LITMIR.BIZ

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and dwindle and bloom. He shook his head. “Now then, this way to the family room. TV room. It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

      He slid a louvered door aside and went into the next room. Christy gestured to Daniel to come and stand beside her. Daniel looked back at the dining room. A lone leaf spun on the surface of the water in the lacquer bowl.

      “Daniel, are you coming?” said Christy.

      “There’s something weird about this house,” said Daniel.

      “I wonder what,” Christy said, giving her eyes a theatrical roll toward the family room and Mr. Hogue. As he passed through the kitchen, Daniel looked around, trying to see if anything portable was missing – a paradoxical exercise, given that he had never laid eyes on the room before. Sugar bowl, saltshaker, pepper mill, tea tongs trailing a winding rusty ribbon of dried tea. On the kitchen counter, under the telephone, lay a neat pile of letters and envelopes, and Daniel thought Hogue might have grabbed some of these, but they had been rubberbanded together and they looked undisturbed. A business card was affixed with a paper clip to the uppermost letter, printed with the name and telephone number of a Sergeant Matt Reedy of the Domestic Violence Unit of the Seattle Police Department. Daniel peeled back the pleat of the letter it was clipped to – it was out of its envelope – and peeked at its salutation, typed on an old typewriter that dropped its O’s.

      “DEAR BITCH,” he read. “ARE YOU AND HERMAN HAPPY NOW, YOU –”

      “Daniel! What are you doing?”

      “Nothing,” Daniel said, letting the letter fall shut again. “They, uh, they seem to be having some problems, the people who live in this house.”

      “Nothing that’s our business, Daniel,” Christy said, with what seemed to him excessive primness, taking hold of his hand.

      Daniel yanked his hand free. He could hear Mr. Hogue muttering to himself in the other room.

      “Ouch!” said Christy, bringing her fingers to her lips to kiss the joints he’d wrenched. She eyed the pile of letters on the counter. “What did it say?”

      “It said maybe they ought to try rubbing each other’s feet a little more often.”

      Now Christy really looked hurt.

      “If you didn’t want to do it, Daniel, I wish –”

      “What’s going on in here?” said Mr. Hogue, returning from the family room.

      “We’re just coming now,” Daniel said. “Sorry. It’s just – man, this kitchen is incredible.”

      Hogue gave a sour nod, lips pressed together. There was an obvious bulge in his right hip pocket now, and what appeared to be a table-tennis paddle protruding from the left one.

      “Incredible,” he agreed.

      In the family room, when they joined him there, Hogue stole a well-thumbed paperback copy of Donald Trump’s autobiography which was lying out on the coffee table, and in the small, tobacco-stained den off the foyer he took a little brass paperweight in the shape of a reclining pasha with curled slippers. When they went out to the garage, where, along with a long, slender automobile hidden under a canvas cover, there was a well-stocked workbench, he filched a box of nails, a Lufkin tape measure, and something else that Daniel couldn’t quite determine the nature of. The thefts were blatant and apparently unself-conscious, and by the time they got upstairs to the second guest bedroom, Christy, too, was watching in a kind of jolly dread as Mr. Hogue worked the place over. He took a souvenir Space Needle, and a rubber coin purse, and a package of deodorizing shoe inserts. When he led the young couple at last into the master bedroom, his pockets were jangling.

      He stopped short as he entered the room, so that Daniel and Christy nearly collided with him. He looked around at the big four-poster bed, the heavy Eastlake dresser and wardrobe, the walls covered in an unusual dark paper the red of old leather books. Once again Hogue marveled, in the same openmouthed, oddly crestfallen manner, as if the bedroom’s decor, like the living room’s, came to him, somehow, as a blow. As in the living room, there was no indication that the sellers had been expecting anyone to come through. The bed was unmade, and there were some ruffled white blouses and several bras and pairs of women’s underpants heaped on the floor by the door. Hogue crossed the dark red room to a door opposite, which appeared to give onto a screened-in sleeping porch. Windows on either side of the door let in some of the bright September light pouring through the outer windows of the porch.

      “I’d sure like to lie down in that hammock out there,” Hogue said, with surprising wistfulness. He gave the knob an experimental twist. It was locked. He pressed his face to the glass. “God, I’m tired.”

      He reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette and found nothing there. He looked back and smiled thinly at Daniel and Christy, as if they had played a cruel trick on him, hiding the only solace of a weary and overworked man. Then he patted down all his clattering pockets until he came up with a tattered Pall Mall. He went over to a marble-topped nightstand beside the bed and pulled open its drawer. He scrabbled around inside until he found a book of matches. His hands were shaking so badly now that he dropped the cigarette. Then he dropped the burning match. At last he succeeded in getting the thing lit. He blew a plume of smoke toward the pillows of the big, disorderly bed.

      “You’ll get the sun almost all day long in this room,” he said, dreamily. “It’s a shame to paper it over so dark.” Then he flicked ashes onto the polished fir floor.

      “All right, Mr. Hogue,” said Christy, with all the sharpness of tone she was capable of mustering. “I guess we’ve seen enough.”

      “All right,” said Hogue, though he didn’t move. He just stood there, looking out at the canvas hammock that was hung between two pillars of the sleeping porch.

      “We’ll meet you downstairs, how about?” Daniel said. “How about you just give us a minute to talk things over between ourselves. You know. Look around one more time. You can’t rush into something like this, right?”

      Hogue swallowed, and some of the old flush of anger seemed to return now to the tips of his ears and to the skin at the back of his neck. Daniel could see that it was Hogue who wanted to be left alone here, in this bedroom, contemplating all his untold mistakes and whatever it was that was eating at him. He wanted them out of there. Christy sidled up to Daniel and pressed herself against him, hip to his thigh, cheek against his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and pressed his fingers against the slight bulge of skin under the strap of her bra.

      “You know how important the bedroom is,” Christy said, in a strangled voice.

      Hogue took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette, eyeing them. Then, as before, the fire seemed to go out of him, and he nodded.

      “I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said. “You kids take all the time you want.”

      He went out of the room, but before he did so, he stopped by the pile of laundry, picked up a rather large pair of lobelia blue panties with a lace waistband, and stuffed them into his pocket with the rest of his loot. They heard his tread on the stairs, and then, a moment later, the sound of a cabinet door squealing open on its hinges.

      “He’s going for the silver,” Daniel said.

      “Daniel, what are we going to do?”

      Daniel shrugged. He sat down on the unmade bed, beside the nightstand that Hogue had rifled for matches.

      “Maybe I should call my parents,” Christy said. “They know Bob. Maybe they know what to do when he gets this way.”

      “I think it’s a little too late for us to snub him,” said Daniel.

      Christy looked at him, angry and puzzled by the persistence of his nastiness toward her.

      “That’s not fair,” she said. “God! Just because my parents –”

      “Check this out.” Daniel had been rummaging around in the nightstand drawer, where he had found,

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