27 Blood in the Water

by Jane Haddam

  “That’s Mrs. Heydreich,” Fanny said. “You can’t go calling her ‘the lady with the pink car.’ It’s rude.”

  “Mrs. Heydreich. Usually she comes by in the morning in the car and goes up to the club house. I love the pink car. I want a pink car like that when I grow up.”

  “I’m sure that will be very nice,” Fanny said. She could have said, “You’ll change your mind.” She was sure that was true. Children hated being told they wouldn’t want the things they wanted once they were all grown up.

  Josh had started excavating his pockets, too. Fanny went over to him and took the bits and pieces of garbage out of his hand and threw them in the wastebasket.

  “Come on,” she said, trying to sound stern and serious this time. “We really have to go.”

  They went, this time, stumbling through the kitchen to the door to the garage, and then through the garage to the street. Fanny grabbed Josh’s hand and tried to ignore the fact that Mindy no longer wanted hers held. It hardly seemed possible that Mindy was eight.

  There were no sidewalks on the streets at Waldorf Pines. There were no school busses, either. The school bus stop was just off the grounds through the back gate, as if school bus drivers were like old-time tradesmen and not allowed at the front door.

  Fanny swung them through the curve that passed in front of the houses of at least four couples without any children at all, and then down the cement path to the back gate. Waldorf Pines looked differently from this side than it did from the golf course. Fanny had never really understood the point of the golf course anyway. For the first three years they lived here, she’d woken up in the middle of the night, dreaming about golf balls sailing through the windows.

  The back gate was, as always, very carefully locked. Fanny got out her key and opened it up. She had to try twice to make it work. Surely there had to be some better way than this to get children to the bus stop in the morning. Fanny always felt like a character in a fairy tale, having to unlock the enchanted mansion to release the prince and princess from their dreams.

  Fanny always felt like a character in a fairy tale. That was the thing. That was the problem. She ran around and did things. She fed and bathed the children and helped with their homework. She slept with Charlie and washed his socks and ironed his shirts. She went out to dinner. She took the children to McDonald’s. She bought books at Barnes & Noble. She watched television.

  And none of it ever seemed as if it were real.

  She shut the gate behind her after they went through. She heard the click that said it had relocked securely in place. She double-checked her pocket for her keys, even though she had just used them, because to forget her keys meant having to walk all the way around to be let in by the guard at the front.

  There were other children waiting at the bus stop, and other mothers. The other mothers didn’t talk to Fanny, because they were not from Waldorf Pines.

  “She went out last night,” Mindy said.

  “What?” Fanny said.

  “She went out last night,” Mindy said again. “The lady with the pink car. Mrs. Heydreich. She went out. I saw her. But she wasn’t in the car.”

  “Really,” Fanny said.

  “I thought it was funny,” Mindy said, “because, you know, it was really late. It was after eleven o’clock.”

  “And what were you doing up after eleven o’clock?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Mindy said. “I never can sleep when it gets too hot. You should let me have the air-conditioning on in my room.”

  “It was only forty degrees last night,” Fanny said. “And you can’t have the air-conditioning on just in your room. It would have to be on for the entire second floor. You’d be happy, but I’d be frozen into an icicle.”

  “I was just lying there trying not to be bored,” Mindy said. “I mean, I’m not supposed to turn on the light or anything, so it’s not like I can read. And if I turn on the iPod you always hear me. I use the earphones, but you hear me anyway. So I was just lying there. And then I heard them coming along the golf course, you know, so I got up and went to the window and looked out.”

  “The bus is late again,” Fanny said. “What is it about this bus that it’s always late?”

  “I just thought it was funny,” Mindy said. “I couldn’t figure out what they were doing there that late and everything. I thought maybe they were burying treasure, because you’re supposed to bury treasure in the middle of the night. But they weren’t doing anything. They were just walking on the golf course. And they were laughing.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Heydreich were walking? Maybe they couldn’t sleep.”

  “It wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. Heydreich,” Mindy said. “It was Mrs. Heydreich and that guy, you know, the one who hangs around all the time at the pool. Except he wasn’t at the pool, this time, he was just at the golf course. Maybe they were going to play golf. They didn’t have golf things or anything, though.”

  “What?” Fanny asked.

  The school bus was pulling up to the curb. The other mothers were herding their children toward the doors. The other mothers acted as if Fanny and Mindy and Josh weren’t there, and Mindy and Josh acted as if the other children weren’t there. It felt as unreal as everything else did these days, and Fanny didn’t have a word for it.

  “Sherry Carlson says Mrs. Heydreich and the guy from the pool are doing something nasty with each other,” Mindy said, “but I think that’s just because her mother has all of Dallas on DVD.”

  Fanny looked up, startled. Mindy was disappearing into the bus. Josh was right behind her. Fanny watched as the two of them sat down together in a seat and then turned to the windows to wave good-bye.

  A second later, the bus and everybody in it was gone.

  Fanny was left standing on the side of the road, thinking that this was just one more day, one more hour when she had no idea what was going on in her life. It all just came and went, and none of it made sense.

  8

  When it was time to leave, it was time to leave. Arthur Heydreich held fast to that thought, because it was the only thought he had that made any sense. He was a man of routine in the strictest possible sense. Only routine made sense to him. He could hear Cortina wandering through the rooms of the house, letting loose a soft stream of Spanish. He suddenly wished he lived in a time and place where he could forbid his maid from having a cell phone. She would be talking to all the other maids in all the other houses that ringed the golf course. She would be talking about the bright pink car in the garage. She would be talking about the pocketbook on the coffee table in the family room, the cell phone still in it. She would be talking and talking, and in an hour or two the maids together would have solved any mystery that might have arisen in the Heydreich house before eight o’clock in the morning. Except that they wouldn’t have solved it. They would just have made it up.

  Arthur went back upstairs to his bedroom and closed the door behind him. He was surprised. If he had been Cortina, he would have come up here first. He would have wanted to check out the story that the bed had been slept in. Maybe she was waiting for him to leave the house.

  He went over to look at the bed himself. There was nothing to see that he hadn’t already seen when he first woke up, nothing that had changed when he came out of the shower. The sheets and pillows and quilts were rumpled and twisted the way they always were when Martha had slept in them. He could remember her pulling them back across the bed and getting in under them the night before. He could remember her lying stretched out, talking about committees. He hadn’t listened. He’d fallen asleep and slept like a stone for hours. Then suddenly he was awake, and she was not there beside him.

  He went over to the windows and looked out on the golf course again. The houses that ringed it looked awake now. There were people on decks and patios. There were children making their way to the bus stop outside the back gate. It was an ordinary fall morning, and he was an idiot to think there was anything strange about it.

  He left t
he room and went out into the hall. He went down the staircase and into the foyer. He went back through the kitchen to the breakfast nook. He could still hear Cortina somewhere in the house. Her Spanish sounded like music.

  He went back into the foyer again and called out. “Cortina? I’m leaving for work.”

  There was something that might have been a muffled reply, or might not have been. He didn’t want to spend the time finding out. He got his briefcase off the kitchen counter. He went out into the huge three-car heated garage. He got into his car and closed the door tight. He was having that odd feeling again. The air around him felt patterned.

  Martha was Martha. She had committees. She had yoga and facials and all the other things that made him feel as if, talking to her, he was trying to make sense of an alien. It was not impossible that she had had something on her mind and simply forgotten her bag. It was not impossible that she had had something on her mind and preferred to walk instead of take the car. He liked to walk when he wanted to think.

  And she had had something on her mind lately. He was sure of that.

  He pushed the little button on his visor and the garage door slid open. The area in front of the garage was wide enough for cars to turn around in. It narrowed to a single lane that led out onto the thin access road that went around the houses to the front gate. This was his routine every morning. He did not have trouble following it.

  His house was at the far end of the course, as far as you could get from the front gate. That was supposed to be an advantage. Real luxury was supposed to be to live away from people. He passed the back gate just as that Fanny woman—Bullstrode? Bullhorn?—was coming back through it. That would have been her children he saw on their way to the bus stop. Arthur had never been able to understand why anybody wanted to have children.

  Fanny What’s-her-name cut across the road and then through somebody’s side yard. She went a little out of her way to do it. Arthur saw Walter Dunbar come out of the house she had avoided, and smiled a little. He’d go out of his way to avoid Walter Dunbar, too. Everybody did.

  Stupid ass, Arthur thought, watching Walter pick up his paper from his driveway. Walter paid no attention to him, or pretended to—but that was what Walter did. He actually paid attention to everything. Then he complained.

  The clubhouse itself was up at the front gate, far away from him still. He looked through the wide grassy areas between the houses at the green. Nobody was out there playing yet. They could have been. The club was ready and willing for most of the day and the night.

  Going around the curve that would let him make the loop, Arthur caught a glimpse of the pool house and its ugly yellow caution tape. It struck the wrong note. It struck just the kind of wrong note Martha’s handbag had. It was out of place. It felt wrong.

  The curve continued relentlessly and he went around it very slowly, looking through the yards each time, looking at the way the grass was still green even this late in the fall, looking at the windows gleaming in the sun. The gates to the right of him were lined with evergreen trees. Nobody could see through them from the outside unless they came right up close, and then there would be sensors and other things, things to keep out the dark, to keep out the unsafe.

  Arthur Heydreich was not like a lot of the people who lived at Waldorf Pines. He hadn’t grown up rich. He hadn’t even grown up lower middle class, in one of those neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else and everybody’s mother watched out for everybody else’s children. He knew the world was not a safe place, and never would be.

  The trick to the thing was people. That was it. There were a lot of different kinds of people, and most people were truly awful—but most people were not dangerous in any way that mattered, and that was what you had to watch out for. Arthur Heydreich watched, and he knew what he was looking for.

  He was almost all the way up the other side of the curve when he saw it, the thing he would describe later, to the police, as “a flicker.”

  “Flicker” was the best word he had for it, and he was willing to admit that on another day, on a day when he was not already worried and a little upset, he might not have noticed it. It came up and bent a little in the wind. It shuddered in and out of sight. It was like looking at the flame on a candle on a birthday cake when somebody without much breath was trying to blow it out. And it was—inside the building.

  He slowed his car to look and tried to see. For a moment or two there was nothing. Then the flicker came back. It rose and fell and rose again. It shuddered and died. It rose again. It shuddered and seemed to twist.

  Fire, Arthur thought.

  He brought his car almost all the way around and stopped at the small parking lot next to the pool house. He looked around. Most people traveled by golf cart inside Waldorf Pines. There were no golf carts parked in the parking lot. He looked at the pool house. It looked the same as it always did. He looked at the roof of it. There was nothing going on there that had not been going on there the last time he saw it.

  He turned off his engine and waited. This was the back of the pool house he was looking at. The front faced the golf course, because people liked to swim and watch the play at the same time. He watched the back windows. He looked at the caution tape. He wondered where Michael Platte was, but not for long, because Michael Platte was never where he was supposed to be.

  Arthur got out of the car. He put his keys in his pockets. He left his briefcase on the front passenger seat where he had put it when he left home. He closed the car door behind him and stood, listening.

  The sound was definitely there. It sounded like paper crackling.

  He walked across the gravel to the pool house door and stopped. The crackling sound was louder and louder. The closer he got to the doors, the louder it was. If he stepped back, it was very faint, almost as if he were making it up.

  He went to the doors and tried them. He was sure he would find them locked. They were supposed to be locked. Instead, the door swung open easily.

  He stepped into the foyer. There was a big glass case for trophies on the far wall. There were no trophies in it. The case looked forlorn and a little lame.

  Arthur tried to listen again, but now he could hear nothing. He might really have been making it all up. He was upset with himself. He didn’t like looking like an idiot. He didn’t like looking like one of those old fussbudget perennial bachelors from the movies of the Fifties, either. He knew the kinds of things people said about him.

  The door snicked closed behind him, ending in a heavy thump. The lights were not on. He didn’t know how to get them on. He tried to hear the noise again. He got nothing.

  The pool was to his left. The changing rooms and showers were to his right. He went first to the changing rooms. He pulled the door of the men’s room wide open and looked inside. There was nothing to see. He backed up and pulled at the door of the women’s room, but he felt a little wrong doing it, as if women might still be inside. He stepped through and the door closed behind him. He was in pitch darkness now, but in a way that was reassuring. If there was pitch darkness, there couldn’t be a fire, or not much of one, not yet.

  He went back into the lobby and looked around again. Then he went toward the pool. There had been something about the pool at the last residents meeting. Something about the water being left in it until it could be properly drained by the people coming in to do the repairs. Something. He didn’t remember what.

  The doors to the pool were big and heavy. He thought he could hear water sloshing on the other side of them, but he was sure he was making that up. The water wouldn’t be sloshing. There wouldn’t be anybody in it.

  He stared into the darkness. The darkness was very, very dark. There were no windows here. He let the door shut behind him. The darkness became even darker. He began to feel along the wall, slowly and slowly, inching his way in case there were things left lying on the floor that could trip him.

  He found the first set of switches when he thought he’d gone a mile and a half, ev
en though he knew he couldn’t have, because he hadn’t turned a corner.

  He flicked the switches on one after the other.

  A couple of dim lights came on and then the sound of air being pumped through a grate or a pipe—maybe he had turned on the air conditioner? He didn’t know what he was doing. He’d never tried turning the lights on in the pool.

  One of the dim lights was coming from under the water itself. That was all right. The pool had heat and light so that people could swim in the winter and at night.

  Arthur turned and looked into the water, and for just a moment he did not know what he was seeing. There was somebody in the water, yes, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the water itself. It was the wrong color, the wrong shade, something. There was something in there, something dark against the palish clearish blue, but—

  But it didn’t matter, because that was when the building went up in flames.

  PART I

  ONE

  1

  It was six o’clock on the morning of Monday, the fifth of November, and it was cold. It was so cold that Gregor Demarkian found himself staring down at the jacket his wife had laid out for him across the back of the living room couch and wondering if she’d gone insane. Insanity was never to be completely ruled out when it came to Bennis Hannaford Demarkian, but the forms that insanity took were not usually thin cotton jackets presented for wearing in the freeze that heralded the run-up to winter. Bennis was much more likely to do things that would not be considered illegal only because she was a very good friend of the mayor.

  Gregor picked the jacket up and put it down again. It was the jacket Bennis had bought him a couple of years ago, when she had gone on one of her periodic campaigns to “update” him.

  “Somehow or the other, you just don’t seem to get the spirit of the times,” she’d said.

  He’d been at a loss to know what she was talking about. Maybe he was too stodgy for the business casual atmosphere of the twenty-first century? Maybe he was too rational for all the television shows about mediums and psychic children?