Unhinged (16 page)

“Jake, you’re not the only one who can follow a credit card trail. Harry shouldn’t have been that hard to find. I think it’s more like what Mr. Ash told us. Maybe some real motive got it all started in the first place. But now something’s changed.”

Inside, the chemical smell was just a faint acrid presence, not the throat-closing poison cloud it had been earlier. George’s fan whirred efficiently in the open front door. “Sam?” I called, and his reply came promptly from the parlor.

By contrast, the silence from Wade’s workshop was deafening. I closed my ears to it, telling myself it was no worse than if he were out on a boat. Through the kitchen windows I spotted Monday outside with George, Mr. Ash joining them after a moment.

“Harry’s leaving wouldn’t stop it,” Ellie went on. “Mr. Ash made me see it; what he said about enjoying his work. And—”

She turned to me. “Somebody likes all this, Jake.”

Harriet, Samantha, and now the nature tourist, maybe. All dead, Sam and Wade lucky not to be. I was lucky, too.

So far.

“The fear, the confusion.”

Her tone sent a renewed chill through me.

“And,” she finished somberly, “somebody likes it
here
.”

When Ellie and George had gone I found Sam in the
parlor. His chest was sore, his arm in a sling to keep his collarbone from moving, but he was cheerful.

Almost
too
cheerful: “Mom,” he enthused from in front of the TV. “Mr. Ash is cool. He knows about dynamite!”

Right. I already knew that. “Great,” I replied, but my lack of enthusiasm had little to do with Mr. Ash.

Now that Sam was home, I would have to start trying not to think about the seminar he had lined up for that weekend, the one on the theory and practice of safe, effective underwater demolition.

“Because sometimes you need to get rid of something in the water,” he’d explained. “A wreck, a ruined wharf. So . . . bang!”

Wonderful. I’d never told him much past the bare facts about my own personal history in the bang! department. I hadn’t wanted him to develop phobias. And now look what I’d done:

“Mr. Ash says if you know how to do it, you can blow one bad brick out of a chimney and replace it without having to take the whole chimney down,” Sam reported.

“Terrific,” I responded.

The seminar was four days off; clearly, Sam would be well enough to go. Ruffling his hair, I walked away from him; he hated being fussed over and at the moment, his weekend plans were even less cheering to me than they’d been.

Besides, I had a chore to perform: reluctantly, I hoped even foolishly. But after checking that Mr. Ash was still out with the dog, I left Sam flipping the TV remote and went to the cellar.

The steps, steep and narrow, curved down to a dirt-floored chamber. Large and low-ceilinged, with massive adze-marked beams crisscrossing overhead, it stretched away to cobwebby corners, shadowy stone niches, and rooms full of shelves loaded with old canning jars, their glass gone bluish over the years.

Piles of rubble marked where Mr. Ash had been working, floor jacks set up to stand in for the missing foundation section. Big stones lay on the floor, chunks of ancient mortar still clinging to them; in the earth where they had been, thick white tree roots coiled forlornly like the fingers of a long-buried corpse.

Chill damp air blew in through the hole in the stone wall under the ell, another long section removed there since I’d found the break in it. Mr. Ash hadn’t wasted any time opening it up, I thought distractedly. And the hole was huge; any bigger and the mason could drive his truck down here, to haul the old stones out. But that wasn’t my problem right now:

In a rafter at the opposite end of the cellar hung the lockbox where I kept a handgun and the ammunition for it. The Bisley .45 was a six-shot revolver, an Italian-made reproduction of the weapon the lawmen used to bring order to the Old West. Unlocking the box, I removed the ammunition box and the weapon itself; in a pinch I could use it to establish some order around here, too.

Soon after I met Wade, he taught me to put six shots in a six-inch target circle, so I had little fear and no ignorance of the handgun’s power. What I did fear was what I was admitting by getting the gun out at all. There in the quiet cellar it was easy to believe that my growing sense of the other shoe getting ready to drop was an illusion.

But Ellie’s comment had spooked me more than I wanted to admit, even to myself. In the next instant a new sound from upstairs made me claw open the ammunition box, pop the cylinder, drop the projectiles into the slots with cold, unnaturally steady hands.

“Jake? You down there?” The cellar door creaked open. I fingered the trigger.

It was Bob Arnold. Breath rushed out past my pounding heart. “You scared the wits out of me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on up here, will you?”

I locked the rest of the ammunition up, mounted the stairs.

“I saw no reason to pass this on earlier,” Bob began. “But with what happened to Wade, and finding Harriet with that paper . . .” He sighed. “Well, it’s made me think again.”

“About?” The Bisley’s weight felt reassuring. When your pocket contains enough stopping power to drop an elk it eases your mind somewhat about the possibility of the elk showing up.

“What happened in New York City,” Bob said. “When the guy killed Harry Markle’s wife and girlfriend. You knew about that?”

The girlfriend part, he meant. “I knew.”

He swallowed some coffee he’d poured for himself, set the cup on the old red-checked tablecloth. Out the window past him I saw Monday duck into a play posture, then sprint to chase something that Mr. Ash had thrown for her.

“Story I got,” Bob said, “Harry was in a bad spot. Wife an invalid, had been for years. Bedridden in a nursing home. Harry stuck by her. Living alone and doing for himself. Pretty much all he did was visit her, and work.”

Work on trying to find my father, for instance. And on not turning innocent bystanders into collateral damage.

“But then,” Bob said, “something happened. Harry met a gal who was on the job, like he was. Someone he could talk to. And—”

“Yeah. And. So she was the girlfriend?”

In the parlor, Sam had discovered
Night of the Living Dead
on Turner Classics. From the sound of it, a passel of zombies had just broken down a door.

“Bob, what are you getting at? What difference does it make if Harry had a girlfriend?”

I had a long day ahead. And then there would be the evening; for an instant I wished I had the big Doberman back from Harry. Prill was a cream puff, but just the sight of her would turn back zombies.

“The difference is,” Bob answered, “it was worse than whatever Harry told you. Whoever the guy is who was doing this stuff, he didn’t just want to
kill
people. He wanted to
hurt
them. So what he did was, over a period of weeks he photographed Harry with his girlfriend, on the sly. Then he killed the girlfriend.”

“Right, I know that part. But what does that have to do with what he— Oh.” Screams from the television. “Photographs.”

Bob nodded somberly. “The wife was a physical wreck, but she could see and hear. She could understand. And until then, she did not know there was anybody else. So this son of a bitch”—his voice hardened at the thought—“he sneaks into the nursing home.”

A sick feeling invaded my stomach. “You’re kidding. He shows her pictures of Harry and another woman, before he kills her?”

Bob looked at the floor. “Ayuh. Left the photos, so that’s what they figured.”

It was so fiendish, neither of us could speak for a minute after that. Then:

“Jake?” Bob stared pointedly at my sweater pocket. The sag didn’t look like anything but what it was: a cannon.

And Bob disapproved of my going around with it. As he said, it doesn’t matter what targets you shoot. If you’ve never faced down a person with your weapon, you can’t know what you’ll do.

“Yeah,” I confirmed, bracing for the lecture. But it didn’t come; I got the feeling I could have set up rocket launchers in the windows and he wouldn’t have made a peep.

Which meant Bob was convinced too, now, that Harry’s paranoia wasn’t mere smoke and moonbeams. But:

“Told the state cops all this,” he said. “But they’re not exactly speed demons, you know. Their job is finding things they can prove in court.”

Meaning it could be some while before they had answers: on Harriet’s death, or Samantha’s murder. The state police worked on lab results and sworn testimony, evidentiary links that took time and legwork to assemble. And time was a thing I was starting to worry we might not have.

“I guess you’ll be around here the rest of the day?” Bob said, gesturing at the hall.

The stripper on the varnish had bubbled up loathsomely. All it needed were demons scampering over it with pitchforks to make it resemble one of the more disgusting departments of hell.

“Yep.” I moved with him toward the door. Outside, his squad idled, so I knew better than to detain him with more questions.

And I didn’t want to bring Wyatt Evert into it just yet. His threats of a lawsuit were still viable and I was reluctant to put George and Ellie at even the slightest risk.

“Got to talk to some reporters,” Bob said. Roy’s interviews had alerted the other major media to our trouble, I guessed. “And to the coroner.”

The one handling Samantha’s death and Harriet’s. Bob hustled down the steps as I went back in, musing over his visit. He was in a rush, but he had stopped by anyway to give me a message, the only bulletin he thought I needed.

If I hadn’t already gotten the Bisley out, he’d have suggested it.

Unwilling to leave
Sam, I spent the afternoon on my hands and knees, scraping up chemical goo and the varnish the goo had lifted. And as usual, old-house fix-up freed my brain to go off on its own, to ruminate.

Chewing over the details of recent events didn’t nourish any brilliant ideas, though. I slid the scraper under another glob of stripper and lifted it up, wiping it on a rag. The exposed wood beneath, smeared with remnants of varnish, resembled a face, but I couldn’t make out whose.

All I did know was that three other strangers had come to town when Harry had: Wyatt Evert, who perhaps didn’t qualify as a complete stranger but was still plenty strange; his assistant, Fran Hanson, whose smart city looks didn’t jibe with her silent passivity; and my guest Roy McCall, whose sweet, youthful buddy act I was beginning to think had a couple of cracks in it.

On TV the night before he’d actually shed tears, but he couldn’t quite hide his gratification at being in the spotlight.
Me,
his eyes had shone legibly. They’re looking at
me!

But what link had any of them had to Harriet Hollingsworth
or
Harry Markle? And what might some tourist’s boots have to do with it? Maybe someone else also belonged on my list of interesting people. Or maybe . . .

But that second “maybe” I shoved savagely to the back of my mind, just as I’d been doing since Harry Markle first brought it up, the night of Sam’s crash.
I know about your father . . .

Pushing the scraper under a stubborn lump of gunk, I went on scraping the smelly stuff messily off the floor. Physical labor, the more mindless the better, was a refuge I’d learned to escape into deliberately since moving to an old house. And I’m not sure if it was the hard work or the faintly dizzying effect of fume remnants rising off the floor, but by about three-thirty when the telephone rang, my mood had improved.

In the next moment it improved even more. “Your ex-husband,” Wade announced cheerfully, “is a power-mad weasel with a Napoleon complex.”

I laughed aloud. It felt wonderful, and so did hearing Wade’s voice without a sedative blur in it; my own pains had gone down to minor-annoyance status, only the purpling around my eye reminding me that I’d been injured. I attributed the persistent ringing in my ears to the aftereffects of the floor chemicals.

“So you’re not coming home today?” I’d been putting off the trip until I knew; if Wade was going to be here, there was no reason to go there.

“A power-mad,
vindictive
little weasel,” he emphasized.

A load of worry slid off my shoulders. “I feel fine,” Wade confirmed. “But Victor says I need to stay here a little longer. He says he needs to
observe
me.”

Personally I thought another night in the hospital was wise, much as I wished the opposite. That neck wound had looked wicked.

“But what’s he going to observe?” Wade complained. “Suppose he’s still trying to figure out how to be a human being?”

“If he is,” I replied warmly, “he couldn’t have any better role model. But one more night isn’t so terrible.”

Wade spent lots of nights away, harbor-piloting. So we were used to it. “Yeah. Too foggy to drive anyway,” he conceded.

Route 1 in a fog is so bad that you don’t dare go too fast because you can’t see, and you don’t dare go too slow because the eighteen-wheeler roaring up behind can’t see either, and he might put his hood ornament up your tailpipe.

“Right.” For his trip home tomorrow, Wade asked for clean clothes, his own razor, and his belt with the big silver anchor buckle on it, all of which reassured me even more; when he feels well, he is particular about his dress and grooming.

Then we hung up and I finished the floor, a job that took me right up until it was time to take a shower and make supper. Sam and I ate on trays in front of the TV, and after I’d stacked the dishes we sat together watching
The Blair Witch Project.

“Mom,” my son said quietly after a while. “I am still going, you know. To the demolition seminar.”

He pretended to be watching the screen. I suppose he thought if he confronted me too hard, I might confront back. “I know.”

But I’d been thinking about this, too. “I imagined you would. And if you think it’s important, you
should
go.”

It was the one thing Victor ever told me that turned out to be worthwhile: I’d been dithering about the training wheels on Sam’s bike, insisting they should stay on. And I can still feel Victor’s hands on my shoulders as Sam pedaled wobblingly away.