Four Years from Home Read online

  “Did you go home for Christmas? Off visiting friends? Come now, you can tell old Mrs. Hoople.”

  Hoople? That didn’t sound Irish at all. I wondered what her connection with Harry was and decided that I could use her being blind as a bat to my advantage.

  “I’ve been away — no place special.”

  “Well, you can tell me all about it at lunch. I was just on my way to the market to get some things. We’ll have grilled cheese and tomato. Did you want me to pick up some Coke while I’m there? I think you drank the last of it.”

  Harry never drank soda as far as I knew or anything with sugar or caffeine in it. He wasn’t so debased as someone like me who took every opportunity to pollute his body with the nectars of the gods — soda and coffee. My lost brother must have changed into someone else since coming to Kenyon. I concluded that Ohio must be the culprit and vowed to make sure I didn’t stay long enough for its effects to make some unwanted alteration in me. “Coke would be great, and chips if you can. Did you want some money for that?”

  “Oh, don’t be an idiot. You know your rent covers all your meals. I’ll see you back at the house.”

  With that, she left me, which was convenient since I was probably standing there with my mouth open, looking pretty foolish. Harry rented a room from her? Why would he do that when he had a perfectly good, though ridiculously small, dorm room with free food at the cafeteria? At least it explained the lack of any signs of life in his dorm room — except the unmade bed. To discover the insanity behind this, I would need to find my way to her house, a feat that would undoubtedly have proved too daunting to the lesser mind. But I was a hardened veteran of combat and tracking the enemy, and, most importantly, I was skilled in following trails.

  The lack of traffic on the sidewalk made it easy to trace her footprints back to 123 Wiggin, the location confirmed by a sign over the wrought iron fence: “Hoople.” Pushing the gate aside, I walked up to the front door. It was one of those old-time ornate wooden doors with a big pane of thick glass that allowed you to see everything and anybody in the hallway within. Not much for security, but it was locked and I wasn’t really in a B&E kind of mood, though I could probably have forced the door pretty easily. It had an old skeleton key lock.

  My hand slipped into my pocket and withdrew Harry’s keys. His skeleton key was a perfect fit and the lock clicked softly. I let myself in and closed the door behind me. The only sound was the ticking of a clock somewhere off in another room. Everything was spotlessly immaculate, too clean for her to have had any student borders other than Harry. There weren’t many as obnoxiously neat as him, especially among the college population. The hallway smelled overwhelmingly of leather and polish, and the wood glistened from the wide-board oak floors to the dark wainscoting. Apparently, her house was built in the same generally Gothic style as Ransom Hall, except that the hallway was wallpapered above the wainscoting in a hideous floral pattern instead of lined with portraits of businessmen and bankers. I liked her choice better.

  So as not to look like a total fool when Mrs. Hoople returned, I explored the rest of the downstairs. The living room was a collection of old, never-used furniture. It was the kind of sitting room people invited their pastor into when he came by for Sunday tea and a “chat” after church. That only happened once that I could remember at the Ryans, and it was a meeting held between Father Harkins and Mom and Dad to confirm that crucifixions were still legal in cases of extreme juvenile misbehavior. At least Mrs. Hoople’s furniture hadn’t been shrink-wrapped in plastic. I had seen that once on a B&E mission into Mrs. Ioli’s to retrieve a ball of ours she had stolen. Unbreakable glass should really be the standard in new homes. I know I have a note to that effect somewhere under Construction Laws.

  The plush of the rug in the living room had been vacuumed meticulously in one direction and remained undisturbed, an obvious sign that she had no husband or juvenile delinquent children living with her. It almost looked suspicious. Indians used to cover their tracks to avoid being followed by the cavalry by dragging brush behind their ponies. I’m sure they would have appreciated the vacuum cleaner technology.

  I skirted this room to avoid leaving any tracks of my own and headed toward the back of the house and the kitchen. Another spotless room, though this one clearly was used. There were a couple of pieces of paper in the wastebasket, the smell of coffee in the air, and a big orange cat sitting on the sideboard staring at me. I decided not to approach it. I didn’t particularly like cats and they didn’t like me much either. I didn’t trust any animal that tried to stare me down like a high school principal or a college administrator. The Ransom Hall Plan now included the stranding inside of as many well-fed and likely to crap all over the place animals as I could round up, starting with the orange cat.

  The kitchen back door led to a porch with two rockers on it, and beyond that a postage-stamp backyard shaded by trees whose canopy was thick enough to shield the yard from the brunt of any storm. It didn’t look like there was much of a lawn under the thin coating of white. Now that was a plus. I could see why Harry would like this place. It came with privacy, a built-in cleaning woman, and a yard that didn’t have to be mowed. This was looking more and more like one of the only smart decisions the little pain had made.

  The last room on the first floor was the dining room. I guess you would call it quaint. I had a different word for it. The center of the room was dominated by a monstrous wooden table around which they must have constructed the rest of the house because there was no way it would have fit through any of the doors. The only other furniture was a china cupboard containing shamrock-covered cups, saucers and plates, and a sideboard. The six-seater table was covered with old-looking papers and maps. I picked up one — Gambier, circa 1872 — a map of the college and environs. A hundred years ago and it didn’t look too different than the map I had memorized earlier that day. The town in 1872 had a bank, a post office, a market, a few buildings, and down over the hill behind the college was the same Kokosing River and the same railroad line and bridge — probably the same bridge from which Harry had jumped or fallen or been pushed or whatever.

  The odd thing was — they had only found his wallet. What had become of the rest of him? I had this strange image flash in mind of Harry’s body washing up downstream and of some Ohio farmer fishing him out of the water and burying him in their side yard. After all, side yards were great for that kind of thing. Who knows? Dead bodies washing up in the farmlands of Ohio could be so common an occurrence that people around here don’t bother to notify the police when it happens. But what do they do when all their good spots in the yard are filled?

  With the downstairs recon mission over, I headed upstairs, taking the wooden steps two at a time, holding the banister for support, not wanting to take the chance that in her enthusiasm Mrs. Hoople had waxed them too. But that would have been too much like me in the good old days when the destruction of Harry was my main goal…

  “That’s not exactly true.”

  Dad was fuming. “What do you mean ‘not exactly’ true? You put the floor polish on the laundry room steps and tricked your brother into walking on them. He slipped on the polished steps and cracked his head on the concrete floor. What’s not true about that?”

  “I didn’t polish the steps. I accidentally spilled the polish.”

  “Then why did you let him walk on the steps? Why didn’t you warn him? He said you told him to go to the garage and get the basketball so you two could play.”

  “That was a coincidence.”

  “It happened right after you poured the polish out on the steps. You wanted him to take those steps. You wanted to see what would happen. You wanted to see him fall. You go around hurting people and then you change the facts to fit your own little scheme of things. You twist the truth until it’s in such a tight knot that it makes you look like the innocent victim. You need to stop lying about things, Tom. It will only get you into trouble.”

  That was all true, of cou
rse, but he had no evidence and I should have gotten off scot-free. But, I didn’t. My ridiculous conclusion was obviously made before I had learned that Dad didn’t actually need evidence to convict me. His justice system was more like Perry Mason’s than the fair and impartial system of the United States. Sometimes life is so unfair, other times it just plain stinks.

  The second floor was four rooms and a bath. And I do mean a bath. There was no shower, just a tub. If there’s one thing I can’t live without, it’s a shower. That’s why I’ve always hated camping, hiking, or any other kind of roughing it. A hot shower and a warm bed are two of the most important inventions of modern man, that and the BB rifle. The idea of bathing in my own filth and calling myself clean after it was disgusting.

  I turned left to the two rooms on that side of the upstairs hall. The one on the front side of the house looked like it was set up to be a sewing room; the back side room was clearly a woman’s bedroom, all pink and lacy and such. Fairly disgusting, but it seemed to fit my current image of Mrs. Hoople. The two rooms to the right of the filthy swill parlor were locked. My key opened the front one, revealing a small bedroom that smelled ancient, like a tomb. Unoccupied, I decided, and closed and relocked the door without further need for investigation. The back room, the only one left, was obviously Harry’s.

  Harry’s room was fairly large with enormous windows on the two outer walls, too much open space for a sniper, but great for an observation post. An old, wooden double post bed, positioned on the north wall, was made up properly. There were two small desks, each with a typewriter and each with piles of books on them. There were also two dressers. And the faint scent of cologne hung in the air, a woman’s cologne. This was why Harry did not live in his dorm room — he hadn’t been living alone, and the room in Farr Hall was way too small for two, especially two people living in mortal sin. That took way more room than it did for one person to go straight to hell. Trust me on that one.

  Harry had come a long way down the long and winding road since leaving home. In four years he had gone from guaranteed saint to hell-bound sinner. I wondered if he had had time to make one last act of contrition to secure his spot in heaven, or if I would be seeing him some day in hell where we could share a rock of burning brimstone and talk about old times. I dismissed the thought since I knew I would be there soon enough and would know the answer then.

  I flipped through the books on the desks. One of them was into religion and by the looks of it, a religion major. I would have guessed Harry but the other desk was piled with books on drawing and painting, some art history, some on technique. The telltale drawing tacked to the wall over the desk gave it away — Harry had apparently become an art major. His drawings hadn’t gotten any better; in fact they looked worse to me. It looked like something I could have done and I have zero artistic talent. It was a drawing of a woman but everything was way out of proportion. It made me wonder for a moment if Harry’s roommate was a man, because if she was a woman she never took off her clothes around him. After all these years he still had no idea what a woman really looked like underneath. In the end, I gave Harry some credit and guessed it was probably some artsy style that had a fancy name like cubism or impressionism or stupidism.

  My attention focused on a framed photo on Harry’s desk — a guy and a girl bundled up against the cold, hanging on to each other, standing beside a stupid-looking snowman. In the background was a building that could have been the church on campus that I had passed. The two in the photo had hooded jackets and the snow was blowing everywhere, so it was hard to tell much about the girl, but the guy… I was looking at a photo of myself. Granted, I hadn’t seen Harry in a while and, granted, the photo was taken in a blizzard, but it was uncanny how much he looked like me in that picture. My first thought was — he had not aged well at all — but then I realized how poorly that reflected on me, and dismissed the notion as ridiculous. It was just a bad photo.

  I heard Mrs. Hoople in the hallway downstairs, and decided that I knew almost all that I needed to know at this point to handle any conversation with her except Harry’s roommate’s name. Mrs. Hoople would have to be tricked into revealing that to me. And once I found the roommate I would probably find out more from her than anyone else I could question. But I’d have to come clean with her. There would be no fooling her with impersonations. I found it interesting that the police obviously hadn’t uncovered her yet — Harry’s real room had not been fingerprinted or disturbed in any way that I could see. My “devious plan” machinery was working full throttle by the time I got to the first floor hallway. It was a classic battle plan, worthy of Patton — to develop a strategy that could be changed as battlefield conditions evolved; a plan that was fluid enough to fulfill the original objective no matter what the original means got changed into. And, of course, the objective was to find out what happened to Harry while creating the most trouble possible for the college that had killed him. Oh yes, I was convinced that the killer was more than just a person or persons, it was a way of life, an archaic system created by the businessmen and banker pirates in Nowheresville, Ohio, to make them rich. Harry just got in the way somehow and had to be eliminated.

  I went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Hoople was making grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. I had this urge to sound her out on my theory that Harry had seen something he shouldn’t have seen and had to be removed clandestinely by the administration, but I knew she wouldn’t understand — especially since she thought I was Harry. I took a seat at the table and the orange cat that had been rubbing around the old lady’s leg wandered over and started rubbing around mine.

  Despite disliking cats, I agreed with their overall philosophy on life — people are here to be used, like tools or furniture, until a more suitable scratching post came along. When they were of no more use, they were discarded. Most people viewed cats as fickle for this, but I saw it more as being utilitarian. This one had probably worn out Mrs. Hoople’s leg satisfying its need to rub against something, and was now using mine. I pulled my leg up under me. It looked up in disdain and lay down in the spot where I would need to put my foot back down if ever I were to move. It was a classic, annoying cat-test of wills. Who could last longer? Would it become bored and wander off first? Or would my leg fall asleep forcing me to put my foot down first? I saw it as win-win for me. It would either move or when I needed to move my leg, I would just step on it by accident of course.

  Mrs. Hoople brought the sandwiches and two glasses of Coke over to the table and sat down across from me. She was staring at me and I gave her a quizzical look.

  “You seem different for some reason, Harry. You don’t look the same. Did you get a haircut? Maybe it’s just that you didn’t shave today. Oh well, I’m sure Beth will fix that when she gets back from break.” She chuckled, then coughed.

  For a second, I thought she was going to choke on her drink and that I’d have to administer my version of the Heimlich maneuver, but she recovered and kept laughing. “You know the girls don’t like a scratchy face.”

  I felt an odd warmth in my cheeks and just smiled, glad that I didn’t have to Heimlich punch the old biddy in the stomach. It was a technique that worked well with twelve-year-olds who were choking, or whom I suspected of choking, but I doubted it would go over big with a hundred-year-old lady. At least I knew her name now — Beth.

  “Did Beth say when she’d be back?” I asked innocently.

  “That’s an odd question to ask of me, isn’t it? After all, she is your friend.”

  This was one of those times when the emphasis put on a word conveyed the entire meaning of the statement. Beth was my friend, my roommate, she was my lover. Well, Harry’s, that is. “I guess she said she’d be back when everyone else showed up. I don’t remember.”

  Mrs. Hoople glanced at the calendar on the wall. It was a Kenyon calendar with all things Kenyon marked on it, such as the all-important dates of when students came and went. I guessed that watching that periodic spectacle was how the l
ocals got their kicks on Route 66, although it was Route 229 that passed by Gambier, and the excitement probably kept their pacemakers charged for months. December must have been stuffed shirt month at the college — there was a picture of Ransom Hall above the calendar portion, obviously taken in the fall, and quite pretty in its own stupid way. Removing Ransom would have improved the splendor of the old oaks and maples on campus dramatically. I made a note in the Ransom Hall Battle Plans to consider the removal of the structure entirely. It would save me the hassles of getting in and out unnoticed, after all.

  “I guess that will be tomorrow, then. I was wondering, Harry, if you could help me clean out that shed today. I know you just got back, but it really does need attending to and you did promise.”

  This woman had no idea who she was dealing with. Me? Promise to help? With anything? I had to do a major recalculation of the pluses and minuses of this little charade, a veritable cost-benefit analysis on the fly, and unfortunately, I still came up with the same overall result. “Of course I’ll help. I can get started right after lunch and if you don’t feel like it, you can just watch a real man do his thing.”

  We both laughed and those laughs turned out to be prophetic as the real man was still at it, alone, two hours later. There really wasn’t much to the shed — your basic lawnmower, rake, shovel, and other junk — but I wasn’t motivated to clean, straighten up, or otherwise help make this crapshack look any better than it already was. As the clouds rolled in again, promising another round of weather I finally surrendered, and worked like a demon to straighten up the mess. It turned out to be a half hour job. I guess in terms of my time management I could have learned a lesson there, but I’m not into lessons much; never have been.

  When I got back inside, the wind had again picked up and flurries were in the air. Mrs. Hoople was waiting with hot chocolate. Now that’s a treat not available in Farr 208. And marshmallows just the way I like them, the small ones, not those big, messy ones. Harry didn’t have it so bad here, not bad at all. A man could get used to this — one woman to live with and another to cook and take care of the house. I could get used to this. I wouldn’t even have to become a Mormon. Harry had really lucked out. He had always been lucky…