Trap Door (14 page)

She stepped back from the door. It was my cue to go. “Thanks for the drink.”

The fabric was blue. I bent to leash the dogs as the door closed behind me and the light in the living room went out. But she was probably still in there, sitting in the dark, not going upstairs to bed on this first night after her son’s death.

She’d be trying to make it last, this brief time when only a day still separated them. Breathing air he’d breathed, touching the things he’d touched, before it all whirled away into memory.

Before he was really gone. But there was nothing I could do about that. In the darkness the world tilted a bit under my feet: that Scotch. The night air cleared my head, though; by the time I finished climbing the rest of the Sullivan Street hill, I was awake and glad to be out of Henny Trow’s too-warm living room.

And still thinking about that blue cloth. Which was why as a car sped uphill from behind me I didn’t notice at first just how fast it was coming.

Its headlights brightened ominously as I reached the narrow part of the street, without sidewalks and bounded by granite outcroppings, hemming me in so there was nowhere to escape.

I drew the dogs nearer to give the car plenty of room. As if on signal it veered and roared straight at me, its headlights swelling to blinding disks.

“Hey!” Fright made me shout as I flattened myself against the granite. “Prill! Monday!” I yelled, yanking the dogs in tight as the car’s lights dazzled me.

Pressing the animals to my legs, I leaned desperately into a niche in the granite, sucking in my breath as the vehicle sped by with mere inches to spare. Exhaust fumes billowed into my face and gravel flew, stinging as it hit me.

Then after what seemed like minutes but was really only a couple of seconds, the car roared away. A hundred yards distant it stopped briefly, brake lights brightening, and I knew it would come back.

Instead, with a shriek of tires it took the turn past the water tower and into Hillside Cemetery, engine howling as it sped toward Clark Street and the fastest way out of town.

Tightening both dogs’ leashes I hurried us all to where the sidewalk resumed, then paused to listen. Nothing. Slowly I began walking home, the animals trotting ahead unfazed as if to say a little accidental unpleasantness was a small price to pay for the pleasure of an extra walk.

But I didn’t think it was accidental. And given Sam’s near miss of the night before, I doubted that it was coincidence.

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subj: Eastport book
Dave
Thanks for the news on the old book. Now that it’s happened I’m uncertain whether to be elated or terrified time will tell, I suppose. I’ll keep a weather eye out for Merkle but doubt he’ll come around. I agree he’s a weird duck, not to be trusted.
I’m afraid I can’t agree with your thoughts re misleading the book’s owner, though. For one thing, she must decide whether or not to go on living in the house where it was found. I think we’ve got to play it straight with her.
But all that is a topic separate from what is to be done with the book itself. One potentially good result of telling the owner all we know about it might be that she won’t want it back.
Meanwhile Lang says nix on the vacation idea for now. He’s deep in research—sends bookishly distracted greetings.
Horace

“You don’t think
she
did it, do you?” Ellie asked the next
morning.

I pretended to consider. “Killed Cory? Hmm, a professional killer with a fine personal motive versus his own mother.”

There’d been no car parked at her house, and even if there had been, Henny hadn’t had time last night to get into one and come after me. “Nope,” I said.

I was perched on a stepladder smoothing patching compound into the holes created when I’d pulled the plastic down from the kitchen window frames a day earlier.

“And you’re sure it was deliberate? Someone actually
tried
to hit you?” Ellie pressed me.

“Oh, of course someone did,” I said crossly. The patching compound, a gray substance with the consistency of loose mud, had a habit of dripping off the putty knife before I could smoosh it into the hole. Some of the compound fell in a glob to the hardwood floor behind the washing machine. But I could remove it later—fortunately, patching compound cleaned up easily if you let it dry thoroughly—with one of the stray socks huddled together back there, too; so
that
was where my good gray argyle went.

“The car swerved all the way over across the road to get at me,” I said, finally managing to get a small dab of the patching compound onto the woodwork, approximately where it belonged. Awkwardly I smoothed it in.

“If there hadn’t been a big enough crevice in that granite along the street, I’d be as mushy as
this
stuff now,” I added, waving the putty knife.

Not smart. Some of the patching compound flew off the knife and onto the windowpane, and the rest went in my hair. And hair is the one thing even dried patching compound doesn’t like to clean up out of.

“Somebody knows we’re snooping,” I declared. What else could explain two recent attempts at vehicular homicide?

Careless driving, maybe; still, I thought odds were against a pair of such similar accidents so close together.

“Well then, have you told Bob Arnold about it? Because if someone’s going around trying to run you and Sam over with cars,” said Ellie, “Bob’s the first one who ought to know.”

“Sure, call the cops.” I clambered to the floor under Cat’s cross-eyed gaze. She’d adopted the new refrigerator without any hesitation; it was the looking down upon people she enjoyed, not a particular spot from which to do it.

“I should tell Bob,” I went on, “that someone tried hitting me,
and
just by coincidence somebody did almost the same thing to Sam, only a night earlier.”

Cat looked scornful. “And I should
also
tell him how sorry I am that no, I couldn’t recognize the car again.”

Its headlights had blinded me. “Nor did I get a look at the driver, and I didn’t get a plate number, either, not even part of one. And neither did Sam.”

In Cat’s opinion, if you couldn’t leap gracefully from things, then you shouldn’t get up onto them. Helpfully she demonstrated the technique by launching herself acrobatically, landing on my shoulder with every single one of her sharp claws fully extended, and teetering there for an excruciatingly painful moment before exiting the room.

I let loose some of the curses I’d practiced while working on the old refrigerator. But there was no point to chasing her; if there had been, her nine lives would’ve been used up years ago.

“I don’t know, though,” Ellie said, packing oatmeal cookies into a plastic box. At the last minute she’d decided a sheet cake wasn’t enough dessert for Cory’s memorial, set to start in twenty minutes.

I wiped the thickest globs of patching compound out of my hair with a wet paper towel as she went on. “What if his mom got fed up with him, maybe decided she deserved payback for all the heartache he’d caused her, got him to Henderson’s barn somehow?” she speculated. “It’s an awful idea, but… ”

Yes. It was. “But she
would
have understood the suicide limitation on the policy,” I said. “Or assumed it. That kind of thing is common knowledge to most people, wouldn’t you say?”

Just maybe not to a teenaged wise guy like Cory, with so little real-world experience or idea of how anything worked. “As for that fabric I spotted at her place, if it was the same stuff I saw on his hand, he probably got it snooping in her things, looking for money,” I said. It was the reasonable explanation. “Hooked a scrap of it on his finger-nail, it was still there when he went to the barn.” Because he hadn’t been in the nail-cleaning habit either, I recalled.

“I used to hide money from Sam all the time,” I added. Although in the end my own wallet had been the best hiding place; after a while of finding only a few pennies for his trouble, Sam had stopped looking there. Even today I kept my walking-around cash in my pants pocket.

“You know,” Ellie said, surveying my patch job on the window frame, “if you just smoothed that some more with the edge of the putty knife… ”

“Yes, and if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a tricycle,” I responded irritably, still rubbing my cat-scratched shoulder. And then I saw it, over by the sink where my dead ex-husband used to stand with a cup of coffee, criticizing me while scanning for tasty edibles he could pluck up and devour.

A Victor-ish shape. Resolutely I scraped patching compound from the putty knife into the wastebasket, and when I looked again the shape had disappeared.

“We should go,” Ellie said. She hadn’t noticed anything. “I’d like to get all the food on the tables before they start.”

For the event she wore a lime green turtleneck under a denim smock, red-and-green-striped leggings that would’ve turned my calves into tree stumps but on hers looked divine, and blue suede clogs.

“Okay.” I surveyed the kitchen. Cat Dancing had returned to the top of the refrigerator; thumping from above said my father was on the roof again, and the dogs snored in their beds.

And Wade was at work, while Sam was I-didn’t-know-where: situation normal. “I guess I can leave for an hour without the whole house falling down completely in my absence,” I said.

As if in reply a horrific crash came from upstairs, followed by a cracking sound, a much larger thump, and a string of profanity that put my refrigerator-inspired curses to shame.

All suggesting that my father had just fallen through the roof into the attic.

“Leave me alone,”
he groused minutes later as Bella dabbed blood from his forehead. “I’m fine. Damned rotten sheathing.”

Luckily the attic had contained a pile of old mattresses some earlier tenant had thought too unattractive to use but too good to throw out. And he’d landed on them.

Mostly. “Hush up and sit still,” Bella told him, inspecting the gash over his eye. “You look,” she allowed reluctantly, “as if you’ll live through the day.”

“Hrmph,” he growled at her. He was the kind of person who if he suffered a calamity and survived, all he wanted was for you to forget it.

But I was the kind who if he tore so much as a hangnail I had to keep an eye on him for an hour or so, to reassure myself. So over his grumpy protests we took him along to Cory’s memorial gathering, where as usual he gravitated to the prettiest female in the room.

“My goodness,” Ellie said at the sight of Walter Henderson’s daughter Jennifer flirting shamelessly with my father. “Sociable, isn’t she?”

The church hall with its white wallboard interior, low ceiling, and green tiled floor still smelled faintly of baked beans and dishwashing liquid from the fund-raising community supper held there the night before. The church ladies had helpfully left all the tables up, decorated with centerpieces of construction-paper spring flowers that the Saturday-afternoon Bible-study children had made.

“That’s putting it mildly,” I replied. Tall, blonde, and so tan that she made the rest of us look like we had blood diseases, Jen Henderson resembled an ad for vitamin supplements. Or surfboards.

Or both. She was wearing a pale blue cashmere sweater over a white wool skirt so short that I could have used it for a belt. While Ellie went to cut more cake for the memorial service attendees, I approached Jennifer; my father retreated tactfully.

“I know who you are,” she said when I introduced myself and offered condolences on the death of her friend.

She wore unusual perfume, a faintly exotic-smelling blend of sandalwood and lime, and she’d inherited her father’s eye color: cool blue sapphire. “You and that other one,” she angled her head at Ellie, “you’re who found him. But he was no friend of mine,” she added. “Don’t get the wrong idea about that.”

Those amazing eyes hardened at some thought she didn’t share with me as around us the few others in attendance—teachers from the high school, a gaggle of rowdy, dungaree-clad young men, a dozen other adults who I guessed might be schoolteachers’ wives and husbands—mingled in quiet conversation. But no one looked as if she could be Cory’s rumored wife.

“I don’t even know why I came,” Jen declared. “What a waste of time.”

I was starting to think so, too. Some of Cory’s buddies had begun engaging in horseplay near the refreshments table. My dad ambled over and with a few words urged them in the direction of the cake; sullenly, they complied.

Then another girl approached us: mid- to late twenties with a jaunty, confident way of moving and short dark hair done up in purple-streaked gel spikes.

“Hello,” she began amiably, grinning at me. “I’m Ann Radham, Jen’s hipster sidekick.” She had multiply pierced ears, a tiny gold lip ring, and horn-rimmed glasses on her snub nose.

“Don’t mind her,” Ann added to me as Jen glowered. “She’s irony-deficient.”

“I want a drink,” Jen Henderson declared in petulant tones, ignoring her friend’s quip and looking around fretfully as if wondering why, now that her wish had been so clearly expressed, the beverage didn’t appear.