'Let's check the two towers,' he said, brushing dust from his black suit with evident distaste. 'Then we'll tackle the sealed room.'
The towers were drafty columns of winding stairs and storage niches full of spiders, rat droppings, and piles of yellowing old books. Each tower staircase dead-ended into a tiny lookout room, with windows like the arrow slits of a castle, looking down over the lightning-troubled forest. D'Agosta found himself growing impatient. The house seemed to have little to offer them other than madness and riddles. Why had Helen Pendergast come here--if she'd come here at all?
Finding nothing of interest in the towers, they returned to the main house and the sealed door. As D'Agosta held the light, Pendergast drew out two long screws. He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. D'Agosta followed--and almost staggered backward in surprise.
It was like stepping into a Faberge egg. It was not a large room, but it seemed to D'Agosta jewel-like--filled with treasures that glowed with internal brilliance. The windows had been boarded over and nailed with canvas, leaving the interior almost hermetically preserved, every surface so lovingly polished that even a decade of abandonment could not dull the luster. Paintings covered every square inch of wall space, and the interior was crowded with gorgeous handmade furniture and sculptures, the floor spread with dazzling rugs, sparkling jewelry laid out on pieces of black velvet.
In the middle of the room stood a single divan, covered in richly tanned leather that had been tooled into an astonishing cascade of abstract floral designs. The ebb and flow of the hand-worked lines were so cunningly wrought, so hypnotically beautiful, that D'Agosta could scarcely take his eyes from them. And yet other objects in the room cried out for his attention. At one end, several fantastical sculptures of elongated heads, carved in an exotic wood, stood beside an array of exquisite jewelry in gold, gems, and lustrous black pearls.
D'Agosta walked through the room in an astonished silence, hardly able to focus his attention on any one thing before some fresh marvel drew it away. On one table stood a collection of small, handmade books in elegant leather bindings with gold tooling. D'Agosta picked one up and thumbed through it, finding it full of poems handwritten in a beautiful script, signed and dated by Karen Doane. The loom-woven rugs formed several layers on the floor, and they displayed geometric designs so colorful and striking that they dazzled the eye. He flashed the light around the walls, marveling at the oil paintings, landscapes lustrous with life, of the forest glades around the house, old cemeteries, vivid still lifes, and ever-more-fantastical landscapes and dreamscapes. D'Agosta approached the closest one and squinted, playing the light over it--observing that it was signed M. DOANE along the bottom margin.
Pendergast came up beside him, a silent presence. 'Melissa Doane,' he murmured. 'The novelist's wife. It would appear that these paintings are hers.'
'All of them?' D'Agosta played the beam over the other walls of the little room. There was no painting in a black frame, no painting, in fact, not signed M. DOANE.
'I'm afraid it's not here.'
Slowly, D'Agosta let his flashlight drop to his side. He realized he was breathing fast, and that his heart was racing. It was bizarre--beyond bizarre. 'What the hell is this place? And how has it stayed like this without being robbed?'
'The town protects its secrets well.' Pendergast's silvery eyes darted about, taking everything in, an expression of intense concentration on his face. Slowly, once again, he paced the room, finally stopping at the table of handmade books. He quickly sorted through them, flipping the pages and putting them back. He left the room, and D'Agosta followed him down the hall as he entered the daughter's room. D'Agosta caught up as he was examining the shelf of identical red-bound volumes. His spidery hand reached out and plucked the last one down. He riffled through the pages; every one was blank. Pendergast put it back and drew out the penultimate volume. This one was full of nothing but horizontal lines, made apparently with a ruler, so densely drawn that each page was almost black with them.
Pendergast selected the next book, flipped through it, finding more dense lines and some crude, stick-like, childish sketches in the beginning. The next volume contained disjointed entries in a ragged hand that climbed up and down across the pages.
Pendergast began to read out loud, at random, prose written in poetic stanzas.
Pendergast flipped a few pages. The ravings continued until they seemed to dissolve into disjointed words and illegible scratchings. More thoughtfully, he put the book back and drew out another, much earlier in the set, opening it in the middle. D'Agosta saw lines of strong and even writing, evidently that of a girl, with doodles of flowers and funny faces in the margins and
Pendergast read off the date.
D'Agosta did a quick mental calculation. 'That would be about six months before Helen's visit,' he said.
'Yes. When the Doanes were still new to Sunflower.' Pendergast paged through the entries, scanning them swiftly, pausing at one point to read out loud: Mattie Lee razzed me again about Jimmy. He may be cute but I can't stand the goth clothes and that thrash metal he's into. He slicks his hair back and smokes, holding the cigarette up close to the burning ash. He thinks it makes him look cool. I think it makes him look like a nerd trying to look cool. Even worse: it makes him look like a dweeb who looks like a nerd who's trying to be cool.
'Typical high-school girl,' said D'Agosta, frowning.
'Perhaps a bit more incisive than most.' The agent continued flipping forward through the volume. He stopped abruptly at an entry made some three months later. 'Ah!' he exclaimed, sudden interest in his voice, and began to read. When I got home from school I saw Mom and Dad in the kitchen hovering over something on the counter. Guess what it was? A parrot! It was gray and fat, with a stumpy red tail and a big fat metal band around its leg with a number but no name. It was tame and would perch right on your arm. It kept cocking its head at me and peering into my eyes, like it was checking me out. Dad looked it up in the encyclopedia and said it was an African Grey. He said it had to be somebody's pet, it was too tame for anything else. It just showed up around noon, sitting in the peach tree next to the back door, making noise to announce its presence. I begged Dad to let us keep it. He said we could until he found the real owner. He says we have to run an ad. I told him to run it in the Timbuctoo Times and he thought that was pretty funny. I hope he never finds the real owner. We made a little nest for it in an old box. Dad is going to the pet store in Slidell tomorrow to get him a real cage. While he was hopping around the counter he found one of Mom's muffins, gave a squawk, and started gorging on it, so I named him Muffin.
'A parrot,' D'Agosta muttered. 'Now, what are the chances of that?'
