foot across the threshold of Lion’s Keep I knew my fate was sealed. I had been here before, in desperate dreams and fevered fancies, and always I knew it to be the place wherehewould finally ensnare me—the man of my dreams—the incubus of my nightmares. The dark stranger, my demon lover…
I stopped reading. I didn’t recall the wordincubusfrom the first paragraph ofThe Dark Stranger, or the phrasedemon lover. Although Dahlia LaMotte flirted with the supernatural with her use of dreams, portents, creaking stairs, veiled figures, and telepathic voices, she never made overt use of it. At the end of each book the events were tidily explained. Her anti-heroes had all the elements of the rakish Byronic heroes of Gothic Romance, but they were flesh and blood, not incubi, demons, or vampires. Perhaps she was just playing with the imagery, but that imagery hadn’t made it into her final drafts. When, I wondered, had it been edited out?
