Know Your Beholder: A Novel (14 page)

According to the radio, things in Afghanistan are bad. An American soldier lost his mind and barbecued an entire Afghani family. Another head coach for the New York Knicks has resigned. And in local news, Bethany Bunch is still missing.

After I stripped and sprinkled baking soda on my mattress, I took my coffee to the window and peered out. Indeed there was a fresh hide of snow, with a bluish, lunar crust. An old four-door Buick was moving slowly down the street, spinning its tires. The two bald sycamores in front of the house were so heaped with virgin snow they looked put-upon, humiliated.

Across the street, in plain perfect sight from my attic window, the astomatous snowman was in Hazard Groom’s front yard. Charcoal eyes. The carrot nose. The pink scarf.

I called Mansard and told him as much, not taking my eyes off it.

“So you’re coming over?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, “I’ll swing by.”

At around two thirty p.m. Haggis shoveled the walkway and steps to both the front and back porches. He salted everything down too. This time he actually used a new snow shovel made of bright aluminum, which he said he’d purchased from Target.

When I came downstairs to meet him at the front porch I feigned stiffness in my back and lurched dramatically for the handrail.

“You might want to see someone about that back,” he said.

“If it doesn’t get better in a few days…,” I said.

Haggis had also brought me a small blob of foil, about the size of a baseball, inside of which were two dozen Percocets. He could have charged me five bucks for each little white pill, which could double as Tylenol, but he charged me only sixty dollars.

“Enjoy the flotilla,” he said. Then he told me about some new shipment of pills he’d just gotten in that were supposed to guarantee a fifty percent growth of your penis.

I considered the thrill of my penis doubling its size. The confidence it would inspire. The hefty bulge in my thermals. “I’ll take some of those too,” I said.

“Next trip,” Haggis said.

Just as he was leaving, Baylor Phebe pulled up with a small U-Haul trailer attached to the back of his black Dodge Ram 1500. He parked in front of the Grooms’ house and met me at the front porch. He walked like an escaped circus bear, making his own time in the world. We shook hands and I told him it’d be easier to pull into the back lot, behind the house, and unload from there.

“The aft staircase has a little more width,” I explained.

“I don’t have much,” he said. “The whole kit and caboodle’s in there.” He pointed to the U-Haul. “Everything else is in storage in Cairo.”

When he got back in his truck and pulled around behind the house, the snowman was gone from the Grooms’ yard.

I stood beside Mansard on the front porch, staring across the street at the Grooms’ yard. “It was right there,” I said. “Next to the ceramic deer.”

Squinting and visoring his eyes with his yellowed hand, he said, “The deer on our side of the tree or the deer on the other side of the tree?”

“On our side. That other thing’s an elk.”

“An elk,” Mansard said, “right.”

Certain men have smoked for so many years that you can actually smell the nicotine coming through their pores. In the summer mosquitoes avoid these men. You could probably put Mansard in a Speedo, stand him on a pontoon boat in a thriving Southern swamp in the middle of August, and do a field study on high levels of epidermal nicotine in congruence with mosquito avoidance.

He lit a Lucky Strike, pulled on it so that his mustache pulsed, and said, “Pink scarf again?”

“Pink scarf, yep.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive, Detective.”

He exhaled an incredible amount of smoke and said, “You realize you have cereal in your beard?”

I raked my hands through my beard. Two pieces of Cap’n Crunch tumbled onto the front porch. And another smaller item that might have been a crescent of fingernail.

“Why don’t we cross the street,” Mansard said, “and you can stand exactly where it was.”

“I’m not going to do that.” I said this resolutely, like a man refusing to eat a worm. I cited my back yet again. “If I slip and fall it could be disastrous.”

He looked at me for a second, pulling on his cigarette. With smoke in his lungs, in that cool, small-voiced way, he said, “I feel like every time I see you you’re in your pajamas.”

To which I replied, “You’ve only seen me twice and these aren’t pajamas. They’re long johns.”

“Are they?”

I looked down and I was wearing plaid flannel pajama bottoms.

He exhaled and said, “Look like pajamas to me.” He produced a face that somehow made it seem like he was thinking with his mustache, as if whatever powers of sleuthing he possessed were sourced in those yellowing brown bristles. “You gettin’ enough sleep there, Francis?” he asked.

I told him that I sleep just fine.

Then he touched his hearing aid and asked me if anyone else had ever mentioned these snowmen.

I didn’t answer.

“Might it be possible that you’re seeing things?” he said.

I couldn’t even scratch the surface of this proposition. He smoked some more and ashed in one of the front porch’s standing ashtrays, crushing the butt. I think he finished his cigarette in under six pulls.

“Have there been any leads on Bethany Bunch?” I asked.

He replied that there hadn’t been a single one. “Best theory we’ve come up with so far is that she was kidnapped by someone passing through town. That it wasn’t even premeditated.”

“What, like someone saw her and just said, ‘Come with me, little girl,’ and walked her out of the Target?”

“Could be.”

“Which means Bethany might have gone willingly?”

He said it could have been love at first sight.

“Which means it’s possible Bethany wasn’t exactly too keen on Mommy and Daddy.”

“The mind of a three-year-old’s not an easy thing to decipher,” Mansard said.

“So, but what are we talking about, like a trucker or something?”

“More likely’d be a woman,” he explained. “A little kid isn’t gonna just start walking toward a big scary-looking trucker. We’d like to bring some dogs by. Get Bethany’s scent.”

I reminded him that the Bunches had thrown their daughter’s clothes out.

“They’ve likely kept other things,” he said. “Toys. A pillow. Her mattress.”

“What if Todd and Mary don’t cooperate?”

“It’d be in their best interests, don’t you think?”

“Maybe they’re freaked out by all the attention.”

He knocked on their door. Out of the side of his mouth, negotiating his lips through his calico mustache, he said, “Freaks getting freaked out? They were trapeze artists, Francis. Why would a little attention bother them? They’re used to performing in front of hundreds of people.”

I told him that they just seem a little anxious.

“If they’re anxious about people trying to help them find their daughter,” he said, “then that says something right there.”

Mansard knocked again.

“By the way,” he said, “always knock, even if there’s a doorbell.” He was suddenly instructing me on the subtleties of detective work. He said that people were generally more likely to open the door if you knocked. “It’s less heraldic,” he added.

I told him I’d keep that in mind.

He stroked his mustache with one hand, pinching the midpoint, just under his nostrils, and spreading his thumb and index finger wide. An unself-conscious gesture shaped by years. He glanced at his watch and then produced a piece of chewing gum, a lone, old-fashioned stick of Wrigley’s, still in its foil. He unwrapped it and folded it into his mouth a little obscenely. The piebald mustache began undulating as he chewed.

He pressed the doorbell now. “Doorbell is phase two,” he instructed.

“What’s phase three?” I asked.

“Occasionally I’ll go to the side of the house and tap on a window. Columbo would do shit like that. Or he would pretend to be the plumber. Or he would just break the hell in somehow. Columbo was a fucking god.”

Still no answer, so he pressed the doorbell again. It was the same doorbell we’d had since I was a kid. I’d kept it as one of the original items. It was strange to be so familiar with its two-part tone yet feel so far away from the rooms that used to be on the other side of the door.

I asked him if he was going to go tap on a window.

“Not just yet,” he replied. He explained that phase three was a big jump. “Once you start tapping on windows you have to see yourself actually breaking into the house. I’m not seeing that yet.”

I nodded, a little baffled by the detective logic.

“And the next time our snowman makes an appearance, do yourself a favor and take a picture of it with your cell phone.”

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. “Good thinking,” I said. I swear I could hear Mary Bunch quietly padding around inside her apartment. Mansard pressed her doorbell three more times, but there was no answer.

Down in the laundry room I was putting my sheets, thermals, and bathrobe in the dryer when Bob Blubaugh poked his head in.

“Bob,” I said. “Hey.”

He asked if he could show me something. There was a slight look of dread on his mostly neutral face. Or maybe I was projecting dread. I thought he was going to lead me to a dead rodent or some sort of unfortunate water leak caused by the extra eight inches of snow, but that’s not what it was at all.

He led me to the storage room. He bent down and lifted the old rope rug that used to live on the Falbo living room floor. Again, the efficiency of movement. Nothing wasted. Total balance and coordination. He pulled at the rope rug, clearing away some floor space.

Underneath the rug was a door. An old iron door perfectly housed and hinged, rusted and ancient. I’d never seen this door before.

“How’d you find this, Bob?”

“I thought I heard something in here in the middle of the night.”

“Like a person?”

“I don’t know what it was. But something was moving around. It could have been anything. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t an animal.” He explained that back in Minnesota his family had similar rugs, and mice would get trapped under them. “When I pulled the rug aside,” he said, “there was this door.”

I yanked on its handle but it wouldn’t budge. It was outfitted with a mortise lock, the same kind of system used to secure government explosives. The lock was much newer than the actual door. I pressed my ear to the single keyhole and listened but could hear nothing except my own blood pulsing through my head.

I called Lyman down in Jupiter.

“Son,” he said.

In the background I could hear voices, laughter, clinking glasses, Frank Sinatra. He wasn’t thrilled to be talking to me. Lately I’ve felt like some past-life irritant.

“We’re sorta in the middle of somethin’ here,” he said. “Sissy’s throwin’ a cocktail thingy to try and raise money for African babies with cleft palates or some such.”

“What’s up with the door in the floor?”

“The door in what floor?” Lyman said.

“In the basement. Under Grandma Jelly’s old rope rug.”

“Oh, that.”

“
That
?”

“It’s a shelter.”

“A
shelter
?” I said.

“Yeah, a fallout shelter, a bomb shelter.”

“Since when did we have a bomb shelter?”

“We had it made before you were born.”

“What? Why?”

“Why do you think? In case we got nuked by the friggin’ Russians.”

I asked him what year it was built and he said, “Seventy-one, I think. Your uncle Corbit was puttin’ ’em in all over the Midwest.”

I asked him how big it was and he said it was only a few rooms, maybe a few hundred square feet.

I asked him if it was furnished and he said that indeed it was. “With actual furniture?”

“With actual furniture, yes. Kitchenette, sofa, functional bathroom. Entertainment stuff.”

“And supplies?”

“It’s stockpiled.”

“With what?”

“Canned goods, candles, a generator, cans of Sterno, flashlights, blankets, pillows, board games—”

“Board games?”

“Monopoly, Yahtzee, Scrabble, that sorta thing.”

“Family night in the bomb shelter,” I said.

“Gas masks too. And your mother loved pears, so there’s a few cases of canned pears. Del Monte, I think.”

“There’s a mortise lock on it.”

He asked what the hell a mortise lock was.

I told him it’s the kind of lock the government uses for securing explosives. “In like pressurized bunkers,” I explained. “The lock is way newer-looking than the door.”

He said he had no idea why it would be necessary to have such a lock.

“Like I said,” he continued, “your uncle Corbit built the damn thing.”

I asked him why he and my mother never told me about it.

To which he answered: “I guess we forgot.”

I asked him how I would get down there.

“Well, you need the key,” he said. I asked him where it was and he answered, “It’s definitely somewhere.”

In the background an old lady made a whooping sound like she was getting goosed, followed by a chorus of elderly, wheezy laughter. I imagined oversized earlobes and insanely white dentures radiating through tan, leathery skulls. Rolexes and ship captain hats. Absurd alien-being face-lifts. Gauzy hair augmented with high-end toupees. Lifted, laser-corrected, macular-looking eyes.

I said, “I can call a locksmith.”

“No,” he replied. “I’ll dig up the key. I think it’s in a safety deposit box somewhere.”

“And you’ll send it to me?”

“Why are you so hell-bent on going down there?” Lyman said.

I told him that I’d like to know the house I’ve been living in for basically my entire life. “Which I’m now leasing to people who are depending on me,” I added. I explained that as of tomorrow every unit would be filled.

“Good for you, Francis.”

I told him that I didn’t like keeping architectural secrets from my leaseholders.

“Fair enough,” he replied.

“By the way,” I said, “you still haven’t seen the renovation.”