Scary Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  “Brother James. Who else?”

  Jane hit the automatic childproof door locks from her side this time, locking Nellie in. She wasn’t going to let her mother leave her hanging while she exited on a good line.

  “Unlock the damn door. Swanette’s got a lot of work in there for us to do.”

  “What do you mean, Brother James?”

  “I had your dad drive me out there after the first grocery delivery because I got to worrying she might not find the bags, you know, maybe she wouldn’t even open the door. I had no way of checking. So when we got there, I had to walk in just like today, because she didn’t hear us knock. She didn’t seem surprised. Didn’t seem lonely or scared or anything. Was in a fine mood. And before I could ask her about the groceries, she told me that James was taking real good care of her. Brought her everything she needed. Even bought the right kind of oatmeal and flour. So, Dad and I decided there wasn’t any harm in letting her think James was doing the grocery shopping.”

  “You let her believe that her dead brother goes to the Jewel for her?”

  “What’s the difference? Let her think what she wants. If you ask me, real life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Did you hire that woman to keep an eye on her?” asked Jane.

  “Nope. Maybe Edna asked her to look in.”

  “Yeah, she seemed pretty surprised to find out there were relatives. She might be stealing from her. Somebody is. I think there were some books missing in the study.”

  “Well, let’s get on that. I don’t want anybody taking advantage of her. She’s a kind old thing.” Nellie seemed to hear herself say this and added quickly, “Even if she is nuttier than a fruitcake.”

  “So Dad pays the bills. You order the groceries. And the spirit of Brother James is playing her guardian angel.”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay,” said Jane, unlocking the car and opening her own door, “but there is still one thing unaccounted for . . .”

  “Okay, Walker, Texas Ranger, what’s that?”

  “Who carved that pumpkin?”

  Jane had noted earlier that Tim had left his speedy little Mustang at home. Instead, he had made this house call in his truck. Was he hoping to haul out some good stuff before he even signed a deal for T & T Sales? Jane knew that compartmentalization was not usually her strong point. Her mind was more likely to race, three or four vintage bicycles at a time, around tracks paved with whos, whats, and whys. But she was able, when faced with a house like Swanette’s, to put aside everything but the stuff. The sheer number of items packed into that house, crammed into the closets and alcoves, shoved onto windowsills and hidden under beds, might give her a break from puzzling over what was going on over at Ada’s, which was certainly linked to someone hiding behind her brother Michael’s image on the Internet. If she could throw herself into straightening out Swanette’s mess, her mind might be refreshed enough to think clearly about the situation at Cousin Ada’s.

  “Tim,” Jane called, walking in through the side porch. Tim had the radio blaring from the kitchen, but he wasn’t in sight. Nellie had preceded her and, she assumed, had disappeared upstairs to begin dusting and mopping and scolding Swanette for letting this house go to the . . . well . . . if not the dogs, then the packrats. “Tim,” she called again, thinking she might lose her voice from all the shouting she had had to do today.

  “I’m in the back bedroom,” called Tim.

  Jane didn’t notice any furniture items missing. Tim couldn’t have culled any pieces yet—she could hardly move through the room.

  “This must have been the niece’s room when she lived here. Swanette described her as quite the teenybopper. Look at the great condition of all these magazines,” Tim said, pointing to the stacks of Teen and Sixteen. “And there’s a slew of celebrity photos, too. A lot of them autographed, although they might have been studio signed.”

  Jane recognized Tim’s chatter. He wasn’t really talking to her, he was just doing a kind of running inventory, the kind of out-loud thinking one did when faced with so many inanimate objects that, inanimate though they might be, screamed loudly for attention and assessment.

  “Where’s Swanette?” asked Jane. At the same time, Nellie came clumping down the stairs asking the same question.

  “She found a ring of keys and thought some of them might fit the padlocks on the coop and the sheds, so she was going to check. She thinks the good old furniture might be out there,” said Tim. “A lot of this stuff is all very cool, but it’s mostly kitsch and a lot of junk. You are going to love it here, Janie.”

  “I’ll go see if I can help her,” said Jane.

  Tim tossed her the keys to his van and asked her to bring in some folding tables he had in the back. He wanted to actually start staging a room by sorting the wheat from the chaff, setting out the good stuff on the tables so they could see what they were dealing with. Jane wasn’t sure where they’d find the space to set up even one table.

  “Swanette!” Jane called. The padlock was still in place on the door to the old chicken coop directly behind the house. There was a shed about twenty feet away and Jane cut across to it. As she got close, she could see the padlock dangling. Goody, Jane thought, I’ll get to see the good stuff before Tim.

  The door was partially closed and Jane swung it back on its hinges to let in as much light as possible. She should have stopped to get the flashlight out of her car or one of the big torches she knew Tim kept in the van.

  Jane’s eyes adjusted quickly enough to see the chairs stacked one on top of another. They did look good. Six, maybe eight, really good carved-walnut dining chairs.

  “Nice,” said Jane out loud. She scanned the shed. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet by thirty feet, but it was packed efficiently from top to bottom. There were some boxes to her immediate left that were partially unpacked. A wooden crate had slats pried off it and was almost empty except for some newspaper-wrapped objects at the bottom. Jane stepped into the shed a few feet, to see what the back corners held, and stopped short, barely preventing herself from tripping over a stylish low-heeled pump.

  Just as one is disconcerted when one sees another in an unfamiliar situation—a running buddy out of his gym gear and dressed in a three-piece suit, a teacher out of the classroom—Jane was momentarily confused. Why would a single modern shoe be in this shed packed with items clearly over a hundred years old? It only took a second for her to shake herself out of the fog and follow the shoe, to the foot to the leg to find Swanette crumpled on the ground. Jane awkwardly felt for a pulse. Knowing she wasn’t an expert at it, she was relieved to find a faint ticking beat. It wasn’t too late. She slapped her pocket and realized her cell phone was in her bag, still in the car.

  She screamed at the house, knowing that the radio would drown her out. She hated to leave Swanette alone, even for the minute it would take to get to the door and yell for Tim to call the ambulance. Standing, she turned to find Nellie, her mother in the form of a shadow, right behind her. For once, she was grateful that her mother hovered over her every move.

  “Stay with her and I’ll run to the house to—”

  “I’ll go. I’m fast,” said Nellie, and sure enough, she sprinted for the porch, yelling at top volume for Tim to get on the phone to 911.

  “Swanette,” said Jane, “it’s going to be okay.”

  Was it a slight movement in her cheek, a tic, a twitch? Her mouth moved, lips pursed.

  “Blue . . . no . . . blue . . . one blue . . .”

  Even as Jane shushed her, she was pleased to hear her talk. This had to be a good sign. Had Swanette had a heart attack? A stroke? Had she tripped over one of the boxes?

  “Head . . . Oh . . . head oh . . . dad? Head . . . crosswor . . . good . . . aitch is for . . . so many . . .”

  Was Swanette trying to tell her something or just wandering?

  “Don’t try to talk, Swanette,” Jane said, trying to sound soothing. She wondered if Swanette knew she wasn’
t serious. Jane did want her to talk, to tell her what had happened. Blue? Head? What was that about? “Shhh,” Jane lied, “the ambulance is on the way.”

  Then Jane noticed two things. Later, she would be hard-pressed to remember which she saw first. There was a wound on the side of Swanette’s head, just above her ear. There was a darkened area, swelling and the beginnings of a bruise, but the bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Jane had seen more than her share of dead bodies, but she realized she had little experience with what she hoped was a nonfatal wound. Could this have happened in a “slip and fall”? Jane doubted it. It appeared to Jane as if someone had hit this poor woman hard on the side of the head.

  The other thing Jane noticed was more of an oddity, but equally chilling. Swanette, with her impeccable taste and stylish clothes, was wearing a pair of dark slacks and a cropped navy blue jacket over her turtleneck. Although Swanette had been surrounded by all the dust and filth in the house and now the shed, Jane noted that her jacket had remained impeccable except for where it now touched the dirt floor and except for a small place on the jacket sleeve. Near the inner elbow of the jacket was a clump of a stringy viscous substance. At first Jane thought it was just a gross little something, nothing unusual to find on a farm-shed floor, until she leaned in closer. Small, flat ovoids, caught in the strings, all beige and shiny?

  Were those pumpkin seeds?

  11

  The ambulance careened down the driveway. Jane was always taken aback when professionals arrived on a scene. The flashing lights, cryptic radio communication full of static and staccato commands, slamming doors, squeaking wheels, the clear loud voices of the EMTs all contributed to a hyperrealistic scene that played out in a most unrealistic way. Too many movies, too much television. All that time watching fictional events unfold made real events recede into a kind of alternative universe.

  Since no one knew what had happened, no one could be very helpful with information. Tim estimated that Swanette had been out of the house no more than thirty minutes, no less than fifteen. Jane looked into Swanette’s purse, still in the house on the kitchen table, and found her cell phone. Scrolling through the phone book, she found office girl Christine’s number and asked Nellie to call her and tell her what had happened.

  “Just say that Swanette fell and is being taken to the hospital in Kankakee. No speculation, just the facts. Ask her if she knows how to get in touch with Swanette’s niece,” said Jane.

  “What the hell am I going to speculate on?” asked Nellie. “What do you know?”

  Jane shook her head. She didn’t know what she knew. Without thinking, she had plucked the pumpkin seeds and strings from Swanette’s jacket and wrapped them in a handkerchief. They were in her pocket right now. She didn’t want to take the chance that the hospital staff would remove her clothes, shake off the seeds and pumpkin debris and it would be lost altogether. If she hadn’t been so worried about Swanette, she might have made Tim laugh by suggesting they run the seeds through the lab to check out the pumpkin DNA and see if it matched up with Nellie’s pumpkin at Ada’s house. Did Swanette’s accident have something to do with the massive pumpkin carving that was going on at Ada’s?

  A police car had arrived and an officer took their names, addresses, and asked them questions about Swanette and their reasons for being there.

  “I don’t get it. You’re here to buy all this stuff?” Officer Cord asked.

  “We’re here to sell it,” said Tim.

  “But it’s not yours to sell, right?”

  Tim explained his duties as someone who conducted a house sale and showed Cord the contract that Swanette had signed sometime after Jane and Nellie had left that morning. Jane noticed that Tim had agreed to have the sale ready to go in two weeks. She pointed to the date and raised her eyebrow at Tim.

  “I was counting on you to help me,” said Tim.

  “Still,” said Jane, “I’m not sure the two of us—”

  “I thought Nellie might work with us,” said Tim.

  “I’ll bet you did,” said Nellie. “You got a lot of nerve, Lowry, to think you can make me work like a dog in that—”

  “I pay pretty well,” said Tim.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Nellie.

  One of the paramedics came over and announced that they were ready to leave for the hospital in Kankakee.

  Jane looked at her mother.

  “Yeah, I’ll go,” said Nellie, “I’ll make sure they don’t screw anything up. You can come and meet me at the hospital. Now just wait a minute.”

  Nellie ran into the house, grabbed Swanette’s purse off the table, and held it up so Jane could see it. “Her insurance information,” Nellie said.

  Jane watched Nellie argue with the driver all the way to the ambulance, and even out of earshot, the body language was clear. She wanted to ride in the back with Swanette, and they wanted her up front. Jane watched her mother climb into the back and the driver throw up his hands. The other paramedic, the one who had been tending to Swanette, smiled and shook his head and climbed in after Nellie. They were going to get along.

  Cord was putting away his notebook and Jane, silently arguing the pros and cons of mentioning any suspicions to him, decided it was better to bring up a question now than to try to start from scratch later.

  “Officer, I’m not sure that this was just a fall,” said Jane.

  Cord looked very much like he was trying not to look amused.

  “Amateur detective, are we?” he asked.

  “I heard one of the paramedics say that her EKG looked good. I saw nothing in the shed that she might have tripped over. She was groggy, but agitated, like she wanted to tell me something. And she had a huge bump on the side of her head, like she had been struck.”

  “Or like she struck her head when she fell?”

  “I just have a feeling . . .”

  “Do you think Mr. Lowry here might have wanted a better deal to sell her stuff—” Cord began to say.

  “Oh no,” said Jane. “Not at all, I—”

  “Well, we’ll get to the hospital and see what the lady has to say about all this when she feels better,” said Cord. He looked in Tim’s direction. “And we’ll hope that she wakes up feeling better soon, right, Mr. Lowry?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Tim. He stopped himself. “Yes, Officer, we do. Swanette is a lovely woman and I was nowhere near that shed, I was busy inside. Mrs. Wheel has a notoriously overactive imagination. Likes to play cops and robbers and doesn’t always think before she speaks.”

  Jane nodded. “Mr. Lowry is right. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  Cord nodded and left for the hospital.

  “Are you out of your mind?” said Tim.

  “It was silly of me not to realize the position I’d put you in by raising the question. You saw how humbled I got . . . enough to convince him I’m just an armchair detective out of control,” said Jane. “But she was attacked.”

  “I didn’t hear anyone drive in,” said Tim. “Hey, look at your dog. Rita’s crying her eyes out over there.”

  Jane looked over at Rita who had run over to the spot where the ambulance was parked. It was the last place she had seen Nellie . . . and now she sat whimpering at attention.

  “Look,” said Jane, “you had the radio on so loud you wouldn’t have heard a tank roll in. Did Swanette mention anyone who might be coming out? She had been trying to call a handyman, right? Did she ever get him?”

  “No,” said Tim. “That’s why she was so excited to find the ring of keys. The only reason she wanted him was so he could let us into the outbuildings.”

  Jane began walking toward the shed and motioned for Tim to come along. She stopped at the doorway.

  “I saw those chairs and noticed the box and that crate, then I saw Swanette’s shoe right about there,” Jane said, pointing, but she did not go in. The police might not have wanted to tape this building off as a crime scene, but she was determined not to disturb the spot any more
than necessary. Tim stepped around her and into the shed before she could stop him.

  “What’s the difference? Both paramedics have been in here. They rolled the stretcher in . . . you and Nellie were both in here. Let’s look it over thoroughly.”

  “We need more light,” said Jane.

  “That’s why you’ve got me,” said Tim. He took a flashlight out of his back pocket and handed it to Jane. She shone the light on the spot where Swanette had lain on the ground. The other boxes and crates, still sealed, were tightly and neatly packed. Jane moved the light back and forth over the floor space carefully.

  The wooden shipping crate that Jane had noticed before had letters stenciled on the side. Two slats had been pried off. One lay flat on the ground as if it had been bent back from the box. The other one had been entirely removed.

  “Where’s that board?” asked Jane.

  Tim had gone to his truck and gotten another light, a lantern with a large rectangular base. He stood behind Jane and began imitating her slow steady sweep with his light.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  Jane stepped farther into the shed. Tucked in between two boxes, just to the side of where she had found Swanette, was the piece of wood. Jane left it.

  “He could have come in behind her. The slat was probably on the floor in front of that crate. He could have picked it up and whacked her with it while she was turning around, which would explain why she was on her side, facing that way,” she said. “Maybe he got scared or heard our car coming up the drive and just stashed the board there. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t looking. He might have figured he’s coming back . . .” Jane and Tim both glanced over their shoulders when Jane said that. “No . . . he’s long gone by now,” Jane added. “All the ambulance activity would have covered his getaway.”

  “Two questions,” said Tim. “Probably more to come, but first, why he? Why always, always he? And second, where did he or she come from? If it happened while you were coming up the drive, you would have seen the car. He or she couldn’t have come from anywhere on foot, there’s no place. Which of course begs the question, where, after coming from nowhere, did he or she get away to?” Tim turned so he could keep one eye on the door behind them.