suspicion.
Friday's dinner had not been unusual. Alden had dominated the conversation, Daisy had agreed with everything he said, and Davey had been silent. When he mentioned the new edition of Driver's book, his father changed the subject. After dinner, Alden said that he hoped Davey would get some rest, he wasn't looking very good, to he frank. By ten, despite the coffee, he was asleep in his old bed.
To his surprise, Davey did not wake up until eleven on Saturday morning. By the time he left his room, it was eleven-thirty. The irregular tap of typewriter keys and the smell of cigarette smoke, along with the faint drone of a radio, came through the door of his mother's studio. For a moment he considered going back for the books he had brought along from the Chancel House basement, but he decided to surprise his mother with them at brunch on Sunday, as he had originally planned.
Maria poured steaming coffee into a mug, uncovered golden toast in a silver rack, and asked if he would like a small omelette. Davey said that toast and jam would be fine and asked if she knew where Mr Chancel was. Mr Chancel had gone out shopping. Then, because she seemed to be preparing to leave, he asked her about Jeffrey.
Jeffrey was the son of her sister-in-law. Yes, he did enjoy very much to work for the Chancels. Before he come here? Well, before he come here, he do many things. College student. Soldier. Yes, officer in Vietnam.
Where college?
Maria struggled to remember. Harterford? Haverford? Davey supplied, aghast. In Massachusetts, said Maria, badly mangling the name. A terrible possibility occurred to Davey.
With at least an hour to squander before either parent appeared, Davey searched the basement without any luck. When he came back upstairs, he found his father removing groceries of various kinds, including scotch and vodka, from bags bearing the name of Waldbaum's and Good Grape Harvest.
'Doesn't Jeffrey do that sort of thing?' he asked.
'Jeffrey has the weekend off,' his father announced. 'Like you. What were you up to down there, that you got so dirty?'
Trying to find some old books,' Davey said.
During lunch, Alden abandoned the usual monologue to question his son about Frank Neary and Frank Tidball, their longtime crossword-puzzle makers. For decades Neary and Tidball had dealt with the company through Davey's predecessor, an amiable old alcoholic named Charlie Westerberg. Soon after Charlie had staggered cheerfully off into retirement, Neary and Tidball hired an agent, with the result that they were now paid a slightly higher fee for their puzzles. Most of the increase went in the agent's commission, but Alden had never ceased to blame Davey for the insurrection. For half an hour, he was forced to defend the two old puzzle makers against his father's implications that they were past their prime and should be replaced. Alden's real but unadmitted objections lay in the discovery, made soon after Westerberg's departure, that the two men shared an address in Rhinebeck. Neary and Tidball would be more difficult to replace than his father understood!. There were only a few young crossword-puzzle makers, most of whom had adopted innovations undesirable to Chancel House customers, who did not long for clues about Moody Blues lyrics or the films of Cheech and Chong.
During this discussion, Daisy toyed with her food, at random intervals smiling to indicate that she was paying attention. As soon as Maria began clearing the plates, she excused herself in a little-girl voice and went back upstairs. Alden asked Davey a few questions about Leonard Gimmel and Teddy Brunhoven - he was always interested in the murderers - then wandered off to watch a baseball game on television. Within fifteen minutes, he would be dozing in his easy chair. Davey thanked Maria for the lunch and climbed the stairs to the attic.
The Poplars' attic was divided into three unequal areas. The old maid's rooms, the smallest of these, were a series of three chambers situated around a common bathroom and a narrow staircase at the north end of the house. These wretched rooms had been empty since early in the reign of Helen Day. (Davey's parents had ordered the construction of two large apartments over the garage, one for the Cup Bearer, the other for any overflow guests, and these apartments now housed Maria and her nephew.) The second, central portion of the attic, roughly the size of a hotel ballroom, had been floored and finished but otherwise unchanged. It was here that Lincoln Chancel's gifts to the first David Chancel had been preserved for the second, and for this reason the central section of the attic had always inflicted an oppressive, uncanny feeling of fraudulence upon Davey. The third section, reached by a door from the middle attic, had been floored but not otherwise finished.
Metaphorically holding his breath against the psychic atmosphere in the central portion of the attic, Davey walked through the jumble of old chairs, broken lamps, boxes upon boxes, and ratty couches to make sure that the old maid's rooms were as empty as he remembered.
The three little rooms contained nothing but spiderwebs, white walls blossoming with mildew, and dust-gray floors. Then he made another quick pass through the center of the attic to inspect the unfinished section. At last he could no longer postpone moving into the main area of the attic, jammed with Victorian furniture.
The old oppression came back to him in various forms as he lifted padded cushions and bent down to see far back into wardrobe closets. Davey experienced resentment. Why should he waste his time like this? Who was Paddi, anyhow, to set him prowling thieflike through his parents' house?
Davey's thoughts had reached this unhappy point when he heard footsteps on the stairs leading to the maid's quarters. He froze. His mind went empty, as though he were a burglar about to be discovered. He half-padded, half-ran to the light switch beside the main attic stairs, flicked it down, and crouched behind a Chinese screen in a heavy wooden frame.
The footsteps on the stairs reached the maid's rooms a few seconds after Davey had found shelter. Footsteps rang on the wooden floor. Peering around the side of the screen, Davey saw a line of light appear beneath the door separating the maid's quarters from the rest of the attic. He drew back. The footsteps advanced toward the door. He flattened his upper body over his knees and covered his head with his hands. The door swung open, and a shaft of light hurtled toward him. Then the entire room flared with light.
A voice he did not know called out, 'Who's here?'
Footsteps came toward him. Davey found himself on his feet, fists raised against the shadow whirling to meet him. The shadow grunted in shock and surprise and struck out. The blow drove Davey's right hand into the bridge of his nose. Blood spurted out onto his clothes, and a bright, clear wave of pain made the world go dark. The side of his head crashed into the frame of the screen.
A hand caught his hair and pulled sharply, painfully, upward. 'What the hell did you do that for?'
Puckered with consternation, Jeffrey's face stared down at him.
'I thought you were someone else,' Davey said.
'You attacked me,' Jeffrey said. 'You jumped up like a -'
'Wraith,' Davey said. 'I'm sorry.'
'So'm I,' said Jeffrey.
Davey clutched the standard of a tall lamp and tilted back his head. Sluggish blood ran down his throat. He said, 'I guess I got scared. How did you know someone was up here? I thought you had the weekends off.'
'I saw the lights go on from my windows.'
Davey groped in his pocket for his handkerchief and swabbed his face before holding it to his nose. 'Say, Jeffrey.'
'Yes?'
'Did you go to Harvard?'
'If I did, I hope nobody finds out,' Jeffrey said.
Davey swallowed. His entire face hurt.
He spent half an hour cleaning bloodstains from the attic floor, then went to his bathroom, washed his face and hands, and fell asleep stretched out on his covers with a cold cloth on the bruised parts of his face. He woke up in time to shower and put on fresh clothes for dinner. His nose was swollen, and a purple lump had risen on his right temple. When he explained at dinner that he had hit himself in the face with the bedroom door, his father said, Funny, when you have kids nobody ever tells you how many lies you're going to have to listen to over the next thirty or forty years.'
Daisy murmured, 'Oh, Alden.'
'If he hit himself in the face with his door, then he took a practice swing.'
'Did someone hit you in the head, darling?' asked his mother.
