Me: So, anyway, I just found out about that Harvey fellow, Charles Harvey, the suicide.

(long silence)

Me: The URI professor? Rented the place before me.

Blanchard: Yeah. I know who you mean. The man wasn’t right. So, what. You angry I didn’t tell you about him?

Me: No, I’m not angry. I’m just curious.

Blanchard: I’m the one found him, you know.

Me: No, I didn’t know that. None of the obituaries or articles I found online mentioned that.

Blanchard: Well, ain’t like it’s the sort of thing they hand out medals for, finding a man strung up in one of your trees. But I did. I found him not far from the house.

Me: Thishouse?

Blanchard: Yeah. Used an extension cord, not rope, but it worked just fine. He’d been up there four or five days, the coroner said. That’s what they told me. It was hot weather, and that wasn’t a pretty thing to come upon. Birds had been at him, and the maggots, and whatnot.

Me: I had no idea.

Blanchard (sounding defensive): Hardly the sort of thing you go around advertising when you want to lease a house. Not the sort of thing attracts the element I want to be renting the place out to.

Me: No, I guess not. Still, you know, it wasa bit of a shock. I have to admit that.

Blanchard: You’re not angry about this, are you?

Me (laughs): No, no. It’s fine. Really. I was just curious, that’s all. Poor man.

Blanchard: I suppose you gotta have sympathy for situations like that. Still, he wasn’t right, and he croaked himself owing me two months back rent. His girl up in Portland offered to pay, but hell, what kind of asshole would I have looked like taking the money from her?

Me: He was writing a book. That’s what I read.

Blanchard: Yeah, he was writing a book. You don’t come across like the superstitious sort to me, Miss Crowe.

Me: No, I’m not superstitious.

Blanchard: So, sure you’re not sore I didn’t tell you about him?

Me: I’m sure. Why didn’t the daughter take his typewriter with the rest of his belongings?

Blanchard: Daughter didn’t take none of his stuff. My wife sent a bunch of it off to the Goodwill, and I just threw most of the rest out. I thought someone might be able to use that typewriter someday, so I put it in the basement.

Me: And the ribbons?

Blanchard: Ribbons? You lost me.

Me: There was an envelope with ribbons for the typewriter. Several of them. I found those, too.

Blanchard: Yeah. There was an envelope. That’s right.

Me: So, what happened to his book? The manuscript, I mean. There was a page still in the typewriter. I assume he died with it unfinished.

Blanchard: Listen, Miss Crowe, can we please talk about this later? I don’t want to be rude, but I got business over in Wakefield this afternoon, and I’m already running late as it is.

I told him not to worry, that I was probably being nosy and that I hate nosiness, especially when I’m the guilty party. I promised again to have the rent to him by the 10th of the month, and he thanked me for letting him know I’d be late with the check, then hung up first. I switched off the cell phone, and promptly hid it from myself. Maybe I’ll find it later. Maybe not. If anyone wants to harass me, they can use the landline.

Anyway, I’m left to conclude that the late Dr. Harvey’s unfinished book, in all likelihood, went to the local landfill or a bonfire or whatever, ifit’s true that the daughter in Maine claimed none of his effects. I can’t imagine why Blanchard would have lied about something like that. All that survives is that one peculiar page, incomplete reflections on “bloody apples” from a tree that died seventy years ago. I’ve been thinking about driving down to Connecticut, to Franklin (formerly Norwich), where Micah Hood’s cursed fruit is said to have sprouted some three hundred years ago. If I’m lucky, I might can get a magazine article or short story out of this.

And that reminds me, I got the extension on the novel. The extension on the originalextension. The guillotine will just have to wait another six months. Dorothy’s a miracle worker, but I gather my publisher is magnificently displeased, and I’ve had to promise this will never, ever happen again and so forth. Which is rather like promising you’ll never get the flu again, or let it rain on the Fourth of July. Do they think I’m doing this shit on purpose, just to foul up their publishing schedule? Right now, I’d probably give all the fingers on my left hand (I type mostly with my right) for a finished manuscript to appease my editor and fulfill my contractual obligations. Something I could trade in for a decent goddamn payday. Anyway, maybe if I can give Dorry a short story to peddle, everyone will leave me alone for a while. Also, I think this will be the last entry I make in the notebook. I’ve got half a mind to dust off Dr. Harvey’s old Royal machine, feed it a little oil to loosen up the sticky keys and suchlike, and transcribe everything from the spiral-bound notebook to typescript. It’s something to do. And I haven’t felt like going near the laptop for anything but the web (mostly porn, I will admit) since I got here.

Blanchard called at some ungodly hour this morning and woke me up to tell me he’s letting the upstairs, the attic, out to some artist from California. What the fuck? I think I actually said that to him. He pointed out that the lease permitted him to do so, that, as it happens, I’d only rented the downstairs portion of the house. I asked him to hold on while I read through the lease, and yeah, the bastard’s telling the truth. It’s right there, which is what I get for not bothering to read the things I sign before (or after) I sign them. He offered to let me out of my lease, like I have anywhere to go. I declined. I half think he wantsme to leave. Likely, I’m just being paranoid, but maybe I shouldn’t have brought up the subject of the dearly departed Dr. Harvey. The woman arrives next fucking week. So much for solitude.

I have now typed everything from the notebook. It comes to sixty-five pages, all stacked neatly on the table beside me and the bottle of Jack I’ve been working on since yesterday. From here on, I’ll keep this journal — which is what it seems to have become — on the dead man’s typewriter and give my pens a rest. I had to drive all the way to Foster to get paper, a pack of five hundred sheets. So, I cannot type more than five hundred pages. Oh, and the woman, this painter from California, is named Constance Hopkins. My luck, she’ll be straight. Watch and see.

Spent most of the day in the basement, hiding from the heat and trying not to think about the imminent arrival of the dreaded attic lodger. Also, I got to thinking that just maybe, when Blanchard stowed the old typewriter and the envelope of ribbons down there, possibly he did the same with the anthropologist’s unfinished manuscript. So, hours spent picking through all the moldering junk. I tried to be systematic, beginning at the shelf where I found the typewriter. It wasn’t there, just empty Mason jars, cardboard boxes of grimy machine parts, a busted electric fan that surely must have dated back to the twenties, a plastic milk crate filled with bundled copper wiring, three broken claw hammers, and so forth. I moved from one slouching plywood and cinder-block shelf to the next, venturing deeper into the basement than I ever had before. After about an hour and a half, I came across a low archway of fieldstones and mortar, and realized it marked the northern periphery of the house, below the kitchen table. I shone my flashlight through the arch, and it was clear that more shelves, more boxes, more indistinguishable mountains of refuse, lay on the other side. I thought about giving up the search and heading back to the stairs. Surely, Blanchard would have put the manuscript near the typewriter, had he decided to keep the thing (which was beginning to seem unlikely). I lingered there at the place where the house ends, where the merely dank basement seemed to give way to a genuine clamminess. There was a draft, air that was not cool, but cold, cold and unpleasantly damp, leaking through the archway, and I spotted a rusty iron horseshoe mounted on the keystone. A few of the nails had come loose, and it was hanging down, not up, and the first thing I thought of was Blanchard’s question on the phone—“You’re not a superstitious woman, are you?” or however he phrased it. The remaining nail had a distinctly square head, so I’m guessing that horseshoe’s been up there quite some time. There was a red-brown ghost of rust on the granite from when it hadhung with the two ends pointing upwards towards the ceiling, so the overall impression was of something like an hourglass. I thought of the red bellies of female black widow spiders, and tried to recall if they live as far north as Rhode Island. And then I remembered when Amanda and I went to England (a sort of working vacation), how she’d laughed at me because I wouldn’t follow her into some damned abandoned railway tunnel that she wanted to explore. I chickened out and let her go in alone. I looked it up online, the tunnel, before I started writing this entry; it was, in fact, the Morewell Tunnel at Tavistock in West Devon (N 50° 31.154 W 004° 09.997). It had been a passenger rail, closed down since the 1960s, and was overgrown when we visited. There was a gate you had to scale to get inside — to trespass,as I’d pointed out to Amanda. She made clucking noises and scrambled nimbly over the chain link.