“Go on,” David said, urging him toward the doorway. “Get in.”
Deke shuffled inside and David followed. The lights were off, and David felt along one wall for the switch. When he found it, he flipped it on, and the single bulb over the kitchen sink winked on. Deke quit shuffling and stared up at the naked bulb as if in awe.
Unmarried and without children, Deke Carmody lived alone. The house was the domicile of a lifelong bachelor, complete with dirty dishes stacked in the sink and the smell of burnt coffee in the air. But as David looked around, he saw that things had been changed, and in a way that set him on alert. David’s first thought was that Deke’s house had been burglarized . . . but on closer inspection, he realized that no burglar would bother doing the things to Deke’s house that David was observing. Kitchen chairs, for instance, hadn’t simply been knocked to the floor; instead, they were stacked on the kitchen table. The sight of them was jarring. When he turned around, he saw that all the cupboard doors stood open. Boxes of cereal and canned goods had been arranged in careful pyramids on the countertops. David couldn’t help himself—he thought of poltergeists and exorcisms.
“What’s been going on here, Deke?”
“You know,” Deke muttered, shuffling out of the kitchen and into the living room. He said no more.
David heard noises in the adjoining room. It was the TV, showing the rerun of some eighties sitcom.
“Sit down,” David said, beckoning Deke over to an upholstered armchair.
Deke sat without protest. In fact, he was smiling at David. Practically beaming.
That smile is worse than the blank look in his eyes, David thought. What the hell is wrong with him?
“I’ll be right back,” David said, and hurried down the hall. In the bathroom, he found a towel on a hook behind the door. He brought it to Deke, draping it over the big man’s broad shoulders.
“Thanks, David.”
“You want to tell me what the heck you were doing out there?”
Deke laughed. It was a nervous, tittering sound that should have come from a smaller person. “Damnedest thing. I guess I was sleepwalking.”
“Sleepwalking.”
“Used to do it a lot when I was a boy,” Deke said. “And again in my early twenties. It’s brought on by stress, you know. Doctors told me so.”
Ellie had suffered the occasional bout of somnambulism when she was four or five. It was eerie—David had once caught her ambling past him in the hallway in the middle of the night, which had scared the shit out of him but hadn’t woken the girl—but as eerie as it was, it seemed a quirk befitting of a young child. Deke was in his fifties. The thought of him roving around his house—Christ, the goddamn street—in his sleep was more than just unnerving.
“Is this a common occurrence?” David asked.
“The sleepwalking?”
“You wander around outside in your underwear regularly, or is this a special occasion?”
“For me?”
“Of course for you. Who else would I be talking about?”
“I don’t know.” Deke’s eyebrows arched and his mouth curled into what could only be described as a playful frown. “There could be other things here, too.”
David frowned. “What do you mean?” He looked around, noting that the walls were all bare and there were picture frames on the floor. A rug had been rolled up into a tube and set against the jamb of the front door in the foyer. The gauzy curtains hanging over the windows were all tied together in knots.
“What have you been up to in here, Deke?”
“I don’t know if it’s something new,” Deke said, and it took David a moment or two to realize he was answering David’s previous question. “If I’ve been doing it for a while, I’ve been asleep and wouldn’t know.” And then he laughed—a great bassoon blast that caused David’s toes to curl in his shoes.
“Are you on any medication?”
“Cholesterol meds,” Deke said. “Nexium for my ’flux.”
“Anything heavier?”
This time, Deke’s scowl was genuine. “I look like a drug addict to you, David?”
“I’m just trying to help. I almost ran you over out there. I can’t say I like the idea of you wandering around the neighborhood in a daze every night. And your house . . .”
“What about it?” Deke said, glancing around. If he recognized the unusualness of the place, his face did not register it.
“You got any liquor in the house?”
“You want a drink, buddy?”
“No,” David said. There was a credenza against one wall, a few bottles of vodka and bourbon on it. None were open, and he couldn’t see any used glasses. “I mean, have you been drinking?”