“That’s pretty much what I heard, too,” I said. Diane would have plenty of time to learn how much worse the situation might turn out to be. Not only for her friend, but also for the injured bicyclist.
My phone vibrated. I said, “Just a second,” to Diane. The screen displayed a forwarded text from a cycling buddy. The cyclist grapevine had gone active. All the text said was that there’d been a hit-and-run on South Broadway with a car and a bike. The injured bicyclist was Rafael Toronado. He was critical.
The text was also a plea for witnesses to the accident. And blood donors. B negative. Jesus. Shit. My heart sank. Rafa—everyone had called him that, as long as I’d known him—was more than an acquaintance, less than a friend. We rode together occasionally, rarely by design. At the end of the day—actually, well before the middle of most days—I couldn’t keep up with him on Boulder’s roads. I had a prayer if I could draft him in the flats, but he was a true animal in the steep hills, where my quads always failed me.
If you rode with Rafa, you inevitably ended up in the steep hills. The man had titanium quads. Rafa liked to joke that it was my will, not my quads, that failed me. Once he said, “Quads can be trained. But determination? That’s what the mountains test, Alan. Your determination. You have it in your heart, or you don’t.” He’d pounded once on his chest with a closed fist before he zoomed past me up Left Hand Canyon.
Rafa was gregarious, generous, and well liked in the cycling community. He wasn’t known as a provocateur around vehicles. The fact that he was the apparent victim of the hit-and-run would make things even more difficult for Mattin Snow.
“What is that?” Diane asked.
“A text. It’s nothing important,” I said to Diane. I put my arm on her shoulder and walked with her toward the big house.
“People always tell me that about texts. That’s why I don’t like them. They’re always unimportant. If video games are always unimportant, why bother?”
I was tempted. I controlled myself. I said, “What do you think we should do next?”
“I’ll call again,” she said. She hit ten buttons on her phone. I bit my tongue about speed dialing. “Now that she can see my car out here, maybe she’ll answer.”
“It’s possible that someone—another friend—took her to the police station, right?” I asked.
“I think I would have heard about that. Did you see a car pick her up?”
I could tell Diane was skeptical. “No, but—”
“Did Emily go nuts?”
Emily always let us know when a car came down the lane. Usually her alert came in the form of a deep-pitched woooo sound that was like a practice bark. In Bouvier-speak, I’d learned to take the sound to mean she wanted me to look out the window and make some human judgment. I almost always did what Emily wanted me to do. It was part of our canine/Homo sapiens pact.
“No, she didn’t hear anything. Does Mimi text? She has kids, right? She has to text. Give me her cell number, I’ll text her.”
“Okay,” Diane said reluctantly. She gave me the number. I texted a simple, Are you doing ok? Do you need anything? Please call Diane on her cell.
I showed Diane the message.
“That’s on her phone? Right now?”
“If the network gods are cooperating, yes.”
“How does she know it’s there?”
“It makes a sound when it arrives. Tells her to look.”
“My phone makes sounds all the time. Maybe I’m getting texts.”
Again, so tempting, but I didn’t want to get lost in a tech tutorial with Diane right then. “Yes,” was all I said. “I’m sure your phone does beep sometimes.”
Diane said, “Don’t be condescending, Alan. You know I hate it when you’re condescending. Have you checked the outside doors? Walked around the house?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t. I didn’t feel right about—”
“Well, I feel fine about it. Shall we?” she said. She took my arm. She was dressed as though she had come directly from the office. She was wearing heels. Sensible heels, but heels. We started on the ravine side of the house on the south exposure, where the lower-level walk-out entrance had been cut into the slope over a hundred years before. On each side of the solitary door to the basement was an awning-type window that probably dated from midcentury. High above the door, on the main level, were the windows of the current kitchen.
Diane tried the door. It was locked. “Where does this door go?”
“It’s actually kind of interesting. Peter told me the history once—his understanding was that this was the original kitchen level of the house.”
“It’s not interesting, Alan. Don’t kid yourself. Just tell me where this door goes.”
“The basement. Once, the kitchen. The family that owned the ranch had a maid, and a cook, and all the food preparation was done down here, not on the first floor.” I increased the pace of my talking to a rapid clip, wary that Diane would again interrupt. I thought the story was interesting. “A long time ago—after the Second World War—the kitchen was moved upstairs. Now”—she rolled her eyes—“this is the laundry room, utility room, and—oh—in back there’s a gorgeous wine cellar that Peter built in a space that was originally used as a root-cellar-type thing. Perfect temperature for wine. All the way in back, beyond that, there’s another storage room with the original dirt walls, too. Mattin didn’t show you the cellar during the housewarming? It’s something.”
“No,” Diane said. “I must have missed that part of the tour. Maybe next time.”
She wasn’t being sincere. Diane didn’t like old, if old meant anything that approximated creepy. A tour of the cellar? A room with dirt walls? She would demur.
She looked up at the windows above. “What was originally where the kitchen is now? Upstairs?”
“A conservatory. That’s what Peter said.”
“Ooooh,” she said. “Fancy. Are we talking the greenhouse kind of conservatory or the music kind of conservatory? Elizabethans? Or Clue?”
“The music kind, I think. The woman of the house did recitals and things. Peter had an old photograph of her way back when from the Camera playing a Steinway, something called a Centennial Grand.” I shrugged. I didn’t know pianos.
“How refined,” Diane said. “And to think she could have wasted all that time she’d spent practicing and playing doing something unimportant, like . . . texting.”
I laughed. We continued around to the back of the house. Diane paused at the corner and pointed up. “What are those windows? On each side? Is that the”—she took in a little extra air, as though she anticipated needing reinforcements—“guest room? Right . . . there?”
“It is,” I said.
Diane went to take another step, but I kept my feet planted. I hoped Diane would say more about the guest room. In our previous discussions about the Friday-night party, she hadn’t mentioned anything to me about the guest room. I was convinced Diane knew things that I wanted to know, too. About the guest room.
She didn’t offer a thing.
The house’s foundation had been cut back into a section of the hill that rose gently, rather than precipitously. Peter had taken advantage of the natural features by constructing an expansive, multilevel, heart-redwood deck that climbed up the hill to match the angle of the slope. Two sets of french doors provided exits to the deck from the big family room addition on the back of the house. Although the house blocked any view of Boulder and the Indian Peaks—both due west—the mountain views to the northwest and southwest from the terraced deck were special.
I led Diane up a few stairs to a portion of the big deck that was nearest the house. It was pretty dark. She did the actual peeking through the windows. I was good with that; I figured that of the two of us, she was the one who would be less likely to be shot as a Peeping Tom.
“It’s obvious someone’s home, or has been home,” Diane said. “There are things out on the counter. Cheese. See the cheese? But I don’t see her.”
/>
I didn’t see the cheese. Diane tried the handles on each of the french doors. Locked.
“They’re home from their trip, Diane. I saw them get dropped off this afternoon. They use a car service.” That was a gratuitous dig. I regretted saying it.
“I know they’re home,” she snapped. “Mimi and I talked already. We’re going to lunch tomorrow. And sometimes Raoul and I use a car service.”
I touched her wrist to get her attention. “Are you worried, Diane?” I said. Diane knew me well; she knew that I was asking a question about her friend’s state of mind. And her friend’s impulse control.
Diane wasn’t ready to go there. She said, “She could be in the bathtub, right? That would explain it.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “But Adrienne had Peter put a phone by the tub. In the old days, before cell phones? It was a big deal between them for a while, kind of funny. He teased her about wanting extensions at all the toilets, too. It was so she wouldn’t miss emergencies when she was on call.”
My friend Adrienne had been a urologist. A fine doctor.
“I’ve been calling her cell, not her home number. She might not hear that in the bathroom.” Diane located the home number—she found it in a cute little leather, handwritten phone book, with tabs for all the letters of the alphabet, that she kept in her purse—dialed the number into her phone, and hit SEND.
I almost offered to load all the data from her little book into her phone’s memory for her. I didn’t. The gesture would not have been appreciated.
I could hear a phone ringing, not only from the speaker on Diane’s phone, but also from inside the house. “It went to voice mail. It’s possible the ringer could be off in the bathroom,” Diane said.
“I don’t know, Diane, it made a lot of noise in there. I could hear it.” I repeated my earlier question: “Are you worried about Mimi, Diane? I barely know her. Are you worried, right now? I’m talking about her state of mind.”
“Her state of mind?” She pondered my question for a moment. She turned to face me and looked me in the eyes. “Here’s what I think. I’m in that phase of anxiety where I’m still convincing myself there is probably a simple explanation for the fact that she appears to be home but is not answering her phone or coming to the door. A simple explanation that I just happen to be missing. That’s the kind of worried I am. Do you ever do that?”
“All the time,” I said, allowing Diane room to manage her anxiety. “Does the process work any better for you than it does for me?”
“Not usually. Her state of mind? I came out here, didn’t I? All the way from Lee Hill. Hell yes, I’m concerned.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“No.” She sighed. “I don’t think being more specific is a good idea. What about the other side of the house? Over there? Are there any more doors over there?”
“At the back, on that side, there are more windows into the family room. Pretty much the same view of the inside we have from right here. The rest of the first floor of the house at this grade is the attached garage up front. It was added after the war when the kitchen was moved upstairs. We could check the garage to see if any of those doors are unlocked.”
We did. They weren’t. I said, “And we should probably check the barn. Peter’s shop.” I had once discovered a body hanging from the rafters in Peter’s shop. It was not an experience I wished to repeat.
Diane said, “Mimi wouldn’t go in there. She told me that she’d never been in there. It’s not her kind of place. She’s not an ‘old barn’ kind of girl. We’re what? A couple of miles from civilization? For Mimi, this is like homesteading in Irkutsk.”
“I think Irkutsk is a city, Diane. You can’t homestead in a city.”
“Alan—don’t. Irkutsk is both city and countryside. And for the record—but I didn’t tell you this—she has a thing about skunks.”
“Everybody has a thing about skunks. Do you know anyone who likes skunks?”
“I’m making a point here.”
I translated. “The move here was Mattin’s thing?”
“You could say that. If it weren’t for the view, she wouldn’t have agreed to move out here.”
Lucky for us, I thought. “Regardless, Diane, I’ll feel better if I check the barn doors. You want to wait here? Or come with?”
“I’ll go with you, but I won’t go in.”
The big barn doors were padlocked the way they had been padlocked almost every day since the time I found the body. The two smaller access doors—one on the south side and one on the north—were both dead-bolted and padlocked. I couldn’t think of an uncomplicated way to padlock oneself inside a barn. Diane was going to be spared the indignity of having to enter.
“Told you,” Diane said. She insisted that we walk around the back of the house one more time before we give up our search for Mimi. We were just turning the corner below the guest room windows when I heard what I thought was the sound of footsteps. I grabbed Diane’s arm and I stopped.
I’m no wilderness seer. In the dark, and that night was getting darker by the moment, I couldn’t tell human footsteps from coyote paw-steps or brown bear paw-steps. Raccoons, I knew from experience, could make quite a racket.
I guessed the sound had come from somewhere behind us, but it could have been from the ravine.
Who, or what, would be in the ravine? I had a plethora of fears: A pack of coyotes. Or a solitary cat. Or a brown bear, especially a mama looking for her cubs.
The reality was that I wasn’t sure which I was more wary of at that moment, human visitors or critter visitors. But I was certain that I wished I’d brought Emily with me on this errand.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered to Diane.
“Yeah,” she whispered back. I didn’t need to hold her arm anymore. She was gripping mine with some ferocity. “Are you worried, Alan?”
Her voice told me that she was worried. But I knew what she was asking. She wanted a reality check. My thoughts had left the extended family of possible critter visitors and moved on to the possible identity of the solitary man that Nicole had seen walking on the lane late on Friday night. “Yeah,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I am.”
I pulled out my phone and texted Lauren as fast as I could. Find the kids. Stay away from the windows. Get your Glock.
29
Diane whispered, “What’s a Glock?”
I thought about lying to her. Diane was not someone who would have her accelerating anxiety diminished by the prospect of adding a .9mm firearm to whatever soup we were in. I whispered back, “Lauren has a . . . handgun. Those threats she had a few years ago from . . . that guy? I suggested she get it ready. Just in case.”
Diane stood on her tippy toes and put her lips near my ear. “Lauren carries a pistol? And just in case of what? Do you do this every time you get nervous? I thought eating all the chocolate I have stashed in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator was an unhealthy response to anxiety.”
Diane made me laugh. I said, “Whatever—whatever—happened here Friday night after you left the housewarming thing has me spooked. I admit that. But right now, I’m just being . . . prudent.”
“After we left? How do you know what happened after we left?”
Shit. I thought of saying “I don’t know” but that would have been a lie. More to the point, Diane wouldn’t believe me. “Just an assumption,” I said instead. Though I quickly realized that was a lie, too.
“I get prudent sometimes, too. Never once has my prudence involved a handgun. Typically involves things like balancing my checkbook instead of relying on the bank.”
“I don’t have a gun, Diane. But Lauren does. And fortunately, she’s the one of us who knows how to use it.”
“And tonight, she’s going to use it for what?”
“Probably depends what that noise was we heard.”
“You guys need weapons to live out here? We live in the mountains and I’ve never once grabbed a pistol.”
�
��Raoul has rifles.”
“For hunting.”
“Would you feel better if Lauren had a rifle?”
“No, I’d feel better right now if we were out front, where there is some damn light. Can we do that?”
We doubled back past the door to the walk-out portion of the basement. I tripped over a stone and fell to one knee. Diane was holding my arm so tightly she almost tumbled down with me. Diane leaned over me and said, “I always thought your daughter was named after you.”
“What?”
“Grace?” She extended her hand to help me up.
“Cute.” My other hand came to rest on something cold. I looked down and saw the shine of a new key. A house key. It had probably been stashed under the stone I just tripped over. I showed it to Diane. “What do you think? You want to go in?”
“Have you heard that sound again?”
“No, but then we haven’t been very quiet, have we?”
“Let’s get a flashlight first,” she said.
“Or we could just turn lights on as we go. We’re not trying to sneak up on Mimi, are we? We’re trying to find her.”
“Point. Is there an alarm?”
“Adrienne didn’t believe,” I said.
Diane sighed. “I’m not asking if she worshipped them. Just whether she had one.”
“No,” I said.
I texted Lauren that it had been a false alarm and that all seemed cool. Diane and I were going inside the house to check on Mimi.
I got a text back almost immediately. But it wasn’t from Lauren. It was from the cyclist grapevine.
Rafa has a subdural hematoma. Concern about brain damage. We need a lawyer for Kari. Anyone? Still need blood. B-neg?????
The subdural was bad news. Kari was Rafael’s wife. She wasn’t a rider. But, by all accounts, she was a sweetheart.
“Unimportant?” Diane asked.
“Yeah,” I said as we entered the basement level of the house.
Diane flipped on every light switch she saw. She also flicked on a table lamp and a floor lamp. I’d seen operating rooms with less illumination. I didn’t say anything.
She waited in the part of the basement that had been the original kitchen, while I went off on my mission to search the darker, more primitive rooms dug into the hillside in the back of the basement. As I headed off down the doglegged hallway past a room with bunk beds, Diane said, “Don’t skip any storage rooms that have weird doors or any rooms that have train sets in them.”
The Last Lie Page 23
