Glen Cook - A matter of time

Cash was fishing for an invitation to see the rest of the house.

She was cool for having been so long alone. Panic scrambled around behind her eyes, like a roomful of mice with a cat thrown in, but she did a good job of controlling it. Time had made her timid, but she refused to be spooked when the world assaulted her privacy.

"Is no chance, I think. No. But look we can. Where do we begin?" She rose, patted her skirts down.

"Any souvenirs?" Cash asked. "Something glass might have taken a print. Or paint if he touched it while it was tacky. Or a photo."

"Was a photograph once, yes. Just one. Your Leutnant Carstairs never gave it back. I do not remember any painting doing then. Everything has been painted since. Many times. I would not leave a dirty glass sitting for fifty years."

"We're grasping at straws," Cash admitted.

Her spectral smile informed him that she was aware of that fact.

For a moment he felt he and John were being manipulated, that her cooperation was a subtle form of mockery.

"Well, come then. Upstairs we'll go and see."

Cash didn't know what to expect. A locked, dusty room, memorially closed in respect for a withered love? Something like that. He just couldn't take her no love claim at face value.

What he did see was pretty much what an ordinary visitor would expect: just an old lady's house.

Cash stuck close. He was briefly bemused by her spryness on the stairs. John hung back, sticking his nose everywhere. With another of her quiet smiles, Miss Groloch pretended not to notice.

"Where to look I really do not know," she said, leading Cash into a bedroom. "But this seems the best place to start. It's a mess. I'm sorry."

"My wife should be so slack."

"Most of his time he spent here. Or in the kitchen. He was that kind."

Despite her ingenuous claim, the room had been kept with the care of a woman who had little else to occupy her. Cash picked up a perfume bottle that looked old enough, but which was of cut glass. "Any presents?" he asked. "He ever bring you anything?"

"Presents?" She looked thoughtful. "Now that I think, yes. Once. A porcelain doll. From Germany. Dresden, I think. He stole it, probably."

She went to an alcove off the bedroom which seemed to function as storage space, though it had probably been meant for a nursery. She opened a wardrobe which showed flecks of dust, rummaged around the back of a cluttered top shelf.

Cash noted four dresses hanging inside, all in styles a woman might have worn shortly after the Great War. They appeared to have hung undisturbed since their proper period. Miss Groloch wore appropriate old lady clothing now.

She might live outside it, but she was not unaware of the world.

It just keeps getting weirder, Cash thought.

"Here it is." She brought out something wrapped in yellowed tissue paper that crumbled when she tried to unwrap it.

"Hold on." John appeared genielike, a doily in hand. "Lay it here. You'll ruin any prints if you handle it."

"Fah!" she said. "Filthy it is. Laziness. No excuse is there. Someday to clean this, I will come." She stirred through the wardrobe, muttering to herself. "Sergeant, your force. It has the… vas ist?… charity?" She held up several sound but ancient shoes.

"We do." He forebore saying that he didn't think anyone was desperate enough to accept something fifty years old.

John slipped away with the doll, carrying it in front of him, on his palms, as though it were a nitro bomb. Miss Groloch abandoned the wardrobe in disgust, continued giving Cash the tour. John rejoined them as they were about to look into the attic, which proved to be a vast, dark, dusty emptiness. Miss Groloch refused to go up.

"Up there Tom gets sometimes," she said. "Filthy he comes back. I maybe should get one of those vacuum sweepers…"

"Don't you go climbing around up there," Cash told her. "If you fell over a joist and broke a leg, who'd come help you?"

She smiled, but didn't reply.

Cash was satisfied. He did not bother going into the attic. As Carstairs had noted so long ago, she was too smart to leave any evidence. If ever there had been any.

But Harald asked to see the basement. He seemed determined to push till he found the limit of her cooperation.

The basement had to be entered through the kitchen. Miss Groloch did have a refrigerator, Cash noted. It was so ancient that it had the round radiator stack on top. Ammonia coolant? he wondered.

To Cash the basement looked as innocuous as the rest of the house. Already certain they would find nothing, he remained at the foot of the steps taunting himself with Miss Groloch's accent while Harald prowled. What little looking he did was for his own curiosity's sake.

As he had suspected, the furnace was a conversion, coal to gas, probably with fuel oil as an intermediate step. The electrical wiring was the old exposed single strand, heavy guage copper wire. He noticed several places where the insulating fabric had become frayed.

"You see where the cloth on the wires is getting ragged? That could cause a fire someday. And this floor joist. You see where the insulator goes through? By the knot. It's cracked. You should have a carpenter scab on a sister beam before it settles and ruins your floor."

"This house and I, we are alike," Miss Groloch responded. "Getting old. Coming apart. Nothing lasts forever."

It was odd, the way she said that. Her wistfulness caused Cash to examine her expression. For a moment she wore a faraway look, then gave him that ghostly smile. Once again he had the feeling he was being manipulated.

"Tear it down they will when I'm gone, I expect. A pity that would be. It is a good house. Love and attention it needs, is all. Houses, they are like people, that way."

Before she could pursue this unexpected line, Harald said, "Well, sorry to take up so much of your time." He seemed disappointed. "We appreciate your cooperation." He made it sound as though he would have appreciated a confession a good deal more.

"I am happy to help, any time. You will be back, yes?"

That had the ring of accusation. Harald shrugged.

"You are always welcome. To being alone one never grows accustomed."

John grunted, took a last look around.

Loneliness. Cash wondered why she had never taken another friend after Jack O'Brien. Or had she? He would have to double-check with Annie.

Back in the car, after another round of tea and cookies, Harald asked, "What do you think?"

"What's to think? It's perfect. We've got to find another goddamned angle."

"Something's out of kilter. Something's not straight."

"How so? I didn't see anything."

"I don't know. Petty shit, I guess. Maybe it was the basement. You notice anything queer?"

Cash tried to visualize. "No."

"Probably nothing, but there were a couple things I noticed. Like, it wasn't a full basement."

"So?"

"So the end that would've gone under the rest of the house had a wall that looked like it was built a long time after the other three. The stone was different. And it was laid on top of the floor. And the floor was poured a long time after the basement was dug. It looked like it was done in sections. Like somebody mixed and poured it by hand."

"So? What can we do about it? Never mind the buried men and the secret rooms. You think Carstairs wouldn't have found them? Think we should cite her for not getting a building permit? Even then you'd have to prove she violated the building codes. They probably did it before there were any."

"You're no help, Norm. Not a damned bit. We already know Carstairs wasn't infallible. And there were other anomalies."

"Ooh, college words. Like what?"

"A washer and dryer. And water heater."

"That's a crime?"

"When the rest of the house is so old-fashioned?"