yards—a border collie, a poodle, a beagle (although Don suspected the beagle was just along for the ride) and two or three mixed breeds—and, more succinctly, because the pack had once chased him from the mailbox to his front porch.
The quarter-mile walk went slowly, Thule hell-bent on sniffing every bush in the ditch and then hiking his leg for a squirt.
The subdivision was arrayed around the streets of Red Lane & Darkmans like a body on a crucifix. The biggest and boldest house in the neighborhood belonged to the Rourkes, half a block in. Barry Rourke was an executive for AstraCorp (and thus one of Don’s current bosses), his wife a semi-retired cellist and fulltime gadfly who played with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and their home was very old and ponderously stylish; a Victorian number raised months after the First World War. Then Red Lane and Darkmans were the only lanes, and made of good, honest dirt. The woods had lain even deeper and darker in those days when wolves roamed the forest, and black bears and cougars from the hills, and according to the coots at the Mud Shack, the occasional escapee from Wharton House, the old asylum that got shut down in the ’90s. The wolves were long gone, the feral inmates shipped off to Western or wherever, but coyotes still laired in the woods; deer, and of course the packs of dogs that swelled with the inevitable wave of abandoned pooches each frantic tourist season and encouraged people of wisdom and prudence to arm themselves for the daily stroll.
The Rourke manse and environs had history, all right, were fairly steeped in it like an old blackened tea bag left to wither at the edge of a saucer. Don had several occasions to venture inside the house during the late ’70s and early ’80s—Kirsten Rourke threw frequent and lavish parties and because Don was a minion of AstraCorp at the time, Michelle was invited into the Friday afternoon pinochle club for awhile, and of course, Rourke invited Don over periodically to indulge his impulse for slumming with the help. The place was imposing and decorated in a museum-quality fashion that discouraged touching a blessed thing on pain of arousing the housekeeper’s ire.
One could scarcely move in a straight line without tripping across metastasized lumps and growths in every cavernous room, the benighted accretion of ineffable superiority through breeding and fortune: Circassia walnut Victrolas dredged from the wreckage of East India Company outposts; Flemish oak paneled armoires brought West in the face of marauding red devils; wicker baskets threaded by the cracked fingers of villagers long subsumed unto the dull gray chalk that collects as a mantle over everything everywhere; oil paintings from estate sales and private auctions; Ming vases and Tiffany lamps; Kirsten’s million-dollar shoe collection, an affectation she’d contrived after following the exploits of Imelda Marcos. Rourke collected Western European medieval art—swords, shields, ragged banners and a library of withered books behind glass. Rourke knew a bit of Latin and recited Olde English poetry when he got drunk, or, as Don suspected, when he pretended to be drunk.
Rourke had been an affiliate member of the John Birch Society; an amiable elitist, a masterful badminton player with a savage left-hand serve. He subscribed to Foreign Policy and a clutch of peer-reviewed journals pertaining to historical research societies of which Don had scant knowledge.
Back in the day when everyone was young and busy, sometimes Don had seen one of the Rourkes in passing when he walked down his own long bumpkin drive to fetch the mail or the paper from the roadside mailbox, the old star route, as the postal workers dubbed them—Kirsten cruising in her Jaguar, squiring the two-point-five children (twins Page & Brett, and Bronson Ford the adopted boy from a village in Angola) to or from recital (soccer, ballet, gymnastics, chess club, etc); or Rourke, in his mega-sized
The quarter-mile walk went slowly, Thule hell-bent on sniffing every bush in the ditch and then hiking his leg for a squirt.
The subdivision was arrayed around the streets of Red Lane & Darkmans like a body on a crucifix. The biggest and boldest house in the neighborhood belonged to the Rourkes, half a block in. Barry Rourke was an executive for AstraCorp (and thus one of Don’s current bosses), his wife a semi-retired cellist and fulltime gadfly who played with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and their home was very old and ponderously stylish; a Victorian number raised months after the First World War. Then Red Lane and Darkmans were the only lanes, and made of good, honest dirt. The woods had lain even deeper and darker in those days when wolves roamed the forest, and black bears and cougars from the hills, and according to the coots at the Mud Shack, the occasional escapee from Wharton House, the old asylum that got shut down in the ’90s. The wolves were long gone, the feral inmates shipped off to Western or wherever, but coyotes still laired in the woods; deer, and of course the packs of dogs that swelled with the inevitable wave of abandoned pooches each frantic tourist season and encouraged people of wisdom and prudence to arm themselves for the daily stroll.
The Rourke manse and environs had history, all right, were fairly steeped in it like an old blackened tea bag left to wither at the edge of a saucer. Don had several occasions to venture inside the house during the late ’70s and early ’80s—Kirsten Rourke threw frequent and lavish parties and because Don was a minion of AstraCorp at the time, Michelle was invited into the Friday afternoon pinochle club for awhile, and of course, Rourke invited Don over periodically to indulge his impulse for slumming with the help. The place was imposing and decorated in a museum-quality fashion that discouraged touching a blessed thing on pain of arousing the housekeeper’s ire.
One could scarcely move in a straight line without tripping across metastasized lumps and growths in every cavernous room, the benighted accretion of ineffable superiority through breeding and fortune: Circassia walnut Victrolas dredged from the wreckage of East India Company outposts; Flemish oak paneled armoires brought West in the face of marauding red devils; wicker baskets threaded by the cracked fingers of villagers long subsumed unto the dull gray chalk that collects as a mantle over everything everywhere; oil paintings from estate sales and private auctions; Ming vases and Tiffany lamps; Kirsten’s million-dollar shoe collection, an affectation she’d contrived after following the exploits of Imelda Marcos. Rourke collected Western European medieval art—swords, shields, ragged banners and a library of withered books behind glass. Rourke knew a bit of Latin and recited Olde English poetry when he got drunk, or, as Don suspected, when he pretended to be drunk.
Rourke had been an affiliate member of the John Birch Society; an amiable elitist, a masterful badminton player with a savage left-hand serve. He subscribed to Foreign Policy and a clutch of peer-reviewed journals pertaining to historical research societies of which Don had scant knowledge.
Back in the day when everyone was young and busy, sometimes Don had seen one of the Rourkes in passing when he walked down his own long bumpkin drive to fetch the mail or the paper from the roadside mailbox, the old star route, as the postal workers dubbed them—Kirsten cruising in her Jaguar, squiring the two-point-five children (twins Page & Brett, and Bronson Ford the adopted boy from a village in Angola) to or from recital (soccer, ballet, gymnastics, chess club, etc); or Rourke, in his mega-sized
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