Skull Session by Daniel Hecht Read Free Book Online Page B

Pontiac without wheels, closing off the driveway to cars.
    "Typical of Vivien," Dempsey grumbled. "Blocks the driveway effectively, but also announces to all and sundry that the place is empty. Might as well put up a god damned sign."
    They got out, and Paul belted on the waist pack he'd loaded earlier with the camera and a few tools.
    "It's very beautiful here," Lia said. She looked around, inhaling deeply. "We never see big old oaks like this in Vermont."
    "That's the way these old parcels are," Dempsey told her. "This land has been in a single estate for a long time. The Morgans didn't take any timber down, and neither did Vivien. Oho! Take a look at this." He had stopped at the glassless driver's side window of the Pontiac. When Paul and Lia looked inside, they saw a human head grinning up at them from the seat.
    Paul jerked back involuntarily. Dempsey chuckled, set aside his cane, and reached inside to pick up the chipped marble head. "Too bad. I always found Vivien's garden statuary rather charming." He held up the head—a smiling Greek youth, his nose broken off, ears and curls chipped. "These screwball kids. Well. On that note—" Dempsey faced the hill.
    Lia was already crunching up the drive.
    The afternoon sun rode above the hills, slender cirrus clouds trailed at the zenith of a clear sky. A thin dusting of snow made the woods seem bright and open.
    "No, Vivien and I didn't always get along," Dempsey went on, puffing, "and I always considered her a bit fetched.' But she was a smart woman, complicated, tough. You had to admire her. The one I really didn't care for was Royce—Vivien's son."
    "Why not?" Lia asked.
    "He liked to play mind games, even as a little kid. Once I was up there with my tool kit, planing a door while Royce watched. I set the plane down to do something else, and when I reached for it, it was gone.'What did you do with my plane?' I ask him. He says, 'What plane?' 'You know what I'm talking about,' I tell him, 'give it here, I've got work to do.' He just smiled his little smile, enjoying watching the hired-handyman- cum-family-friend cope with the ambiguities of his role. And this was when he was about six years old.
    "On the bright side," Dempsey continued, "he hasn't been around for twenty, thirty years. Never kept in touch with Vivien after he went off to school. I think it broke her heart, but I say good riddance."
    The driveway turned again, lined by lichen-covered boulders. The land sloping away on either side was rugged, corrugated by ravines. Explosions of white birch trees, growing in clusters, alternated with the darker trunks of old oaks and maples. Through the bare branches they could see a vista of hills and the far end of the reservoir, an uneven line where the land met the plane of water.
    They rounded a last, steep turn and suddenly the lodge was there, incongruous in the heavy forest, like an ocean liner beached on the hill. Most windows were broken, but a few remained, the diamond-shaped mullioned panes Paul remembered. The gaping windows gave the house a forlorn look, and yet it still struck Paul as a well-proportioned structure, set nicely near the crest of the hill, big trees grown close on two sides. Out of the massive stone foundation rose three chimneys, one at each gable end and a huge main hearth in the center of the long wall. Just uphill, a terraced garden with marble statuary lay beneath a patch of bright sky.
    "Has it changed much since you were a kid?" Lia asked Paul.
    "Well, it didn't have its windows broken out. As I recall, the statues used to have heads." Set at bends in the garden path were statues of Greek youths and maids, some fallen, all headless.
    Paul felt a wave of revulsion overtake him. Oddly, it was only partly the yawning windows, the headless statuary, the sense of abandonment. There was something else, too, as if the emptiness had always been there, not far beneath the surface of the dinners and gatherings they'd had. His hands checked the zipper