raked - no, not just raked, Gardener saw. Cellar dirt got old and sour after a while; you had to do something about it if you planned to be spending much time belowground. Anderson had apparently brought in a fresh load of dirt and had spread it around to dry before raking. Gardener supposed that was what had sweetened the atmosphere of the place.
Fluorescents were racked in overhead rows, each hooded fixture hung from the old beams by chains and more brass fittings. They shed an even white glow. All the fixtures were single tubes except for those over the worktable; those each had a pair, so here the glow was so bright that it made Gardener think of operating theaters. He walked over to Bobbi's worktable. Bobbi's new worktable.
Anderson had had an ordinary kitchen table covered with dirty Con-Tact paper before. It had been lit with a gooseneck study-lamp and littered with a few tools, most of them not in very good condition. and a few plastic boxes of nails, screws, bolts, and the like. It was the small-repairs workplace of a woman who is neither very good at nor very interested in small repairs.
The old kitchen table was gone, replaced by three long, light tables, the sort on which bake-sale goods are placed at church sales. They had been placed end to end along the left side of the cellar to make one long table. It was littered with hardware, tools, spools of insulated wire both thin and thick, coffee cans full of brads and staples and fasteners ... dozens of other items. Or hundreds.
Then there were the batteries.
There was a carton of them under the table, a huge loose collection of long-life batteries still in their blister-packs: C-cells, D-cells, double-A's, triple-A's, nine-volts. Must be two hundred dollars' worth in there, Gardener thought, and more rolling around on the table. What in the blue hell - ?
Dazed, he walked along the table like a man checking out the merchandise and deciding whether or not to buy. It looked as though Bobbi was making several different things at once . . . and Gardener was not sure what any of them were. Here, standing halfway along the table, was a large square box with its front panel slid aside to reveal eighteen different buttons. Beside each button was the title of a popular song -'Raindrops Keep Fallin'on My Head,' 'New York, New York,' 'Lara's Theme,' and so on. Next to it, an instruction sheet tacked neatly to the table identified it as the one and only SilverChime Digital Doorbell (Made in Taiwan).
Gardener couldn't imagine why Bobbi would want a doorbell with a built-in microchip that would allow the user to program a different song whenever she wanted to - did she think Joe Paulson would dig hearing 'Lara's Theme' when he had to come to the door with a package? But that wasn't all. Gardener could at least have understood the use of the SilverChime Digital Doorbell, if not Bobbi's motivation in installing one. But she seemed to be in the process of modifying the thing somehow - hooking it, in fact, into the workings of a boom-box radio the size of a small suitcase.
Half a dozen wires - four thin, two moderately thick - snaked between the radio (its instruction sheet also tacked neatly to the table) and the opened gut of the SilverChime.
Gardener looked at this for some time and then passed on.
Breakdown. She's had a very odd sort of mental breakdown. The kind Pat Summerall would love.
Here was something else he recognized - a furnace accessory called a rebreather. You attached it to the flue and it was supposed to recirculate some of the heat that ordinarily got wasted. It was the sort of gadget Bobbi would see in a catalogue, or maybe in the Augusta Trustworthy Hardware Store, and talk about buying. She never actually would, though, because if she bought it she would have to install it.
But now she apparently had bought it and installed it.
You can't say she's having a breakdown and 'that's all,' because when someone who's really creative highsides it, it's rarely a case of 'that's all.' Crackups are probably never pretty, but when someone like Bobbi tips over, it can be sort of amazing. Just look at this shit.
Do you believe that?
Yeah, I do. I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit