The Back Door of Midnight

by Elizabeth Chandler

  “Why did you do this?” I cried.

  “I told you before, Joanna, it’s dangerous to pry into the secrets of others.”

  “What secrets?” I demanded.

  “I warned you. Only animals can be trusted. People will turn on you.”

  “People like Audrey?”

  She put her hands over her eyes, as if she were trying to block out what she saw. “Forget about Mick. It was an accident.”

  Her fear and insistence made me think his death was anything but.

  I remembered her first mention of Mick and how puzzled she was when I, trying to play the role of my mother, had referred to him as “my lover.” I remembered the tone of surprise: “Your lover?” Of course, Mick was a generation too old for my mother. He was Audrey’s age; he was Iris’s age. What if he had been Aunt Iris’s boyfriend? Was this one of the secrets that she could never tell?

  If I asked directly, she would probably deny it. I had to cast the question in another form. “Aunt Iris, why did Mick choose to marry Audrey?”

  She stood still, her fingers gripping the knobs of the stove, and for a moment I thought she was going to turn it back on. I set my hands lightly on her arms. “Why didn’t he marry you?”

  She pulled away from me. The large frame of her body bent forward and her shoulders sagged. I began to regret my question.

  At last she spoke, her voice rough. “He said I was crazy. He said I was sick. He said I was too sick in the head to raise a child. That’s what he said.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He was afraid of me.”

  “I’m really sorry.” I lay my hand on her back, but she slipped away, withdrawing into the dining room, walking slowly down the hall, climbing the steps quietly.

  I didn’t like Mick Sanchez. If I discovered that my great-aunt had killed him, I wasn’t sure I would tell the police. But I had to know, because it looked as if Joanna had been trying to find out the same thing and had paid the price for it.

  Picking up a pen, I jotted on a napkin the images and wording I could remember from the poem. As I wrote, I became aware of the stinging heat in my wrist. I got up to retrieve some ice from the freezer.

  It had become a habit, reaching up to catch the large, speckled fish before it fell on my foot. But there was no fish today. I looked in the shelves and bins of the lower part of the fridge, then in the trash can. I’d have smelled the fish if Aunt Iris had cooked it. I looked out the back of the house. Maybe she threw it into the creek. Maybe she thought it would perk up and swim away.

  Returning to the kitchen, I wrapped a chunk of ice in a dish towel and held the cold pack against my wrist, studying the images I had written down.

  Did the snake represent a sneaky form of killing—something that masked itself as a naturally occurring heart attack? Were the rabbit and cat symbolic of other people who had been involved? The turbulent emotions of the last week and lack of sleep were catching up with me: Images shifted in my mind like the colored shapes in a kaleidoscope. I needed fresh air to clear my head. I went upstairs to change into shorts and running shoes. After checking on Aunt Iris, finding her asleep in her room, I grabbed an apple and headed out for a walk.

  The gardens once kept by Mick Sanchez were a short distance away. What if there was a literal basis for my mother’s images, something concrete and specific that tied her garden symbols to Mick? Perhaps if I saw the gardens, the images would make more sense. With less than an hour of sunlight left, I hurried to the Fairfax estate.

  twenty-two

  FIFTY MINUTES LATER I stood scowling at the Fairfaxes’ fence, tall metal bars that ended in an earthy-smelling marsh. The ground had turned soft and wet beneath my feet, and with each step, I sank in deeper, my footprints becoming puddles. The high river grass was alive with whining insects. I imagined that snakes liked it too.

  I hadn’t been able to enter the property from the road. The estate’s large gates had been locked electrically. There was a keypad for punching in codes, and I had tried some obvious ones without luck. If there was a caretaker on the property, he hadn’t responded to the intercom button that I’d pressed repeatedly. So I’d followed the iron fence, thinking there might be a service or employee entrance, and discovered a smaller gate with a narrow driveway. But it, too, was locked electrically and didn’t accept the random codes that I’d tried. I’d peered through the bars; if there was a car parked inside, the landscaping prevented me from seeing it. The left side of the property was thick with trees, so I’d turned back and searched on the right side instead, moving toward the Flemings’ property. There was no break in the fence, not until it ended where I was standing now, in a marsh.

  I did not want to wade any farther into the muck, not in the growing darkness. I realized that Marcy might know the gate codes, but she’d ask questions I didn’t want to answer yet. And this time, I knew, there would be an immediate call to the sheriff. I would have to be patient and search again in daylight.

  I took a shortcut across the Flemings’ property. No one was on the terrace. Ducks waddled fearlessly on the lower lawn. Beneath the dock light, the cabin cruiser and rowboat rocked gently. The rowboat!

  I tried to recall the water approach to the Fairfax property. The house sat on top of a hill, with all but its roof invisible behind the trees. The shoreline itself was crescent-shaped, the creek cutting into the land. As I remembered it, the drop from lawn to water was a steep clay and sand bank, a wall of erosion high enough to make climbing difficult. With the family gone, there was no place for docking and no wooden steps up to the lawn. But if the rowboat could be nosed onto the tiny strip of beach, I might be able to climb up—especially if Zack gave me a hand.

  I walked quickly around the Flemings’ house to the front. I heard Clyde baying before I reached the porch. He stopped, as if silenced. As soon as I rang the bell, Audrey answered the door.

  “She’s gone off, hasn’t she! I knew she would. These things work in cycles.”

  “No, Aunt Iris is fine,” I replied. “May I speak with Zack, please?”

  “He isn’t home. I knew it was going to be a bad night,” Audrey went on, her eyes peering into the darkness behind me as if she saw signs of evil hanging from the trees. “When I took the dog out, I heard Iris screaming like a banshee.”

  I was curious now. “What was she saying?”

  “It was gibberish, all gibberish. The devil’s language.”

  “I see. Do you know when Zack will be home?”

  Audrey shook her head. “He went out with that girl.”

  “Erika?”

  She nodded.

  “May I leave a note for Zack?” I had his cell phone number, but I wasn’t going to call him, not when he was with Erika.

  “Of course. Come in. We’ll talk.”

  “Thanks, but I just want to leave a note for Zack.”

  I saw the change in her eyes. Lips pursed in disapproval, she let me in and begrudgingly provided pen and paper, watching my hand as I wrote. I figured that even if my note were folded and taped, Audrey would read it, so I left out details, simply asking Zack to call me no matter how late he got in.

  “Please make sure he gets this tonight,” I said, handing the note to her.

  When I returned to the house, I found several of the cats lounging around the kitchen and a few nuggets of fresh food scattered around an empty platter on the floor. Aunt Iris must have gotten up and fed them. I checked out front and saw that her car was gone.

  For a moment I considered calling the sheriff, but what could I say—that I was worried because Aunt Iris had smashed a mirror, laid down for a nap, and then gone out? When I left her, the violent behavior appeared to be over. And it was, after all, nine o’clock on a Saturday night, a time when a lot of people went out. Besides, she had left the house at stranger times than this.

  Of course, McManus would come if I told him I had some ideas about Uncle Will’s death, but all I really had was a pile of disjointed theories. I paced for an ho
ur, waiting for something to happen: Zack to call, Aunt Iris to return, the images from my mother’s notebook to fall into a pattern that I understood. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  I searched the house for a stepladder, found a three-foot one, and carried it with a flashlight to the Flemings’ dock. The moon, which had glowed yellow at its rising, shone whiter and more brightly now. For the next fifteen minutes I focused on the task of launching the boat and rowing it through the dark. It was hard to judge distance without being able to see the shoreline. I felt as if I had rowed miles when I finally caught the glint of moonlight on the rooftop and chimneys of the Fairfax house. I turned toward shore. As I rowed closer to the sandy bank, I pushed one of the oars straight down in the water to gauge the depth. I couldn’t touch bottom. I got goose bumps all over—I really don’t like dark water. But I continued to test every ten feet or so, afraid that if I ran the boat aground, I’d damage it.

  When the depth dropped to two feet, I gingerly climbed into the dark creek. My wet shoes felt heavy on my feet and kept slipping on the river stones. The boat had an anchor, but I didn’t know how to make sure it would catch and hold in the creek bottom. I towed the boat a short distance, then carried the anchor to shore. I dug a hole, dropped in the anchor, and pushed the heavy sand over it.

  By the time I had done that, the long line for the anchor had unreeled and the boat had floated away from shore. I waded out again, hating the way the currents swirled and eddied around my legs, imagining eels and other slimy things. I towed the boat a second time and shortened its rope with a knot. Then I carried the flashlight and ladder to shore and set the ladder close to the bank. Climbing to its top, I found the edge of the lawn was even with my shoulders.

  I tried to pull myself up and over the edge, grabbing handfuls of grass. Tufts tore off, spraying sand in my face. I tried again and created a small landslide. Looking to either side of me, I saw that far down on the left, close to the area that became swamp, the bank dipped and was noticeably lower than where I perched. Unfortunately, the base of it was submerged, the moonlit creek lapping against it.

  I climbed down and carried the ladder into a foot of water, gritting my teeth all the way. After stabilizing the ladder on the rough bottom and climbing to the top, I found I had gained only six inches on the bank. I pulled hard with my arms, my legs and elbows grinding into the sandy bank, and finally heaved myself onto the grass.

  Standing up, I brushed off and climbed the hill toward a stand of trees that screened the house from the land below it. On the other side of the trees I was surprised to find a pond, obviously man-made, a perfect oval, a flawless mirror reflecting the three-quarter moon. With an entire creek below, I wondered why the Fairfaxes had bothered to put in an artificial pond.

  They must really love their privacy, I thought. Then I remembered a story about wealthy people who stocked their ponds with exotic fish that they and their friends could enjoy catching. That’s when it struck me, not like a bolt of lightning out of the blue, more like a fish falling on my foot: the speckled one in the freezer, the one that didn’t look like the others Uncle Will had caught, the one that had disappeared recently. I started to laugh. What if Uncle Will had been poaching? What if, winter and summer, when the Fairfax family moved on to their other fabulous homes, he had come here to fish?

  And what if someone else had made the connection and removed the evidence that Uncle Will hung out here? I stopped laughing. My eyes moved from the pond to the dark hedge set back from it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the hedge, a tall wall of clipped bushes, forty or fifty feet long. Its top, traced in moonlight, was artfully cut to form notches, like those in the battlements of a castle. My eyes dropped down to the base, where a rectangle was cut through the greenery: the doorway I had passed through two times in the last ten days. I glanced back at the pond and shivered. When the owners were gone, this was more than a peaceful spot to fish; it was a perfect place for murder.

  Who knew that Uncle Will came here? Aunt Iris, and Audrey, even Elliot Gill could have known. Anyone who happened to be on the water at the right time might have seen Uncle Will arrive in his boat, especially if this was a regular habit of his. The police had found the boat adrift some distance down the creek. It had probably been cut free by his killer, so the police wouldn’t guess where my uncle had been fishing. Of course, it was possible that, as longtime neighbors, Will and Iris knew a way onto the estate that I hadn’t found; Audrey, too, as a former employee.

  I passed through the door in the shrubbery and found myself in an enclosed garden, the hedge and two brick walls making three sides of the square area, the house making the fourth. Lights flicked on, outside lights—there was probably a motion sensor. I stood in the shadow of the hedge for several minutes, studying the house. Every window was dark. If there was a resident caretaker, it was likely that his windows faced the swampy or wooded sides, rather than the scenic view of pond, garden, and creek.

  I surveyed the garden, which was divided by crushed stone paths into four sections with a gazebo at the center. “Well, hello,” I said softly. To my right was a human-size rabbit, shrubbery sculpted into a tall rabbit with a humanlike stance. Next to him was another tall bush pruned into the figure of a cat, and on the other side of the garden were two more topiary figures, a caterpillar that appeared to be sitting on a mushroom and some kind of rodent—a dormouse, of course! He belonged, along with the Cheshire cat, white rabbit, and caterpillar, to Alice in Wonderland.

  It was a children’s garden and, like a deserted playground, it felt lonely. While summer was in bloom everywhere else in Wisteria, these flower beds had only the headless stalks and papery leaves of dead spring flowers. I walked the garden paths, pausing to study the rabbit and the cat. Rabbit and cat! Amazed at finding the place that had figured in my O.B.E., I had momentarily forgotten about Joanna’s words: The snake slides past a rabbit, glides past a cat. The images she had “seen” could have been drawn from here. Topiary gardens, requiring years of pruning to create, were maintained for decades and longer. It was possible that this garden had been kept by Mick Sanchez.

  Walking the perimeter of the garden with Joanna’s images swirling in my mind, I tripped. A hose had been left out, a long rubber snake with a metal head pointing to the gazebo. I turned and strolled toward the wooden structure.

  The gazebo had been designed like a child’s playhouse. Four of its six sides had windows with shutters, each shutter carved with a heart. The other two sides, one facing the house, and its opposite, facing the entrance through the hedge, had doorways with a carved heart above each of them. I mounted the four steps up to the gazebo and stood inside, pivoting slowly, looking out at the garden. From this focal point, the pattern formed by each quadrant of dried stalks became clear: hearts.

  Child-size chairs were pushed over to one side of the structure. I glanced down, then clicked on my flashlight to survey the floor. A film of dirt and pollen covered the portion facing the house, but the section facing the door in the hedge, and the steps down from it, had been washed clean. I was about to turn off my light when I noticed a deep groove in the wood flooring. I traced it: a square, a door to storage beneath the gazebo. Was this my “rabbit hole,” part of my—and Uncle Will’s—route to the fire site?

  It was easy to imagine a murder scenario: Uncle Will holding his fishing rod, gazing peacefully at the pond, struck on the back of the head by someone he never saw coming; Uncle Will being dragged from the pond, through the hedge, past the topiary rabbit; Uncle Will’s body stored beneath the gazebo, the murderer waiting for a way to dispose of it. I figured that the hose had been used to wash down the bloody track left behind.

  Although I had followed the path of Uncle Will’s murder during my O.B.E., I didn’t think I had actually been present at his death. I would have sensed someone else on the paths of this garden, the way I had sensed the crowd on the night of the fire. Somehow, for some reason, Uncle Will chose to lead me along the path he had trav
eled from his death to the fire. I gazed down at the door to the storage area. There could be evidence here: hair, threads from clothing, a weapon, somthing. I knelt down. Feeling around the edge of the door, I found an indentation that allowed me to slip my fingers under the boards and lift.

  I stared in horror. The beam of my flashlight illuminated the lower end of a leg. The victim’s foot was bare, the skin pale and splotchy. My stomach heaved, and I thought I was going to throw up. Then the foot moved.

  twenty-three

  “AUNT IRIS. WHAT are you doing in there?”

  She slowly shifted position, her face edging out of the shadow created by the gazebo’s flooring. “Get in.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “You must get in.”

  She reached up to grasp my arm. I pulled back.

  “You must do what I say.”

  “I won’t.”

  I shone my light into the dark hole, but I couldn’t tell how big it was or what it contained. Aunt Iris’s eyes shone back at me with a peculiar light. I wasn’t sure if I was gazing into the eyes of a psychic or a madwoman. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be the next one to die.

  “Then you must get in, Anna.”

  She’d spoken as if she had heard my thoughts, and she had called me Anna. The floodlights, which I had triggered earlier and which had begun to dim, suddenly flashed on again. Someone else is here, I thought.

  Iris gripped my arms, pulling with all her strength. “If harm comes to you, William will never forgive me. Get in!”

  The floodlights went off quickly, not fading, the way they had before. There was no time to reason through the situation. I climbed into the hole with her and lowered the door.