Whether it was that quick clang or some other sound that set Boone off, suddenly he charged up the stairs. He sniffed under the door to Dolly’s kitchen, snuffling his nose along the narrow gap with whiny yelps that upset Max.
“Come!” Max called, but Boone ignored him. It wasn’t just odd, but creepy, Boone’s flattening himself on the stairs, as if in desperate need to squeeze under the door. “Come!” Max kept demanding, then he’d swear under his breath. “Goddamn it! Jesus Christ! Come!” More than mad, he seemed nervous, as was Nellie, fully expecting Dolly to come raging out at them. “Come!” Max smacked his hands together, agitating Boone even more. He began to bark and wouldn’t stop. “Get! Get!” Max shouted, bounding up to him. “Get down here!” He grabbed the dog’s collar and dragged him, yipping down the stairs. And every bony strike of Boone’s legs hitting the steps was a jab in the pit of her stomach.
“Don’t hurt him!” she pleaded.
“Hurt him, I’ll damn well hurt him if I have to,” Max growled pulling the struggling dog along with him.
“But he stopped. He’s okay now,” she said on Max’s heels through the cellar.
“Not when he don’t come he ain’t!” he said with a vicious yank through the door, out to his truck. He shoved the whimpering dog up into the cab and closed the windows. His face twisted with the same rage she’d seen when the truck driver wouldn’t pick up the asbestos pipe he’d dumped.
“It’s too hot! He’ll suffocate in there.”
“Then he’ll learn, won’t he?” Max muttered, stomping off to the back of his truck. Boone was panting. Strings of drool dangled from his tongue as they regarded each other, she through smudged eyeglasses and he through the nose-smeared window. How utterly sad his watery eyes were. And humiliated. Suddenly, she disliked Max. She understood how he’d been able to crack that pit bull’s skull open. He just hadn’t cared. He didn’t have normal feelings like other people. He could be one person one moment, then entirely different another. Just like that. And while he may have saved her brother’s life, anyone who’d treat his own dog like that was not a good person. And with his hot temper, it was her guess that Boone had seen his share of hurt. And maybe his family’d been right, maybe he had shot his own brother on purpose. Wrenches and a small saw in hand, Max headed toward the cellar.
“That’s not right, that’s just cruelty to animals,” she called after him and he spun around.
“He’s gotta obey. The minute he hears my voice.”
“Well, that’s not how to teach him. Putting him in a hot truck.”
It was a long glaring moment. There was a struggle going on inside his head, too. He didn’t like her much either, right then, only difference was, she knew, he couldn’t afford to show it. “He’s my dog. And how I raise him’s my business.”
“Not if you don’t treat him right.” Her heart was pounding, but she stared straight back into his squinting meanness. “There’s a law about that.”
“Lemme tell you something.” He gave a close gesture with the lug wrench. “Obeying, that’s the most important thing. Only thing’ll keep him safe.”
He disappeared inside. And for a long time after, she would remember that, those exact words. Because maybe obeying can get in the way of things, of a life, she would later think. And because maybe when Boone barked, if they’d opened that door at the top of the stairs and looked inside together, then everything might have turned out different.
She marched into the house and looked up the number of the Springvale SPCA. The phone shook against her sweaty ear, she was so mad and so indignant.
“Helloo,” she said in a low, deep voice to the woman answering. “I’d like to report a dog that’s in a boiling hot truck.”
“Could I have your name, please?”
“No. This is anonymous. But—”
“I need a name, that’s all.”
“Louisa Humboldt.”
“Okay, all right then, so where’s the dog? I need the address. Can you—”
She hung up. Not only would she get in trouble for using Miss Humboldt’s name, but Max would know it was her, not that it should have mattered, she knew in her Get Tough! principled heart. She might have brought down Bucky Saltonstall with one of the major’s holds, but standing up to an adult was a different kind of toughness, one that went against everything she’d ever been taught, and now she couldn’t very well call back saying she was someone else. She could hear Max working downstairs. Unnerved by the spiteful racket of banging, clanging, rattling pipes, the cellar door opening and slamming shut, she went outside and asked Henry to come in the house with her. She needed his help. It would take only a minute. She wanted him to call the SPCA, but she didn’t tell him that.
“Can’t,” he grunted from his squat on the sidewalk. He was pinching ants as lightly as possible from a teeming sand hill in the cracked cement, then flicking them into a jar. Never had she been so resentful of his single-minded intensity that everyone else called brilliant, but she knew the truth. Her brother was a selfish creep and she was through sticking up for him. She needed help and he wasn’t the least bit interested. She went back inside. She took a bowl from the cupboard and held it under the faucet, but only a drip came. So instead, she filled the bowl with milk and carried it out to Boone. The truck doors were locked. She pressed her forehead against the window, wanting the poor creature to know someone cared, which only got him howling. She set the bowl on the ground and went into the cellar. Max stood on a wooden box aiming a small blow torch at a water pipe.
“The Springvale SPCA just called,” she said breathlessly. “Something about a dog barking. Somebody complained. A neighbor, they said.”
“Jesus!” He turned off the flame and she noticed the cloth wrapped around his hand, green and white striped, from her mother’s ragbag, which hung by the clothes dryer, and the thin blood streak on the front of his shirt. He hurried out to the truck, then returned with Boone. But the dog shot right back up the stairs and started whining and yelping under the door.
Before he could drag him back down the stairs again, she asked if Boone could come with her. He let her take him up their stairs into the kitchen. She was having fun rolling the tennis ball to Boone and wasn’t noticing the time, so she wouldn’t know how long Max was alone in the cellar that time either. But it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, insignificant enough, it would seem, to keep to herself. Even Henry wouldn’t recall her trip out to the sidewalk, so focused was he on his ants. And besides, what happened next seemed logical enough, except for Max’s agitation, charging up their cellar stairs, banging on the door, and yelling that he needed to get in Dolly’s apartment and she wasn’t answering the door.
But the way she told it, she’d been down cellar the whole time with Max and Boone. Partly, it was guilt for taking the dog into the house when she shouldn’t have because of Ruth’s allergies, but then came fear. She’d already told everything that needed telling to the first policemen on the scene. They knew her parents and kept assuring her and Henry, who were both crying, that they were safe. Nothing else bad was going to happen. They even made taking Max to the police station sound routine. A few questions and he’d be back for Boone. Before the State Police crime scene unit arrived, she was questioned by Detective Des La Forges, a large man of no little self-importance. He also knew her father, but he was all business, terse and suspicious. He kept pressing the same questions on her, rephrasing them this way and that, as if he thought she was lying.
So what about Max’s cut? The one on his hand. If you were down there the whole time, you must’ve seen him do it then.
No. I told you, I was at the other end, playing with Boone. (But upstairs, the part she left out.)
Did you ask how he got it?
No. He just said. From a jagged pipe.
Did he yell or swear or anything?
No.
What about the blood on his shirt?
Same thing. He even pointed to it, the jagged pipe.
I mean, what’d he say?
He didn’t. I just figured it was from his hand.
He didn’t tell you he’d already been in the apartment?
No.
But you said he seemed upset.
No, I didn’t. I said, bothered. Like he had to get in there so he could finish.
Bothered, upset—that’s not the same thing?
No. It was the pipes. He was having a hard time.
He said it was the pipes?
I could tell. He was, like, flustered, that’s all. Because of the pipes.
And that’s why he wanted you to go inside the apartment with him? To help with the pipes?
No! He just wanted me to unlock the door, that’s all.
But it wasn’t locked, was it?
No.
BUT OF COURSE she hadn’t known that. She told Max she wasn’t sure where the apartment key was, but that she’d go look. The last time Dolly had locked herself out her mother had been really annoyed. She told Dolly there was only one spare key left, so she’d just have to go get her own made. There had to be one here somewhere, Nellie said and kept pawing through drawers and cupboards. Maybe there was one at the store—her father always used to cut extras, she said. But when she called the store, the line was still busy. She waited a minute, then tried again. Still busy. Max didn’t seem to be in a hurry or anything, just quiet. He stood there, by the kitchen door, staring down at Boone, who sat at his feet, the perfect dog, not wanting to be punished again. She finally found the key in a bank envelope in the pantry junk drawer. When she went to give it to him, he said she should come, too, so they headed back down cellar. Boone tried slipping out with them, but Max stopped him.
“Stay, boy! Stay, now!” he ordered with a thump on his broad back.
Max followed her up the stairs to the apartment. She felt a little giddy, wondering what fireworks would happen when Dolly saw him again. She figured that was why he wanted her there. He even stood behind her while she knocked on her door. No answer. She called Dolly’s name, knocked again. Still nothing, so she put the key in the dead bolt.
“It’s not locked,” she said.
“Go on in,” he said.
“I don’t know if I should.”
His hand brushed past and turned the knob. The minute the door swung open she saw Dolly. On the floor. Curled on her side, legs drawn as if to protect herself from whatever hulking rage had intruded before them. The bottoms of her feet were soiled, the glittery toenails, fuschia. Her card table and two folding chairs had been knocked over. There was a broken plate and bowl on the counter. A red mug on the floor, the toaster in a spill of burned crumbs. The white trash can had been tipped over. A greasy black plastic takeout container had spewed its noodly Chinese entrails near her blond ponytail. A trickle of blood ran from her nose and the corner of her mouth.
“She’s dead,” Max said from the step below.
Nellie turned and ran, through the cellar, stumbling on all fours, back up the stairs to her own orderly kitchen, where she lurched back and forth, gagging. She had to do something, couldn’t think what. Call, call her father. He came home. The Springvale police arrived next, then her mother. She brought Nellie up to her bedroom and held her so she’d stop shaking. Then the detective needed to talk to her. He sat in the rocking chair and let her huddle on the bed with her mother while he asked questions. Questions only she could answer. Questions about time. Time, when all of time had stopped.
Max stayed in the back of a cruiser for a while before they drove him to the station. They left Boone tied up outside, so Henry wouldn’t be nervous. Her mother wanted the dog brought to a shelter, but Nellie begged her not to. Instead, her father took Boone to the junkyard, then he went to Rollie’s, but Ruth wasn’t at work, hadn’t been all day. Afraid Max had done something to Ruth, too, her mother was inconsolable. Nellie told them to try Patrick’s house. Her father drove Ruth home dripping wet and shivering in a beach towel. In Nellie’s mind, this was all her sister’s fault. If only she’d been here, everything might have been different. A part of Nellie felt dead. Ruth was grounded, forever, she hoped, as her sister sobbed up in her room. She’d gotten exactly what she deserved.
DOLLY DIDN’T HAVE a real funeral. Just a memorial service at her aunt Lizzie’s house. Only a few people came. Tray, some dancers from the club, and the manager. And Nellie’s mother and father. “You were, like, her only family,” one dancer told Nellie’s mother. “She’d tell us things, stories, like about Nellie, how she was like a little sister or something. And stuff they’d do. Like that time, the night she slept in the tree house with them.” Not true, but poor Dolly, Nellie hurt inside for her. And for Max, too. With the truth being turned every which way, it was easier to keep certain things to herself.
THERE’D BEEN TROUBLE between them from before. Max swore he’d been fishing, but couldn’t prove it, so he’d probably come earlier than Nellie knew. Dolly’d probably let him in because of the plumbing work, and for some reason he’d snapped. He’d hit her, and in the struggle they’d both been cut. And then he’d put his strong hands around her neck and strangled her before going back to Charlie’s for a shower and fresh aftershave. Needing to cover his tracks, he’d returned with the used hot-water tank, then come next door so Nellie would think he’d just arrived. So there it was, the pieces fitting just right. Motive. Opportunity. A man with a violent past, who’d been in jail a few times. A cousin came forward to say she remembered hearing how as a boy he’d shot his own brother to death.
Everyone said how lucky Nellie was. It could have been her, too. If she hadn’t run.
She didn’t know what to think, so she tried not to.
Chapter 12
STRANGE HOW QUICKLY THE MOST HORRIFIC, THE MOST UNIMAGINABLE events manage to find their place in a life. The family’s new norm was evasion and pretense. If on the surface everything appeared to be all right, then perhaps in the end it would be. Nellie’s mother continued going to work. She even had a few new clients. When pressed for the juicy details, she begged off, saying she couldn’t discuss it because of the upcoming trial and also out of respect for Lizzie, who had the chair next to hers. Lizzie, however, was eager to defend her niece. She wanted it known that Dolly was in no way the slutty little stripper the newspapers had made her out to be. If Dolly had a problem, it was always being too naive, and trusting.
One day, after going to the movies with Krissie Potek and her cousin from Wyoming, Nellie had taken the bus uptown to the salon. She didn’t like being alone in the house anymore. None of them did. Their family home, their haven, was now a crime scene, the back half wrapped in yellow police tape. Cars still slowed down out front. Police investigators had returned three days ago to see the apartment again. They had taken measurements of each room, which, her mother complained to Detective Des La Forges, had already been done. But apparently not to the enormous man’s satisfaction because, as he told her through the door screen, he “was all about details, especially when a life’s at stake.”
A life. Whose? Max Devaney’s? No longer did Nellie press her ear to the clammy bathroom plaster, not even to listen to the detectives’ terse voices. Far safer not to know, numbed as she was by her paralysis of dread and hope. She feared what might happen, all the while certain it could not. She couldn’t think about who had actually killed Dolly, but knew it hadn’t been Max.
Ruth had taken Henry to the town pond at noon, her reprieve from being grounded. He was her reluctant companion, because all she did, he complained, was ignore him and hang out with her friends. But then again, she did supply him with as much candy and soda as he wanted. And she let him go into the swampy woods at the far end of the pond to catch frogs.
Jessica had been calling constantly, begging Nellie to do something with her, anything. What Jessica really wanted, though, were the gruesome details. “All right, just tell me one thing then,” she whispered into the phone. “Was her tongue, like”—she made a gagging sound—“sticking o
ut? Cuz that’s what happens when you get strangled.”
Nellie repeated the party line: because of the trial, they couldn’t talk about anything; they weren’t allowed to. That might squelch most probing, but not persistent Jessica’s, who blind as she was to most social cues, just didn’t get it. Tragedy conferred a twisted celebrity, Nellie was discovering. It was like living in a bubble, both transparent shield and showcase. People were fascinated but also uneasy around them. And yet, as she would realize that day in the salon, everyone wanted inclusion, however peripheral their role.
She’d been speed-reading her way through the salon’s magazines. Her mother was in the back room folding the last dryer load of towels before going home. Lizzie’s client was a homely older woman in lavender pants. When Nellie first came in, she’d been struck by her teeth, how big and square they were, like horse teeth. Not wanting to make her feel bad, she’d looked away quickly. Lizzie was cutting the woman’s hair. Lulled by the soft music and the close blur of female voices, Nellie hadn’t been paying attention until she heard Max Devaney’s name.
“Even the first time she met him he tried coming on to her,” Lizzie was saying. “But it was, like, weird. Like something was wrong with him. Like, really wrong. The things he said, his whole … you know, it all just creeped her out.”
“No!” she blurted over the magazine. “That’s not what happened.”
Lizzie paused midcut, her full mouth caught in a sour pucker. She and the woman stared back through the mirror. “Excuse me, Nellie, but I think I know a little better than you.”
“But I was there. I know what happened. Everything.”
Now Lizzie turned to face her. “Maybe you think you do,” she said with peevish deliberation. “But some things’re probably a little over your head, if you know what I mean.” Lizzie and her client exchanged glances.
Light from a Distant Star Page 17
