He snapped the toolbox closed and unhooked the support rod from the hood. It was time to get out of here.
"I remember the fires," Marrity's father said, looking over the top of the house at the white northern sky.
"Tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire,'" said Marrity, randomly quoting Emerson as he strode up the driveway. He was impatient to get inside now, and it irked him to wait for his limping father to catch up.
As Marrity pushed open the kitchen door, his father nodded toward the blistered VCR that still lay on the grass.
"That's an unfamiliar sight," he said.
"The machine burned up," said Marrity shortly. "Bad wiring, I guess." He pulled the door closed behind him when the old man had limped unsteadily inside. "Daph! We've — got company."
When Daphne appeared in the kitchen doorway she had changed out of her pajamas and was wearing green corduroy overalls over a white T-shirt; clearly she had expected her father to ask the old man in. "I was just explaining," Marrity went on, "that a short circuit in the VCR burned it up yesterday. Did you shut your bedroom door to keep the cats out?"
She nodded, and then told her grandfather, "Burnt up the movie in it too."
"Really?" said Marrity's father. "What movie?" He unzipped his olive green Members Only jacket, and Marrity noticed that it was still stiffly pressed, and the long-sleeved red-and-white-striped shirt under it was stiff too, and creased where it had been folded. Marrity wondered if Grammar had had any cash lying around at her house.
"Pee-wee's Big Adventure," Daphne said.
Marrity's father seemed to have some trouble draping his jacket over the back of a chair. "I—" he began hoarsely; then he cleared his throat and went on, "I hope it wasn't a rental."
"No, one of ours," Marrity told him. "Can I get you some coffee?"
"Coffee," echoed his father absently. "Coffee." He blinked at his son. "No, I've been up for so long it's near lunchtime for me. A glass of that Southern Comfort on the rocks would be bracing."
It occurred to Marrity that the man's odd smell was a mix of Juicy Fruit gum, cigarette smoke, and vodka. Vodka before eight, he thought, and Southern Comfort as a chaser? If a cop pulls him over and gives him a 502, when he drives away from here, am I liable, for having served him the alcohol? Marrity discovered that he didn't care, and poured a generous slug of the amber liquor into a water glass.
"Ice in the freezer," he said as he handed it to him. "Help yourself."
"Can I have a bracing drink?" asked Daphne.
"No!" said the old man.
Marrity smiled at her. "No. Sit down and be seen and not heard."
"Aye aye."
Daphne had sat down at the table, so Marrity did too; and as soon as his father had fumbled a couple of ice cubes into his glass, he settled into the chair with his new jacket on it.
The old man was leaning back and looking around the kitchen, and Marrity found himself resenting his father looking at the things he and Lucy and Daphne had assembled over the years — the Kliban coffee cups and dish towels, the cat calendar on the pantry door, the collection of cartoony salt-and-pepper shakers on the high shelves. But maybe the old man was envious of a settled home — certainly he seemed rootless.
Finally the old man looked at Marrity. "It's a very bad idea to give children alcohol," he said earnestly.
"How did you hurt your leg?" Daphne asked him.
"A car ran over me," the old man said. He seemed angry at Daphne for asking.
"Grammar called you yesterday?" Marrity said. "How did you know she's dead?"
The old man shifted his gaze to Marrity. "I got worried and called the police in Shasta," he said. "When she called me from there, she was talking as if she thought she would die soon, giving me the car and all. Even calling me."
Marrity realized that he didn't believe him. Maybe, he thought, he did kill her! Well no, he couldn't have got back from Shasta in time to break Grammar's window and take her keys.
"You asked," the old man said, apparently to Daphne, though he was staring into his drink, "why she was blackmailing me. A man died, and some money was absconded with, and she knew of evidence that would implicate me in it. She might even have believed I was the guilty party. But she didn't blackmail me for money, she only wanted me to go away and not contact any of you again. I'd have gone to prison, almost certainly — it was a very good circumstantial case. I even wondered if she—" He stopped, and groped clumsily for his glass; after closing his hand on empty air a few inches short of it, he managed to get hold of it and take a deep sip of the liquor.
Marrity could see that Daphne was anxious to ask a question, so he asked it for her. "Why did she want you to go away, to disappear?"
"It's not — really a subject for a little girl to hear," said Marrity's father haltingly. "Uh— I married your mother, to some extent, just a little bit, to prove to myself that I — could love a woman. In the 1950s there was no other option, really. It — wasn't entirely a success." The old man's face was red, and he gulped some more of the liquor and exhaled through his teeth in a near whistle.
"So was your grandfather Albert Einstein?" asked Marrity quickly. "My great-grandfather?"
"You seem to know it already," old Marrity said cautiously.
"Why is it such a secret? I never got a hint of it till yesterday. The Britannica doesn't mention Grammar, and she never said a word about it."
"Grammar was born in 1902, before Einstein and her mother were married. Uh — too much of a scandal. He wanted to be a professor, and this was really still nineteenth-century Switzerland. After a while the lie, and the little girl's new identity, were too established to change."
"Huh. Why did you visit him in '55, right after leaving my mother? "
His father stared at him with no expression. "I don't think you have the story entirely correct," he said. "We can go over all the old history later."
"Were you going to blackmail Einstein?" asked Marrity. "About his daughter?"
"Can I smoke?" his father asked, reaching behind him to fumble in the pocket of his jacket.
"Sure. Daph, would you get an ashtray?" Daphne nodded and pushed her chair back.
"You don't know me at all," the old man went on, "so I can't take any offense at that remark. But no, I didn't try to blackmail him. My mother may have."
"To get what?" asked Marrity.
Daphne laid a glass ashtray on the table at the man's elbow, but he didn't look at her as he tugged out of his pocket an opened pack of Marlboros and shook one out. "The same thing she extorted from me, maybe. Absence. He never came back to California after '33." He looked at Daphne at last. "I bet your movie wasn't wrecked. Did you pull it out?"
"It sure smoked," she said cautiously. "And it's been outside all night. Snails probably ate it."
The old man tore off two matches and lost hold of both of them, then with evident care tore off another and managed to strike it alight and hold it to the end of his cigarette. "I've got," he said as he puffed on the cigarette and blew out the match, "a friend who restores all kinds of electromagnetic hardware — computer disks, cassette tapes. You give it to me and I'll show it to him."
"No," said Marrity. "I'm going to — fix it myself."
"Right," said Daphne.
His father stared at Marrity. "You know about that stuff, do you?"