The Dark House by John Sedgwick

her.”
    Â 
    Neely in glasses; her golden hair dulled. His hands reaching through the air toward her. And her hands up sharply to deflect them—“No, please don’t”—as she backed to the door.
    Â 
    â€œBut she pushed me away. She was out the door before I could stop her. And that was it.”
    â€œWhat do you suppose was going on?”
    Rollins shook his head. “I have no idea.”
    Rollins looked down at the publicity photograph again. For the piece on Neely’s disappearance, he’d accumulated quite an archive of photographs, but he’d never seen this one before. He’d taped the images up all around his desk. Snapshots, newspaper photographs, even sketches that friends had provided. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them. Neely had filled practically the whole wall of his partition at the Beacon .
    â€œWhere do you think this was taken?” Marj asked.
    â€œLooks like the side porch at her house in Londonderry.” Rollins had gone there many times when he was working on the story. (Not in, though. The house was locked up tight as a drum.) He still went back there, from time to time, if he was in the area. He thought he might pick up a feeling for her, a sense of what had happened, where she had gone. But nothing had ever come to him.
    â€œHow’d you find it?” Rollins asked.
    â€œThe Sloane file was cross-referenced to a file on Twenty-nine Elmhurst.”
    â€œBut what did Neely have to do with the dark house?”
    Marj shrugged. “Beats me.”
    Once again, the dark house was swelling with portent and significance. It was sprouting black towers and creeping vines; it was looming up against a night sky. He wanted to discharge that ominous specter, to break any connection to it. He wanted to turn it back into a house like any other. He didn’t at all enjoy the idea that Neely—and through her, he himself—might be linked to a house that he had visited only at random. For that would force him to reconsider his understanding of chance, which was, after all, the basis on which he had constructed his many years of pursuits. If his arrival at the dark house was not arbitrary, then it was planned. And if it was planned, it was certainly not planned by him. So, who planned it, and why and how? These were large, immensely troubling questions, and Rollins recoiled from them.
    He slapped the photograph down on his desk. “Why would this have ended up in a file on Twenty-nine Elmhurst? Why would there even be a file on Twenty-nine Elmhurst?”
    â€œThe librarian said there were some handwritten notes in with it. They referred to some rumors about the place that a reporter was trying to track down for a ‘Metro’ story.”
    â€œWhat sort of rumors?”
    â€œThe librarian wouldn’t say anything about them, except that they were ‘a little bizarre.’”
    â€œWhat’s that mean?”
    â€œI don’t know, Rolo,” Marj said irritably. “I’m just passing on what Sally told me. Apparently, the librarian tossed them. She said they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Supposedly, those files are only for published material.”
    â€œWell, it’s probably nothing,” Rollins said.
    Marj’s eyes flared. “Oh, stop.”
    â€œI mean it.”
    â€œYou’re going to tell me this is nothing? Look at me.”
    He didn’t mind. She was so lovely, particularly around the eyes. They didn’t speak, but he felt something pass between them.
    Marj reached for his hand where it lay outstretched on his desktop and ran her fingers lightly over his knuckles. “Trust me a little, okay?”
    â€œOkay.” Rollins smiled. “Sorry.”
    â€œGood.” Marj picked up the pencil and started her drumming again. “So where are we going tonight?”

Six
    T he house was a two-story Cape, somewhat run-down, with cracked shingles