Dead Level Read Free Page B

of all, there was the whole thing about him being dead, a condition that I firmly believed impeded even the most determined attempts at communication. And anyway, what would Victor have to say after six whole years?
    He’d said it all—the good, the bad, the deeply, hideously atrocious—backwhen he was alive. That, however, didn’t seem to matter to the hairs on my neck, which had taken a cue from the ones still bristling on my arms.
    Meanwhile, on the telephone, Dan Weatherston—the editor of our local newspaper, the Quoddy Tides —was trying to persuade me of something. “Sure, Dan,” I heard myself replying. “No problem.”
    Ordinarily I’d have cheerfully agreed to get my thumbnails yanked out rather than tell anyone that I would write five thousand words about anything, and before I’d have said I would do it by the following Friday I’d have pulled them out myself with pliers. But at the time, I barely heard what the Tides editor was saying, still too preoccupied by what had—or hadn’t—just occurred, so I answered him without thinking.
    After I hung up, though, it hit me: what I’d promised, and what I would have to do to fulfill that promise. Downstairs in the kitchen, in a full-on bout of knuckles-to-the-front-teeth horror more chilling than anything my ghastly—and now possibly also ghostly—ex-husband could inspire, I considered calling the editor back to say I’d developed a case of dyslexia. Or maybe a brain tumor; after all, Sam suffered from the former ailment and Victor had died of the latter one, so I could plausibly pretend to have either.
    Not that I’d have tempted fate that way … I think. But why, why had I agreed to write a newspaper column?
    “Jake?” The voice came suddenly from behind me and this time it definitely didn’t belong to my dead ex-husband.
    Well, of course it didn’t, I told myself sternly; it hadn’t been his the first time, either. Also, it hadn’t been his face in the bathroom mirror that morning, in the steam from the shower I had taken. And once the face was gone, dissolved all at once like a magic trick, the droplets trickling on the mirror’s still-foggy surface absolutely had not been trying to form words.…
    “Jake?” Again, but now instead of being scared speechless, I was too stunned by the pickle I’d gotten myself into to reply.
    All Dan Weatherston wanted was an article about old-house fix-uptips and tricks, which was what I’d been doing pretty much nonstop since I came here from New York. But while many of the tasks I’d done were standard—window salvage, falling-plaster rejuvenation, doorknob rejiggering, and the ever-popular old-plumbing rescue maneuver (consisting of [a] know where the water main is and [b] shut it off), my methods usually weren’t.
    Standard, I mean. Just for starters, I almost always broke something while trying to repair some other thing, and no home-repair book that I’ve ever read recommends this. Then there was the parts problem; modern plumbing, for example, is done with space-age glue, PVC pipe, and hard plastic connectors, whereas in 1823, when my house was built, the plumbing consisted entirely of a cast-iron hand pump, plus buckets.
    Later upgrades—pipes, faucets, a drainage system that didn’t rely heavily on one of those buckets—hadn’t been exactly space-age, either, unless you count Sputnik . The most recent refit of anything mechanical in the whole place, in fact, was back in the sixties when they reluctantly got rid of the coal furnace.
    As a result, trying to get replacement parts for my old house was nearly impossible, or if they were available they were wildly expensive. I could tell you what an early-nineteenth-century brass window latch costs at a salvage warehouse, for instance, but if I did I’d have to start taking blood-pressure pills.
    So—and perhaps also, as my son Sam has suggested, because I enjoy a battle—I’d gotten into the habit of improvising. A strip of Teflon tape