“If you let me buy tonight’s dinner, I’d prefer to stay here. I know Tina would, too.”
“That’s good, then, I’ll feed the kids first.” They went in. “Gus took the cordless, I think he went to Nielsons’.”
An elderly customer was waiting at the counter with bread and tonic water. Her stylish aqua running suit and champagne-perfect hairdo suggested a city wife indulging a retired husband. She looked at Brenda as Janey stepped behind the counter.
“You were on the boat,” the woman said. “I saw you come in.” She shook her head.
Janey placed an old-style phone on the counter, like the one at Kettle Falls. She held out the handset. Brenda took it and faced away. “Carrie?”
“Tanya’s dead.” The girl sighed. “I came home. When I opened the door, there was this smell, like when the freezer downstairs got unplugged.”
Voice shaky, Carrie sighed again, a sigh identical to her mother’s. “I saw her check, I opened the basement door and turned on the light—”
Brenda had been through it herself. More than once, she had reported from crime scenes with bodies left for days or weeks in crack houses. Putrefaction started within two or three days. It was horrible, the sense of smell the most primitive, the most basic. The stench of death was nothing you could ever grow up to manage, or prepare for.
“I’m very sorry,” Brenda said.
“She was at the bottom of the stairs, she fell bringing up towels—”
Lomak, she thought. A man who killed women. Carrie was crying now, lost and weeping, a young girl who did not need to know about Lomak. Better by far for her to think Tanya Bates had died a sad, ordinary death, a bad-luck death that was nobody’s fault.
“Your mom’s on the way,” Brenda said. “Just stay with the Heanys.”
“That’s when the firemen came in,” Carrie said. “I was on the basement stairs, I was so scared, I heard people and noise.”
Someone was speaking to Carrie.
“They said it was dangerous and I should go back where I was staying. But I ran next door, and Mr. Heany was on the ground.” Carrie sighed again, her mother’s sigh, the very same. “He broke his wrist. Do you know where my mom is?”
“On her way. I promise, Carrie, she’ll be there soon.”
Brenda took the phone from the counter and walked with it, trailing the cord into the passage. “But you’re all right,” she said, speaking she hoped with authority.
“Yes, but it’s so awful.”
“What about Mr. Heany? You say he fell?”
“He was on a ladder. He was changing the light over the front porch.”
“So you helped him.”
“He was on the ground, I went over. Mrs. Heany called Beaumont.”
“And you helped him.”
“I just saw him on the ground—”
“And you helped him get inside.” A good girl, Brenda thought. Nice girl. “Lucky for Mr. Heany you were there.”
“But Tanya’s dead, it’s so awful—”
“You couldn’t do anything, Carrie. Is that Mrs. Heany with you?”
“She stayed here with me when the police took Mr. Heany to Beaumont Hospital.”
“Let me talk to her.” Brenda knew the Heanys. They were in their eighties, long retired and devoted to meticulous landscaping. Frail but clear of mind.
“Brenda, hello,” Mrs. Heany said. “This girl, I don’t know what we would have done. I was making lunch when she brought him in. I called Beaumont, I was filling the ice pack and looked out, I saw all these patrol cars, a fire engine—”
With the inflections and words of her generation, Mrs. Heany made clear her gratitude. Brenda remembered her from last summer. Small and birdlike, in denim wrap skirt and lime-green polo, she had stretched out on a chaise next to the Rosses’ pool, keeping watch on her great grandchildren. I would be her granddaughter, Brenda thought. The children’s mother.
“But it’s just awful about Tanya Walker,” Mrs. Heany said. “Such a good person. One of the officers said she fell bringing up laundry.”
“Marion would be very glad to know you’re there,” Brenda said.
“Well, you bet I’m here for this great girl, I can tell you that for sure. And you tell Marion not to worry. Carrie’s going to be fine here, aren’t you?”
Mrs. Heany went back to the police and Tanya. How many disasters occurred in a life of eight decades? How many moments of delight? So many of both, waiting to happen. To oneself and one’s children and their children, attachments and things that gathered meaning—sighs and duct tape, cards fanned out on a table, retrievers in fog, broken shoe laces. That, really, was the whole of it, and you had to accept it all, otherwise you lived a remembered lie. That, really, was everyone’s story—the chunk of a trailer hitch, a sound full of people and places. The feel of folded paper in a breast pocket.
“So they didn’t evacuate the street,” Brenda said.
“They didn’t have to,” Mrs. Heany said. “But one of the firemen told me it would have been very bad. The men who got Carrie found some kind of detonators with timers or switches. On the gas line.”
Carrie was speaking. “That’s right,” Mrs. Heany said. “When the police took my husband, they told us this thing was set to go off in seven-point-two days. They said it would’ve blown up the whole house, and us too. On Thursday. Think of that.”
“They told you Thursday?”
“That’s what they told me. Whoever did it wanted the house to blow up on Thursday.”
Brenda shook her head, half hearing as Mrs. Heany went on. No, she thought. Seventy-two hours, not seven-point-two days. It fit with everything else, another mistake. Lomak had meant for the house to blow up today, not Thursday. For a big finish, an exclamation point. Like coming to the aid of helpless women with a tangled fish. But he had confused the time of his getaway with the day he was due to be sentenced.
A minute later they said goodbye. Brenda hung up, still in the passage. The store’s radio had been turned down, so she could hear. Looking ahead to the family room, she saw the hideabed she would sleep on tonight. It was grouped with worn chairs around a pine coffee table. The Gustofsons would make adjustments tonight, change their routine.
Knowing she would see Charlie Schmidt in the morning, Brenda turned and started back with the phone. She remembered them side by side at dinner, listening to him tell about his house. It’s red, he told her. Like a barn, at the end of the lake.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After a career of college teaching, Barry Knister returned to writing fiction. The Dating Service, his first novel, had been published by Berkley. His second, a story about dogs titled Just Bill was published in 2008. The Anything Goes Girl is the first book in the Brenda Contay suspense series. Deep North is the second, and is due for release in July 2015. Knister is the past secretary of Detroit Working Writers, and the former director of the Cranbrook Summer Writers Conference. He has published travel and humor in local markets, and writes an occasional blog/column for the Naples (Florida) Daily News. He lives in Michigan with his wife Barbara, and their Aussie shepherd, Skylar.
Visit the author at:
Websites:
www.bwknister.com &
www.bhcauthors.com
Cover design, interior book design,
and eBook design by
Blue Harvest Creative
www.blueharvestcreative.com
AVAILABLE NOW IN TRADE SOFTCOVER & EBOOK
Table of Contents
About “Deep North”
Title Page
Copyright Information
Also By Barry Knister
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter
13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
About The Author
Visit The Author
Meet The Design Team
Don’t Miss More Brenda Contay Suspense
Deep North (A Brenda Contay Novel Of Suspense Book 2) Page 27
