Wicked Appetite (10 page)

“What about spiders?”

“Haven’t seen any.”

I cautiously crept down the stairs, stood next to Diesel, and looked around. The cellar floor was crudely poured cement. The walls were mortar and stone. A bare 60-watt bulb lit the space. The air was cool and damp and smelled musty,
like rotting wood and mildew. The ceiling was riddled with pipes, and wires running along support beams. The water heater and furnace were to one side. The rest of the cellar was cluttered with plastic bins and cardboard boxes.

“You don’t expect me to go through all these bins and boxes, do you?” I asked Diesel.

“Yeah.”

“It’ll take hours. And what about the hiding and the booby-trapping? This stuff’s just sitting here.”

“No stone unturned,” Diesel said. “No pun intended.”

Okay, let’s get this out in the open. First, I’m a big coward. I don’t like the idea of getting blown up, and I don’t like spiders. I know at first glance we don’t see any spiders, but they’re sneaky. They hide in places and then jump out at you. And second, what about my muffins and my cookbook? I don’t have time to save the world. I need cookbook money to fix my foundation, or my house is going to fall over. And third, this whole thing is weirding me out. It would make a good television show, but things like this aren’t supposed to happen in real life.

“If we go back to my house, you can eat more muffins,” I said to Diesel.

“If we stay here and go through these bins, I’ll get out of your bed.”

“Really?”

“Scout’s honor,” Diesel said, wrangling the lid off a plastic bin.

I looked inside the bin and found it was filled with sheet music for classical guitar. The second bin Diesel opened held CDs. Opera, guitar, symphonies. A lot of Haydn and Mozart and artists out of my scope of knowledge.

“Hey, Lenny!” I yelled up the stairs. “Do you play the guitar?”

“Used to,” he said. “Traded it for a fraternity paddle used in the movie
Animal House.
It’s a collector’s item.”

“That’s so sad,” I said to Diesel. “He had a whole other life before his inheritance.”

“Focus,” Diesel said. “At the risk of seeming insensitive, I don’t care about his life then or now. I care about the charm. Anyway, he’s got the paddle used in
Animal House.
I’m jealous.”

Fortunately, the rest of the bins contained neatly folded men’s clothes, which was sad only in Lenny’s sometimes unfortunate choices in ties. I ripped through the bins in record time, and Diesel opened the first of the boxes.

“Are you okay up there?” he called to Leonard.

“I want a pizza.”

“We have three boxes to check out, and then it’s pizza time,” Diesel told him.

The boxes were filled with the sort of junk you acquire over a lifetime and can’t discard but no longer need. A baseball mitt, a broken stapler, a bunch of photos, Hardy Boys books, a commemorative chunk of the Berlin Wall, a cassette player, a bicycle chain, his high school yearbook, a kitty litter scooper.

I was making my way through the last box when there was a
whoosh
of air, the cellar door slammed shut, and the light went out, throwing us into utter blackness. Diesel moved flat against my back, his arm tight around my waist. There was thirty seconds of wind screaming on the other side of the door, and then all was quiet and the light blinked back on.

“What was th-th-that?” I asked, my heart knocking around in my chest.

Diesel took my hand and tugged me up the stairs. “That was Wulf.”

“Is he here?”

“Not anymore.” Diesel opened the cellar door and stepped into the kitchen. “And neither is Lenny.”

“Where’d they go? Are you sure Lenny isn’t here?” I looked around the kitchen. Nothing was out of place. No sign of struggle. No damage from the howling wind. “It sounded like a tornado blew through here. Why aren’t things tossed around?”

“I guess that wasn’t part of the show,” Diesel said.

“And you think it was Wulf?”

“I know it was Wulf. I can sense his presence.”

“How?”

“I know his scent. The air pressure changes. I get a cramp in my ass.”

I didn’t notice a change in the air pressure, and my nose was still stuffed with cellar smells. Fine by me. I didn’t want to add any more special skills to my Unmentionableness. I
already had one too many. I could deal with baking Unmentionable cupcakes. I’d like to lose the empowered objects thing.

“Where did Wulf take Lenny?” I asked Diesel.

Diesel shrugged. “Someplace to talk.”

I had a really icky feeling in my stomach. Lenny was creepy, but he didn’t seem like a bad person, and I wasn’t happy about him being whisked away.

“Wulf won’t do the death claw on him, will he?”

“Not as long as he needs him,” Diesel said. “A dead man can’t tell you where the treasure is hidden. If we weren’t here, I’m sure Wulf would have stayed and had Steven Hatchet sweep the house.”

“So now what? Do we chase Wulf down and duke it out with him?”

“That would be the movie version. In the real-life version, we go through the rest of the house and look for the inheritance.”

I wasn’t crazy about either of the versions. I wanted to get back to my muffins.

“The muffins will wait,” Diesel said. “Let’s start upstairs.”

There were three bedrooms upstairs. I stepped into the master first, immediately turned to leave, and bumped into Diesel.

“Out of my way,” I said to him. “You can’t make me go in there.”

“Of course I can,” he said. “Look how big and strong I am. And I’m insensitive, too.”

The bed was a tangled mess of twisted sheets and lumpy pillows without pillowcases. Empty liquor and beer bottles were everywhere. Drawers were open with clothes spilling out, and dirty clothes were scattered across the floor, interspersed with crumpled fast-food wrappers, half-eaten bags of chips, two roaches the size of lab mice taking a feet-up permanent siesta, and another rubber chicken.

“I’m not touching any of this,” I said to Diesel. “And I’m
especially not touching whatever is hanging on the doorknob.”

Diesel checked out the doorknob. “It’s underwear.”

“Ick!”

“He’s a single guy,” Diesel said. “This is the way we live.”

I looked at him, and I think my eyes went blank for a moment and my mouth dropped open.

“Not me,” Diesel said, smiling. “But
some
guys.”

I did serious mental eye-rolling. “Where do we begin?”

“Look for something that might contain a charm, and be careful not to explode yourself.”

I cautiously picked through the mess, testing out watches, shoes, beer bottles, belt buckles, and the rubber chicken. Nothing glowed or felt warm.

“This is stupid,” I said to Diesel. “It’s none of these things. We should be looking for a booby trap.”

“Problem is, most of the time you don’t recognize a good booby trap until it’s too late,” Diesel said.

“Have you ever been booby-trapped?”

“Yeah, and it’s usually not pleasant.”

It took a while to get through the master, but things went faster with bedrooms two and three. The furniture had been removed from these rooms, leaving only a few dents in the carpet as evidence of habitation.

“Looks to me like the Missus backed the truck up to this house before Lenny even knew she was leaving,” Diesel said. “He got picked clean.”

We went downstairs and searched the living room. Not hard to do, since the furniture consisted of a matching brown leather couch and chair that had seen better days. Probably picked up at a yard sale after his ex-wife took the good stuff. No furniture in the dining room. That left the kitchen, and I’d already handled everything that wasn’t nailed down in the kitchen.

“Let’s think about this for a minute,” Diesel said. “We’ve done the object-touching routine, and I’ve had my eyes open for anything remotely resembling a booby trap or secret hiding place. What have we missed?”

“Maybe it’s not in the house. Maybe it’s in his car or his office.”

“If we’re to believe him, he was drunk when he hid the inheritance, so it had to be something fairly easy to do. I think that leaves out his office, and probably his car. Most likely, he set the device when he was relatively sober and then walked around the house with a bottle of liquor in his hand, trying to decide on a hiding place.”

“We didn’t check appliances,” I said, peering into the microwave, flipping the door down on the dishwasher. I opened the oven and burst out laughing. There was a rubber chicken in the oven.

“What’s with these chickens?” I asked Diesel. “He’s got a rubber chicken fixation.”

I took the chicken out of the oven, held it by its long skinny neck, and a metal-and-glass cylinder fell out of its butt.

“Uh-oh,” Diesel said.

An instant later, he had his hand clamped onto my wrist, pulling and shoving me out the kitchen door, half carrying me in a sprint across the small backyard. We were maybe thirty feet from the house when there was an explosion, followed by a second mega-explosion. The second explosion blew the back of the house apart and sent us sprawling. I felt Diesel roll on top of me, and all around us, debris was falling out of the sky. Bits of paper and wood and flaming chunks of mystery material. Diesel got to his feet, dragged me up beside him, and we moved into the adjoining backyard.

“Looks like you found the booby trap,” Diesel said.

I had my fingers curled into his shirt in a death grip, and I was babbling. “What the? How? Who?”

Diesel pried my fingers open. “Honey, I love that you’ve got ahold of me, but I think you’ve got some chest hairs in there.”

Flames raced up the side of what was left of Lenny’s house and black smoke billowed into the sky. Sirens screamed a couple blocks away and people were stepping out of their houses and gathering in the street.

“There isn’t going to be anything left of Lenny’s house,” I said, barely able to hear myself over the ringing in my ears.

“Yeah,” Diesel said. “The historical society’s going to be pissed.”

“It’s so horrible. Everything’s gone. All his treasures from high school. All his sheet music. All his clothes.”

Diesel had an arm wrapped around me. “Don’t forget his paddle collection, and his inheritance.”

“Omigosh. His inheritance! It must have gotten blown up into smithereens. We’ll never find it.”

“No, but Wulf won’t find it, either. And that’s what we really care about.”

We walked around to the front of the house and watched the spectacle for a while. A police car was the first on the scene. A fire truck arrived seconds later. More cop cars and fire trucks. Two EMT trucks. They’d responded fast, but the house had burned even faster. By the time the hoses were working, there wasn’t much left to save.

I stood with arms slack at my side, pretty much dumbfounded by the whole incomprehensible event.

“The booby-trap gizmo was so small,” I said. “How did it make such a disaster?”

“I suspect it ignited a gas line. I don’t know what else would account for the second explosion and fire.”

We left the scene, buckled ourselves into Diesel’s Porsche, and motored off, giving one last look at the smoldering rubble that used to be Lenny’s house. The
FOR SALE
sign was still standing, and behind it, the brick skeleton of the fireplace was blackened but intact.

I choked back emotion, overwhelmed by Lenny’s loss and the destruction of a house that had survived for over a hundred years.

Diesel reached over and tugged at my ponytail. “It’s okay,” he said. “No one was hurt. And everything will eventually recycle.”

“Recycling sucks.”

Diesel nodded. “Sometimes it definitely does suck.”

It was a little after seven o’clock, and now that I was away from the action, I was hungry. I’d had some bites of muffin around three but nothing since, and I’d expended a lot of energy being terrified.

“I’m starving,” I said to Diesel. “And you’re going in the wrong direction. Marblehead is south.”

“I’m not going to Marblehead. I’m going to Beverly. When Wulf finds out Lenny’s inheritance isn’t available, he’s going to go after the remaining piece to the puzzle.”

“Mark More.”

“Yeah. We need to get to him first.”

“What about dinner?”

“Keep your eyes peeled for fast food.”

“There!” I said. “On the left. It’s a cluster fast-food stop. Burgers, doughnuts, chicken, subs.”

“Which do you want?”

“I want them all.”

“Pick one,” Diesel said.

“Burgers. No wait. Chicken. No, no. Burgers. Definitely burgers. With extra cheese. And fries. A large size. And a chocolate shake. And doughnuts.”

Ten minutes later, we were back on the road with bags of burgers and fries and a dozen doughnuts. I ate my double cheeseburger, finished off my fries, and eyed Diesel’s fries.

“Are you going to eat all those fries?” I asked him.