by Sarah Graves
“That's a fine plan,” I said, remembering Greg's comment about her seamanship. Besides, I liked the idea of her being on someone else's conscience if she went overboard.
Turning the water on again, I discovered my screw choice had been correct. One down, one to go; I closed the toolbox, turned my attention reluctantly to the electrical problem.
The first step in fixing it was going into the crawl space under the house, to the fuse box. That meant hauling the toolbox and a flashlight through a trapdoor and then down a ladder, over a dirt floor to the far wall where the fuse box hung, while trying not to crack my skull open—there was hardly any headroom down there—and not running into anything in the near darkness.
Just as I put a foot through the trapdoor in the back hall, however, Marge reappeared. She'd combed her hair and pressed a cold cloth to her face; dents from the washcloth's nubs had left shallow troughs in the reddened skin of her eyelids.
And she'd put on a different cardigan; seeing me, she straightened her shoulders under it.
“Come on, then,” she said. She led me to Wanda's room and stepped aside to wave me ahead of her.
In the doorway, embarrassment made me pause. Scant daylight filtering through a pair of too-small windows revealed where the fake-wood paneling and scarred wallboard met up with the uneven floors and cheap, poorly installed orange shag carpet.
“What a dump,” I said, stricken. Ellie and I had meant to tear it all out, but now as I noted the new water stains on the ceiling—oh, goody, a roof leak—it hit me that maybe we ought to have the house torn down instead.
“I'm ashamed that we rented this place to you,” I blurted. The bed had only one thin blanket; I wondered if Wanda had been cold. The linens and furniture had come with the house, and though we'd done our best to clean the place, it was still awfully shabby and depressing.
“Anything different about it?” I asked her. Suddenly the crawl space looked positively attractive; all I wanted was to flee this grim little chamber. And Marge's presence was about as energizing as a dose of poison gas.
“And Wanda's things, are any missing?”
She frowned. “She had a little backpack that I don't see anywhere. And she used to read by flashlight, I'd see it glowing in here at night but I don't see it now.”
The only light was a bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling, controlled by a switch near the door.
“And . . . boots,” Marge murmured, her forehead wrinkling. “She had a pair of hiking boots but they're not here. And her jacket's gone.”
“But not her pills.”
“What?” Marge seemed startled for a moment, as if she'd been thinking about something else. A wince of pain crossed her features fleetingly, then vanished. “Yes, her diabetes pills. Here.” She produced a small orange bottle from her cardigan pocket.
“How critical is it that she take these?” I squinted at the writing on the label. Sulfa-gluca-something-or-other was the chemical name for whatever had been prescribed for Wanda, to be taken twice a day.
Marge bit her lip worriedly. “Very important. It's a new drug, not insulin like most kids with the disease have to take.”
“So she's not collapsed somewhere in a diabetic coma?” I didn't know much about that kind of problem—Victor's harangues, back when we were married, stuck strictly to surgery when they weren't focused on my child-rearing deficiencies—but I did know untreated diabetes could be fatal.
And although it was harsh to ask under the circumstances, I needed to know. “Talk to me, Marge. Is this a medical emergency on top of everything else?”
She shook her head. “I don't think so. Not yet. Her form of diabetes isn't the usual kind kids get. Most youngsters end up on insulin just about right away.” Wistful affection smoothed her features. “Trust Wanda not to do things the usual way. Under normal conditions her body makes enough insulin to get along, as long as she eats right and takes the pill every morning and night.”
The smile vanished. “But this isn't . . .”
Right, these weren't normal conditions. This time of year it got cold out at night just as soon as it got dark. And as I'd wondered before, who knew what—or even if—Wanda was eating?
“You have more of these?” I asked Marge, and when she said she did I dropped the bottle into my own pocket. “In case I run across her I can give her one of them right away,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied gratefully. “That would be—”
There was nothing to be grateful for yet. “The bottom line,” I interrupted, “is that Wanda could have left on her own and not brought her pills along. The jacket and boots argue that way, too, and so does the missing backpack. But I'm still not so sure that she did.”
Marge went on looking relieved until my point penetrated. Then her face crumpled once more. “You . . . you mean you think someone might have taken Wanda?”
“I'm wondering about it,” I admitted. “Where was Wanda that morning, on the day of the storm? Jenna said she thought she was with you, Hetty, and Greg Brand, out in the van somewhere.”
Marge put it together. “When that man was shot in the house, you mean. It . . . it could have happened while we were out.”
She took a shuddery breath. “But Wanda wasn't with us. She wanted to stay home and make a nest for that little bat. She was here, alone in her room . . .”
Which reminded me, where was the bat? I didn't see it, or a nest for it either. “Did you tell the police that?”
She shook her head, then persisted anxiously, “I never even realized . . . she never . . . you mean she might've seen . . . ?”
“It's not certain,” I said firmly, feeling a pang of guilt for adding to her worries. “Could she have gone home? I mean, back to—”
“No. I called the neighbors, they checked. And the parents of her friends. She does have friends,” Marge added wistfully.
“Of course she does,” I said, taking pity on her. “And if someone had grabbed her they wouldn't have been very likely to wait around for her to put a traveling kit together, would they?”
Or one for the bat. “No. No, I suppose they wouldn't,” Marge agreed.
So there we were. Some things argued one way, some another. “Marge, how do you and Wanda communicate? Because if she doesn't speak or write . . .”
I tried to think about a life without words, stopped trying as Marge answered almost cheerfully again.
“Oh, she has receptive language. That means she understands what you say,” she added at my blank look. “And she's very expressive when she wants to be. With her hands, her eyes . . . she gets her message across.”
As she had tried to the night of the storm, possibly? Again I saw Wanda gazing imploringly at me, recalled my decision to ignore the strange little girl with the bat peeping tranquilly from between her fingers.
But at the time, she'd had her mother there with her; she hadn't been my responsibility, I reminded myself with an effort as I left the girl's room.
Marge followed; turning back, I saw yet another repair job. All by itself the closet door had drifted open. Like the other doors in the place, it needed rehanging to make it level: hammer, chisel, new wood screws . . .
“I just can't picture her taking off alone,” said Marge. “In a storm, when it's so awfully dark out—where would she even go?”
I had no idea. But by then I was only half listening anyway, because the closet had a shelf and on the shelf lay a baglike thing made of soft, shiny fabric, too small for a laundry bag but with the same kind of drawstring at the top.
Seeing it, I knew suddenly that Wanda hadn't been cold, and I knew why. She'd had a sleeping bag; probably she'd used it for a blanket. The thing on the shelf was its carry sack.
She'd taken the sleeping bag, then, but maybe she'd been in too much of a hurry to stuff the bag in its sack, even though it would have been much easier to transport that way.
More runaway evidence? I thought of mentioning it to Marge, decided not to. It would only co
nfuse her more.
Just as it was doing to me. “Has Wanda ever done anything unpredictable before? Or . . . maybe the two of you had an argument that night that I didn't know about?”
I was grasping at straws. But if she'd gone on her own there was a reason. Marge shook her head slowly. “She resisted taking her pill. But no more than usual. And she's never run away.”
Her posture straightened in defense of her daughter even as another wince of discomfort pinched her face. “She's perfectly intelligent. Just because she doesn't speak . . . we've been to a lot of specialists but no one's been able to tell me why. She's unusual, yes. But not disturbed, not poorly adjusted, or . . .”
Her voice broke. “It's my fault she was here. Such a fool I was, I believed that awful Mr. Brand's lies. Jenna told me about him while we were out. I . . . I believed he was going to help her!”
“Now, now,” I said, mentally scolding myself for what I'd been thinking about her earlier, that she'd been a fool to come here. It wasn't so unusual to do desperate things when you were trying to help your child.
I'd done plenty of them. “Try to stay positive,” I added.
As I said this Hetty emerged from the other bedroom, where she'd obviously been listening to us. In addition to the bungalow's many other flaws, the walls were polite fictions in the privacy department.
“Come on, honey,” Hetty crooned, guiding Marge toward the kitchen. “Let's have coffee, you'll feel better. You don't want Wanda to see you like this when she comes home, do you?”
Which was exactly the right thing to say, and it made me feel bad about my earlier opinion of Hetty, too.
“I know, we'll sit down and do your horoscope,” Hetty went on as the two women moved away. “At bad times like this we always can find our way with the stars to guide us.”
Too bad the stars couldn't do anything about that fuse box. But if I didn't check it I'd just have to do it later, so I grudgingly hauled the toolbox down the ladder to the crawl space.
It was like going into a grave: smelling of damp earth and pitch dark until I stepped off the ladder and had a hand free for a flashlight. The yellowish beam didn't stop hanging cobwebs from exploring my face with their shudder-producing tendrils.
Still, I made it to the far wall, opened the fuse box, and soon discovered the reason why Hetty Bonham's hair dryer, Greg Brand's shaver, and Jenna Durrell's electric toothbrush—not to mention the overhead light and the pair of fluorescents on either side of the bathroom mirror—had suddenly stopped working.
Blown fuse. And of course none of them had come down to try correcting the problem, which was annoying, too. But at least I could repair it without much trouble.
Lined up atop the fuse box was a row of fresh fuses in the sizes the various circuits required. Choosing the correct one was a simple matter of matching the blown fuse's color with its similarly color-coded replacement.
In other words, wham-bam. I changed the fuse and dropped the old one in my pocket, and when I was done I aimed the flashlight up into the wiring above the fuse box, just checking to make sure everything looked shipshape.
Which was when the huge spider dropped directly into my hair and skittered across my face. “Blearggh!” I shrieked, or something very like it, and dropped the flashlight to free my hands for wild rubbing, brushing, and swatting motions while my legs did the little hopping dance my nervous system threw in for good measure.
Gradually I stopped, alert for the tickle of spidery feet. When that didn't happen, I groped very cautiously on the dirt floor for the flashlight, found it, and switched it back on—amazingly it hadn't broken—moving the beam over the earth to search for the offending creature.
Relieved, I saw no sign of it. But on the floor under the fuse box I spotted a small white object.
Spider egg, I thought with another reflexive shudder; squinting harder, though, I saw that in fact it wasn't one. Spider eggs are round, and they don't have a line scored across them to make them easier to divide into halves.
I picked the thing up between my fingers, examined it by flashlight though by now I already knew what it must be; there had been a recent article on rural drug abuse in one of the news magazines Wade and I subscribed to, with pictures.
Some of the photographs had been taken in Eastport, others in a pharmaceutical laboratory.
What I'd found was an oxycontin tablet.
When I left a little while later, Hetty Bonham followed me to my car. “There's something you should hear,” she told me. “About the dead guy, Eugene Dibble. You know much about him?”
I stopped with my hand on the car door. “Yep. Rabble-rousing self-styled fundamentalist preacher, not of the goodness-in-his-heart variety,” I recited.
“He talked as if fire and brimstone were his personal weapons systems,” I went on. “Liked to hang out with a lot of other losers and get them all fired up against somebody, too. Why, what else should I know?” The oxycontin tab was in my toolbox.
“That he was married before,” Hetty said, her voice hardening. “Before his wife here in Eastport, I mean. First one divorced him after he was convicted of abusing her young daughter.”
She eyed me, gauging my reaction to this, then went on. “His stepdaughter. Girl of about fifteen, I heard about it later from Greg. Dibble got three years, all but six months suspended. So I guess he had some pretty good reasons for wanting people around here to keep focused on the bad stuff other folks did. That way he was more sure of keeping the spotlight off himself.”
“I guess so,” I said slowly, stunned by this news. “Anyone else know about this?”
Hetty shook her head. In daylight the little lines around her eyes were cruelly visible. “Around here? Not from me. I'll tell you what, though,” she declared, throwing her blonde head back angrily.
“One,” she ticked off on a long, crimson-tipped finger, “if I'd ever faced him with a gun in my hand I'd have shot the son of a bitch myself. Six months, my ass. And two, I've been waiting for Wanda to come back on her own. Because of the jacket and backpack and the sleeping bag, I really thought she would.”
So she'd noticed what I had: that the missing items spelled runaway. Just . . . not quite straightforwardly enough.
“But it's starting to seem like she isn't going to,” Hetty went on. “And that's not the kind of thing I signed up for, some poor little girl in trouble. It's why I figured you'd better know about Gene Dibble, too.”
She straightened determinedly. “So when I go back in that house I'm telling Greg to call your police chief, tell him everything.”
“Right,” I said, “that's just what he should do.”
“Because Gene Dibble was a damned child molester and I don't care what anyone says, those guys never change. What they do is find other creeps to hang out with, share their enthusiasms.”
“And if someone took Wanda—” I was thinking aloud.
“That's right,” she replied tightly. I thought about what Greg Brand had told me about Hetty; if it was true, she had her own good reasons for hating guys like Dibble.
“Because if some other bad-guy creep took Wanda, why else would he be hanging around to even know about her, other than that he was here with Gene?” she demanded.
Again it was what I'd thought, but now the theory had taken on a stomach-turning twist. Hetty stared across the wide cove as if reading her next words off the water.
“While they were here they saw her,” she said flatly, her opinion once more mirroring my own.
“Think Greg had anything to do with it?” I asked. Might that account for that pill being in the cellar? Maybe he'd hidden them down there, dropped one somehow.
“You mean do I think Greg knew the drugs were here? Or brought them himself?” She shrugged expressively. “I doubt it. It's not something Greg would do, let someone else complicate his own scene like that.”
By, she meant, ending up dead. I leaned against the car.
“But,” she went on, “I can picture what else
might've happened. One guy wants to take Wanda. The other doesn't. Partner says screw you, I'll take the drugs and the girl. Shoots Eugene . . .”
I put a hand up. “But then doesn't take her?”
“He worries someone might've heard the gunfire, books out of here without anything.” She brushed off my objection.
Hetty was turning out to be a far more detailed thinker than I'd given her credit for. I completed the scenario. “Comes back later but by then the drugs are gone, confiscated by the cops.”
Except for that one tablet, of course.
“But Wanda's still here,” she pointed out. “His consolation prize.”
All of which was still only speculation, but it intensified my darkest worry. I drove home discouraged, filled with a sharp new foreboding about the possible whereabouts of Wanda Cathcart.
And about her possible condition.
Chapter
7
Life in my old house has a habit of going on in my absence whether I like it or not, and when I got home that day my first reaction to its progress was negatron, as Sam would've put it.
I'd stopped at Bob Arnold's office but he wasn't there and I didn't want to leave the pill without talking to him. So I went on up Key Street until I noticed that an enormous metal Dumpster had been deposited in my front yard.
I'd ordered it thinking a Dumpster would make it easier to perform step two of the porch-rebuilding project; i.e., disposing of the debris. But due to the press of recent events, I hadn't yet completed step one: turning the porch into debris in the first place. That was why half an hour later I was out there swinging the sledgehammer.
Or it was part of the reason. The other part was that if I didn't take a break from thinking about Wanda, my head was going to explode. It should've made me feel better to know that she probably wouldn't die of a medical problem before she got found. But it didn't, and I didn't know what that oxycontin tablet meant, either.
