Dead Before Dark

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  A total stranger answers the door.

  Oops.

  “I’m sorry….” Lucinda steps back to look up at the house number, illuminated in the glow of the porch light. “I must have the wrong house. I was looking for—”

  “The Bullards? You’re in the right place.” The man—balding, graying, somewhere around retirement age, wearing denim overalls—holds the door open for her. “Come on in. You must be Lucinda.”

  “Yes.” And he must be…

  She really has no clue.

  “I’m Garland Fisher,” he explains, shaking her gloved hand. “I just moved in next door.”

  “Oh! It’s nice to meet you.”

  “You, too. Say, that’s some moon up there, isn’t it?”

  She looks over her shoulder to briefly admire, beyond the bare tree branches, the fat white orb hanging low in the sky.

  Just like in the movie Moonstruck, she finds herself thinking—the memory triggered by that DVD that mistakenly arrived earlier.

  Though tonight’s moon, in its waning phase, looks as though someone sliced a crescent from its curved surface.

  “Neal’s trying to get the grandkids into their pajamas,” his neighbor informs her as she steps over the threshold. “Said for me to tell you that he’ll be right down and for you to make yourself at home. Told me to do the same thing when I popped over a few minutes ago, but really, I just need to borrow a wrench. Got a leaky faucet in the kitchen. Old houses…You know how it goes.”

  She does…. But how does he know that?

  Of course there’s no hidden meaning in his words—no hint of a knowing expression in his pale blue eyes as they gaze at her from behind a pair of wire-rimmed bifocals.

  He’s just a nice man making conversation, nothing more.

  He certainly didn’t break into Lucinda’s apartment while she was away, tamper with her own leaky faucet, and leave behind a scrapbook filled with dead women. Of course not.

  “Was out all day, and walked in a little while ago to find my sink full of water,” he confides, plopping himself down on the couch in the Bullards’ familiar gold wallpapered living room.

  Familiar to Lucinda, that is. She can’t help but notice that newcomer Garland Fisher really is making himself right at home amid the family photos and 1970s era furniture, with the air of one who belongs.

  “All my tools are still packed—just moved in last week—and darned if I didn’t open half a dozen boxes, looking for a wrench, before I decided it would be easier to just borrow one. But it looks like poor Neal has his hands full with those kids. Sounds like it, too,” he adds, casting a glance at the ceiling as running footsteps scamper overhead.

  “I’m sure he does.”

  “Got a couple of grandkids myself,” he confides. “They live with my son and daughter-in-law out in California.”

  “Is that where you moved from?”

  “Oh, no. Lived in Philadelphia all my life.”

  Watching Garland Fisher cross his legs and drape an arm along the back of the couch atop Erma’s homemade doilies, she again notes that he’s a little too comfortable here for someone who’s so new to the neighborhood.

  “Lost my wife last spring,” he adds. “She was just sixty-six. We were high school sweethearts, had been together forever.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He nods. “Couldn’t stand living in our house without her. People say a widower shouldn’t make a move for at least a year, but me, I’ve always thought a change of scenery is good for the soul. Helps you heal. So here I am. New house, new neighborhood, maybe even new career. Always wanted to be a writer, and now I’ve got a couple of stories accepted by a magazine.”

  “Really? Congratulations. Which magazine?”

  “You probably never heard of it. One of those literary short story publications. Pays in copies, not cash—but hey, my name and my work will be in print. That’s what counts, right?”

  “Absolutely,” she agrees, discarding her paranoia in favor of the theory that he’s simply an exceedingly affable, harmless, lonely old guy.

  Mentioning a leaky faucet and a wrench wasn’t a veiled message that he was behind the album in her hands. That’s ridiculous.

  Although when his eyes flick down at it, held stiffly on her lap in her gloved hands, she finds herself growing tense all over again.

  “That a photo album?” he asks.

  Technically it isn’t, but she nods anyway and fights the urge to put it behind her back.

  “Come over to show Neal some pictures, did you?”

  Footsteps pounding down the stairs save her having to reply.

  Neal’s twin redheaded, freckled grandchildren, Maeve and Sean, skid into the room wearing footie pajamas.

  “Hi Lucinda!” Sean—whom his grandfather calls a shameless little flirt—looks thrilled to see her. “Guess what? I lost my front teeth!”

  “I see that. Very cool!”

  He grins broadly, then hollers, “Poppy! Lucinda’s here!”

  Maeve has already busied herself over by the fireplace, picking up a poker and jabbing it into the dying embers beyond the folding glass door and screen.

  “Whoa there, I don’t think that’s a good idea, young lady!” Garland, surprisingly spry, is on his feet and taking the poker out of the child’s hand before Lucinda even realizes what she was up to.

  “No! I want that! It’s mine!” Maeve protests, grabbing at the poker.

  Garland staunchly holds it out of her reach.

  Sean looks at Lucinda. “Want to know a secret Maeve told me? The tooth fairy isn’t real.”

  Lucinda shakes her head. “Maeve, guess what? A secret isn’t a secret unless only one person knows it.”

  “Ah, truer words have never been spoken.”

  Lucinda looks up to see Neal in the doorway.

  As always, she’s momentarily taken aback at the sight of him in casual clothes: a flannel shirt, jeans, and suede slippers. What’s left of his salt and pepper hair tufts on the crown of his head, probably courtesy of a child’s playful fingers, and his green eyes, deeply set beneath bushy white brows in a weathered face, are tired.

  “Maeve! You stop that,” he scolds, and takes the poker from Garland’s grasp.

  “I’m a cowgirl. I have to cook my supper over the fire.”

  “You already ate your supper, cowgirl, and fires are dangerous.” Neal sets the poker in the wrought iron stand on the tile hearth, then glances over at Lucinda.

  “I hate to bother you when you have your family here, Neal. I didn’t know they were coming this weekend.”

  “Neither did I. Erma and I went to visit them in Scranton Saturday, and Patty and the kids decided to ride back with us for a few days. Then tonight Erma decided they needed some mother-daughter time, so they went out to dinner and left the kids with me.”

  “Even the baby?”

  “Not the baby. Her, they took with them. Why not? She doesn’t do anything but sleep, eat, and crap. But these twins are a handful lately.”

  “Where’s Jeff?”

  “Back in Scranton, on E.R. duty all weekend.” Neal turns his attention to his new neighbor. “I’ll go to the basement now and grab that wrench you wanted, Garland. Sorry about the wait.”

  “No rush. Take your time.”

  “After that, Maeve and Sean, you two can sit here and watch Noggin and keep yourselves out of trouble while I talk to Lucinda in the other room.” Even as he says it, he glances worriedly at the fireplace.

  “Don’t think that’s a good idea.” Garland voices the thought on Lucinda’s mind—and probably on Neal’s as well.

  “All right, then, Lucinda and I will talk in here, and you two kids will go wait in the kitchen.”

  Right. With the stove and the knife block and all kinds of food they can choke on. Lucinda opens her mouth to tell Neal she’ll just catch up with him tomorrow, but Garland speaks first.

  “Neal, how about if I sit here and watch TV with the kids while you and your fr
iend go talk in the kitchen?”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “What else have I got to do?” Garland shrugs. “My leaky sink can wait. When you’re done with your visit, I’ll take the wrench and be on my way.”

  “Thanks, Garland.”

  Lucinda follows Neal to the kitchen, past a glass cabinet that holds Erma’s collection of Willow Tree figurines, a table cluttered with little wooden Cat’s Meows, and a shelf lined with thimbles from around the world. Not that Erma’s been any of those places—she asks friends to bring them back to her.

  Neal is always grumbling about Erma’s many collections, but Lucinda notices that he seems to enjoy adding to at least one of them on every gift-giving occasion. Just last week on Valentine’s Day, he’d shown Lucinda a silver bracelet dangling with dragonfly charms he’d bought for Erma, who—of course—collects dragonfly jewelry: pins, earrings, pendants.

  The Bullards’ affectionate marriage is so different from her own parents’. The only thing her mother collects is designer handbags, and every time Dad buys her one, Lucinda suspects, he also buys one for his longtime mistress.

  Neal kicks the swinging kitchen door shut behind them. “Sorry about the mess in here.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  Erma ordinarily keeps a neat house, but the remnants of supper—and perhaps lunch, too—are on the countertops and sink. Crumbs litter the floor, several apple magnets have fallen off the fridge door—Erma collects apples—the throw rug in front of the stove is askew, and one of the blue gingham check curtains that frame the back door window is missing a tie-back.

  “Want some tea?” Neal asks, turning on the flame beneath the copper kettle on the stove. “I’m making some for myself.”

  “Thanks…. We should make this quick, though, so that your neighbor can be on his way.”

  “I just hope we don’t go back into the living room and find him roped to a chair with a fire burning at his feet.”

  She can’t help but grin at that. “The kids aren’t so bad.”

  “No, they’re just…creative. With active imaginations. That’s what Erma keeps telling me. Good thing Mr. Fisher hasn’t been hanging around here all day, or he wouldn’t have offered to keep an eye on them.”

  “He’s a nice man.”

  “Seems that way. Little too folksy for me, though,” Neal adds in a whisper, and she can’t help but smile.

  Folksy about sums up Garland Fisher, from the overalls to his pronoun-dropping speech pattern.

  Folksy—and harmless.

  “Have a seat and I’ll be right back. I want to go grab that wrench from my tool box before I forget.” Neal disappears through a doorway and down the stairs into the basement.

  Lucinda sits at the table. She’s shared many meals here with Neal and Erma, a motherly homebody with an innate need to feed people.

  Quite the opposite of the fashionably skeletal Bitsy Sloan, who exists mainly on lemon water and watercress and believes others should do the same.

  Back from the basement, Neal puts the wrench on the counter beside an open loaf of Wonder Bread and jar of peanut butter, then sits opposite Lucinda.

  “Let me see what you have there.” He gestures at the scrapbook.

  Lucinda lays it carefully on the kitchen table between them. “I found this on my bed when I got home—I was away this weekend, remember?”

  “With that guy Jimmy.” He nods. “Someone broke in while you were gone and left this?”

  “Well, I don’t know that they ‘broke in.’ I mean, the door was locked, so…” She pauses, hearing running footsteps and giggling. Uh-oh. The kids are on the move.

  Neal ignores it, focused on the matter at hand. “So someone has a duplicate key.”

  “It looks that way. Or maybe they came in a window. Some of them don’t have locks, and there aren’t any bars, or anything. And—well, the thing is, I didn’t have the door locks changed, either, when I moved in,” she admits, and waits for him to scold her.

  “Lucinda, don’t tell me that after all these years of living in the city you—”

  “I know, I know. I’ll talk to Peggy tomorrow.”

  “Who’s Peggy?”

  “The super.”

  “A woman super?”

  “Yes, and we can vote, too.” She opens the scrapbook. “I want to show you—”

  She breaks off at the sound of a loud crash somewhere at the front of the house.

  “What the devil…” Neal bolts from the kitchen, with Lucinda on his heels.

  A shattered vase lies on the floor beside a table in the front hall. Garland and Sean are on the stairway, peering over the bannister.

  Seeing them, Neal asks, “Where’s Maeve?”

  “Don’t know…. She kept asking if we could play hide and seek. Told her no, we were watching TV, and the next thing I knew she was gone. Sean and I were just looking for her.”

  “Maeve! Where are you?”

  “I didn’t do it, Poppy,” a small voice announces, and Lucinda spots Neal’s granddaughter peeking around the doorway in the living room.

  She looks so traumatized that Neal’s expression immediately softens. “It’s okay, Maeve. It was an accident.”

  “But I didn’t break it. The man did.”

  They all look at Garland. “You did me a favor,” Neal says. “I never liked that vase, and Erma has so many knickknacks around here that you can’t make a move without—”

  “Not that man.”

  “Wasn’t me.”

  Simultaneously interrupted by both Maeve and Garland, Neal breaks off, confused, looking from one to the other.

  “The other man did it, Poppy,” Maeve explains, still half-hidden—almost cowering—behind the door frame.

  “Which man?”

  “He was scary. I was hiding over there.” She points at the corner behind a coat tree draped in winter garments. “He didn’t see me.”

  “Who?”

  “The scary man,” she says impatiently.

  “What scary man?”

  “The one who opened the door. He knocked the vase off the table and then he closed the door.”

  Neal looks at Lucinda. “Active imagination is right,” he mutters, and she smiles sympathetically at both him and Maeve.

  When Lucinda was young, she herself was often accused by her family of having an active imagination. That’s what you get when you see things nobody else can see and know things you can’t possibly know.

  Lucinda is pretty sure Maeve isn’t a budding psychic, but she feels a kinship to the child nonetheless.

  Neal goes over to Maeve and crouches beside her. “I don’t mind that you broke the vase, but I do mind that you’re lying about it.”

  “Lying is bad,” Sean announces from the stairway above. “Mom says liars don’t get dessert.”

  “I’m not a liar, Sean!”

  “You are too!”

  “I am not!”

  Lucinda begins picking up the shards of broken pottery as Neal referees and Garland surveys the situation, probably grateful that his own grandchildren live across the continent.

  During the first lull, he clears his throat and announces, “Really should get going….”

  “Oh, Garland—” Crouched beside a frustrated Maeve, Neal looks apologetically up at his neighbor. “I’m sorry, I left the wrench on the counter in the kitchen. Go ahead and grab it.”

  “Thanks, Neal. I’ll let myself out the back door then.” He takes a down jacket from the coat tree, shrugs into it, and pulls on a knit navy blue ski cap and matching gloves. “Nice meeting you, Lucinda.”

  “You, too.” She waves with the hand that isn’t full of broken shards.

  Neal goes back to trying to reason with the kids as Garland disappears into the kitchen. A moment later, Lucinda hears the back door open, then close behind him.

  Neal gives up on trying to reason with Maeve, who is still insisting she didn’t lie, and Sean, who is still insisting he’s going to tell their m
other. He sends the kids back into the living room and Noggin, then turns to Lucinda, still picking up pieces of the vase.

  “I’ll get that, Cin. You’ll cut yourself.”

  “It’s fine. I’ve got it. Lucky thing I never took my gloves off, see?”

  He nods. “We’ll take that photo album to be dusted for fingerprints tomorrow.”

  “I knew you were going to say that.”

  “It’ll have to wait until afternoon, though. I have to drive Patty and the kids back to Scranton.”

  And none too soon, she suspects. “Do you really think they’ll find any prints—any that match anything in the database, I mean?”

  Neal shoots from the hip, as always. “Hell, no. But you know we have to check.”

  “I know.”

  Lucinda straightens and heads toward the kitchen with the broken pottery, suddenly exhausted. She isn’t eager to head back home to her apartment after what happened, but what choice does she have?

  As if he’s read her mind, Neal falls into step behind her, saying, “Stay here tonight with us, Cin.”

  For the briefest moment, she entertains the possibility.

  “No,” she tells him, “I can’t. You already have a houseful, and anyway, I have to go back there sooner or later.”

  “You can’t be sure it’s safe.”

  “This time, I’ll lock the windows. And I’ll chain the door.” After she checks under the bed and in the closets again, just to be sure she’s alone.

  “Wait for Erma, at least, so that I can come back with you and check things out.”

  Again, she shakes her head.

  Tempting as the offer is, she can’t let herself take him up on it. He’s been through enough tonight, and he has a long round-trip drive ahead of him tomorrow.

  “I really want to get home to bed,” she tells him. “I’ll take the album with me. Call me when you—”

  She breaks off, staring at the kitchen table.

  The scrapbook is gone.

  On the table, in its place, is a piece of paper.

  Stepping closer, Lucinda sees that it reads:

  74.2

  39.6

  That’s it. Just a pair of decimal numbers, one on top of the other, in the center of the page.