I put my hand on it, but didn’t turn it right away. I listened to the sounds of the house-the creaking of wood beams, a soft hooting of wind somewhere up in the attic, a gentle snoring that came from the bedridden Mother Hoobin’s room. All the sounds were muffled and faraway, lost in the big solid confines of the house. They were gentle sounds, homey sounds, the sort of easy familiar sounds that lull you right to sleep.
I turned the knob, pushed and let light from the hall lamps spill in before me.
It was just as I imagined. Neat and orderly. Hand-sewn and bright and comfortable. There was a four-poster bed with veils hung across the posts and a big iron-banded cedar chest at its foot. There was a polished oak dresser that hadn’t come from any flooded farmstead, a big round mirror hung on the plaster wall above it. There was a nightstand on the far side of the bed, a flower-box beyond the window and a door that led to a bathroom on the far wall. There were lamps, and a handful of long matches in a silver vase. I lit both lamps and looked about.
The wood floors were covered with two big red rugs, the weave and dye so fine I found myself unconsciously tip-toeing over them.
A pair of fuzzy slippers waited by the bed. A second pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses sat atop a book on the nightstand. A long-hemmed, plush, red bathrobe hung on a hook by the bathroom door.
And there was the closet. I made for it first.
If it was empty, I had some bad news for the Hoobins. But I doubted I’d find it empty-anyone who packed their clothes would certainly take their reading glasses and a book or two as well.
The closet was full. I mean packed tight-clothes upon clothes upon clothes. I pulled a handful of dresses out at random and spread them on the bed.
Darla had been right. Martha had a gift. She’d taken silk and cotton and wool and made works of art.
I poked around in the closet, counted ten pairs of shoes, fifty-six dresses, nineteen pairs of pants and a plethora of hats and scarves and undergarments I left untouched lest the Hoobins hang me from a ceiling beam or mount my head above the mantel. Also in the corner was a good leather clothes bag. It was new and empty and if it had ever been used I couldn’t spot it.
I finished poking in the corners and turned from the closet to the dresser. I spent a few moments rifling through the drawers, starting at the bottom and working toward the top like a good burglar. Stockings and unmentionables and bolts of silk and linen were all I found.
Atop the dresser lay neat ranks of moderately expensive make-up, the various and sundry tools of application, and a plain glass jar full to the brim with clothes-pins, bent needles and bits of this and that.
Satisfied that the dresser contained no threatening letters from deranged suitors or the torn halves of still- legible stagecoach tickets, I opened the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. There were more clothes, more bolts of new fabric, a stack of old books and a tiny cedar jewelry box in which a single gold ring lay. Atop it all was a ragged stuffed bear, more tatters than fur, wrapped in a clean white towel with a tiny pillow tucked under its head.
I closed the chest and entered the bathroom. Aside from a fancy flushing toilet and hot running water in the sink, I found nothing there worth mentioning except the half-used bottle of bath suds that smelled of Darla’s hair.
I closed the bathroom door behind me, heard footfalls on the stair, counted, divided and decided that all the Hoobins were about to pop in and see what I was up to.
I sighed, regarded my glum expression in Martha’s big round dressing mirror, and saw a tiny glimmer of silver from deep within the junk jar at the edge of her dresser.
I went that way. I’d marveled at the way Martha’s make-up, combs and whatnots were lined up in neat ranks on the dresser-top. You see that a lot, with poor folks who come into money-they tend to treat every possession, no matter how humble, like a treasure. Martha was certainly that way. The junk jar was only there for things she didn’t want to throw away yet, but had no particular affection for.
So what was that gleaming silver at the bottom?
I was dumping it out just as Ethel popped his head in the door.
“Have you found aught amiss?” he said.
I froze. There it is, said a voice only I could hear. Finally.
“Oh, I have indeed.” I picked my “aught amiss” up, shook a pair of sewing needles out of the bristles. “Have you ever seen this before? Any of you?”
I held it up, and they crowded around, tip-toeing on Martha’s fine red rugs just as I had.
I’d found a comb. A silver-handled comb, worked in the shape of a swan, finely cast, laden with detail, heavy in my hand like the small fortune it surely cost.
The brothers Hoobin shook their honest heads.
“No, never.”
“Not I.”
“Nor I.”
“No,” said Ethel. He scowled at the comb as if he could make it confess to a litany of sins merely by glaring it toward righteousness. “No, I have not seen this thing.”
I nodded toward the dresser. “But you have seen that one. The comb there.”
I pointed. They all nodded yes. “It was our mother’s, and her mother’s before,” said Ethel. “From where did this comb come?”
I squinted. There were no hairs in the bristles.
You use a comb once-even once-and there will be hairs.
I felt like dancing. Instead, I shrugged. “I found it there. Stuffed in that jar, with a lot of other junk.”
“But it is not junk,” said Ethel. “Is silver, no?”
“Silver, all right. Well worked.” I turned the comb. Let it glisten in the light. “But Martha put it in that jar. She never once used it.”
Ethel held out his hand. I let him take the comb.
He closed his eyes, gripped it tight. The other Hoobins closed their eyes and began to mumble what I took to be lilting Balptist prayers.
I shut up and watched. Ethel’s face went red, his jaw quivered and I could see his teeth grind together through the skin of his cheeks. I counted to fifty and decided Hoobins didn’t breathe like mere city folk when his ears flushed and he opened his eyes and sucked in a lungful of air.
He flung the comb down, atop Martha’s bed.
“I could see nothing,” he said, more to his brothers than to me. “Nothing to help, or find.”
I frowned. “What were you looking for?” I said.
“For Martha,” he said. “Sight runs in our family. But mostly to the women. And Momma is stricken, Martha is gone and it is for you to find her.” He took up the comb, holding it gingerly, as though it were hot, or unclean. “Take this, finder. Take whatever you will. Take and find.” His gaze turned down, and he sagged. “This much I saw, brothers. Martha lives. But only at the sufferance of those who know neither mercy nor shame.” He looked up at me again, sky blue eyes wet and pleading. “Find her. Any price. We will pay.”
I took the comb and looked about at Martha’s things, at the sad rabbit-furred slippers waiting by her bed, at the bathrobe patient on its hook.
“I’ll find her,” I said. “And you’ll pay what we agreed, no more.”
Ethel nodded. His eyes were welling up, and I got out of there, preferring the tender mercies of halfdead or the Night Watch to the spectacle of all the Hoobins weeping around Martha’s empty red chair.
Chapter Four
I kept to the middle of the street, all the way out of the New People neighborhoods. I even whistled an old Army marching song and put a jaunt in my step, jut to let the scores of New People peeping down at me know how much vampires and silly Curfew laws meant to the fearless finder Markhat.
Once out of sight, of course, I shut my fool mouth and slunk all the way home, darting from doorway to doorway, giving dark alleyways wide berth, hiding twice from passing Watchmen and once from a band of mean- eyed drunks.
