Revenant Rising (56 page)
“Yes, and I told him you’re looking forward to your dinner meeting with him tonight.”
“Looking forward could be something of an overstatement,” Laurel says while leafing through a fresh stack of phone messages. “Anything here need immediate attention?”
“No. The sensation-seekers seem to be on pause, so the bulk of the nuisance calls are coming from literary agents and publishing houses wanting a piece of the Colin Elliot biography action. Oh, and the periodicals wanting exclusive rights to excerpts.”
“They can wait. Indefinitely. Anything else?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary except for that loony Mrs. Floss. She called several times. I took one of the calls myself while the intern was on break.”
“Did she say what she wanted?”
“Mainly to dither, I think, and to let you know your maintenance man didn’t show up until noon.”
“Shit. I don’t
have
a maintenance man. I only told her I was
looking
for one, and now she’s at it again. Sunday night she thought she saw someone on my porch roof and went chasing after that hallucination with a broom. The day before, she thought my family still all lived at home and gave me food to share with them—this, after leaping out in front of my moving car to get my attention. I can see I’ll have to do something about her, if only for her own safety. But not today. Grab your belongings, we’re going to Saks and Bergdorf’s for starters and maybe to—”
“Problem.”
“What now?”
“I don’t shop in those stores. I can’t afford to.”
“Sure you can. You’re getting a bonus for all the extras you’ve taken on lately. And for completing the transcription of the Rayce interview on your own time because I need it tomorrow morning.”
“Will do. Lead on.”
Hoop enters the house at 13 Old Quarry Court through the grade door of the attached garage. The door is screened by tall waxy-leafed bushes with pink-purple flowers and sagged enough in its frame that he only has to apply a little wrist pressure to spring the simple doorknob lock. Inside the garage he spots the opener device he saw Laurel Chandler use last night. If luck holds he’ll find out she depends on that instead of using a key for the inside door. His luck holds; when he tries the door to the house it opens to his touch.
He doesn’t go in right away. Even though her car is gone, nothing says someone else might not be inside, so he listens, watches and waits. But not as long as he did last night, when too much carefulness let the lawyerwoman get away.
A minute or two later he steps into a hallway with enough natural light coming from the far end that he can pick out several doors along its length. He pricks his ears one more time, opens the nearest door a crack, and makes out a steep wooden stairway going up. He shuts the door without making a sound; the upper floor can wait till he’s seen everything that matters on this floor.
The next door is to a food closet with more empty shelves than full ones. The door after that opens onto stairs going down to a cellar that doesn’t hold any interest. The last door is to a toilet that’s likely called a powder room in a house like this.
On full alert, he passes through an archway into the kitchen. Within the kitchen, he stays to the inside wall, ready to duck behind the freestanding counter in the middle of the room at any sound or sign of movement beyond the stretch of bare windows opposite. He sidles along, brushing against stove knobs and drawer handles till he’s partway hidden by the big icebox with kid’s crayon drawings stuck to its side by magnets.
Strange as this seems, he finds even stranger that the drawings are old; the colors are faded, the papers are yellowed and show crackles along their edges. He leaves that to be puzzled over later and moves on to another hallway, this one wider and interrupted by doorways without doors.
He sees a room set aside for eating. The kind of setup where you’re either putting on the dog or making too big a thing out of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Next he looks into a room filled with books. The shelves go right up to the ceiling, calling for use of a ladder. The only place he ever saw this many books was a regulation library and, after that, the front room of Big Bill’s place in Bimmerman where Bill kept his hoard of Zane Greys and Louis L’Amours.
The front room here has a piano and a fireplace and a TV and more bookshelves, these holding board games and video entertainments and useless objects you’re supposed to admire just because they’re there. He looks into another room that’s set up as an office, then into one done up prim and proper—the kind of room where the preacher-man sits when he comes to call. The last room he comes to is small, and by the look of the flowered wallpaper and chair cushions, it’s the place where womenfolk sit when they visit.
He goes up the wide front stairs on cat feet and moves along the upper hallway with some beginning notions about the people that live here. Or used to live here. The doors to the first three rooms he comes to are open. A passing glance into the first two rooms is enough to say that kids once lived here,—that’s for sure—but a day-long glance at faded decorations isn’t going to say how long since they lived here. Same with the third doorway he looks into.
This room is bigger, with a grownup bed against one wall, a baby bed on the other side, and a rocking chair in between. Here he can imagine little kids listening to stories and calling out tag lines like the “Wig and a wag and a long leather bag” of his childhood. He sits down in the chair, gives it a few rocks as if the back-and-forth motion will help him figure out who the children were that used these rooms and maybe don’t anymore. No amount of rocking is going to produce that answer, so he moves on to the next room, the last one on this side of the hallway.
The door to this one is closed. He opens it with the same care he’d use if he thought a fire was blazing on the other side. The inside might as well have suffered a fire because it’s been stripped of everything but a few nails where pictures used to hang and a layer of dust showing footprints of the last person who entered.
“Jackassed-fool,” he says half aloud for letting his own footprints get mixed in with the others and immediately goes down on his knees with a pocket kerchief to wipe them all away.
To do a good job of it he has to do the whole room, from baseboard to baseboard, one side to the other, and over to the closet, where the first set of footprints go. He opens the closet door so a high-water mark won’t be left, and while making a clean swipe of the footprinted floor inside, the kerchief hangs up on something that turns out to be a loose board. After he thinks to look for and pull the chain to an overhead light, he sees that it’s five loose boards he’s happened on. He pries them up in his own shadow and feels around inside the opening.
The first thing he touches is feathery, giving him a start. But when he lifts it out, it’s not the dead bird he thought it was; it’s a beat-up angel figure of the kind you’d stab onto the top of a Christmas tree. Next his hand goes around a small book with a strap closing that he doesn’t have to see to know is a diary. He gropes around some more and comes across something soft that jingles. He’s thinking it’s another holiday ornament till he fishes out a homemade cloth collar with little bells attached, like it was meant for a pet animal of some kind. He brings up a collection of homemade greeting cards tied with a ribbon, and a snap-lid plush-covered box holding what looks like teeth—human milk teeth—along with small samples of hair bound with thread, and a locket greened by cheapness and age.
The bottom of the hidey-hole is paved with what can only be marbles. Lots of marbles. He lifts out a handful, then lets them fall back, forgetting about the clatter they’ll make because something’s caught his eye. Something made of paper is sticking up at the back edge of the opening. Again, he doesn’t have to take a close look to know what he’s touching when he eases a pair of banknotes loose from the rough edge. No real surprise to someone recently grown used to handling money in whole stacks. But the surprise in it is that the two bills he just freed up are each of the one-hundred dollar amount, making this more the hiding place of a grownup than a kid.
While he puts everything back the way it was, he ponders if any of this has meaning for his purpose and decides it doesn’t. Then again, maybe it does. He reaches back into the hole and grabs the little book with the locking strap on it. Writings so secret they’re kept under the floorboards might tell him something after all.
The door to the room across the hall is open. One glance says this is the biggest bedroom in the house and the one the lawyerwoman sleeps in when she’s not whoring herself to the rock star. He enters this room like he’s been sucked into one of those five-X places on 42
nd
Street and might catch one of those diseases nobody calls by name.
Once that feeling passes, he memorizes the layout and where the furniture is placed before he gets down to particulars. He’s extra careful not to disturb anything because common sense says this is where she’d be most apt to notice. But common sense also says this is where he’s most apt to find out if her going away last night was for more than just the one night.
He checks the trash basket next to the desk for clues. It holds a lot of stickumed yellow notepapers wadded together like a ball of burrs. The time spent pulling them apart and smoothing them out is wasted because none have place names on them, just dates and times and names of people. For what it’s worth, he bothers to notice that the rock star’s name does not appear even once and that all the dates are close to a week old.
The trash basket in the bathroom is empty. So is the toothbrush holder, but that doesn’t say how long it will stay empty. He gets a partial answer in the clothes closet where a count of the empty hangers dropped to the floor provides a clue. He counts ten, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll be gone ten days because ritzy people are known to change their clothes more than once a day. Or so he’s heard. And ever how long she’s gone, he still doesn’t have a clue where she’s gone.
In the hallway, two more doors remain. Both are closed. Now that he’s near enough to see the damage, he’s drawn to the door at the very end of the hall. It’s suffered hammer dents, and the frame is splintered in several places. He half expects the knob to fall off in his hand when he turns it and the hinges to fail when it swings open; he’s prepared to see almost anything on the other side, and all there is to see is the top end of the steep stairs glimpsed earlier and a few splinters on the top step.
Why the door was nailed shut, he can’t guess. Nor can he figure out why the door was so roughly whacked open unless it was because somebody was in a terrible big hurry to get out—like they were running from something. He gathers up the splinters and pockets them as reminders to maybe puzzle this through later when his nerves are settled down.
The last door opens into a large cedar closet with an overhead light turned on by a wall switch. A long hanging rod on one side holds a lineup of zippered garment bags. The other side of the space is taken up with a bucket of cleaning supplies, a broom, and an electric carpet sweeper.
None of this interests him as much as the hatchway in the far wall. The beaverboard cover slides away without resistance and gives him a view into an attic he calculates to be above the garage. The wide-plank platform extending eight or ten feet beyond the hatchway holds a few mismatched valises and gym bags and farthest from the opening, some pasteboard cartons bellied out with age. There’s a noticeable gap between the valises and the boxes, hinting that another valise or two might have been stored there till last night.
He boosts himself into the attic and lets his eyes adjust. In light from the louvers up near the eaves, he dares spider across the rafters when he runs out of platform. He narrowly avoids an entanglement with loose wiring he gauges to be above the door opener device in the garage and the sloppy job of someone ill-acquainted with electrical work. He encounters other light sources, none of them intentional. Most are minor clefts lowdown on the outside wall that wouldn’t take any time at all to fix with a caulk gun. Same for the ones on the inside wall next to the chimney where time and weight have caused enough settling that he can see through one chink right into the big main bedroom.