Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (32 page)

Apparently, furnace soot stuck much better to hands than it did to a wad of paper towels. The caller ID box said
Undisclosed
.

“Listen, you,” she began angrily, but then a voice broke in.

“Jake? Jake, this is Roger Dodd. Sam’s here, I’ve found him, Randy must have—”

“What?” Relief coursed through her, as strong as a drug.

“He’s here,” Roger repeated. “I found him in the cellar, I don’t know how—he’s hurt, I called an ambulance and the county dispatcher’s trying to find Bob Arnold right now.”

Sam
. She leaned against the wall of the telephone alcove.

“Can you come down here? He’s asking for you,” said Roger. “He’s conscious, but I don’t know how long he can—”

Another voice came on. “Hello?” Faint but recognizable; her heart leapt. “Hello, can you hear me?”

“Sam,” she managed. He sounded awful.
“Yes
, I can hear you fine. You hang in there, now, honey, I’m on my—”

Roger came on again, his tone urgent. “He’s losing blood, Jake; I don’t like the looks of him. Maybe you’d better—”

“I’ll be right down,” she said, and hung up. Then, pausing only to call Ellie White and let her know the astonishing thing that had just happened—

“I’ll meet you there,” Ellie said without hesitation.

—she rushed from the house.

In the dark yard, she yanked the car door open and hurled herself in, key in hand. She’d thrown the car into reverse and was halfway out of the driveway when Randy Dodd sat silently up in the back seat and put a knife to her throat.

BELLA WAS COMING DOWN THE HALL STAIRS FROM THE
third floor, where she’d been running a dustcloth over the old floorboards in Jacobia’s workroom—you could vacuum all you wanted, she felt strongly, but until you got down on your hands and knees it just wasn’t clean—when she heard Jake leaving the house.

So now was her chance. Two minutes later, she strode down the dark street toward the Dodd House with fear and determination warring in her heart.

She wasn’t supposed to go there. Bob Arnold had been very clear about it. When the search warrant was finally obtained, the whole place would be gone over by people who were authorized to do so.

Until then, everyone else was to Keep Out. But …

It simply was not possible to let the earring Anne Dodd had given her remain lost. Not without even looking for it. And the only place she’d been recently that she hadn’t yet searched was …

The old cellar. She’d noticed that the earring was gone on the way to St. Stephen with Jacobia, her reflexive touch for good luck to it finding nothing but her own earlobe. Since then, she had retraced her steps to the Dodd House and back, and had gone over her own domestic territory with the grim intensity of a prospector hunting for even the tiniest gold speck.

Without result. A seed pearl, two pennies, and a whole clove that had rolled away while she was sticking them into oranges for pomanders a week earlier had been her only discoveries.

So this was her last chance. If the earring wasn’t somewhere in the Dodd House, she would probably never find it. And although a lost earring was not the worst tragedy, she would never be able to replace it.

Never mind that the very thought of entering the place alone made her feel small and quavery.
You can quiver when you’re back home
, she told herself brusquely.

Because sometimes if you wanted things a certain way, you had to make them that way. And if you didn’t …

Well, if you didn’t, you deserved whatever you got. Telling herself this, she emerged from the dark alley that ran alongside the Eastport Nursing Home onto the slightly less dark and shadowy thoroughfare of Washington Street.

Across it, hunkered down among the leafless overgrown trees, the Dodd House seemed to sulk behind shade-covered windows reflecting the yellowish streetlights. In the damp, chilly breeze, a patch of shingles on the sloping roof made a
wet flap flap
sound.

No light showed from within. If it had, she might’ve turned tail and run. But—

There’s no one in there
, she told herself firmly.
And I’m only going to find what’s mine
.

At nearly suppertime there were few cars on the street. She waited until none were in sight, then crossed and hurried up the old steps, careful not to put her foot through any rotten ones. She was so intent on not being seen, she forgot for a moment how nervous she was about being inside.

But she remembered once the door closed behind her and she stood alone in the dark. With trembling fingers, she snapped on her flashlight and forced herself down the hall, past the old staircase, whose carved mahogany banister, polished with beeswax and lemon oil until it shone, had been Anne’s particular pride.

Now it was hung with cobwebs. A gritty scrim moved under her feet as she crept on; the whole place smelled like a sour mop. She scanned the kitchen floor with the flashlight but found only a few hollowed-out acorns, brought in by squirrels through some hole that hadn’t been patched, she supposed.

It was hideous in here, and sad. She wished heartily that she hadn’t come back. Still, almost done. A few minutes more and she would know whether or not she’d lost her earring for good.

She started downstairs, to the cellar.

THE GREAT, FIERY WIND OF THE TALL SENTINEL PINE’S EX
-ignition sucked the air up out of the pit where Chip Hahn lay. Waking in horror, he forced his face in under some rocks and clasped his hands over his head, struggling to breathe.

As the initial roar faded, a rain of fire began, burning embers and sizzling sticks showering all around him with a sound like hail clattering on a tin roof, the reek of smoke filling his lungs. A massive flaming branch thudded down, inches from him.

Everything burning … a swarm of hot coals bit through his pants and attacked his legs. He jerked up and swatted them off frantically, then doused the remaining ones with handfuls of the damp sand, heedless of the tiny burning bits in it, blistering his hands.

A sound made him look up just in time to see a ball of fire plum meting at him, a ball the size of a house… . It was the huge pine’s flaming top, broken off and falling to earth like a fiery comet.
Run …

Gasping, weeping, shoeless and burn-flecked, he scrambled in terror halfway up the side of the sand pit. The massive fireball struck the ground with a concussive
whoomph
of renewed flame that hurled yet another spark-storm stinging and burning over his exposed skin.

But then it fell back. What remained collapsed into itself, burning more sedately as if, having demonstrated its unearthly power, the fire was content now with snapping and popping. A few remaining flaming branch fronds floated lazily down into it.

But the big event was over, Chip realized as he watched it. Already the yellow flames were subsiding to a mass of red coals, glowing in the dark.

He steadied himself as best he could on the unstable slope of the old sand pit. His streaming tears made the blisters on his face and hands sting like acid burns, and the smoke and hot gases he’d inhaled turned his breathing into torture.

And he was still bleeding, possibly a lot. He didn’t dare to check,
but the waves of light-headedness he felt washing over him were probably not all from the fire and his terrified flight from it.

His ears rang like gongs. Gagging, he hacked up sour gobbets of soot. His voice was gone, only a faint croak emerging when he tried it, and his throat felt like pins were being stuck into it.

Christ, what a mess. But under all his pain was the exultant realization that he’d done it, he’d lit the damned thing on fire. Someone would see … .

Someone would come. Now if he could just get to the top of the pit, find Sam, and try to help him until their rescuers got here… . He dug his stockinged feet—where had his shoes gone? He couldn’t remember—into the sand slope. But when he did that, it started sliding again and he couldn’t hang on, to stop himself. So he slid with it all the way down to the bottom again.

And again. On his third try, or maybe his fourth, he was no nearer the top than before. His fingers bled stickily from digging into the stony, shifting earth, and every so often an ember from the fire still sulking at the pit’s bottom sailed up and zinged him; by now the exposed back of his neck felt like—and probably was, he realized—cooked meat.

He collapsed onto his face, spread-eagled on the steep hill. Again, he had to try again. Because the whole tree had exploded, for God’s sake—somebody would’ve seen it. Surely they’d be curious.

But not about Chip, because no one knew he was here. No one but Randy Dodd, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone. So people might come to find out about the fire, but they wouldn’t be here to save some poor injured fellow from out of this pit.

For all Chip knew, they’d never get anywhere near it. If they approached what remained of the sentinel tree from its other side, they might not even realize the sand pit existed.

And with his voice gone, he couldn’t even yell to alert them. So he had to try to climb. Cold, hungry, thirsty, bleeding, burned—everything hurt now, banging and crashing with pain, so he had no way of
knowing which parts of him were severely injured and which were just beat to hell—

Climb, damn it. It’s easy. Put a hand out, dig in. Push with the foot. Again. Up, big fella
.

Chip smiled in the darkness, remembering how he used to tell Sam Tiptree that same thing whenever Sam fell—running for a fly ball or a long, spiraling pass—on the lawn in Central Park. Or when Sam tripped over his own feet trying to make an easy layup or return a marshmallow serve …

Back then, Chip had been the athlete, not Sam, and the clear admiration in Sam’s eyes when Chip knew how to throw a curveball, tie a slipknot, or get them both into a video game emporium with just one ticket had been, in Chip’s pathetically lonely, solitary adolescent life, worth a million bucks.

He’d have given a million to see it again, too. But he was never going to, he realized bleakly as a cascade of stones from above showered down on him, loosened by his efforts at climbing. Sam was dead, either from the gunshot wound he’d had or drowned by the rising tide.

And I’m the only one who knows
. The thought triggered a fast mental snapshot of Chip’s mother, before she’d walked out on the Old Bastard.

Walked out on Chip, too. He grabbed another handful of sand. Walked, and never came back. His fingers seized a root clump as he went on thinking about when the cards from her stopped coming.

The Old Bastard’s sourly delivered explanation was that she’d gotten tired of them, but Chip never believed it completely. He feared something bad had happened, that something had simply erased her from the face of the earth.

Chip thought that if only he knew what specific disaster had befallen his mother, which terrible event out of the many that capered in his imagination—if indeed any of them had happened at all—he might not feel so bad about it.

The way Sam’s own mother was going to feel about Sam: just a big hole full of awful questions that would never get answered. Just nothing. Which plenty of people would say was probably for the best. Easier not to know the details.

But Chip knew better, and so did all the families of all those girls he and Carolyn had written about.

So maybe he wasn’t going to make it; the funny, thready feeling he had all over his body now made him think that probably he wasn’t.

That the bleeding he was doing might not be reversible, even if he got found. He’d probably be dead now if it weren’t for the life jacket, the thick metal buckle all smooshed from a bullet’s impact, flat and misshapen when he put his fingers on it.

It must’ve deflected the projectile just enough, he thought, when he finally felt it and understood what had happened. But the darkness all around him still kept shrinking and expanding with an effect like the wah-wah pedal on an electric guitar.

Another bunch of big stones clattered downhill at him. When they’d gone by, he stuck his hand up into the sand slope above him and dug his feet in again, and was rewarded with yet another six or eight inches of upward progress.