Trap Door

by Sarah Graves

  More wrong, I mean, than things already had. I kept shoving Jemmy’s disappearance to the back of my mind, along with all the worst possible explanations for it.

  But it kept popping up again, grinning like the clown from a scary jack-in-the-box.

  “S-so what d’you want me to do?”

  The closer we got to Henderson’s place, the more nervous Ann grew; you’d think she’d been raiding Fort Knox. We pulled up in front of the gates. Lights from the house winked intermittently through the trees. “You can get in, right?”

  Faced with actually doing it, she balked. “Yes, but…”

  That’s the thing about unwilling co-conspirators: they take so much goading. “So you are ripping her off, aren’t you?”

  Her expression darkened but she said nothing, the gold four-leaf-clover earrings winking in the reassuring glow of the Fiat’s dashboard lights. “What is it, a credit card scheme? Or does she keep so much cash around, you can just dip in whenever you want without her noticing?”

  Sulkily Ann drew a keypad from her bag, pressed buttons on it. The gates swung open. “Shut up about me, okay? Just do what you came to do. And for your sake, I sure hope you know what that is.”

  If I hadn’t been so mad, scared, and practically on my knees with the headache I still had, I’d have burst out laughing at the thought of me knowing what I was doing. I mean besides looking: all over the house, the grounds, and in the barn, in case Jemmy was here alive and I could get him out before Henderson murdered him.

  The others, too, of course: Trish, the baby, and Mudge. But mostly Jemmy, because when I said I’d be dead if it weren’t for him, I meant it. The gates closed behind us.

  “So did Jen tell Cory what her dad does for a living?” I asked as we approached the big house.

  I still thought she had and that Henderson had killed Cory on account of it. Then he’d snatched the others who might betray him believably—because Cory might’ve told Trish, and she could have told Mudge—before homing back in on his original target: Jemmy himself.

  “What he did,” Ann corrected me flatly. “Did for a living. He’s been retired for a couple of years now.”

  “Aw. That’s sweet. Took a pension, did he, got a gold watch? They gave him a party, then he magically turned himself from a paid killer into a harmless old duffer who wouldn’t hurt a flea?”

  The paved driveway transitioned to that dratted pea gravel. The crunching tires-on-stones sound was loud. The yard lights were on, too. The porch in particular looked like a trap. But at least no ravenous dogs appeared, and the lights inside the house had that motionless look: nobody home.

  Ann scowled. “You’re on the wrong track, you know. The whole idea of Jen telling Cory anything is ridiculous. Do you have any idea how much trouble she’d get in if she—?

  “What, then? What is the right track? What do you know that you’re not saying?” But at this the girl fell stubbornly silent, her narrowed eyes and tight, angry mouth letting me know she thought I was being really mean.

  “Oh, please,” I told her. “Wipe that snotty look off your face. Like I give a rat’s ass about your opinion of me.”

  The scowl vanished, replaced by resignation. “Pull the car around to the rear, you’ll see a place.” Behind us the driveway remained empty, no headlights moving on it.

  So far. I eased the Fiat around to the side of the house, into the dark.

  “I don’t know why you even think any of this is any of your business, anyway. I mean, you stick your nose in, stir up a whole lot of trouble, maybe even get me in trouble—”

  “Ann. I’m losing patience with you. Maybe I’ll just go back to the ballpark and tell Henderson that you—”

  “Okay, okay.” Trapped, she put her hands up in a surrendering gesture.

  As we left the car behind us in the shadows, it struck me that I was out here looking for three full-grown adults plus an infant, and the Fiat was for all practical purposes a two-seater.

  But it was too late to worry about that now; if I found them all, and I should be so lucky, I’d just have to put the top down and they could sit in each other’s laps. I doubted they’d object.

  Ann let us in. I scanned the hall leading to the living areas and back to the kitchen; there I glimpsed the glowing green “ready” lights on the panel for the alarm system. A couple of empty duffel bags sat on a bench against the wall. I eyed them questioningly.

  “Jen’s leaving in two days for a couple of weeks of practice with her new team,” Ann explained. I glanced around a final time at the deluxe interior of Henderson’s trophy house; over it all hung the smells of cedar and beeswax, lemon oil and camphor…

  Eau de cash, my dead ex-husband Victor used to call it. “So are you just going to stand there?” Ann prodded.

  “No. Where would he hide somebody?”

  Her dark eyebrows went up in surprise. “I don’t think…”

  “Good. Just show me.” Hope springs infernal, Jemmy always said. Or used to say; Ann led me to a door leading off the hall.

  “Goes to the cellar.” I paused in front of it. The doorknob sported a Block lock, the kind it takes heavy explosives to open if you don’t have a key, and when I tapped experimentally on the door it made a heavy, metallic noise like the door to a vault.

  The cellar was a safe room, I realized; of course Henderson would have one. There was a light switch by the doorway; Ann flipped it and reached past me to open the door. A clean, well-built set of varnished blond oak steps led down between pristine white-painted walls.

  Silent, clean, empty. At the bottom of the stairs a green tiled floor stretched vacantly away into what resembled an office corridor with white walls and white fluorescent fixtures recessed into the acoustical-tiled ceiling.

  Doors lined the corridor, three on each side. Suddenly I didn’t want to go down there where I might find Jemmy’s body…or more. “What’s in the rooms?”

  “Nothing.” I’d heard of that, never experienced it. Any time my own cellar wasn’t full of water it was full of things we would never use again but couldn’t quite bring ourselves to throw away.

  My least favorite was Victor’s treasured set of surgical tools. But now I was glad I’d kept them. If my headache got any worse, I planned using them on myself when I got home. The knit cotton cap atop the scalp stitches had been a particularly bad idea. Ann’s eyes widened suddenly as footsteps sounded on the pea gravel outside.

  “Oh, shit,” she muttered in heartfelt tones. Swiftly she shut the light off and closed the cellar door, leaving me on the wrong side of it.

  But first, with the speed of a snake striking, she pushed me.

  Hard.

  Well, of course Ann had pushed me. The great and terrible Walter Henderson was coming home, and there I was sneaking around his house with her help. It made perfect sense that she would want to get me out of sight fast, so I was more okay with her action than I might have been. My question was, would she tell him I was here?

  Probably not. It was in her interest for me to get away so that (a) she wouldn’t be asked about my presence and (b) I wouldn’t betray her thievery against Jen in a (no doubt futile) bid to save myself.

  What I really didn’t like was the darkness. I’d had my hand on the rail when the shove came, so instead of toppling down the steps, I’d more like scampered down them. But the only light came from another grid of glowing LEDs at the end of the corridor.

  Slowly my eyes adjusted so that by the light’s faint gleam I could see the walls and doors again. Footsteps crossed the floor over my head, moving to the kitchen. Next came a chunk! of the big refrigerator door closing and a clatter of ice from the ice maker.

  He was fixing himself a drink. So Ann hadn’t told him about me. That gave me breathing room; not much, but a little. And to go with it I had a scrap of information, the kind of stray fact you learn by accident, never thinking it will do you any good.

  Like this: Once upon a time you could move to Eastport, buy land, and con
struct anything you wanted on it. Those times were gone, though; nowadays you had to obey the building code, many details of which I knew due to my own house requiring another building permit approximately every ten minutes. And the building code said a cellar had to have a door to the outside.

  True, cellar doors were usually locked. But if I’d had a safe room like this one in my cellar, I’d have put in a quick way to exit it from the inside. Creeping down the corridor, I paused to open each door and briefly switch on every light in each of cellar rooms. As Ann had said, they were empty except for one that held winter sports gear: skis, poles, skates, hockey equipment.

  Jen’s, I supposed. As I went along I tried not to remember that each room also had a small, high window at ground level; that building code again. If Henderson looked out he’d see those lights going on and off. But there was no help for it.

  Five rooms opened, one to go; no Jemmy, no anyone else. Metal strips were inlaid into each door frame, making me wonder again about that alarm system. Even if I couldn’t hear them, they should be going off somewhere. I’d seen the system’s panel of “ready” lights in the kitchen.

  The green lights down here belonged to a backup panel, showing the system still activated and featuring a big red panic button. Another safety feature; you could press the button, summoning the cops.

  Still, by now I’d done about a dozen things that ought to have set the alarms off and nothing was happening. Which meant the alarms were disabled, either because they’d malfunctioned or because they’d been shut down; so much for summoning help via the panic alert. Switching out the final room light, I made my way to the end of the hall; time to pray that there really was an emergency exit.

  The cellar doors I’d hoped would be there actually were; oh happy day. As I reached eagerly for them, however, lights blazed on. “Looking for something?” Walter Henderson asked, smiling as he descended the stairs toward me.

  Biting my lip in sudden terror, I shoved the doors. But they wouldn’t open and a heavy metal rattle from outside told me why; a chain had been thrown over them and fastened.

  Probably with a padlock.

  Brush-cut silver hair, faded remnants of a Florida tan, eyes like iced sapphires coldly focused on me…casually strolling down the basement corridor at me, Henderson kept smiling.

  Carrying a thick black leather-gripped assault baton in one hand, he slapped its lead-weighted business end into the palm of the other.

  Oh, my aching head. There was nothing I could say and I was too scared anyway to speak. He stopped a few feet from me, still slapping the baton.

  “You would be looking for…?” he asked fake-helpfully.

  Looking for trouble, was what I’d been doing. And I’d found it. Yes indeed, I’d found a great big heaping helping of…

  “Jemmy Wechsler.” Henderson answered his own question. “Your old pal and compatriot. As you can see, he isn’t here.”

  Annoyance seized me and with it my voice returned. “I’ve noticed that.” Because what did I have to lose? Alone with what amounted to a serial killer—

  I meant let’s face it, when you added up his numbers the fact that he got paid for them was pretty much beside the point, wasn’t it?

  —who was getting ready to bonk me. Maybe to death. And there was nothing I could do about it. So yeah, I mouthed off a little. My final words.

  So sue me. “You son of a bitch,” I pronounced carefully.

  It was a good bet I wouldn’t get to say any of this again. Or anything else either, for that matter.

  I wanted to make sure he understood me. “You murdered that kid because he was in your way. You made it look like suicide so you could go on with your main plan. Killing Jemmy.”

  A bolt of guilty sorrow pierced me. I’d been wrong even to try searching here; Jemmy was already dead. The others, too, even the baby.

  Because standing here with him, I understood something about Walter Henderson that I hadn’t before: that when you confront a guy like him and ask the age-old question about how could a person do such things, you’re ignoring the obvious.

  The fact, I mean, that a person couldn’t. That no matter how civilized he’d been able to make himself appear in the past, this wasn’t a person but a hideously clever facsimile like one of Fred Mudge’s puppets. One that in Henderson’s case possessed flashes of human feeling; he cared, apparently, about his daughter.

  But it was the way he expressed his feelings that revealed his true nature: murder, mayhem. That was why I was so shocked when he reached past me and unlocked the cellar doors.

  The lock was a simple push-button affair, not a chain on the outside; in my fright I’d simply missed it. The doors swung open onto a set of concrete steps leading up to the night sky.

  “Go on,” he said, waving outward, apparently so I’d know in which general direction I ought to remove myself.

  “The bodies are in the barn, aren’t they? You’ve got them in the barn,” I said from outside the cellar.

  Because of course they were all dead. Henderson looked up at me, his dark shape silhouetted in the lights from behind him. “Would you like to look?” he invited.

  The barn’s high roof loomed against the sky: dark, silent. From his confident offer I knew it would be empty. He’d found somewhere else to stash them.

  As I turned he spoke once more. “I’ve behaved with restraint so far, as I’m sure you will agree, Ms. Tiptree. But…”

  He didn’t have to finish. I knew a threat when I heard one. Gathering my courage and what few shredded tatters remained of my dignity, I turned my back on him.

  Two minutes later I was gunning the Fiat out through the gates, weeping partly in relief because they actually opened and partly because my head was killing me.

  Seriously killing me. But mostly I wept because Henderson had murdered Jemmy and the others by now; I was certain of it. That was why even in the face of my invasion of his home he’d been so cool and contemptuous: his mission was accomplished.

  And he was getting away with it. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, when I got home all the house lights were on.

  Wade was back.

  At two in the morning the stitches in my scalp woke me by the simple, efficient method of feeling as if they’d been lit on fire. Wade slept deeply, dead to the world as I slid out of bed. Once he’d heard the story of my evening and of the past couple of days, he’d read me the riot act I deserved, then offered an idea.

  “Maybe she works for him,” he said, meaning Ann. “Maybe she deliberately met Jen in one of those city clubs. On his say-so.”

  “Oh,” I breathed, seeing the sense of this. “Because if he knew Jen was going into Manhattan and hanging out in places where she might…”

  “Yeah, get in all kinds of trouble. And he might realize he couldn’t stop her. So he’d get her a minder.”

  That explained why Ann had taken me out to the house when I demanded it, too. Not because she was really guilty of something but to learn what I was looking for, on Henderson’s behalf.

  Whether she’d then told him I was there or he’d discovered it himself hardly mattered. “Get some rest,” Wade had ordered finally, and I’d promised to.

  But I couldn’t sleep. The way I’d failed Jemmy was making me crazy; that and the fact that I was never going to see him again. In the bathroom I fumbled for the switch, squinted at the sudden flare of light, and decided not to look at myself in the mirror as I opened the medicine cabinet.

  Pawing through old bottles of remedies for ailments we no longer had, plastic bags with only one cotton ball inside, and other pharmaceutical flotsam and jetsam, I found a tube of Xylocaine ointment and another of antibacterial gel originally meant for the dogs.

  I’d sent the bacitracin home with Ellie. Smooshing a generous amount of what I did have in the palm of my hand, I put the mixture on my scalp, hoping the numbing effects of the Xylocaine would stay on the surface while the anti-infection gel sank in, and not the reverse. Because I alr
eady felt stupid but that was nothing to the way I felt when I turned around.

  “Hi, Jake.”

  It was Victor, standing in the bathroom doorway looking the way he did before he got sick—i.e., snotty and superior.

  “Damn it, what the hell are you doing here?” I snarled, taken aback. Even when he was alive a visit from Victor was no big joy-fest, and at the moment I was in no mood for it.

  “Beats me,” he replied with a disarming shrug. “I think I missed getting the instruction booklet,” he added.

  I blinked; there was an instruction booklet?

  “But since I am here—or maybe I only seem to be—anyway, I’m sorry,” he said.

  Now I was sure I must be dreaming. He’d never admitted not knowing something in his life, and as for feeling sorry…

  “Yeah,” he said, seeming to read my thought. “Not much like me, is it? But you know, it’s different here.”

  “Really?” I peered closer at him, intrigued in spite of myself. “How different?”

  He seemed to step back from me but the funny thing was, his feet didn’t move. More like he was near to me and then he was—

  Farther. The effect was startling; I let out a little gasp of fright.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Victor repeated, telescoping away from me. Now he was halfway down the hall and sort of dissolving; I could see through him all the way to the linen closet. Did he mean sorry for frightening me? Or for something else?

  “Victor,” I managed, weeping again but this time without tears. You always suppose that if somehow you could talk with the dead, you could communicate.

  “Sorry…” The word hung in the air, whispery.

  Or imaginary. He shrank to a pixel and winked out.

  When I first came to Maine I thought my old house might end up being too huge for me, that after Sam grew up and moved away I might end up rattling around in it like a marble in a box. But when I got up the next morning, I found the whole place so crowded you’d have thought my home was an airport waiting lounge, especially with the roaring noise coming from above the attic.