Death on the Family Tree (14 page)

Katharine’s legs refused to hold her any longer. She slid down, felt for a thick cushion she knew was there, and sat with arms clutched around her knees and her back against a prickly stud. She had no idea how long she trembled once the sirens died away. Finally, hearing no sign of anyone returning, she opened the phone, rejoiced to see the small square of green light, and punched 911 again.

“I called a few minutes ago, but we got cut off,” she told the operator in a shaky voice. “There was a man in my house. He may be gone by now, but I’m not sure of that.”

“What is the location of your emergency?” It was a different voice, but equally calm. Katharine pictured the woman sitting in a place of safety, a Coke on the console, reaching out with a lifeline. That image did a lot to steady her nerves. Her voice did not tremble as she gave her address and name.

“We have already dispatched units to that location,” the operator said. “They are on their way.”

Relief was followed by panic. “How will I know it’s them? I can’t go out into the house until I’m sure it’s safe.”

“Where are you?”

“Locked in a small room behind a closet in an upstairs bedroom—the one to the right of the stairs. I should be safe here, but—”

“Stay there. I’ll give them your location and they will call out to you, using your name. Would you like for me to stay on the line until they come?”

Katharine would have liked that very much, but the operator might be needed for other emergencies. “No, I’m okay for now. Just tell them to hurry, please.” She slumped against the stud and told herself it was silly to feel abandoned when she had access to immediate comfort in her hand. She checked her phone again to see what time it was, and was astonished that it was still just a few minutes past ten. She considered calling Posey, who was probably piled up on her bed with Wrens watching some old movie, but there was no point in scaring them into getting dressed and coming over when there wasn’t a thing they could do that the police couldn’t do better. Besides, if the intruder was still on the grounds and had a gun—

Katharine refused to dwell on Posey and Wrens getting ambushed in her yard. Instead, she finally asked herself why she had instinctively hurried to that hiding place instead of shoving a chair under her bedroom door and calling 911 from there.

She smiled in the darkness. Jon would be so proud.

His third grade teacher had taught a Safety First at Home course, which involved the entire family. She had arranged for each child to be fingerprinted and photographed for identification, and then she had given each family three assignments.

First, they had to choose a family code word that children would ask for if somebody besides parents or grandparents approached them and said, “Your parents sent me to pick you up.”

Second, they had to designate a place at some distance from the house where they would all gather in case of a fire or tornado. The family had to practice meeting there, to be sure all family members knew exactly where it was, and parents were asked to instruct children to remain there until everybody was accounted for.

Finally, they had to do one project to make their family safer in the home. Parents had to sign a statement that their family had established a confidential code word and a gathering place, and each student had to give an oral report on the family’s project.

According to Jon, most families labeled poisons, changed batteries in smoke detectors, or put medicines out of reach. He revealed more about his family than he knew, for he had decided, “We need a plan for what to do in case somebody breaks into the house when Daddy isn’t here.” He had chosen his own hideout as the place they would go, and he made Susan and Katharine practice climbing in and out of the little door quickly and quietly until they were both sick of it.

Katharine felt her breath grow ragged as she remembered one night when Jon had waked her and said urgently, “Mama, there’s somebody in the house! Come on.” Terrified, she had wanted to pick him up and run for the front door, but he had grabbed her hand and dragged her unerringly through the dark to his room, into his closet, and through the door to the hideout. She found Susan already there, cowering in fear.

Only when the bolt was shot did Jon turn on the light and announce, “Okay, that wasn’t real, but you all did good.”

Now it
was
real. Katharine thanked God for that teacher as she sat in the darkness of the small space that cradled her safely.

She also felt kind thoughts toward Tom. This room was one of the things he had done right in raising the children. At six, Jon had asked for a secret place. Tom had calculated the slant of the roof behind Jon’s closet and figured they could put a hideout there. He and Jon had cut a hole in the closet wall for the door, carried narrow sheets of plywood inside, and pounded down a floor. They had worked together all weekend, lit by a trouble light on a long cord. The next weekend Tom had let Jon help him wire a bulb and a switch. The third weekend they had constructed the door behind Jon’s clothes and installed a sturdy bolt that could be locked from the inside. “Nobody can go in there without your permission,” Tom had told Jon, “but if your parents tell you to open this door, you must obey. You are not to use this as a place to go and defy us. If you do, I will nail it shut. Is that understood?”

Jon had agreed and he had kept his promise. But he had spent many happy hours in the hideout, with friends and alone. It had been a space ship, with an old computer monitor and spools nailed to studs for controls and old sofa pillows for seats. It had been a fortress against various Bad Guys. During one period, Jon had decided he’d rather
be
a Bad Guy, so it had become his pirates’ den. In high school years, it was the refuge to which he fled when he wanted to be alone. But he had never changed it much. The space ship controls were intact. Comics and dog-eared Three Investigators and Encyclopedia Brown mysteries overflowed a rudimentary bookshelf in one corner. Water pistols and other plastic weapons were stashed in an old milk crate. And a crayoned Jolly Roger still dangled from the rafters.

She slid over toward the shelf and felt underneath a stack of comics, expelled a breath of satisfaction when her fingers found the necklace concealed between the soft pages. Then she gasped. The diary still lay on Tom’s desk, where she had been working on it.

Nobody would steal a diary
, she consoled herself silently. She hoped that was true. But when she recalled Hasty’s threat, she shivered in the hot darkness. To distract herself from thinking about the diary, she named and mourned what was likely to be missing: the televisions, her small CD player, her computer, their silver. Insurance would replace it all, but the hassle that would entail infuriated her. What made anybody think they had the right to inflict that much chaos on somebody else?

Then she had a heartening thought. Maybe the burglar had noticed that ugly rug in Tom’s office, rolled and ready for stealing. Maybe she could get enough insurance money for it to refurnish her study.

Sirens screamed so near she knew they must be in her own driveway. Katharine held her breath and heard doors slam, voices call, the doorbell ring. She climbed to her feet and flexed her muscles, then stood rigid with hope until she heard a shout, feet pounding up the stairs, and a friendly call. “Mrs. Murray? Police. The house is secure.”

She climbed awkwardly through the small door and limped into the glare of a bright flashlight that went right through her gown.

As she clutched arms across her chest, the officer courteously tilted the light to show his face. “I’m Officer Williams, ma’am. Your power seems to be out. Do you need me to help you walk?” With the light at that angle he looked like a jack-o’-lantern, all head and no body, but he sounded kind.

“No,” she told him. “I’m just a bit stiff. Did you catch him?” She grabbed Jon’s old blue terrycloth robe from a hook and pulled it on.

“No, ma’am, but we found your front door wide open and your security system disarmed.” That was the second officer, standing in the shadows. His tone was disapproving, as if she had left her door open and invited burglars in. His partner turned toward him to light up his face and badge, which read H
OWARD
. He didn’t look a day older than Jon and stood ramrod straight, like he had a poker up his backside.

“The alarm system must have gone off with the power,” she concluded.

“They have backup batteries,” he said curtly. “You’re sure you heard a prowler?” Skepticism oozed out of every word. “It couldn’t have been the door blowing open?”

She might be standing there barefoot in nothing but a flimsy gown and tatty bathrobe with blood trickling down her leg from one of the scabs that had torn open coming through the child-sized door, but not for nothing was she the niece of Sara Claire Everanes. She tilted her chin and said with hauteur in her voice, “Absolutely not. I heard him moving around, saw his flashlight, even heard him swear. After I was hidden, he came up into this very closet, but a siren scared him off and he ran out. That must be when he left the front door open.”

“But why wasn’t the alarm on?” Officer Howard demanded.

Katharine hesitated with a furrowed brow. Had she rearmed the system after she went for the hydrangeas? Had she even locked the doors? Everything seemed hazy.

“Let’s walk through the house to see if anything is missing,” Officer Williams suggested. He shone the light so she could lead the way.

She saw nothing missing upstairs. As they headed downstairs, the grandfather clock in the hall chimed ten-thirty. To make conversation, Katharine said, “My husband was supposed to come home this afternoon. If he had, we’d have been at the symphony tonight and whoever it was would have had time to empty the house.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Office Williams responded.

But Katharine wasn’t feeling too thankful just then. They had reached the foyer. “Tom’s jade!” she cried. The entire collection was gone.

“Isn’t it insured?” Office Howard asked when she had told them what was missing. He didn’t sound too sympathetic. Katharine supposed on a scale that included rape and murder, a missing jade collection was pretty small potatoes. Still, it mattered greatly to Tom.

“The silver’s still here,” Officer Williams called from the dining room. He shone his light across the buffet, and even from the hall Katharine could see the glint of her grandmother’s tea ser vice, which she had inherited on the death of Sara Claire. She checked the drawer where they kept their flatware and it was all there, as well.

The police moved toward Tom’s library. When Officer Williams’s light roamed the room, she gasped. The stack of dictionary, legal pad, and copy of the diary were still there, but the diary and the jade paperweight were gone.

“Something else missing?” Officer Williams swept the desk again with his light.

“Another piece of jade and an old diary. I had it there, working on it.”

“A book,” muttered Officer Howard from the shadows.

“Maybe you can get some fingerprints,” she suggested. The desk kept a bright polish, thanks to Rosa.

“Doubtful,” said the surly Howard.

“There were none on the front door, either,” Officer Williams told her. “Looks like whoever it was, he was savvy enough to wear gloves.”

Her conscience was asking unanswerable questions.
How much was that diary worth? Why didn’t I put it back in the hideout when I wasn’t using it?

Was it really her conscience, or Hasty’s voice?

The rolled rug still lay on the library floor, but as wedges of light circled the room, she saw that the rest of the jade was gone from Tom’s curio cabinet. At that point she felt like sitting down in the leather desk chair and bawling, but the two officers were already taking themselves—and their lights—to the den and she was too leery of shadows to let the lights get away.

“He didn’t come for electronics,” Officer Howard pointed out, shining his light on the entertainment unit where the television’s big blank eye gleamed back. “If you don’t see anything missing but the jade and the book, shall we wrap it up?”

Katharine was beginning to dislike that young man intensely. “You aren’t planning to do much investigating, are you?” She didn’t bother to keep the irritation out of her voice.

“Ma’am, it’s Friday night. By morning we may have a dozen homicides, gunshot wounds, and drive-by shootings. So far all you’re missing are some pieces of insured jade and an old book. There’s no sign of a forced entry, your alarm was turned off—” His tone was familiar. Her father used to have the same impatience with rich people who thought their sufferings and losses equaled those of the hungry poor. But dammit, she
was
suffering. Wealth doesn’t provide armor against pain.

Office Williams interrupted. “Anybody else have a key to your place?”

“My husband and children,” she told him, “but none of them are in town. And my sister-in-law, Mrs. Wrens Buiton.” She mentioned Posey instead of Hollis because Wrens’s name was familiar to anybody who knew Atlanta. It worked its magic with the older officer.

“Calm down,” he told his colleague. “As much as I hate to say it, ma’am, there’s not much we can do tonight except file a report. We can come back out tomorrow for a good look around outside and a detailed list of the pieces that are missing—”

“We have a list with pictures in our safe-deposit box,” she told him. “I can get that for you Monday morning.”

“Good. Now do you happen to have any suspects in mind?”

“I do, actually.” She hesitated, for words spoken cannot be taken back. “Zachary Andrews was over here this afternoon with my niece, and he spent part of the time prowling in my bushes. He said he was admiring the azaleas, but what’s to admire? Maybe he was doing something to the alarm system. He’s very bright. Maybe he’s clever with electronics.” (She thought, “Or maybe my niece gave him my security code,” but she didn’t say it.) “He also picked up a couple of pieces of jade and looked them over. And he played in this house as a little boy with my son, Jon, and I swear that whoever it was who broke in was coming directly for the hideout when he was frightened away. Zach played in that hideout many times.”