Trap Door (27 page)

She stiffened, but managed to produce the requested facial expression. Smart girl; the way I felt, I’d have had no problem moving my hands a few inches upward and twisting her head off.

“Why should I?” Ann demanded when I’d marched her across the seating area and through a set of French doors, leading to a hall with the restrooms at one end and the fire exit at the other.

“Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Jen you’ve been stealing from her,” I replied.

I knew nothing of the kind. I just knew rich people always suspected something like that. This time the jab hit home harder than I expected, though. Ann’s pixie face blanched guiltily.

“Hey, I don’t care how far into her pocketbook you are.” I took her arm; she didn’t resist and I walked her out through the emergency exit, down the gravel-paved alley to the street.

“Fifty bucks here, a hundred there,” I persisted; might as well have her good and scared. It would make her obey me better.

But her answering look said I’d underestimated: not fifty or a hundred dollars. More, maybe a lot more. I aimed her at the Fiat, which I’d left at the curb. She gave a little sideways hop to avoid stepping on a crack in the sidewalk, got in and slammed the door.

As we were pulling away she looked yearningly back at the warm wash of light spilling from the Bayside’s window. “I’ve got to be back in time to—”

“Yeah, yeah.” I gunned the Fiat. “You’ll be there in plenty of time to play your second set,” I told her, heading out County Road to the Henderson place.

Not that I cared if she was. “So, are they home?”

“No. Listen, I hope you’re not going to tell—”

“That you’re a sneak thief? Depends how the evening goes.” I drove past the small wooden houses on either side of Marble Street. Inside, folks were watching television or sitting down with their knitting or taking hot baths; peaceful endeavors.

Maybe if this girl had been more forthcoming earlier, I’d be doing one of those things, too, instead of nursing a head bump the size of an ostrich egg, complete with a laceration big enough to let the ostrich out.

“From here on out I’ll ask the questions and you’ll answer. So where are they and how long d’you think they’ll be there?”

“Jen and her dad?”

I made a face. “No, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Come on, Ann, let’s not get off on the wrong foot. You won’t like the result.”

She nodded, replied hastily. “They’re at the ball game. The girls’ team here in town. Jen’s pitching.”

“Daddy’s watching?” Another grudging nod. And sure enough, as we passed the ball field at the edge of town, tall banks of white lights glowed over the diamond.

I happened to know the girls’ night games didn’t start until eight. That gave me about two hours; plenty, unless something went wrong.

More wrong, I mean, than things already had. I kept shoving Jemmy’s disappearance to the back of my mind, along with all the worst possible explanations for it.

But it kept popping up again, grinning like the clown from a scary jack-in-the-box.

“S-so what d’you want me to do?”

The closer we got to Henderson’s place, the more nervous Ann grew; you’d think she’d been raiding Fort Knox. We pulled up in front of the gates. Lights from the house winked intermittently through the trees. “You can get in, right?”

Faced with actually doing it, she balked. “Yes, but… ”

That’s the thing about unwilling co-conspirators: they take so much goading. “So you are ripping her off, aren’t you?”

Her expression darkened but she said nothing, the gold four-leaf-clover earrings winking in the reassuring glow of the Fiat’s dashboard lights. “What is it, a credit card scheme? Or does she keep so much cash around, you can just dip in whenever you want without her noticing?”

Sulkily Ann drew a keypad from her bag, pressed buttons on it. The gates swung open. “Shut up about me, okay? Just do what you came to do. And for your sake, I sure hope you know what that is.”

If I hadn’t been so mad, scared, and practically on my knees with the headache I still had, I’d have burst out laughing at the thought of me knowing what I was doing. I mean besides
looking:
all over the house, the grounds, and in the barn, in case Jemmy was here alive and I could get him out before Henderson murdered him.

The others, too, of course: Trish, the baby, and Mudge. But mostly Jemmy, because when I said I’d be dead if it weren’t for him, I meant it. The gates closed behind us.

“So
did
Jen tell Cory what her dad does for a living?” I asked as we approached the big house.

I still thought she had and that Henderson had killed Cory on account of it. Then he’d snatched the others who might betray him believably—because Cory might’ve told Trish, and she could have told Mudge—before homing back in on his original target: Jemmy himself.

“What he
did,
” Ann corrected me flatly. “
Did
for a living. He’s been retired for a couple of years now.”

“Aw. That’s sweet. Took a pension, did he, got a gold watch? They gave him a party, then he magically turned himself from a paid killer into a harmless old duffer who wouldn’t hurt a flea?”

The paved driveway transitioned to that dratted pea gravel. The crunching tires-on-stones sound was
loud
. The yard lights were on, too. The porch in particular looked like a trap. But at least no ravenous dogs appeared, and the lights inside the house had that motionless look: nobody home.

Ann scowled. “You’re on the wrong track, you know. The whole idea of Jen telling Cory anything is ridiculous. Do you have any idea how much trouble she’d get in if she—?

“What, then? What
is
the right track? What do you know that you’re not saying?” But at this the girl fell stubbornly silent, her narrowed eyes and tight, angry mouth letting me know she thought I was being really mean.

“Oh, please,” I told her. “Wipe that snotty look off your face. Like I give a rat’s ass about your opinion of me.”

The scowl vanished, replaced by resignation. “Pull the car around to the rear, you’ll see a place.” Behind us the driveway remained empty, no headlights moving on it.

So far. I eased the Fiat around to the side of the house, into the dark.

“I don’t know why you even think any of this is any of your business, anyway. I mean, you stick your nose in, stir up a whole lot of trouble, maybe even get
me
in trouble—”

“Ann. I’m losing patience with you. Maybe I’ll just go back to the ballpark and tell Henderson that you—”

“Okay, okay.” Trapped, she put her hands up in a surrendering gesture.

As we left the car behind us in the shadows, it struck me that I was out here looking for three full-grown adults plus an infant, and the Fiat was for all practical purposes a two-seater.

But it was too late to worry about that now; if I found them all, and I should be so lucky, I’d just have to put the top down and they could sit in each other’s laps. I doubted they’d object.

Ann let us in. I scanned the hall leading to the living areas and back to the kitchen; there I glimpsed the glowing green “ready” lights on the panel for the alarm system. A couple of empty duffel bags sat on a bench against the wall. I eyed them questioningly.

“Jen’s leaving in two days for a couple of weeks of practice with her new team,” Ann explained. I glanced around a final time at the deluxe interior of Henderson’s trophy house; over it all hung the smells of cedar and beeswax, lemon oil and camphor…

Eau de cash,
my dead ex-husband Victor used to call it. “So are you just going to stand there?” Ann prodded.

“No. Where would he hide somebody?”

Her dark eyebrows went up in surprise. “I don’t think… ”

“Good. Just show me.”
Hope springs infernal,
Jemmy always said. Or used to say; Ann led me to a door leading off the hall.

“Goes to the cellar.” I paused in front of it. The doorknob sported a Block lock, the kind it takes heavy explosives to open if you don’t have a key, and when I tapped experimentally on the door it made a heavy, metallic noise like the door to a vault.

The cellar was a safe room, I realized; of course Henderson would have one. There was a light switch by the doorway; Ann flipped it and reached past me to open the door. A clean, well-built set of varnished blond oak steps led down between pristine white-painted walls.

Silent, clean, empty. At the bottom of the stairs a green tiled floor stretched vacantly away into what resembled an office corridor with white walls and white fluorescent fixtures recessed into the acoustical-tiled ceiling.

Doors lined the corridor, three on each side. Suddenly I didn’t want to go down there where I might find Jemmy’s body… or more. “What’s in the rooms?”

“Nothing.” I’d heard of that, never experienced it. Any time my own cellar wasn’t full of water it was full of things we would never use again but couldn’t quite bring ourselves to throw away.

My least favorite was Victor’s treasured set of surgical tools. But now I was glad I’d kept them. If my headache got any worse, I planned using them on myself when I got home. The knit cotton cap atop the scalp stitches had been a particularly bad idea. Ann’s eyes widened suddenly as footsteps sounded on the pea gravel outside.

“Oh, shit,” she muttered in heartfelt tones. Swiftly she shut the light off and closed the cellar door, leaving me on the wrong side of it.

But first, with the speed of a snake striking, she pushed me.

Hard.

Well, of course
Ann had pushed me. The great and terrible Walter Henderson was coming home, and there I was sneaking around his house with her help. It made perfect sense that she would want to get me out of sight fast, so I was more okay with her action than I might have been. My question was, would she tell him I was here?

Probably not. It was in her interest for me to get away so that (a) she wouldn’t be asked about my presence and (b) I wouldn’t betray her thievery against Jen in a (no doubt futile) bid to save myself.

What I really didn’t like was the darkness. I’d had my hand on the rail when the shove came, so instead of toppling down the steps, I’d more like scampered down them. But the only light came from another grid of glowing LEDs at the end of the corridor.

Slowly my eyes adjusted so that by the light’s faint gleam I could see the walls and doors again. Footsteps crossed the floor over my head, moving to the kitchen. Next came a
chunk!
of the big refrigerator door closing and a clatter of ice from the ice maker.

He was fixing himself a drink. So Ann
hadn’t
told him about me. That gave me breathing room; not much, but a little. And to go with it I had a scrap of information, the kind of stray fact you learn by accident, never thinking it will do you any good.

Like this: Once upon a time you could move to Eastport, buy land, and construct anything you wanted on it. Those times were gone, though; nowadays you had to obey the building code, many details of which I knew due to my own house requiring another building permit approximately every ten minutes. And the building code said a cellar had to have a door to the outside.

True, cellar doors were usually locked. But if I’d had a safe room like this one in my cellar, I’d have put in a quick way to exit it from the inside. Creeping down the corridor, I paused to open each door and briefly switch on every light in each of cellar rooms. As Ann had said, they were empty except for one that held winter sports gear: skis, poles, skates, hockey equipment.

Jen’s, I supposed. As I went along I tried not to remember that each room also had a small, high window at ground level; that building code again. If Henderson looked out he’d see those lights going on and off. But there was no help for it.

Five rooms opened, one to go; no Jemmy, no anyone else. Metal strips were inlaid into each door frame, making me wonder again about that alarm system. Even if I couldn’t hear them, they should be going off somewhere. I’d seen the system’s panel of “ready” lights in the kitchen.

The green lights down here belonged to a backup panel, showing the system still activated and featuring a big red panic button. Another safety feature; you could press the button, summoning the cops.

Still, by now I’d done about a dozen things that ought to have set the alarms off and nothing was happening. Which meant the alarms were disabled, either because they’d malfunctioned or because they’d been shut down; so much for summoning help via the panic alert. Switching out the final room light, I made my way to the end of the hall; time to pray that there really was an emergency exit.

The cellar doors I’d hoped would be there actually were; oh happy day. As I reached eagerly for them, however, lights blazed on. “Looking for something?” Walter Henderson asked, smiling as he descended the stairs toward me.

Biting my lip in sudden terror, I shoved the doors. But they wouldn’t open and a heavy metal rattle from outside told me why; a chain had been thrown over them and fastened.

Probably with a padlock.

Brush-cut silver hair, faded remnants of a Florida tan, eyes like
iced sapphires coldly focused on me… casually strolling down the basement corridor at me, Henderson kept smiling.