Trap Door (2 page)

But that wasn’t the kind of thing you told a little girl who idolized and adored you: that her father was maybe the most respected and feared professional killer on the whole east coast. And later… Well, the time had just never been right.

So at the outset of this whole business, Walter had merely asked Jen if she didn’t think a town kid with no money and no prospects was maybe a little beneath her.

“Oh, Daddy,” she’d responded indulgently, looking up from the magazine she was reading. “What an old-fashioned way to look at things!”

Yeah, it was. He was an old-fashioned father. And his daughter’s answer had told him her reaction to his comments, too: she wasn’t taking the hint.

That had been in the winter when she was home for holiday break. As soon as Jen returned to school, he’d arranged to have the kid prosecuted for stalking; an easy task, since maybe the local yokels didn’t know who Walter Henderson was but the state yokels certainly did. Enough of them, anyway, to get accomplished what Walter required.

The kid’s public defender, a jug-eared bumpkin with a boil on his neck and dandruff on his suit, had looked appalled at the sight of Walter’s expensive legal team, the courtroom equivalent of a tank full of piranhas. Jennifer had come home for only a single day to testify, and despite her furious resentment she’d said exactly what he told her to say.

Or else. He’d been clear enough about that. And even if she didn’t know the nature of his employment, she knew he controlled the purse strings: her tuition, pocket money, clothing allowance, car, all the rest. She was a smart girl, his Jennifer.

Just not quite smart enough.

The verdict, predictably, had been guilty. Disposition: the defendant was out on bail until the sentencing hearing.

Which, Walter recalled as he stood very still on the barn’s main floor, was tomorrow. But his pending court date apparently hadn’t deterred the kid in the slightest.

Walter turned slowly in a half circle, feeling the concrete beneath his moccasins, sensing the bulk of the timber-constructed loft in the shadows above. Silence. Except for… What the hell?

Suddenly he was all business, both hands on the pistol grip, feet planted like an athlete’s. Gun up in a practiced stance, his eyes scanning the darkness, he swung to the left and right.

No one there, although he still had the strong impression of
someone
very near. Silent, or
almost
silent…

Calm down,
Walter ordered himself. Cat-footed, he eased forward, feeling his pupils dial out to take advantage of any stray gleam. But… nothing.

Puzzled, he moved stealthily back out to where the barn’s massive rafters rose high above his head unseen. The darkness up there was cavernous. The sound he’d heard had likely been just a barn beam creaking. Or a mouse.

Then annoyance at the stab of fright he’d felt hit him: Goddamn it, why hadn’t the kid just given in?

Although Walter’s own infrequent court dates had never had much effect on him either. None, actually, he recalled as he approached the loft stairs again. Because like anyone else in his business he’d accepted that sometimes you took one for the team, sometimes you didn’t.

But once upon a time Walter had
had
a team, an organization in which his own place was secure and unquestioned and to which his loyalty had been supreme.

This kid didn’t. This kid was either too stupid to know he was going away or too foolish to care.

If he
was
going away. Walter took another step. If instead the little punk didn’t end up with a suspended sentence. Because a guilty verdict was one thing but a sentencing decision was another. And unless a judge was securely bought and paid for, you never knew what one would do.

Doubt over this was one reason why Walter was out here in the dark, sneaking around his own barn in the middle of the night with a gun. He padded toward the row of pine-board enclosures already made comfortable with straw bedding for the next bunch of animals he planned to acquire when the weather got warmer.

He already had sheep paddocked in their own shelter at the other end of his property. He meant to add goats, maybe a llama. After all, a man couldn’t be a country squire without livestock. The idea amused him. But his smile faded swiftly once more at the memory of his final encounter with the kid, only a week earlier.

One last chance, he’d decided, which by itself was uncharacteristic of him. And he’d already known that it probably wouldn’t work, that if the court’s order
and
a felony conviction wouldn’t stop the kid, then nothing else would.

Only one thing would stop him. Still, for Jen’s sake, Walter had made it his business to run into the boy in front of the hardware store down on Water Street in Eastport’s tiny business district.

“Sure, Mr. Henderson, I understand,” the kid had replied when Walter, in reasonable tones, had explained his concerns. Jen had a future, college and a career to look forward to. Jen had a life.

Unlike you,
he’d wanted to add. The kid had a pretty face and curly blond hair like an angel’s, but that was the only even faintly angelic thing about him. His smile was mocking—that alone would have gotten him killed back where Walter came from—and he wore torn dungarees, ratty sneakers, and a T-shirt that said
The Liver Is Evil and Deserves to Be Punished
on the back.

“I sure am going to miss her, though,” the kid added slyly. His inflection deliberately left no doubt about just which of Jennifer’s many fine qualities he most would regret losing.

You know nothing of regret,
Walter had thought clearly. “I’m sure you will,” he had replied, his own voice gone soft. Back in the city, men who heard that tone out of Walter generally reacted by soiling themselves in terror.

But the kid just stood there grinning impudently at him. Walter yearned to tear the T-shirt off his back and ram it down his throat, preferably in front of the smirking gaggle of friends who hung back a little ways listening.

“Tell Jen I said so long, though, will you?” the kid added. “I mean, since I’m not going to be seeing her again.”

All the while his snotty expression and his eyes, alight with ignorant malice, conveyed another message entirely:
Get stuffed, you stupid old fart. I’ll see her if I want to see her. Do anything else I want to do to her, too
.

Then the kid had turned and swaggered away with his sniggering pals—also clad in T-shirts, though the temperature was a bare fifty degrees—into the hardware store, leaving Walt out on the sidewalk watching his reflection in the store’s front window as he ran a hand over his short silvery hair.

Smiling to himself because Walter now knew what the score was, which the kid so clearly did not that it was pitiful. That conversation was the other reason why if the kid was out here in the barn tonight, Walter was going to kill him.

And he was here, no question about it. Being very quiet. But with senses sharpened by thirty-plus years at the top of a human food chain so brutal it made jungle man-eaters resemble tenants of some particularly benign petting zoo, Walter could feel it.

Smell it, too, as if the new creatures he meant to acquire for his estate were already inhabiting and fouling the place. Walt’s nose wrinkled involuntarily as he took another step into the darkness.

And… that sound again.
Creak-creak
. Was it a beam? In its faint regularity it summoned the mental picture of a boat tied to a pier, moving with the gentle swells of the sea, a rope rubbing against wood.
Creak…

Creak
. Only not quite. Familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He knew the smell, though. He hadn’t been expecting it, not yet, but all at once its identity came to him.

The smell of death.
Oh, Christ…

Jen.
No…

Dropping the pistol as a rush of ice-watery terror poured through him, Walter Henderson scrambled back to the barn door, its window a rectangle of deepest marine blue against the darkness of the wall.

Had the kid killed her? He fumbled against the particle-board panel to the right of the door, where the new circuit breaker box and the light switches were hung.

Had he? Walter’s breath came in painful gasps. Oh, sweet Jesus God in heaven, had the stupid little son of a bitch done that?

“Jen?” he shouted, all possible need for stealth evaporated. Never mind the kid, who could and most certainly would be dealt with later. All Walter wanted, all his every shrieking brain cell required absolutely right now, was to see…

His frantically searching hand found the light switch and flipped it. White light flooded the barn’s interior, from the fluorescent panels hung on chains beneath the rafters.

Half blinded by the sudden brilliance from above, Walter turned in a helpless circle, feeling as if he’d been impaled on an icy spike.

“Jen? Goddamn it, Jenny, I know you’re in here.”

Frantic, he flung himself at the loft stairs, the gun all but forgotten as he tossed heavy straw bales aside.

“Jenny?” he gasped. Then a bright scrap of cloth caught his eye. It was one of her silk scarves. She had a drawerful of the things, a tumble of them in jewel-toned colors like a sultan’s riches.

Snatching the scarf up in both hands, he pressed it to his face, inhaling the perfume he’d smelled earlier, drunk with it as he turned. “Jenny!” he bellowed.

No answer. Staggering forward, he peered over the railed edge of the loft, down the side wall of the unfinished office room and across the barn floor.

Silence again. Hope pierced him; maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe this time she hadn’t been lying to him. Maybe she’d been upstairs in her bed all along. Asleep, safe…

Then he felt it through the thin soles of his moccasins, up through the loft’s floor. An odd vibration; slow, rhythmic, and occurring in time with the sound he had heard.

Was still hearing now.
Creak…
It came to him all at once, what the sound was. What he would find when with trembling, sweat-slick fingers he grasped the big iron handle set into the top of the loft’s closed trap door.

Nearly weeping, Walter strained at the heavy thing, hauled it up and fell to his knees at the opening’s framed-in rim, the sweet-smelling silk scarf still clutched between hands pressed together as though in prayer. Below him through the square trap door opening lay the office room: dark, enclosed, silent.

Or almost silent. “Jen?” Walter whispered. The soft perfumed folds of her scarf caressed his cheek. “Jennifer, honey, are you down there?”

Creak…
The sound slowed, stopped. Steeling himself, the most respected and feared professional killer on the whole east coast bit back a whimper.

And peered over the edge.

My name is Jacobia Tiptree and when I first moved to
Maine, the last thing I expected was for my dead ex-husband Victor to end up haunting my house. My idea was to repair the ramshackle old dwelling and live happily ever after in it.

Which right there was absurd. I no more knew how to rehabilitate an antique house than I knew how to jump off the rooftop of one and fly.

Soon after I moved in, for example, I found a springy spot in the hall floor. And springiness, I’d heard, meant weakness. So I jumped energetically on the spot in order to test just how weak it really was, whereupon my foot went through and the rest of my leg followed, all the way to my hip.

And there I stayed. I couldn’t pull my trapped leg up past the broken floorboard, whose sharp splintered ends already threatened several of my favorite arteries. I couldn’t go down, either; the floor around the hole felt solid as concrete.

So I waited: one hour, then two. Monday, my black Labrador retriever, came and sniffed me, then went away again, bored. The trashman came, and the meter reader. Neither heard my shouts, and the mail carrier passed by without stopping.

Finally my son Sam came home from school and found me there, furious and humiliated. “Mom,” he said gently, looking down at me and taking in the whole sad situation. “You know, I think maybe the next time you decide to make a hole in the floor… ”

Right.
Cut it with a saw
. Although at the time I’d have preferred just using a bomb, and if it blew me up, too, I might not have minded very much. Because the alternative was repairing the house, which as a personal-injury generator was already showing itself to be (a) efficient and (b) murderously creative.

Meanwhile, my ability in the happily-ever-after department looked doubtful as well. For instance, back in the city I’d just finished divorcing a guy whose idea of faithfulness consisted of leaving his wedding ring on his finger while he slept with other women, an activity he pursued so regularly you’d have thought he’d entered a contest, and if there’d been one for most commandments broken in a single marriage, Victor would have won it.

And I had Sam, whose idea of sobriety was… well, I’m not sure what my son’s notion of sobriety consisted of then. Before we moved here he was mostly too drunk, too stoned, or too strung out to think much about it at all; at age thirteen, his liver most likely resembled a pickled herring, his eyes were so bloodshot and frantic that they looked as if they belonged on a cartoon character, and as for his brain, I preferred not to imagine its probable condition.