Trap Door (28 page)

Carrying a thick black leather-gripped assault baton in one hand, he slapped its lead-weighted business end into the palm of the other.

Oh, my aching head. There was nothing I could say and I was too scared anyway to speak. He stopped a few feet from me, still slapping the baton.

“You would be looking for… ?” he asked fake-helpfully.

Looking for trouble, was what I’d been doing. And I’d found it. Yes indeed, I’d found a great big heaping helping of…

“Jemmy Wechsler.” Henderson answered his own question. “Your old pal and compatriot. As you can see, he isn’t here.”

Annoyance seized me and with it my voice returned. “I’ve noticed that.” Because what did I have to lose? Alone with what amounted to a serial killer—

I meant let’s face it, when you added up his numbers the fact that he got paid for them was pretty much beside the point, wasn’t it?

—who was getting ready to bonk me. Maybe to death. And there was nothing I could do about it. So yeah, I mouthed off a little. My final words.

So sue me. “You son of a bitch,” I pronounced carefully.

It was a good bet I wouldn’t get to say any of this again. Or anything else either, for that matter.

I wanted to make sure he understood me. “You murdered that kid because he was in your way. You made it look like suicide so you could go on with your main plan. Killing Jemmy.”

A bolt of guilty sorrow pierced me. I’d been wrong even to try searching here; Jemmy was already dead. The others, too, even the baby.

Because standing here with him, I understood something about Walter Henderson that I hadn’t before: that when you confront a guy like him and ask the age-old question about how could a person do such things, you’re ignoring the obvious.

The fact, I mean, that a person couldn’t. That no matter how civilized he’d been able to make himself appear in the past, this wasn’t a person but a hideously clever facsimile like one of Fred Mudge’s puppets. One that in Henderson’s case possessed flashes of human feeling; he cared, apparently, about his daughter.

But it was the way he expressed his feelings that revealed his true nature: murder, mayhem. That was why I was so shocked when he reached past me and unlocked the cellar doors.

The lock was a simple push-button affair, not a chain on the outside; in my fright I’d simply missed it. The doors swung open onto a set of concrete steps leading up to the night sky.

“Go on,” he said, waving outward, apparently so I’d know in which general direction I ought to remove myself.

“The bodies are in the barn, aren’t they? You’ve got them in the barn,” I said from outside the cellar.

Because of course they were all dead. Henderson looked up at me, his dark shape silhouetted in the lights from behind him. “Would you like to look?” he invited.

The barn’s high roof loomed against the sky: dark, silent. From his confident offer I knew it would be empty. He’d found somewhere else to stash them.

As I turned he spoke once more. “I’ve behaved with restraint so far, as I’m sure you will agree, Ms. Tiptree. But… ”

He didn’t have to finish. I knew a threat when I heard one. Gathering my courage and what few shredded tatters remained of my dignity, I turned my back on him.

Two minutes later I was gunning the Fiat out through the gates, weeping partly in relief because they actually opened and partly because my head was killing me.

Seriously killing me. But mostly I wept because Henderson
had
murdered Jemmy and the others by now; I was certain of it. That was why even in the face of my invasion of his home he’d been so cool and contemptuous: his mission was accomplished.

And he was getting away with it. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, when I got home all the house lights were on.

Wade was back.

At two in
the morning the stitches in my scalp woke me by the simple, efficient method of feeling as if they’d been lit on fire. Wade slept deeply, dead to the world as I slid out of bed. Once he’d heard the story of my evening and of the past couple of days, he’d read me the riot act I deserved, then offered an idea.

“Maybe she works for him,” he said, meaning Ann. “Maybe she deliberately met Jen in one of those city clubs. On his say-so.”

“Oh,” I breathed, seeing the sense of this. “Because if he knew Jen was going into Manhattan and hanging out in places where she might… ”

“Yeah, get in all kinds of trouble. And he might realize he couldn’t stop her. So he’d get her a minder.”

That explained why Ann had taken me out to the house when I demanded it, too. Not because she was really guilty of something but to learn what I was looking for, on Henderson’s behalf.

Whether she’d then told him I was there or he’d discovered it himself hardly mattered. “Get some rest,” Wade had ordered finally, and I’d promised to.

But I couldn’t sleep. The way I’d failed Jemmy was making me crazy; that and the fact that I was never going to see him again. In the bathroom I fumbled for the switch, squinted at the sudden flare of light, and decided not to look at myself in the mirror as I opened the medicine cabinet.

Pawing through old bottles of remedies for ailments we no longer had, plastic bags with only one cotton ball inside, and other pharmaceutical flotsam and jetsam, I found a tube of Xylocaine ointment and another of antibacterial gel originally meant for the dogs.

I’d sent the bacitracin home with Ellie. Smooshing a generous amount of what I did have in the palm of my hand, I put the mixture on my scalp, hoping the numbing effects of the Xylocaine would stay on the surface while the anti-infection gel sank in, and not the reverse. Because I already felt stupid but that was nothing to the way I felt when I turned around.

“Hi, Jake.”

It was Victor, standing in the bathroom doorway looking the way he did before he got sick—i.e., snotty and superior.

“Damn it, what the hell are you doing here?” I snarled, taken aback. Even when he was alive a visit from Victor was no big joy-fest, and at the moment I was in no mood for it.

“Beats me,” he replied with a disarming shrug. “I think I missed getting the instruction booklet,” he added.

I blinked; there was an instruction booklet?

“But since I am here—or maybe I only seem to be—anyway, I’m sorry,” he said.

Now I was sure I must be dreaming. He’d never admitted not knowing something in his life, and as for feeling sorry…

“Yeah,” he said, seeming to read my thought. “Not much like me, is it? But you know, it’s different here.”

“Really?” I peered closer at him, intrigued in spite of myself. “How different?”

He seemed to step back from me but the funny thing was, his feet didn’t move. More like he was near to me and then he was—

Farther. The effect was startling; I let out a little gasp of fright.

“Sorry, sorry,” Victor repeated, telescoping away from me. Now he was halfway down the hall and sort of dissolving; I could see through him all the way to the linen closet. Did he mean sorry for frightening me? Or for something else?

“Victor,” I managed, weeping again but this time without tears. You always suppose that if somehow you could talk with the dead, you could communicate.

“Sorry… ”
The word hung in the air, whispery.

Or imaginary. He shrank to a pixel and winked out.

When I first
came to Maine I thought my old house might end up being too huge for me, that after Sam grew up and moved away I might end up rattling around in it like a marble in a box. But when I got up the next morning, I found the whole place so crowded you’d have thought my home was an airport waiting lounge, especially with the roaring noise coming from above the attic.

It sounded as if something was trying to land up there and not having a good time of it. “Hey,” Wade said, getting up from the kitchen table to embrace me.

“Hi,” I said. Just breathing made my head ache; being hugged made it feel as if the top of it might pop off.

“Mom,” Sam began anxiously from where he stood loading his laundry into the washing machine. His eyes widened at the sight of my injury.

“I’m fine,” I assured him as Wade handed me coffee. A couple of fellows I didn’t know were there, too, standing at the kitchen counter finishing their own cups. Wade had apparently put Prill’s mind at ease about them and vice versa; the big red dog lay relaxed in her dog bed, half asleep.

My appearance, however, was a different story; when they saw me, the strangers vamoosed. They were the carpenters, I realized, come to help my dad do the tricky stuff on the roof. But the way I felt, I didn’t care if they were all up there planting explosives.

“Never mind,” I told Sam wearily when he tried to question me. I’d taken a gander at myself in the hall mirror, too, and as a result the carpenters’ hasty exit didn’t surprise me.

Because the surgeon who’d worked on my scalp was no doubt very accomplished at gallbladders and appendectomies. But he wouldn’t be winning any awards for fine stitchery anytime soon; I looked like an unhappy cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and a sewing machine demonstration. “Where’s Bella?” I asked.

“In the dining room,” said Ellie, who stood at the stove warming up a midmorning snack of macaroni and cheese for Lee. The latter was in her playpen—the ear infection was better, I gathered—amusing herself by grabbing Monday the Labrador’s nose whenever the animal pushed it between the bars to tease her.

Cat Dancing observed scornfully from atop the refrigerator. “Reading,” Ellie added.

The notion of Bella reading while the kitchen looked as if a tornado had struck it was astonishing, but I was too beat to pursue the topic. The roaring from upstairs continued. Occasionally the sound was punctuated by a heavy thud, as if somebody was lopping off the ends of big beams with a power saw.

“He’s lopping off the ends of big beams with a power saw,” Wade said.

“Oh, goody.” Taking a deep breath, I let myself notice even more unaccustomed mayhem. Besides all the dirty dishes and Sam’s bags of dirty clothes, the kitchen also contained a duffel bag lumpy with the laundry Wade had brought home from the freighter; I recognized it by one of the red socks sticking out at the top.

Also: a sorry-looking heap of kitchen rugs Bella had been meaning to shake out and wash, the countertops littered with crumbs, plus a basin and a clean rag for her standard daily routine of wiping down everything in the whole house that didn’t actively try making its escape.

The basin was empty, the rag dry and unused. A crash came from the attic; I wondered if possibly we ought to evacuate, but no one else suggested it and I was too tired, not to mention too damned bone-deep miserable.

“Bella’s on the last chapter of another one of those mystery novels we brought home,” Ellie informed me. “And she doesn’t seem able to stop.”

Thus the undone chores. “Good for her,” I muttered. A tear slid down my cheek just as another hellacious crash from above made everyone flinch.

“There was,” Wade informed me gently, “even more demolition work needed up there than your dad thought.”

I nodded, unable to trust myself to speak. “You sure you’re okay?” Wade asked. I nodded—ouch—then went through the phone alcove to peek into the dining room.

“Bella,” I said, hesitating for fear of startling her. I’d seen her concentrating before: while distributing Cat Dancing’s flea powder so evenly into her fur, for instance, that you’d have thought it had been put on grain by grain with tweezers and a magnifying glass. Or bleaching a stain out of a sink.

But I’d never seen her so
absorbed,
sitting in a dining room chair with a book open on the table before her, gobbling it up with her eyes.

“Hah!” she exclaimed suddenly, finishing the last page and slapping the book shut. “I knew it!”

Tossing it aside—several more, their covers ranging from 1940s noir to 1990s Miss Marple reissues—littered the table. She reached for another from the box at her feet, then saw me.

“You see,” she began, “they put in clues. And if they do it right and you read ’em careful, you still won’t know who done it. But you’ll think you should’ve.”

Her big grape-green eyes shone with enthusiasm. “
And
in the books, the bad one always gets his in the end,” she finished with just the right amount of lip-smacking satisfaction.

The right amount for my purposes, that is. Because she was correct; in books, the bad guys always got theirs. But another thing often happened in those books, too: a revelation scene, in which the participants gathered for the unmasking of the culprit. And on account of that I was getting a new idea.

“Punishment,” she breathed; just the frame of mind I wanted her in. That plus her fascination with puzzles and her obsessive need to clean up messes could do me a lot of good.

And Henderson some harm. Bella’s face clouded guiltily. “Oh, my,” she remembered aloud in dismay. “All them dishes still in the sink and I never did get to the laundry or the carpets… ”

From upstairs came a final-sounding crash, followed by the slam of the attic door. Footsteps descended the stairs.

My father, I supposed. “No, Bella,” I said gently. “That’s all right.” In fact, compared to her usual manic activity this was a relief. But it wasn’t why I urged her to sit and select another book.

It wasn’t the reason at all.

“Well,” said Bella
indignantly a little later after the men had gone—Wade down to the freighter terminal, my father to the hardware store for another saw blade, and the hired carpenters on lunch break—and I’d told the story about Victor showing up in the upstairs hall the night before, then vanishing. “I call that plain rude,” she declared.

“I call it indigestion,” said Ellie. “Or those pain pills you got at the emergency room.”

“I haven’t taken any pain pills,” I retorted. “Or anything else.” The Xylocaine seemed at last to be doing the trick on the stitches; I still had a significant headache but I didn’t want to take anything for that in case it made me feel dopey.

Victor was death on over-the-counter medications for head injury anyway. He said they messed up your clotting ability and if you were going to have a brain bleed you should have one on account of your primary trauma, not some rinky-dink drugstore item that probably wouldn’t work. For pain he’d liked morphine, especially at the end, when he’d needed so much of it himself.