Still, he said nothing, just watched without comment as Hannibal sifted through the rest of what was in the box.

  Anyway, the embroidery only appeared to be initials if you looked at it the right way. In which case, if he called it to Hannibal’s attention, he could very well be setting him off on a wild goose chase. Suggestion sometimes could be as good as fact, and harder to change. And, although the thought was mostly unformed in Stanley’s mind, there was a vestige of resentment at the taken-for-granted way in which this man had assumed authority over all matters Korski.

  “And this is everything?” Hannibal asked after he’d gone through the box’s contents carefully, but not so carefully as to notice that ambiguous embroidery.

  “I know, it’s not much. Understand, we weren’t exactly rich in possessions, and a lot of what there was, was junk. Most of it got tossed. This is all I saved.”

  Hannibal regarded him was an accusatory glance, as if blaming him for being so careless as to dispose of potential clues.

  “You’ll talk to no one about any of this,” Hannibal said as he was leaving, taking the box with him. It was not a suggestion, 42 Victor J. Banis

  nor even a request. His tone implied dire consequences for disobedience.

  § § § § §

  It was Tom, however, the seasoned detective, who said, after Hannibal had gone, “You know, Stanley, that’s not altogether true. About your family’s possessions.”

  Stanley, thinking of the box Hannibal had carried away with him, said, “No, that’s all there is, I’m sure of it. All that’s left, anyway.”

  “Except the house itself,” Tom said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The house had been closed up for years, since Stanley had committed his father to Home Gardens. The sensible thing to do would have been to sell it, and in fact he did put it up for sale, but it was too far out of town and too close to the railroad tracks, where freight trains still rumbled by with discomforting regularity. It wasn’t exactly in a prime real estate area—

  Petaluma in general was not prime real estate—and after nearly a year without a single glimmer of interest, he’d taken it off the market, thinking maybe the time wasn’t right.

  Some part of him must have clung to the notion, too, that he would one day bring his father back there. A fantasy, to be sure, but dreams don’t depend on reason. There’d been precious little to dream about in his relationship with his father.

  The house sat in a thick grove of oak and juniper and, he thought, piñon, across the railroad tracks and near the end of a dirt and gravel road that was nothing more now than a track. A couple of ruts that led past the house and ended about forty feet further on, where a few charred timbers gave evidence that there had once been another dwelling there.

  Stanley tried to remember whose house that had been. It had been empty then, he thought. He remembered he and Irene exploring it—but, he’d come to be suspicious of his memories.

  How did you know, anyway, what you really remembered and what you wanted to remember? What were really the facts of your past, and what only your opinions of the past? The past, it seemed, was more like what one wanted it to be rather than what it really was, and that subject to myriad interpretations.

  People thought you needed to know the past to understand the present, but it was the other way round, wasn’t it? One interpreted one’s past in terms of one’s present.

  “I’m fond of reality,” he had once told Chris, “I’m just not sure this is it.”

  44 Victor J. Banis

  The house, for instance. Some houses, whether by the design of the builder or mere chance, looked at one with their surroundings, as if they were a part of the natural space, but this house looked as if it had been dropped down in its setting without a thought for how it might fit in or not. Unfortunately, the choice, either of house or setting, had not been successful.

  It was much smaller, too, than what he remembered, and ill proportioned, long at the sides and narrow in front. With its steep pitched roof and the chimneys that looked too thin to be altogether functional, it had a pinched, nervous look, like a less than seaworthy ship waiting for the right tide and a favorable wind to bring it to harbor. White paint had chipped and peeled to reveal badly weathered wood underneath.

  It was ostensibly two stories, but if his memory was correct this time around, the second story with its ill-suited dormer windows was nothing more than an attic that had been partitioned into three cubicles, one tiny bedroom for himself and one for Irene and an even tinier bathroom in between.

  Their parents slept downstairs.

  For a moment, walking from his car through tall grass so dried-brown that it crackled beneath his feet, he thought he saw a light in one of the windows, and stopped, surprised. But it was only the afternoon sunlight glancing off the glass, the house playing tricks with him, the illusion fading when he feinted to the side.

  The two steps leading up to the tiny porch were visibly rotting. He stepped over them, directly onto the porch, gave the boards there a cautious test before putting his full weight on them. They objected, but held.

  Hadn’t he and Irene played some kind of nonsensical game about the steps that had necessitated jumping them? Or, maybe they’d been unsafe even then. They were shallow steps. Easy for an adult to step right over them, but a child would have had to jump. Surely, though, if they were dangerous, his father would have repaired them, wouldn’t he? He paused to think for a moment about his father. His pot smoking father. Or maybe not.

  DEADLY DREAMS 45

  It had been years since he’d been here and he’d been unable to find the keys back in San Francisco, but the door, when he tried it, opened with a faint protest from rusty hinges. He stepped directly into what had been their front room; again, smaller than he remembered, narrow. Dust motes danced in the slanting afternoon light that came in with him. The house seemed to hold its breath, startled into an uneasy silence by this unexpected intrusion. He had an odd sense that he was not alone.

  “Hello,” he called. His voice echoed back to him, unanswered.

  The front room opened directly into the large kitchen—

  they’d spent much of their time here, hadn’t they, especially in cold weather, when the big cast iron stove kept at least this room toasty warm? The stove still occupied much of one wall, the room’s only remaining furniture. It had been old fashioned then, looked positively antique now. He wondered if it were of any value. Possibly. He knew from his decorator past that there were people who treasured things like this. It would take a derrick to move it, though. Probably more than it was worth.

  His parent’s bedroom was beyond the kitchen, in a kind of built-on lean-to that had clearly been added after the house was built. He paused in the doorway, trying to see them in it, but no images came to him.

  Maybe he hadn’t been permitted to come in here. He tried to remember rules; mostly, his mother and father had seemed preoccupied. Or maybe that was the dope. Dopers traveled a different path. It was odd, when he thought about it—they became almost like children. You’d think they would relate well to other children, real children, but they didn’t. At least his parents hadn’t.

  No, now that he was standing in the doorway, he remembered, of course he hadn’t been permitted to come in here. Or… but, yes, there had been one time. He’d run in, from outside, he thought, intending to tell his mother something, he couldn’t remember now what, although at the time it must have seemed very important to him, and his mother had been crying, lying on her back across the bed, sobbing almost soundlessly, 46 Victor J. Banis

  but with her shoulders heaving, and tears streaming down her cheeks.

  He’d stopped in the doorway, confused and frightened the way children are by their parents’ emotions, and had finally gotten up the nerve to ask, “What’s wrong?”

  “The tracks. Those damned tracks.” She might have been talking to herself rather than answering him. “I’ll never get away from them.”

  “What tracks? You mean the railroad tracks?”

  She turned her head and stared at him for the longest time as if she weren’t seeing him, as if she hadn’t known he was there, and then she said, in a voice so normal that it contradicted the tears still running down her cheeks, “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  It was the only time he could remember her actually showing emotion, but that emotion, whatever had inspired it, whatever had brought her to those tears, had nothing to do with him. He had wondered, though, why anyone would be crying over railroad tracks. These tracks weren’t even in use anymore. He couldn’t recall that he’d ever seen a train on them.

  “I’ll bet she lost a dog on the railroad tracks,” Irene suggested. “Mrs. Miller, my teacher, she says a train ran over her dog one time. She said he was sleeping on the tracks and, smoosh, just like that.”

  “Why would a dog be sleeping on the railroad tracks?”

  Stanley wondered, but Irene had no answer for that.

  § § § § §

  He went back through the kitchen. At one side of the front room, a flight of stairs, with no banister, led upward. He put a foot on the first step and hesitated. The dust on the stairs looked disturbed. Not footprints, exactly, too muddled for that.

  More as if someone had gone up and down them often enough to disturb the dust but erase any clear footprints.

  He looked over his shoulder, at the floor of the living room.

  Here too the dust seemed to have been muddled about.

  Animals? There were no droppings, no obvious ones, anyway.

  DEADLY DREAMS 47

  Probably if he looked he’d find evidence of the inevitable mice, but nothing bigger than that.

  “Hello,” he called again, “anyone here?” Again, that listening silence. Waiting. Wary.

  He went cautiously up the stairs, mindful of the lack of banister, keeping one hand on the wall to balance himself, wishing now that he’d taken Tom up on the offer to come with him.

  Which was silly. It was just an old house, a long time empty.

  What possible danger could there be here? It was all those ghosts, those memories, real and imagined, teasing him. Like the spider webs that hung in the corners and from the windowsills, trapping him in the filigrees of the past.

  His past, his suddenly mysterious past. That was surely the only occupant here.

  Three doors led from the small landing at the top of the stairs. His had been the door to the right, Irene’s to the left.

  Between them the bathroom, jury-rigged, nothing more than a toilet and a sink for washing their hands. They showered in the larger bathroom downstairs.

  He opened the door to Irene’s room first, pushing it wide with one hand, standing balanced on one foot. Ready, reason notwithstanding, to turn and dash down the stairs if need be.

  It wasn’t. The room was empty. Across from him, the closet door stood wide. He could see at a glance that it was empty, too.

  As was the bathroom between the two bedrooms, when he went to investigate it. He had forgotten how tiny it was, barely room to turn around in. Barely room for the porcelain toilet, its seat missing, and the rust stained sink with the cracked mirror above it.

  He and Irene had left secret messages for one another in the mirror. You stuck your finger in a little jar of cooking oil they’d stolen from the kitchen and kept hidden behind the toilet, and you wrote on the glass with the tip of your oily finger. When the mirror was clear, you couldn’t see what was written, but if 48 Victor J. Banis

  you ran the water hot enough to make steam, the words appeared as if by magic.

  “Why are you kids wasting all that hot water?” their mother would shout up the stairs. “There’s not going to be any left for the dishes.”

  He resisted the urge to run the water. It wouldn’t be hot now. The water heater, if it were even still here, was certainly long since turned off. What would he see anyway? He couldn’t for the life of him imagine what messages he and his sister had left for one another. They had hardly communicated at all, it seemed to him. What need could there have been for secrets?

  A limerick—yes, he remembered that: “Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me-Tight, went down to the river, to see the fight; Adam and Eve went home, and who was left to see the fight?”

  He’d always played the fool for Irene’s benefit, no matter how many times they did the game. “Pinch-Me-Tight,” he would answer with all the innocence he could muster, and she would oblige him, laughing merrily while she gave him a pinch on his arm. He smiled at the memory. Had they really ever been that carefree together, he and the sister who was so uncomfortable with him now, so distrustful? Because he was gay—but what did she have to fear from that, he’d often wondered.

  It occurred to him that they were their only playmates when they’d been little. No one ever came here. It wasn’t until he’d gone off to school that he had any male friends. Until then, his older sister had been his only friend. Had that influenced him, he wondered? Contributed to his being gay. But probably not, he thought; didn’t they say now that the tendency was inborn?

  It seemed to him as if he’d always been attracted to men. But how could he have been, when apart from his father, he hardly saw any until he started school?

  He turned the hot water tap, half expecting to see words emerge from the glass, and got nothing for his efforts. The water was off. Which, surely, he might have expected.

  “You’re being a goose,” he chided himself, and leaving the bathroom and its cracked mirror behind, strode boldly to the DEADLY DREAMS 49

  door of what had been his room, pushed it open and stepped in without hesitation.

  And stopped dead just inside the door. A bed—a cot, really—was pushed against the wall under the window, blankets piled carelessly atop it. Near the head of the bed, a scarred wooden table, one broken leg resting on a couple of bricks for balance, and atop the table, a Coleman lantern.

  Not, he was sure, things he had left behind when he emptied the house. He stared at the bed for a long moment, scoured the room with his eyes. The closet door here was closed. Childhood fears came back to him: the bogey man hiding in the closet, the ogre under the bed. All those things that went bump in a childish night.

  “Now, that is just silly,” he told himself aloud. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded uncertain, tremulous. He knew he should cross the room and look into that closet, he willed his feet in that direction, but they refused to obey.

  Finally, he turned and went out, leaving the bedroom door open, and went back down the stairs, not looking back, but listening, straining for any sound of footsteps following him.

  The stairs creaked once, and he hesitated, but it was just an old house complaining of stiff joints. The wind, blowing in a quick gust through an open window somewhere (had he left a window open when he’d cleaned the place out?) sounded like someone’s ragged breath.

  There were ashes in the stove in the kitchen. He sifted them through his fingers. Not warm, of course not. They might have been years old. How could he say? Had he looked in the stove when he was here last? He doubted it. Why would he? Why, really, did he do so now? What would you find in an old kitchen stove, if not ashes?

  Unlike the front door, the back one, off the kitchen, opened without any rusty squeaks, as if it had been greased recently. He ran a finger over one hinge, but his finger came back clean, no trace of oil on it. Doors rusted differently, didn’t they?

  He went from room to room again, looking for any evidence of occupancy, but there was nothing more than the strangely 50 Victor J. Banis

  disturbed patterns of the dust on the floor, and he couldn’t even be sure of that. Animals might have come and gone, without staying. Might have pushed an unlocked door open.

  And closed again.

  He made himself go slowly back up the stairs, treading still more cautiously now, almost tiptoeing, as if he might disturb some sleeping giant. He went straight to his old bedroom, crossed it without a pause, and flung the closet door open, his heartbeat faster, holding his breath, and took a step back, half expecting someone to charge out of it at him.

  There was no one, but there was a pair of jeans hanging against the back wall on an old nail. He took them down from the nail. They were stiff and in need of a wash. The pockets, when he checked them, were empty. But, really, what had he expected to find in them? A note, apologizing for making use of the premises?

  Because that, assuredly, was all this meant. Some wayfarer, a homeless person, a drifter, a passing hiker caught out in a rainstorm, had taken advantage of an empty house to spend an afternoon, a night, a few nights even.

  He threw the jeans down on the floor of the closet, and looked again about the room. A wayfarer, let it be said, with a cot and blankets, and a Coleman lantern.

  Well, then, someone homeless, who had set up temporary quarters here. Why not? An isolated old farmhouse, nearly three miles off the main road, obviously left empty for a long period of time. A perfect place to shelter for a while. Probably, this had all been long ago.

  He went to the table and ran a finger over the base of the lantern. The lantern was dust free. Not so long ago, then.

  Which told him… exactly nothing.

  He took the blankets from the cot and shook them out and a paperback book fell out of them. He picked it and looked at the cover. Karl Marx. A literate traveler, then, which somehow seemed to make it stranger still. An all but illegible name had been inscribed on the inside cover, Donna, maybe. He knew DEADLY DREAMS 51

  any number of Donnas, and couldn’t imagine any of them reading Marx. People could surprise you, though.

  The wind gusted again. A peculiar chill went up his spine and quickly back down again. Suddenly, quite unreasonably, he felt unsafe, felt certain he was not alone here. There was a scent—no, not quite a scent, even, more a sense—of someone’s presence. He thought that the house didn’t smell empty, whatever empty smelled like.