No Return: A Contemporary Phantom Tale (12 page)

The gate into the side yard had only a simple latch without even a padlock. Erik reached over the fence, lifted the latch, and let himself in, hoping at the last minute that the girls in the house didn’t employ a Rottweiler or pit bull as their own form of burglar protection.
 

No snarls or startled barking met his intrusion onto the property, however, and he continued to the back door that opened on to a service porch. Jerome’s thoroughness had resulted not only in Carrie’s address, phone number, academic records (spotty at best), bank accounts (impressive for a girl in her early twenties), credit cards (mostly maxed but all paid for by daddy, apparently), and DMV record (better than she deserved), but also the actual blueprints for the house, unearthed in some archive that dated back to the gentrification of the neighborhood in the late 1980s. It was always better to go to the back door if possible; not only was it was less visible from the street, but people were usually less careful about what sorts of locks they put on their back doors.

As appeared to be the case here. He hadn’t approached the front door, a handsome oak affair with a stained-glass inset, but it had a handsome newish-looking brass latching handle, probably with a matching handsome deadbolt. The back door, however, looked as if it could use a new coat of paint, and while it too had a deadbolt, it was only a Kwikset, something Erik could probably pick in his sleep.

Picking locks was something he had taught himself when he was in his early twenties, bored beyond belief and looking for something to occupy his mind. Lock-picking seemed interesting, something that would challenge his mind and his manual dexterity—and he was equally attracted by the slightly subversive nature of the skill. So he acquired a fancy lock-picking set, several books, and a variety of locks to practice on, and went at it nonstop until he could pick even a difficult Schlage in less than two minutes.

He set the duffel bag down on the back step and pulled out his lock-picking set, a fancy seventy-two-piece kit that had come in its own leather case. It seemed like overkill for the lock he was facing right now, but of course he hadn’t known exactly what he would have to deal with when he came here.
 

First, using his left hand, he inserted the tension wrench, a thin, flat piece of metal, and turned it slightly. Then he drew out the two picks that he’d used on Kwiksets in the past and leaned close as he inserted the first one, lifting, lifting—

Click
. There went the first pin. Good. He tried again for the second pin. It too clicked into place, and the next three were a matter of less than a minute. Using a cam, he was able to turn the plug as easily as if the correct key had been inserted, and the door swung inward.
 

Moving quickly, he removed the picks and tension wrench from the lock and tossed them inside the duffel bag. There would be time enough to put them in their proper places after he was done here.

The service porch was dimly lit by the sickly salmon glow of the sodium-vapor street lights outside, its only occupants a washing machine and dryer and an empty laundry basket. It opened onto the kitchen, which was likewise dimly lit and also empty, its counters littered with what looked like empty containers of Chinese food and several stacks of dirty dishes.

He frowned in fastidious distaste. Of course the kitchen in his own home had never been anything but spotless, its counters and floor gleaming under the watchful eyes of Ennis and his attentive staff, and he’d certainly never had to shift for himself
 
beyond the odd midnight snack. But in those rare instances he’d at least always cleaned up after himself, unlike Ms. Gustafson, who apparently could add “slob” to her long list of undesirable qualities.
 

However, once he reached it, the bathroom wasn’t as bad as the kitchen had led him to expect. Despite an unfortunate preponderance of pink in the decor, it was reasonably tidy, although cluttered with a frightening assortment of hair products and styling tools.
 

Under the ski mask, Erik’s mouth twitched. Very soon she wouldn’t have much need for those items....

The shampoo bottle sat in a plastic caddy that hung from the shower head. He took it, carefully poured a little over three-quarters of its contents into an empty plastic bottle that he’d also brought with him in the duffel bag, then lifted the pink bottle he’d carried along with him and drained it into the larger shampoo bottle. Then he placed the empty pink container back into the bag.

He lifted up the ski mask just long enough to take a whiff from the open shampoo bottle. Luckily Carrie favored a shampoo with a heavy floral scent, a scent that did a fairly good job of masking the underlying chemical smell of the product he had added. Very probably she wouldn’t notice the difference until it was too late.
 

Excellent. He zipped the duffel bag shut, looked around quickly to make sure nothing else in the bathroom had been disturbed, then exited down the hall, moving with quiet haste. After returning to the service porch, he pulled the door shut behind him, double-checked to make sure it was locked once again, then made his way back to his car.

Once inside the vehicle, he threw back the hood of his sweatshirt, turned the key in the ignition, and pulled quietly away from the curb. It was not until he was safely cruising up the 110 Freeway back toward Pasadena that he also pulled off the ski mask and started to laugh. He could drive through the darkness without anyone seeing his face, and he could no longer tolerate the itchy knit against his skin.

It had all worked out perfectly. His only regret was not being able to hide there until morning, to see Carrie’s rage and despair when she lifted her eyes to the mirror and saw what the Phantom’s revenge had done to her.

Yes, Ms. Gustafson
, he thought,
very soon a mirror will be your enemy as well!

Meg grabbed me almost the moment I walked out of my comparative lit class on Wednesday afternoon. “Oh, my God, Christine!”

“What?” I stopped, catching my breath, certain from her tone that she’d just had a car accident, a fight with one of her boyfriends, or something similarly earth-shattering. “Are you okay?”

I must have sounded sufficiently worried, because she stopped for a second, then shook her head and laughed. “No,
I’m
fine. Didn’t mean to freak you out there. Haven’t you
heard
?”

“Heard what?”

Meg looked around, almost as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear her gleeful tones. “See what happens when you avoid Facebook? You haven’t heard what happened to Queen Bitch of the Universe!”

She could mean only one person. “Carrie?”

“Yeah, Ms. ‘look at my perfect two-hundred-dollar highlights’ Gustafson. Well, now those highlights are down the drain—literally!”

“What?”
 

“Oh, yeah. I heard it from Jessica Montalvo.”
 

Jessica, I recalled dimly, lived in the upstairs flat in the house she shared with Carrie and another girl, Lisa Keneally, a pre-med student.

Meg practically glowed with unholy glee. “Well, I guess earlier this morning Carrie was getting ready for class and got in the shower first, which Jessica really hates because Carrie uses up all the hot water. So Jessica was already pissed because she was running late and Carrie was going to probably make her miss her first class. Then a little while later, after the water finally stops running and Jessica starts calculating how long it’s going to be before the water heater makes enough water for
her
shower, all of a sudden Carrie starts screaming bloody murder.”

“Screaming?” I repeated.

“Screaming,” Meg said, obviously relishing the word. I was starting to wonder whether I should have told her the whole story of my abortive trip to the Long Beach Opera and Carrie’s involvement with it. She was enjoying this way too much. “So Jessica starts freaking out, like should she call the police or should she go down and see what’s wrong? After all, knowing Carrie, it could have been just a big spider or something, and then Jessica said she would have felt really stupid if she’d called the cops. So she goes downstairs to see what’s going on, and there’s Carrie, standing in the bathroom, screaming and bald, with huge chunks of hair on the floor and coming out of her hairbrush.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, even as I started to think,
Could Randall...?

“Oh, yeah,” Meg replied. “And okay, she wasn’t totally bald, but she might as well be. Jessica said it was one of the scariest things she’d ever seen—there were still strands here and there, but everywhere else it was just white scalp.”

“So what did Jessica do?”

“Well, Jessica can hold her own in a crisis. Maybe it’s because she’s got five younger brothers. Anyway, she managed to get Carrie to wrap her head in a towel, found some Xanax in the medicine cabinet—it figures that Carrie would have some of
that
on hand—made her take some, and then called her parents. She stayed with her until Carrie’s mom came to pick her up.” Meg grinned. “Of course, Carrie’s mom started freaking out, too, but she hung on to it long enough to look at Carrie’s shampoo bottle, smell it, and then realize what had happened.”

“Hair remover, right?”

Meg grinned. “You got it. Apparently Carrie’s mom went really ballistic then—called the cops, had them come over and dust the whole house for
fingerprints
, even though there wasn’t any sign of forced entry or anything like that. The only fingerprints they found were Carrie’s, though, and a couple from Jessica and Lisa. Of course Carrie’s mom started saying Jessica or Lisa had something to do with it, which is just stupid, because even though neither one of them were big fans of Carrie’s they still had to
live
with her, for Chrissake. Jessica got all pissed, naturally, but I guess the cops finally managed to quiet Carrie’s mom down and got her and Carrie out of there, supposedly to make a statement at the police station, but probably more to get them away from Jessica than anything else. Jessica talked to Lisa an hour or so ago, and Lisa said that while Jessica was out at class, Carrie’s mom came back and got a bunch of her clothes and stuff, so I guess she’ll be staying at home for a while.”

“Wow,” I said finally, once the flow of words had eased. Certainly I wasn’t exactly sorry that someone had targeted Carrie for such a trick, but it
was
horrible—and really hit Carrie where she lived. She’d always been insufferably vain.

“Exactly.” Meg gave me a considering look. I knew exactly what she was going to say next. “Christine, you didn’t—”

“Right,” I said. “Because I really know how to pick someone’s locks, break into their house in the middle of the night, and doctor their shampoo. All this singing stuff is just a front for my real life as a master criminal.”

At that she had to laugh. “Okay, well, you’re right. Of course you didn’t do it. But you’re not sorry that it happened, are you?”
   

“Take a wild guess!”

“Thought so.” She paused for a moment, then added, “All the same, you
do
have an alibi, don’t you?”

“Well, I was at work until eleven-thirty, if that helps any.” Then I added, “And Jeff next door saw me come in a little before midnight, because he was just leaving for work.” Jeff, my neighbor—our bungalows shared an adjoining wall—worked the graveyard shift at a local call center. It made for a nice neighborly arrangement, since we hardly ever saw each other unless we happened to do the ships-passing-in-the-night thing as I came home and he left.
 

“That’s probably good enough.” Her dark eyes narrowed a bit. “You’d better check with Randall, though. Yesterday I was pretty sure he was going to back his Beemer over Carrie’s head. Did you
hear
what he did to her aria?”

Since I had been sitting next to Meg in the master class the day before, of course I had heard. Carrie was already a little bit off, because when she’d come flouncing into class, she’d probably been expecting to see me a miserable, cowed heap. Instead I had just flashed her a bright smile, then continued chatting with Meg as if nothing had happened the evening before. She’d frowned for a moment, looking as if she were searching for something pointed and snotty to say without revealing her culpability. Her wits hadn’t saved her before Dr. Green asked us all to stand for the warm-up session.

Things had soon gone from bad to worse for Carrie. When she’d gone to practice her aria with Randall, he altered the tempo, coming in a half-second late in some places, and then early in others, just as Carrie had caught up with the first series of misplaced beats. The result had been, well, a mess, with Carrie getting more and flustered and Randall smiling beatifically throughout the whole process. It ended with Carrie looking daggers at Randall while Dr. Green sat there, bemused, trying to figure out what exactly what had just happened.
 

“Oh, yeah, I heard,” I said finally, smiling a little at the recollection. “But I’m pretty sure that was the extent of Randall’s revenge.” But even as I was upholding Randall’s innocence, I was thinking that I’d better call him as soon as I got home. Not for the first time I wished I could afford to use my cell phone for anything besides dire emergencies, so I could call him right away.

“Well, you know him better than I do.” Then she glanced at her watch. “Crap—I’m going to be late for my psych class. I’ll talk to you later.”

I waved as she took off, heading across the quad. Time for me to get moving, too, if I wanted to beat the traffic home. But even as I headed to my car I wondered about Randall. Could he? And if it wasn’t Randall, then who?

“No, not me,” Randall said with some regret. “I wish I’d thought of it, but I don’t think I could have gotten past the lock-picking part.”

“Hmm.” I cradled the receiver between my ear and shoulder as I bent down to slide on one of the ugly but comfortable black loafers I wore to work. I’d called Randall as soon as I’d gotten home, but he hadn’t answered his cell at the time. Now he was returning the call just as I was getting ready to leave for the restaurant.