have to buy the house from you. For now, this place is yours."
The visit to the title company was brief. It was unusual to clear title in this amount of time, they told Reuben, but this house had been owned by only one family down through the years, which had made it easy. Reuben signed where they told him to sign.
Nideck Point was now legally his. Property taxes were paid in advance through the end of the following year. Insurance was in place.
He drove Laura south to get her Jeep and the bulk of her possessions, which amounted to so few boxes that he was kind of amazed. Half of them were filled with flannel nightgowns.
Finally Grace called with the news that Stuart might be visited the following Tuesday. He,d not had a temperature for two days, and the rash and the nausea were gone. So were all signs of injury. And the boy,s height and weight had increased.
"Like I told you, it,s all happened so much faster," she said. "He,s not so manic now. But the moodiness has begun."
Frankly, she wanted Reuben to see him. She wanted Reuben to talk to him. The boy wanted to go home, and that meant San Francisco. His mother wouldn,t have him in the Santa Rosa house, she was afraid of the stepfather, and Grace didn,t trust him on his own.
"Yes, it,s a hell of a lot easier for me to look after him down here," said Grace, "in San Francisco. But this kid is acting too weird, just too weird. Of course he,s clever as they come. He knows better than to say anything more about hearing voices. Reuben, it,s playing out like it did with you, exactly. The lab results. Well, we make a little progress and then the specimens disintegrate! We haven,t solved that problem. And he,s not the same boy he was when I first talked to him. I want you to see him."
He sensed that they were able to talk about all this much more easily now that it involved Stuart. They were speaking as if there was no silence between them, no secret, no mystery, as if all the mystery had to do with Stuart.
That was all right.
Reuben said he would see Stuart anytime that he could. He,d be there early Tuesday morning.
Finally Grace asked: would he and Laura be willing if she, and Jim, and Phil came to dinner?
Reuben was overjoyed. He could control the Wolf Gift now. He had no fear of it. This was what he so wanted!
He and Laura spent all day Monday preparing for a feast in the august dining room.
They dug out linen for the table, great cloths trimmed in old lace, dinner-sized napkins embossed with the initial N, and heaps of old graven silver. They ordered flowers for the main rooms, and specialty desserts from the nearest bakery.
Grace and Phil were completely taken with the house, but it was Phil who fell in love with it, just as Reuben had anticipated. Phil stopped responding to questions or remarks and roamed off by himself, humming under his breath, running his hands over paneling and doorjambs, and the varnish of the piano, and the crinkled leaves of the weeping ficus, and the leather-bound books of the library. He put on his thick glasses to examine the carved figures of the hunters, boards and the medieval fireplace. Phil looked like he belonged to the place in his disheveled tweed with his long unkempt gray hair.
They had to pull him down from the second-story rooms finally because everyone was starving. But Phil was whispering to the house, communing with it, and paid absolutely no attention to Grace when she began to talk about the obvious expense of it.
Reuben was thrilled by this. He kept hugging Phil. Phil was in a dream world with the house. He murmured under his breath, "I,d live here in a second." And now and then he beamed proudly, lovingly, at Reuben.
"Son, this is your destiny," he said.
Grace said such houses were obsolete, ought to be converted into institutions, museums, or hospitals. She looked especially beautiful to Reuben, with her red hair natural around her face, her lips only slightly rouged, and her sharp intense features expressive as always. Her black silk pantsuit looked new; she had put on her pearls for the occasion. But she was tired, worn, and watching him intently no matter who was doing the talking.
Jim came to the defense of the place, pointing out Reuben