A/N: This chapter was written with fond memories of my grandfather, whose favorite TV show was . . . well, you'll see. "Dishonest, departed, or dead" was his own summary. I remember watching many reruns with him.

The book FDR's Deadly Secret is one I found recently at Paperbackswap - if you haven't yet discovered paperbackswap dot com and you still enjoy the feel of a physical book in your hands, check it out. Free books! It's an online book exchange based on the theory that what you no longer want, somebody else somewhere probably does. They have every conceivable genre, about 5 million books currently available, and the wishes that aren't currently available come in on an average of about one a week in my experience. I have found things there ranging from current best sellers to classics out of print since the 1930s. The FDR book is quite interesting, a medical biography that tracks his whole life. The author is definitely on a "my pet theory" crusade, but he isn't without evidence for it, and he convinced me that it's a good possibility, even if it can never be proven 100%. I was thinking reading it that House would have enjoyed this book.

Next chapter is Wilson and more of the egglings, and then the chapter after that, things start to happen a little faster. Thanks for the reviews and enjoy chapter 5.

(H/C)

Going out for lunch. House hit send on the text to Cuddy and started his car, pulling out of the PPTH lot. Her schedule was quite busy today. A text was much quicker than a conversation and would disrupt her day less, though if he thought about it, he had to admit that he didn't want to face questions as he left. Not that he really wanted to think about it. He was curious, that was all.

She had, of course, been worried about that stubborn old idiot last night with his sleeping bag, and House had even overheard her calling this morning before breakfast, ostensibly to invite him to the meal. Filling in the other side of the conversation while eavesdropping, House concluded that Thornton had given her a brief fine and had told her he needed to stay at his place to wait for the truck in case they were early. At least the call had reassured her the old man was none the worse for wear or at least not much worse for his night on the floor. House would tell her later where he had been for lunch and let her ask questions then, but he didn't want interrogation on his way there.

It was hard to believe that it would be a year next month since her meltdown. She had made a lot of progress in therapy, but he still tried a little harder since to keep her informed where he was. It still amazed him that she had been that worried about him, that he mattered that much to her. Disappearing around the hospital was somehow no longer a game, at least not when he thought about her looking for him, though he was perfectly willing to hide from the team. Patterson was good for her, so different from Jensen but seeing things clearly and getting to work from the start on steering Cuddy past just the assassination attempt on the President to the deeper issues House always had sensed in her. He wondered what his reaction would have been if somebody years ago had predicted not only that he would be married and a father but also that he and his wife both would be willingly seeing psychiatrists.

She did seem to be getting more tense on the subject of horses as the actual one approached. He wasn't sure what all was involved there; surely seeing Lyla get stomped and howling about it couldn't have been that traumatic. In fact, he would have paid for a video of the occasion. Obviously there was some physical risk associated, but there was physical risk in riding in cars and even in crossing the street, too. Hopefully, Cuddy would talk to Patterson about it.

Eleven months ago. So much had happened in the last year: Cuddy's meltdown, Patrick's trial, his mother's death, the explosion at the track.

The old man. If the last year was a musical work, he would be the recurring theme. House was glad to see the street up ahead, and he turned on his blinker. Enough of introspection; he was ready for some observation. So much data could be gathered from a person's house and what was in it. He'd never seen the former house in St. Louis, and while he'd tagged along house shopping several weeks ago, this one had been an empty shell. Up until today.

The big moving truck was still there in the driveway, but they had to be almost done unloading, assuming they had been on time and based on capacity of the new house. It would explode if much more time was spent filling it. He parked out by the street and deliberately walked across the front yard instead of taking the longer paved way up the driveway to the sidewalk. The house was compact, two bedrooms with attached garage. It looked pleasantly impersonal, a little landscaping but not much, though there was a new rosebush planted by the front steps since his last drive-by Friday night on the way back from Jensen. The two features the old man had seemed most taken with in choosing it were a large living room and a fenced back yard that contained that slide and climbing tunnel. He had mentioned wishing for a fireplace but had compromised on that because he liked the rest of the place, and it was only two miles away from the House house.

The front door was open, and vigorous activity could be heard within. House walked straight on in without knocking or announcing himself but then came to a stop two steps into the living room and gave a quick look around. The old man wasn't visible at the moment, but he could be heard back down the hall. "Right there is fine." Footsteps approached, and House couldn't help noting how strong and vigorous they were, attached to young, whole legs. Two movers appeared, noticing him but not saying anything, just dodging around him to go back out to the truck. Finally, Thomas himself came down the hall after a moment's delay; House could easily picture him studying the newly placed item critically.

Thomas' face lit up when he saw him. "Greg! Good to see you. Come on in." He waved a hand. "Welcome to my mess; I think it's going to take me a week to dig through everything and get it put up."

Surveying the living room more closely, House had to agree with him. The place looked like a warehouse. Empty bookcases lined much of the living room with an entertainment center breaking the row at one point, and boxes were everywhere. Over against the shared wall with the kitchen was the piano, and House limped to it, carefully threading his way through the cardboard maze. He looked it over carefully - no new scratches, either from its journey to St. Louis from Blythe's house or its longer trip to Jersey - and then opened the keyboard and struck a test note. He flinched.

"I'll get it tuned," Thomas said quickly. "The trip knocked it off."

"I know that." House closed the keyboard and turned to face him. "Make sure you get a tuner who knows what he's doing. Here." He fished through his cell phone address book, finding his own piano tuner, then held it out. "That one isn't too bad." Thomas carefully copied the number over into his own phone, looking like he was trying not to laugh for some reason. Before he put his phone away, House double checked texts just in case he had missed hearing Cuddy's reply to his. No reply. Good; she had accepted it as a routine lunch out and wasn't going to question him.

The two movers reappeared, one of them with a nightstand and the other with a large picture that was carefully wrapped in blankets. "This is it, Mr. Thornton."

"The nightstand goes on the right side of the bed in the main bedroom. Just lean the picture against some boxes for now." The picture was put down, and House walked over to remove its blanket shroud and check it out. It was a landscape, a painting of mountains, sharp and jagged against the sky, with a rippling stream flowing down from them. The signature was in the lower right corner, TT, the letters small but distinct, like those on the color portrait of Blythe. He had painted this. Judging from the frame, it was several decades old.

Thomas reemerged from the back of the house with the now empty-handed mover. The one who had had the painting was writing out an invoice on his clipboard. Thomas walked over to the picture, looking at it himself, his eyes distant, filling in more than was on the canvas. "Is that a real place?" House asked. Thomas nodded.

"Here you go, Mr. Thornton. We already have your card on file, but could you sign at the bottom that you've received everything?"

Thomas signed it. "Thank you, gentlemen." They nodded to him and left, and he closed the front door.

"Those aren't gentlemen," House protested. "Those are hired muscle. No brain required." The large truck rumbled into life and pulled out of the driveway. "At least no more brain than is required to drive, and a lot of people seem to do that without much between their ears."

Thomas shrugged. "Courtesy is free, and it might even make them handle things a little more gently."

"So you're courteous with selfish reasons behind it. Nice." He looked back at the painting. "In the Rockies?"

"Yes." There was just the hint of reserve there, not a stone wall but a closed door. Whatever this place was to him, the deeper meaning was private.

So of course House had to pick at it. "Did you live near there once? Vacation there? Vacation rings some bells." This painting was about three feet by four with intricate detail. He'd gone to a lot of time and trouble recreating this. "Let me guess: The first trip you and Emily took after you were married?"

Close but not quite. Thomas sighed. "That's where I asked her to marry me. We were on a camping trip in the mountains."

"And why is that a bad memory? I thought you two had a great marriage, match made in heaven."

"It was. And the place isn't a bad memory." The past tense came out a little sharply, and House wondered if he was remembering not just the proposal but the fact that she was dead. "Greg, I'd rather not talk about everything that painting means right now."

The simple request caught him off guard. "Right now?" he qualified.

"Someday, I'll tell you. But please, not today."

Reluctantly, he backed off, while hanging a mental note to push again there some other time. He started a slow limping tour of the house, absorbing everything. The furniture back in the main bedroom was old, but at least it didn't look like dated to Victorian days or was trying to break weight records. The sleeping bag was on the bare mattress now, rolled up neatly. The old man had probably spent the night back here. The second bedroom held not only another bedroom set, slightly smaller, but many, many boxes. He opened the top one, curious. A model train. Winding back through the house toward the front, he discovered that even the bathroom had a small bookcase in it, and the kitchen held a few more plus a desk. The table was a simple model, refreshingly different from John's. There was a platter of cookies on the counter, and House grabbed one and shoved it down in two bites.

"You know, old man, the walls aren't expandable."

Thomas gave a rueful grin. "I thought I cut things way down back in St. Louis, but I might have to do some more now that I can eyeball it. It's amazing how your life can sprawl out when you aren't looking."

House grabbed another cookie. "You and your memories do some baking last night?"

"No, that's from the neighbors. Nice couple; I met them yesterday when they came over after the closing."

"You're already meeting the neighbors?" How did people make friends that easily?

"It's not something I had to work at, Greg. They're curious. Anywhere I've been, the people always come over to check the new arrivals out pretty quickly."

The phenomenon sounded totally foreign to him. Any place he'd ever lived before his marriage, it was as if he'd carried a 12-foot-high no-trespassing sign with him, and the few surrounding people curious quickly learned to leave him alone. Granted, he knew his current neighbors and their habits from observation, but Cuddy had known them first; he was just added into an already-existing circle of acquaintance.

Thomas' voice broke back into his thoughts. "You can start unpacking some of the boxes in the living room next to the bookcases if you want, Greg."

House looked at him suspiciously, searching for any side swipe at his disability but unable to find one. "I'm not here to work. This mess is your problem, old man. I already have a job; I'm just on lunch break."

"I'll order us a pizza." Thomas pulled out his cell phone, then added almost as an afterthought, "but those boxes are mostly books and a few of DVDs." His son stumped off gruffly toward the living room as he made the call, and Thomas smiled to himself.

House opened the first box. Books as advertised. The top few were in English, but the next one, though the same genre, was German. He'd decided that it would be better to work out Thomas' complete linguistic list instead of simply asking him or fishing in the dark, to have a sure answer before he stumped him with an unknown, and the contents of his bookshelves were a golden opportunity. Still, he couldn't help pausing at the titles as he worked and even sampling a page or two. The old man obviously liked true adventure stories; every book in this first box was on topics such as sledging across Antarctica or climbing Everest or sailing around the world.

He hadn't heard his father approach, and the quiet voice at his elbow startled him. "I've always loved adventure stories. They have to be true, though. Fiction doesn't quite have the same impact as fact. There are some incredible stories out there that if they were fiction, you'd criticize them as unrealistic."

House snorted. "Haven't you had enough adventure in life?"

"I like people watching. That's what the good stories are about; it's the people. Doing something like climbing a high mountain or losing most of their food down a crevasse in the ice in Antarctica and having to get back to safety strips the layers away. The battle distills them down to what they're really like. Dad loved those stories, too."

"Were these his?" House asked.

"Some of the same titles but not his actual copies." Thomas opened the next box as House neared the bottom of the current one. "This box is history. Start another bookcase; I'll need a whole bookcase for history." They moved over one case. "Same thing with history, at least well-written history. It's about the people. Fascinating to study them, who they are, what made them tick. You'd really like this one, Greg. It's written by a doctor." House took the book he offered. FDR's Deadly Secret. He opened it and skimmed a few pages. "That's sort of a medical detective story. I got it because of the history, but you'd like it for the medicine. He's chasing down a diagnosis and trying to prove it. It's an interesting case."

An interesting case. House's ever-multitasking mind went to the egglings. If real life wasn't going to cooperate and give them something to sink their teeth into, maybe history would. His own knowledge of FDR had been mostly centered on the man's polio and on his heroic efforts to conceal the fact he was a cripple from the public. "Does the author know what he's talking about?" Nothing was more annoying than a supposedly nonfiction book written by an outsider who hadn't been any nearer the relevant subjects than Wikipedia.

"He seems to know his medicine; you could judge that better than I could. He is absolutely sure he's right, so it's a little dogmatic at times, but he does present evidence for it and constructs a clear, logical case."

"Hmm." House set that one aside on a lower shelf than the one they were currently filling. They worked on, Thomas extracting the books from the box and handing them one at a time to his son, usually with a comment attached. He really had read all of these. A feeling of unreality gripped House. It seemed so foreign to be working on a task alongside his father. The followup question came in Jensen's voice in his mind. But is foreign bad or simply unfamiliar?

The next box was DVDs, and Thomas moved down to the entertainment center. House followed him as they started to unload that one. The old man's tastes seemed to run the full gamut from old classics to recent releases. He liked Hitchcock, Westerns, sci fi, and even some of Cuddy's chick flicks. There were a few foreign films, French and German so far. The next DVD out of the box brought a protest from House. Bonanza: The Complete First Season.

"Bonanza? You like that?"

Thomas pulled out yet another Bonanza multipack from the box. "I have all of them that are released on DVD, and I'm eagerly watching for more."

"Seriously?"

"What's wrong with Bonanza, Greg? Nice blend of action episodes with an occasional humor episode to spice it up and always plenty of horses. What more could you want?"

House shook his head. "But it's so fake."

They were facing each other now, the work paused. "How is that one especially fake? Anything made for TV or the movies is fake to some extent."

TV had been tightly restricted in the John House household, but he had watched several episodes later. Blythe had quite enjoyed Bonanza reruns once the rules on evening TV were relaxed after he had left for college, and she had praised the series in a letter to him. So of course, he had to watch some after that to pick it apart, and he had immediately realized why his mother had liked it. "They never had any problems," he stated.

"Never had any problems? They were constantly dealing with bushwhackers, gunfights, rustlers, problems in the town. And racism - Bonanza was one of the first TV shows to actually address the subject of racism. They also had the most unbelievably bad luck in love. That family seemed cursed. Every woman any of the four of them ever got interested in wound up dishonest, departed, or dead by the end of the episode. That doesn't sound like lack of problems to me."

"I know about all that, but . . ." House trailed off, and Thomas put it together, his eyes abruptly sad.

"But they were a family; is that it? Even when they argued, when the chips were down, they always were there for each other. That's not fake, Greg. I've known it. You know it now."

To House's relief the doorbell rang at that moment, and Thomas went over to pay for the pizza. After the deliveryman left, he turned back to his son. "Do you want to eat in the kitchen or here?"

House rolled his eyes, secretly grateful that the old man didn't want to follow up on the subject of fake family harmony. "I'm not Lisa. Get your eyesight checked."

Thomas gave a good-natured shrug. "Let's dig down to the couch, then." They threaded their way to it, and Thomas set the box between them, then went back into the kitchen, returning with drinks and the remainder of the platter of cookies and placing them on a handy nearby box. "Is Lisa always that edgy on the subject of horses? It seems stronger lately."

House took a big bite of his first slice. "It is stronger lately. She knows how much Rachel likes them, though. I don't think she'll stand in the way, just worry from the sidelines."

"It might just take time for her to get comfortable with the idea." Thomas munched for a few moments. "This barn is really well recommended. The trainer doesn't start kids on formal lessons until they're at least four. They have to have some attention span and bodily control established to really benefit. So that's about another seven months with Rachel, although she's welcome to visit in the meantime as long as she's directly supervised. Hopefully by that time, Lisa will have settled down some."

"Don't forget, you got the kid into this. You're paying."

"I'd be glad to pay for lessons. Even a pony when the time comes."

House was suddenly struck by a vision of his older daughter, a year or two from now, getting her very own first pony, her excitement, the joy filling every inch of her, a moment she would spend a lifetime looking back on, and he mentally watched her thanking Grandpa Thomas for that. "We can buy our own pony," he said a little sharply. "You pay for the lessons, old man, but the pony comes from us."

Thomas didn't object; he actually looked understanding. "Of course. Abby is really starting to ask more pointed questions. She's changed just in the few months I've known her. Is she like that in public?"

House grinned. "Not any more, not since the night of the grocery store when Lisa told her to save up questions about people and ask us later at home. Have you heard about the night of the grocery store?" Thomas shook his head, and House launched into the tale.

The meal was over almost before he realized it. Odd, the two of them sitting here, separated only by a pizza box, talking. Not mocking, not belittling, just talking. He looked at his watch - the daytime watch - and saw the glimmer of recognition in his father's eyes as he absorbed that piece of data. Thomas knew he had been wearing the other one the last two evenings. He didn't make fun of his son for switching them, though. "I need to get back to work - real work. The egglings will be back from lunch by now."

Thomas couldn't resist that one. "Egglings? Who are the egglings?"

"Egglings are little eggs, unhatched," House said, as if it were obvious. He stuffed down the last cookie and stood up. "Not bad cookies. Stay on good terms with this neighbor." He limped to the door without farewell and was gone. Thomas sat there on the couch in his room full of boxes, finishing the last slice of pizza and smiling. It suddenly felt more like home here.

Two minutes later, the door opened without a knock, and his son silently limped across the room, grabbed the FDR book out of the bookcase, and took it with him as he left again.