Death at a Fixer-Upper (19 page)

I drove home on autopilot. The highway was just as deserted as before, shrouded in heavy mist and lonely as a grave. I fixed my eyes on the horizon, trying to come to grips with what I'd learned. My knuckles throbbed a little. That part, anyway, had been satisfying.

As I slowed down for the flashing yellow lights by the bridge, I saw a turkey vulture at the edge of the road, hunched over the still form of a raccoon. The bird raised its naked head and stared at me, a challenging, arrogant look. Something long and pinkish dangled from its bill. I glanced away, unwilling to gaze into its hooded eyes, and focused on my driving. Fortunately, I don't believe in omens or any of that shit.

I'd gone another quarter mile when all the bits of information swirling about in my head collided with such suddenness I nearly left the road.

“He figured he had a big inheritance coming his way…”

“They were never able to trace him…”

“…hadn't even left a note…”

“Red…dripping down the stems…”

Something I'd seen when I was with Biddie…and something else, something to do with
sheets…

I slammed on my signal and made and abrupt left onto Johnson Ranch Road, cutting across the path of an oncoming bubba truck and earning an assurance from its driver that I was number one in his book. The VW almost stalled, and I realized I was still in third gear. Shoving the stick into second, I put my foot to the floor. A minute later, I passed the bridge where Wayne had shown up so appositely—okay, where he'd rescued my ass, if I had to admit the truth. Today, in broad daylight, it was just an innocent concrete structure over a placidly moving body of water. I rolled on without a second glance.

I thundered down a country lane that decanted me at the western end of Eleventh Street, took a right, and pulled to the curb by the leafy back entrance to the Harrington property. I felt around until I found the string that released the latch. The gate sagged open. I passed through and closed it behind me.

Gray mist blanketed the estate, blurring its outline against a backdrop of trees. I waded through the wet grass until I reached the crumbling brick path that led to the back door, then climbed the stairs and pounded on the door. Only after Merrit answered a moment later, wiping her hands on a towel, did I realize my sudden appearance was both unprofessional and startling.

“Sam?” she said.

I let out a slow breath, forcing myself to speak calmly. “I'm sorry. I should have called.”

“There's no need. I'm glad to see you.”

“Maybe this is a bad time.” I glanced around.

Again, eerily, she seemed to read my thoughts. “Lily's at a friend's house. You'd better come in.”

She held the door open and I entered the kitchen. It was bright and warm, a contrast to the chill damp of the afternoon, and smelled of freshly baked cookies. I spotted them cooling on a wire rack by the stove.

“I need to check something,” I said abruptly.

Merrit studied my face. “This is serious.”

“I hope I'm wrong. Can I take a look upstairs?”

“Lead the way.” She dropped the towel on the counter and followed me down the hall toward the front of the house. We started up the curving mahogany staircase, passing the landing where Biddie had taken her odd turn, then climbed the last ten steps to the second floor. What was I looking for?

My steps slowed as we made our way down the passage. The floral paper was yellow with age, moisture curling it back at the seams. Its ornate pattern of twisting vines climbed the walls, forming columns of pale and dark foliage dotted with deep red blooms and patches of mildew. And something else. Past the doorframe of the east bedroom, I stiffened. Here, just above the baseboard, flat brownish spots were mixed in with the flowers. I dropped to my knees. The russet splotches had trickled down the wall here and there, leaving rusty tracks. I examined the baseboard and found splatters of dull color that stood out against the dark veneer.

Merrit's face had gone pasty. “What's that?” she whispered.

“I think it's blood.” I climbed heavily to my feet. One more stop to make.

I moved to the very end of the hall and the linen closet, the subject of so much interest to my erstwhile clients. But why? They'd had ample time to search it for…whatever. The door stood ajar. I pulled it wide open and tugged on the string that dangled from a single bulb in an enamel socket. Nothing.

“I got a big flashlight downstairs,” Merrit said. She slipped down the hall and was gone.

I began moving trunks and satchels out into the hallway. My hand touched a sprinkling of mouse droppings and I pulled back in distaste. Dust motes rose and swirled in front of me. By the time Merrit hobbled back with a flashlight, I'd cleared most of the trunks and moved the linens from the pine shelves, stacking them in the hall. The shelves themselves rested on metal brackets. I tested one, and discovered they weren't fastened down. I lifted them out one by one and leaned them against the wall.

The closet's side walls were white, yet the back was a smooth plane of mustard yellow. I gave it a tentative push. It flexed beneath my palm. Surely a lath-and-plaster wall wouldn't do that. I checked along the top and sides for a seam of some sort, but it had been sealed with a bead of painter's caulk.

“Kick it in,” Merrit said. So she knew.

I placed my sneaker near the center and kicked hard. The surface crumpled like paper. Dust filled the closet, and I coughed, not just at the cloud of plaster but at the sour scent of decay and death. Pulling my shirt over my nose and mouth as a makeshift mask, I enlarged the hole with my foot, then drew back until the dust settled. I'd made a decent-sized hole in what appeared to be thin wallboard. Merrit handed me the flashlight. I leaned in and let the light play over what was behind it.

He was curled up, knees drawn to chest, arms folded awkwardly in front of him, on a bed of black heavy-weight plastic dusted with white powder. Mice had gnawed away at the bluish-gray fabric that must have been jeans once; what remained hung in tatters from bony knees. His red plaid shirt had fared better, draping his shoulders and mostly covering a curving sweep of pale ivory spinal bones, stacked as neatly as a child's toy blocks. I followed the faded shirt to its open collar and gleaming vertebrae till I reached his head. The skull was tilted back, the jaw thrown open is if he'd been in the middle of a gale of riotous laughter when his life ended, reacting to a joke that would never be shared. His eye sockets were hollow, and a few wisps of brownish hair still clung to the bones of his head. His skull had been crushed in.

I made an involuntary sound and blundered backward, stumbling out into the hall and away from the mortal remains of Vito Price. I leaned against the wall, feeling nausea stir, then subside, as I breathed steadily in and out.

Merrit seemed to shrink within herself. “He's there, then.”

“He's there.”

She made the sign of the cross. “God rest his soul.”

I left my contact information with Merrit and took off before the first car arrived. I knew it was cowardly, but I did it anyway. I'd been through this before. They knew where to find me.

I trudged up the stairs to our apartment and found a notice taped to the door. It was from Bob Hancock, informing me he'd be entering the unit to conduct a moving-out inspection on Wednesday at two o'clock. Well, goody for him. I pulled it down and crumpled it up in a ball. When Harley raced over to greet me, I tossed it across the floor for him to chase.

I showered to wash away the dust and horror, then dialed Phanh Lo's for takeout, giving our address and requesting delivery. I fed the cat, cracked open a beer, and waited for Max to get home.

The phone rang. I let the machine pick up. It was Bernie. “Call me,” he said.

I would. Just not yet.

I couldn't get comfortable on the couch or close my eyes; every time I did, Vito Price's dead face leered back at me from the dark corner of the closet, twisted in obscene mirth. So I wandered around the kitchen, polishing the cabinets and wondering if Bob would notice a couple of nail holes I might have made during the course of our tenancy. Surely those fell under the category of normal wear and tear.

Max was home by six, and nodding off over his pork dumplings by six-fifteen.

“Maybe you should hit the sack,” I said.

“Got a little homework to do.” He stumbled toward his room, his eyes at half-mast. I checked on him at eight and found him crashed out on top of the bedcovers, his algebra still spread out in front of him. I turned out the light and shut the door.

I was clearing away the cardboard boxes from our feast when my cell phone rang from inside my bag. Probably Bernie again. I dug it out and checked the number, but it wasn't one I recognized. “Hello?”

“We have a little problem.”

I squinted at the phone. “Lois?”

“I'm not sure what kind of training you got over at Home Sweet Home,” she said in her grating voice. “But where I come from you don't enter a property without a confirmed appointment. And I just got word you did exactly that. Not once but twice. Is that right?”

Uh-oh. “No. Well, sort of. You see—”

“Spare me the excuses,” she snapped. “First thing tomorrow I'm gonna be on the phone with the association, then with your broker. I'm looking forward to it, actually. They'll convene a disciplinary committee just for you. And then they'll suspend your license. We'll be having fun then, won't we?”

“Just a damn minute. The tenant asked me to stop by.” The first time, anyway.

“Doesn't make a whit of difference. This will be humiliating for Everett Sweet. Shit, I kinda feel bad for him. Wait.” She paused. “No, I don't.”

I drew a deep breath. “Go ahead and call the association. In fact, let's both call them. Because I'm sure they'll be interested to learn you suppressed two offers, and presented only one to your client. The one
you
wrote. I may be a rookie, but I seem to recall that's, like, a huge no-no.”

There was a long silence. “You can't prove it.”

“Actually, I can.”

More silence. “Stay the hell away from Aster Lane,” she said at last. Then she hung up.

It took a lot of deep breathing and a second beer before I recovered from Lois's call. I needed to be more careful. She could prove to be a powerful enemy.

By nine, I realized I was exhausted. I brushed my teeth, stripped down to my T-shirt, and hit the sack.

I woke up to find Harley pawing at my ear. I brushed him off, muttering, “Knock it off, would ya?” He sat back and stared at me, tail swishing.

The clock read 2:15. I closed my eyes and tried counting cows, something we have a lot of in Arlinda, but sleep was elusive. I tumbled out of bed and headed to the kitchen for a glass of water.

I was filling a cup from the tap when something clunked on the stairs. For a moment, it didn't register. The clunk was followed by the soft scrape of a shoe on the treads. Someone was in the stairwell.

For a moment I entertained the notion it was my neighbor, Mrs. Fenner. She'd been known to creep around at night documenting my misdeeds, her trusty camera in hand. But a sixth sense told me otherwise. Whoever it was moved with infinite stealth.

My heart began to pound. Had I locked the door? I tried to think back, but I just couldn't visualize my fingers twisting the deadbolt.

I set the cup down very carefully and began to ease across the linoleum, hoping the floor wouldn't creak and betray my presence. By the time I'd worked my way down the short hall, I could hear small noises outside the door: the rustle of clothing, the faintest intake of breath. I reached the door. It was locked.

As I watched, the knob began to turn. It stopped, then turned in the other direction. I waited. Finally, there came a very light tap at the door.

I didn't move a muscle. My blood pounded in my ears, a roar I feared was audible through the door.

Slowly, very slowly, the sounds began to recede. I heard a whisper of metal on metal, then the
snick
of the outer door closing. Then silence, except for my heart.

When Harley rubbed against my ankles, I leaped a foot in the air.

“Mom?” Max stood in the dim kitchen.

“Hey. What are you doing up?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Heard something. What's going on?”

“Nothing. I can't sleep, that's all. Go back to bed.”

“Okay.” He disappeared, and I drew a sigh of relief.

I made up a bed on the couch and closed my eyes. But I never did sleep.

I was bleary-eyed and out of sorts in the morning; otherwise I wouldn't have started the day by saying, “Your dad will be at the public library at half past three.”

Max glanced up. “Really?” He looked a lot brighter than I did.

“Yeah. Let me make you some eggs.”

“I'll do it.” He took over at the stove, cracking four eggs into a skillet and stirring them up with a fork. I popped two pieces of bread into the toaster and watched the little grids heat to glowing.

We sat across from each other at the kitchen table and munched eggs and toast. I sucked at a cup of coffee as if it were nectar. “I'm signing papers today.”

“That's awesome.” Max dumped his plate in the sink and hastened down the hall to his room, emerging with his backpack. “See you tonight?”

“About that.” I couldn't hesitate. “You think you could spend the night at Peter's?”

“Why?”

I gave him my brightest smile. “Just for fun. You could rehash the race. Make plans for next year.”

“What's wrong?”

“Why should anything be wrong?”

“It has to do with last night, doesn't it? Was someone outside?”

“No, no. No big deal. I swear.”

“Mom.”

I took a page from Wayne's book and met his eye squarely. “Okay. The truth is—I have a date.”

“Really? I mean…really?”

“Oh, get out.” I gave him a kiss and pushed him toward the door.

“I'll call you later, okay?” he said. I hadn't raised a fool.

“Sure. See you.”

I watched as he clattered down the stairs. Something caught my eye, a glimmer of green on the welcome mat. I picked it up. It was a sprig of evergreen, dark-needled and familiar. Yew, that's what it was. Someone had left a bit of yew by my front door.

I ran to the foot of the stairs and threw open the door. When I saw Max spinning away on his bike, I turned back, climbing the stairs like I'd aged ten years.

I left for the office a few minutes later. More rain was in the forecast, but for the moment it was dry, the air unusually warm and with an elusive scent that told me summer wasn't too far away. I drove slowly and carefully, following backstreets so as not to run into any minions of the law.

When I got to the office, I started a pot of coffee and checked the back deck. Curly was there, sitting under a green plastic tarp he'd secured to the deck railing. I waited for the coffee to brew, avoiding my desk, then poured out two cups and took them outside.

I handed him his cup and some sugar, then leaned against the pale yellow stucco of the building, cradling my own mug to warm my hands. “Nice that the rain's stopped,” I said.

“It is that.” He emptied two sugar packets into his coffee and swirled the cup to mix it. “Well, Sam, what's on the docket for today?”

“A little of this, a little of that.”
Watch for silver trucks. Stay out of jail
.

“That's the great thing about working for yourself. You make your own schedule.”

“You ever sell real estate?”

He laughed. “No, ma'am. I've done a lot of things, but not that. Still, we have a lot in common. I work when I want to and as long as I want to. When I've had enough, I stop.”

“I guess that's what I do, too. More or less.”

He wasn't quite packed up, and my eyes were drawn to a small pile of gear spilling out onto the deck. A pair of grayish-white socks was rolled up into a ball. Next to the socks was a set of military dog tags.

Curly followed my gaze and gathered up the items, stashing them in his pack without a word. He glanced at me. “You ever been up to Seattle?”

“Nope. You?”

“Born and raised there. Little section of the city known as Ballard. A lot of Swedes settled there around the turn of the century. Little Sweden, they call it. Best pastries in the city, and you could smell the lutefisk six blocks away.”

“You still have family there?”

“No, ma'am.” His eyes went opaque, as if he were looking at a distant horizon I couldn't see. “I left Ballard in 1965 and never set foot there again.”

“Why?”

He didn't seem offended by the direct question. “There was a girl. The prettiest girl I'd ever seen or ever hoped to see. My parents said she wasn't suitable.” He took a sip of coffee. “After she left town with her folks, I had a falling-out with my dad. I always figured he'd arranged her leaving somehow. I couldn't stand to be at home, so I lied about my age and joined the army just short of my eighteenth birthday. Wanted to distance myself from my family, I see that now. I figured I'd do my time and sign up for college on the G.I. Bill. Six months later they shipped me to Da Nang.”

“You were in Vietnam?”

“Two tours. It suited me. I was reckless and headstrong. The psychologists would say I had a lot of repressed anger.” He smiled a little. “In the end, I came back to the States and things were different. It wasn't so much that I had changed. But the world had. There wasn't a place for me. I didn't fit. I couldn't be around people, couldn't sleep at night, couldn't hold down a job.”

“Post-traumatic stress.”

“That's what they call it now. Back then they had another name for it. Shiftless. No direction. I packed my bags and hit the road, and that's been my home ever since. Spent the summers on a fishing boat in Alaska. Traveled to Mexico. Picked cranberries in Maine. Then hitchhiked up through Quebec and Montreal. Caught fish off the Florida Keys.” He drained his cup and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” he said.

I opened my mouth to say something, then thought better of it, turned, and went inside. There'd been a third object lying carelessly on the deck boards: a photograph of a woman—a girl, really. Her hair was long and dark, framing a face as clear and pure as a Madonna's.

When I glanced out five minutes later, he was gone.

I was contemplating my desk and chair when Gail came through the front door.

“What's the plan here?” she said.

We both looked at Carl Stopowitz's desk, made from the same faux-oak veneer as mine.

“You think he'd mind?” I said.

“Not at all.”

It took us a few minutes to shift the contents of the drawers, then we swapped out the desks. Carl's chair smelled faintly of pot and animal hair, but I spritzed it with a heavy dose of air freshener and rolled it over to our new desk.

“What now?” Gail said.

As if in response, my cell phone rang. It was Merrit Brown.

“I wondered if you could stop by,” she said.

“Actually, I can't.”

“It's important. Something—there's something I need to tell you.”

“The listing agent's all over my ass about being on the property without an appointment. I can't risk losing my license.”

“That's my fault. She called here and talked to me. I didn't plan to mention your name, but she acted like she knew all about you. I hope you didn't get into trouble.”

“It's fine. We, uh, reached an agreement. I shouldn't have left you to handle things yesterday.”

There was a pause. “Could you park on the street near the gate? I'll come out.”

“You sure you're up to that?” I heard a patter on the roof and glanced out the window. The rain had started again.

“I'm sure. Yes.”

“Give me half an hour.”

“All right.”

I hung up the phone. Gail was staring at me curiously. “What was that about?”

“I don't know. I have to run an errand. You haven't seen me this morning, okay?”

“Whatever you say. You ever track down that lady? The ghost hunter?”

“Loretta? She found me, actually. She's moving on.”

Gail shook her head. “You just can't count on people in this business.”