No Safe House (46 page)

Bam
.

THAT
night, Cynthia started sleeping at the house again. There was no way we were going to be apart as a family. Not after all we’d been through. But she didn’t move all her things back for another couple of days. It wasn’t that she was hesitant about the commitment. She just didn’t get to it.

Grace wouldn’t let her leave the house.

Our girl phoned in sick for the next two days. Same with Cynthia. They spent a lot of time in Grace’s room, sitting on the bed. Just talking. I popped in once in a while, but they seemed to be having such a good time in there, just the two of them, that I gave them their space.

I figured they were talking about the ordeal of the last few days, hashing it out, working on the theory that the more we confront our demons, the better we can deal with them. But when I walked down the hall past Grace’s room and caught snippets of conversations, they weren’t about guns and attics and death. They were about boys and movies and school and Angelina Jolie.

But not always.

Sometimes, all I heard was crying. From both of them. More than once, I peeked in and found they’d fallen asleep together on Grace’s bed, Grace’s back tucked up against Cynthia, her mother’s arm draped over her.

I had to tell Cynthia some of it.

It was all over the news. A massacre, they called it. Four dead in a Milford house. Detective Rona Wedmore—we knew that name well—while trying to track down a car believed to be linked to a homicide, had arrived at the house just as notorious thug Vincent Fleming was attempting to flee the scene. He had as much as confessed to all four murders before Wedmore shot him dead.

I told Cynthia most of what happened. The meeting in the cemetery. Coming back to this house, getting the drop on Wyatt and Reggie, taking them back to their place, rescuing Jane.

Like I said, I told her most of it.

Everyone was tied up in the basement, I told her. Vince made Jane and me leave, said he would catch up with us. We had no idea Vince was going to hurt anyone, I said. I speculated that after we’d taken off, the one called Joseph got free and tried to kill Vince. Vince shot him, and then must have felt he had no choice but to kill the others.

I was shaking as I told Cynthia my theory.

“My God,” she said. “Oh my God, that’s—it’s unimaginable.” She was shaken by how close I had come to such horrific violence. “If there’s any silver lining to any of this, at least you got out of there before it all started.”

Yeah.

The police said Vince had also confessed to the killing of one of his employees, Eldon Koch, as well as his son, Stuart, although the boy’s body had not been found.

Grace saw that part on the news.

“No way,” she said. “Vince was in the house? He shot Stuart? It was that guy who lived across the hall from Mom.”

She and Cynthia had filled me in on that part, but I still didn’t know what to make of all of it.

I read and watched everything I could find on the case. Even though the police believed they knew who had done what, they weren’t sure why. What they did learn was that Reggie and Wyatt had been running a sophisticated IRS tax fraud scam. They determined that a gun found at the scene was in all likelihood the same one used to kill a private detective named Heywood Duggan. And they also believed the husband-and-wife team was responsible for the murders of those two retired teachers and someone named Eli Goemann, although they were still investigating.

Which wasn’t really news to me.

One of the stories featured an interview with Reggie’s uncle, who turned out to be Cynthia’s landlord, Barney Croft. Cynthia watched as he told a reporter that while he talked often on the phone to his niece—including a call he’d made to her the day she died that went unanswered—he had not seen her in many months and was unaware of her involvement in any sort of criminal activity.

“Lying bastard,” she said.

Another local TV station managed to track down Jane as she was coming out of work at the advertising firm.

Adopting a similar strategy as Croft, she said, “Yes, Vince Fleming was married to my late mother, but I hadn’t seen him in months and I don’t know anything about any of this. But my heart goes out to the families of those who Vince is alleged to have harmed. It truly does. I don’t know what else to say.” She got into her Mini and sped off.

One of Vince’s former employees, Bert Gooding, was still missing.

There was another, seemingly unrelated story on the news one night about some people named Cummings who had returned
home from a trip to find their basement window kicked in but nothing missing from the house. This, in and of itself, would hardly have been newsworthy, but it led to another story about onetime software millionaire turned dog walker Nathaniel Braithwaite.

He hadn’t shown up to walk people’s pets. People were starting to worry about him.

Every day that went by without the police coming to our door, I wondered whether our involvement in all this was going to go unnoticed.

“It’s going to be okay,” Cynthia assured me. “Vince thought it through.”

Three days went by. Then four. Then an entire week.

I was starting to think maybe Cynthia was right.

The evening of the eighth day, an unmarked cruiser pulled into our driveway. I saw it from the window. I’d been sitting by the window a lot lately. Waiting.

“Cyn,” I said.

She and Grace came into the living room. Cynthia said, “Grace, go to your room and don’t make a sound.”

Grace took off. She knew what was at stake.

“It’s Wedmore,” I said. “This is it. They’ve figured it out. They’re going to take me in.”

Cynthia looked at me. “You? I thought the one we were worried about was Grace.”

The doorbell rang.

Cynthia studied me. “There’s more, isn’t there? You haven’t told me everything. I know there’s more.”

I didn’t want to lie, so I said nothing.

The chimes rang a second time.

Cynthia managed to get herself moving and opened the front door. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “Detective Wedmore. I can’t believe it. It’s been a long time.”

“It has,” she said.

I came up alongside Cynthia. “Hello. Nice to see you.”

“You, too.”

It had been years since Cynthia had seen Detective Wedmore, but she had come to visit me at school a year or so before, asking some questions about a case she’d been working at the time about a bogus psychic Cynthia and I had had the misfortune to deal with back when we were having our troubles. Our other troubles.

Wedmore asked to come in and we directed her to the living room, where we all took a seat. Cynthia offered to make coffee, but the detective declined.

“What’s going on?” I asked her. “I’m guessing this is about Vince Fleming.”

Be direct, I thought. Don’t act like you’re trying to hide anything.

“What makes you ask that?”

“Well, we watch the news. We know what happened. And Cynthia and I, we knew him. He helped us, you know. Got shot in the process.”

Cynthia nodded. “I know what kind of person he was—we’re not naive. But even knowing that, what happened, it’s all pretty hard to believe.”

“It is,” Wedmore said. “I wondered if either of you had been in contact with him at all lately?”

Cynthia and I glanced at each other. I said, “We visited him when he was in the hospital, but since then …”

“I sent him a card,” Cynthia said. “A sympathy card after his wife died. I ran into him a few weeks ago and we chatted.”

“That’s all?” Wedmore asked. “Nothing else?”

We both shook our heads. “No,” I said. “Why?”

“Because you’re on a list,” she said.

I felt as though my heart skipped a beat. Before I could respond, Cynthia said, “What list? Terry and I are on whose list? Where?”

“Not you and Terry exactly, but your house,” she said.

“You mean, like, in an address book?” I asked.

“Not exactly. We’re slowly taking a look at the various things Mr. Fleming was involved in, and one of them appears to have been an operation where he would hide things for other criminal operations—cash, drugs, what have you—in the homes of individuals who were not on any police department’s radar. Decent, upstanding folks.” She paused. “Like yourselves.”

“You’re saying he used our house?” I asked. “To hide stuff? You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not,” Wedmore said calmly. “Most likely, in your attic.”

“That’s impossible,” Cynthia said. “We’ve got a security system.”

“Well, seems he may have found ways around that. Do you have a dog?”

“A dog?” I said. “No, we don’t have any pets.”

“That’s one way he got access. You heard of dog walkers? People who come into your house through the day to take your dog for a walk? They have keys, access codes.”

Cynthia took this one. “For a while, I had a place across town, an apartment. Terry and I—I just needed some time to myself, and the man who lived across the hall from me, he did that.”

I wondered what she was doing. But I was betting Wedmore already knew Cynthia had lived, for a short while, across from Nathaniel Braithwaite. She’d have been waiting to see whether Cynthia volunteered this.

“That’s right. That’d be Mr. Braithwaite.”

“Yes,” Cynthia said. “Are you saying he was doing this for Vince? He couldn’t have had our key or access code.”

“One way to be sure would be to check your attic. Would you mind?”

We said we thought she was wasting her time, but I got a ladder and set it up under the access panel upstairs. She climbed up and spent about five minutes rooting around up there before concluding there was nothing to be found.

She was hot and sweaty by the time she came down, and this time she accepted the offer of a cool drink instead of coffee. Back in the living room, Cynthia handed her a bottle of water from the fridge.

“So I guess this means that whatever Vince was up to, it didn’t involve us,” Cynthia said.

Don’t be too eager
.

“Maybe not,” Wedmore said slowly, uncapping the bottle and taking a drink.

“Does this have anything to do with all those people who got shot?” I asked.

“It might,” Wedmore said. “The Stockwells—Reggie and Wyatt Stockwell—were acquiring large sums of cash through fake IRS returns. They might have needed someplace to hide it. Maybe Mr. Fleming was hiding it for them and decided to hang on to it, and they didn’t like that. But that’s just one theory.”

Cynthia and I both looked at her expectantly, as if we couldn’t wait for the next tidbit of inside information.

“What’s interesting,” Wedmore said, “is how your names have popped up a couple of times in connection with all this.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Your house is on a list Mr. Fleming kept of places where he might have hidden proceeds of crime. Your wife happened to live, briefly, across the hall from this Mr. Braithwaite, who may have been helping Mr. Fleming. And you both have a history with Mr. Fleming.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Cynthia said, shaking her head in wonder at these coincidences. She looked at me. “You have any ideas?”

I shook my head, too. “I don’t. But I’m glad no one got into this house.”

“Well,” Wedmore said, standing, “thanks for your time. If you think of anything—anything at all—please call.” She left a card for us on the coffee table.

We showed her to the door. We all said our good-byes and closed the door behind her as she left.

“Dear God,” Cynthia said, falling back against the wall.

I had a hand on my forehead as I caught my breath. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”

“When she asked about—”

The doorbell rang again. We looked at each other, terrified. We took five seconds to pull ourselves together, and Cynthia opened the door.

Wedmore said, “Sorry. I meant to ask. What happened to your front yard?”

I’d done my best to repair the lawn where Cynthia had torn it up with the car, but there were still two parallel streaks where the grass was having a hard time growing back.

Wedmore motioned for us to step outside, and reluctantly we did so. “See what I’m talking about?” she asked, pointing to where the grass had been dug up to within a couple of feet of the shrubs under the front window.

Something caught my eye. Something bright. In the soil, at the base of the shrubs.

“Yeah, let me tell you about that,” Cynthia said slowly, clearly struggling to come up with something. While Wedmore focused on her, I stole a quick look down.

It was the extra set of Beemer keys.

The ones that had belonged to Wyatt. When Vince had taken Reggie’s and Wyatt’s car keys, he hadn’t needed both sets, and tossed one toward the house. How would I explain it if Wedmore found those? Keys not only to their car, but their house, too.

Those keys connected me to a house where four people had been murdered. Where one of them had been murdered by me.

“No, let me tell you how it happened,” I said, taking three steps toward the driveway, forcing Wedmore to pivot and turn her back to the shrubs.

I looked her in the eye. Not just to hold her attention, but to stop myself from looking at the keys, which, at least to me, stood out like a garden gnome in a spotlight. I had to get Wedmore out of here, grab those keys, and drop them down the nearest sewer grate.

“The truth is, I’m actually a little afraid to tell you,” I said.

Wedmore’s head tilted slightly. “Why would that be?”

“I—I don’t want to get charged with anything.”

“What are you saying, Mr. Archer? Were you—were you driving under the influence?”

“Cynthia sort of intimated there that she’d moved out for a while, and I went through some periods where I was feeling pretty down, and one night, I was out, and I guess I had a little too much to drink, and I—this is the part I’m kind of reluctant to tell you—got in my car and drove home and totally missed the driveway.”

Wedmore sized me up. I couldn’t tell whether she believed it. She said, “That was an incredibly foolish thing to do.”

“I know.”

“You could have got yourself killed. Or someone else.”