Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  It was odd that, somehow, the fact of the plane and Norm’s absence from it seemed to have released her from the grip of her agonizing lack of ability to think…to act. Since winter had locked the county in the frozen grip of snow and ice, and increasing darkness reduced the daylight to a few narrow hours around noon, she had felt powerless and stunned. Retreating into the sheltering confines of the house like an animal into hibernation, she had been only marginally aware of her surroundings. Except for Norm’s jacket, she had left almost everything of his the way it was the day he’d disappeared, pretending he would be back at any minute.

  Turning her head, she could see his toothbrush and shaving gear, neatly lined up by the bathroom basin, his towel still on the rack, laundered without thinking when she laundered her own and replaced. Why? He had gone. What had she done…what sin committed…to make him leave? What personal failing had she exposed that he could not accept? It had to be something. What? She wasn’t enough for him?…pretty enough?…young enough? He would not have left her for nothing…would he? Could she possibly have misjudged him? She desperately wanted to know.

  For a few seconds she fell back into the hole the winter had been, then, suddenly, she was angry. Stop it, she told herself savagely. It’s useless…wallowing. Some people leave, with or without justification. You know that—or should by now.

  It wasn’t your fault, even if it was because of you. Your father left because he was weak, because he couldn’t stick it out with a child—any child—because he didn’t want you, or your mother…didn’t know how or want to be a father. Bill left because he was a bastard, plain and simple. You knew that from the bruises and married him anyway. Men leave—one way or another. It’s what they do finally. That’s all. And sometimes they do you a favor when they do.

  With a sudden furiousness that splashed water over the side of the tub, she stood up, stepped out onto the mat, and grabbed a large towel. Drying roughly and wrapping herself in it, she took another, turbaned her wet hair and moved to the basin. In one impulsive motion, she yanked open a drawer directly under the toothbrush, razor, and bottles of shaving cream and lotion and swept them all into it with one motion of her arm. Norm’s bathrobe hanging on the back of the bathroom door and the towel on the rack, she wound into a bundle which she took into the bedroom and threw on the pile of clothes to be washed. Discarding her own towels in similar fashion, she put on the pajamas and robe and, instead of finding socks, went hunting for a pair of slippers that had not been worn in so long they had lost themselves in the back of her closet.

  They weren’t there.

  Well, maybe they were in Norm’s. Their things had often mixed, especially things like slippers that tended to clutter the bedroom floor and get tossed into the first open door. Opening his closet, she dropped to her knees and, using her sense of touch as well as sight, in the dark recesses under the hanging clothes, searched through the disorderly collection of shoes and boots.

  Ah! No…only one of his socks that had escaped the laundry pile. Nothing. Damn. Maybe they were farther back. Pawing into the last corner, her fingers hit the edge of something cool and square. Not the shape of shoes. What the hell was it?

  Pushing aside some of the clothing on hangers, she reached in and lifted out a gray metal box similar to those used sometimes for cash boxes. Though they had two that were used for the charter business, this one was not familiar, or the same. It was larger, new and unmarked, not scratched and battered as were the others that had been in and out of trucks and planes for months. Those had carried paperwork mostly. Cash went promptly to the bank. What could this one possibly hold? Why had it been hidden?

  Abandoning her quest for the slippers, Chelle spotted them under the foot of the bed, got up and went barefoot across the room to the small table where she had placed her mug of tea, collecting the footwear on the way. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, she stared down at the gray box on her knees and frowned. It was not as much like the others as she had originally thought. This one had a combination lock and was stronger, much heavier, and fireproof, from the look of it. She would have been able to break into the others, had a key been lost, with a pry bar or a sledge, perhaps. Not this one. In fact, it had a different kind of lock entirely…that required a combination. What the hell? She shook it and heard the muffled rattle of something within.

  With shaking hands, she tried, unsuccessfully, to open it. The three small rings of numbers that were dialed to a position that would release the lock had been turned to obscure the correct combination. Vividly, she remembered Norm thumbing similar rings on the lock for the storage shed near his plane. The last thing he had always done was turn them to be sure it could not be casually opened. “Lots of people forget,” he had said. Obviously habit had not failed him on this one.

  All right. What combination of numbers would he have used then? Something he could remember easily. His birthday? August 7, 1952. In order from the left: 8-7-2. Nothing. His plane identification had four numbers. The first three: 5-9-6? No. The last three: 9-6-8? Wrong. The first three numbers of their phone number: 2-4-3? Damn it.

  The thing sat almost smugly in her lap, resisting her efforts to break its code. What was his driver’s license number? His social security number? Had to look, since she had trouble even remembering her own. She carried it down the hall to their shared office and scrambled through records till she had both numbers and tried them both in several different orders. Nothing worked.

  “Damn it, Norm,” she finally swore aloud. “How could you do this to me?” She shook the box again, listening to the intriguing rattle. It sounded like something hard—metal, wood, plastic?—as it hit the sides. Perhaps more than one thing. Click…. clink.

  Back in the bedroom, she tossed the box down on the comforter and plumped herself down against a pile of pillows at the head, scowling angrily at it as she drank her lukewarm tea. They had no secrets. I thought! Everybody has secrets. Not important ones. You do. That’s different. Is it? She shrugged. So what was this? And who was the babe in the plane? What would he have wanted to hide from her? Damn you, Norman Lewis! How could he? And the plane you flew in on! But he hadn’t wanted her to open it, had he? If you had, you’d have used…

  Slowly she sat up and reached for the box. Pulling it back onto her lap, she sat rigid in heart-stopped stillness. Was it possible? Could he have…? Carefully, with unsteady fingers, she turned the numbers, one by one, till they lined up in a very familiar group, indeed. Then, as easily as if it had never been locked, she opened the lid of the box.

  9-2-9. September 2, 1949. He had used her birthday.

  She sat looking into the box for several long minutes before she could make herself reach in. There wasn’t much, it was almost empty. Lying on the metal bottom were two things: a key and some folded papers.

  The key, when she laid it in the palm of her hand, was solid—had weight and reality. Chelle closed her fingers around its uneven shape, closed her eyes and sighed, realizing she had been holding her breath. She looked again, not recognizing its type immediately. Longer and thinner than most, it was a one-sided key, the square cuts deeper than those on a house or car key. It was unlike any she had ever held before.

  Turning it over, she saw that it was numbered, 548, and on it was printed, “Action Locksmiths” and “Do not duplicate.” So it was for something important. What? Could be anything, she thought, but no ideas were forthcoming.

  Tears welled up when she reached trembling fingers for the papers and turned them over. A message? Could there be something for her after all? Shuffling through them, she quickly identified documents with which she was already familiar: the deed to the house, tax statements, the notes for both planes, titles to her car and his truck, life insurance policies—all the paperwork that had anything to do with the financial side of their lives. There was no letter among them to explain why, after much procrastinating on buying a fireproof lock box to protect them, he had suddenly done it without telling her and hidden it
away in his closet, where she was least likely to stumble over it.

  In confusion she turned over the pages to find a yellow sticky on the back of the first one. On it were a series of numbers written in black ink: 6082645732. What the hell?

  They looked like the account numbers she wrote on checks for the payments on loans for her plane or the house mortgage. Usually those were hyphenated, but she supposed they might not have to be. She compared it to the number of the policy—not the same. What she knew for sure was that it was a number she had not seen or written before on any regular basis, a number that seemed to have been Norm’s alone. What could it mean? Obviously it identified something for him and had been attached to the pages for a reason. What?

  Registration numbers for cars or planes were similar. Did they have this many digits? She counted them. Ten. A long-distance telephone number? Three, three and four. It fit. Without hesitating, she lifted the receiver from the phone on the bedside table and dialed. In a moment she could hear it ring. Once…twice, then, with a click, a woman’s voice spoke in her ear. “Two-six-four-five-seven-three-two. Talk to me,” then the beep of an answering machine and the slight hum of its recorder, waiting for a message. Chelle hung up and sat staring at the phone. A woman. The woman?

  Any ten-digit number might reach someone, somewhere…wouldn’t it? This one still might not be a phone number. And, if it was, where and who had she reached? Six-o-eight. Flipping through the phone book from the drawer of the table, she located the page that listed area codes. Slowly she searched, checking each state, and finally found it in the next to last one: Wisconsin. Wisconsin? As far as she knew, Norm had no connection with, had never been to, or so much as mentioned Wisconsin. Three cities were listed with that area code: Beloit, Janesville, and Madison. The rest were either four-one-four or seven-one-five.

  Picking up the receiver again, she dialed the six-o-eight long-distance information number.

  A recording, “Thank you for using AT&T.” Then an operator, “What city, please.”

  “I don’t know,” Chelle told her. “I have an area code and phone number that I can’t identify. Can you tell me what city it’s for?”

  “What is the area code and the first three digits?”

  Chelle told her.

  “That would be Madison.”

  “If I give you the rest of the number, can you tell me who it belongs to?”

  “I’d have to have a last name.”

  “Is there any way I can find out?”

  “I’m sorry. You’d have to call the number and ask.”

  Chelle hesitated, stymied, then gave up.

  “Thanks anyway.”

  Have to have a last name? If she had a last name she wouldn’t need to ask, would she? Well, tomorrow she could call again…see if someone real and nonmechanical answered.

  What did the insurance and the number mean? What was Norm trying to tell her? Was he trying to tell her anything? Why hadn’t he left some explanation?

  She was suddenly exhausted again. And still angry with Norm, though his use of her birthday for the combination to the box had brushed against the part of her that had responded to and remembered his warmth and caring attention. He had meant her to open it—was attempting to care for her somehow, to tell her…something. She felt emotionally wrung in opposing directions. Information. She needed more information and she was too tired to try for it tonight.

  Putting the key and papers back in the box, she closed it and turned the numbered rings, as she knew he would have done. After all, she wouldn’t forget the combination. The box, however, she did not replace in his closet, but set down on the floor at the foot of the bed. Tomorrow. She would deal with it tomorrow.

  Would Jensen be able to help with what she had found? Probably. But the way she had found it—hidden away in the back of the closet—made her feel that caution was indicated. She needed to find out all she could about both things first, she decided. Maybe she wouldn’t tell anyone anything yet. Definitely not Ed, and maybe not even Jensen, or anyone.

  But her feelings were subtly different than they had been. Before she went to bed, she carefully hung Norm’s leather jacket back in the closet and resolutely closed the door. Then she set her alarm for six o’clock, turned out the light, and went quickly and soundly to sleep.

  7

  WHEN THE ALARM CLOCK WENT OFF AT SIX THE next morning, Rochelle Lewis wasn’t there to hear it. By the time she returned from a three-mile run, breathless and rubber-legged from exercise too long ignored, it had shut off its own insistent, repetitious beeping.

  “Damn,” she panted. Laying down yesterday’s mail, picked up from the box as she came in, she stripped off her blue sweats and headed for the shower. “I’m a physical wreck.”

  Later, clean and dressed, she made herself breakfast for the first time in weeks: eggs and bacon, toast, juice and coffee. It even tasted good.

  When she had finished the last bite of the toast wiped in yolk and loaded the dishwasher with the plates and pans she had just used, plus those from the night before, she dumped in soap and went back to the bedroom, leaving the machine to slosh energetically without her company. Grabbing the still unopened mail, she took it with her and sat on the end of the bed to flip through it. Two bills, a flier for a new restaurant, a community newsletter, and the bank statement, which reminded her that a payment on her plane would need to be made in the next few days. She had not bothered to look at a statement since…last fall, knowing what there was and automatically paying bills as necessary. Tearing back the sticky flap, she took out the report and small number of canceled checks she had written in the last month, glancing at the total in the account, and stopped cold. The amount was unexpectedly much less than she anticipated…several thousand dollars less.

  The figure had to be wrong. She and Norm had carefully calculated what payment must be made on her plane during the slow winter months and deposited one payment more than enough to cover them until business picked up again in the spring. Now there was less than enough to cover the minimum amount almost due, let alone two months after that. Had she somehow paid them twice? Had they miscalculated? No. She knew neither of these answers were right. Some other error was at work here.

  From a pigeonhole of her desk in the office, she took unopened statements for the last few months and began to go through them, searching the withdrawals. March back through October there were none at all, nothing larger than her usual check for payment on the plane. Then in September’s statement she found it—a withdrawal for five thousand dollars, the slip written in Norm’s handwriting. What the hell was going on? He had said nothing about the missing money, and it made no sense. If anything he was more conservative than she, carefully accounting for every dollar, working toward a business owned free and clear. He had borrowed only when absolutely necessary and paid loans back as soon as possible, making inroads on the principal with anything extra.

  Chelle sat at the desk, staring at the statement, thinking hard. Could it have anything to do with the key she had found in the lock box? Had he hidden the money somewhere? Why? No interest would accrue if it weren’t in the account. It didn’t seem likely. Could he have bought something…lost some bet…owed someone for something he didn’t want her to know? It didn’t feel right. Or—she finally let in the thing she didn’t want to think about—had he needed it to leave?

  With that, she stopped turning it over in her mind and went back to the bedroom. She would find out what that key—and the number she had found—meant. Right now. Picking up the strongbox from the floor and putting it in her lap, she took out the key and the papers. Once more she dialed the number on the slip of yellow paper and listened to the phone ring in Wisconsin. As before, she reached only the answering machine that beeped at her, demanding a response she was unwilling to give.

  Maybe it wasn’t a phone number at all, she thought, hanging up and putting her mind to work on the puzzles provided by the box. Letting the number go for the moment, she tu
rned to the key. What could it open? Who could tell her? Where would Norm hide money that needed a key? A storage locker somewhere? The airport? No, they cleaned out lockers on a regular basis. It didn’t seem that kind of key anyway.

  Well, if one wanted to know about something, one went to someone who would know. Who would know keys better than a locksmith? She had the name of the one who should know all about it, Action Locksmiths, on the key itself, right? In the yellow pages, she found an address on West Forty-eighth.

  Taking her wallet and a jacket, she dropped the yellow paper with the number and the key into a pocket, locked the door of the house, and headed toward midtown in her battered Subaru station wagon.

  “A safe-deposit box key. You’re sure?”

  The bored locksmith nodded, handing it back to Chelle. “Only kind looks like this.”

  “Which bank?”

  “Da’know, and couldn’t tell you if I did. If you got the key, you should know.”

  She knew, faced with his bored expression, that it was the truth. He wasn’t being helpful, but he didn’t know. Now what? Check every bank in town? Well…how many could there be?

  There could be a lot. Not counting the credit unions and mortgage companies, the phone book contained the names of eight banks with between one and seventeen branches listed for each. How would she ever find the right one? Frustrated, she ripped the page from the phone book and headed out to try.

  Picking one she considered a low possibility, she drove to Denali Street to see what she could find out—a practice run. They might very well refuse her any information at all, or worse, take away the key. Approaching a counter behind which she could see a vault with safe-deposit boxes, she waited until a woman stepped up to ask how she could be helpful.

  “I have this,” Chelle told her, indicating the key she had laid on the counter. “Does it belong to a box at this bank?”