A House by the Side of the Road (32 page)

He crossed the last few yards from the trees and hugged her to him.

“I was worried when you weren't at the house,” he said softly, pressing her head against his chest. “Your car was there, but you weren't. Yes, I brought the painting, all done up in a plain brown wrapper, though it's not what usually comes in a plain brown wrapper. Unfortunately, I didn't have the requisite knowledge for that particular painting.”

The flannel of his shirt was soft and smooth against her face. She rubbed her cheek gently against it and moved her arms to encircle him. With her right hand, she stroked his side.

“Worried?” she said. “Why?”

He released her and stepped back slightly to look down at her. “Because I don't like not knowing if you're okay. Does that make you nervous?”

Meg looked at him. “No,” she said. “That doesn't make me nervous.”

He pulled her to him again. Meg stretched up her hand to cup the back of his neck. Harding pulled at the leash, trying to get to the bushes, and whined. Meg drew in her breath.

“What?” asked Jack, smoothing her hair with gentle fingers. “Let's walk along the creek, and you can tell me what makes you breathe like that. I brought sandwiches, hoping I'd find you here.”

Meg put her hand against his chest and pushed gently. “Jack,” she said. “Jack, I … I'm afraid I've done something really stupid, something I need to tell you about.”

He gazed at her, his eyes soft with concern. “So tell me. There isn't anything you can't tell me.”

She turned away from him and looked across the creek at the tangled growth on the far side. Harding danced around her feet, lunging against the leash and barking. Meg thrust her right hand through the loop of the leash, grabbed the leather strap, and yanked him toward her sternly.

“Harding! Quiet! Heel!” Meg's voice was annoyed. The dog moved to her left side and sat grudgingly.

She sighed and turned her head, looking up at Jack and dropping her left hand, spread out and flat, in front of Harding's nose.

“I … I was talking about you to…” She broke off. “Look, Jack, I don't know how to say this. Just listen for a minute without reacting. Please?” She moved her shoulders nervously. “I shouldn't be so jumpy … I should just flat-out confess.”

“Meg! What is it? Just tell me. Please!” His eyes were beseeching. “What stupid thing could you possibly have done?”

She moved behind him, putting her left hand against his back and rubbing between his shoulder blades. “I
think
you'll understand. You just
have
to understand.”

She stepped to his right side and out in front of him. Turning slowly to face him, she opened her mouth to speak. “I…”

She yanked the leash toward her as hard as she could. It caught Jack at the back of his knees and pulled them forward. He landed heavily on the ground, letting out a whoosh of breath.

Harding, taken by surprise by the unjustified wrench to his neck, looked reproachfully at Meg as she landed on Jack's chest, grabbing for the knapsack and trying to pull it from his shoulder. Christine ran from behind the shrubs, determination if not comprehension in her eyes, and pulled at his arms as he clawed at Meg's face.

“Fuck you,” he breathed softly, his eyes furious. He pulled his arms from Christine's grip and closed his hands around Meg's neck. Christine rose, stepped back slightly and drew back her right foot. She kicked the side of his jaw, and his head rocked to one side as he grunted, letting go of Meg and struggling to roll over and rise.

Harding tried to pull away, barking frantically with fear and confusion, but his leash was taut, caught between Jack and Meg. The man kicked out blindly, one foot landing sharply against the big dog's ribs. That was too much for Harding, who sank his teeth into Jack's calf.

Christine unsnapped the leash from Harding's collar, and he pulled away from the thrashing humans. He ran around them crazily, trying to adjust his youthful sense of the order of things and a dog's place in it.

Jack bucked and rose, throwing Meg to the ground, her head by the edge of the water. She bent her knees and kicked up with both legs as he reached down, the knapsack falling from his shoulder. The blow caught him in the stomach, pushing him back, and Meg scrambled to her feet. He made a grab for the knapsack, but Meg took a step and kicked it as hard as she could. It landed in the creek near the opposite bank.

Christine drove into him from behind and he stumbled, then got an arm around her, lifted and threw her down, landing on top of her.

Meg looked around wildly for a weapon. The only rocks by the edge of the creek were small; there were no sturdy branches on the ground nearby. There was, however, a leash. She gathered it and looped it over Jack's head, pulling it tightly around his neck. She lifted, straining, and Christine squirmed out from under him.

Jack grabbed for the leather strap and tried to pull it away from his neck. He maneuvered onto his knees, got one foot under him, and attempted to stand, to allow his greater height to break Meg's hold. He couldn't stand. A small brown creature had dashed from the path and sunk her teeth into his other ankle. She pulled backward with thirty pounds of fury. Jack fell forward onto his chest, his hands still grasping at the leash.

“The knapsack,” said Meg. “Look in the knapsack.”

Christine splashed into the creek, snatched the knapsack, opened it, and reached inside. She took long strides back through the water. Her eyes were hard and determined, but her voice was light.

“Oh, goodie,” she said, taking out an object. “He brought a gun.”

*   *   *

Detective Stanley put her hand on top of Jack's head as he slid into the backseat of the squad car and then walked over to Meg.

“We're not going to be able to hold him long on an unregistered, concealed weapons charge,” she said.

“I know,” said Meg. “And the DA probably won't care that he lied to a lady about having sandwiches in his knapsack, either. I should have let him shoot me.”

The policewoman smiled ruefully. “You want to answer the charge that you attacked him—that his, shall we say, ‘tussle' with you two was self-defense?”

“If it will help you hold him longer,” said Meg. “While we were sharing a tender moment, I couldn't help but wonder why his knapsack contained such a small lunch, and why the sandwiches felt so solid and heavy against the back of my hand.”

“Did he, by any chance, make an overt threat?”

“No,” said Meg. “But I'd be curious to know why he has a key to the padlock on my cellar doors—a lock I
don't
have a key to but which is, right now, unlocked. Before he came down to the creek, he'd been in the house.”

She looked over at the police car and raised her voice. “Did you find my notes? Did you wonder about the floor? And did you
really
think I'd fall for that romantic
crap?
”

She handed the officer a set of keys. “He lost this while he was trying to throttle either me or Christine,” she said. “It answers the question I had about how he was able to get into my house anytime he liked. That small key there with the rounded top is the one I've been looking for. When he cut off the old lock and put on a new one, he kept the only key.”

She glanced again at the police car. “When you've got him tucked away, see if you can find a bloodhound.”

The woman frowned. “What for?”

Meg tipped her head in the direction of the creek. “Well, it wouldn't have to be a bloodhound, but it has to be trained. I'm willing to bet that someone Jack did overtly threaten is buried in those woods.”

*   *   *

“Now that the wretched brute can get into and out of the yard,” said Mike, “I'm glad she's decided I'm not a sociopath.”

It was early evening, and they were sitting on the porch waiting for the search to be over. The subject of Mike's comment lay at their feet. Meg patted her fondly.

“She did a good job of digging her way out from the fenced yard,” she said. “I hope the dog the police found is as good at his job as she was at hers.”

“Cadaver-trained,” said Mike, grimacing. “Everybody's a specialist.”

It had taken several hours to locate a dog trained to detect the nitrogen given off by dead bodies, and another hour had been spent waiting for that dog and his handler to arrive. The police had used the time to grid the woods, marking off squares of territory to be searched one at a time.

“Harold Mathieson, the man whose bloodhound we'll use, says it's more efficient to limit the search,” Barbara Stanley explained. “But once the dog starts, Mathieson says it won't take but an hour or two. I guessed the wooded area at not much more than an acre. That is, I don't think he would have carried her much farther than that.”

Meg hadn't wanted to watch the search going on now in the woods. Neither had Christine, who'd gone home to put ice on her shoulder and let Harding have his choice of what the refrigerator contained.

Mike folded his arms on his chest. “You know, if you'd told me what you were up to, I could have helped. As it was, we each had to snoop alone.”

“You were snooping?”

“I had to. You wouldn't tell me anything! You'd been asking about Aunt Hannah's silverware, and then I followed you to the library and saw you check out every volume in the place that would have information about silver.”

“You followed me?” Meg stared at him.

“Oh, get huffy!” he said. “Wouldn't you have? So I thought, gee, I wonder what's on her mind? I talked to my sister, asked her about the stuff she got. She'd been a little surprised by the silver boxes and figurines and biscuit jars and what all. They're nice, she says, but nothing really special. Nothing that'll put her kids through college. So I started thinking. I was still just in the floundering-around stage, though.”

“What were you floundering through?”

He looked at her and continued, his voice slow and serious. “Aunt Hannah kept a copy of her will at home. Who, besides me, could have seen it, realized the opportunities it provided by the way it was written? Who, besides me, had easy access to her attic?”

He paused, and Meg nodded encouragingly. “Go on.”

He reached over and pushed her dark hair away from her face. “I wanted to think it was Jack, but I didn't have much but that to go on. How did you figure it out?”

“Like you said, anybody who'd seen her will was suspect. But that's not an infinite number of people. And whoever it was … well, it was someone who'd been watching me, watching the house, knew when I was home and when I wasn't, even though one time—the time he got the tape—he was wrong. That limited it more.”

She had told Mike, as they had sat waiting for Mr. Mathieson's bloodhound, about the tape. She'd told him about the indications that someone had been searching her house, about the stains behind the cabinet and on the floor, about visiting Wakefield Antiques, about her conversations with Jane. As she'd talked, he had leaned forward, his eyes revealing that the bits and pieces of the story were taking on, for him, the cohesion they had so gradually acquired for her.

Mathieson, as it turned out, was right about how long it would take his dog. Forty-five minutes after the huge animal began, he found what he was looking for: four feet underground, her grave neatly packed and covered with the twigs and old leaves that nature would have deposited across such a spot. The various officials who needed to deal with the scene came and went, and what remained of Angie Morrison was carried away.

Mike's eyes followed the ambulance as it turned out onto the road. “How did you get to Jack? I would have thought he'd be the last person you'd suspect. You
liked
him. Unbelievable as that was to me, you did.”

“Yeah,” said Meg. “I did.” She crossed her legs and looked at him. “You have some lovely narcissus in your garden,” she said. “It's called Tahiti. We looked at it the other day—gold and orange and yellow, a double blossom, pretty. Even so, it's not expensive.”

“The flowers at the far end, that you said I should put on Aunt Hannah's grave?”

Meg nodded.

“You said they were called By George. I looked them up on the chart she made, and that is, indeed, what they are.”

“No,” replied Meg. “That's what they're supposed to be, not what they are. By George is new, so new it isn't in most catalogs. She had to get it from a nursery, but she didn't drive. So she sent Jack. I knew she sent Jack; Teddy told me. She gave him, oh, two hundred dollars for maybe thirty-five bulbs. But when he got there, he discovered that Tahiti costs less than a third as much.”

“So he bought the other bulbs? Why?”

Meg sighed. “He hates to waste money,” she said. “He had to come back with something, but one narcissus bulb looks a lot like another. Why not spend, oh, maybe sixty dollars and keep the difference? Your aunt wasn't going to live to see the flowers. She'd never know. That's what it came down to. The person who planted those flowers knew she'd never see them bloom.”

Twenty-three

“Over here!” said Meg. “Leave your stuff and get over here.”

The Astros gathered around her in silence, their faces glum.

“How much did we lose by?” asked Meg.

“One run,” said Suzanne.

“Uh-huh. Do you know what that means? To play one of the best teams in the league and lose by one run? While we're missing Jane and another seventh grader? It means you all are getting
good,
that's what it means. You played heads-up ball. Your defense was terrific. We've just got to do more at the plate. We can't afford to go up there looking for a walk.”

“The ump was calling them so
low,
” said Bobby.