'In the dark, it looks like any other room.'
'Perhaps you'd like to stay here?'
It takes me a second to interpret what she's just said.
'Just for a night or two,' she goes on. 'Until you're finished looking through Ben's things.'
'It's very kind of you. But I wouldn't—'
'Be no trouble.'
'You must be very—'
'I'd
Mrs. McAuliffe puts the teapot down on the table. Uses her now free hand to wipe the sleeve of her sweater under her chin.
'Of course,' I say. 'Thanks. I'l bring my things over this evening.'
'Good.
This is my first thought as I push open the door to Ben's attic room and look up at the splintery beam from which he'd tied the noose.
At the same time, even as I enter with the sound of my shoes sticking to the recently waxed floorboards (was this done after Ben died? Perhaps to clean away the blood? if there
The room is clean, but preserved. Even if I didn't know of Ben and the wasted years he'd spent up here, I could discern the not-rightness of its former inhabitant through the teenage boy things that hadn't been replaced or stored away. So there was stil the Specials poster over the dresser. Stil the Batman stickers on the mirror, the neat stacks of comics and Louis L'Amour novels against the wal. Stil the Ken Dryden lamp on the bedside table.
I sit on the edge of the bed, and the wood frame barks. A sound Ben would have been so used to he'd long ago have stopped hearing it.
The package he left for me sits on my lap. His square letters speling my name. So carefuly printed it suggests the final act in a long-planned operation. The licking of the envelope's fold a taste of finality, of poison.
I tear it open in one pul.
It's heavy. A cover worn pale through repeated openings and closings, its inner pages dense with ink.
The entries are mostly brief, al written in chicken-scratched print, as though the paper he wrote on was the last in the world. The book opens with an unintentionaly comic record of non-event:
Then, after several more days of this:
No names, hardly any mention of the neighbours' comings or goings. Just the house. And, at certain points, the apparent sightings of characters so familiar to Ben he didn't waste the letters to name them, as in 'He was at the downstairs window' or 'She shouted someone's name' or 'They moved together across the living room like balroom dancers.'
I flip ahead, scanning. Five hundred pages of lunatic surveilance and shouted warnings. I close it after reading only the first dozen pages, my mind aswirl. Why did Ben bother keeping such a record in the first place? How did he think his observation was protecting anyone? Why kil himself now, leaving his post vacant?
And the kicker: Why had he left this to me?
