Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  I received a text. It was from Mom. “Nope,” I said, putting my phone away.

  “That’s the exasperated voice you use when it’s your mother,” Halloran said.

  “You know me far too well. She wants me to go to Hawaii.”

  “Why in the hell would you not want to go to Hawaii, Pengram?”

  “Because my mother is there.”

  We turned onto a dead-end road, pasture showing in the gaps between houses. It was golden from a dry summer. I couldn’t wait for the rain to start and turn everything green again. Cattle grazed far in the distance, wind shaking the few trees in the fields. “You know what I hated about living in L.A.?” I said. “There’s no space between the cities. They just flow one into another like a concrete sea. Here there are a few miles of pasture before you hit the next place. What’s the address on this one?”

  “6228 Sumner,” Halloran said. “That’s 6206 there. God, these grand old houses hurt my heart. I want to fix them up and make them shine again.”

  In various stages of disrepair, the houses rested on big lots. The first families to call this neighborhood home were likely very large; these places were big enough for six bedrooms or more. “Why haven’t they been scooped up and flipped?” I wondered.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Halloran said. “Work in Napa and you’ve got to cross all of Darby and then miles of farmland to get there. May as well live in Napa or Sonoma or Vallejo then, or at least on the east side of Darby. Work in San Francisco and you’ve got a long commute to battle both ways when you could just live in Novato or San Rafael. Work north or west of here and you’d pick Petaluma, Rohnert Park, or Santa Rosa. Back when Darby did bigger business in farming, there were probably people lined up to live here. But not now.”

  “6228,” I said when we came to the last house on the block.

  We got out of the car. This house was the worst off of them all, the white paint chipped and dingy, the windows dirty on both floors and the frames splintered. Dead grass filled the yard. A rusted mailbox at the foot of the driveway had its lid gaping open and nothing within. There were no cars parked in the driveway.

  “The owner is a man named Robert T. Rochlin,” Halloran said.

  A tall fence blocked our view of the backyard. Halloran went up the steps to see if anyone was home. I stood in the unkempt grass and weeds at the base of the porch, glancing at the nearest properties. The house directly across the street had a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign that looked like it had been there for a very long time. All was silent at the other houses, no kids playing in the yards or dogs barking. This neighborhood felt like it was quietly dying, the people growing old and passing on, nobody new coming in to replace them.

  No one responded to the knock. Halloran came down the steps. “Nobody’s home.”

  We strolled down the driveway, weeds pushing up between the concrete slabs. It ended in a garage, the corrugated metal door stuck halfway down. Figuring I was closer to the ground than Halloran, I bent and peeked in.

  Boxes. Tons and tons of boxes, so many boxes that no vehicle could have fit inside with them. Not even a bicycle could have been jammed in there. But a packed garage didn’t mean a hoard. Plenty of people had full garages.

  Still, a chill ran down my spine.

  I walked along the garage and peeked in again, seeing dusty garbage bags among the boxes. Old shoes and purses were crammed in around them. When I straightened, Halloran saw my expression. “Let’s see if this May woman is in the back,” he said.

  We walked along the fence, which exceeded height regulations and was taller even than Halloran. Finding an aged bucket in the tall grass we were stepping through, I turned it upside down and set it beside the fence. Then I climbed up, pressed onto my tiptoes, and looked into the yard.

  Plastic bins were stacked up on the other side. Unable to see beyond them, I jumped off, grabbed the bucket, and moved farther down the fence line. Climbing back on, I looked over.

  Oh my God. There were legs stretched over the dirt and dead grass about twenty feet away, protruding from beyond the stacked bins. They were still. “Halloran, we need back-up,” I said in a hushed voice. “We may have a body.”

  “Let me see,” Halloran said. I jumped off the bucket and he climbed on. The plastic cracked under his weight and he fell off. Moving the bucket a third time, I balanced carefully on the rim to get another look. Halloran stood close by with his arms out to catch me if I fell.

  All I could see were those legs wrapped in blue jeans, boots covering the feet. They were women’s boots with chunk heels. A breeze whistled through as I stared. And then I heard a small, desperate voice plead, “Help me.”

  Chapter Twenty

  It was a woman’s voice. Weak.

  “Are you hurt?” I called.

  Silence.

  Halloran called for back-up as I looked around frantically for a way over the fence. But there was only the cracked bucket. Then I noticed a loose board farther down and hurried to it. The nails at the bottom were still holding fast, but those at the top were coming free. I dug my nails into the wood and yanked.

  Just like everything else on this road, the boards were old. It pried free entirely and I dropped it to the ground. Sticking my head through the gap, I was disappointed to find I had no view of the woman from here. Just cheap bins rising high overhead, the blue plastic bleached almost to whiteness from the sun. “Hello?” I called.

  Silence.

  I fit my left shoulder through the gap. Squeezed tight, I forced myself through inch by painful inch. Halloran struggled to pull free the surrounding boards and got nowhere, so he bent down to help me squash into the hole.

  There were no jokes between us about him being married or threats to get his hands off my ass. We needed to get to the victim, whether it was May Macdonald or someone else, because I had a sick feeling from that one fragile call for help that she was dying.

  Once I was through, I stood up on the bare earth and moved aside for Halloran. But as hard as it had been to get me in, there was no way his barrel-chested frame was going to make it. He stepped back to work on the boards again.

  I motioned to him that I was going to check it out. He peeked into the gap with worried eyes and mouthed, “Look sharp, Pengram.”

  I pulled out my gun. The bins ran parallel to the fence, creating a narrow corridor blocked off at one end by a squat, bushy tree. That was the way I needed to go, but as I approached, I saw that the tree was wrapped liberally in razor wire. So it was the other way then. I pivoted and started down the passage. The bins were densely packed together, eight and nine high and sitting here for so long weeds had grown up around the ones at the bottom. In addition to the weeds, some were cracked from the weight of the bins on top.

  A strain of music floated through the air, something dark and thunderous that stopped me in my tracks. I looked back the way I had come as it trailed off. Halloran was still outside the fence. He wouldn’t be listening to music on his phone while waiting for more people to arrive. Perhaps it had come from the house, which I couldn’t see over the bins. An open window, a television playing . . .

  “Help me.”

  Her voice was so small that I hardly heard her. Pushing around foliage, I was disappointed to see a dead end coming up. This wasn’t a way to reach the woman, unless I tipped over a stack. I tested a bin, sticking my finger under the lip of the lid and shaking it.

  The bin didn’t budge. I tried another one and got the same result. These were loaded down with extremely heavy objects. It seemed unwise to knock them over, even if I could, because I couldn’t see where she was and they could land on her.

  I tried to peek through the tiny gaps between them, but moldy sheets were hanging down on the other side. We were going to have to reach her by going through the house, most likely, although even that might pose problems. I hadn’t ever tried to get to someone before in a hoarded backyard.

  I moved along the bins to see if the sheets covered all of the gaps. To my surpri
se, I found that it wasn’t a dead end as it first appeared. The bin passage continued to the left, and it was even narrower than before. Thinking grimly that I was going to be crushed if these fell over on me, I sucked in my gut and entered, walking sideways with my gun down at my side.

  The studio had been like this, a narrow space and a wall of boxes. And if the stuff inside these bins was the same quality as what had been in the apartment, then I was walking through several dumpsters’ worth of garbage. It smelled, and I hoped I ran into a ladder somewhere.

  The corridor crooked and widened, terminating in a circle of bins surrounding two large, metal culvert pipes. They were about eighteen inches off the ground, bins beneath them and also above them. Beside my feet was a small heap of trash, food wrappers and old paint cans, spools of thread and chunks of concrete. A bit of meat was gray and maggoty in an open sandwich bag.

  I squatted down a little to look through the pipes, which were corroded and bent. One twisted out of sight, and the other was just a few feet long with blinding daylight at the far end. I had to get over there and out of these damned bin stacks to backtrack to the woman. There needed to be an alternate route to get the EMTs to her; no one would be able to get a stretcher through this way.

  Did I really want to crawl through this stained pipe? Ugh.

  I holstered my gun and scooted inside. Then I crawled, the metal squeaking in protest and filth adhering to my hands. It was hard to imagine how any of this could be someone’s treasure.

  The light grew even more blinding as I approached the end. I squinted and dipped down lower to get under a caved-in part of the pipe, hissing as I put my hand down in some sticky substance.

  Ants had formed a marching line near the end. Brushing them away, I awkwardly climbed out of the pipe. Then I wiped off my hands on my pants and flicked away the ants on my shirt.

  Well, that had been for nothing. I’d just landed in another area full of bins. But these ones had mirrors stacked up against them in careless jumbles, some reflecting the sunlight in a nearly violent intensity. There were antique oval mirrors with wooden frames carved with flowers, side mirrors taken from vehicles, the tall, rectangular kind from dressing rooms, face mirrors on stands, hand mirrors and a bathroom mirror with an entire cabinet attached. The ones tilted upwards showed me standing there dumbly; the ones facing lower showed a funhouse of my feet. There was broken glass under my boots from a mirror that had fallen over and shattered into pieces. I shielded my eyes from the glare and noticed yet another corridor.

  A grating sound rasped at the tube behind me. Whirling around, I snatched my gun from my holster and raised it.

  No one was there. A heavy metal cap had fallen over the tube’s opening.

  That gave me pause. There hadn’t been anything particularly deliberate in the placement of the bins, stacked up in lines, and I’d assumed the sheets were there in a poor attempt to protect them from the elements. Nor was there anything deliberate about the mirrors everywhere. They looked like they had been carried here and dropped without much interest in where they landed.

  But that cap had been put there very deliberately, blocking me from going back. And that second pipe . . . the one that turned away into darkness, the one I had discarded for the other whose end I could see plainly . . .

  This was a maze.

  It wasn’t like the mazes at the silk mill or farm property, but rough and unfinished. Perhaps this was what John Macdonald did. He built them in his mother’s backyard for practice runs. Or it could be his backyard, for all I knew. May Macdonald hadn’t been seen at the studio apartment in years, and her last arrest was also years in the past. She could have moved away.

  Or she could have met a darker fate.

  I found it hard to accept that she could have anything to do with the conception or execution of these mazes. Her run-ins with the law were extensive, but they weren’t for kidnapping, assault, or murder. This was a woman who stuck a porterhouse steak down her pants at the grocery store and tried to sneak out with it, and spilled chocolate bunnies all over the floor in a temper tantrum when she didn’t get her way. She got picked up for twenty-dollar blowjobs and being a public nuisance. The woman to appear over and over in the police reports had been no mental giant. Reckless and impulsive, hostile and volatile . . . She was not, however, conniving or homicidal. May Macdonald definitely wasn’t right in the head, but her son’s pathology ran to a far deeper, more disturbing level.

  Was he out there right now? Watching me through some spy-hole I couldn’t see? Or was he not even at home and utterly unaware that someone was in his unfinished maze?

  I stood still, listening. All I heard was wind.

  Well, I didn’t want to play his little games whether he was here or not. I was going to scale these bins and look over the yard from the top. It would be much easier to locate the woman that way, and John Macdonald with his scythe if he was around.

  I eyed the stacks around me. Doing what I could to get a handhold, I nudged aside a mirror and attempted to scale the old bins. They didn’t rock at my weight, apparently filled with concrete. I huffed and puffed as I went up, jamming my feet somewhat painfully into the tiny gaps and clinging to the lips of the lids in fear that they were going to break at my grip.

  Then I gasped as my hand closed down on what felt like barbed wire only one bin from the top row. Yanking away, I lost my balance and fell down to the bottom. I hit the ground with a thump and checked the punctures in the fingers of my left hand. Blood was already running.

  “Help me. Please help me.”

  Hee-hee-hee.

  The first had been the woman’s voice. The second was a high-pitched giggle, malicious and male. Canned somehow. Neither of the voices was very close to me, but neither were they all that far away.

  There was no choice but the corridor. I crept down it, hearing my own heartbeat in my ears. A breeze blew through, rattling a symphony of distant wind chimes in creepy, atonal chords. The bins just went on and on ahead of me, twisting right and left into more short corridors until I was completely turned around. At times wires crossed overhead, though their purpose was a mystery.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  This time, the giggle was very close. My throat closing from fear, I looked behind and above me with my gun at the ready. I was still alone, at least in this part of the maze. From somewhere outside my corridor was a scratching sound, followed by that manic giggle.

  It was him. It had to be.

  The corridor branched. One side was dim with tarps stretched over the top, crooking out of sight, and the second led to a decorated room. It had a Wild West theme with saloon door cutouts that had to be pushed through to enter the space. I crouched to peek beneath the doors. Dolls wearing cowboy hats and sheriff’s stars were propped up on ancient rocking horses. Scattered among them were pairs of cowboy boots, ranging from adult sizes to a pair for toddlers.

  The dolls were sagging on the horses; everything was watermarked. These decorations had been sitting in here a while. Maybe it was an idea he’d been working on and abandoned, or was holding for some future date. The numerous pairs of boots reminded me of the Easter eggs and Christmas presents. Those were there so he could hide the personal effects of his victim in them. And something for fun, like the fake hand and fake toes.

  “What are you doing in these here parts?”

  He was right at my back! I spun around so fast at the voice that my neck cracked, finger on the trigger as a figure dropped into the corridor and swung over to me on a wire overhead. It hit a clip on the wire and stopped a few inches away from me, spinning on a string.

  I’d almost shot a scarecrow dressed in tattered overalls, straw protruding from its arms and its legs dangling a foot above the packed earth. “Fuck,” I whispered, my blood racing as it gave me a stupid smile. At my feet was a trip cord, almost invisible in the earth. I had triggered the scarecrow all by myself.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  Turning away from the scarecrow, I looked int
o the dimmer corridor. Was he in there? Were those his giggles?

  This corridor was the one that people wouldn’t pick at night. Chloe hadn’t, Francisco hadn’t, and I had full confidence that Nevea would have been no different. All of us would go to the light in our fear and uncertainty, soothed by what we could see. We didn’t need the additional confusion caused by Quell to make that choice.

  But it wasn’t night and I wasn’t drugged, and I had a gun and a legion of officers pulling in soon. Minding every step I took, I went down the branch less taken. It might be a dead-end, but it might not be.

  There were no decorations in here, nothing but the bins on either side of me, and the flapping tarp above. A pinprick of light shined on a bin to my right. There was a bigger gap between two of the blue containers, one of them ever so slightly smaller in size. Following the beam, I pressed up on my tiptoes and looked through it.

  A brown eye with a broken blood vessel stared back at me. Hee-hee-hee.

  I pulled away in terror, which was quickly papered over with adrenaline. “John Macdonald, you are under arrest!” I shouted authoritatively, rushing around the corner to another corridor. It ended in an empty patch of earth. Going for it, I stopped short at the end and looked around.

  He wasn’t there. Cautiously, I edged into the clearing.

  There it was, the legs and boots I’d seen from the fence, and nothing more. It was the lower half of a mannequin. As a hard wind blew through, it tripped a string running off the pocket of the jeans. The string tugged on a complicated contraption of levers and wiring, which connected to an ancient cassette player upon a stump. The play button was depressed.