American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,32

and Mrs. Benjamin peers at her through her tiny spectacles. Through their lenses the old woman’s eyes appear very far back in her head, like they are too small for their sockets, and she looks at Mona as if searching for something in her face, some familiarity or flaw that would tell her far more about Mona than any crumbling old paperwork.

“Are you really sure about this, my dear?” she asks finally. “You don’t seem like someone who should be here… perhaps you ought to go home.”

“Excuse me?” says Mona, indignant.

“I see,” says Mrs. Benjamin mildly. “Well. If you are sure, then you are sure. Your paperwork seems to all be in order. It shouldn’t be an issue. Let me check a few things.” She stands, smiles at Mona, and hobbles off into the cabinets.

“I am so sorry for my rudeness,” says Mrs. Benjamin’s voice from the back. “You surprised me. We have not had any new arrivals here for years. I should’ve introduced myself—my name is Mrs. Benjamin.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured,” says Mona. “You do all the court work here?”

“I do. There’s not a lot of activity. So I mostly do crosswords, but please don’t tell anyone.” She laughs. Mona suspects it’s a well-worn joke she enjoys trotting out.

“You seem to, uh… have quite a few deer heads in here.”

“Oh, yes. Storage, you see. They used to have them all throughout the courthouse. I am not sure why, but dead things were the primary decoration in Wink for many years. Now I’m stuck with them down here. But they do make me feel a little less lonely on slow days.”

Mona glances into the frozen amber stare of one ratty old buck’s head. She has no idea how anyone could take comfort from such a thing.

There is the sound of old, creaky drawers being pulled. “Larchmont… I believe I know the house, actually,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “It is abandoned.”

“I’ve heard.”

“For a while it wasn’t. After its initial abandonment, possession was ceded to the town. Someone scooped it up and it was rented out to a family who lived there for a short time.”

“But you don’t have any record of a previous owner?”

“My records go back to 1978, and indicate it was abandoned,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But then my predecessor was not the most organized of people. It was swiftly abandoned again, though.”

“Why?”

“Oh. There was a mishap.”

“What, is it haunted or something?”

A goose cry of laughter sounds from the cabinets. “Haunted?” says Mrs. Benjamin, delighted. “Oh, no, no. It was one of the buildings struck by lightning. Hit the little girl, who was bathing in the tub at the time.”

“My God,” says Mona. “Was she all right?”

“No,” says Mrs. Benjamin primly. She hobbles back out of the cabinet passageways. “Here we are. This will only take a moment for me to get everything filled out and filed. I have the number of the locksmith. You should be able to move into the house this afternoon, if you’d like.”

“That fast? I thought there’d be more of a turnaround time.”

“Well, I suppose there normally would be, as it needs to be approved by various officials of several different agencies… but luckily for you, these are all me. And I approve. Isn’t that nice of me?” She takes out a tackle box full of rubber stamps and begins applying them to Mona’s paperwork with a surprising ferocity.

“What happened to the house after it got struck by lightning? Is it all right?”

“Oh, it’s fine,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Unlike some of the others. But it was never rented out again after, I know that. It was eventually abandoned again.”

“Pardon me, but did you say other buildings were hit by lightning?”

“Yes.”

“Like… in the same storm?”

Mrs. Benjamin looks up at her. “Oh, has no one told you about the lightning storm yet?”

“I just got in last night,” she says again.

“It was a historic event for the town,” says Mrs. Benjamin, with the relish of a gossip revisiting an old tragedy. “Many buildings were struck and burned down. Some pessimistic people believe we never recovered. I don’t agree with that, but it certainly was something. Why, it hit one of the trees in the park and split it in half. It even hit the dome, but, well, the dome being the dome, no damage was done.”

“Is that that… ball thing out front?”

“Yes, in the park. It is a”—she thinks—“a geodesic dome. A model of what they thought future architecture would look like. They constructed it long ago, back