Ruffly Speaking

Savery!” This loud, hollow bray was a stranger’s. In what felt like an effort to demonstrate my control of the alien sound, I repeated, “Miss Savery!” We reached the large entrance hall at the front of the house, where my foot caught in a braided rug. To regain my balance, I rested a hand on Rowdy’s back. I raised my chin, opened my throat, and let the strange voice boom up the wide staircase ahead. “Miss Savery!”
    A momentary burst of silence hit my left ear. Rowdy jerked his head and pulled away from the stairs. “Buddy, I am so sorry,” I told him. Far above us, something moved. We headed up the stairs. On the second-floor landing, I hit every light switch and saw no one. Straight ahead, a door opened to a filthy green-tiled bathroom that looked like the stage set for a film on home safety hazards. Teetering on a little marble shelf above the ancient sink, as if deliberately positioned to tumble into the basin, was a battered electric radio plugged into the same four-way adapter that also sprouted the cords of a grungy Water-Pik and a new-looking rotating-bristle toothbrush, both of which sat on top of a toilet you don’t want to hear about. On a filthy bath mat rested a rusty electric heater heavily patched with duct tape. A three-legged stool next to the empty tub supported a little student lamp positioned like a duck ready to dive into the water. Alice Savery evidently enjoyed reading while she soaked. Her taste in books, it seemed to me, should have run toward sizzlers, but cosied up next to the lamp as if prepared to nudge it into the tub was a beautifully bound volume of A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust’s In Memory of Things Past. Courting lost time. The old Venetian blinds that covered the window had ivory-colored slats like the thinly milled tusks of poacher-killed animals. Maybe Rowdy smelled them. I had to drag him out.
    On the landing, I again shouted to Miss Savery. Then I headed up the worn wooden servant stairs to the third floor. On both sides of the treads, books were stacked so high that Rowdy and I were forced to ascend single file. I went first. On top of one stack of especially scholarly-looking tomes were two dismantled smoke detectors, their battery compartments gutted. Chunks of plaster from the hospital green walls crunched underfoot.
    When we’d finally picked our way up, I was sweating from the trapped heat, and my lungs sounded like an artificial respirator in need of a tune-up. The landing offered a choice of four closed doors. A foot or so above the knob of one door was a large blotch of smudges that looked like a nonrepresentational finger painting grudgingly produced by a depressed child. Working on scent rather than sight, Rowdy headed for that door. He had raised a paw to add a bas-relief to its decoration before I tugged him back, gave him an informal version of the down signal, and murmured that I’d be back soon. I turned the doorknob, wormed past Rowdy, entered the room, and quickly pulled the door shut behind me, leaving Rowdy’s leash securely caught in it.
    The room I entered had a low ceiling, but it was long and wide, and its walls were so heavily lined with books that it looked like some out-of-the-way section of the stacks of a university library. Despite three open, unscreened windows that admitted smoke-tinged air, it smelled predominantly of old paper.
    Directly ahead of me was an ugly, beat-up teacher’s desk. The only light came from an old-fashioned gooseneck lamp on the desk top, which also held three or four Harvard Coop notebooks, a mug of pens and pencils, a large red fire extinguisher like the one in the kitchen, an antique Underwood manual typewriter, a black telephone wired to what looked like two answering machines, and three or four other electronic devices that I couldn’t identify. I’d found Alice Savery. I no longer needed Rita’s aid. I popped it out of my ear and dropped it into a pocket of the black dress.
    She was sitting at the desk. She faced away from me. As approaching sirens finally began to wail, she rose from her seat. Before she had finished turning around, I said, “Your carriage house is on fire, but the little boy got out. Now you need to come with me.”
    Her gray hair with its Roman cut made her head look like a steel helmet with the visor raised, and the khaki clothes that had seemed practical and above style when I’d first seen her in her garden now looked unmistakably military. Her eyes were