Some more thinges of import for my time groweth short I can scarce make out the page though it be clare day & I am griped by my mortal agonie you know well my leathern boxe that I keep in my privy closet, in it you shall finde the letteres cypher’d in the fasioun I devized. Doe you keepe them safe and show them to no one. They tell all the tale nearlie of my Lord D. his plot & oure spyeing upon the secret papist Shaxpure. Or so wee thought him although now I am lesse certayne. In that manner & bent of lyfe he wase a Nothinge. But certayne it is hee wrought the playe of Scotch M. I commanded of him in the Kinges name. I find it passing strange that all though I am dead and him also yet the playe lives still, writ in his own hande & lying where onlie I know & there maye it reste for ever.
As to the letteres: if the King should prevail in this present affarye, which God forbid, and his ministers come at you with ill intent, these leaves may holpe to secure your fortune, yours and that of oure son. You know how to worke the cypher and I recollect you the Keye be the Willowe where my mother lieth and if thou’rt able I wish that my bones may lye besyde hers hereafter.
Fare thee well my girl & with Gods grace I hope I shall see you agen in the incorrupt bodie promised us by oure Lord & Saviour Christ Jesus in whose name I sign this yr. husbande
RICHARD BRACEGIRDLE
10
Crosetti sat in his father’s car, a black 1968 Plymouth Fury, and watched 161 Tower Road, feeling stupid. The house was a two-story frame model in need of a coat of paint, set in a weedy lawn behind a low chain-link fence. A row of brownish junipers bordering the house seemed the limits of H. Olerud’s horticulture. This name was displayed on a battered black maibox nailed to a crooked post. In the driveway sat a rust-flecked green Chevy sedan with the hood up and a scatter of tools on a tarp next to it. In the open shedlike garage that adjoined the house, he could see a red tractor and a tangle of shapes that could have been agricultural implements. The place had a tired look, as if it and the people who lived there had been knocked down and were waiting for breath to return. It was a Saturday. Crosetti had left the city at dawn and driven across the state of Pennsylvania, nearly three hundred miles on I-80 and 79, and reached Braddock a little past three. Braddock was built around a single intersection with two gas stations, a McDonald’s, a pizza joint, a VFW hall, two bars, a 7-Eleven, a coin laundry, and a collection of older brick-built commercial buildings, most of the shops in them Wal-Marted into oblivion and now occupied by junk dealers or storefront services for the distressed. Behind this strip were dozens of large homes that must have been built for the commercial and industrial aristos when the steel mills and mines had been working. Crosetti couldn’t imagine who lived in them now.
Tower Road and the sad house on it had not been hard to find with his Google map, and after arriving there he had knocked on the front door with no result. Crosetti had pushed the unlocked door open and called out, “Hello! Anyone home?” and felt the hollow sense of an empty house. Inhabited, though: messy but not filthy, toys on the floor, little cars and a plastic gun, a TV tray with an empty plate set up in front of the large-screen TV. They had satellite too-behind the house a white dish scanned the heavens. In front of the TV a La-Z-Boy lounger in brown vinyl attended a sagging chenille-covered couch. A narrow mantelpiece held photographs in frames, but Crosetti could not see them from the door and did not wish to venture within. No dogs barked, which he thought was strange. Didn’t all rural households have dogs? Another clue to he knew not what. He walked around the house. In the backyard there was a plastic playground set much faded by the sun and sized for very young children. In the center of the yard stood a clothes-drying contraption of the kind that resembles an inverted parasol. It was empty, and several of the lines had broken away and dangled, waving feebly in the light breeze. On the back porch stood an elderly cylindrical washing machine. He checked it; dry and spidery.
After his brief exploration he sat in the car and thought about all this and also how really dumb it had been to drive all this way because of a postcard he’d found in the street. He had no idea whether Carol Rolly had any connection whatever to this house. She could have picked the card up off the sidewalk or found it marking an old book. No, he thought, don’t think about that. Let’s go with the gut. This has something to do with her and that photograph of the two women and the kid. Well, there was a kid here, a boy. He took the photo and looked at it once again. He judged that it had been snapped around five or so years ago, given the apparent age of Carolyn’s face in it, and so the boy would be around eight or nine by now. Crosetti studied a bicycle tossed casually down on the driveway. That would fit a kid of that age, and the various toys scattered around the house and yard suggested the same. There were no girl toys in sight, nor was there another bike, and Crosetti wondered what had become of the baby girl in the photograph…no wait, there in a sandbox attached to the playground set, a single, weathered, naked Barbie. So that checked out too, unless Barbie had been dropped by a visitor. Or stolen.
He considered the backyard. A sunny day, a Saturday, no clothes on the dryer and it in disrepair, nor had he spotted an electric dryer exhaust, nor did the washer look much used. Which meant that probably there wasn’t a woman in residence. The guy lived here with his kid (or kids), and on Saturday he went to town and did his laundry in the Laundromat, because it was ignoble for a man to do laundry at home, and by going to town on a Saturday he got to meet women and advertise his availability, and maybe he’d go across to the VFW and have a couple of beers while the dryer spun. The kid(s) could play video games at the 7-Eleven and get a Slurpee.
Crosetti caught himself spinning this tale and wondered where it came from even while he understood that it was as true as if he had made a documentary of the life of H. Olerud. That he was the child of a legendary police detective and a well-known research librarian did not at the moment present itself as an explanation, for he had always made up stories about people, even as a kid. It was one reason why he wanted to make movies, and why he thought he’d be good at it. He took his powers of observation and inference for granted, much as natural musicians think little of causing an inert appliance to sound the secret music they hear in their heads
He hadn’t eaten since a gas stop at ten and now it was close to four and he was feeling hungry. He thought he would drive back to town and get a bite, and was about to start his car, when he saw a plume of dust coming from the direction of town, which soon resolved itself into a green pickup truck that slowed, passed him, and turned into the driveway of 161 Tower Road. He saw with some satisfaction that the cab contained a man and a boy of about nine, whose small head just showed above the dashboard. The truck was going a little too fast as it made the turn, and its off-front wheel crashed into the boy’s bike that lay in the driveway.
A bellow of rage from the driver as he slammed on his brakes and a shrill cry from a child. The driver’s door of the truck flew open and out jumped a stocky man a few years older than Crosetti, dressed in jeans and a clean white T-shirt. He had a sizable gut, and a reddish buzz cut topping a tight flat red face of the kind that always seems a little angry. He ran to the front of the truck, cursed again, kicked the bike out of the way, and jerked the passenger door open. From the cab came shrill screams, and Crosetti realized that there was another, younger passenger, and also that the man had not secured either of the children with seat belts. The man reached in and yanked the boy out by his arm. Still holding the arm he batted the boy several times across the head, heavy blows that made awful meaty noises Crosetti could hear from where he sat, all the while demanding of the boy how often he had told him not to leave the fucking bike in the fucking driveway and also whether he thought he was ever going to get a new bike or anything new ever again you little piece of shit.