Last Lie (21 page)

"Her state of mind?" She pondered my question for a moment. She turned to face me and looked me in the eyes. "Here's what I think. I'm in that phase of anxiety where I'm still convincing myself there is probably a simple explanation for the fact that she appears to be home but is not answering her phone or coming to the door. A simple explanation that I just happen to be missing. That's the kind of worried I am. Do you ever do that?"

"All the time," I said, allowing Diane room to manage her anxiety. "Does the process work any better for you than it does for me?"

"Not usually. Her state of mind? I came out here, didn't I? All the way from Lee Hill. Hell yes, I'm concerned."

"Can you be more specific?"

"No." She sighed. "I don't think being more specific is a good idea. What about the other side of the house? Over there? Are there any more doors over there?"

"At the back, on that side, there are more windows into the family room. Pretty much the same view of the inside we have from right here. The rest of the first floor of the house at this grade is the attached garage up front. It was added after the war when the kitchen was moved upstairs. We could check the garage to see if any of those doors are unlocked."

We did. They weren't. I said, "And we should probably check the barn. Peter's shop." I had once discovered a body hanging from the rafters in Peter's shop. It was not an experience I wished to repeat.

Diane said, "Mimi wouldn't go in there. She told me that she'd never been in there. It's not her kind of place. She's not an 'old barn' kind of girl. We're what? A couple of miles from civilization? For Mimi, this is like homesteading in Irkutsk."

"I think Irkutsk is a city, Diane. You can't homestead in a city."

"Alan--don't. Irkutsk is both city and countryside. And for the record--but I didn't tell you this--she has a thing about skunks."

"Everybody has a thing about skunks. Do you know anyone who likes skunks?"

"I'm making a point here."

I translated. "The move here was Mattin's thing?"

"You could say that. If it weren't for the view, she wouldn't have agreed to move out here."

Lucky for us,
I thought. "Regardless, Diane, I'll feel better if I check the barn doors. You want to wait here? Or come with?"

"I'll go with you, but I won't go in."

The big barn doors were padlocked the way they had been padlocked almost every day since the time I found the body. The two smaller access doors--one on the south side and one on the north--were both dead-bolted and padlocked. I couldn't think of an uncomplicated way to padlock oneself inside a barn. Diane was going to be spared the indignity of having to enter.

"Told you," Diane said. She insisted that we walk around the back of the house one more time before we give up our search for Mimi. We were just turning the corner below the guest room windows when I heard what I thought was the sound of footsteps. I grabbed Diane's arm and I stopped.

I'm no wilderness seer. In the dark, and that night was getting darker by the moment, I couldn't tell human footsteps from coyote paw-steps or brown bear paw-steps. Raccoons, I knew from experience, could make quite a racket.

I guessed the sound had come from somewhere behind us, but it could have been from the ravine.

Who, or what, would be in the ravine?
I had a plethora of fears: A pack of coyotes. Or a solitary cat. Or a brown bear, especially a mama looking for her cubs.

The reality was that I wasn't sure which I was more wary of at that moment, human visitors or critter visitors. But I was certain that I wished I'd brought Emily with me on this errand.

"Did you hear that?" I whispered to Diane.

"Yeah," she whispered back. I didn't need to hold her arm anymore. She was gripping mine with some ferocity. "Are you worried, Alan?"

Her voice told me that she was worried. But I knew what she was asking. She wanted a reality check. My thoughts had left the extended family of possible critter visitors and moved on to the possible identity of the solitary man that Nicole had seen walking on the lane late on Friday night. "Yeah," I said. "As a matter of fact, I am."

I pulled out my phone and texted Lauren as fast as I could.
Find the kids. Stay away from the windows. Get your Glock.

29

D
iane whispered, "What's a Glock?"

I thought about lying to her. Diane was not someone who would have her accelerating anxiety diminished by the prospect of adding a .9mm firearm to whatever soup we were in. I whispered back, "Lauren has a . . . handgun. Those threats she had a few years ago from . . . that guy? I suggested she get it ready. Just in case."

Diane stood on her tippy toes and put her lips near my ear. "Lauren carries a pistol? And just in case of what? Do you do this every time you get nervous? I thought eating all the chocolate I have stashed in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator was an unhealthy response to anxiety."

Diane made me laugh. I said, "Whatever--whatever--happened here Friday night after you left the housewarming thing has me spooked. I admit that. But right now, I'm just being . . . prudent."

"After we left? How do you know what happened after we left?"

Shit.
I thought of saying "I don't know" but that would have been a lie. More to the point, Diane wouldn't believe me. "Just an assumption," I said instead. Though I quickly realized that was a lie, too.

"I get prudent sometimes, too. Never once has my prudence involved a handgun. Typically involves things like balancing my checkbook instead of relying on the bank."

"I don't have a gun, Diane. But Lauren does. And fortunately, she's the one of us who knows how to use it."

"And tonight, she's going to use it for what?"

"Probably depends what that noise was we heard."

"You guys need weapons to live out here? We live in the mountains and I've never once grabbed a pistol."

"Raoul has rifles."

"For hunting."

"Would you feel better if Lauren had a rifle?"

"No, I'd feel better right now if we were out front, where there is some damn light. Can we do that?"

We doubled back past the door to the walk-out portion of the basement. I tripped over a stone and fell to one knee. Diane was holding my arm so tightly she almost tumbled down with me. Diane leaned over me and said, "I always thought your daughter was named after you."

"What?"

"Grace?" She extended her hand to help me up.

"Cute." My other hand came to rest on something cold. I looked down and saw the shine of a new key. A house key. It had probably been stashed under the stone I just tripped over. I showed it to Diane. "What do you think? You want to go in?"

"Have you heard that sound again?"

"No, but then we haven't been very quiet, have we?"

"Let's get a flashlight first," she said.

"Or we could just turn lights on as we go. We're not trying to sneak up on Mimi, are we? We're trying to find her."

"Point. Is there an alarm?"

"Adrienne didn't believe," I said.

Diane sighed. "I'm not asking if she worshipped them. Just whether she had one."

"No," I said.

I texted Lauren that it had been a false alarm and that all seemed cool. Diane and I were going inside the house to check on Mimi.

I got a text back almost immediately. But it wasn't from Lauren. It was from the cyclist grapevine.

Rafa has a subdural hematoma. Concern about brain damage. We need a lawyer for Kari. Anyone? Still need blood. B-neg?????

The subdural was bad news. Kari was Rafael's wife. She wasn't a rider. But, by all accounts, she was a sweetheart.

"Unimportant?" Diane asked.

"Yeah," I said as we entered the basement level of the house.

Diane flipped on every light switch she saw. She also flicked on a table lamp and a floor lamp. I'd seen operating rooms with less illumination. I didn't say anything.

She waited in the part of the basement that had been the original kitchen, while I went off on my mission to search the darker, more primitive rooms dug into the hillside in the back of the basement. As I headed off down the doglegged hallway past a room with bunk beds, Diane said, "Don't skip any storage rooms that have weird doors or any rooms that have train sets in them."

Diane was making overt JonBenet Ramsey finding-the-body references. They weren't particularly welcome. I didn't say anything. But I didn't skip any storage rooms, either. I searched all the rooms. No train sets. One weird door, but every old basement has at least one weird door. I encountered a solitary surprise--Peter's temperature-controlled wine cellar, a magnificent space he had designed and hand-built to hold and display a few dozen cases' worth of his prized wine, had maybe twenty bottles in the slots nearest to the door. That was it.

Not much wine,
I was thinking,
for a wine nut who has a second home in Napa.

"Nothing back there," I said to Diane as I rejoined her in the room nearest the door. "Weird rooms. But it looks like it always looked. Just less junky."

"Alan," she said as she placed her fingertips on each of my cheeks, "we're not scouting for
Dwell,
we're looking for Mimi."

Although I assumed it was a dig, I didn't know what
Dwell
was, something I wasn't about to admit to Diane. She'd begun pressing buttons on the wall of the old kitchen that was opposite the door. The wall was close to the center of the room. No lights came on. She asked, "What do these do?"

"Nothing. Peter told me they'd been part of the second iteration of a dumbwaiter for the original kitchen. To move stuff up and down to the dining room and a sitting room on the second floor? It's defunct."

"What was the first iteration?"

"Ropes? Pulleys, I guess? It was the nineteenth century. The frontier."

Diane said, "I can't imagine." She pointed at the door adjacent to the wall with the dead buttons. "I didn't go into that room."

"It's the laundry," I said. I walked in. She followed, comfortable that any danger would assault me first. Over my shoulder, I said, "Quasimodern--maybe mid-nineteen eighties. I think you'll be okay in here." My first impression was that it was much more orderly than it had been during Adrienne's time in the house. The old washer and dryer--harvest gold--were still in place.

Mimi was not inside serenely folding towels.

The old wiseguy I had treated named Carl Luppo, the one who left us as caretakers to his miniature poodle, had once told me a story about how he and his gangster buddies had transported recently dead bodies by stuffing them into appliances. "You move a refrigerator into a building," he'd told me, "nobody pays much attention when you move a refrigerator back out of the building."

Small bodies, he'd added, could be transported inside washing machines or dryers. I had assumed at the time that those bodies would require some dismemberment in order to fit into the smaller spaces. Despite my unease, I had confirmed those suppositions with Carl. Dismemberment was not a topic that made him queasy.

I checked inside both the washing machine and the dryer. No bodies, no laundry.

"There's a laundry chute," Diane said. She was examining a curved sheet-metal pipe that terminated above the kind of canvas bin on wheels one might see in a small commercial laundry. The canvas bin was empty. "I told Raoul I wanted one in the new place."

"One what?" I was having trouble letting go of the image of an armless, legless torso stuffed into the front-loader.

"A laundry chute."

I said, "Your new place is a condo. It will all be on one floor, Diane."

"Maybe it could be something pneumatic," she said. "That would be cool."

Diane was determined not to learn how to text. Her mobile phone was older than my daughter. She continued to e-mail as though it were 1999. But she was interested in having a compressed-air cannon installed in her new home so that she could launch her husband's used underwear to her new laundry room.

I shook my head as we climbed the stairs from the basement to the main floor.

Diane remained in charge of turning on lights. She continued to overperform. I did the snooping. Since I was looking for something the size of an adult woman, my task wasn't that difficult.

Some big boxes had been stuffed into the back of the walk-in pantry in the kitchen. A couple of them were large enough to hide a body. I lifted one--it was too light. The second one, I opened. It contained a big ornate hanging pot rack. Wrought iron.

The only area on the first floor that gave me any emotional pause was the guest suite. I was reluctant to go inside. And I was also anxious to go inside. When I did open the door, I felt instant dismay.

The room had been freshly painted. New art on the walls. New window coverings. None of that surprised. What caused my breath to go shallow when I gazed into the guest suite was the fact that the bed was stripped to the bare mattress. No mattress pad. No sheets. Nothing. A few more steps revealed that the adjacent bathroom was devoid of hanging towels or any other linens. There were no bars of soap in the shower or at the sink. No throw rugs or bath mats were on the floor, anywhere.

I sniffed the air. Both rooms reeked of chlorine and Lysol. I opened a small linen closet. It, too, was empty.

Diane stood in the doorway while I did my poking around.

"Is this the way Mimi would usually leave a guest room?"

"Not really. She's fussy, but this is a little over the top. She probably hasn't gotten around to it since she got back, that's all."

I wondered whether Diane was being disingenuous or whether she really didn't know that one of her friends had spent the night in the guest room. "Has Mimi had guests already?" I asked.

Diane walked out of the guest suite without replying to my question. Her explanation about the sterile appearance of the room seemed vague. Something wasn't adding up for me.

I found no one hiding under the bed--I stayed behind and checked--or stuffed in the wardrobe. The bathroom was unoccupied.

As I rejoined Diane near the fireplace, she looked at me for a second before she looked away. She said, "That took you a while."

I nodded. "I'm trying to be thorough. I thought that was the point."

She said, "Okay," while she made a face that made it clear that she didn't believe me.

We went up the stairs to the second floor. The upstairs rooms weren't difficult to search. The only bedrooms the family had moved into were the master bedroom and the study/office. I opened a big linen closet that faced the hallway outside the entrance to the master bedroom. The closet was neatly stocked with bed linens and towels.

No Mimi.

As she climbed more stairs, Diane was growing more comfortable with our adventure. After she finished in the master suite and told me the office was "clear," she wandered into Jonas's old bedroom. "What's this?" she called to me.

From the hallway, I responded. "A special place that Peter built for Jonas. Adrienne called it his cubby. Peter called it a knothole. Jonas loved hanging out up there."

"How do you get in? It's too high off the ground. Especially for a little kid. He was a little kid back when Peter was still here."

Peter and Diane had a history I'd never learned about. I would ask Diane someday. But not that day.

I joined her in Jonas's old room. She was standing in front of the knothole. On the other side of the room, a couple of dozen moving boxes were piled along one wall, but no furniture had been moved into the room.

"There's some secret passage opening in the closet. Peter built it all himself. Jonas has never shown me how to get in. I've never pressed him on it."

I reached up and pulled back the curtains so Diane could see all the details of what Peter had built into the knothole. "It's empty," she said.

"It's a special, private place Jonas shared with his father. Or at least his father's memory. There's also a secret compartment of some kind hidden on the side with those shelves."

Diane was shaking her head. "Must be a boy thing."

"It's like having an indoor tree house. A special cave. Look at the wood, Diane, the way all the grain comes together. The joinery. It's great cabinetmaking. Jonas used to keep all his little-boy treasures hidden in there. It was--is, really--a very special place for him."

"Okay. Great kid place, I get it," she said. "But a secret passage? Really?"

"That's what Jonas told me."

"He wasn't pulling your chain? You can be kind of gullible, Alan."

I considered defending myself, but didn't. I could be kind of gullible. One rule of clinical practice that I'd learned the hard way was that the more skillful the sociopath, the less I should be his therapist.

Diane, of course, started digging around in the closet looking for the entrance to the secret passage. She was pressing on the walls, stamping on the floor, feeling along the molding and trim for hidden switches. Her efforts were futile.

"Come on, we're done in here. No Mimi," I said after giving her half a minute to solve the puzzle of Peter's secret switches. "Let's turn off some of the lights you turned on, lock up downstairs, and go." She agreed.

I walked Diane to her Saab. She said, "You've been home since they got back from the airport, right?"

"Yes."

"And neither you nor Emily heard a car come down the lane? Right?"

"Right."

"Her car is here, but she's not here. How did she leave? She's not someone who would walk out of this neighborhood. She has to be around somewhere."

I thought about the conundrum. "What if she left earlier with Mattin? He may have dropped her somewhere on the way to wherever he was heading when he got in the accident. He might have planned to pick her up later."

"I didn't think of that," Diane said. "But that doesn't explain why she's not answering her phone."

"It could be in her purse on vibrate. The battery may have died. Stuff like that happens all the time. It's technology."

"Which means she may not know why Hake hasn't picked her up. She may not even know about the accident."

"That is possible, too," I admitted. "Unlikely, but possible."

Diane pulled her phone from her pocket. She said, "No, it doesn't make sense. She would have called one of her girlfriends if Hake hadn't picked her up. If she couldn't reach him, if she needed a ride. Someone would have called me. It's the way . . . we do things. Us girls."