And One to Die On(39)

Carlton went out on the landing, turned off the light in the little room, and closed the door behind himself. That had been interesting but unproductive. There had been no clue to the things he wanted to know up there. He looked up the dark staircase. This was a servant’s staircase, of course, and maybe nobody used it anymore, at least at night. He had checked all four walls and been unable to find a switch. He had looked up into the blackness and been unable to see a lightbulb or a light fixture or a lamp. What did the servants do in this place when there were servants, if there were ever servants? Did they carry candles?

Carlton thought about going back to the others. He decided against it. He would just wander around mooning about Bennis Hannaford, and she would just go on ignoring him. He could try to confront her, but he didn’t think that would be a good idea. Carlton had a very good eye for the kind of people who would treat his claims to wounded vulnerability with contempt. He climbed a few steps and looked up into the darkness. Things would get better as he went higher, he realized, because there was a window on the landing above him. The problems would come between landings. The half flights were long and steep and narrow. They boxed off whatever light was coming through the windows and made the climber wait for it.

Carlton went up to the first landing. The window there was tall and thin. He looked out and saw black rocks and a black ocean and the tiny lights of a buoy at sea. He was at the back of the house in more ways than one. He wasn’t looking across to Hunter’s Pier from here.

Carlton went up another half landing and found another window. He went up another half landing yet and found another window yet. There were, apparently, going to be windows on every landing but doors only on every other one. He went up another half landing and opened the door there. He had lost track of where he was. He was looking out on a meanly proportioned hall, lined with plain wood doors again. He opened one of the doors and found a miserable little bedroom. It was equipped with a metal bedframe and a thin mattress and a single small wood table. He went back to the landing. Servants’ quarters, definitely. How glad he was that he hadn’t had to be a servant in a nineteenth-century house.

He went up the next half flight of stairs, stopped to look out at the night again—same scene, lots of black, illuminated buoys—and then went up the half flight after that. This was the end. The landing had a door on it, but no further stairs. Carlton opened the door. He was surprised to find that the vast room beyond seemed to be brightly lit. It wasn’t, of course. This was the attic, an undifferentiated space whose low walls were lined with periodic windows. The windows on the far side of the space looked out on the front of the house and let in the light from the powerful security arcs out there. Carlton closed the attic door behind him and took a deep breath of musty air.

Attics, Carlton thought, can be interesting places. There might be anything at all stuffed into them. He walked across the middle of the room to the front windows, looking around as he went. This attic was not neglected. There was no carpet of dust and grit under his feet. Somebody had been sweeping the floor up here.

He got to the front windows and looked out. The sea looked angrier than it had when he had come over on the boat. The water seemed to be rising higher against the dock than he remembered it doing. The wind was rising, too. It was pressing against the side of the house the way Sisyphus had pressed against his boulder. Out there in Hunter’s Pier, everything was quiet. Lights glowed on the docks and in the windows of houses and bars. The flagpole where the flags of the United States and the state of Maine had flown when they came in this morning was bending in the wind.

Carlton had turned around to contemplate the contents of the attic, to decide where he was going to start searching for something he could use, when he heard them for the first time—except that he didn’t think of them as “them” yet, only as “it,” and what he thought he heard was the squeaking of a metal hinge in need of some 3-In-One oil. He looked back at the door he had come in through, wary. It was still shut. He looked around for another door and found it, to his right, but it was shut, too.

The squeaking, he realized, was coming from above his head. He looked up and saw nothing. It was too dark up there, beyond the reach of the light from the windows. The darkness seemed to be breathing, but Carlton was certain that was his imagination. His imagination was working so hard right now, he could have conjured up the Loch Ness monster with wings and convinced himself that it was perfectly real.

There was a big black steamer trunk in the very middle of the room, plastered over with theatrical stickers. Carlton was sure it had to belong to either Cavender Marsh or Tasheba Kent, because he was sure that no one else who had ever been connected to this house had ever had a theatrical background. He knelt down by the trunk. It was the kind that had to be padlocked, but the padlock that had once been threaded through the hasp was nowhere to be found. Carlton lifted the top of the trunk. The hinges squeaked, but they didn’t sound anything at all the way the squeaking had sounded just a few moments before. He put the top of the trunk gently on the attic floor and looked into it. On the top there was a wooden tray, lined with felt and divided into sections. In the sections were such uninteresting objects as paper clips, safety pins, and loose glass beads from long-broken necklaces. Carlton took the divider out and put that on the attic floor, too.