by Jan Burke
From a distance, 1647 Sleeping Oak appeared to be a modest, white wood-frame house. Grass grew up around the ankles of a “For Sale” sign in the big front yard. The lawn was due for a mowing and the windows were dirty, but otherwise it looked as if it had been a place someone cared about not so long ago.
Molly kept sneezing, her eyes red and watery now. When I suggested that she just wait for me back at her house, she gave me a congested version of “not on your life.” I walked up the steps and knocked on the front door, not expecting an answer. Brutus suddenly started going berserk, making me wonder if someone was waiting inside. He would alternately bark and wheeze as he strained against his rhinestone collar. I walked over to one of the larger windows at the front of the house and looked in. I saw a sun-faded beige carpet in a bare room. Dark marks and nail holes outlined the places where pictures had been taken down. The stigmata of an abandoned home.
“I don’t think anyone’s here,” I said over the dog’s barking, hoping to God I was right. “But would you mind letting Brutus off his leash? Maybe he can show us what’s got him so worked up.”
“I guess I can catch him again,” she said, unsnapping the leash as he twisted in impatience. He bolted around the corner of the house, stopping at a wooden gate. He looked back at us, yapped, then suddenly disappeared. We could hear him in the backyard.
“Brutus!” Molly cried, but he just yapped louder.
As we came closer, we could see that Brutus had wriggled through a hole in the ground beneath the gate; apparently a project he’d worked on during his previous visits. The gate had a latch with pull string on it. I tugged on the string and cautiously stood aside as the gate swung open. I peered into the backyard. No one there but Brutus.
Still, there were signs of another presence having preceded me — something much larger than Brutus. The grass was taller in the backyard, almost to my knees. Molly and I cautiously followed the pathway of flattened grass toward the sound of Brutus’s toe-nails, scratching furiously.
He seemed determined to burrow through what once had been the entrance to a basement. The weathered doors had been nailed shut long ago; rusting metal bands bolted across their width further secured them.
“Brutus, get back from there!” Molly said, picking him up and suffering another sneezing fit. He squirmed in her arms for a moment, then resorted to whining.
“Is there another entrance to the basement?”
“Oh sure,” Molly said, talking rapidly, nervously. “The Nelsons boarded this one up long ago. Most of us did that — to make the houses more secure, I guess.” She stopped to blow her nose. “We all built staircases and an entrance from inside the house. Some people had a door going off the kitchen, like mine. Others had trap doors in the floors. The Nelsons had one of those. Put in a laundry chute, too. I thought that was overdoing it.” She sneezed. “Kids throw clothes down the chute, they land all over the place. I always made my kids carry their clothes down the stairs. It was good for them.”
I wasn’t listening very carefully. I was watching the crevice near the edge of one of the doors. Ants were streaming in and out of the basement. An army of them. And there was a faint but distinct odor in the air, one that made my hopes plummet.
“Maybe you should take Brutus home now, Molly.”
She looked at me in surprise, then looked down at the doors. “Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lordy-Lord-Lord-Lord. She’s in there! Call her name, maybe she can answer you.”
I tried it once, but my voice caught. “Molly, go home, please. I’ll come over in a while. There’s… there’s a smell.
“I don’t smell anything.”
I looked over at her, but didn’t say anything.
“Even with all that sneezing, I’d smell a dead body! Besides, if there is a smell, you don’t know that it’s a comin’ from her! Could be a cat, or a possum or something else dead.”
She was right, of course. I couldn’t see into the basement.
She was waiting for me, silent and afraid, but her eyes pleaded with me to do something. Brutus yapped once, then stared at me in much the same way.
I looked at the trail blazed by our unknown predecessor and sighed in resignation. “Try not to step on the flattened grass,” I said, knowing she would follow me. I made my way alongside the trampled path, which led around the corner of the house to a set of concrete steps. At the top of the steps was the back door. It wasn’t wide open, but it hadn’t been closed hard enough to latch.
Sometimes the last thing on earth you want to do is the very next thing you need to do. My curiosity demanded I go into the house, see for myself what was in there. My fear, or perhaps my common sense, said to let someone else take care of it.
“She might still be alive,” Molly said.
Curiosity had an optimist on its side. It always does.
I climbed the steps and used the toe of my shoe to budge the door. It creaked open, and I stood staring into an empty kitchen, yellow linoleum peeling and stained where a stove and refrigerator had once hidden its faults. The counters were bare, the sink empty. I waited. Silence.
Brutus’s sharp yap behind me came close to scaring me right out of my skin. Just as I had decided to listen to the pessimist within me, the dog wriggled free and scurried through the open door, into the house, and out of sight.
“Brutus!” Molly wailed.
“Stay here,” I told her, blocking her attempt to follow the dog. “If I’m not back out in five minutes, or if you have any inkling that something’s happened to me, get the hell out of here. Go home and call the police. Don’t come in looking for me or the dog.”
She didn’t say anything, just peered inside the house. It was silent again.
“Promise,” I said firmly.
“I promise,” she said.
The kitchen had two interior doorways. One led out into the dining area of the living room I had seen from the front window. A quick glance showed this area to be empty of man and beast. The doorway at the other side of the kitchen was darkened.
With every step I took across that kitchen floor, I was sure I wasn’t alone in that house, that I had walked into a trap. REPORTER KILLED IN POODLE RESCUE ATTEMPT. What a headline that would make. Undoubtedly, the subhead would read, “Poodle Found Unharmed.” I kept listening, hearing the soles of my shoes moving across the linoleum, the rustle of my clothing seemingly amplified to shout my presence. I noticed a trail of ants moving along one corner of the kitchen floor — toward the darkened doorway. I swallowed and tiptoed to it.
The smell was stronger here.
I peered cautiously around the corner. A long hallway, as near as I could tell. I held still, hearing a noise to my left. I waited. Nothing.
I glanced behind me, saw Molly watching from the door to the backyard, and tried once again to screw up my courage.
There was only enough light coming from the kitchen windows to allow me to determine that the hallway ran in two directions. I hung back in the kitchen, poised for flight as I groped for a light switch on the hallway wall. I found one. Outside of making a loud snapping noise, it did nothing. The electricity was off.
I reached into my purse for my keychain flashlight. Felt the comforting weight of the cellular phone. If I couldn’t call for help, maybe I could use it to bean an attacker. I switched on the little flashlight, held it to the left, where I had heard the noise, and even its small circle of light revealed enough to make me feel weak in the knees.
An opening gaped in the floor. If I had stepped into the hallway without the light, I might have fallen through the trap door and down the basement stairs.
“Bruuu… tus,” I crooned.
I could swear I heard the little bugger panting, but in the distance. Down in the basement.
I pointed the beam in the other direction, passed it from one closed doorway after another. Three altogether. Thought of opening those doors first, just to try to get more light in the hallway. Didn’t know if I had the nerve to find out what was behind them.
I crept up to one and shoved it open, then ran back into the kitchen, purse raised.
“Irene?” I heard Molly call.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said. Liar, liar, pants on fire.
I took a breath and looked into the hall. A little more light. No bogeymen. Not yet, anyway. Two more rounds of hit-and-run with the doors brought the same result. The house had two bedrooms, one bath. I had the shakes.
Brutus barked. He was down in the basement.
“That’s him!” Molly called. “Do you see him?”
“Not yet,” I said. I was not pleased with the dog.
I thought of giving in and calling Frank right then and there. Let him explore the damned basement.
But what if I called Frank away from a homicide investigation only to find there was nothing more down there than a toy poodle and something like, oh, maybe a smelly old dead gopher? The woman who cried wolf. Over a poodle.
I walked over to the edge of the trap door opening. My flashlight beam showed nothing more than wooden stairs. I stepped down on one, then another, and another, until my head was just above the opening in the hallway floor. I made myself duck a little, and held the flashlight out in front of me. Cobwebs. I could hear Brutus. I lowered the beam a few degrees and saw a concrete wall. I caught a movement and gave a little yelp. But it was Brutus, sniffing along the wall, apparently unconcerned by my presence. For a few seconds, I felt a slight easing of the tension that had my stomach in knots. Brutus wouldn’t act so nonchalant if there were anyone else in the basement. Would he?
I moved the light a little to the left, and I could make out a card table, with what looked to be a bowl of fruit and a pitcher of water. Tantalus.
My mouth went dry.
I knew what would be behind me. I forced myself to take two more steps down the stairs, clinging to the handrail.
I heard a noise above me and cringed. “Molly?” I called.
I waited. Nothing.
Brutus came closer to me, his nails clicking along the cement floor.
Slowly, I turned around.
I saw the wide piece of tape first. It covered her mouth. She was bound to a large pipe against the back wall. Even in the faint light, I knew she was dead.
The trap door slammed shut above me.
12
I WAS STILL SCREAMING my head off when it opened again, not more than a few seconds later. Molly, red-faced, was leaning over the opening, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Brutus, unhappy with both of us, shot up past me and out of the basement. I gained a modicum of control over myself and did the same.
“I thought I heard you call to me,” she said, only slightly less upset than I was. “It’s so darned dark in this hallway, I accidentally knocked the door shut. I’m so sorry, honey, I know I scared the bejesus out of you. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
As soon as we were out of the house, she said, “So there wasn’t anybody down there after all?”
The optimist.
“I wish I could say there wasn’t.”
She stared at me a moment, the color draining from her face. “She’s dead?”
I nodded, then put an arm around her big shoulders and walked out to the front yard with her, leaving the gate open. I stayed there; she kept walking, her eyes on Brutus, who waited in her own front yard.
I used the cellular phone to call Frank’s pager and left a message on his voice mail, asking him to meet me at the address on Sleeping Oak. I dialed the City Desk next. Let John bitch about the order of the calls, I thought. Lydia answered on the fourth ring. I stood in the ankle-deep grass, watching Molly walk back to her house, looking twice as old as she had just moments before. I told Lydia to call the police, but to mention to them that I had already called Frank’s pager. I told her I would be waiting in front of the house. I heard John yelling, “Is that Kelly?” in the background, told Lydia I didn’t want to run up the bill, and hung up.
The phone rang almost immediately. I thought it might be John, but it was Frank.
“I’m on my way,” he said. “I’m not too far from you.”
“Hurry,” I said, looking through the gate, suddenly noticing that there were long leafy stems growing out of a place at the far corner of the yard. The stump of an oak tree.
“You think she might still be alive?” he asked.
At my feet, another trail of ants.
“No. But hurry.”
BY THE TIME I finished writing my contribution to the story on Rosie Thayer, I was fighting off a serious case of the megrims. The story itself made me feel down, but that wasn’t all that was getting to me. The general atmosphere at the paper was tense. I learned that Lt. Carlson had argued with Wrigley and others over a new issue: whether or not the police should be allowed to put a wiretap on my phone line. So far, Carlson was being forced to live with the paper’s refusal.
I felt restless and decided to get some fresh air. Let the chronicling of cruelty be left to others for a while. I put on my coat and stepped outside.
Holiday decorations lined the street, as they had since Thanksgiving. I walked aimlessly, listening to the sounds of the downtown streets — the rumble of passing traffic, snippets of pedestrians’ conversations, horns echoing off tall buildings, the sharp staccato of a jackhammer at work in the shell of an old building. I heard a street musician playing “Fever” on a flute. The same guy played this same song every day, so that by now “Fever” seemed to be the anthem of this block on Broadway. He was getting better at it. Some days I noticed the improvement, heard the notes one by one; some days the flute’s song was nothing more to me than all the other sounds of the street. As I walked that afternoon, whenever I thought of Rosie Thayer, I tried to listen for the flute again. It worked for a little while. I turned up the collar of my coat against the chilly air and kept moving.
I walked east a couple of short blocks to Las Piernas Boulevard, and then south a couple more, past the old post office and bank buildings and found myself standing in front of Austin Woods & Grandson Books, a used bookstore not far from the paper. I know a remedy when I see one, so I pushed the front door open and stepped inside.
The bookstore occupies a huge brick building that has withstood both earthquakes and city redevelopment plans over the last century. I’ve been told that it was once home to a market, then a car dealership, and later a machinery warehouse, but I’ve only known it in its present incarnation.
Once inside, I stood still for a moment, letting the store’s warmth and cathedral quiet welcome me. Skylights in the high, arching ceilings overhead brought softened sunlight into the cavernous rooms. Around me, wooden crates were nailed together to form walls of bookcases. Ten feet high or higher they stretched, holding row upon towering row of musty tomes. Each cover and spine seemed to long to be held again, the way a widower might long for his late wife’s embrace.
I took a deep breath, inhaling the distinctive old-book fragrance of yellowed paper and aged binding glue. Images of dark basements and bloodstained offices faded. I walked down the aisles, reading titles, and eventually began smiling to myself. You can find just about any book in this store, provided you aren’t really looking for it.
The shelving system was designed by Austin Woods, who has a mind that apparently views the universe of printed matter in a unique way. Books should not be subjected to silly things like alphabetical order or genres; even a division between fiction and nonfiction was unnecessary, since the latter might have less to do with the truth than the former. This whimsical approach was not to his only son’s liking; Louis Woods refused to work in the store and went on to start one of Las Piernas’s oldest accounting firms.
In one of those twists of fate that have long caused parents to go gray and balding, Louis’ own son, Bill, rebelled against the accountant’s orderliness. Bill spent most of his childhood helping his grandfather; Austin rewarded this loyalty by giving him half-ownership and a
dding the “& Grandson” to the name of the store.
O’Connor had introduced me to the place, and taught me that the best strategy was to relax and browse and let something intrigue you on its own; if you really wanted a specific title, just ask one of the Woods and they’d miraculously make a beeline for it. O’Connor sometimes asked for a certain title just to watch Austin or Bill do this; he figured the entertainment value was worth the price of a book.
Austin is a dried apple of a man, with a face that can hardly be found among his wrinkles. At ninety-six, he spends most of his time sleeping at an old desk in a cluttered back office, glasses atop his head and buried in wisps of thin white hair, some favorite tome opened and serving as a pillow beneath him. Bill, his wife Linda, and his daughter Katy carry on the business, which has attracted a faithful clientele over the years.
I browsed for a while, then made my way over to the counter, where the fourth generation was at work. Katy Woods looked up from a beautifully bound volume of The Master of Ballantrae. She’s about nineteen, very pretty, but shy. “Hi, Irene,” she greeted me. “I didn’t think I’d see you until Christmas Eve. Are you doing some early Christmas shopping?”
I laughed. “I suppose I should, Katy. In fact, you’ve just given me an inspiration. I’d like to purchase one of Stevenson’s other works to give to my former brother-in-law.”
“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”
“You know me too well.”
She called to her mother, who took over at the register while Katy unerringly steered me directly to the book, which was next to a 1948 high school science textbook. All the other works on the shelf appeared to be science fiction or relatives of science fiction.
“I give up,” I said. “Why’s the textbook here?”
“This science book has a few pages in it that espouse some pretty silly ideas about radiation. Austin says this shelf is where we should have works about what happens when scientists don’t fully understand the impact of their discoveries.”
With Katy’s help, I found an old edition of Jane Austen’s Emma, and decided to buy it for Barbara, quite sure that she would never get the hint it might offer about sticking one’s nose in where it doesn’t belong.
