Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 07 - Mad as the Dickens

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  There were a desk and a filing cabinet in one corner of Seth’s bedroom, and I started there. I found a ledger book right off, and I went through it first, hoping that I’d find some solid evidence of Seth’s moonshining. Unfortunately, it only had records of the household expenses, and listings for buying supplies and selling furniture. The rest of the desk drawers held the usual stuff people accumulate: unpaid bills and giveaway pens and tape and a postcard reminding Seth to make a dentist’s appointment. The filing cabinet looked promising at first with its neatly labeled folders, but though I glanced through every folder, I didn’t find any threatening letters or panic-stricken journal entries.

  It didn’t take long to search the rest of the bedroom, but unless I counted the three well-thumbed copies of Penthouse, there was nothing suspicious. Then I hit the living room, then the kitchen, and even the bathroom. Nothing. At least, nothing that pointed to Seth’s murderer.

  There were a few paperback men’s adventure novels scattered about and a couple of woodworking magazines, but apparently Seth hadn’t been a big reader. There were some videos on the shelf under the TV and VCR, but all store-bought ones. Seth had liked Top Gun and Benny Hill. Plus, there were photo albums, and the memorabilia any parent or grandparent collects: graduation programs, homemade cards of construction paper, school book reports, and crayon drawings. But I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.

  Knowing that Seth and Jake were carpenters, I tapped around on the walls and furniture, looking for secret compartments. All I got were sore knuckles.

  I even tried to get mystical. I sat down on the end of the couch that showed the most wear, figuring it must have been where Seth liked to sit, and closed my eyes, trying to sense what the dead man had been like. Why had he spent his life breaking the law, and what had he done when he wasn’t making moonshine? Why had he slept with Tim’s mother and only admitted it recently? Why had he never remarried after his wife died? Who in the heck was Seth Murdstone?

  I opened my eyes. Maybe the strangest thing I found was nothing. Despite the obvious signs that Seth had lived there and kept his belongings there, there was almost no personality in those rooms. It was as if Seth had hidden himself as carefully as he’d hidden his still. Maybe Junior or a psychologist could have gotten to know Seth Murdstone by looking at his home, but I couldn’t.

  I finally decided I might as well go help my aunts, but halfway down the stairs, I stopped and stared in amazement. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought I was in a different house. Every surface either shone or gleamed, as appropriate, and every newspaper, cigarette butt, and beer bottle was gone. I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving fingerprints while searching that house—my aunts would polish them right off again.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  “We’re in the kitchen,” one of them replied, and I followed the voice through the newly immaculate living room. They’d just gotten started in the kitchen, so I could see what a mess the room had been, but the smell of Pine-Sol promised that any germs were on their way out. Aunt Nellie had her head in the refrigerator and was pitching styrofoam containers into a green garbage bag while Aunt Edna sprayed glass cleaner and Aunt Nora loaded plates into the dishwasher.

  “Did you find anything?” Aunt Edna asked eagerly.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “I thought I’d look around down here.”

  Aunt Nora said, “Go right ahead. We’ve got plenty to keep us busy.”

  In fact, they had enough to keep me busy for a month, but I suspected they would be done in an hour or two.

  The downstairs part of the house was bigger than the upper floor because of a long room along one side that had probably started out life as a porch. There was the living room and kitchen I’d already seen, a half bathroom off the front hall, and a full bathroom with doors to both bedrooms. The former porch had been set up as a combination den and playroom, although from the number of toys scattered around, I suspected the playroom function had taken over.

  Even though my aunts hadn’t cleaned in there yet, and despite the toys, it was probably the neatest room downstairs, and I wondered why. Then I saw the scorched patch of carpet and realized that was where Barnaby must have gotten burned. I was surprised it wasn’t worse, considering how badly Barnaby had been hurt. Even thinking about the boy’s injuries made my stomach roll, and though it was the wrong time of the day for morning sickness, I decided I needed some fresh air.

  There was a door leading outside from the playroom, and I called out, “I’m going out back,” before stepping through.

  The yard wasn’t much to see. The grass had been mowed and the weeds kept under control, but it didn’t look as if Jake or Seth had spent any time planting flowers or bushes. There was a large-ish wooden building out there, too big for a playhouse, and when I checked the door, it was unlocked.

  Inside was a home handyman’s dream, with all the woodworking tools anybody could want. Not that I knew what most of them were, but they looked impressive. There was also plenty of lumber waiting to be made into furniture, and a few completed pieces. Even though their real business lay elsewhere, clearly Seth and Jake had spent a lot of time in the workshop. There was a little refrigerator, a coffeemaker, and even a telephone.

  One of Seth’s signature chairs was sitting in the middle of the room, and after making sure the varnish had dried, I took a seat. Florence was right; it wasn’t as comfortable as the average church pew. While sitting there, I saw a mangled pile of metal on one of the worktables. It took a closer look and some imagination to picture what it must have been, but once I did, my stomach turned again. It was the remains of a space heater.

  I nearly ran out of the little building, and went back inside the house. My aunts had finished up in the kitchen, and I offered to tackle Jake’s bedroom. Then I looked inside and started to regret it. It was strewn with the same kinds of trash as in the rest of the house, but with dirty clothes thrown in for good measure.

  “Aunt Nora,” I called out, “did y’all bring any spare rubber gloves?”

  Once my hands were protected, I brought myself to start searching, but other than learning that Jake was a briefs man, I didn’t know a bit more than I had before. Aunt Nora came in while I was gingerly picking my way through. She said, “Throw the dirties into the hall, and I’ll put them in the washer later.”

  “You’re a braver man than I, Gunga Din,” I said.

  “Lord, Laurie Anne, after washing up after Buddy, Augustus, Thaddeous, and Willis all these years, this is nothing!”

  “Do kids make that big a mess?” I said, worried for the future.

  “Not until they start walking,” she said cheerfully. “Unless they spit up a lot, of course.”

  “Maybe I should hire a cleaning service.”

  She just laughed. “You start over there, and I’ll start over here, and we’ll meet in the middle.”

  Actually, we met when I was only one-third done, and she’d already gotten two-thirds of the way through. She might have gotten farther along than that if she hadn’t stopped at Jake’s chest of drawers. A minute later, I realized she was crying.

  “Aunt Nora?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  She waved a piece of paper at me. “Oh, Laurie Anne, this breaks my heart.”

  “What?”

  “Read it,” she said, handing it to me as she looked for a tissue to blow her nose.

  It was a letter, hand printed on notebook paper and dated December 1.

  Dear Santa,

  How are you? I am fine. Only I’m in the hospital, but the doctor says I might get to go home for Christmas. If not, you can find me here.

  I have tried to be a good boy this year. I did lie once, but Grandpaw says it’s okay to lie if it’s for a good reason. So I hope it doesn’t count.

  I would really like the new PlayStation if you can get one. Daddy says they are hard to find, but I figure you can make one yourself. And games for it, too.

  I would also like you to br
ing my Daddy a CD player for his car. I broke the old one, and have been trying to earn money to buy a new one, but I got hurt before I got enough. If you’ll bring him one, I promise to spend the money I have saved on CDs for him. Or on PlayStation games so you don’t have to bring me so many.

  I hope Mrs. Claus is good, and that the reindeer are, too. Especially Rudolph, if he’s real.

  Love,

  Barnaby Murdstone

  PS: If you can’t find a PlayStation, that’s OK, but don’t forget the CD player for Daddy.

  I started crying, too, and Aunt Nora handed me the box of tissues she’d found. Aunt Nellie and Aunt Edna must have heard us, because they showed up, wondering what was going on. Both of them read the letter and reached for the tissues.

  “I’ve never read anything so sad in my whole life,” Aunt Nora sniffed. “Asking for a present for his daddy when he was in the hospital dying. Can you imagine?”

  I shook my head. I’d never been that sweet in my Christmas letters. After a perfunctory inquiry into Santa’s health, I’d methodically listed a page’s worth of stuff I wanted.

  “He had such pretty handwriting, too,” Aunt Nellie said.

  “He didn’t write that,” Aunt Edna said. “Mrs. Gamp told me she did it for him. He died not long after he wrote this, and she never got around to mailing it, so when she found it in her pocketbook the other day, she gave it to Jake. It must have torn the poor man up. She should have just thrown it out.”

  Aunt Nora said, “No, she did the right thing. Now Jake knows what a wonderful boy he had.”

  That made us start crying all over again, and we had to stop working long enough for Aunt Nora to brew some iced tea for us to drink. For once I didn’t pay attention to the caffeine or the amount of sugar she added. I had to have something to loosen my throat.

  After we pulled ourselves together, we started cleaning as if our lives depended on it. There was no way we could comfort Jake for the loss of that little boy—we couldn’t even admit we’d read such a private letter. What we could do was get that house so spic and span that you could have eaten off any floor in the place.

  I knew I was going to have to tell Junior that I hadn’t seen anything that would lead us to Seth’s killer, but I didn’t regret having spent the time out there. Making Jake’s house fit to live in was the least we could do for him.

  Chapter 31

  It didn’t take long to report to Junior what I’d found at Seth’s house, once Aunt Nora dropped me off at rehearsal, because there wasn’t much to tell. So we hashed over what we knew, and we rehashed it, and then we made goulash out of it. None of it did any good. All it did was make me hungry.

  Richard kept everybody but the kids late that night, trying to make up for the time lost because of Seth’s services. But finally he admitted that we’d accomplished as much as we were going to. The next day was the technical rehearsal and the dress rehearsal, with our first performance the night after that, so he warned everybody to get plenty of sleep because come tomorrow, he wasn’t going to let anybody go until everything was perfect. People were out of there in record time.

  As soon as we got into the car, I said, “Richard, I can tell you’re worn out, but we’ve got to talk.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine; the baby’s fine. It’s about Seth’s murderer.” I launched into a report of everything Junior and I had done over the past couple of days, which lasted through the ride home and into our preparations for the night. Only when we were in bed, with Richard’s arm around me, did I tell him about what I’d seen Mark doing.

  “Jesus, Laura!” Richard said. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “I didn’t get a chance,” I said, “and I was so horrified, I didn’t want to. It was like when I was a little kid. If something bad happened, I thought that if I didn’t say anything, nobody would find out, and it wouldn’t be real. Telling somebody would have made it true. I know that doesn’t make much sense—”

  “No, I think I understand.”

  “Once we saw the flat was broken, you were busy trying to make sure nobody got hurt. I told Junior because he’s her deputy. She and I decided not to tell anybody else.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s no proof. It would be his word against mine.”

  “Don’t you think people would believe you over him?”

  “I don’t know. The point is that it wouldn’t do any good to tell people now. We need to find out what’s going on, and we can do that better if he doesn’t know we’re onto him.”

  “Are you sure he doesn’t already know?”

  I thought about how he’d acted after talking to Aunt Maggie. “He might suspect, but he can’t know for sure.”

  “Laura, if this is true, Mark’s got to be getting desperate, and he’s got a gun. I’m worried.” He gently rubbed my tummy. “About both of you.”

  “I’m worried, too,” I said, “but I’m going to be careful. I won’t go anywhere without somebody with me—preferably you or Junior—and I’m going to stay as far away from Mark as humanly possible.”

  “Good,” he said firmly. “Otherwise I’d be tempted to get us onto the next plane out of here.”

  “We can’t do that! The play is the day after tomorrow, and everybody is depending on you. And Junior is depending on me.”

  “Do you think any of that would make a difference to me if I thought you were in danger? Would it mean anything to you if I were in danger?”

  “No, I guess not. But I don’t think I’m in danger.”

  “Then we’ll stick around. But if there’s the first sign that Mark, or anybody else, might hurt you—”

  “We head for the airport. Got it.”

  “Good. You get some rest,” he said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Despite everything, Richard was asleep in minutes. It took me a little longer. I was thinking about what Richard had said about Mark getting desperate. He was right, and that explained why the so-called practical jokes had been getting nastier. The question was, how much more desperate was Mark going to get?

  Chapter 32

  Thanks to my taking so long to get to sleep, Richard and I were late getting to rehearsal the next day, and when we arrived, people were milling around and looking a lot more upset than they should have been over missing five minutes of rehearsal. I snagged Mrs. Gamp as she rushed by, and said, “What’s going on?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” she asked. “The most terrible thing happened last night. At least, it almost happened. Though of course it would have been much more terrible if it had happened. But like Mrs. Harris always says, to have something almost happen is nearly as bad as it actually happening. Don’t you think?”

  I just blinked at her, wishing mightily that there really was a Mrs. Harris, because surely she’d be able to explain things better than Mrs. Gamp did.

  Fortunately, Junior came over then. “It’s about time y’all got here. People are kind of stirred up.”

  “So we see,” Richard said. “What has Mar—” Junior looked at him sharply, and he changed it to, “What has our practical joker done now?”

  “No joke. Jake Murdstone nearly died last night from gas fumes.”

  Mrs. Gamp said, “He’s going to be fine, but if he’d been in there much longer …” She wagged her head. “Thank goodness for his brother. Because poor Jake was feeling no pain, if you know what I mean.”

  Actually, I had no idea what Mrs. Gamp meant, so I looked to Junior for a more coherent explanation.

  “David went over to the Murdstone house last night,” Junior said obligingly. “Jake’s car was there, but Jake didn’t answer the door, and when David went inside, he smelled gas. Jake was passed out at the kitchen table, so David dragged him outside and called for help. By the time the ambulance showed up, Jake was already coming round. He was sick as a dog, but he’s going to be all right.”

  “Good Lord,” I breathed. “
How did it happen?”

  “These things do happen,” Mrs. Gamp intoned. “Especially when liquor is involved. Mr. Gamp went that way. Only he was driving a truck, not using a stove, and of course he would never have taken a drop when he was driving, but it happened just the same. You just never know.”

  “Mrs. Gamp,” Junior said, “did Vasti find you? I think she wanted you to help her fold programs.”

  “Did she? I better get right over there.” She trotted away.

  “Did Vasti really ask for her help?” I asked Junior.

  “No, but I knew I’d never get the whole story out if we didn’t get her out of here. Anyway, when the fire department got there, they found one of the eyes of the stove had been turned on full blast and the pilot light was out. Jake is just lucky his brother picked last night to bring him something to eat.”

  “ ‘Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families,’ ” Richard said. “David Copperfield, Chapter Twenty-eight.”

  “How did that eye get turned on?” I wanted to know.

  “Ask Jake yourself. He just came in the door.”

  Pretty much everybody in the room looked in Jake’s direction as he walked past. Jake’s face colored and he refused to meet anybody’s eyes.

  David stepped toward him. “Jake, what are you doing here? The doctor said you need to take it easy for a few days.”

  “I feel fine,” Jake said, but I don’t imagine anybody believed him. Other than the angry flush on his cheeks, he looked as pale as could be. “I’ve got things to do before the play opens.”

  Richard said, “Jake, nobody appreciates your devotion more than I do, but there’s no reason to make yourself sick.”