A Face at the Window (5 page)

Presto, one wasted trip, he thought. Or worse, if Marky's stunt blew up in their faces. Annoyed, he decided the first thing he would do when they got back to the house was find a percolator and something to brew in it. Acorns, maybe; they must have a lot of those here, and to hell with what Marky wanted or didn't.

But once they reached the place, Anthony just stood looking at it again. It had about a million wooden shingles on it, a tan silvery color, and its different rectangles were stacked unevenly atop one another but still flowing together, the opposite of the aluminum-sided three-deckers he was used to back in New Jersey.

Big clay pots of dead flowers out front, leaves matted on the stone walkway leading around to the rear…

The guy who'd sent them here had found this place and made sure nobody would be in it, Marky had informed him. One week in July and another in autumn was all anyone ever used it.

What a life, Anthony thought. An envious pang struck him as he imagined the ritzy cocktail parties the owners probably held here when they did come, with beautiful women in sparkly dresses; fancy, unfamiliar snack foods on trays; and tinkling music played on a real piano.

Nice, he thought; the women in dresses, especially. And if he ever got a chance to try any of those strange snack foods, he decided, still staring up at the house, he was going to.

The last of his earlier panic faded as he imagined himself all dressed up in a tuxedo—smelling like Cleopatra, as he dimly remembered his mother saying once—slurping down an oyster and chasing it with champagne, or maybe a martini.

But then a small, brownish-red creature ran practically across Marky's feet on the front steps, chittering angrily. Marky let out a high shriek and jumped back fast, glaring furiously at Anthony as if to say it was his fault.

Anthony knew Marky was mad because of the shriek, which had sounded like a little girl's. But he also knew better than to say anything about it, or to let his face betray anything.

"C'mon," he said quietly, stepping past Marky.

The key had been right where the guy who'd hired them said it would be, under a certain rock. A bunch of dark, many-legged insects had been squirming under there with it when Anthony first looked, but these hadn't bothered him. He understood insects. Ignoring them once more, he retrieved the key again.

The cardboard box stood in the entryway where he'd left it. "Just a chipmunk or something," he said, flipping a light switch.

Nothing happened. Hurrying to keep Marky happy, he hadn't tried the lights the first time he'd come in. But now he recalled suddenly that he hadn't seen any power poles along the dirt road.

"The freak you know about chipmunks?" Marky demanded. "You some kind of freakin’ nature expert?"

He stamped his feet hard as if coming in from the cold. "And where're the freakin’ lights?" he demanded. "I drive all the way up here, you're just sittin’ there playin’ with your…Come on, make me a cup of coffee or something, will you? I mean, what am I now, your freakin’ baby-sitter?"

Anthony knew this was meant to make him forget the chipmunk embarrassment. But worse was to come as soon as Marky discovered what Anthony had already figured out.

Marky stopped in mid-tirade, seeing Anthony's face. "What?" he asked scathingly. "What is it now?" He reached past
Anthony to snap the wall switch up and down a few times himself.

Still nothing. But the light dawned inside Marky's head, all right, and then he really went ballistic, pulling the gun from his jacket pocket and waving it as he stomped around cursing and threatening, spit drops flying from his mouth.

"Guy freakin’ didn't turn the power on!" he bellowed. "Guy freakin’ thinks we're idiots, doesn't even trust us to close the blinds, fer freak's sake!"

But it was worse than that, Anthony realized. The house had electricity; why else would there be light fixtures in it? But…where did it come from?

Back in juvie, guys had tried to teach Anthony things, guys who were plumbers, electricians, or carpenters. They took kids out to job sites, showing them how it was to be a working stiff, that maybe it was okay: getting up early and breaking their asses for a few lousy bucks a week. Carrying their lunches and kissing up to bosses; beers after work, maybe, for a treat.

Big whoop, Anthony had thought back then. He hadn't seen the attraction, and kowtowing to Marky now only reminded him how much he hadn't seen it. But he'd picked up a few facts on his outings with working guys, one of them being that everything in a house either came from somewhere, or went somewhere, or both.

Water, sewer…power. You could run it in underground, but the driveway was way too long for that. So it was a mystery, but if he didn't want Marky going batshit, Anthony knew he'd better figure it out fast.

Moving through the house, he kept searching for the answer. There weren't any blinds at the windows; no shades or curtains, either. It wasn't that kind of place, the walls all painted a clean,
pale tan like a bleached paper bag, floors polyurethane-shiny and the woodwork white as a polished skeleton. And all the windows faced the water, as Anthony had noticed right off, so no one would see any lights.

He crossed through a large, sparsely furnished living and dining area—cream-colored sofas covered in nubbly cloth, pale wooden tables and chairs, huge framed art prints—to stand by a wide plate-glass sliding door leading out onto the deck. Through the trees, he could see a flock of birds flying low across the water, all turning at once this way and that as precisely as if the flock were a single well-trained acrobatic troupe.

Or a single bird. Behind him, Marky ranted and raved some more; Anthony tuned it all out until a thunderclap sent his heart into his throat, the shot from Marky's pistol whizzing past him to punch a small hole in the plate glass with a sharp
whap!

As slowly and gracefully as a waterfall in a slow-motion nature film—they'd run a lot of nature films in the juvie home, those and John Wayne pictures—the window collapsed, cascading a shower of shining, greenish-white bits down onto the deck hanging off the back of the house, and the polished wood floor inside.

"Freakin’ guy," Marky pronounced, tucking the gun back into his jacket as if he'd accomplished something useful with it. "No lights, no coffee, what the freak we're gonna do, now?"

Turning to Anthony as if he expected an answer.

T
he night before, they'd all had dinner together in
the big old house on Key Street: grilled salmon with mustard sauce, wild rice pilaf, and Swiss chard from the garden. Dessert was a pie of wild blueberries picked locally, earlier in summer; in the dining room with candlelight reflecting in the gold-medallion wallpaper, dusk purpling in the wavery-glassed antique windows, and a birch log flickering on the hearth—for in August the
Maine evenings already hinted insistently at winter-Jake basked contentedly in the presence of her nearest and dearest.

But then in the noisy confusion of everyone leaving at once, she'd wished them all gone immediately, if only to get some peace and quiet around here.

"Don't lose her Raggedy Ann doll," Ellie White entreated at the last minute, gazing around a little wildly. Lee was already upstairs in the child's bed they'd set up for her in Jake's room.

Ellie's husband, George, waited in the car. "Or forget to pick her up from day care," she added.

"I won't. Ellie, come on, now, we've talked about this. You know it's going to be fine." Jake would've happily kept the child home with her all day but Ellie wanted the little girl's mornings to go exactly as usual, and Lee, a precocious, outgoing toddler, adored visiting her baby-sitter.

"I know, I know." Tall, slender, and ridiculously pretty in tailored slacks, a white blouse, and a black cashmere cardigan that she'd plucked out of a sale bin—on her, it looked as if it had been designed for her in Paris—Ellie pushed pale red hair off her forehead uncertainly. "Oh, what am I forgetting?"

Outside, George touched the car horn lightly. "Go," urged Jake. "It'll be okay, you'll see."

Ellie hadn't ever been away from her daughter for even one night, and now here she was going off to Italy for a whole week. "I guess," she said doubtfully, glancing around as if she might just stay home after all. But at last with a tearful embrace she fled, and then the rest of them were going, too.

"See ya," said Sam, easing out before Jake could grab him. With dark, curly hair, a rakish grin like his late father's, and way more physical agility than one human being had any right to possess, he was a man now, his attitude seemed to say, no longer available for random hugs from his mother or anyone else.

"Bye," she said softly. He'd spent the last few days trying to teach her how to handle a boat, using his own wooden dory out on Passamaquoddy Bay for a classroom. But she'd spent most of the time on the water with him just memorizing his face; if things went well for him in Portland, he'd be away from here all autumn and winter.

"Where," Bella Diamond demanded fretfully, rooting through her handbag as Sam's car backed noisily out the driveway, "are my spare packets of antiseptic hand wipes?"

With her henna-purple hair twisted into a knot on her skinny neck and her ropily muscled arms poking from the sleeves of a red silk dress, Jake's housekeeper resembled a rawboned male prison inmate put forcibly through a department-store beauty makeover. Bella was a clean-freak, but she was also the kindest, funniest, hardest-working person Jake knew, and her marriage to Jake's dad just put the cherry on the cake as far as Jake was concerned.

"Now, now, old girl," the old man groused comfortably to his new wife. "No soap shortage where we're going." He was dressed for the occasion in new jeans and suspenders, a new plaid flannel shirt with the creases still in it, and leather boots.

Or rather, one boot. The other foot was encased in a plastic cast. He saw Jake looking at it, waved her concern away.

"Now, if both feet were broken," he began, wrapping an arm around Bella's skinny, silk-clad waist.

Slipping away from him, Bella ran for the door, her voice as usual the squawk of a rough stick scratched over a violin. "Come on, you old fool, or we'll be left on the dock the way I nearly left you at the altar. And I'm still not sure I shouldn't have."

But it was in their faces, their happy triumph at having found one another; her dad's, especially. The ruby stud glinted in his earlobe as, taking Bella's hand, he hobbled out.

Which left only Wade. Tall and solidly built with blond, brush-cut hair, pale eyes that were blue or gray depending on the weather, and a confident grin whose ability to make her heart do flip-flops hadn't lessened in the slightest since the first time she saw it, he wrapped her in a farewell embrace.

"You going to be okay here without anyone to boss around?" he wanted to know.

"Don't worry, I can boss you around from any distance."

He chuckled into her hair. "Guess so."

He was headed out to help stabilize a freighter that had lost propulsion in the channel on its way into the harbor. The radio call had come in about an hour ago; the vessel had dragged one anchor and was in serious danger of dragging the other.

So it was an emergency. "I'll be fine," she told him as he stepped away from her to shoulder his backpack. "Lee's going to keep me busy. Watch out for the sidewalk hole," she added as he went out and descended the porch steps.

Through the gathering fog-wisps of evening he'd strode away toward the harbor, whistling as he went. Bath, book, bed; she'd thought contentedly of the solitary evening ahead of her.

But now only a little over twelve hours later she clutched the phone in one suddenly icy hand. Around her the house stood empty, the phone alcove scented by the boxes of spices she kept there, morning sunlight lying motionless in pale squares on the varnished hardwood floor.

Couldn't be him,
she tried telling herself. But it was; she hadn't heard the voice on the phone in decades, yet its harsh, distinctive rasp was as familiar to her as her own. Anxiously she punched in Sandy O’Neill's New York number and cursed when it connected her to his voice mail.

"Sandy, listen, Ozzie Campbell just called me. I don't know
where from, the number was blocked. But…tell Larry Trotta, and get back in touch with me as soon as you can, will you please?"

She wondered what else to add. But there wasn't anything. "Thanks, Sandy," she said finally, and hung up.

In the kitchen she gazed around indecisively, barely seeing the high, bright windows, pine wainscoting, and venerable old soapstone sink, her glance lingering instead on the dogs’ dishes lined up by the stove.

She should have kept the animals here. The old black Lab, Monday, would be no help against an intruder, but the Doberman would be; Prill was a rescue dog with some very bad history Jake was better off not knowing, but whatever it was made the dog a mailman's worst nightmare.

Or an intruder's. And even Monday could still bark. But when she tried calling the training center's number she got a message reminding her that hunting-dog refresher training took place on a remote lake way up-country. Ham radio was the only voice access, so unless she got in the car and drove the ninety or so miles to the center to claim them, the dogs were gone for the duration.