Lye in Wait (3 page)

Ambrose had also asked about Walter's family and friends. Appalled at how little I knew about these aspects of his life, I found
myself unable to provide any useful information at all. It still disturbed me that evening, as Meghan and I cooked dinner and discussed the police interviews.

"So you stayed with exactly what you did and saw and kept all
your opinions to yourself," Meghan said. She smeared a dollop of
pungent garlic butter on a piece of Italian bread and reached for
another slice.

"It's not my opinion that I didn't leave a bunch of lye sitting
around for Walter to kill himself with." I whacked a carrot in two
with my knife. "If that detective would have just listened to me."

"Sophie Mae, tell me you didn't piss Ambrose off."

I shrugged.

Sighing, she arranged the bread on a cookie sheet and placed
it under the hot broiler. Turning back to me, she said, "What happened to Walter wasn't your fault."
"

I never said it was."

She held my gaze for a moment, then shook her head and
stooped to check on the garlic bread. "It was a pretty weird way to
commit suicide."

"Oh, I don't know. The choices people make? They seem perfectly normal to them." But I wasn't thinking of Walter when I said
it.

She started to nod, then grimaced and ran a hand over her
eyes. "Oh God. I'm such a jerk. I completely forgot about your
brother."

I waved off her chagrin and forced a smile. Bobby Lee had
killed himself so many years ago that now I could sometimes go
for a week at a time without thinking of him, but all that afternoon, memories had crept around the edges of my awareness. I
changed the subject.

"So tell me, would I be in trouble if I'd left the lye out?" I kept
my tone light.

She narrowed her eyes at me. I could tell she wanted to say
something else about my brother.

"Well, would I?"

She sighed, giving in. "You can get lye in the cleaning aisle at
the grocery store. They'd have to prove criminal negligence. No
prosecutor would touch it."

"But they brought in the forensics people and took our fingerprints," I said.

"They do that anytime someone dies an unnatural death."

"Why doesn't that make me feel better?" I tossed the carrot
scrapings in the covered crock we used to collect vegetable matter
for the compost bin. "Did they ask you about Walter's family?"

"Yeah"

"Could you tell them anything?"

She shook her head. "Not really."

The water was boiling, the steam clouding the window over
the sink. She dropped a handful of spaghetti in the pot, stirring it
with a long wooden fork to separate the strands. "This whole thing
scares the bejesus out of me."

"Me, too." I finished slicing green onions and sprinkled them
on top of the salad. "I'm glad you believe I'm careful when I work
with the lye."

"Of course I do. Do you think I'd let you make soap in the
house if I didn't have every confidence it was safe for Erin? And
I've seen your soap-making getup: rubber apron and gloves, goggles. I'm surprised you don't use a gas mask."
"

I open the windows," I said.

"Even better." She stopped stirring, though her hand remained
curled around the wooden handle. "Sophie Mae?"

I looked up.

"Is there any way it could have been an accident?"

I put the salad on the table. "I just can't see how. You have to
mix the sodium hydroxide granules with water. That's not something you do by mistake."

"And you're certain you didn't have any already mixed?"

I groaned. "God, not you, too."

"Stop being so dramatic. Can't you buy liquid drain cleaner?"

"Sure. It's usually colored. Blue, I think. The liquid on the floor
was clear, but there may be some brands that pour clear. Still, you
don't buy liquid drain cleaner and drink it by accident, either."

"Hmm. Guess not." She took the toasted garlic bread out of the
oven and put it on the butcher-block kitchen table where we ate
most of our meals.

I couldn't get the image of Walter's grimacing, blistered face
out of my mind. "I've heard of people drinking lye...but why do it
here?"

"Instead of at home like any other self-respecting suicide?"

"Well, yeah, something like that. Did it have something to do
with us?"

She blew out her breath, a sound of frustration. "No way to
know now, is there?"

"Maybe he left a note," I said.

She went to the doorway and called up the stairs, "Erin! Dinner!"

Hearing footsteps on the wooden stairs from the second floor,
we dropped the subject. I went to the stove and tested the pasta. Al
dente. I dumped it into a colander, drained it, then drizzled a little
olive oil over it and slid it back into the pot. Meghan tossed it with
home-canned red sauce while I got the salad dressing out of the
refrigerator and Erin washed her hands at the sink.

I turned and saw mother and daughter from behind, one a
smaller version of the other. Dark curls reached almost to their
shoulders, blue jeans and T-shirts hugged their short, slender
frames, and when they turned together I saw only slight variations in their almost elfin features. Meghan doesn't wear makeup,
blessed with a face that needs no improvement. Her blue eyes can
get this intense look that makes me think she would have been
a good courtroom lawyer if she had chosen that path. Erin's eyes
were grayer and sometimes struck me as old for such a little girl.

Settled at the table, we loaded up our plates with food. We were
having spaghetti because it was Erin's favorite meal, and she felt
pretty low about Walter. I didn't feel particularly hungry, and I
doubted that Meghan did either, but for Erin's sake we made the
effort.

Erin swallowed a bite of spaghetti. "Mom?"

"Yeah?"

"How old are you?"

"I'm thirty-four."

Erin played with a piece of lettuce in her salad bowl. "How old
are Grandma and Grandpa?" Meghan's parents had moved to Taos,
New Mexico four years before.

Meghan put her piece of garlic bread down on her plate.
"Grandma is sixty-three and Grandpa is sixty-six." She waited for the
next question.

"Sometimes people live to be a hundred, don't they? But usually not that long. Is there any way to tell how long someone's
going to live?"

"Not really. Some families have genetic tendencies toward certain diseases, and how someone takes care of themselves-not smoking, eating right, that kind of thing-can affect how long
they live."

"Yeah, I know about that stuff. But the family stuff-do we
have any of that in our family?"

"Well, I can tell you my grandmother lived to be ninety-seven,
which is pretty close to a hundred. And my grandfather lived to be
ninety-four. Is this about Walter?"

"Well, of course it is, Mom." Erin sounded a little exasperated
at the question. Then a wry expression crossed her ten-year-old
face. The look flickered away, and she said, "At least it sorta is."

I said, "Walter had an accident, Bug. His age didn't have anything to do with it." I didn't know how much Meghan had told
her daughter about the details of the "accident" The police had
still been down in the basement, sampling or measuring or doing
whatever it is they do, when Erin came home from school. She'd
wanted to go watch them, but Meghan nixed that idea.

Erin nodded. "Yeah. But him dying just made me think about
other people dying, is all." She leaned over her plate and stuffed a
huge dripping bite of spaghetti in her mouth.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Meghan asked.

Erin shook her dark curls. But a moment later she swallowed
and said, "Walter said he used to drink a lot."

Meghan shot me a glance, and at that moment I was really glad
I wasn't the mom, didn't have to handle all the tough questions.
Though Erin still managed to hit me with the occasional unexpected zinger from out of left field.

"Walter was a recovering alcoholic. Some bad things can come
from drinking, but you have to understand that it's a disease. It
didn't make him a bad man," Meghan said.

There, I thought. I never would have handled that so well. She
seemed to find just the right words.

But Erin looked stricken. "I never thought he was a bad man."
Her fork clattered to the table, and she pushed her chair back.
Tears welled up in her eyes. "I loved Walter. He was funny and nice
and he showed me how to plant things and build things and he
let me help him sometimes and he liked to talk about baseball,
and... and..." She turned and fled up the stairs to her room, crying in earnest now.

Meghan shot me a helpless look, then picked up a whining
Brodie from the foot of the stairs and carried him up to help console her daughter. I sat alone at the wooden table for a few minutes, poking my fork at strands of pasta. Then I got up and started
scraping the mounds of food from the plates.

Sometimes the right words just don't exist.

AFTER CLEANING UP THE dishes I went downstairs. Three wholesale orders of soap remained to package, box up, and send, and I
needed to make up for some of the time I'd lost that day. But once
in the basement, I knew I couldn't work down there that night. I
was so tired my bones felt mushy, and the stark pools of fluorescence from the track lighting hurt my eyes.

The authorities had been very tidy; there was no indication
Walter had ever been in my workroom. The glass was gone, but the
spilled sodium hydroxide mixture had eaten into the rag rug and
soaked into the concrete floor, creating an ugly stain. I got out the
apple cider vinegar I used for much of my cleaning, poured some
straight onto the stain and left it. It probably wouldn't remove the
mark, but the acid would neutralize the alkaline in the lye. As I
capped the bottle, I caught a whiff, and the spicy-sour smell lodged
in my throat.

I tossed the rug in the garbage.

A smear of black powder came away on my hand when I closed
the hasp on the cupboard. I'd have to get another lock. Besides
sodium hydroxide, the cupboard contained potassium hydroxide, which is another kind of lye used for liquid soaps. I had only
a small amount, as I didn't have any liquid soaps in my current
product repertoire. Considering it now, I realized many of the substances I used could be dangerous. Peppermint could burn skin
if applied full strength, as could clove or cinnamon oils. In fact, I
didn't know of any essential oils that could be used full strength
with any guaranteed safety. Only wintergreen oil is actually regulated by the FDA. But none of them could do the kind of damage
the lye had done, and frankly, all were far milder than some of the
chemicals you would find in a typical cleaning closet. Still, I'd pick
up a couple extra locks while I was at it.

The room spanned the width of the house, and windows lined
the upper halves of three walls. The front wall snugged up to a hill,
so there was no front entrance to the basement except the stairs
from the kitchen above. I walked the perimeter, checking the lock
on each window. I hadn't bothered with curtains or blinds, wanting as much natural light as possible during the workday. Tonight
I felt the eyes out there; not benign nighttime critters going about
their business, but threatening, malignant eyes. I shrugged off my
heebie-jeebies. A penchant for too much Stephen King combined
with finding a dead man-granted, a particularly gruesome-looking dead man-and there I went getting all spooked by the dark
like some neurotic schoolgirl.

I paused in front of the window by the back door. My smudgy
reflection gazed back at me from the glass. Next to Meghan and Erin,
it's like I'm from a different planet, one with a stronger gravitational field. I feel stout and unwieldy, blonde and big-boned. In reality, I'm not any of those things, except blonde. At five foot six, I
do have bigger bones than the Bly family-but so does a goodsized crow. When I'm out among normal people, I'm an attractive enough woman in my mid-thirties, with my long hair in a
practical braid down my back and a tendency toward simple Eddie
Bauer-esque clothing so I don't have to think too hard about how
to put myself together in the morning.

Tonight all that showed in the glass pane was a wavering outline of my features and reflected glare from the overhead lights.
And then it was Bobby Lee looking back at me, the same light hair,
the same snub nose, the same genetic mix as mine, with the same
sense of humor and way of looking at the world. For a moment his
absence skewered through my solar plexus, and I began to close
my eyes against it.

But I blinked and stood up straight again as my eyes refocused
on a bright rectangle across the alley. While seeing a light on in
someone's window on a dark October evening isn't unusual, this
one was: this light shone in Walter Hanover's cottage.