Dear Irene,

by Jan Burke

  “Don’t worry about it. You weren’t expecting company.”

  “Well, that’s a fact,” she said, and proved it by talking nearly nonstop for over an hour. In that time, she told me the name of every neighbor within a dozen or so houses of her own, their children’s names and approximate ages, where they worked, and at least one of their habits, interests or problems. She told me which ones had left to visit relatives for Christmas, what state the relatives lived in, and even gave a weather forecast, saying, “White Christmas” or “No White Christmas there” depending on the family destination. She paused only twice, to take the bread out of the oven and when the phone rang. It took both of us a minute to realize the ringing was coming from the cellular phone. I answered around a mouthful of warm bread.

  Lydia was calling, certain I was in mortal danger. I swallowed the bread, reassured her, learned that no one had found Rosie Thayer yet, and went back to Molly Kittridge.

  “How is it you know all your neighbors so well?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Well, two reasons. First off, I’ve lived here since God was a baby. My grandaddy on my mother’s side built this house as a sort of a retirement place, I guess you’d say. Southern California was a paradise then. My folks ruined his retirement by packing up the family and following him out here from Oklahoma during the dustbowl days. Lots of Midwesterners settled in Las Piernas. That’s why you can find more basements here than most places in Southern California. They’re great for tornados, but lousy for earthquakes.”

  “So your family moved here before any of the others?”

  “The only ones that had been here longer was the Nelsons, up at the end of the street. They died and their kids sold it to that young couple that got transferred to North Dakota.”

  “This is the vacant house, the one three doors up the street?” I asked, remembering her discussion of the couple who had lived there for less than a year, were “asking way too much for that old place in this market,” but were too stubborn to lower the price before they were forced to move. After several months without any offers, the couple let their listing expire and were looking for a new real estate agent. I had heard enough about them to write and ask them how they were doing. (No kids; he, a distributor for a shoe company and she, an engineer; both crazy about bass fishing.)

  She chuckled. “Not three doors, exactly. There’s no doors, windows, or anything else on half of these places up here on the crest. The old Nelson place is at 1647. There’s two vacant lots between us now.”

  “You said there are two reasons you know your neighbors. What’s the second?”

  “Brutus.”

  He started yapping in response.

  “Hush!” she commanded. He gave one more bark and settled down again. “He’s a wild little fellow. Wilder than a fox raised by wolves. I have to chase him all over the neighborhood. Now all of a sudden he’s crazy about the old Nelson place. I think he knows I don’t like hauling my old buns up to the top of the hill. And all the grass in these lots gets my hay fever a-going. But most times Brutus will come back when I whistle.”

  “He does seem to be well-known around here.”

  She cackled at that. “I’ll just bet everyone you talked to griped about him. He’s a barker, I admit it. He’s very protective of me. He’s usually good about being quiet at night, but for the past week or so he’s been a little bothersome.”

  “The past week?” I asked, suddenly feeling a chill in that warm kitchen.

  “Oh, about that long, I guess. Something just got into him. Middle of the night, two, three in the morning, he starts barking. ’Bout to drive me crazy.”

  The hair on the back of my neck was rising. “Do you remember which night he first started barking?”

  She thought for a moment. “Wednesday, maybe?”

  Wednesday night. The night Rosie Thayer had disappeared.

  “No idea what he’s barking at?”

  “The top of the hill, for all I can tell. I get up, I turn the lights on, ask him what’s the matter, let him out in the backyard, show him there’s not a living soul to be found. He stops barking, follows me back into the house, hops back up on the bed, and looks at me like I’m crazy to be up at that time of night. And he’s probably right.”

  She was disappointed when I said I’d have to be going. I gave her one of my cards and thanked her for her help. I started to leave, and felt myself losing my nerve.

  “Molly, I have an unusual favor to ask.”

  She looked up from studying my card. “Sure, honey, what is it?”

  “I need to look around the Nelson place. Would you watch me from your window for a few minutes? I mean, just in case anyone else happens to be there . . .”

  Her eyes widened. “Holy smokes, I just got it! You think she might be in there. You’re the one he’s been writing to . . .”

  “Yes. The house is probably empty, he’s probably miles away, but just in case—”

  “I’ll get Brutus on the leash and come with you.”

  She refused to hear my objections.

  I had expected Brutus to be nipping at my heels, but the leash seemed to change his personality. As we neared the house at the crest of the hill, he pulled like a huskie in his traces. Molly sneezed once, twice, three times. “What’d I tell you?” she said, reaching for a handkerchief.

  From a distance, 1647 Sleeping Oak appeared to be a modest, white wood-frame house. Grass grew up around the ankles of a “For Sale” sign in the big front yard. The lawn was due for a mowing and the windows were dirty, but otherwise it looked as if it had been a place someone cared about not so long ago.

  Molly kept sneezing, her eyes red and watery now. When I suggested that she just wait for me back at her house, she gave me a congested version of “not on your life.” I walked up the steps and knocked on the front door, not expecting an answer. Brutus suddenly started going berserk, making me wonder if someone was waiting inside. He would alternately bark and wheeze as he strained against his rhinestone collar. I walked over to one of the larger windows at the front of the house and looked in. I saw a sun-faded beige carpet in a bare room. Dark marks and nail holes outlined the places where pictures had been taken down. The stigmata of an abandoned home.

  “I don’t think anyone’s here,” I said over the dog’s barking, hoping to God I was right. “But would you mind letting Brutus off his leash? Maybe he can show us what’s got him so worked up.”

  “I guess I can catch him again,” she said, unsnap-ping the leash as he twisted in impatience. He bolted around the corner of the house, stopping at a wooden gate. He looked back at us, yapped, then suddenly disappeared. We could hear him in the backyard.

  “Brutus!” Molly cried, but he just yapped louder.

  As we came closer, we could see that Brutus had wriggled through a hole in the ground beneath the gate; apparently a project he’d worked on during his previous visits. The gate had a latch with pull string on it. I tugged on the string and cautiously stood aside as the gate swung open. I peered into the backyard. No one there but Brutus.

  Still, there were signs of another presence having preceded me—something much larger than Brutus. The grass was taller in the backyard, almost to my knees. Molly and I cautiously followed the pathway of flattened grass toward the sound of Brutus’s toe-nails, scratching furiously.

  He seemed determined to burrow through what once had been the entrance to a basement. The weathered doors had been nailed shut long ago; rusting metal bands bolted across their width further secured them.

  “Brutus, get back from there!” Molly said, picking him up and suffering another sneezing fit. He squirmed in her arms for a moment, then resorted to whining.

  “Is there another entrance to the basement?”

  “Oh sure,” Molly said, talking rapidly, nervously. “The Nelsons boarded this one up long ago. Most of us did that—to make the houses more secure, I guess.” She stopped to blow her nose. “We all built staircases and an entrance from inside th
e house. Some people had a door going off the kitchen, like mine. Others had trap doors in the floors. The Nelsons had one of those. Put in a laundry chute, too. I thought that was overdoing it.” She sneezed. “Kids throw clothes down the chute, they land all over the place. I always made my kids carry their clothes down the stairs. It was good for them.”

  I wasn’t listening very carefully. I was watching the crevice near the edge of one of the doors. Ants were streaming in and out of the basement. An army of them. And there was a faint but distinct odor in the air, one that made my hopes plummet.

  “Maybe you should take Brutus home now, Molly.”

  She looked at me in surprise, then looked down at the doors. “Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lordy-Lord-Lord-Lord. She’s in there! Call her name, maybe she can answer you.”

  I tried it once, but my voice caught. “Molly, go home, please. I’ll come over in a while. There’s . . . there’s a smell.

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  I looked over at her, but didn’t say anything.

  “Even with all that sneezing, I’d smell a dead body! Besides, if there is a smell, you don’t know that it’s a-comin’ from her! Could be a cat, or a possum or something else dead.”

  She was right, of course. I couldn’t see into the basement.

  She was waiting for me, silent and afraid, but her eyes pleaded with me to do something. Brutus yapped once, then stared at me in much the same way.

  I looked at the trail blazed by our unknown predecessor and sighed in resignation. “Try not to step on the flattened grass,” I said, knowing she would follow me. I made my way alongside the trampled path, which led around the corner of the house to a set of concrete steps. At the top of the steps was the back door. It wasn’t wide open, but it hadn’t been closed hard enough to latch.

  Sometimes the last thing on earth you want to do is the very next thing you need to do. My curiosity demanded I go into the house, see for myself what was in there. My fear, or perhaps my common sense, said to let someone else take care of it.

  “She might still be alive,” Molly said.

  Curiosity had an optimist on its side. It always does.

  I climbed the steps and used the toe of my shoe to budge the door. It creaked open, and I stood staring into an empty kitchen, yellow linoleum peeling and stained where a stove and refrigerator had once hidden its faults. The counters were bare, the sink empty. I waited. Silence.

  Brutus’s sharp yap behind me came close to scaring me right out of my skin. Just as I had decided to listen to the pessimist within me, the dog wriggled free and scurried through the open door, into the house, and out of sight.

  “Brutus!” Molly wailed.

  “Stay here,” I told her, blocking her attempt to follow the dog. “If I’m not back out in five minutes, or if you have any inkling that something’s happened to me, get the hell out of here. Go home and call the police. Don’t come in looking for me or the dog.”

  She didn’t say anything, just peered inside the house. It was silent again.

  “Promise,” I said firmly.

  “I promise,” she said.

  The kitchen had two interior doorways. One led out into the dining area of the living room I had seen from the front window. A quick glance showed this area to be empty of man and beast. The doorway at the other side of the kitchen was darkened.

  With every step I took across that kitchen floor, I was sure I wasn’t alone in that house, that I had walked into a trap. REPORTER KILLED IN POODLE RESCUE ATTEMPT. What a headline that would make. Undoubtedly, the subhead would read, “Poodle Found Unharmed.” I kept listening, hearing the soles of my shoes moving across the linoleum, the rustle of my clothing seemingly amplified to shout my presence. I noticed a trail of ants moving along one corner of the kitchen floor—toward the darkened doorway. I swallowed and tiptoed to it.

  The smell was stronger here.

  I peered cautiously around the corner. A long hallway, as near as I could tell. I held still, hearing a noise to my left. I waited. Nothing.

  I glanced behind me, saw Molly watching from the door to the backyard, and tried once again to screw up my courage.

  There was only enough light coming from the kitchen windows to allow me to determine that the hallway ran in two directions. I hung back in the kitchen, poised for flight as I groped for a light switch on the hallway wall. I found one. Outside of making a loud snapping noise, it did nothing. The electricity was off.

  I reached into my purse for my keychain flashlight. Felt the comforting weight of the cellular phone. If I couldn’t call for help, maybe I could use it to bean an attacker. I switched on the little flashlight, held it to the left, where I had heard the noise, and even its small circle of light revealed enough to make me feel weak in the knees.

  An opening gaped in the floor. If I had stepped into the hallway without the light, I might have fallen through the trap door and down the basement stairs.

  “Bruuu . . . tus,” I crooned.

  I could swear I heard the little bugger panting, but in the distance. Down in the basement.

  I pointed the beam in the other direction, passed it from one closed doorway after another. Three altogether. Thought of opening those doors first, just to try to get more light in the hallway. Didn’t know if I had the nerve to find out what was behind them.

  I crept up to one and shoved it open, then ran back into the kitchen, purse raised.

  “Irene?” I heard Molly call.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said. Liar, liar, pants on fire.

  I took a breath and looked into the hall. A little more light. No bogeymen. Not yet, anyway. Two more rounds of hit-and-run with the doors brought the same result. The house had two bedrooms, one bath. I had the shakes.

  Brutus barked. He was down in the basement.

  “That’s him!” Molly called. “Do you see him?”

  “Not yet,” I said. I was not pleased with the dog.

  I thought of giving in and calling Frank right then and there. Let him explore the damned basement.

  But what if I called Frank away from a homicide investigation only to find there was nothing more down there than a toy poodle and something like, oh, maybe a smelly old dead gopher? The woman who cried wolf. Over a poodle.

  I walked over to the edge of the trap door opening. My flashlight beam showed nothing more than wooden stairs. I stepped down on one, then another, and another, until my head was just above the opening in the hallway floor. I made myself duck a little, and held the flashlight out in front of me. Cobwebs. I could hear Brutus. I lowered the beam a few degrees and saw a concrete wall. I caught a movement and gave a little yelp. But it was Brutus, sniffing along the wall, apparently unconcerned by my presence. For a few seconds, I felt a slight easing of the tension that had my stomach in knots. Brutus wouldn’t act so nonchalant if there were anyone else in the basement. Would he?

  I moved the light a little to the left, and I could make out a card table, with what looked to be a bowl of fruit and a pitcher of water. Tantalus.

  My mouth went dry.

  I knew what would be behind me. I forced myself to take two more steps down the stairs, clinging to the handrail.

  I heard a noise above me and cringed. “Molly?” I called.

  I waited. Nothing.

  Brutus came closer to me, his nails clicking along the cement floor.

  Slowly, I turned around.

  I saw the wide piece of tape first. It covered her mouth. She was bound to a large pipe against the back wall. Even in the faint light, I knew she was dead.

  The trap door slammed shut above me.

  12

  I WAS STILL SCREAMING my head off when it opened again, not more than a few seconds later. Molly, red-faced, was leaning over the opening, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Brutus, unhappy with both of us, shot up past me and out of the basement. I gained a modicum of control over myself and did the same.

  “I thought I heard you call to me,” she sai
d, only slightly less upset than I was. “It’s so darned dark in this hallway, I accidentally knocked the door shut. I’m so sorry, honey, I know I scared the bejesus out of you. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  As soon as we were out of the house, she said, “So there wasn’t anybody down there after all?”

  The optimist.

  “I wish I could say there wasn’t.”

  She stared at me a moment, the color draining from her face. “She’s dead?”

  I nodded, then put an arm around her big shoulders and walked out to the front yard with her, leaving the gate open. I stayed there; she kept walking, her eyes on Brutus, who waited in her own front yard.

  I used the cellular phone to call Frank’s pager and left a message on his voice mail, asking him to meet me at the address on Sleeping Oak. I dialed the City Desk next. Let John bitch about the order of the calls, I thought. Lydia answered on the fourth ring. I stood in the ankle-deep grass, watching Molly walk back to her house, looking twice as old as she had just moments before. I told Lydia to call the police, but to mention to them that I had already called Frank’s pager. I told her I would be waiting in front of the house. I heard John yelling, “Is that Kelly?” in the background, told Lydia I didn’t want to run up the bill, and hung up.

  The phone rang almost immediately. I thought it might be John, but it was Frank.

  “I’m on my way,” he said. “I’m not too far from you.”

  “Hurry,” I said, looking through the gate, suddenly noticing that there were long leafy stems growing out of a place at the far corner of the yard. The stump of an oak tree.

  “You think she might still be alive?” he asked.

  At my feet, another trail of ants.

  “No. But hurry.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME I finished writing my contribution to the story on Rosie Thayer, I was fighting off a serious case of the megrims. The story itself made me feel down, but that wasn’t all that was getting to me. The general atmosphere at the paper was tense. I learned that Lt. Carlson had argued with Wrigley and others over a new issue: whether or not the police should be allowed to put a wiretap on my phone line. So far, Carlson was being forced to live with the paper’s refusal.