Broke: (18 page)

"Ready to get out now," said Drew.

Immy
rummaged
around for a
nother
towel, but she'd used them all up swabbing the floor.

"Wait a sec. I'll get one from my bedroom."
There was stack that Hortense had washed for them on her dresser.
She started the water draining so they wouldn't drown and dashed into the hallway.
She shut the bathroom door to keep the warm air in. The passage
was dark. Ralph hadn't
yet
rehung the light fixture that had attacked Geoff.
Immy couldn't tell where her bedroom door was.
She felt
along the wall
where she thought
it
should be, but hit
more
blank wall. Crawling her fingers along the
rough plaster
, she
searched
for the
smooth
wooden door. She came to the end of the wall, where the balcony started. She'd missed
her bedroom
and would have to reverse.

A split second
before she felt the push, a cold whoosh blew past her.

Two hands
punched into
the small of her back.
Shoved. Hard.

S
he was over the railing. She grabbed for whatever she could and caught one balustrade with her right hand.

As she dangled, far above the Great Hall floor,
over the hardwood part not covered by the carpet,
the person who had shoved her tried to pry her fingers off the post.
There wasn't as much as a silhouette to identify her attacker.

A shaft of light fell into the hallway. Marshmallow grunted a
s
he and Drew emerged from the bathroom.

"No!"
shrieked
Immy. "Go back!
Stay away!
"

H
er attacker banged down the stairs and out the front door.
Immy let out a breath of relief that the person hadn't gone after little naked Drew, shivering in the
hall
way.

Immy
couldn't get a look at the
departing
perp, since she was facing the other way and mostly concentrating on not falling to her death.
The hand holding her up was
getting
sweaty
. H
er fingers were slipping. She threw her left hand up, feeling more secure with a two-fisted grip.

"Mommy, can we help you?"

Immy considered. "I don't think so. I just need to get…somewhere."

"Over there." Drew pointed to the staircase.

Yes.
What a clever daughter she had. Immy
used the posts like a monkey bar
s
et
and worked her way, hand over hand, to the stair banister, then downward until her feet welcomed the floor. Then she plopped
to the
boards
and cried.

Drew and Marshmallow ran down to her and Drew hugged her mother until Immy noticed the child's teeth were chattering from the cold. Drew was still naked. Immy carried her upstairs and dressed her in warm PJs, then made hot chocolate for both of them.

Later, when Ralph showed up
,
she had to tell him what happened, since Drew gave a garbled version that included a mermaid.

Immy put Drew and Marshmallow to be
d
while Ralph searched the whole
house to make sure no one else was there
. Then he
checked all the locks
. The back door was unlatched and they concluded Immy had left
it
unlocked after Marshmallow came in, shedding
his
mud and debris all over the kitchen.
If that wasn't what happened, someone had gotten in with a key.

Ralph called the Wymee police force, but since he was a cop and
since
he was there and had searched the grounds, they took statements over the phone.

"Could you tell at all who it was?"
Ralph asked. They sat side by side on the settee. Ralph
had his arms
wrapped around Immy because she was still shivering
,
from fright
, not cold
.

"It was pitch black in the hallway. After Drew opened the bathroom door
and there was enough light to see something
, I was hanging by one hand and not concentrating on much else."

Drew
had said
she saw a "bad man",
and
there seemed to be only one person involved.

Ralph persisted. "What did the hands feel like? Big, small? Strong?"

He wasn't bad at this.

"Fists? Open hands?"

Ralph's warm hand gripped her shoulder.
Now that he asked her, she
remember
ed
the feel of the
other
hands
as they pushed her
. "Not too big.
Smaller than yours.
Open, not fists.
Not hard, like yours.
Softer.
"

"Do you think it was a woman?"

"A woman? What woman would it be?" The hands were small, but--Sadie McMudgeon couldn't have run down the stairs
and out the door
that fast.
Unless--c
ould the woman be acting old
er than she was,
faking it?

"Do you think Jersey Shorr is mixed up in…whatever is going on here?"
Ralph said.

Immy shuddered. It wasn't at all good that so many people might be trying to kill her.

***

At work on Monday, Immy got busy using the lessons she'd learned about tracking down information on people. Mike had to testify in court all morning, leaving her free to use the computer for three uninterrupted hours.

Immy wanted to find out how negative Mrs. Tompkins really was.
She
located
the property records for the house. Mrs. Tompkins had owned it for a long time. Immy found the record of
a
marriage many years ago.
She even found
a
driver's license registration. The woman had probably driven a car when she was too old to do so. There were no records of lawsuits, so she must have been law
-
abiding. The only news article
Immy
found was
her
obituary.
Mrs. Tompkins'
nephew Geoff was the only relative listed as a survivor.

Immy ended up with lots of little bits of information, but nothing
that
was helpful in forming a picture of the woman
and what she was like
.
She
typed in her address again, but must ha
ve
mistyped the house number, because she pulled up the property
records for Sadie McMudgeon's address
instead
. I
mmy was surprised
that
Sadie
had bought the house
only
five years ago. The name
McMudgeon couldn't be that
common, so Immy searched it to see if she could find out more about the crabby, unhappy woman.

A garish headline popped up. Whoa! Immy jerked
upright
in her secretary chair.

FAMILY PERISHES; ONE SURVIV
ES
SUSPICIOUS FIRE

The
house
in the article
had burned on the other side of Wymee Falls six years ago. Two members of the McMudgeon family, Mr. McMudgeon and an adult child, died in the fire.
Only
Sadie
had
escaped in her nightgown. The fire inspectors suspected arson from the start. Immy found more articles, but couldn't find any that drew final conclusions. The cause of the fire was left undetermined, but suspicious. No one was charged.

The adult child was mentioned
again
in a column written three months after the fire. Carl McMudgeon
's co-workers missed him
at his "job" which had been opening doors for people at a local hardware store, owned by Mr. McMudgeon. Carl had been severely mentally handicapped.

How sad, thought Immy. No wonder the poor woman was crabby. Immy would try to be more considerate. Maybe she could
take
her some brownies.
She would copy
M
other's recipe next time she was in Saltlick.

Next, she started
researching
Geoffrey "with a G" Tompkins. Before she got beyond birth certificate, Mike retur
ned and threw a pile of notes he'd taken in court onto her desk.

"Type these up, would ya, kiddo? I need to give a report to my client and I don't think he'll be able to read my scribbles."

He went into his office
. She heard him strike a match and soon the
fumes from
his annoying walnut-scented
candle
drifted by her desk
. Immy squinted at the "scribbles," not sure she'd be able to read them either.
At lunch time s
he
ran out
for a submarine sandwich and
ate it at her desk. I
t took until the end of her day to get the notes done. Mike had
written
pages and pages of them. It was a boring case of insurance fraud. A supposedly disabled man had been photographed, by Mike, not only jacking up a pickup and crawling under it, but lifting an engine out of the same truck with a pulley. His disability was a bum shoulder that
was supposed to
prevent him from lifting more than ten pounds.

The insurance company, Mike's client, not only wanted detailed court notes, they wanted reams of forms filled out. She'd get to that tomorrow. Tonight she
wanted
to get Drew's Halloween costume
together
.
Drew had changed her mind from wanting to be a longhorn steer and had decided she wanted to be a ghost. That would be much easier.
They had plenty of
drop cloths
.

Chapter Twenty

When Immy got home after picking up Drew, she fixed snacks for Drew and Marshmallow and had some ice tea herself. Drew finished almost as quickly as her pig and they
trotted
outside.

"Wait," Immy called after them. "Don't you want to help with your costume?"

No answer, so Immy headed for the third story, where most of the
drop cloths
had been taken. She heard the back door slam as Drew and Marshmallow came inside. Then she heard Marshmallow's hooves on the ramp, coming up the stairs behind her. Drew was nowhere to be seen.

"You're more interested in her costume tha
n
she is, aren't you?" Immy gave Marshmallow a pat on the head and they proceeded to the second floor landing. When Immy got to the staircase at the other end of the hallway, she didn't expect the pig to follow her to the top floor. But
s
he
heard him
trott
ing
up the stairs
behind her
with no problem.

Immy turned, halfway up, and stared at him. "So Ralph has built all these ramps for nothing? You can go up the stairs without them?" She gave an exasperated huff
as the pig passed her up, then
she
joined Marshmallow in the upstairs hallway.

She
looked inside
the first small room
.
A dresser lay on its side, probably the one that had fallen on Geoff. Immy stood it up. It was wobbly. Maybe Geoff had bumped against it and knocked it over.

The room
was full of boxes and furniture piled every which way. This
was
where she and Ralph had thrown the
drop cloths
they removed from the
furniture on the
first two floors. That is, Immy had thrown them in, but Ralph had folded and stacked them on top of a box. However, the stack was
now
strewn across the floor.

Marshmallow m
ight
be able to go up the stairs, thought Immy, but he couldn't
turn
the doorknob and get in here.

So who had disturbed the stack? There was other evidence that someone had been here. Some of the furniture and boxes were moved and unpiled.
Geoff hadn't been up here long enough to do all this the other day. Maybe the person who shoved Immy had been in the house for awhile.

Someone had been looking for something up here.
Mrs. Tompkins? Or a real person?

Immy got a creepy feeling and decided to get out of there. She grabbed a cloth and ran down the stairs to the kitchen.

"Drew, come try on your costume."

Drew
dropped
the three Barbies that were having some sort of
whispered
discussion on the floor. She stood in front of her mother and Immy draped the cloth over her.

The child sank to the floor
with a faint cry
.

"I guess that one's too heavy. Wait here. I'll run up and get a
smaller
one."

Immy didn't like the thought of going back to the creepy
-
feeling room.

"I go with you, Mommy."

She didn't know
if she wanted
Drew
exposed to possible danger
, but the child would be able to
tell her
if a ghost were there.
She didn't think anyone could have gotten in since the last episode.
Ralph had nailed shut the window with the broken latch.
She'd been checking the door constantly.

On the other hand, she was getting used to the idea of "the lady".
If
a ghost was what gave her
the heebie-jeebies
in this room
, she wouldn't mind
too much
. Unless
it
was
n't Mrs. Tompkins, but
another ghost
,
an unfriendly one
.

When they reached the room, Immy realized that Marshmallow hadn't come down with her. She heard him grunting in the corner. He'd knocked over more furniture and boxes. One delicate table had lost a leg.

Immy called the pig, but he didn't emerge from the shadows in the corner.

"C'mere Marshmallow,"
called
Drew. Still the pig didn't come.

"We have to get him," Immy said. She made her way through the maze, Drew on her heels, until she spotted the pig.

He was nosing a metal canister, which tipped over as Immy watched.
It was a curious-looking thing, like a small milk can, the kind they sell in antique shops. But it was plain
colored, some kind of
silver
metal,
and had
no Amish designs or ducks or flower
s
embellishing it
.

Marshmallow started pushing it with his nose and rolling it toward her. Immy stopped it with her foot and
held it in place. She
saw the words "liquid nitrogen" printed near the bottom.

The pig,
thwarted
from making forward progress in the crowded space, lashed out with a hoof
, then put both front hooves on the side of the container. He put his weight on it and one foot sank slightly.

Immy heard a hiss. A
white
cloud swirled out of the crack Marshmallow had made in the side.
At first Immy thought maybe the pig had released a ghost--or a genie. Then she realized it had to be
l
iquid nitrogen.
W
hat a strange thing to store in this
room
.

The pig had jumped
away
when the mist whirled out, but now wanted to play with the thing again. Why was he so fascinated with it, Immy wondered.

She picked it up
after the liquid nitrogen had all escaped
. It wasn't very heavy. There was some more printing, hand letter
ed
, near the top.

"Grand Glory, Rocking I Ranch
.
"

"But is it OK?" Drew said.

"Is what OK, sugar?"

"I'm talking to the lady. She says it's OK to take the silver thing that Marshmallow broke.
She wants us to take it.
"

The lady again.
"Ask her what I'm supposed to do with it
,
"

"Just take it, she says."

Immy
carried
the canister and a lighter
-weight
drop cloth out of the room
.
Drew and Marshmallow follow
ed
close behind.

"That's my costume, right?" Drew said. "Can I carry it?"

"Don't trip going down the stairs."

Halfway down the flight, Immy hear Marshmallow squealing from the top of the
flight
.

"Ah, that's it," she said. "You can go up, but not down, right?"

The pig shook his head up and down. Was he answering her?

"I am talking to pigs and ghosts
,
"
Immy muttered.
"
What next?
"

Next, was getting the pig down the stairs.

***

Ralph hadn't been able to come for an hour, but
now he was here and
the pig was downstairs, the door to the third story closed
. Ralph had let Marshmallow outside after he carried him down. A
nd Drew
now
had a
ghost costume
with eyeholes,
the bottom
pinned up so it would
n't drag. Immy was ready for Halloween! Well, except for buying candy in case she got any trick-or-treaters.

"Should we build another ramp?" Immy asked
, pouring ice tea for her and Ralph
.
Drew had taken her Barbies into the Great Hall.
"So he can get down by himself?"

"That would be me, not we
,
building that ramp
. Don't let him up there again. He doesn't need to be on every floor of the house."

Immy heard the clip clop
of piggy hooves
on the back porch and went to le
t the pig in.
Marshmallow went straight to the metal container where Immy had
left
it, by the sink.

It clanged as he knocked it over and started
pushing
it across the
tile floor
with his snout
.

"What the hell?" said Ralph, watching it roll. "What are you doing with that?"

"What is it?" Immy asked. "It was in the room where we put the
drop cloths
. Marshmallow loves it."

Ralph picked it up, to Marshmallow's displeasure. The pig grunted and butted his head at Ralph's sturdy legs.

"It's a semen container." Ralph turned it to read the printing.

Immy choked on her tea. "Semen? It's, uh, kinda big. That's a lot of semen."

"Probably from a horse or a bull."

"Oh, I guess they would have a lot more than a, you know, tha
n
a guy."

"But it was upstairs? In
a
corner
, you said
?"

Immy nodded as she wiped up the tea she'd spilled. "Why would Mrs. Tompkins keep that in her house?"

"I wonder if she did. How many years has she been dead? More than a couple, right?"

"Jersey Shorr said
she died
a few years ago."

"I can't see anyone storing this
here
for that long. It goes bad if you don't keep the coolant up."

"Coolant, like liquid nitrogen?"

"Exactly like that."

"Well, it's all gone now. Marshmallow made a hole in it and it all whooshed out."

***

As Ralph had suggested, Immy
took the container to Dr. Fox the next afternoon
,
before she picked Drew up from her mother's. That morning she'd put it into her trunk and she was proud that she remembered her
after-work
errand with the thing out of sight like that.

Dr. Fox entered the examining room
,
where Immy waited
,
and greeted her. He was the veterinarian she used for Marshmallow. He was a tall, thin man with carroty-red hair, sort of red fox colored, Immy always thought.

"You found this i
n your rental house?" Dr. Fox didn't seem like he believed
her.

"Marshmallow found it."

"Pigs have marvelous noses. I wonder if he could smell it through the walls of the container."

"Maybe. He sure likes it. But he cracked it. See?" She pointed out the fissure.

"When was that?"

"Last night."

"And where has it been since then?"

"In my kitchen, then in a closet so Marshmallow would leave it alone. In my
car
trunk
all day
today."

"So it's ruined. If it's really from Grand Glory at the Rocking I, it was worth a lot of money. I'll call the ranch and see if they want this."

Dr. Fox thanked her for bringing it to him. He thought someone
at the ranch must
be looking for it
and promised to call her to tell her what he found out
.

As she drove home with Drew, Immy pondered that. Someone was looking for something in her house, she knew that. It must have been this, this
...
bull semen.
It seemed to be valuable.

But who had put it there? And how did everyone but her know it was in her house?

That evening, she got a call back from Dr. Fox.

"The Rocking I Ranch isn't missing any semen containers," he said.

"You mean they forgot about that one?"

"I'm sure they didn't. They keep very close track of what comes out of that prize bull. Grand Glory is the best stud bull they've ever produced. They sell that stuff for thousands."

"Oh no! Marshmallow ruined thousands of dollars worth of...semen?" Immy saw dollar bills flying out the third story oriel windows.

"
No.
Listen to me, Immy." The doctor sounded impatient. "That canister is a fake. There's semen in it, but it's not from Grand Glory. Someone was probably selling it for a lot more than it's worth."