Witness
Page 31
No, she was not.
His rage swallowed him up whole, and he came this close to taking all the god-damned Tupperware containers out to the trash can in the back yard and just dumping them, when, slowly, by degrees, he forced himself to calm down and regain control over himself. No, he wasn’t about to let the fucking Tupperware give him away as his wife’s murderer.
Not happening.
He took the Tupperware container he wanted and slammed the cupboard door shut on the remaining Tupperware crap, and got up and walked over to the stove and set the Tupperware container onto the stove beside the saucepan, poured the soup into it, and closed the lid.
And then it hit him.
The fuck with it. I’m taking this to work today and eating it.
He loved her soup.
And she sure as fuck wasn’t attending her precious ladies’ luncheon or potluck today, was she?
No, she was not.
The stupid fucking bitch.
He walked the Tupperware container of soup over to the back door and set it on the table. Grab it on his way out. Walked back to the stove and studied the empty saucepan.
Better clean it.
He put the saucepan, the little ceramic dish, and the wooden spoon into the sink, filled the saucepan with boiling hot water and poured in a generous dollop of hand dishwashing soap. As the hot water foamed, he put his hands on either side of the sink and stared out the window.
What the hell did I do?
Did I really have to kill her?
Well, too late, now, to take things back. If he was lucky, people would think she’d taken her own life. But was he doing the things she would’ve done, had she decided to commit suicide?
Would she, for instance, have bothered making soup at all? And, if she’d made the soup before killing herself, would she have still bothered to wash the saucepan, scrub the stove, clean up the sink, and then walk calmly into the dining room, climb up onto her precious fucking maple-wood table she ordered from fucking Italy, coil a heavy rope around the chandelier, and then hang herself?
Well, would she?
Terror gripped his throat and he gagged. Tension laced through his body; he had to get out of this house, and right now, before anybody else came along.
Oh, and don’t forget the kid.
He’d deal with the boy, later.
In a hurry now, he scrubbed out the saucepan, set it upside down onto the immaculate plastic dryer rack, purchased at IKEA—oh, how Miranda loved that fucking place, wanted to visit the one in West Chester, Ohio, all the time—put the ceramic bowl upside down beside it, and the wooden spoon. It’d all air dry. Even Miranda, on the day she decided it end it all, would’ve had her limits, and even she might not have gone to all the trouble of washing and hand drying the saucepan and putting it back away in the cupboard. Even Miranda might let her housekeeping skills relax for one fucking second on the day she decided to end it all.
Right?
I need to get the hell out of here.
The short hairs on the back of his neck prickled and he had a sudden creeping sensation of someone watching him.
He stared out through the kitchen window but saw nobody.
Hurried into the dining room and looked up at her face, just to make sure. Make sure of what, he didn’t know, but she still looked damn fucking dead. Her tongue lolled from her mouth, the stupid cunt, and her head had turned purple and bruised, like an eggplant. She dangled up there, a bizarre ornament to her table, her body quiescent, still, just like a piece of furniture, really.
Yep, she’s still dead.
He hurried from the dining room, swept through the kitchen, grabbed the Tupperware container and the garbage bag with the sodden dishrag and walked out of the house through the back-kitchen door, retracing the steps he’d taken when he first arrived, a half-hour earlier. Hard to believe it’d taken only thirty minutes; felt more like thirty hours.
Walked across the street, slid behind the wheel of his cruiser, set the Tupperware container onto the front passenger seat floor, and drove out of the neighborhood. While driving, he peeled off the blue surgical gloves and tucked them into the garbage bag. He’d dump the bag at a dumpster on his way back to the office.
And he’d better take a shower and change out of these stinking clothes. Christ, he stank like a homeless man. He had a spare uniform in his locker at the office. He’d take a quick shower, change, send his uniform to the drycleaners.
Boy, would they love him when they got his uniform.
But what’d he forgotten?
A niggling sensation at the back of his mind worried him.
He’d forgotten something.
Oh yeah, the kid.
He’d better find this fucking kid.
A few minutes later.
Hank Wittenberg stood at the dining room window and waved to Melanie as she pulled away from the house in his BMW. He didn’t see Ginny; she’d probably decided to lie down in the backseat, keep on pretending she was sick. He chuckled to himself. His eldest granddaughter, Ginny Marie Wittenberg, at ten years of age, was the most perceptive little woman he’d ever met. She reminded him most of his dead wife, Millicent, in her keen understanding and sharp mind.
Millie had possessed this innate gift of sensing things before they happened, and she’d passed this ability on to her granddaughter. Ginny sensed things when her mother and sister, eight-year-old Evie, remained unaware. Where in the world did this awareness come from, and why didn’t eight-year-old Evie possess this same sense? But Ginny had seen more; she’d witnessed her mother’s abuse first-hand; she knew the signs, they frightened her, and she’d done what she needed to do to get her, and her mother, out of that house.
And this sense had kicked in today, he knew it; Ginny had sensed something, something bad, and she’d faked being ill, and then, when she came home faster than expected from her newspaper route, she’d been frightened out of her mind.
What happened during the newspaper route?
Did she see her father, subject to a protection order, trolling the neighborhood?
Spooky, how prescient Ginny was, and her ability to sense things before they happened. Did she sense the presence of her father? Was his son-in-law planning to pay an unexpected—and unwelcome—visit?
He turned away from the window and walked to the kitchen, still musing.
He puttered around the kitchen, put the dirty breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, scrubbed down the kitchen table. When Ginny and Ginny got back, first thing he’d do, he’d sit Ginny down and make her answer him. Did Brad send her any messages, did he threaten her through a text or email? Ginny might be concealing it from him, but he’d winkle it out of her eventually.
Still musing, he picked up a banana, peeled it, ate it, dropped the peel on top of the garbage, noticed the trash can needed emptying. Went to the pantry, grabbed a fresh trash bag; exchanged it for the full one, knotted it up, and hauled it out to the garbage cans behind the garage.
Holding the full and knotted-up trash bag with his left hand, he lifted the lid to the garbage can with his right and was about to toss the trash into the bucket when he paused.
Half . . . well, nearly half of Ginny’s newspaper delivery lay on the bottom of the trash can floor.
What in the world?
Shocked, he stood stock-still, staring into the bottom of the bucket and seeing the freshly-printed up newspapers, The Shelbyville Times, lining the floor of the trash can, and a thread of worry laced through his heart.
Why did Ginny dump half her newspaper run into the trash? That’s not like her.
He tipped the trash bucket over and dumped the undelivered newspapers onto the grass, then set the bucket right side up, and put the kitchen trash bag into the bucket, secured the lid, and studied the newspapers lying on the dewy grass.
And gave himself a moment to think on it.
Why'd she dump half her newspaper run?
Not like her to abandon her job like that, and the thread of un
ease grew thicker, knotting his throat. The way she’d looked as she ran back into the house, tearing upstairs and hiding in her room, and when he came upstairs to get her, she’d been cowering under the covers as if escaping a ghoul.
She’d witnessed something, something bad.
What did she see?
Still brooding, still thinking on it, Hank bent down, groaning—his back was killing him this morning—and methodically scooped the undelivered newspapers into his arms. Ginny would get in trouble if she failed to deliver her route, why not help his granddaughter out and do a little looking around while he was at it?
The ole killing two birds with one stone, analogy.
Or metaphor. He couldn’t remember what they called it, but it was a tired old saying. With the newspapers cradled in his arms, he walked back into the house in search of Ginny’s newspaper delivery bag.
He wondered what he’d find.
An hour later.
Hank caught the phone on the first ring. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” a woman said. “This is the principal’s office from Shelbyville Elementary School, and we’re calling to find out why Ginny Wittenberg failed to appear in class today.”
“Oh, well, hello, and drat.” Hank chuckled. “I guess that’s my fault, or rather, my daughter, Melanie. She forgot to call it in.”
“Is Ginny sick?”
“Yes, ma’am, yes, she is,” Hank said, wondering at the back of his mind if that was true, but going along with it, “and her mother’s taking her to the doctor right this minute for a check-up.”
“All right,” the woman said. “So, you say she’s sick?”
“Yeah, she is.”
“If she’s at a doctor’s visit, can you please ask the doctor to write her a note and we’ll call it an excused absence, otherwise, it’ll be unexcused.”
“I’ll be sure to do that.”
Hanging up the phone, he made a mental note to text Melanie, remind her to get a doctor’s note. Pulled out his cell phone, texted Melanie, then, as he pushed the cell back into his front pants pocket, started with surprise at the whine of an ambulance. The sound pierced the normally blissful silence of this sleepy neighborhood, and part of him sensed he already knew something bad was going to happen, and here was the proof of it.
His heart thudding dully, he walked out through the front door and put his hands on his hips as he and other neighbors emerged from their houses to look down the street.
To the last house, Ginny delivered a newspaper to, earlier in the day.
To 2354 Wells Falls Lane, to Sheriff Randy Randalls’s home.
What’s up, I wonder?
And then a frightening idea darted into his head.
What did Ginny do?
A few minutes later.
With his old Korean War haversack on his back, and with Ginny’s undelivered newspapers in it, he marched out through the front door. He’d taught Ginny how to do her route, had walked her through it half-a-dozen times, so he’d developed a pretty good sense as to where she’d left off. He figured it was somewhere along Wells Falls Road.
At first, Melanie—ever the over-protective mother—had resisted the idea of Ginny getting a paper route, but Hank had prevailed. Good for a child to earn her own pocket money. Helped build valuable work skills for later in life; Ginny was learning to be a dependable person, people would know they could rely on her; in short, he talked and talked until, finally, Mellie relented.
Not even a tough route; it’d belonged to another kid, Robbie Sheffield. When Robbie got too busy with baseball practice, he let Ginny take over his newspaper route for the duration of the season. If Ginny proved competent, she might very well prevail upon Robbie to retire from the route altogether.
As he walked down Persimmon Circle on the way to Wells Falls Lane, he noted with approval that Ginny had taken his admonitions to heart, not to toss the newspaper into the bushes, but to throw it in a place where the homeowner could easily find it, such as the driveway, or the front sidewalk.
Good girl, good girl.
He walked past Belvedere Court, and there, sure enough, newspapers dotted the neighbors’ yards.
So where did Ginny abandon her route, well, he’d figured it was Wells Falls Lane, and he figured he was right on the mark, then. That’s how he noticed the pattern she’d figured out all on her own. More efficient for her to start on Persimmon Circle, move onto Belvedere Court, and then head into the back of the subdivision. Quickly retracing her route, he didn’t find the place she’d stopped at until he reached the main artery leading in and out of the subdivision, Plum Run Road. Plum Run Road led directly to their house, located at 1234 Huguenot Drive, and that’s where she should’ve finished her run, having properly delivered all the papers, but at 2354 Wells Falls Lane, apparently, she’d suddenly stopped cold.
She’d delivered her last paper to 2354 Wells Falls Lane, Sheriff Randalls’s house, and then, at 2356 Wells Falls Lane, she’d stopped. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the Sheriff’s house and looked up at it and wondered what’d made Ginny suddenly decide to abandon the route? He turned on his heel and gazed out at the street. Did someone drive too fast down Wells Falls Lane and spook her? Or did some creepy man drive past in a windowless, white-paneled van? That’d explain it, for sure, but if someone had tried to harass Ginny, wouldn’t she have said something to him the minute she ran in through the door?
No, whatever Ginny had seen had spooked her.
Did her dad drive through the neighborhood?
But again, she would’ve said something to him, or to her mother. She wouldn’t have kept it clamped up inside her.
On an impulse, he walked up the sidewalk to the Sheriff’s house and pressed on the doorbell. The ding-dong of the alarm resonated through the house, but no other sounds followed, no barking dogs, anything like that. The large, picture frame window drapes were closed. Just the tiniest bit odd, but nothing out of the ordinary. Most of the folks in this neighborhood liked to use those fancy window treatments, seen to best effect with the drapes pulled back with an expensive bell cord. Seemed like people didn’t mind losing their privacy and enjoyed letting anybody who wanted to peer inside their home and snoop to their heart’s content. Hank grew up in the country, where people drew their curtains closed at night-time, but apparently, it wasn’t the thing out here in Shelbyville, for folks to close their drapes.
And yet here was Sheriff Randalls, who’d decided to close his curtains, or probably Mrs. Randalls had decided to close the curtains. Well, that’d make sense, wouldn’t it, the lady of the house closing the curtains? They were a kind of private couple, from what little he knew of them. Certainly, the sheriff had a public life, but even he probably craved his privacy. And besides, who cared what anybody did with themselves behind closed doors, after all?
He cocked his head one last time, listened intently, but heard nothing.
“Well, okay then.”
He turned on his heel and walked across the yard to the house at 2356 Plum Run Road and started pulling out newspapers and dropping them onto the neighbors’ lawns. By the time he made it back home, he’d delivered all of Ginny’s papers, but he felt strangely winded. It’d been a light walk for him, what was the big deal? But he went inside and lay down on the couch for a few minutes, until he felt better.
But at least his Ginny wouldn’t get into trouble.
It’d be their little secret.
47
Monday, March 11, 6:45 a.m.
“Mom, I’m gonna be late for work if you don’t let me go,” Kathryn McGlone, a Deputy with the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office said, as her mother adjusted her collar. “You didn’t make this much fuss over my veil, and that was my wedding.” She rolled her eyes with mock weariness.
“I just can’t seem to get it to fold right,” her mom said, her brow creased with worry. “I thought if I put a little extra starch into it, it’d work, but I’m afraid it’s not lying flat the way I want it to.”
Anna’s eyes filled with tears and Kathryn groaned inwardly.
“Your dad would be so proud if he could see you, honey.”
“I know, Mom, I know.”
Rex McGlone, who’d died of brain cancer one month before Kathryn graduated from Officer Training School, had been a Sergeant at the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office in Shelbyville, Indiana. Kathryn, knowing she had big shoes to fill, wondered if Mom knew how hard Dad had tried talking her out of a career in law enforcement.
The guys will resent your presence, Kathy. They won’t cut you any slack. They’ll tear you apart. They’ll eat you alive.
Kathryn had never told her mother how hard Dad tried to talk her out of joining the Sheriff’s Office.
“I know what,” Mom said, pulling her hands from Kathryn’s grasp. “Give me your shirt and let me iron that collar out one more time. I realize now what I did wrong, I see it now, I didn’t put enough starch into it, that was my mistake. It needs more starch.”
“Mom,” Kathryn said firmly. “No.”
“Oh, you’re so stubborn,” Anna said. “Just like your father.”
“Oh, right,” Kathryn said dryly. “Not too sure which parent I inherited my bull-headedness from.”
“You did not get it from me, young lady,” Mom said tartly, and Kathryn laughed softly. Mom finished adjusting her collar, the tie, the clasp, then patted her shoulders and stood back. “Let me look at you.”
“How do I look?”
“Like a woman who’s got the world by the tail.”