were his old tools, his favorites, and this was the claw hammer with the chewed-up old wooden handle, the one he had owned all his years in San Francisco.
A strange awareness came over him and he clutched it tight, and went to peer through the library window again. This had been his dad’s hammer. He’d taken it out to San Francisco when he was a boy, with all his dad’s tools. Nice to have something of his dad’s amid all the great carefully inventoried Mayfair wealth, just one simple tool or two. He lifted the hammer. Love to bash it through the burglar’s skull, he thought. As if we don’t have enough trouble in this house, and some bastard tries to break in the library window!
Unless…
He switched on the light nearest the corner and examined the little gramophone. Covered with dust. No one had touched it. He didn’t know whether or not he could touch it. He knelt down, put his fingers on the soft felt turntable. The records of La Traviata were in their thick old faded album. The crank lay beside the thing. It looked impossibly old. Who had made the waltz play twice now in this house, when this thing itself lay inert and dust-covered?
There was a sound in the house, a creaking as if someone was walking. Perhaps Eugenia. Or perhaps not.
“Goddamnit,” he said. “Son of a bitch is in this place?”
He set out at once to make a search. He covered the whole first floor room by room, listening, watching, studying the tiny lights in the control boxes of the alarm which told him if anything was moving in rooms beyond him. Then he went upstairs, and covered the second floor as well, poking into closets and bathrooms that he had not entered in all this time, and even into the front bedroom, where the bed was all made and a vase of yellow roses stood on the mantel.
Everything seemed all right. Eugenia was not here. But from the servants’ porch he could see the distant guest house in back, ail aglow as if there were a party going on. That was Eugenia. She always turned on all the lights. She and Henri swapped shifts now, and so this was her turn to be alone back there, with the radio playing in the kitchen and the television tuned to “Murder, She Wrote.”
The dark trees shifted in the wind. He could see the still lawn, the swimming pool, the flags. Nothing stirred but the trees themselves, making the lights of the distant guest house twinkle deceptively.
On to the third floor. He had to check every crevice and crack.
He found it still and dark. The little landing at the top of the stairs was empty. The street lamp shone through the window. The storage room lay with its door open, all empty shelves clean and white and waiting for something. He turned and opened the door of Julien’s old room, his own workroom.
The first thing he saw was the two windows opposite, the window on the right, beneath which Julien had died in his narrow bed, and the window on the left, through which Antha had fled only to fall to her death from the edge of the porch roof. Like two eyes, these windows.
The shades were up; the soft light of early evening flooded in on the bare boards and on his drafting table.
Only those were not bare boards. On the contrary, a threadbare rug lay there, and where his drafting table should have been was the narrow brass bed, which had long ago been moved out of here.
He groped for the light.
“Please don’t turn it on.” The voice was frayed and soft, French.
“Who the hell are you?”
“It’s Julien,” came the whispered response. “For the love of heaven. I am not the one who came to the library door! Come in now while there is still time, and let me talk to you.”
He shut the door behind him. His face was teeming with heat. He was sweating and his grip had tightened on the hammer. But he knew it was Julien’s voice, because he had heard it before, high high above the sea, in another realm, the very same voice, speaking to him softly and rapidly, putting the case to him, so to speak, and telling him he could refuse.
It seemed the veil would lift; he would see the shining Pacific again, his own drowned body on the heaving waves, and he would remember everything. But