A Tap on the Window (17 page)

THIRTY

“I’m
going to have to call you back,” Sanders said to his ex-wife. He ended the call and handed the phone back to me. The color had drained from his face.

“She said—”

“I heard.”

I turned off the cold water still streaming down from the showerhead. “Claire told you her mother was going to pick her up?”

“That’s what she said.”

“What kind of car does your ex-wife drive?”

“Um, one of those little convertibles. A Miata.”

“Not a Volvo wagon.”

Sanders shook his head. “No, she doesn’t have one of those. Neither does her husband.” He looked imploringly at me. “Where the hell could she be?”

“Looks like she accomplished exactly what she set out to do,” I said. “She didn’t just give whoever was following her the slip. She gave everybody the slip. You think this war between you and Perry was really enough to make her want to disappear?”

No hesitation. “Absolutely.”

“That’d suggest Claire doesn’t even trust you to keep her whereabouts secret. Does that make sense?”

He raised his hands in frustration. “Christ, I don’t know.”

Annette crossed the hall and came into the bedroom in a pair of killer heels. She was wearing a scoop-necked black dress that showed off her ample cleavage, plus a hint of a lacy push-up black bra that was assisting the process. A sexier getup than when I’d seen her outside the furniture store. “What’s going on? Did you tell Claire? Did you tell her about Hanna?”

“She’s not with her mom.”

“Well, then, where is she?”

Neither Bert Sanders nor I said anything.

“You don’t know?”

“We don’t know,” I said.

“Oh shit,” she said.

Sanders met my eye. “What do I do now?”

I felt like telling him to pray that Claire hadn’t met the same fate as Hanna, but I’m not a particularly religious man. Plus, it would have been a pretty shitty thing to say. So I came up with something else.

“Start calling around. Her other friends, boyfriends. Teachers.”

“I’ll ask Roman,” Annette said. For my benefit, she explained, “My son went out with her for a while. Maybe he has an idea where she might have gone.” She bit her lip. “Although I kind of doubt it. It’s not like they’ve been talking that much.”

“They used to go out,” I said.

“Yeah. But she broke it off. Roman took it hard.”

I didn’t have it in me to feel bad for Roman at the moment. My head was still throbbing from where he’d hit me.

“So, anyone you can think of,” I said to Sanders.

And then I felt like slapping my head. “Try her cell,” I said, and handed him my phone again.

He entered a number and listened. “It’s gone straight to voice mail. Claire? It’s your dad. Where the hell are you? I just got off the phone with your mother. We’re both worried sick. If you get this, call me right away, okay? Just call me. Or call Mr. Weaver. I’m using his phone. Please, okay? I love you.”

Sanders handed the phone back to me.

“If it went straight to message, it means the phone is off, right?” he said.

“Or the battery’s dead,” I said.

“This is terrible. I just don’t know what— No, I’ll do what you said. I’ll start asking around.”

I felt, at that moment, some small sense of relief. I didn’t have to carry all the weight of this on my shoulders. Sanders had a better handle on Claire’s friends than I did. He might have her tracked down before I could do it.

What nagged at me was why Claire had lied to him. She’d told him why she wanted to go, but not who it was going to be with. The surveillance video I’d seen at Iggy’s showed she’d gotten into a car with someone.

“Okay, you do that,” I said. “We’ll talk in the morning, see where we are. That sound like a plan?”

Sanders nodded.

Annette had a concern of her own. “You’re not going to tell anyone about us, are you?”

“Tell you what,” I said. “You can buy my silence with a lift home. I’ve had some car trouble tonight.”

* * *

I
ran out to the cab, rapped lightly on the window so as not to scare the driver to death, and settled up with her. I scanned the street for cop cars and didn’t see any, although there were a few regular vehicles parked along the curb. I suppose it was possible someone was slunk down behind the wheel of one of those.

Then I walked briskly to the rear of Sanders’ house and mounted the steps to the kitchen door, just in time to see Annette slip out of Bert’s arms. He’d left the outdoor lights off, which meant Annette needed a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness so she could navigate her way across the yard, around the garage, and between the houses that backed onto Sanders’ property.

Luckily, no dogs barked and no motion-sensitive lights flashed on. Annette was, indeed, unsteady on her feet—her heels were three inches at least—going from grass to gravel to sidewalk and taking care to sidestep trash cans, bicycles, and lumber scraps, so I took her hand and led her through the worst of it.

“Why the hell I wore these shoes I’ll never know,” she said. “Well, of course I know. Is there a man alive whose motor doesn’t get a kick start from high heels?”

It struck me as a rhetorical question, so I let it go. Once we’d come out from between the houses and were on the sidewalk of the next street over, I let go of her hand. But she latched onto my elbow and held on until we were almost to her car.

“You’re a nice man, you know,” she said. “I’m sorry for all your troubles.”

We were coming up on a black Beemer sedan. “This one,” she said, taking a remote from her purse and hitting the button. The taillights flashed. “Why were you taking a taxi, anyway?”

“Long story,” I said, and slid in on the passenger side.

There was no need to tell her where I lived. During Scott’s stint at her store, she or Kent had dropped him off several times. Scott wasn’t old enough to drive, so Donna or I usually chauffeured him back and forth. But when we were occasionally unavailable, he got a lift with friends or coworkers.

“I really appreciate you keeping quiet about me and Bert,” she said as she buckled her seat belt. “I mean, this is probably just a passing thing with Bert anyway.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m a realist. I know Bert. I know what he’s like.”

“And what’s he like?”

“Oh, come on,” she said, putting the Beemer into drive and easing her foot down on the gas. “Like you haven’t heard.”

“He likes the ladies,” I said.

“That’s putting it mildly.” She laughed. “I know I’ve only got a limited amount of time with him before someone else catches his eye. It’s why Caroline left him. He was screwing some other professor at Canisius.” I thought about Donna’s comment, about the woman at work Sanders hit on when she was a student and he was still teaching. “For a while there, he was even doing it with someone else at work.”

“His work?”

“No, mine. Rhonda McIntyre?”

I didn’t know the name.

“Hot little thing, I admit. And about forty pounds lighter. But what she had on me in the youth department I could more than make up for in experience. Bert thinks I never knew about her, but I could tell. The way she looked at him when he came into the store, or if they ran into each other on the street. It was back in the summer. He still believes I think he was only seeing me. Anyway, Rhonda doesn’t work for us anymore.”

“Did you fire her?”

“She quit all of a sudden, couple of months back. I think she actually left town, got a job somewhere else, broke it off with another guy—a cop, as it turned out, who she was finding kind of freaky, and who didn’t know she was seeing Bert on the side. Or on her back.” Annette chuckled. “Just as well she quit. I’d have had to find a way to cut her loose, dropped some hints to Kent that she was taking an extra cut off the top with cash deals, fudging some receipts, something. But in the end, I didn’t have to. It’s bad enough, knowing this thing I’ve got going with Bert has an expiration date, but while I’m still in the ‘best before’ days, I want him to myself. You think there’s something wrong, wanting a bit of excitement in your life?”

“I guess it depends what kind. Maybe you should try white-water rafting.”

“It’s just that my life these days . . . it’s just
life
, you know? Today’s going to be like yesterday and tomorrow’s going to be exactly like today. But with Bert, even if it’s just for a while, I can have a few days that aren’t like all the others. You have to admit he’s a handsome man. I mean, you can say that and it doesn’t mean you’re gay or anything.”

“He’s a handsome man,” I said.

“He’s got the looks to be a lot more than a small-town mayor. He could be a governor or a senator or anything like that if he decided that’s what he wanted.”

“It’s not what he wants?”

“He’s not ambitious that way,” Annette said. “He just wants to make a difference wherever he happens to be at the time. He cares about being a good mayor, about doing what’s right. That’s why he’s in this fight with Perry, who, I just want to say, is not
that
bad a guy. I think he does right by this town, and I’m not just saying that because he’s Donna’s brother, you know? Maybe he goes a little overboard now and then, I’ll grant you that. But Jesus, you don’t really think he has Bert’s house bugged, do you? I mean, that would be—that’d be bad.”

I shrugged.

“How’d you get looking for Claire in the first place?”

I told her, briefly, about the night before.

“God, kids,” she said. “You can never predict what they’re going to do.” She appeared to be thinking. “This thing with Hanna—that’s just so awful. You think maybe Claire ran off because she knows who did it?”

“Claire took off before it happened, so no.” I pointed. “We’re almost to my street.”

“I know.” Half a minute later, she brought the car to a stop at the end of our driveway.

“How are you and Kent doing?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Annette said.

“This thing you have going with Sanders—you don’t have to be a genius to figure out it means you and Kent are going through a rough patch.”

“It doesn’t have to mean that,” she said.

“So things between you are perfect?” I asked.

“No couple on this planet has a perfect relationship,” she said. “Do you?”

When I hesitated, Annette jumped in. “God, I’m sorry. With what you’ve been through, I don’t know how I could have said that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Listen, sometime I’d like to go up on the roof again.”

“Oh, Cal.”

“I just . . . I’m still wrestling with this, Annette. I keep playing it in my head, how it happened.”

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll mention it to Kent. If you don’t hear from him, if he doesn’t call you, then you’ll know he’s not okay with it.”

I was betting I’d never hear from him.

“Thanks for the ride. Oh, and would you say hi to Roman for me?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Sure. Why?”

“We kind of ran into each other earlier tonight. Tell him I’m thinking about him.”

* * *

Donna’s
car wasn’t in the driveway, so I figured she must have put it in the garage, which she didn’t do very often. I let myself into the house as quietly as I could and went to the kitchen, thinking I’d have a glass of water, then realized I’d gone through another evening without any dinner. I opened the cupboard and took out some saltines and peanut butter. Not exactly fine dining, but a few smeared crackers would keep my stomach from growling through the night.

Stealthily, I put the dirty knife and glass into the dishwasher and crept up the stairs. I tiptoed through the bedroom, but I stepped on something hard and there was a sudden cracking noise. Not all that loud, but loud enough, I feared, to wake Donna. When I didn’t hear her stir, I knelt down and patted the carpet until I found what I’d stepped on. One of her pencils. I’d snapped it in two. I picked up the pieces, noticed that the small can of spray fixative had hit the floor, too, and scooped that up, then slipped into the bathroom.

I waited until I had the door closed before turning on the light, put the broken pencil pieces in the trash basket, the spray can on the counter, and disrobed. Stripped to my boxers, I brushed my teeth, then killed the light before opening the door.

It hit me then that Donna usually left the bathroom light on for me.

My eyes were taking a while to adjust to the dark, so I made my way to the bed by instinct, pulled back the covers on my side, and slipped between the sheets.

I knew the moment I was in the bed that something was off. I blinked hurriedly until my eyes were accustomed to the absence of light—as though that might somehow help—then sat up and looked at the other side of the bed.

Donna was not there.

THIRTY-ONE

The
porch light helps her as she slides the key into the front door and turns the dead bolt. She’s surprised, when she opens the door, to see her son standing there in the front hall, having seen him only a few hours earlier.

“You scared me half to death,” she says.

“You’re not usually out this late.”

“What’s going on?”

“Things are working out,” he says. “I had to tell you. I didn’t want to wait till morning.”

“You’ve found them?”

“No, but I may have found a way to find them.”

She throws her purse on the closest chair. “Please don’t get my hopes up.”

He tells her what he’s done. He has been, she must admit, a busy boy. “That’s a lot of running around,” she says. While she remains skeptical, he does seem to have thought this through.

She likes one of his ideas in particular. “That’s a good plan, to use the detective,” she says. “I saw him earlier.”

“We put him to work for us, except he doesn’t even know it,” he says.

“It could work.”

“I feel like it’s coming together.”

“Don’t get carried away,” she snaps. “We’re a long way from being able to put this behind us. If the boy took the book, when you find him, you have to get it back. I should have cottoned to the fact that he’d given it away sooner. Usually when he fills a notebook, he asks for a new one, and I get him one. But he didn’t ask this time because it was too soon. He’d probably only filled half of it. He figured I’d get suspicious.”

“You’re worried too much about that damn book.”

“No, I’m not. You need to take this seriously.”

“Are you kidding? You think I’m not taking this seriously? Really? Look at the shit I’ve had to deal with. I’ve been thinkin’ on my feet. Like with the other girl, how I made it look like something it wasn’t. How about a little credit for that?”

“I’m going to bed. I can’t deal with this one more minute.”

“It’s your fault, anyway, you know,” he says.

That stops her on her way to the stairs. “What did you say?”

“Leaving the house while the dryer was running, not being here when the lint caught on fire. If there’d never been any smoke, none of this would have—”

Her hand moves so quickly he doesn’t have a chance to stop her from slapping him across the face.

“I will not have you speak to me that way. Who do you think all this has been for? Huh? Who’s it all been for?”

He puts a hand to his hot, red cheek. “It’s been for Dad,” he says.

“No,” she says. “It’s always been for you. All of it. I did it all for you, and so help me, God, it looks like I’m going to have to do more before we’re done.”