by Jane Haddam
They had been working their asses off all day on this particular job. They would be working their asses off for at least another two hours. They’d stay as long as the light lasted. It was late August and the days were already beginning to go dark a little earlier. It wasn’t much earlier, but still. It was coming. The fall was coming. The winter was coming. They had to have the shell up before the first snowstorm, or they were never going to get this thing done on time.
“It’s a matter of track records,” Shpetim said to his son, Nderi. Then he made a mental correction and said, “Dee. What a name for a man. Dee.”
“People find Nderi too hard to pronounce,” Nderi said. “I find Nderi too hard to pronounce.”
“We’ve got to bring it in on time and on budget,” Shpetim said, “or as close to both as possible. It’s our first job for the state. If we do it well, we’ll get another one. There’s a lot of money in doing construction for the state.”
“We’ll get the shell up in time,” Nderi said. “Don’t worry about that. If you’re going to worry about something, worry about the electricians. It’s the wiring that keeps me up at night.”
“You shouldn’t be keeping up at night,” Shpetim said. “You should be rested to come to work in the morning. And you should consider a girl. It’s time you were married.”
“I have considered a girl.”
“A Muslim girl.”
“I have considered a girl who will convert.”
“Yes, all right,” Shpetim said. “I know. I’m not comfortable.”
“She’s even Albanian,” Nderi said. “Born and brought up in Albania. Only came here three years ago. Modest to a fault, if you ask me.”
“Eh,” Shpetim said. “It’s that you’re young. You don’t really want those things you see on TV.”
“Every man alive wants those things I see on TV,” Nderi said, “but not in a wife, I agree. But Anya is not like that, and you know it. She’s willing to convert, and you know it. She has no family—”
“You don’t think that’s strange?” Shpetim said. “You don’t think there’s something wrong with that?”
“I think we know enough people who saw half their families vanish into Soviet jails, they weren’t the ones there was something wrong with. There’s no family to object to her conversion. Give it up. I will get married to her, one way or the other. You can’t prevent it. This is America.”
“Then calm your mother about it first,” Shpetim said. “Just because you can’t sleep nights doesn’t mean your mother should be keeping me up. Have they stopped work over there? What is going on?”
The two of them were standing at the edge of the site for the new technology building at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College, standing at the door of the little shed they had built at the very beginning of the job. The shed was the place where they could do paperwork if they had to in the middle of the day. They had every man in the business out here working. Shpetim himself came out here to work, even if he couldn’t lift heavy objects anymore. Nderi could lift them. He could pick up steel girders as if they were made out of bread dough.
“It’s not like we’re Arabs,” Nderi said. “Our women don’t go veiled. They don’t even wear the hijab most of the time. She won’t have a hard time fitting in. And Albanian cooking is Albanian cooking.”
“They’ve stopped work over there,” Shpetim said, pointing across the site to where poured concrete and steel reinforcement bars were sticking out of the ground. A half-dozen men were in a little clutch right next to a pile of concrete blocks. The earthmover next to them was puffing away, using up fuel, but not actually doing anything.
“They can’t just stop like that,” Shpetim said. “What do they think they’re doing?”
“I want you to help me talk Ma into letting Anya come for dinner some night,” Nderi said. “That’s how you start this kind of thing. You have the girl to dinner. And I want Ma to meet her.”
“Your mother has met her.”
“I want her to meet Anya formally,” Nderi said.
One of the men broke away from the clutch and began to walk across the blasted landscape toward Shpetim and Nderi. It was Andor Kulla, looking—Shpetim couldn’t put a name to how he looked.
“There’s something wrong,” Shpetim said.
“There’s always something wrong,” Nderi said.
Andor walked up to them and stopped. Shpetim was about to start shouting, but then he didn’t. He didn’t know why.
“Why are you not working?” Shpetim asked. “What are you all doing, standing around like that? You know we’ve got a deadline.”
Andor looked up, then down, then back the way he had come. The other men were all standing in their clutch, looking at Shpetim and Nderi and Andor. Andor turned back.
“You’ve got to come,” he said. “We found something.”
“Found something? Found what?” Shpetim asked.
Andor shook his head and turned away. “This is the last place they saw him alive, isn’t it?” Andor said, walking back across the site as he talked. “That kid. Ten, twelve years ago. This was the last place anybody saw him alive.”
Shpetim felt something drop right inside him, as if his intestines had fallen loose and were about to come out. He hurried after Andor, walking over the pocked earth as quickly as he could. Nderi came with him, moving faster.
This is what I need, Shpetim thought. Something to bring all the work on the site to a halt. Something to make me a suspect in an investigation. He had no idea what kind of investigation. The men must have found a body. That was the only thing that made any sense. They must have found a body, or a skeleton, and this would be a crime scene, and the work would stop, and they would be blamed for it. There would be blood. There would be policemen. It would be the end of everything he had started out to do here, and then he would have to go back to Albania.
Except that he couldn’t go back to Albania. He was an American citizen now.
Shpetim got to where the men were standing and looked around. They backed up, and he could see that there was a hole where the earthmover had been digging earlier in the day. He looked into the hole expecting to see a ghostly skeleton hand reaching up out of the dirt.
What he saw instead was the top of a bright yellow backpack, full of something.
4
For Darvelle Haymes, life in Mattatuck, New York, was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. That was what she had been doing when Chester went missing, and it was what she was doing now, as the day began to fold in on itself and the dark began to creep in around the edges. She pulled her Honda Civic into the driveway of her small brick ranch house and turned the engine off. She took the key out of the ignition and looked around. This was a reasonably good neighborhood for Mattatuck. She’d only been able to buy the house because, being a real estate agent, she’d seen it go on the market, underpriced, five days before anybody else knew it was there.
She got out of the car and looked around again. The telephone pole at the curb was just a telephone pole. The community bulletin board at the bus stop was empty. She thought about going into the house right away, and then she thought better of it. She marched down to the street and looked around. All the telephone poles she could see were just telephone poles.
Darvelle went back up the driveway and then through the breezeway and into the house by the side door. She could have parked the car in the garage, but she didn’t want to.
She got into the kitchen and put her purse down on the counter next to the microwave. She stood still for a moment and listened for any sounds she shouldn’t hear in the house, but the house was as quiet as the community bulletin board was blank. She got her cell phone out of her purse and headed for the living room.
The living room had track lighting. Kyle had put it in for her the week after she moved in. That was the first week the telephone poles had been covered with flyers, and the first week she’d found the crazy old woman trying to get in through a window in t
he back.
Darvelle sat down on the couch. Her hair was a mass of red running down her back. Her nails were long curves of violet with sparkles in them. The nails matched her suit. She punched, and then held down the number 2 on her phone and waited until it started ringing.
Kyle picked up right away. “Holborn,” he said first—but Darvelle wasn’t worried about that. He was just trying to appear professional in front of the people he worked with.
“Don’t worry about it,” Darvelle said. “I just got home. Everything seems to be fine. She didn’t come back and put more flyers up while I was gone.”
“Come back? Was she there before?”
“Well, she must have been,” Darvelle said. “When I left to go show the Petrovski house, the street was full of flyers again. What does she think she’s doing? I didn’t own this house when Chester disappeared. He never got near this neighborhood, as far as I can tell.”
“She thinks you killed him,” Kyle said.
“I know she thinks I killed him,” Darvelle said, ‘but it stands to reason that if I had killed him, I’d have left his body in the place I was living in then. I wouldn’t have carted it halfway across the city to put it in the flower beds here. Not that I have any flower beds. I hate flower beds. In the winter they look like crap. And in the summer they bring bees and you’re trying to show the house and the clients are running around freaking out.”
“Did you check the whole house?”
“No,” Darvelle said. “Nobody’s here now, though, I can tell.”
“You should check the whole house.”
“You mean maybe she came back and threw stage blood all over my bedspread again? I don’t think she’s going to do that. We’ve got a restraining order. And besides, she’s getting what she wants. They’re doing that TV show about the case. Whatever that is. God, I hate true crime shows. They’re so boring.”
“You’re not worried about it? Those people coming here to look into it?”
“No,” Darvelle said. “I’ve told you and told you, Kyle. Chester disappeared. He just disappeared. He was supposed to pick me up and drive me to school and he never showed up. And that’s all there was to it. No matter what his mother thinks.”
“You don’t have to have evidence to—to suggest things, if you know what I mean. Those shows suggest things.”
“And what are they going to suggest?” Darvelle asked. “That I killed him, why, exactly? Has anybody ever been able to come up with a motive? He was my boyfriend, yes, okay, but he wasn’t my husband. I didn’t have a life insurance policy out on him. And I wasn’t worried about losing him. In fact—”
“In fact, you were already going out with me.”
“Exactly. So I don’t see the point here. I just wish that old bat would give it a rest. It’s been twelve years.”
“I’ve got something here,” Kyle said. “We’ve got some kind of call.”
“Really?” Darvelle said. “Crime in Mattatuck? Is it a homicide?”
“I don’t think so,” Kyle said. “I’ve got to go. I’ll tell you about it later if there’s anything to tell.”
“It’ll probably be another one of those convenience store robberies,” Darvelle said. “I mean, how stupid can you possibly get, anyway? They go running into these places and they have to know there are security cameras. They have to know it. The World’s Dumbest Criminals. That’s a show I like. Except I don’t like Tonya Harding, and they always have her on doing commentary.”
“It’s something out at the college,” Kyle said. “I have to go, really. If you find something in the rest of the house, call here and get somebody to come out. I don’t like the way that woman behaves. I don’t think she’s safe.”
“She just comes around and puts up hundreds of those damned flyers,” Darvelle said. “She puts them up and I take them down.”
“Even so. You said she put them up today.”
“She did.”
“So check the house and call if there’s anything wrong,” Kyle said. “I’ll be over after shift. Leave something in the refrigerator I can microwave in case I’m late.”
“Maybe she killed him,” Darvelle said. “Wouldn’t that be an absolute gas?”
“I’ll see you later,” Kyle said.
Darvelle put the phone on the end table near the lamp and got up to go down the hall to her bedroom. Her head hurt a little. She didn’t think she was going to sell the Petrovski house to these people she’d brought out there today. She didn’t think she was going to sell it to much of anybody until she convinced the Petrovskis to bring the price down by at least thirty thousand dollars. It was not the kind of market you could play games in, and the Petrovskis were playing games.
Darvelle stepped out of her shoes. She picked them up and walked down the hall to the master bedroom in her pantyhose. It wasn’t much of a master bedroom. It didn’t have a bathroom en suite. It was just the bigger bedroom of the two, and the one with the walk-in closet.
She stopped at the bathroom and looked in. Everything was what it should be. She went to the bedroom and opened the door and looked in there for a moment, too. There was nothing to see. There was no stage blood on the bedspread. There was no wadded mess of flyers on the carpet. There was no bright-red CHESTER written in lipstick on the vanity table mirror. Honest to God, Charlene Morton was some kind of lunatic.
Darvelle Haymes did not believe in being afraid of her own shadow. She didn’t believe in being afraid of anything. She was certainly not afraid of the ghost of Chester Ray Morton, wherever he might be and whatever it was he was doing.
She sat down on the side of the bed and started stripping her pantyhose off.
It was a good question—just what it was Chester had been doing, and where it was he’d been doing it.
She’d been wondering that for twelve years.
5
The flyers were lying on the counter next to the sinks in the third floor women’s bathroom in Frasier Hall, and that made Penny London very nervous.
She put her two big tote bags on the floor and picked up the flyers, one by one. There were six of them, splayed out in a fan, as if somebody had deliberately placed them for maximum recognition value. She put the flyers down again. It wasn’t as if they were anything unusual. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? they read. Then there was that same picture that was up on the billboard at the front entrance to the college. It had to be a dozen years since Chester Morton went missing. Penny still remembered him.
She pushed her mop of gray hair out of her face and bent down to the tote bags. She found the one with the shampoo in it and got it out. She didn’t like those flyers. Those flyers meant that somebody had come up to this bathroom, and the reason Penny had chosen it in the first place was because she was sure nobody ever came up here, except perhaps the cleaning staff. It was hard to find bathrooms at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College that nobody ever spent time in. There were too many students looking for places to get stoned.
Penny glanced toward the door. It would be better if she could lock it, but there was no lock on it. If there was an emergency, a hostage situation, one of those school shootings, anybody who came into the bathrooms in this place would be doomed.
She turned on the hot water in the left-hand sink full blast, then turned on the cold a third of the way. Then she bent over and put her head under the faucet. The cold water felt good on her scalp. It felt so good, Penny thought she might give in in a day or two and spend some of her money taking a motel room for a night. It would be wonderful to have a full-on shower for once. It would be even more wonderful to have a full-on bath. She’d promised herself she’d take a hotel room whenever it got to the point where she just couldn’t stand it.
She put shampoo in her hair. She rubbed the soap deep down into her scalp with the tips of her fingers. She put her head back under the faucet and let the soap rinse out. When she was done with her hair, she’d risk taking some of her clothes off and washing the rest of herself. Then she’d change in
to the clothes she’d brought from the car. It was only twenty-five minutes before class. She would have to hurry.
It would be terrible if somebody walked in on her.
Maybe Chester Ray Morton’s mother was still in the building somewhere. Maybe she would come back to see if her flyers had been thrown away by a janitor. Penny had met Chester Ray Morton’s mother when all that had happened, and she was of the opinion that the woman was a stark raving loon.
Penny took off her shirt, and then her bra. She dressed very carefully for the days she took sponge baths in the Frasier Hall bathroom. She took the fresh shirt and the fresh bra out of her tote bag. She put them down on the counter next to the sink. She got out the Irish Spring soap and the Dove deodorant. She thought it was odd how she’d gone on buying all the familiar brands even after she’d lost her apartment.
Her cell phone rang. It played the theme music from Looney Tunes. Penny took it out of her other tote bag, the ones with the books in it, and stared at it.
It was a good little cell phone, nothing fancy, but with “features” to it, as her sons said. She could read and answer e-mail on it, for instance. She could instant message. She could have a presence online just as if she still had a computer and a home to put it in.
She slid the phone open and put it to her ear. Her body felt oddly exposed, without the shirt. She bit her lip.
“Mom?” George said. His voice still sounded high, as if it had never changed with puberty. He was twenty-three now. “Mom, are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right,” Penny said. “I’m trying to get my act together for class. I’ve got a night class this term.”