by Lis Wiehl
“That’s not the way he told it to me,” Dani said.
“Well, I’m sure that with twenty-twenty hindsight he can see it more clearly,” Carl said. “Time and perspective and all that.”
“Good night, Carl,” Dani said.
“He loves you very much, you know.”
“I know,” she said. But inwardly she thought, If he loved Cassandra but played it down when I asked about it, what’s he saying now that we’re involved? Does he even know what being in love means? “You going to be okay down here?”
“All good,” he said. “Can’t fall asleep on my first watch.”
“No, but when you’re done, warm milk really can do the trick. It’s not just an old wives’ tale.”
“I’m good,” he said. “You go to bed. Otto and I will be fine.”
Alone in the kitchen, Carl fought back tears. He’d thought there was no hell greater than the one he’d been in, but now that he was leading the people he loved down a path toward destruction, he wished only to die. He felt beyond redemption, and yet he knew if he could just ask for it . . . He tried to bring his hands together in prayer, but it was as if he were holding powerful magnets with opposing poles, his hands repelling each other, no matter how hard he pressed.
His hands gripped the armrests of his chair and he leaned forward, gritting his teeth, squeezing his eyes closed as he fought to say the words.
“Our Father . . . who . . . art . . . in heaven!”
He heard himself growling, his throat constricting to cut off the flow of air. He grunted and pushed harder to make his mouth obey his will, but his will was failing.
“Hallowed . . . ,” he managed to say, but he could go no further. The harder he struggled, the more he was trapped, like in one of those straw finger puzzles he’d loved as a child.
“Help me, Jesus,” he mumbled. “Please . . .”
He was crying, weeping tears of anguish and profound regret. He wanted to die and he wanted to kill simultaneously. If only he could kill himself, he thought, but when he tried to move his arm to pick up the Colt automatic sitting on the counter not five feet away, he couldn’t do it.
Then the thing inside him noticed that Tommy had left his cell phone on the food island to recharge.
He picked up Tommy’s phone, searched his contacts, and found the private cell phone number for Cassandra Morton.
Using Tommy’s phone, he dialed her number, made sure it went to voice mail, then hung up.
When she called back, Carl didn’t answer. A moment later, he listened to the message she’d left him, or rather, the message she thought she was leaving Tommy: “It’s good just to know you’re still there. You’ve got a home in me too.” He deleted the voice mail and put the phone back where he’d found it.
21.
“This place is like an optical illusion,” Tommy told his aunt. “It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Has anyone ever gone through all this stuff?”
“I wish we could hire someone,” Ruth said. “Who knows what they’d find in the far corners.”
They were in the library attic. They’d brought flashlights and lightbulbs, as well as an electric camp lantern Tommy kept in his garage in case of power failures. Carl had volunteered to come along, but Tommy asked him to stay with Dani, who was still trying to track down Quinn. Ruth illuminated the room with her flashlight while Tommy replaced the overhead bulbs. Ruth said she was going to speak to Leon again about the squirrels.
“It’s hard to keep up when half of your staff are unpaid volunteers. If we could pay them, we could fire them,” she told Tommy. “When they’re volunteers and you ask them not to come in, they say, ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ and they come anyway.”
“There’s what you probably smelled,” he said, pointing his flashlight beam at the carcass of a dead pigeon.
“How did that get in here?” she said.
“You must have a hole under the eaves somewhere.”
They pushed farther into the labyrinth, the shadows getting longer behind them as Tommy carried the lantern forward.
“Hel-lo,” he said when they found the old oak desk in the northeast corner of the room.
Ruth looked at him, puzzled. “Who are you saying hello to?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what Sherlock Holmes always says when he finds something.” He set the lantern on the desk and pulled on the chain of the old gooseneck desk lamp. It did not light up. He screwed the lightbulb in tighter and tried again, had no luck, then replaced it with a 100-watt bulb from his pocket.
“Fiat lux,” Ruth said as she turned off her flashlight and sat down in the folding chair beside the desk. The surface was covered with a layer of dust thick enough for Tommy to write his name in with his fingertip. The desk had a matching captain’s chair on wheels. He sat down in it and opened all the drawers, but found only pencils and blank pads of yellow legal paper, a small dictionary, a box of paper clips, a hole punch, rubber bands, note cards, Post-it notes, an eraser, and a box of brass roundhead fasteners.
“I can’t believe you let Abbie work up here in all this dust,” Tommy said. “You could have at least given her a feather duster.”
“She insisted on being up here, now that I think of it,” Ruth said. “I offered to make her a place downstairs, but she said she liked the quiet up here.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “Everybody knows how deafening it can get in a library. Did she carry a briefcase or a book bag?”
“She always carried a large straw bag. Almost like a beach bag. With handles. I don’t know what was in it.”
Tommy turned on his flashlight and swung the beam around the attic, a cone of light illuminating the dust in the air. Close by, he saw shelves stacked with copies of the East Salem Chronicle dating back to before the Civil War. Below that, massive volumes, two feet high and four inches thick, labeled Plots and Titles, shelved in chronological order.
“If she wanted to hide something,” Tommy said, “this would be a good place.”
He shone the light on the floor, hoping to see some indication of where she might have walked, or a sign that anything might have been recently disturbed.
Everywhere he looked he saw only cardboard or paper or leatherbound book spines. A collection of Shakespeare that appeared about to crumble; a bundle of Mickey Spillane paperbacks, tied with twine; stringbound bundles of Colliers magazines.
“Do you think there’s a loose floorboard?” Tommy said.
“I can virtually guarantee you there’s a loose floorboard,” Ruth said. “But where to start? We’d have to move everything, and there’s nowhere to put it.”
“If that’s true for us, it was true for Abbie too, and she was a little old lady. She’s not going to be shoving heavy boxes around. She would have kept it simple. Given that we don’t even know what we’re looking for, whatever it is could be the size of a matchbox or larger. Probably small enough to carry in her straw bag. The desk is easy to get to, but we’ve already searched it.”
“No, we haven’t,” Ruth said, moving the gooseneck lamp to the front corner of the desk. “Your grandfather had one of these desks. In his day people used old typewriters, but they didn’t want them cluttering their desktops when they weren’t using them. So they had a foldaway drawer, and they’d mount the typewriter there. I used to play with it—it was like a magical hidden compartment. It’s this middle part here.”
She bent the light over the edge of the desktop. Tommy now saw the groove cut into the bottom of the front edge.
“Pull that forward and flip it back,” she said.
The center portion of the desktop rotated backward as the hidden drawer tilted up and forward. On it they saw a wooden box about the size of a small briefcase, perhaps 16 x 12 x 4 inches. Made from rosewood, Tommy guessed, or perhaps a dark mahogany. The box had a striking inlay, a Celtic cross about a foot tall and eight inches across, made of gold, atop a smaller circle of what Tommy guessed was silver, because it had tarnished whil
e the gold had not. Centered along each of the four sides on the top of the box was a smaller Celtic cross made of silver, each one about the size of a nickel. When Tommy turned the box over, he saw identical small Celtic crosses in the same four locations.
“Hel-lo,” Ruth said.
When Tommy tried to lift the box, it was heavier than he had expected, and when he shook it, nothing inside moved. When he rapped on it with first his knuckles and then with the end of his flashlight, it sounded solid. He examined it from every direction but could not find anything resembling a hinge or door. He pried and pressed from all angles but could not open it.
He rotated the center portion of the desktop back into position and set the box on it, then moved the lamp down to throw more light on the object. He pressed every part of the inlay, in varying combinations, thinking there might be some kind of hidden latch or button.
“I give up,” he finally said. “What do you think is in it?”
“I’ve seen similar boxes that held Bibles,” Ruth said. “Though that was when I was in Europe. It might be a chasse.”
“A chasse?”
“A reliquary,” she said. “Containing a relic from a saint or holy person.”
“You mean bones?”
“Sometimes.”
“Abbie wanted us to find this. She knew you’d lead me to it. Let’s get it back to the house.” He rolled his chair back from the desk. “But make sure Otto doesn’t bury the bones in the backyard.”
At the house, Dani studied the box from every angle and pronounced it lovely and mysterious.
“Thanks,” Tommy said, “but we already knew that.”
She thought it might be one of those ancient puzzle boxes that opened by sliding and pressing and rotating hidden panels and knobs and levers.
“Could be. I also have a table saw in the garage in my shop that could expedite matters.”
Dani advised against it. She’d seen a show once about medieval puzzle boxes on the History Channel and learned that the makers often boobytrapped them with vials of acid or ink that destroyed whatever was inside if someone tampered with it.
“How about an MRI?” Ruth said.
“You can’t put metal in a magnetic imager,” Dani said. “But maybe an X-ray or an ultrasound would work.”
“Maybe Quinn could use his incredible psychic powers,” Tommy mocked. “It’s a joke,” he added when he saw Dani scowl.
Dani had finally heard from Quinn—he’d sent a text to say he was coming back with news she would find interesting. She needed to pick him up at the station in Katonah at 4:40 that afternoon.
“We should probably wake Carl up from his nap,” Tommy said. “Why don’t we ask him to pick Quinn up?”
“Carl couldn’t sleep,” Dani said. “He left twenty minutes ago. He said he had an errand to run.”
“He left you here alone?” Tommy said, irritated. “What happened to the buddy system?”
“I told him I’d be fine with Otto on guard and your aunt’s arsenal close at hand. Carl seems a little off. Maybe he’s fighting something. My sister called to ask me if I thought she should get her girls flu shots. She keeps thinking I’m a pediatrician.”
“I think he’s still thinking about Esme,” Tommy said. “He can’t stop blaming himself.”
Too late he realized his thoughtlessness. He knew Dani blamed herself for letting her parents book a flight home with a bush pilot who was a known smuggler after they had visited her in Africa. She’d left them at the airport because she’d wanted to stay to say good-bye to Quinn instead of going with them. If she’d stayed with them, she would have insisted they find another pilot. And they’d still be alive.
“Did your folks ever meet Quinn?” Tommy said, knowing she was thinking about them.
“No. He was supposed to join us in Kumasi, but something came up. But that’s just the way it is in Africa. You can plan a trip, but if the gas station is out of gas or somebody stole the train tracks and sold them for scrap, you gotta adjust.”
“Like the old line, ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.’”
“I wish they’d met you,” Dani said.
“They did,” Tommy said. “Or your dad did. He used to give me my sports physicals.”
“I mean now.”
She thought about how often Quinn had disappointed her, stood her up, or canceled on her. She remembered her mother saying, after she’d learned Dani was homecoming queen to Tommy’s king, “He’s such a nice boy.” Her mother would approve. Her dad would too.
“Just promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise you won’t break my heart.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Not gonna happen.” He kissed her.
Dani spent the day online catching up on the latest developments in psychotropic pharmaceuticals. A colleague had once commented that the untold billions of dollars spent developing drugs to treat the symptoms of depression would be better spent fighting the causes of it, war, poverty, hunger . . . and sometimes Dani was inclined to agree. Linz, the German pharmaceutical giant, was clearly poised to dominate the marketplace, the way Microsoft dominated the computer industry. When it was time for her to leave for the train station, Tommy walked her to her car and made sure her Beretta was in working order.
The gates opened as she headed down Tommy’s driveway. She’d gone half a mile when she saw a cab coming in the opposite direction. It occurred to her that Quinn might have taken an earlier train, so she turned around to follow the cab, thinking he might be in it. As she got closer, she saw that it was a New York City taxi. She knew it was at least a $150 cab ride from Manhattan to East Salem, and she was sure Quinn didn’t have that kind of money. And come to think of it, how would Quinn know where Tommy’s house was, or that she was staying there?
When the cab turned into Tommy’s drive, pausing at the gate, Dani pulled over, fifty yards behind it. There was nowhere for her to hide, she realized, but there was also no reason to hide. She started making her three-point turn to head back to the train station when she saw a figure get out of the back of the cab and walk to the intercom on Tommy’s gate. It was a woman wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, with her blond ponytail looped through the hole in the back of the cap, but Dani knew from the way the ponytail bounced, and the way the woman bounced when she walked, and the way she smiled to the cabbie as she asked him to wait, that it was Cassandra Morton.
Dani stopped in the middle of the road, shocked, then jerked her steering wheel hard to get pointed in the right direction and stomped on the gas.
“Surprise!” Cassandra said. “What’s that?”
“This?” Tommy said. “Nothing.” He lowered the RAZ-IR PRO 2 he’d been pointing at his ex, closed the screen, and turned it off. Cassandra was still trouble, he knew, but according to the scanner, not of the supernatural kind. “What brings you here?” he said, trying to sound welcoming.
“You’ve got a home in me,” she said. “That’s what you said.”
“I did indeed,” he said, smiling gamely. “If you ever need a place to stay, or to hide, I’m your man,” he’d vowed—a long time ago. Usually people don’t take you up on offers like that. “Come in,” he said as he reached for her suitcase. “Here, let me get that.”
He lifted her bag and grimaced a bit for comic effect. As they stepped into the kitchen, Tommy congratulated himself for remembering to put Aunt Ruth’s guns back in the broom closet as the cab pulled up.
She looked around. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”
“You mean, cleaned it?”
“Tom, if this is inconvenient, tell me,” she said. “I know I should have called first, but it would have ruined the surprise. At least I knew when you called me and hung up last night that I wasn’t completely off your radar.”
“I called you? I didn’t call you.”
“Your private number is on my call log,” she said, confused.
“I must have pocket-dialed. Seriously, Cass—I didn’t call you
.”
“Oh no,” she said, her mouth turning down. “I thought—”
“It’s okay, though,” Tommy said. “It’s all good. Don’t worry about it.”
“Is this a bad time?”
He couldn’t help laughing.
“Oh dear,” she said. “It is a bad time, isn’t it? Let me call the cabbie back before he gets too far.”
“Cass, it’s all right,” he said. “But yeah, it’s not a good time. It’s too much to explain right now. But it’s obviously not a good time for you either, is it?”
Cassandra was, generally speaking, a loving, caring person, but she was also accustomed to being the center of attention. Tommy had figured out early in their relationship how easy it was to change the subject, any subject, by putting the spotlight back on the actress who’d always been the prettiest woman in the room no matter how big the room was.
“You’ve heard?” she said.
“Only what I try not to read in the tabloids.”
“I thought you didn’t read the tabs.”
“Actually, Carl told me,” Tommy said. “He was one of those one-named Brazilian soccer guys, right? Like Kaka, or Poo-poo . . .”
“His name shall not be spoken,” she said.
Tommy nodded in agreement. “I thought you were in LA.”
“I’m going to be on Broadway,” she said. “I’m doing a month in South Pacific as Nellie Forbush. My agent says it’s something all us Hollywood types have to do these days. We’re required to go on all the talk shows and say how much we love the theater.”
“You don’t?”
“Right now, I’m terrified. Not just about what the critics might say. I’ve never sung in public.”
“You have a beautiful voice.”
“Well, that’s very nice of you to say. You are one of the few people who’ve heard it.” Her eyes fell on a woman’s purse on the counter. “Do you have a guest?” she said. “I really should have called. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s my aunt’s,” Tommy said. “But yes, I do have some people staying for a few days. You remember Carl?”
