thirty reel across Route 1A. He left the town on Argilla Road, passing widely spaced houses with BMWs and Volvos and tremendous oak trees planted outside them. Soon he came to a stone gate marked KERNAGHAN. A driveway bordered with spruce trees wound up a hill through rolling unmown pastures. At the top of the hill was a gracious white house with symmetrical wings, a domed portico, and, squatting among its dormers, a pyramid made of white aluminum siding. It was easily fifteen feet tall. The effect was of a well-dressed woman wearing a plastic garbage pail on her head.
He stood for a moment on a hemp mat stenciled with a black yin and yang and peered in through a narrow window beside the front door. He saw a tiled entry hall and a living room that extended to the back of the house. In theory at least, since this house now belonged to his mother, it was a second home to him. He opened the door and walked in.
The dining-room table, to his left, was covered with folders and portfolios. A broad-shouldered man in a white shirt was seated with his back to the hall, and at the head of the table, reading a stapled document, sat Melanie.
“Hi Mom, how you doin’,” Louis said.
She looked up at him severely. Only the white tip of her long nose held her half glasses on. She was wearing a crimson silk dress, crimson lipstick, and earrings with large black stones. Her dark hair was pulled tightly behind her ears. “Hello Louis,” she said, returning her eyes to the document. “Happy Easter.”
Her companion had swung around, capturing the back of his chair in an armpit, and revealed a flushed and amiable face with chalky blue eyes and a bushy reddish mustache. His collar was open, his necktie loosened. He seemed so delighted to see Louis that Louis immediately shook his hand.
“Henry Rudman,” the man said. He almost but did not quite say Henwy Wudman. “You must be the son that lives in Sumvull. I think your mother said Belknap Street?”
“That’s right.”
Henry Rudman nodded vigorously. “Reason I ask is I grew up in Sumvull myself. You familiar with Vinal Avenue?”
“No, sorry,” Louis said. He leaned over his mother’s shoulder. “Whatcha reading there, Mom?”
Melanie turned a page in pointed silence.
“It’s an old brief,” Wudman answered, leaning back in his chair expansively. He waggled his pen like a drumstick. “We got a piece of architectural ornamentation upstairs that’s worn out its welcome. The town of Ipswich agreed a few years back to pay for its removal. Now it’s looking like they want to welsh.”
“That’s some ornament,” Louis said.
“Hey, to each his own. I know what you mean, though. I understand you moved up here from Texas. What do you think of the weather?”
“It stinks!”
“Yeah, wait’ll you see it do this in June. Tell me, you a Sox fan yet?”
“Not yet, no,” Louis said. He was appreciating the attention. “Cubs fan.”
With a big mitt the lawyer swatted his words back in his direction. “Same diff. You like the Cubs, you got everything it takes to be a Sox fan. I mean for instance, who lost us a Series in ‘86, Bill Buckner. Who did us the favor of trading us Bill Buckner, Chicago Cubs. Like some kinda conspiracy there. What two teams played the most years without winning the ultimate cigar, you got it, Sox and Cubs. Listen, you want to see a game? Let me send you a couple tickets, I’m a nineteen-year subscriber. Unlikely you’ll get tickets like these through normal channels.”
Louis drew his head back in surprise, thoroughly disarmed now. “That would be great.”
Melanie cleared her throat like a starter motor.
“Hey, don’t mention it,” Rudman said. “I’m a corrupter o’ youth. You gotta excuse us, though, we’re looking at a snake’s nest here.”
Louis turned to his mother. “Where’s Dad?”
“Outside. Why don’t you look in the yard. As I told you on the phone, Mr. Rudman and I have a lot to discuss by ourselves.”
“Don’t let me … disturb you,” he told her in his Nembutal voice.
In the kitchen he found coffee cake, a party-sized urn of coffee, and, on a long counter, other bakery products in white boxes with the name “Holland” in blue crayon. His eyes widened when he opened the refrigerator. There were pâtés and seafood salads in transparent plastic cartons, jumbo fruits in decorated tissue paper, a tin of Russian caviar, half a smoked ham, whole foreign cheeses, premium yogurt in unusual berry flavors, fresh artichokes and asparagus, kosher dill pickles, an intriguing stack of wrapped deli items, German and Dutch beers, name-brand soft drinks, juices in glass bottles, and thirty-dollar-a-pop champagne—
“Louis.” His mother spoke from the dining room.
“Yeah, Mom.”
“What are you doing in there?”
“I’m looking at the food.”
Silence.
“No way you’re liable,” Henry Rudman said. “Guy pocks his Jag in the street, somebody else comes along secures a loan with it, no way on earth Guy A’s responsible. It’s straight fraud, doesn’t involve you whatsoever. Can’t really blame the bank either. She’s living in the house and the title she shows ‘em’s a first-rate forgery, so good it makes you wonder if she did it all by herself, I bet not. It’s a slick trick. She gets a home-equity loan for two hundred K, spends seventy-two on this pyramid that she’s just gotta have, can’t live without, and puts the difference in a different bank. It’ll cover payments for another ten, fifteen years plus she can throw the occasional pahty on it. Slick trick. She dies, the bank’s screwed. I mean assuming the trustees still have the real title. Your pop must’ve known what he was doing. Four thousand a month tax-free plus a free house with groundskeeping fully paid and she still can’t quite make ends meet, not even paying the Haitian slave wages. I can’t say I like this dead-hand business (you understand this is just a professional opinion), but if I’d been married to a woman like that I wouldn’t let her near the capital myself. Next thing you know, we’d be looking at Mount Fuji in the back yod.”
“Louis.”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Would it be possible for you not to be in the kitchen?”
“Yeah, just a sec.”
A dark, cold hall off the rear of the kitchen ended in three doors, one leading outside, the others into a bathroom and a bedroom. Louis sat down on the bed and slurped coffee and wolfed cake. All the hangers in the closet were bare. It was a while before he noticed that a pane was missing from the window. This was the only earthquake damage he saw all morning.
Out in the back yard he could find no sign of his father, although the air was so still and thick it almost seemed a person walking through it would leave a trail. He crossed a patio and tried one of the French doors at the rear end of the living room. It swung right open.
The living room was large enough to hold four separate clusters of furniture. Above the fireplace hung a large oil of Louis’s grandfather, a formal portrait painted in 1976, when John Kernaghan was seventy-five or so. His eyebrows had still been dark. With his near-perfect baldness and firm skin and elegant, compact skull he looked ageless. He was, Louis realized, the man responsible for his loss of hair. The painted image drew further life from the living daughter sitting across the hall in the dining room, reading documents with her father’s own glittering unapproachable dark eyes.
“When they meet on the thirtieth,” Henry Rudman said quietly, “they have to distribute the entire corpus. The entire corpus, it’s unambiguous, they have no choice. The full transfer may take another four to six weeks, but we’re looking at June 15 absolute latest.”
That the living room did not entirely belong to Melanie yet was clear from the New Age reading matter on the coffee tables, from the ugly phantasmagoric