A Thief in the House of Memory (2 page)

“Had to get the war started,” said Birdie.

“What war is it this time?”

She held up two fingers.

“The Second World War?”

She nodded.

“All of it?”

Birdie glanced at him wearily. “Just D-Day.” She tasted Sunny's drink. Too hot. She poured some into the sink and topped up Minnie with cold water.

“My ear hurts.” It was Sunny's voice, all wobbly, drifting down from her room.

“As if D-Day weren't enough,” said Birdie. She joined Dec at the window. “It's three in the morning, and your father is out there in his shop happily building some beach in Normandy. Go figure.”

She sounded kind of proud, as if only a special kind of guy stayed up late playing with model armies.

“D-Day,” said Dec. “That's a long way from the Greeks taking out the Persians at Marathon.”

“I thought you'd be pleased,” she said.

“Why?”

“Your old man finally joins the twentieth century. You're always grousing about him being stuck in the past.”

Dec was just about to remind her it was now the twenty-first century when Sunny called out again. “Mommy?”

“Coming,” said Birdie.

And Dec bit his lip the way he always did when he heard his sister call Birdie Mommy. Even after so long.

Alone in the dark of the kitchen he looked towards his father's workshop.

“Bernard Steeple arrives in the twentieth century,” he murmured. “Alert the press.”

Just then, as if his father had heard him, the lights in the shed went off. And in the new darkness Dec thought he saw, far up on the very top of the hill, another light. He stared. Must have been a shard of moonlight shining on a window in the big house. Where they used to live when his real mother was still around.

“W
AKE UP
, gearbox, you're home.”

The voice cut through the music in Dec's head. A horse-faced boy brayed at him, reeking of Hot Rods and vinegar chips.

Dec stood as if in a trance at the foot of his driveway as the school bus rumbled away. Half-Handed Cloud was in his earphones. Something Ezra Harlow had downloaded for his immediate attention.

Camelot looked even drearier than it had that morning. Fake half-timbering and fake shutters and fake diamondpaned windows. Birdie had been working up the soil in the garden but it was too early for planting. There was only a garden gnome to greet him, and from the sneer on his face, Dec could imagine what he was thinking. “Welcome home, gearbox.”

Sunny was standing in the bay window, all five years, nine months of her. She was still in her nightie, having fussed all night. There was a cardboard box in her arms. Behind the
sheer curtains her face looked ghostly in its corona of red hair. Their mother's hair.

Dec pushed his own hair out of his eyes, just a mangy shade of his mother's glory.

“It's time for my Polly Pockets to go to the Big House,” she said, greeting him at the door. He could barely hear her over the music blaring out of his MP3: “Can't Even Breathe on My Own Two Feet.” She held up the box. He looked at the assorted pastel-coloured toys: Fifi, Midge, Suki…all the tiny gals of Pollyville.

“I thought you were sick,” he said.

“Daddy says I need Air.”

Dec shrugged off his backpack and crouched down to Sunny's level. “So why doesn't Daddy take you?” he said, too loudly, pitching his voice above the clamour in his ears.

She stared at his headphones. “What are you Listening to?” she shouted, leaning close to his face. Clearing away her uncombed hair, he placed the earphones on her head. She jerked away and made a face. “Ezra music,” she said.

He switched it off.

“Daddy says he's had Enough of me for One Day. He couldn't do Nothing More.”

“Anything.”

“Not even Anything,” she said.

“I can imagine,” muttered Dec. “D-Day will seem like a holiday.”

“Pardon?”

“Can't you wait for Birdie to get home?”

“It's Friday.”

Which meant that Birdie wouldn't be home until ten. Dec sighed. Sunny was a force of nature. There was no way out.

“Just let me get something to eat,” he said wearily. Her face lit up. “Go put on some clothes,” he added.

“I'm going to put the Polly Pockets on the pink dresser. They can keep Princess Jasmine company.”

“Lucky Princess Jasmine,” he said, as his sister galloped up the stairs to her room. Her interest in the old family home was new. She had been a baby when they left so she had no memories of it, good or bad. For Sunny it was a giant fun-house. The fun had long since drained out of the place for Dec.

He heated up a slice of pizza in the microwave and found himself growing edgy at the prospect of going up there. He wasn't sure why. When they first moved he went up all the time. Then the emptiness had got to him. Emptiness? That was rich. Steeple Hall was a monstrous time capsule, a house so big you didn't need to throw anything away, just close the door on one room's worth of memories and start in on another. It was his father's monument to the Steeple clan. There were over a hundred years of history up there, but the place still felt empty to Dec. It was like the shed snakeskin you found sometimes in the woodpile, beautiful but lifeless.

The timer dinged for his pizza, and there was Sunny. She
wore a bright yellow slicker over her nightie, yellow gum-boots and an impatient frown.

So they set off, Sunny chattering away like a spring-high stream about Midge's flower shop and Suki's teahouse. Dec swallowed a bite of pizza and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Are you sure you're ready to part with those Polly doodles?” he asked.

“Polly Pockets. And I'm not Parting with them. They're just going to live at the Big House from Now On.” She talked like that, in capitals.

They slogged through the gumbo of a low stretch of road. The big house was a game to her. Their father encouraged it. On her last birthday he had said to her, “The past is what happens when the present has no future in it anymore.” She had hugged the doll she was holding fiercely, as if he were going to snatch it from her.

“Hurry, Deckly Speckly.”

The hill grew steep. From County Road 10, you wouldn't know there was a driveway there at all, the grass was so thick. More a cow path than a grand entrance. Bernard didn't like the way to the big house to be well defined. No need to go advertising the house's whereabouts.

The driveway curved again and Camelot was lost to view. The old macadam showed through up here. It was easier to walk now but Sunny panted a bit. She looked a little feverish,
clutching her cardboard box to her chest. Dec offered to carry it. She turned away.

“We're Talking,” said Sunny. “I'm telling Suki what a Great Time she'll have being a Memory.”

One more year, thought Dec. I'll be out of here and this whole place will become a memory. But when, through the maples, he finally caught sight of the tower, the peaked roofline, the many gables and chimney stacks — he felt an ache inside.

They rounded the final curve and the big house sprang fully into view. Light glinted off the glass of the conservatory. The newly budding maples shhhhhed in the breeze. There was always wind up here.

Steeple Hall. The words were carved in stone above the entranceway with a shamrock on either side. Sunny broke into a run. Her yellow boots made a galumphing noise on the wide stone pathway.

She waited for him by the door, wiggling like a puppy back from a walk. Dec dug out the long brass key. The tumblers turned. Sunny pushed open the door.

He smelled it before he saw it, a disturbing scent on the dry, old air. The frosted-glass vestibule door was slightly ajar. Sunny slithered out of her boots, pushed open the door and stopped dead.

“Uh-oh,” she said.

A glass-panelled bookcase had fallen. The spacious front
hallway was lined with bookcases over three metres high and a metre wide on the eastern wall. One of those cases lay before them. Books were strewn everywhere. A bronze bust of Plato lay at Sunny's feet. She stepped back into her brother's arms.

Then they saw the hand.

Their eyes found it at the same moment. It was sticking out from under the massive pile of debris, the fingers curled into a claw. Sunny muttered Dec's name quietly, like a prayer.

He held his sister close. His eyes darted to the parlour on his left, the drawing room on his right, and down the long passageway to the study. No sound came to him but the steady tock of the grandfather clock and Sunny breathing fast through her mouth. Nothing moved. And when he dared to look again, the hand had not moved, either. It was clutching something. He saw a glint of gold.

Sunny dropped her box of Polly Pockets and Dec was jolted out of his stupor. He lifted his sister up and sat her on the old church pew in the vestibule with her box of toys on her lap. She didn't argue until he turned to head back into the house.

“Just stay put,” he said.

The bookshelf was solid oak. It took all of his strength to budge it. Books still trapped behind a lattice of wood and broken glass tumbled out. His great-grandfather's legal books. One of them, as heavy as an anvil, fell on his foot. He
cut himself on a shard of glass and pressed his hand hard against his pant leg.

The man was buried in law books, drowning in a green and gold sea. Dec knelt down and pulled away the rubble until he uncovered the man's face. He had never seen a corpse before, but there was a dullness to the battered face that quickly made him abandon any idea of heroic rescue. You could not attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on lips that blue and swollen.

Then he saw the Chinese letters tattooed on the man's neck and gasped.

“Mr. Play-Doh.”

He swung around. Sunny was in the doorway again, wide-eyed, clutching one of her dolls and crouching by the bust lying on its side by the door. “Mr. Play-Doh is hurt,” she said.

“He'll be okay,” said Dec, turning her away and closing the door on the grisly scene. They hurried down the steps and across the drive. Dec turned, half afraid that a dead man might be following them. But what he saw, or thought he saw, stopped him in his tracks.

His mother.

She was standing at an upstairs window, dressed as Wonder Woman, her fingertips resting on the glass, an expectant look on her face. For a few seconds, the sun glinted off her golden tiara. Then she vanished.

“What are you looking at?” asked Sunny, looking at the same window, her hand shielding her eyes.

“Nothing,” he answered, taking Sunny's hand.

“Not so tight,” she said, as they set off towards Camelot. “Not so fast.”

Neither of them spoke again until they were almost home.

“Who was that man?” she asked at last.

“Nobody we know,” he said.

But that was only half true.

I
T HAD BEEN
three weeks ago. He was not supposed to hitchhike. It had been drummed into Dec since he was a kid. But he was almost sixteen; he wasn't a kid anymore. Besides, it was an emergency. He had to get home, and when you lived half an hour out of town in deep country, there weren't that many options.

He hadn't known about the Art Club meeting to talk about next fall's trip to New York. He hadn't known about Dad going to Kingston for the day, either. He only found out when he phoned home for a lift. That's when he learned that Sunny's babysitter had a chiropractor's appointment and could only stay until five. Birdie wouldn't be finished work until six.

It was that simple.

He had already walked to the western edge of town, when the water-haulage truck pulled over. Dec almost choked as he opened the door. The cab was so filled with smoke it might have been on fire. He started coughing and backed down the step.

“Jesus on life support!” said the driver. “Sorry, man.” He rolled down his window and flicked his cigarette outside. He started making a noise like a fire alarm as he waved his arms at the fug in the cab. “Damn stupid habit, eh?” he said and laughed.

Through the clearing smoke, Dec noticed the man's teeth. They were movie star teeth, a little yellow but straight and lots of them. He was somewhere in his thirties with a terrible mullet and big sideburns and Chinese letters tattooed the length of his neck. But his smile was infectious. If Dec had second thoughts about accepting a ride in a moving smokehouse, the smile charmed him into the cab. He slammed the door and the water-haulage man worked through the gears to get his rig back on the road. There wasn't much traffic on County Road 10. There never was.

“Here,” said the driver, reaching into his shirt pocket. He handed Dec a crumpled pack of Players.

“I don't smoke,” said Dec.

“Me, neither,” said the driver, talking loudly over the drone of the engine. “Do me a favour and get rid of'em.” He burst out laughing again. “Save me from myself, buddy. Save me!“

Dec reluctantly took the package. He felt like the butt of a joke he didn't get. The driver's eyes were glittering or maybe just watering from the rush of air coming in through his wide-open window. Now he flashed his movie star teeth again. “If I tossed 'em out the cab, I might get pulled over for
littering, right? And I don't want to give the cops no excuse. No way. Not with my rep.”

Dec nodded. He slipped the mostly empty cigarette package into his breast pocket. For some reason, the driver roared with laughter again. Dec grasped the door handle.

“I'm already breakin' the law,” the man said. Without taking his eyes off the road, he leaned towards Dec. “And you're my accomplice.” They were rolling along by now. There was no chance of escape. Dec glanced at the driver, who was smiling through squinty eyes. “You're in over your head, kiddo,” he added. “You're in big time.”