The Back Door of Midnight (17 page)

“Mick,” he repeated softly. “Mick Sanchez. He didn’t mean to cause any trouble. All he did was die. How has his name come up?”

I told Mr. Gill what little I knew.

He nodded. “Mick Sanchez was married to Audrey. They worked for the Fairfaxes, whose home—one of their homes—is on Oyster Creek. You may have seen it.”

“Next to the Flemings’,” I said. “Marcy was a Fairfax.”

“That’s right. Perhaps you have already met Audrey, who works for Marcy now.”

“Yes. So why was my mother supposed to forget about Audrey’s husband?”

“He died suddenly, several months before Joanna. Audrey
held your mother responsible for his death. I suppose that Iris was telling Joanna to forget about all that.”

“All what?” I did the math, subtracting fifteen years from Audrey’s current age. “He must have been a lot older than my mother. They weren’t having an affair, were they?”

“Lord, no.”

“How did he die?”

“In a car accident, on Scarborough Road, I believe, a few miles after it crosses Wist Creek.”

“Did my mother cause it? Did she run into him?”

“No, she simply didn’t foresee it. Audrey was a frequent client of Joanna’s and—”

“A
client
of my mother’s?” I interrupted. “But Audrey thinks psychics are tools of the devil. She thinks all of us O’Neills are going straight to hell.”

“Now she does. At that time, however, she was your mother’s steadiest customer—she was dependent on her, really, couldn’t do anything without first consulting Joanna. She asked for readings so often, Joanna felt uneasy. But when her husband was killed, Audrey turned on your mother. She blamed her for not foreseeing Mick’s accident, for not warning them.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “I understand wanting to blame someone at first—you’re upset and everything—but eventually, you
think clearly again. Anyway, I can’t understand how Audrey could have changed that much.”

“In essence, she didn’t,” he replied. “She simply exchanged one extreme belief for another. Audrey is the kind of person who can’t stand feeling uncertain about things. People like her feel safer when they latch on to something that makes them feel like they’ve got the answer, makes them feel like they’re in control. The first way let her down, so now she is trying another.”

“Did my mother blame herself?”

“She felt very bad about Mick’s death. She felt Audrey’s anger and pain, felt it keenly.”

How angry was Audrey Sanchez? Angry enough to kill? But how could someone so religious justify that?

The theory I had spun for Aunt Iris could be applied to Audrey: Angry, she had struck my mother, never intending to kill her. Afterward, she had panicked and ransacked the house to make it look like a robbery. Years later her bizarre religious beliefs justified her action against my “evil” mother. She had gotten away with it, until Uncle Will began to reexamine the case. . . .

But if she or Aunt Iris had killed Uncle Will, who had put him in the trunk of the car at Tilby’s Dream? He wasn’t a large man; both women were strong, and either of them could have
backed her car up to the car that was burned. Still, how would she get him from the place of the murder into her car and—

A light brush of fingers on my cheek sent me leaping out of my chair.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Gill said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I would never hurt you, dear. You just look so thoughtful and concerned, so much like Joanna.”

I remained standing. “Was Mrs. Sanchez angry enough to hurt my mother?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was she angry enough to strike her, to accidentally kill her?”

“Certainly they must have told you. Joanna was killed in a robbery. They never caught the man who did it.”

“How do you know it was a man?”

His eyes grew wary. “I simply assumed it.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have.”

He paled, his face turning the color of skim milk. “This is the result of some peculiar idea of Iris or William. It is natural for you to have questions about what happened, but there is nothing that can be learned so many years after.”

“Maybe,” I said, edging toward the door. “I’ll call you if I have any more questions.”

He stood up. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

“Thanks, but I have a car.”

“Did you park out back?” Without giving me a choice, he walked me there.

I couldn’t wait to get inside the old Taurus. Mr. Gill leaned down, his face close to the driver’s side window. That window worked, but I pretended it didn’t.

“Buckle up. Drive safely,” he mouthed through the glass.

I turned the key in the ignition and waved.

Hours later, I’d think back to the small parking lot and remember a car with several guys inside, but at that moment, the observation registered as nothing more than relief that other people were around. Believing that I was driving to safety, I took off.

AS I DROVE
home, I struggled to sort out what I knew. Was there a connection among the deaths of my uncle, my mother, and Mick Sanchez? Three sudden and suspicious deaths created a bewildering number of possibilities. Because the first two occurred fifteen years ago, it seemed impossible to collect the information that would indicate these two deaths were something more than an accident and a robbery. But key bits of information were missing for the recent crime as well.

It wasn’t even clear if the use of the abandoned car was evidence of a murderer’s plan or a murderer’s desperation. Perhaps placing a corpse in a car that was about to be incinerated in a game was a sign of good planning: After all, any evidence indicating where Uncle Will died and how his body was transported to the old Buick would have been driven over by the cars of Erika’s friends, and then by the heavy fire trucks. Important clues would have been burned and washed away. On the other
hand, if the abandoned car on Tilby’s Dream was a location that was easily recognized in a riddle, then it was a location known by most locals. So it could have popped into the head of a murderer who had done no planning at all, a person who had accidentally killed someone and was desperate for a place to dump a body. I was back to square one.

I knew of two people angry enough to get into a fight with Uncle Will: Aunt Iris, fearing he was going to put her away, and Audrey Sanchez, believing he was in league with the devil. Elliot Gill had once been very angry, but why would he hurt Uncle Will after so many years? And then there was Carl, who was obviously worried about the police finding out who was at the fire and who seemed a likely candidate for the earlier harassment of Uncle Will. But even if I came up with solid reasons for these suspects to intentionally or accidentally strike the blow that killed Uncle Will, it wouldn’t matter without evidence. The most likely place to find evidence was the site of the murder, which the police didn’t seem to know.

But maybe I did. Somehow, before I even arrived in Wisteria, I had seen where the car had burned; some part of me had visited the place. In my second O.B.E., I began somewhere else and ended up at the fire site: What if I was seeing the place where my uncle was struck on the head? Maybe in that O.B.E., I made the journey with him from the time of
the attack to the disposal of his body. If I saw the actual place where he was killed, would I recognize it the way I had recognized the fire site?

I pulled into the area at the top of Aunt Iris’s driveway, waited for a car to pass, then made a U-turn on Creek Road. Driving to where it forked off Scarborough, I headed away from town toward the large tulip poplar. A storm was brewing. The sky, which had been sullen all afternoon, was growing darker in the west, and when I got to the landmark, its leaves looked pale against the threatening clouds. I turned onto the road that ran through Tilby’s Dream and drove between fields of soy and corn. Their vibrant green yellowed in the pre-storm light.

My plan was to check the immediate area, working my way outward from the fire site. I couldn’t remember anything at the actual site that looked like a wall with notches in it, but I remembered how Erika’s clues, her riddles, were metaphors; maybe the images in my O.B.E.s worked in a similar way. Having turned at the “spring flower” in the riddle, I finally spotted the “green tunnel” and parked my car at its entrance.

I jogged down the dirt road. The old trees and overgrown brush were gloomy, the air oppressive. I was glad to reach the clearing. It was still cordoned off by the yellow police tape. To the left were fields that stretched to the horizon. To the right was a small, uncultivated field hemmed by pine. I walked a
ways into the pine trees, perhaps a quarter of a mile, and saw that the wood and its soft floor of needles seemed to go on and on. At that point I stopped. If Uncle Will had been killed here, there would be a limit to how far his body could be easily carried, and the space between the pines was too narrow to drive.

I returned to the burn site, then headed down the road that ran in the opposite direction from which I had come, walking through an identical avenue of trees and passing through open fields. The route curved until I found myself back on what I thought was Scarborough Road, although far enough from the big poplar that I couldn’t see it. I turned and retraced my steps.

It occurred to me that, for the murderer, convenience might not have been possible—or even necessary. Given Aunt Iris’s habit of coming and going any time of day or night, and her state of confusion, there would be time to kill Uncle Will and move his body before anyone thought to ask where he was or wonder why she hadn’t reported him missing.

Since convenience didn’t limit the murderer, the crime could have been done anywhere that Uncle Will might go. Obviously, I needed the help of someone familiar with the town and the area around it, someone who would recognize the images in my O.B.E. and guess the riddle they presented.

I wanted to trust Zack, but I couldn’t because of his loyalty
to Erika. Marcy would be even more familiar with Wisteria and the area around it, but I would have to think of a reason for asking about an image like a notched wall. I could say I had seen the place in one of my mother’s photos and I wondered where it was.

When I reached the fire site again, I heard a rumble of thunder. In the open country, it seemed to roll and roll, like a bowling ball thrown down an endless lane. I knew underneath trees were dangerous places to hang out in a storm, but despite what they said on the Weather Channel, I wasn’t inclined to seek out a low-lying rut in a field. I crossed the burn site and started through the avenue of trees that led to my car, hoping to beat the storm.

A second peal of thunder sounded closer, and I broke into a jog. The thunder was followed by silence, a long, ominous quiet. A fluttering of birds broke the spell. Wind gusted and branches tossed. I saw a streak of lightning through the trees on the right. I never saw what was coming from the left.

I was hit hard from behind and slammed to the ground. The breath was knocked out of me—I couldn’t scream, couldn’t fight back. Facedown in the road, I gasped for air. Branches and shells ground into my skin. My mouth got gritty with sand.

I tried to pull my knees up under me, tried to get
leverage to stand up, but the person holding me down was heavy. I struggled to cover my head with my arms—all I could think of was Uncle Will struck from behind. But the attacker grabbed my hands and pinned my arms to the ground, bending my wrists at odd angles over the ruts in the road. Now I had my breath again, now I screamed, screamed in pain and fear. I got a knee thrust in my back.

“Listen to me,” a male voice said. “Listen, if you don’t want to get hurt.”

I continued to struggle and got my hair pulled hard. I howled like a beaten puppy.

They laughed. There was more than one.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I hissed.

“Stay out of Erika’s business.”

I strained to pick up my head. “It’s my uncle’s business I care about.”

My face was pushed back in the dirt.

“Stay out of it,” said a male voice different from the first. “Your uncle’s dead. Don’t make us stuff
you
in a trunk.”

Their laughter was drowned out by a crack of thunder and a sound like wood splitting. The pressure lightened on me for a second, then I was shoved facedown again. It was raining hard even under the trees, turning the road beneath me into a river
of grit. I had to shut my eyes to keep out the splashing sand and mud.

“We’re going to let you go, but don’t move. We’ll be right back on you. Count to a hundred. Do it nice and slow. Don’t get up till you’ve reached the end. Then walk real slow back to your car. Don’t tell the police. Don’t tell anyone. We’ll know. And we won’t be so friendly next time.”

I was released. As soon as I heard the slap of their racing feet against the road, I lifted my head. I watched the fleeing figures, three of them, until they were erased by rain. I rose shakily to my feet.

I walked slowly, not because they had told me to, but because I was stunned by the attack. I was shocked at how easy it was to overpower me, how quickly I had found myself facedown on the ground and unable to fight back. I walked in a daze, hardly hearing the storm, and finally climbed into my car, soaked to the bone. Lightning flashed over and over; I sat staring up at it dully, as if I were waiting for a traffic light to change. At last I switched on the ignition and headed to the house.

When I pulled into Aunt Iris’s driveway, the rain had nearly stopped, but the trees were dripping heavily. My headlights shone like two ghostly beams through the ground mist. I parked and walked toward the front steps. I longed for a
shower, not to get rid of the mud, but to clean off the touch of my attackers. I longed for my family.

“Anna.”

I jumped a mile.

“Whoa! It’s just me.”

Zack was standing under the covered porch, backlit by the hall light. I stopped at the foot of the steps, and he started down them. “We need to talk and—my God, what happened to you?”

I backed away from him. When he reached toward me, I put up my hands, instinctively shielding my face. He took my wrists, encircling them with his fingers, holding them gently but firmly. “What happened?”