waving good-bye, he looked barely capable of going on. He slumped into the back of the sofa like a leaky sack of grain.
“What do you think happened to him after that?” Tim asked.
The boy’s eyes found his, flicked away. “Everybody knows what happened to Mark. He walked into Sherman Park, and the Sherman Park Killer, or the Dark Man, or whatever you call him, grabbed him. Mark wasn’t even thinking about his own safety. But don’t ask me what he was thinking about, because I couldn’t tell you. He was in his own little world.” Again the watery red eyes met Tim’s. “I think that terrible house screwed him up, if you care about what I think. It got to him, right from the start. It changed him.”
“What about Lucy Cleveland?”
“There was no Lucy Cleveland,” Jimbo said. He seemed amazingly weary. “A gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl hides out in an empty house and lets a fifteen-year-old boy have sex with her all day long? A gorgeous nineteen- year-old girl that nobody else can see? Yeah, that happens all the time. In books, maybe.”
“Exactly,” Tim said.
Skip poised at the top of the front steps, gazing at Tim while trembling with what looked like the desire to attack. Then it occurred to Tim that the dog was not baring its teeth or snarling, standard behavior for dogs in attack mode. It was trembling with old age, not aggression. The dog was probably cold all the time. Probably Skip spent the whole day on the same few feet of porch because that was where the sunlight fell. Tim extended a hand, and Skip permitted his head to be scratched.
“That poor old animal’s so arthritic he doesn’t move much anymore. Spends all day sacked out in that one spot of sunlight.”
Tim had not heard the front door open. He looked up to see Omar Hillyard gazing at him through the screen door.
“Sort of like me,” Hillyard said. “You decided to come back, I see.”
“Yes,” Tim said. “I hope you don’t mind.” He stepped up beside the dog. Leaning on his cane, Mr. Hillyard opened the screen door, awkwardly. “Just walk around Skip and come on in. He’ll move back to his spot, but it’ll take him a little while.”
Tim took another step, and Skip either moaned or sighed. Tim looked down at the old dog. When Skip got his front end pointed toward his favorite place, his stiff legs began to carry him toward it.
“He makes a splendid noise when he collapses into the sunlight,” Hillyard said.
Together, they watched Skip hobble across the porch. The old dog moved like a clumsy piece of machinery that had been assembled by someone who had failed to read the manual. He reached the little square of sunlight and fell into it, all at once, and landed with an audible thump. He made a sound of pure contentment, like humming, deep in his chest.
“Know just how he feels,” Hillyard said.
He moved back, and Tim walked through the front door into the living room, which bore a generic resemblance to Philip’s, except that the furniture was cleaner and not so old. Stumping in behind him, Hillyard waved toward a brown love seat covered in threadbare corduroy. “That one’s still pretty comfortable. Me, if I sit over here, I can lean my crutch on the footstool, makes it easier to get up.”
He parked himself in a high-backed armchair and propped the cane beside him.
On both sides of the room, framed photographs and drawings of young men, most of them nude, looked out from the walls. Two facing drawings depicted young men in a state of arousal.
“I don’t believe I told you this, but the boy on the left is me,” Hillyard said. “Back in 1946, right after I got out of the army. The other one is my lover, George Olander. He was the artist. George and I bought this house in 1955, when people still used the term ‘bachelor.’ We said we were roomies, and nobody bothered us. George died in 1983, exactly twenty years ago. At first your friend Sancho was thrown off course by these pictures, but he decided not to think about it, and pretty soon he was all right.”
“He came over to ask about Joseph Kalendar.”
“Like you. Actually, he came about the house, but pretty soon that brought us to Joseph Kalendar. I’ve got some iced tea in the kitchen, if you’d care for any.”
“No, thanks.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m inhospitable. Truth is, I’m out of practice. For obvious reasons, George and I never had the neighbors in, and I have continued the tradition. Fact is, I went out of my way to discourage visitors. Then I fell down and hurt myself. But am I supposed to take down all my pictures just because the Monaghan boy comes over here?”
“How are you now?”
“Improving. Nothing broke, thank God. Just busted off a few chips, that’s all.”
Tim’s love seat gave him a perfect view across the street to the Kalendar house. “I didn’t ask you earlier if you ever saw the boys going to that house. It seems they were obsessed with it, my nephew especially.”
“I saw it all,” Hillyard said. “Either from exactly where you are now, or through my kitchen window. I saw your nephew and his friend stare at that place hour after hour. You could always hear them coming, because of their skateboards. I saw them come over here one night and shine a light on the window. Sancho saw something that knocked him flat on his rear end.”
“He told me about that,” Tim said.
“I always wondered if maybe what he saw was the other fellow.”
“Ah,” Tim said, feeling something hitherto unknown slide into a place exactly its size and shape. “The other fellow. They called him the Dark Man. My nephew told Jimbo he was something like a ghost.”
“Not unless ghosts are flesh and blood. Man looked kind of like Joseph Kalendar, except he wasn’t quite so huge. He dressed like Kalendar, too. Long black coat.”
“You saw this man? What did he do?”
“He came around at night. Just like the boys, he went to the back of the house and let himself in. I only saw him a couple of times. Even then, I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t just dreaming.”
“Did you tell Jimbo about this man?”
Hillyard shook his head, looking both fussy and bloated with self-importance. “Didn’t think it was any of his business. Besides, I couldn’t be certain I really did see that guy. It was pretty dark out there, and the shadows have a habit of moving around. Anyhow, the boy only wanted to hear about Mr. Kalendar, and I gave him an earful, but there’s as much of what I didn’t tell him as of what I did.”
“Because you didn’t think it was any of his business.”
“And one more thing.” He smirked at Tim. “He didn’t ask me the right questions.”
“Are you willing to tell me what you didn’t say to Jimbo?”
“If you ask the right questions.”
Tim looked at him in exasperation. “I’ll try. To start with, why don’t you fill me in on what you did tell Jimbo?”
“It was pretty much what I told you, the first time you came here. The man was a psycho killer of the first water,” Hillyard said. “Joseph Kalendar did away with his whole family, and God knows how many women besides. Turned his house into a kind of torture chamber. Brought his own son along with him when he went out raping and murdering, and later on he even murdered the boy! A lunatic, pure and simple. Not that we should have been surprised, mind you. Wouldn’t you say there was something wrong with a man that never wants to show his face?”
Tim thought of the snapshots Jimbo had described to him. “Never? Not just in photographs?”
“The man was extremely uncomfortable showing his face. That’s why he eventually grew that big, thick beard. When he lived around here, Kalendar wore a hat, and he turned up the collar of that coat he was always wearing. Sometimes, he went so far as to hold his hands in front of his face. He was always turning his back on you.”
“Did you have much contact with him?”
“Oh, now you’re asking better questions. Yes, I did, a bit. The man was a good carpenter, after all. When George and I needed some new shelves, we called Mr. Kalendar, and he did a beautiful job. So a few years later, when we found dry rot in some of the timbers and floorboards, we went back to him. Kalendar gave us a good price and replaced all the wood in short order.”
