The bus let me off in my downtown neighborhood. I hurried down the sidewalk and hastened up the porch steps, intent on forgetting about anything other than my sewing. The front door was locked.
Belatedly I remembered that I’d misplaced my keys. I didn’t bother ringing the doorbell. I knew Pete was gone, and guessed that Aileen was as well, since there was no driving beat or howling emanating from the basement. Still, I double-checked to see if her car was parked along the curb. No red Ford with flames blazoned across the hood. I traipsed around to the back door, hoping that Aileen had left it unlocked like I’d requested. Nope! I was stuck breaking into my own house.
I knew the window over the kitchen sink had no latch, and the back door had no deadbolt. I jiggled the door handle while I fished in my bag for something to pop the lock with. I didn’t want to ruin a credit card or my driver’s license, which did serve as an ID even if I never used it to drive with. I ended up with the cardboard backing of the notepad I always carried in my sewing stuff. It fit into the space between the door and the door frame with no trouble. I slid it down and caught the latch on the third try. With a little twisting, the lock released and I flung the door open. The entire process took no more than five minutes.
I felt a flush of accomplishment, proud of my new skill at breaking and entering. At the same time I reminded myself once again that I needed to get a proper deadbolt installed on this door. I went inside and closed the door behind me.
I reveled in the quiet, so rare since Aileen moved in. I was especially glad she was gone right now, so I could use the washer in the basement without needing earplugs. I dashed down to the basement, started the fabric in the washer, and then went upstairs to get ready to cut out an eighteenth-century gown. That’s when I heard it.
Footsteps sounded on the third floor above my head. Someone was walking around in Pete’s room.
It could be Pete, of course, but instinct and logic told me that it wasn’t. Pete was working those sixteen-hour days, and today was no exception. I didn’t expect him home before bedtime. Plus, the tread didn’t sound like him. Who else could be walking around upstairs?
I heard the scraping sound of wood grating on wood. It took me a minute to realize that it was the sound of the door to the attic opening with a wrench. Whoever was up there was sneaking into my attic.
I tried to picture the attic space, which was accessed by a panel door in the wall under the eaves in Pete’s room. The space wasn’t very big, but there was room for a certain amount of storage amid the exposed wooden beams. I tended to use the basement for most of my storage needs, but there were a few things stashed away in the attic: things like my grandmother’s pewter mug collection that was neatly packed into two matching crates, or the whole bookshelf of children’s books that neither Pete nor I could bear to part with. Then there were the boxes of school papers that I’d saved for no reason other than the countless hours of work I’d put in to them, and a few paintings that I’d been given but couldn’t stand to look at on a daily basis. I couldn’t think of a single valuable thing in the attic that would draw a burglar to it.
The stealthy footsteps continued to pace around the attic, as I considered what to do. Should I call the police, without knowing for sure what I was dealing with? Suppose it really was Pete, home unexpectedly and maybe looking for some kind of prop in the attic. Alternatively, it could be an arsonist, back for a second try after failing to burn the house down with my Japanese maples. He could even now be pouring gasoline all over the attic floor.
There was only one way to find out. I slipped out of my room and tiptoed up the stairs to the third floor. I positioned myself behind the doorjamb of the unoccupied room across the hall from Pete’s, where he kept his weight bench and a scattering of magazines around a flabby beanbag chair. I had a good view of the attic entrance through Pete’s open door.
I stood there holding my breath for what seemed like at least four hours, although it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. Then I saw a person emerging from the attic. It wasn’t Pete. It was a man dressed all in black with a ski mask pulled over his head. He clutched a bulky bundle that looked like some kind of heavy object stuffed into a pillowcase. He turned to pull the attic door closed, fumbling to get the stiff panel in place.
If I were Aileen I would have tackled him at that moment. But I was me, so I just watched, trembling, while he dusted off his hands and picked up his bundle once more. He turned and paced across the room, bypassing Pete’s computer and the pile of loose bills and change that lay on his dresser. He paused in the doorway and looked around carefully before stepping out of the room. I shrank back against the wall, holding my breath. If he saw me here there was no place for me to run. I would have to fight him. It didn’t take a fortune-teller to predict who would win in that battle.
Lucky for me, he didn’t see me. He walked quietly down the stairs, and I crept down after him, hoping to see where he was going. He headed straight down, bypassing the second floor completely. He made no attempt to check in my bedroom or sewing room, or in Aileen’s room. Clearly he had come to steal the object in his arms and that was all. What could that object be? I racked my brain but couldn’t figure out what he could have taken from the attic, or how he could have known it was there for the taking.
The intruder paused at the front door and pulled the ski mask off his face. He smoothed his hair, preparing to waltz right out my door as if he had every right to be there. As once he had. It was Randall, of course.
A cascade of emotions washed over me at the sight of him. I felt anger, and a little bit of fear, but mostly an overwhelming sense of shame and betrayal as I watched him drop my missing keys onto the window bench to the side of the front door. How could I have been so gullible as to be taken in by his show of compassion last night when all the time he was acting on his own devious agenda? That whole story about wanting to fix what went wrong between us was only a ruse to get inside my house to lift my keys from where they were hanging below the mirror in the kitchen. He’d caressed me in that very spot, leaning in to kiss me while he snagged my keys off their hook behind my head. Then he’d used those keys to let himself in to steal something big and bulky from out of my attic. Well, he wasn’t going to get away with it!
I sprang out of the doorway where I was lurking and hollered at the top of my lungs, “What the hell are you doing sneaking around in my house?”
Randall dropped the bundle with a cry. He swung around to face me, a look of fear on his face. It disappeared when he saw that it was only me, and not Aileen. He scooped up the bundle once more. “I just stopped in to retrieve my property that I left here back in January. Thanks for the loan of your keys.”
“You left something in the attic when you moved out? What kind of a lame story is that? I checked the house from top to bottom after you split, and you had taken everything with you.”
He laughed, holding the bundle behind his back. “Yeah, I cleaned out everything, because I knew you’d sell off anything I left behind. But you didn’t find this, because I hid it. I didn’t have any use for it then, but now I do, so I came back to pick it up.” He pulled the front door open. “See you around, Daria.”
I lunged and made a grab for the bundle while his back was turned to walk out the door. The bundle fell to the floor with a clatter. Randall yelled and swung around to push me away from him with such force that I fell hard on my bottom. I reached out and pulled the bundle open to reveal a large brassy object. It looked like a platter, big enough to hold a Thanksgiving Day turkey.
Randall snatched the platter away from me, wrestling the wrappings out of my grasp. He shoved my shoulders, pushing me down again even as I tried to stand up. I lunged for his leg, but he sidestepped away from me. “Forget about it, Daria,” he yelled, and ran out the front door.
By the time I scrambled up off the floor to give chase, he was gone. I ran down the sidewalk in one direction, onl
y to hear a car accelerating from the opposite direction. I threw up my hands in defeat, and returned to the house.
I started to call the police, but then I hesitated. Randall would either say he was simply picking up his own property from the house he used to inhabit, or he would hide the platter and claim that I’d fabricated the entire story just to make him look bad out of some desperate need for revenge. He might even exploit last night’s camaraderie to prove that anything I said against him stemmed from my unresolved feelings for him. I groaned out loud. He even had Aileen as a witness to our close embrace.
I laid down my phone. He was going to get away with it, like he got away with everything he ever did to me.
I sat down on the window bench and dropped my head in my hands, letting the intense feelings of bitter frustration wash over me. I wished that it were nighttime, so I could crawl under the covers and cry myself to sleep. But it was only three thirty in the afternoon, and I had a gown to cut out.
I pulled myself up off the window bench and made my way down to the basement, leaning on the stair railing as if I were as old as Priscilla. I shook out the fabric and tumbled it into the dryer, then climbed back up the stairs. I walked stiffly, sore from landing on the hardwood floor. Maybe I could finger Randall for assault. I enjoyed the picture of him standing up in court, pleading no contest to the charge of pushing down a defenseless woman who was head and shoulders shorter than him. Of course, he was quite at home in court and he would never plead no contest to anything, so who was I kidding? Maybe I could sic Aileen on him, with Pete backing her up. The two of them could put him in the hospital for sure. But then they’d be the ones pleading no contest to assault. Would it count as assault if you beat up a jerk who deserved it? Probably.
Just the thought of Randall getting his comeuppance made me feel a little bit better, even though I knew it was only a fantasy. I went back upstairs to prepare the pattern for Louise’s dark blue gown.
I spent the rest of the afternoon adjusting my pattern and cutting out the gown. My preferred method was to cut on a cutting board laid out on the floor, so I could spread the fabric out all the way. It was really hard to do that today. I had to keep getting up and stretching the sore muscles in the small of my back. Once again I cursed Randall for interfering in so many different aspects of my life.
Aileen popped into my room just as I finished cutting the fabric for the skirt. “I’ve got dinner on, come on down.” She disappeared before I could politely decline.
I stood up and stretched, and decided that I needed some company bad enough that I could deal with whatever bizarre food Aileen had in store for me. Still, it was with some trepidation that I went downstairs and sat down at the kitchen table.
Aileen stood in front of the smoking oven, dressed in a multicolored one-piece bodysuit spangled with red metallic discs that matched her dangly earrings. She pulled out a casserole dish with a flourish.
I groaned inwardly. You could put anything in a casserole and try to pass it off as palatable food. At least it didn’t smell too bad. I grabbed a hot plate to save my table before she plopped the casserole down.
She lifted the lid, revealing mashed potatoes mixed with mandarin oranges and cheese puffs and topped with what looked like grated zucchini peels. Before serving up, she grabbed up a huge bottle of hot sauce and slogged it over the entire dish.
I could see a round of antacids in my future.
Aileen thumped my plate down in front of me and loaded up her own. She took a big bite and mumbled around her fork, “Bon appétit.”
I took a dainty bite and followed it up with a big gulp of water. “What’s the occasion tonight?”
She shrugged, swallowed her massive bite of food, and wiped her mouth. “Maybe I’m worried about you stepping out to dinner with a former lover turned world-class jerk.”
I tried another tiny bite. “No worries on that score. If I never see him again, it’ll be too soon. He was using me yesterday, just like he used me the whole time we were together.” I laid down my fork and covered my mouth with my napkin to hide my trembling lips.
Aileen nodded, as if she’d known exactly what I was going to say. “I could’ve seen that coming a mile away.”
“Well I didn’t.” I didn’t really want to talk about it, but at the same time I wanted somebody to make me feel better about the whole mess. “While he was cozying up to me in the kitchen yesterday, he was stealing my keys off their hook. He used them today to get in and take something out of the attic—a big tarnished platter. I’ve never seen it before: he said he’d left it here before he split.”
Aileen stared at me, her laden fork halfway to her mouth. “That lowlife stole your keys to break into our house? Did you call the cops?”
I shook my head. “I got the keys back and I didn’t recognize the platter so I can’t say he stole it from me. It just makes me so mad that he came on to me like that, and I bought every bit of it. If it hadn’t been for that argument with McCarthy, I wouldn’t have been in such a vulnerable state of mind.”
Again Aileen stared at me. “You had an argument with McCarthy? What was that like?”
I sighed. “Yesterday I told him I couldn’t trust him because he wouldn’t promise not to repeat something I was going to tell him in confidence. He tried to convince me that not promising was the ethical way to go. Today I told Noah Webster not to trust McCarthy because he takes pictures for the newspaper and is always after a scoop. That really pissed McCarthy off.” I looked down at the food on my plate, pushing it around with my fork. “I think I really hurt his feelings. I questioned his integrity.”
“Damn!” Aileen let the one word hang between us while she shoveled down another few mouthfuls. Finally she spoke. “Integrity.” She stood up, holding her hand over her heart. “‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.’” She sat back down, unfazed by my look of amazement. “That’s where you hit him.”
“You’re right. I feel terrible.” I got up and gathered up my mostly untouched food. “Where do you get this stuff, anyway?”
“‘This stuff’ is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nothing like the classics.” She finished off her last bite of casserole and picked up her plate as well. “Of course, the question is, does McCarthy have integrity or not?”
“Yup, that’s the question.” I dumped the dishes in the sink. “I’ll wash up later. I need to finish this gown.”
I practically fled up the stairs, pursued by Aileen’s question. Did McCarthy have integrity? I settled down to my sewing machine and forced myself to consider it. What did I know about McCarthy, really?
Aileen once told me that what you see is what you get with McCarthy. I’d seen a few things recently. At Randall’s law firm, he went out of his way to be persistent and obnoxious and then set up a conflict in which Randall’s dad would emerge the victor, all in order to keep a secretary from losing her job. He let a waitress goad him into challenging her pool shark boyfriend knowing that he would surely lose, and then he let her enjoy ribbing him about it. He didn’t hesitate to confess a humorous and rather embarrassing story of being afraid of a white-tailed deer if it would help make a grad student feel more comfortable. He showed no self-consciousness about any of these incidents, seeming to enjoy the humor in his own predicaments. What did this all say about integrity? What did it say about Sean McCarthy?
What you see is what you get. I’d always seen a man with a good sense of humor who was a joy to be with. I’d never really thought about his honesty or trustworthiness. Had he ever let me down? Had he ever, in fact, printed something intimate or compromising about me, or even something that I’d requested that he not print? Had he ever violated a confidence?
The answer was no. He never had. I had no basis whatsoever for my assertion that I couldn’t trust him. All I’d accomplished was to show him that he couldn’t trust me to form my opinions about him based on the man he wa
s rather than my own prejudices about newspapermen in general. Who was lacking in integrity here?
I let the bodice I was sewing fall to my lap and dropped my head in my hands. I knew what I had to do. I reached for my phone. I had to make this right. I dialed McCarthy’s number.
The phone rang and rang until it finally went through to voice mail. I left a message. “Sean, I need to apologize to you. I was a jerk. Call me.” I texted him the same message, and then went back to my work.
McCarthy must have really been upset, because he never responded to either text or voice message. I called a second time, but hung up without leaving another message. I guess I needed to give him time to get over his hurt feelings.
I stayed up well past midnight working on Louise’s gown. I took all kinds of shortcuts, leaving seams unfinished on the inside and sewing even the hems by machine. The only thing that mattered at this point was speed and a finished product, with no regard for quality. It was my least favorite way to sew.
Pete poked his head in when he got home. “You’re still up?”
“Duh!” I didn’t know why people always asked such silly questions. Of course I was still up; he could see that. “I have to finish this gown by tomorrow. I only just cut it out this afternoon. I don’t even get to fit it—Louise has to wear it first thing tomorrow morning.” I rubbed my aching back. “I’ll be so happy when this filming is over!”
Pete settled down on the edge of my desk. “I thought you were excited to be a part of it.”
“Yeah, that was before they kept piling on more and more projects. Creeping disclosure, that’s what I’d call it.”
“I guess the professor’s death didn’t help matters, huh? Did the police ever find out who did it?”
Historically Dead Page 22