Trap Door (24 page)

As we entered the circle drive leading to the house, the pavement gave way to the white pea gravel I’d noticed before. “Because ‘speak truth to power’ is still good advice,” I added.

We stopped; no sign of giant, slavering monsters… er, I mean dogs. “Although when the power carries a gun, maybe not so much,” Ellie pointed out. “Here goes nothing.”

“Last one in is a rotten egg,” I agreed, and we dashed for the porch across the wide expanse of gravel just as the enormous animals launched themselves from beneath nearby hedges.

“Run!” Ellie yelled, which was not the advice I needed just at the moment.
Fly!
would’ve been better, along with precise, immediately comprehensible instructions on how to do it.

Liftoff in particular was the maneuver I wanted; I could feel the dog’s kibble-scented breath on my neck. And then…

Wait a minute. I stopped, turning to face the dog. My heart was still pounding so hard that I could feel my tonsils pulsing at the back of my throat. But even in the face of that big toothy kisser right in front of me, it didn’t add up: attack dogs
plus
a flock of purebred, fabulously expensive sheep?

Nuh-uh. “You don’t bite, do you?” I asked the dog. “I mean, not unless somebody tells you to.”

The dog’s eyes, at first as cold and unfeeling as a pair of ball bearings, softened at my tone. Its tail twitched uncertainly and began wagging.

“Ellie,” I said, but she’d stopped, too, staring as her own doggy pursuer skidded to a halt. Then, seeing we weren’t going to provide them with further sport, both dogs sauntered back to the hedges and lay down again just as Jen Henderson came out onto the porch.

Honey-gold hair and long legs in white shorts, a T-shirt on a body that got a regular diet of serious athletic workouts… but from the look on her face I thought we’d have been better off running from the dogs.

“Get in here,” she ordered, gesturing sharply at us as Ann Radham appeared beside her. Ann’s horn-rims shone in the sunlight and her grin was chipper as usual. But it faded when she recognized me.

“Move their car,” Jen ordered, “around back.”

I tossed the keys at Ann, who ambled amiably to the vehicle. Today her earrings were little gold four-leaf clovers and the red filigree pendant at her throat was a Chinese good-luck charm.

Jen’s angry tone drew my attention back. “My dad will be home any minute and he won’t be happy to see you here,” she said, beckoning us toward the porch.

Then why,
I wondered,
are you letting us in?
But the answer to that was clear once we got up the carpeted staircase to her room. “What do you two want?” she demanded.

Which let me know
she
wanted to know what we were up to. “Did you tell Cory Trow what your dad does for a living?” I asked. “And later did you tell your father that you had?”

Her face flattened. “What are you talking about?” Her room’s walls held posters of rock bands, snapshots of people at parties, torn concert tickets—all the small trophies of a happy teenage life, plus some large ones. Three gold-plated softballs mounted on teak bases sported inscribed plaques that read
All-State Champions.

So she really was a softball phenom. “Come on, Jen. It’s an easy question. Did you tell him your father’s a hit man? That he kills people for money?”

Tears sprang to her amazing sapphire-colored eyes. “How dare you say a thing like that?” she demanded quaveringly.

Ann’s voice came from the hall. “Hey, Jen, you okay?” Her purple-streaked head poked in through the half-open door.

“Fine,” Jen snapped. Her mirrored dresser was cluttered with gadgets, including a BlackBerry and two cell phones, one of them the pink model whose directory had caused a famous “It girl”—her name rhymed conveniently with
heiress
—a lot of trouble.

Ann hesitated, not liking it that we were there hassling her friend. “Why don’t you all come with me?” she tried. “I’m playing at the Bayside tonight, I need to go down there and—”

“Go on, then,” Jen ordered impatiently. “They’re not staying long.”

Ann nodded doubtfully. “Here,” she said, thrusting a handwritten poster at me. “For the gig tonight.”

Always the promoter; I supposed the performers got a percentage of the fee charged at the door. I folded the poster without reading it and stuck it into my pocket. A moment later came the sound of the front door closing downstairs.

“My father is retired,” Jen Henderson said tightly. “What he did for work is none of your business, but it’s not true what you just said. And anyway… ”

Ellie stood by the windows overlooking the long backyard. Through them the barn where we’d found Cory’s body was visible, a sight that still gave me an internal chill.

I repressed it, concentrating on Jen. “… anyway I wouldn’t have told Cory anything like that even if it was true. It’d be none of his business, either.”

One of the dresser drawers was open an inch. Inside it a jumble of jewel-toned colors caught my eye. Without asking Jen’s permission I walked over and yanked the drawer open the rest of the way.

It was full of silk scarves, the faint scent of her exotic perfume wafting from them. “What the hell are you doing?” she protested. “You can’t just—”

“Hey, you know what? A kid got hung in your barn the other night. A kid you were playing around with like he was another one of your rich-girl toys.”

Her face flushed. “Hey,
you
know what?” she shot back. “It wasn’t my fault. I mean I’m sorry. It’s a shame what happened to Cory. What he did. But I
told
him he’d better not—”

She stopped abruptly, biting her lip.

“Told him what, Jen? That if he didn’t scram, your father would take care of him?”

“He already had,” she grated out angrily. “That’s how my dad
took care
of things, not the way
you
think. We made a complaint, he got charged and convicted, and he was probably going to jail.”

“Right,” I said. “Likely he was, especially after he didn’t show up for his sentencing hearing. And from there, he couldn’t keep coming around trying to get back in your good graces.”

I couldn’t stop looking at the scarves. Jen stalked past me and slammed the dresser drawer shut. “So what?” she demanded.

“So I guess his heart was broken,” I answered with all the sarcasm the ridiculous statement deserved. “I guess Cory Trow, a scheming little delinquent so mean his own mother gave up on him, decided to end it all. Over you.”

I paused to let the foolishness of that notion sink in. Jen was sharp enough to get it, too. “Maybe he just didn’t want to go to jail,” she offered weakly.

“Maybe. And maybe that’s why he decided to use what you had told him.” Ellie moved from the window, took a few quiet steps to the other side of the room.

“I
didn’t,
” Jen repeated insistently, but I interrupted her.

“Up in the barn loft… that’s where you met, right? I mean that love nest in the hay wasn’t from one of the landscapers meeting his favorite sheep up there or something?”

The crudeness was deliberate, meant to shake her further and distract her, if possible. It did; with her back half-turned she didn’t notice Ellie’s hand moving casually toward the drawer of her bedside table.

Opening it. “You’re disgusting,” Jen quavered. “Why would anyone want to kill Cory anyway?”

The last time I’d seen an expression like hers, it was on the face of a deer in the headlights one night when Ellie was driving us home.

“Sorry,” I said as a tear slid down her cheek. “I guess girls like you don’t enjoy thinking about murder. Living on the proceeds, though, that’s another matter, isn’t it?”

Yeah, like I should talk. But my own past wasn’t the point. Ellie slid the drawer shut, having had a look inside. “Or maybe you murdered him,” she suggested, out of the blue.

Jen was a big girl, tall and large-boned, and in good shape. Once she’d gotten him into the loft she could’ve overpowered Cory long enough to get a rope around his neck and shove him.

My money was still on her dad because this kind of murder—the kind planned in advance—took more than physical strength. Still, might as well follow up on Ellie’s remark. “So where were you the night Cory died?” I asked.

She stiffened. “Asleep in bed,” she replied promptly; just as Ann had said. “And I think you’d better go. My father will be home soon.”

Right; we didn’t want to run into him. And I thought we had all we were going to get out of Jen, for now. But at the door I turned.

“You did tell Cory, though, didn’t you? About your dad, what he does for a living. It must’ve seemed like a good way to get rid of Cory, scare him off with what your dad might do to him if he didn’t beat it.”

Her lips tightened. “But facing jail,” I persisted, “he decided to use what you told him. So you were forced to tell your dad that if Cory served any time on the stalking charge, he meant to spread some news.”

Jen’s eyes blazed but still she said nothing.

“And having that info get around would have screwed up something important for your father,” I finished, “isn’t that right?”

Wordlessly she shook her head, lunged forward. “Shut
up
!” She shoved me blindly. “Get
out
of here!”

The dogs stayed put; the gate at the end of the drive opened automatically to let us out. “Poor kid,” Ellie murmured.

“I guess.” Henderson could’ve used one of the scarves as part of a scheme to trick Cory into the loft somehow, I mused as we left the estate. And in the final struggle—although not much of a struggle, or there would have been more marks on Cory’s body than a single small bruise—the victim grabbed a piece of it.

Unless it really was just a scrap of his mother’s sewing project. “Ellie? The drawer you looked into… what was inside?”

She cleared her throat. “Um, well… let’s see, now. How do I put this? She had some personal items.”

I glanced at her, surprised. Ellie wasn’t the shy type and there wasn’t a lot in life that we couldn’t talk about. Just for example, owing to a small scheduling problem, she’d had her baby in the middle of my kitchen floor.

We drove past open fields, boggy glens full of pussy willow, and the tumbled remnants of old house foundations, the latter like dire warnings of what could happen to mine if that roof didn’t get fixed soon. “Well?” I demanded.

Her cheeks grew pink with embarrassment. “Oh, Jake. There was a pair of pink plastic handcuffs. Some bottles of stuff like hand cream, only it wasn’t. And a… device. A sort of a battery-operated… device.”

I personally wasn’t a big fan of purchased sex toys, since in my opinion the human body already comes fairly well equipped with them. But as Wade would’ve said, whatever floats your boat.

“So Jen’s a little kinky,” I mused aloud.

Ellie giggled. “Cory must’ve thought he’d gone to heaven.”

Yeah, even before he did. “No wonder he didn’t want to give her up without a fight,” I agreed. The silk scarves, I thought. Were they an element of the fun and games, too? Could that be why one of them had been used to help lure him to his death?

We turned past the ball field and the defunct railroad yard. What was left of the old roundhouse still showed through the newly green grass, although the rails and ties had long been torn up and discarded.

Three blocks later my house came into view, complete with an enormous blue plastic tarp spread over half the roof. My father had needed to buy it, I thought guiltily; his request had slipped my mind again. I didn’t think the mountain of newly delivered lumber and roof sheathing was a good sign, either.

“Hey,” said my father, striding out from behind the house. “There’ve been developments.” What he’d torn out of the roof now lay on the lawn, and from the look of it there was enough scrap there to build another whole dwelling.

Or there would have been if it hadn’t all been wormholed and rotten. Although…
were
they wormholes? I bent to peer at a chunk of old beam.

From the outside it appeared undamaged but what remained of its interior was a lacework of membranous wood, reducing the beam’s strength to nearly nothing. Dry, powdery dust dribbled from within, but the beam itself was wet.

“Carpenter ants,” I diagnosed sorrowfully. “And it looks like they’ve been here awhile.”

“Yup.” My dad looked sympathetic. “Leak around the chimney got the wood wet, and that’s what those ants love. Looks as if half the beams are infested. Treat it all for insects, sister ’em up, we can probably save the rest.”

Splice in new pieces, he meant, at a cost of approximately a gazillion dollars. And besides the materials, it would take real, professional carpenters and exterminators; this was no job for an old-house amateur, even one as good as my father.

I sighed. “I guess there’s no other help for it, and it looks like you’ve got it under control.”

If you could call all the brand-new roofing material plus the attentions of an ant killer who billed by the nanosecond “under control,” that is. The phone rang inside and Ellie went in to answer.

“I’ll just nail my checkbook to the kitchen counter where everyone can get at it conveniently,” I told my father.

Ellie came back out looking troubled. “What now?” I asked. “Furnace exploded? Pipes backed up? Electrical wiring spitting sparks out onto the oh-so-flammable parlor carpets?”

Because when one big thing goes wrong in an old house, the other major systems all get the same idea, like grade-school kids acting out because one of their classmates did.

“That was Fred Mudge. He got your number off a card you gave Trish.” I followed Ellie inside where I noted that no floors had collapsed and the panes weren’t falling out of the windows.

“What’s he want?” I opened the refrigerator. Cheese, baked beans, half a loaf of Bella’s spectacularly good brown bread, and a couple of bottles of root beer… at least we had lunch.

But in the next instant my appetite dwindled to nothing. “Trish and the baby are gone,” reported Ellie. “Since last night, Fred Mudge says, and she didn’t take anything with her, not even baby stuff.”

When Sam was that little I’d practically needed pack animals to lug around his gear. “Did he call the police?”