by M. M. Mayle
He doesn’t go in right away. Even though her car is gone, nothing says someone else might not be inside, so he listens, watches and waits. But not as long as he did last night, when too much carefulness let the lawyer-woman get away.
A minute or two later he steps into a hallway with enough natural light coming from the far end that he can pick out several doors along its length. He pricks his ears one more time, opens the nearest door a crack, and makes out a steep wooden stairway going up. He shuts the door without making a sound; the upper floor can wait till he’s seen everything that matters on this floor.
The next door is to a food closet with more empty shelves than full ones. The door after that opens onto stairs going down to a cellar that doesn’t hold any interest. The last door is to a toilet that’s likely called a powder room in a house like this.
On full alert, he passes through an archway into the kitchen. Within the kitchen, he stays to the inside wall, ready to duck behind the freestanding counter in the middle of the room at any sound or sign of movement beyond the stretch of bare windows opposite. He sidles along, brushing against stove knobs and drawer handles till he’s partway hidden by the big icebox with kid’s crayon drawings stuck to its side by magnets.
Strange as this seems, he finds even stranger that the drawings are old; the colors are faded, the papers are yellowed and show crackles along their edges. He leaves that to be puzzled over later and moves on to another hallway, this one wider and interrupted by doorways without doors.
He sees a room set aside for eating. The kind of setup where you’re either putting on the dog or making too big a thing out of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Next he looks into a room filled with books. The shelves go right up to the ceiling, calling for use of a ladder. The only place he ever saw this many books was a regulation library and, after that, the front room of Big Bill’s place in Bimmerman where Bill kept his hoard of Zane Greys and Louis L’Amours.
The front room here has a piano and a fireplace and a TV and more bookshelves, these holding board games and video entertainments and useless objects you’re supposed to admire just because they’re there. He looks into another room that’s set up as an office, then into one done up prim and proper—the kind of room where the preacher-man sits when he comes to call. The last room he comes to is small, and by the look of the flowered wallpaper and chair cushions, it’s the place where womenfolk sit when they visit.
He goes up the wide front stairs on cat feet and moves along the upper hallway with some beginning notions about the people that live here. Or used to live here. The doors to the first three rooms he comes to are open. A passing glance into the first two rooms is enough to say that kids once lived here,—that’s for sure—but a day-long glance at faded decorations isn’t going to say how long since they lived here. Same with the third doorway he looks into.
This room is bigger, with a grownup bed against one wall, a baby bed on the other side, and a rocking chair in between. Here he can imagine little kids listening to stories and calling out tag lines like the “Wig and a wag and a long leather bag” of his childhood. He sits down in the chair, gives it a few rocks as if the back-and-forth motion will help him figure out who the children were that used these rooms and maybe don’t anymore. No amount of rocking is going to produce that answer, so he moves on to the next room, the last one on this side of the hallway.
The door to this one is closed. He opens it with the same care he’d use if he thought a fire was blazing on the other side. The inside might as well have suffered a fire because it’s been stripped of everything but a few nails where pictures used to hang and a layer of dust showing footprints of the last person who entered.
“Jackassed-fool,” he says half aloud for letting his own footprints get mixed in with the others and immediately goes down on his knees with a pocket kerchief to wipe them all away.
To do a good job of it he has to do the whole room, from baseboard to baseboard, one side to the other, and over to the closet, where the first set of footprints go. He opens the closet door so a high-water mark won’t be left, and while making a clean swipe of the foot-printed floor inside, the kerchief hangs up on something that turns out to be a loose board. After he thinks to look for and pull the chain to an overhead light, he sees that it’s five loose boards he’s happened on. He pries them up in his own shadow and feels around inside the opening.
The first thing he touches is feathery, giving him a start. But when he lifts it out, it’s not the dead bird he thought it was; it’s a beat-up angel figure of the kind you’d stab onto the top of a Christmas tree. Next his hand goes around a small book with a strap closing that he doesn’t have to see to know is a diary. He gropes around some more and comes across something soft that jingles. He’s thinking it’s another holiday ornament till he fishes out a homemade cloth collar with little bells attached, like it was meant for a pet animal of some kind. He brings up a collection of homemade greeting cards tied with a ribbon, and a snap-lid plush-covered box holding what looks like teeth—human milk teeth—along with small samples of hair bound with thread, and a locket greened by cheapness and age.
The bottom of the hidey-hole is paved with what can only be marbles. Lots of marbles. He lifts out a handful, then lets them fall back, forgetting about the clatter they’ll make because something’s caught his eye. Something made of paper is sticking up at the back edge of the opening. Again, he doesn’t have to take a close look to know what he’s touching when he eases a pair of banknotes loose from the rough edge. No real surprise to someone recently grown used to handling money in whole stacks. But the surprise in it is that the two bills he just freed up are each of the one-hundred dollar amount, making this more the hiding place of a grownup than a kid.
While he puts everything back the way it was, he ponders if any of this has meaning for his purpose and decides it doesn’t. Then again, maybe it does. He reaches back into the hole and grabs the little book with the locking strap on it. Writings so secret they’re kept under the floorboards might tell him something after all.
The door to the room across the hall is open. One glance says this is the biggest bedroom in the house and the one the lawyerwoman sleeps in when she’s not whoring herself to the rock star. He enters this room like he’s been sucked into one of those five-X places on 42nd Street and might catch one of those diseases nobody calls by name.
Once that feeling passes, he memorizes the layout and where the furniture is placed before he gets down to particulars. He’s extra careful not to disturb anything because common sense says this is where she’d be most apt to notice. But common sense also says this is where he’s most apt to find out if her going away last night was for more than just the one night.
He checks the trash basket next to the desk for clues. It holds a lot of stickumed yellow notepapers wadded together like a ball of burrs. The time spent pulling them apart and smoothing them out is wasted because none have place names on them, just dates and times and names of people. For what it’s worth, he bothers to notice that the rock star’s name does not appear even once and that all the dates are close to a week old.
The trash basket in the bathroom is empty. So is the toothbrush holder, but that doesn’t say how long it will stay empty. He gets a partial answer in the clothes closet where a count of the empty hangers dropped to the floor provides a clue. He counts ten, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll be gone ten days because ritzy people are known to change their clothes more than once a day. Or so he’s heard. And ever how long she’s gone, he still doesn’t have a clue where she’s gone.
In the hallway, two more doors remain. Both are closed. Now that he’s near enough to see the damage, he’s drawn to the door at the very end of the hall. It’s suffered hammer dents, and the frame is splintered in several places. He half expects the knob to fall off in his hand when he turns it and the hinges to fail when it swings open; he’s prepared to see almost anything on the other side, and all there is to see is the to
p end of the steep stairs glimpsed earlier and a few splinters on the top step.
Why the door was nailed shut, he can’t guess. Nor can he figure out why the door was so roughly whacked open unless it was because somebody was in a terrible big hurry to get out—like they were running from something. He gathers up the splinters and pockets them as reminders to maybe puzzle this through later when his nerves are settled down.
The last door opens into a large cedar closet with an overhead light turned on by a wall switch. A long hanging rod on one side holds a lineup of zippered garment bags. The other side of the space is taken up with a bucket of cleaning supplies, a broom, and an electric carpet sweeper.
None of this interests him as much as the hatchway in the far wall. The beaverboard cover slides away without resistance and gives him a view into an attic he calculates to be above the garage. The wide-plank platform extending eight or ten feet beyond the hatchway holds a few mismatched valises and gym bags and farthest from the opening, some pasteboard cartons bellied out with age. There’s a noticeable gap between the valises and the boxes, hinting that another valise or two might have been stored there till last night.
He boosts himself into the attic and lets his eyes adjust. In light from the louvers up near the eaves, he dares spider across the rafters when he runs out of platform. He narrowly avoids an entanglement with loose wiring he gauges to be above the door opener device in the garage and the sloppy job of someone ill-acquainted with electrical work. He encounters other light sources, none of them intentional. Most are minor clefts lowdown on the outside wall that wouldn’t take any time at all to fix with a caulk gun. Same for the ones on the inside wall next to the chimney where time and weight have caused enough settling that he can see through one chink right into the big main bedroom.
With his eye squinted up close to that opening, he can see a portion of the bed and the bench at the foot of it; backed off an inch or two, the view expands to take in most of the bed and some of the floor in front of the bench. But for what good reason? What’s that going to prove? He retreats across the rafters to the platform and out of the attic space.
Watchful for any splinters he may have missed earlier, he goes down the back stairs to the main floor. At the door out to the garage he hesitates, unready to leave without making a meaningful find—the kind you holler about. Made less cautious by disappointment, he returns to the kitchen and in full sight of any who might happen to look in through the porch windows, pokes through cupboards and drawers in search of luck as much as anything else. When this starts feeling like jackassed-fool behavior, he pulls up a stool to the center counter to let his thoughts run free.
If this was the bar at that Silent Woman place, a shot and a beer would go good right now, maybe help some with the letdown. But there’s no letdown of purpose. Nothing’s changed there. That hasn’t weakened one scrap, and if it ever does, all he has to do is remember when the lawyer-woman mocked Audrey on the TV—made her out to be derelict and deficient in so many words—and he’ll feel purpose rush into him like icy water filling up the Edmund Fitzgerald.
He leaves the house by the same door he came in, walking straight and proud the way he would if he’d just finished doing lawful business. If anyone’s around to notice, they’re not showing themselves or raising an alarm—same as when he arrived and same as last night when he kept vigil and no one appeared interested, not even the crazy old woman who took him for a Cuban yard worker.
FIFTY-FOUR
Afternoon, April 7, 1987
Two hours and change after receiving the stunning update from Amanda Hobbs, Nate reverts to the practice that kept him awake on the red-eye and is undermining productivity now. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t avoid running each new thought through a wringer of plausibility and second-guessing any thought older than this morning. Was it his father who once counseled that introspection is for losers and chronic wrongdoers, neither of which is apt to indulge in it? And who was it that said attention to mundane matters could take your mind off the more pressing ones? If that worked, he wouldn’t be in this mode because he’s accomplished nothing that wasn’t mundane since figuratively chaining himself to the desk in his home study.
The call received from shrewd little Amanda falls outside that classification, however, for coming sooner than expected. When he left her company, he felt sure she was weighing his offer against another and wouldn’t get back to him any sooner than necessary. Now he’s closer to believing she had to deal with a logistical problem and that he’s without any real competition.
He hasn’t yet decided if Laurel Chandler slighted him by relaying her dinner confirmation through her assistant. Whether she did or didn’t wouldn’t be an issue if he were not plagued by this hellacious compulsion to question every little thing, draw comparisons, cite precedents, and analyze previous behaviors ad nauseam. It’s a fucking wonder he was able to plan a dinner menu and order the ingredients in under an hour and it’s a damned good thing he’s not cooking dinner himself because god knows that might require a complete review of current culinary practices.
The fax machine suddenly chirps to life. He ignores it at first, then remembers he specified that the Chandler report be sent to his home number. Gut feeling says this is it when the printout spills onto the floor and accordions back and forth on itself. Upon proving his hunch right, he sees deliverance in the sheer length of the fax; there’s enough here to keep his mind occupied for a good chunk of the time remaining until his only appointment of the day.
He gathers up the fax and personal mail accumulated during his absence and descends to the lower level and the fully equipped gym. He’ll knock off a couple birds with one stone by reading the background report on his dinner guest while working loose a few airline-induced kinks on the treadmill. After changing into shorts, T-shirt, and athletic footwear in the dressing area adjacent the gym, he takes a cursory look at the mail, scans return addresses for any standouts, and hesitates over an envelope originating with the Icon people—the American Institute of Performing and Creative Artists. This he slits open with a thumbnail. A quick looks at the contents verifies that it qualifies for special handling and eventual shredding. He sets it aside for return to the study and leaves the rest of the mail for another time.
With all due deliberation he activates the treadmill and unfolds the fax over the display panel, intending it to play out as he goes. He steps onto the treadmill and eases into a brisk walking pace before he begins reading. The initial fifteen minutes benefit only his legs and lungs because nothing new is revealed by the document. He could be reading from the CV handed around when Laurel Chandler was introduced to the Colin Elliot contingent or from pages of the public records sourced by the compiler of the report. The next few minutes are spent fast-forwarding through the fax for anything resembling details of her private life, and it would first appear that she didn’t have one.
He increases the speed of the treadmill and skims over an excruciatingly thorough review of her formative years. Too bad about the tragic death of the mother, the subsequent death of the grandmother, the father’s failing health, and the need for a conservator, but he has zero interest in how she overcame a difficult upbringing. Or how she acquired a first-class education and achieved an enviable record as an assistant district attorney. All admirable feats to be sure, but meaningless toward establishing that she was ever more to David Sebastian than his one-time ward.
No mention is made of those whispered allegations that had her in a romantic relationship with Sebastian, and very little mention is made of documented romantic entanglements. Just three, by actual count, the most recent with and an up-and-comer attached to the State Attorney General’s office in Albany. He pauses over the name Ryan Walker, but it rings no bells other than to suggest that this was probably the guy the overzealous investigator was hoping to catch in the act when the investigator himself was caught in the act.
He breaks a sweat over details of her financial circumstances
that are not as interesting as the minutiae about how frugally she’s continued to live since becoming an heiress. According to this report, she still resides in the family home—one in a state of genteel decay and inconvenient to her Manhattan workplace—and has bought only one big-ticket item—a less-than-extravagant Range Rover automobile—since coming into a trust fund said to exceed seventeen million dollars and assuming substantial interest in a prominent and thriving New York law firm of a value that can only be guessed at, then gasped at.
If he were vetting her on someone else’s behalf, this would be her most salient feature, the one he would promote most aggressively. That she did not take the money and run amok, as do most newly minted millionaires, would qualify her as exceptional, even it her looks and accomplishments didn’t.
For some inexplicable reason, he feels heartened by this discovery and at the same time regretful that the finding cannot be shared with anyone else. He jumps off the treadmill, abandons the fax to fall where it may, and hurries to the stairs with a better sense of purpose than he’s had in days.
At five of seven, dressed in bespoke business clothes, Nate is in the building lobby ready to receive the exceptional Ms. Chandler. At exactly seven, Laurel Chandler alights from a cab, flashing a glimpse of sensational leg. For a second he faults himself for not being at curbside to pay the cab fare, but rejects that notion after the fact as being insulting and having potential for casting her as one of his physical friends. The doorman sees her into the lobby, where they exchange stiff but cordial greetings. On the ride up to his triplex they observe polite silence and typical stare-straight-ahead elevator etiquette.