War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (29 page)

“I’m not sure he did,” I said.
“It sounds like a bunch of factors came together to change both of their lives.”

“The incident,” Mrs. Whickam said.

“If I had to guess,” I said.
But I wondered if it was as simple as that.
I wondered what else I might find, the more I looked.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Tuesday morning, I called Whickam’s neighbor in Harlem.
The neighbor, an elderly man, said that he hadn’t seen anything suspicious, but he lived half a block away.
He would check the apartment for us, and I would call him the following morning.

After I hung up, Malcolm, Jimmy and I got into the van.
Malcolm took us to the only promising place he had found.
The address was in Fair Haven, on the Quinnipiac River. From a distance, Fair Haven seemed pretty.
Lovely old buildings nestled against a hillside, with just a few smokestacks rising above
the trees
.

But once we got into Fair Haven proper, the illusion of beauty vanished.
Most of the buildings on the wide street were boarded up and covered with graffiti.
Many of them had broken windows or empty storefronts.

People loitered outside, watching the cars go by and catcalling.
A number of the loiterers turned away from the cars, hiding their faces.
If I wanted to buy drugs, I had a hunch I
c
ould have an easy time of it here.

We headed toward the smokestacks. The closer we got, the hazier the sky grew.
White smoke drifted out of the stacks, almost like trapped clouds escaping darkness.
The effect would have been pretty if it weren’t for the acrid odor that seemed to
permeate
everything.

Rusted scrap metal and junk lined the river’s edge,
obscuring the view of 
the picturesque harbor.
Children played in the dirt beside the scrap heap, and I shivered at such a careless disregard for their safety.

Malcolm had me turn down a street that followed the river. The street was old and narrow, with broken pavement that denoted a road of long
use
.
Beside it, broken-down buildings, most of them empty warehouses, lined the harbor.

But a few were unusual: they were raised up on narrow cellars that appeared to be dug into the nearby banks.
The shore was right beside them, and, in a few cases, water lapped against the lower stone wall.
These buildings were old — centuries old — and had probably been the cornerstone of the area.

Malcolm had me slow down.
We rounded a sharp corner, and found ourselves in a
varied
neighborhood.
A once-fancy Victorian tilted sideways, its windows covered with thick
plywood
, its door barricaded by long
wooden
slats.
Next to it
sat
one of the old raised-up houses, and beside
it
, a ranch
house
that had clearly been moved from some other location and was now falling apart.

No cars lined the street, and all of the houses seemed empty.
Malcolm had me park the van at the base of a small rise.

“The place is up there,” he said, pointing at yet another of the raised houses.
Only its arched roof and its faded red paint did make it look like a
m
idwestern barn.
“I think Jim and I should wait here.”

“No way!” Jimmy said.
“You guys get to do all the stuff. I get to wait and read and sit and watch and it’s just dumb.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Someone could be in that place, and then what would you do?”

“Run,” he said.

I grinned, and slipped out of the van.
Jimmy made no move to follow me.
Malcolm was leaning forward, gesturing, obviously still making my point.

I walked toward the house.
The day was already turning hot, and this area carried not only the stench of the factories, but the stink of dead fish and a slow-moving river.
I rubbed my nose with my fingers, wishing the smell would go away.

Then I stopped in front of the building.

A
long staircase led to the front door.
I looked from that to the harbor.
This reminded me of some old dwellings I’d seen in Boston, based on the English model.
Boats were usually docked next to these old buildings
,
just as
cars would be parked outside
houses
today.
When the tide was high, the boats would go out, and fish or net lobster or do whatever it took to make a living here.

These steps were chipped, broken, and worn down by water. The door wasn’t barricaded, but the upper
-
story windows had been boarded up.
The lower story windows were closed and covered with newspaper.

As I climbed the steps, I peered at the newspaper.
It had yellowed, but the date on one of the sheets was from April.
Someone had lived inside recently.

The door was a sturdy wood that time and weather had splintered near the knob.
I knocked, waiting for an answer, then knocked again.
The knock had a hollow ring, the kind usually heard in an empty building.

I glanced down the steps at the van.
The sun shone off the windshield, hiding Malcolm and Jimmy from me.
But Jimmy wasn’t striding up the street defiantly, so I figured they were waiting below.

I knocked one final time, listening to the hollow sound echo through the house’s lower floor. Then I grabbed the knob and pushed the door open.

Dust motes floated toward me, along with the faint smell of old cigarettes and a fresh scent of mold.
As I put my foot down inside, the floor creaked, and I wondered if it would hold my weight.
The top of my skull brushed against the ceiling, and I bent at the waist so that I wouldn’t hit my head again.

The low ceiling and narrow room gave me a hint at the building’s age.
It probably had been built in the
eighteenth
century.
I’d been in many
eighteenth-
century buildings in Massachusetts
,
and all of them had
had
impossibly low ceilings.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I left the door open for what little light it could give me.
The main room had no furniture except a broken chair that looked as old as the house.

A central, freestanding fireplace made of brick dominated the room.
Thick wood beams supported the low ceiling.
The walls were made of long boards that had cloth stuck in between the slats for insulation.

I walked around the fireplace into the next room.
A large metal table was pushed against the wall.
Beside it, empty boxes were turned on their sides.
The boxes extended almost to the center, like discarded garbage.

I used my foot to move a box toward the light.
On one side, someone had stenciled:
Danger
,
Explosives
.
On another, someone had written:
Dynamite: Handle with Care
.

My heart started beating hard.
I examined the others, moving as slowly as I could so that I wouldn’t accidentally hit something I shouldn’t have.
The boxes were stenciled with names: Douglass and Sons, Bower Builders, and Tucker Construction were the first ones that I saw.

Beneath the empty boxes were a few full ones. I stuck my fingers in the hem of my shirt to keep my fingerprints off the cardboard, and then pulled a box open.
I saw books piled on top of each other haphazardly.
I slid the box toward the door, so that I could see what was inside, then inspected the other full boxes.

One was filled with cotton batting and chicken wire.
Another was filled to the brim with nails.
And a fourth had briefcases with
U.S. Army
stencil
ed
across the top.

Among the boxes I also found electrician’s wire, duct tape, and a partially disassembled alarm clock.

I peered into the remaining room.
It had once been the kitchen.
Beer bottles lined the countertop, their labels missing.
An empty box of detergent stood beside them, along with some ripped cloth for cleaning.

I went deeper into the room, smelling something faint and pungent that was almost familiar.
Then I found the source of the smell.
An empty gasoline can and
,
beside it, an empty can of motor oil.

My instincts told me to leave.
The last thing I wanted was to get caught by the police in this building.
The police would arrest me first and ask questions later — if they asked questions at all.

But I hadn’t seen everything.
I had to see if I could find anything that tied Daniel to this place.

I felt slightly dizzy, but I kept going, finding the stairs leading to the second floor.
Up there I found some discarded clothing and crumpled sheets of paper.
I picked one up, unfolded it, and saw that it contained writing.
I put it in my pocket. Then I grabbed the rest, holding them as if I had found a bootleg version of the Gettysburg Address.

On one wall, someone had scrawled
Bring the War Home!
Beneath it, I saw some fresh footprints in the dust.
So this was probably what had convinced Malcolm he had the right house.

I hated the thought of Malcolm in here.
He had been lucky that the building was empty.
Who knew what would have happened to him had he caught the people who collected this much bomb-making material at home.

I went through the entire second story, finding a ripped blanket, some filthy socks, and little else.
Then I went back downstairs and examined the kitchen and the back room again.

My foot brushed against something near one of the counters, making the scratching sound of metal against wood.

I crouched, used my shirt as a glove, and picked up the item with my left hand.
A blasting cap.
I hadn’t seen one in years.
Gingerly, I set the cap on one of the empty countertops, and eased out of the room, wiping my prints off the doorknobs as I went.

Thank heavens Malcolm had enough sense to stay behind with Jimmy. Thank heavens I hadn’t allowed Jimmy along.
With all the combustibles in that building, one wrong move could have set it alight.

I hoped that my information was wrong, that there was nothing to tie Daniel Kirkland to that building.
I clutched the wadded
-
up sheets of paper in my right hand.

They could be nothing.

They could be everything.

It took all of my willpower to hang onto them, because I wasn’t
sure I wanted to see what kind of information they held.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I left the house in a hurry,
my back aching from the unusual pos
ture
I’d had to maintain while inside. The sunlight blinded me, and the heat seemed even more oppressive than it had before.

But I couldn’t smell the stench of the nearby harbor or the acrid scent of smoke.
My nostrils were filled with the odor of gasoline, and it was making me light-headed.

I ran down the steps, a headache building across my eyes.
It took me a moment to see the van.
Jimmy and Malcolm stood outside of it, their hands shaded over their eyes as they stared up at me.

They had heard me banging out of the house.
I made a terrible racket in my effort to leave quickly.
I slowed down, took deep breaths, and tried to calm myself.
I didn’t want to panic Jimmy.

But the paraphernalia in the house had only one use.

Bomb
making.

When I reached them, Jimmy stared up at me, his expression neutral, as if he were the adult and I was the upset child.

“What is it?” he asked.

We were all in trouble, three black males standing outside a panel van on a mostly deserted street.
I had just come from a house filled with bomb-making equipment.

I had papers clutched in my hand.

“We have to leave,” I said.
“Now.”