Face on the Wall (24 page)

“Now, now, Homer, don't worry, they're fine. Look, I bought you a file box and a lot of file folders. A hundred folders. I spent all morning putting labels on them. I mean, really, Homer, we had to get the room back. I was tired of tiptoeing around the edges.”

Grumpily Homer ran his finger over the orderly row of folders, inspecting the labels and the neat disposition of his papers. “Well, I don't know. If only we had a library like Annie's, I could spread out in all directions.”

“You're jealous, are you, Homer?”

“Nothing to be jealous of, I'm afraid. The poor kid's going to lose it all.”

Chapter 36

“Open everything, go everywhere, but I forbid you to enter this little room.”

Charles Perrault, “Bluebeard”

S
ergeant Kennebunk's voice on the phone seemed to come from the distant past, all the way back to last week, when Homer had been interested in the disappearance of the battered wife of Frederick Small.

“Oh, Bill, hi there,” said Homer, trying to sound cheerful, failing.

“Say, Homer, that was great, the way your wife interviewed the maid in that hotel.”

“Oh, right. But we still don't know if the blond woman in that room was really Pearl Small.”

“No, that's right, we don't. So I thought you might like to join me in a little research project.”

“Research project?”

“Examining Small's house. He seems to be elsewhere. I can't find him. His phone's been disconnected. I think McNutt knows where he is, but he just blusters and says it's none of my business, it's a free country, Small's a law-abiding citizen. Anyway, I thought I'd just take a look at the premises.”

“Don't tell me you've got McNutt's signature on a search warrant?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Oh, I see.” Homer was delighted. “You're ready to sacrifice your entire career as a law-abiding police officer and future candidate for the job of Rollo McNutt, in order to make a case against that monster Small? Well, good. I'm your man.”

When Homer drove into the Pig Road, he had to fit his car into an opening beside three heavy pieces of machinery—a backhoe, a bulldozer, and a gigantic rig with an enormous toothed jaw. Beyond the machines stretched the ninety-nine burdock-infested acres of Songsparrow Estates. At the end rose the rusty towers of Frederick Small's sand-and-gravel company.

Homer found Kennebunk leaning against his car in the driveway behind the house. He was wearing a pea jacket and khaki pants. Homer nodded at the three big machines. “What's going on?”

“I don't know,” said Kennebunk, “but I think we're too late. Look, the back door's wide open. I think he's about to move out. Come on.”

They spent the rest of the morning roaming from room to room in Small's house. It was unrewarding. There was a dresser in one of the bedrooms, but the empty drawers were stacked on the floor. The drawers of Small's filing cabinet rattled open at Homer's touch, but they too were empty.

“Maybe he put all his papers in these boxes on the floor.” Kennebunk opened the boxes one by one. They were tightly packed with books.

Homer looked at the books curiously, running his finger over the titles. “Nothing but gardening books. Disappointing. I wouldn't have thought Small was interested in gardening.”

“Not Fred,” said Kennebunk, extracting one, “his wife.” He showed Homer her name, “Pearl Small,” on the flyleaf. “Look at this,
Propagating Evergreens.
She was really serious about all this stuff.”

Homer picked up another book. “Did I tell you what Small said when we were walking along the Pig Road? I asked him about the little trees growing up in the middle of the burdock. He said his wife planted them. And then he corrected himself. He said,
We planted them.
But I'll bet it was Pearl.” The book in Homer's hand was a text on the uses of ground cover. He opened it and found Pearl's name.

Kennebunk knelt beside the boxes and extracted book after book, with murmured exclamations of pleasure. “What a collection.” He glanced up at Homer. “I propagate a lot of stuff myself. I've got a cold frame attached to my garage.”

The rest of the upstairs room had been stripped of everything but furniture. As Homer and Kennebunk went from room to room, their footsteps echoed sadly in the hollow spaces. The mattresses were bare. The closets were empty.

The downstairs rooms too had been stripped of curtains and bric-a-brac. Only one picture remained on the dining-room wall, as though forgotten, a drawing of birds in flight, two intersecting flocks. Homer stared at it. “You know, that's nice, really nice. I wonder what happened to all the rest.”

There was a box on the floor here too, but it contained only heavy winter coats, not pictures.

But once again Kennebunk was interested. He took the coats out one by one and examined them, feeling in the pockets. “Look at this jacket, Homer. It's covered with burrs.”

Homer plucked off a burr and stuck it rakishly on the collar of Kennebunk's jacket. “No question where they come from. Small must have been inspecting his magnificent estate, figuring out how to divide it up into three-hundred-thousand-dollar parcels, complete with pig bones, tin cans, and feeding platforms. Come on. I've, seen enough.”

“Wait.”

Homer stood in the open back door and watched while Bill Kennebunk took a small plastic bag out of his coat pocket and plucked leaf fragments from the woolly fabric of Small's jacket. “A forensic botanist will know what these are,” he said, depositing them carefully in the bag.

“A forensic botanist? How could a botanist identify a piece that small? Are you sure they're not just cigarette tobacco?”

“No, no, they're leaves, all right. And those botanists can do amazing things.”

They went outside. The machinery still stood beside the house. “Well, so long, Bill,” said Homer. “I don't know if we learned anything, except that Small's about to move out. Where the hell do you suppose he's going? We'd better find out.”

“McNutt probably knows. Maybe I can get it out of him.” Then Kennebunk took a firm grip on Homer's arm. “Why don't we take a walk up the Pig Road? Half an hour, that's all it'll take. We'll just see if there's any place back there with freshly turned dirt.”

“You think he killed his wife and buried her back there, is that it? Oh, God, it reminds me of a sad little case in the town of Nashoba, a couple of years back, a guy who planted his wife in a tomato patch.”

Kennebunk set off through the burdock. “We've got to cover every square inch. Walk diagonally like this, then go back over the same ground in the other direction.”

Homer groaned. It would take all day. But he set off gamely after Kennebunk, tramping this way, then that, on one side of the Pig Road, while Kennebunk explored the other. Thorny brambles tripped him up, burrs attached themselves to his good pants, and he barked his shin on the corner of a feeding platform.

At the far end of Small's ninety-nine acres, Kennebunk stopped to admire a cluster of evergreens growing along the property line, bushy little white pines, narrow spires of red cedar, hemlocks with light tips on their fernlike branches. “Look at them, Pearl's plantings. I guess she wanted them to grow high enough to hide the towers of her husband's sand-and-gravel works.” He shook his head sadly, and moved to the left along the chain-link fence. “We haven't done this corner yet, and then there's the other corner over there.”

It took them two and a half hours. Homer stayed to the bitter end, thinking regretfully about the papers stored so invitingly in his new file folders. They had found nothing. Bill Kennebunk was disappointed. “Sorry, Homer. No soap.”

They walked back to Small's house, and found a big van parked beside the rear door. A heavy couch was coming out, lugged by a pair of moving men. They lowered it to the lift on the back of the van and pushed a button. With a whine the couch moved upward.

Homer exercised his ever-present curiosity. “Where are you guys taking all this stuff?”

“Northtown,” said the brawny kid in the truck, jumping down. “Warehouse in Northtown.”

Kennebunk was surprised. “You mean Mr. Small's not moving to another house in Southtown?”

“I don't know any Small. General contractor, Max Plank, he called us.”

Homer's head was spinning. “Max Planck, you mean the physicist?”

“Physicist? I don't think so. Big hairy guy, fat?”

Chapter 37

A
nnie's perfect new house, the newly built wing that was the fulfillment of all her dreams, had taken every cent of the advances for her two successful picture books. For future living expenses she could depend on substantial royalties. For security in the future—in illness and old age—there was the comfortable reserve of her invested funds.

What invested funds
? There were no mutual funds anymore. That madman Burgess had cashed in Annie's savings and dumped everything down a hole called LexNet Software. And instead of bottoming out and zooming upward as Burgess had promised, the company went belly-up. It was not snatched up in a merger with a re-evaluation of its assets. It merely sold them off, distributed the profits to top management, and disappeared from the market.

As if that weren't bad enough, Annie's future royalties vanished too. She had a letter from her publisher. But instead of good old
CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC.,
the letterhead was a bunch of crazy tippy letters,
FATCAT FUN BOOKS,
with a crazy cartoon feline grinning at the top of the page. Curtis Publishing had been bought out.

Dear Ms. Xwann,

It has come to our attention that the following titles

JACLK ANMD THE BEANSTALK

The OWL AND THE PUSSYCRAT

are being remaindered. 25,000 copies OF EACH are abvailable at 25 c a piece. This offer xpir4s June 22.