The Man Who Wasn't All There by David Handler (book recommendations website TXT) 📕

Lulu, however, was not curled up on the bed waiting for me. She’d gone back to pacing the house. She was guarding the fort. How did she know it needed guarding? Maybe Annabeth was right. Maybe she could sense it from me. Whatever the reason, she was definitely on patrol. Since bassets are world-class scent hounds – only bloodhounds outrank them – I wondered how close to the house Austin would have to be for her to get a whiff of his feral man scent. A hundred yards? A quarter-mile? I hadn’t a clue. All I knew was that if he was determined to come back and talk to Merilee – whom he did not, repeat not, know was in Budapest – then that teenaged state policeman at the gate was serving as nothing more than an ornament. Austin could hike his way through the woods to the farmhouse from three other directions. I climbed into bed with the heavy blanket and down comforter over me, turned off the bedside light and lay there in the darkness, watching the reflection of the flames dance across the ceiling. I told myself there was absolutely no way that Austin was anywhere other than camped out high on Mount Creepy. That he wasn’t about to come crashing through the master bedroom’s French doors, chainsaw in hand, like a ski-masked spree killer in a horror movie.

And yet, Lulu would not stop pacing the house.

When Quasimodo woke me at the crack of dawn Lulu still hadn’t come to bed. I found her perched on the parlor sofa, wide awake. I put the coffee on and fed Lulu her mackerel, then climbed back into bed with my steaming hot mug of coffee. She climbed her step stool on to the bed and joined me there, her head on my tummy, as I savored the view of the autumn sun rising over Whalebone Cove. Then I stropped Grandfather’s razor, shaved and threw on a warm Viyella shirt over a T-shirt, jeans and my Chippewas. After I’d put on my flight jacket I went outside and fed the girls. There was a thin coating of frost on the roof of the barn. I went back inside, put away a toasted English muffin with blackberry jam and my second cup of coffee, checked my fall chores list and decided it was time to begin installing the farmhouse’s storm windows, a labor-intensive job because the fourteen downstairs windows were not the standard modern-era aluminum over-under variety that simply involve sliding the storm window down and latching it in place, which takes all of ten seconds. No, the downstairs windows were old-fashioned mullioned wood casement windows that swung open outward. The wooden screens, which were hinged on the inside, had to be unscrewed and removed one by one before I could install the storms. Those were made of hard, two-inch-thick yellow pine, latched in place over the windows from the outside and hooked tight on the inside with hooks and eyes. The parlor storms were three feet by five feet, weighed a good forty pounds apiece, and I had to climb a ladder to install them. It was no ten-second job.

And then there were the farmhouse’s old wood storm doors, which weighed nearly a hundred pounds apiece and had to be hoisted into their slots just so. Those would require an extra set of hands – Mr MacGowan’s – to install.

I grabbed a Phillips head screwdriver from the tool drawer in the kitchen, found an empty jam jar and got busy unscrewing the downstairs screens, storing the screws in the jar for safekeeping. Then I carried all of the screens, which had collected a summer’s worth of dirt, pollen and cobwebs, outside. The morning sun had warmed the air well into the forties by now. I filled a bucket with soapy water and took a stiff scrub brush to them. Hosed them down and propped them against the side of the barn to dry. Lulu sprawled in the sun and dozed. I don’t think my guardian had slept a wink all night.

When I went back inside the house she followed me until she realized I was going down into the cellar, which was where Merilee stored the storm windows for the summer. Did an abrupt U-turn and scampered on to the parlor sofa. Mice. She’s terrified of mice. When late October arrives they start to burrow their way in for the winter. Her keen ears could hear them skittering around down there.

I carried the storms up the steep, narrow cellar stairs one by one and propped them in the mudroom. Each one’s destination was marked on the inside in a workman’s neat, tiny handwriting because they were not interchangeable. No two window frames in a 1736 farmhouse are the same exact size. No two of anything are the same exact size. When I’d brought all fourteen of them upstairs and closed the cellar door I examined them and discovered that the glazing compound that seals the glass to the wood had dried out and cracked on several of them. That meant I’d have to remove it with a putty knife, re-glaze, prime and paint them before they’d be ready to hang.

That fall chores list? Total pain in the ass.

I was starting my way out to the barn in search of glazing compound when the unlisted phone rang.

It was Resident Trooper Jim Conley. ‘Just wanted to share some good news with you,’ he said in his calm, steady voice. ‘Michael Talmadge’s Green Berets and their dog found Austin camped out in one of the caves near the ruins of the old family settlement shortly after dawn.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ I said, feeling my stomach muscles relax.

‘You and me both. He offered no resistance and was transported directly to his home, where he’s been sedated and is now under Dr McKenna’s personal care. Michael’s guards are staying put there for now. A nurse is on duty as well.’

‘Did you impound that bogus state