Trap Door

by Sarah Graves

  An antique brass clock under a glass bell ticked softly on the inlaid mahogany serpentine sideboard, built maybe around 1710—yeah, that client again—in the stunningly beautiful black-and-white-tiled hall. It led back to the kind of kitchen featured on home-decorating shows whose budgets run into seven figures. I glimpsed the gleaming brushed stainless-steel side of a Sub-Zero refrigerator tucked between custom-built cherry cabinetry and granite countertops.

  In short, hit man Henderson had the decorator from heaven; that, or his own perfectly flawless good taste plus the fortune to indulge it. “Hello?” Ellie called into the silence.

  No answer. No canines appeared, and neither did anyone else.

  I crept hesitantly into the formal living room, where pale blue and gold upholstery contrasted gorgeously with the marine tones of the carpet. The cream floor-length curtains were the kind you can see in palaces everywhere, sumptuous in fabric yet decorously restrained in their cut and design.

  No frills. No doodads. Nothing but the best. It gave me a bad feeling, because Walter Henderson hadn’t gotten all this by being lousy at his job, had he?

  Not on your tintype. “Jake, look at this.”

  I followed Ellie’s voice down the tiled hall to the den, a low-ceilinged, pine-paneled wonderland of casual comfort whose imaginary entry placard might just as well have read Things Guys Like.

  There was a large but not overly humongous television and a good sound system, stacks of DVDs—Henderson was big on Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and Duke Ellington—soft leather chairs and sofas each equipped with a well-positioned brass reading lamp, a laptop computer on a desk, and the pièce de résistance, a massive stone fireplace that occupied one entire wall of the room.

  You could have roasted a whole pig in the fireplace. I wanted a stiff belt from the Scotch bottle in the glass-fronted drinks cabinet, too. But we didn’t have time. The two hounds from hell could be creeping up on us.

  Or someone else could. “There’s a back door in this place,” Ellie said. “To a terrace. Come on.”

  “But won’t the dogs be…?”

  “Yep.” She nodded grimly. “They’re still on the deck, and the terrace is attached. But I looked into the refrigerator,” she went on as I followed her to the kitchen of Julia Child’s dreams: double ovens, six-burner gas stove, copper pans over a butcher-block-topped workspace big enough to fix meals on the Titanic.

  “Housekeeper’s out doing errands,” said Ellie. “We must’ve just missed her but she’ll be right back.”

  She gestured at the evidence for this: a damp-looking dishtowel, a few drops of water in the brushed-steel sink, and most compelling of all, a note on the refrigerator saying that someone named Erma was out doing errands and would be right back.

  “Without locking the door?” I remembered the keypad mounted by the entrance we’d come in. At the time I hadn’t thought much about it, being more interested in not having my leg turned into mincemeat. But now…

  “Why d’you suppose the alarm hasn’t gone off?” I asked.

  Ellie had opened the refrigerator. She rummaged around, then took something from it. “Maybe it’s a silent alarm,” she replied.

  Not a pleasant thought. Then, without waiting to discuss her next move with me, she stepped out the back door.

  “Here, doggies!” she called, waving a porterhouse steak. At the sight of it my heart practically seized up in terror.

  “Ellie, that’s not going to…urk!” I hurried out after her as the dogs charged slavering around the corner of the deck at us, apparently in a race to see which one of them could reach and devour us first. She tossed the beefsteak confidently at them.

  “Ellie!” I squeaked. The dogs ignored the steak, secure in the knowledge that we were meatier and there were two of us. Jaws gnashing, the animals flew at us.

  It was another thing I’d learned from that old client with all the money: guard dogs are trained not to eat any of the tasty things intruders might toss at them, as the treats might be laced with strychnine.

  Still there needs to be a command that will get the dogs to eat, since obviously they must be able to. For one thing if the creatures get hungry enough but can’t, they might just decide to abandon all their training and consume their owner.

  This whole sequence of thought raced through my mind along with the realization that I hadn’t had my last will and testament updated lately. As the dogs crouched to leap, lips drawn back over teeth that looked as sharp as surgical scalpels, I summoned up the simplest command I could think of.

  “Eat!” The dogs stopped in mid-lunge, looking confused. Then they turned, spotted the steak, and began playing tug-of-war with it, sort of the way a pair of lions on the veldt might toy with a hapless gazelle.

  But once they polished off their appetizer they’d still want Ellie and me for the main course. And now they were between us and the door. So while the animals were still licking their chops, we scurried downhill through a long fenced pasture, under barbed wire sharp enough to inflict ritual scarring, and across a field leading to a big old barn.

  A barn with—thank God!—a door we could open, since the gruesome twosome had indeed made quick work of their snack and were hot on our heels again.

  We fell inside and Ellie slammed the door shut, leaning on it. “Good…heavens,” she gasped.

  “Yeah,” I wheezed sourly. “Safe at last. If you call being trapped here with no way to get out, safe. Why couldn’t we wait inside for the housekeeper to get back?”

  Outside, the dogs snuffled ravenously. “Jake, what do you suppose Bella would do if she found people in your house?”

  Suck them up into the vacuum cleaner, probably, I thought. “Call the cops,” I said.

  After that, the next thing you knew Bob Arnold would be out here arresting us, or at least making our lives miserable. And that was definitely not in our game plan.

  Ellie waved a hand tiredly at me. “Let’s just take one bad thing at a time.” She flopped down onto a bale of straw. “At least the dogs didn’t eat us.”

  Light from the windows above carved shafts of brilliance high in the gloom, but they didn’t reach the floor and otherwise the place was as dark as the devil’s pantry.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a phone in here,” I groused. And of course I hadn’t brought along a cell phone, reception at the lake being pretty much nonexistent.

  “Hmm,” Ellie said, getting up. “That’s a thought. I’d have one out here if this place were mine.”

  She was right. No wires led to the barn but if they existed they were probably buried. Walt Henderson liked things neat if the rest of the place was any indication.

  I peered around. “Is there a lightbulb, maybe? You’d think there’d at least be a…”

  Hmm. Stalls to the left, their shadowy shapes distinct. A big lawn-mowing tractor; I could smell it even before I glimpsed it, sharp reeks of gasoline and engine oil.

  And something else. I turned slowly. Another smell hung in the air, not very nice. Ellie muttered in annoyance as she groped around for a switch. “You’d think it’d be here by the…”

  Squinting around as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I made out the corner of a room built into one end of the barn, under the loft. The room had a tiny window and as I pressed my face against it, hoping to spot a phone beyond the Sheetrock walls and locked wooden door, I spied a shape.

  A longish, didn’t-belong-in-there shape. “Ellie,” I said.

  “Got it!” she uttered triumphantly, and the barn’s interior flooded with white light.

  Along one wall of the room ran a flight of rough stairs, just a pine stringer and steps with a two-by-four railing to the loft above. “Ellie, grab that sledgehammer, will you?” I said.

  She did, bringing it to me from the tool rack on the barn’s far wall. Moments later I had the office room open; the lock was strong but the hollow-core door someone had set it into wasn’t.

  Inside, the not-quite-right shape floated hideously. Above
, the square of brilliance silhouetting the shape was an open trap door. A rope led down through the trap door, stretched tautly from an old iron hook.

  Hung by the neck from the rope was a man, face purple-black, head lolled sideways at an impossible angle.

  What I remembered later was the way his curls haloed around his head, golden in the light from above. But at the time, for the space of an awful heartbeat, I just thought it was Sam.

  In the next moment I realized it wasn’t. The man wore brown trousers, a sweatshirt over a stained white T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes so ragged, the uppers seemed held to the worn soles by only a couple of shreds.

  His fingernails, I noticed, were grimy but unbroken, and the skin of his neck—what I could make out of it through the awful discoloration there—bore no scratch marks.

  So at least it had been quick. “Oh,” Ellie said, sorrow and horror mingling in her voice.

  I nodded, observing the slim wrists, the tanned backs of the victim’s hands, and the soft-looking white skin covering the hip bones, still slender and sharply childlike, where the beltless waistband of the trousers had slipped a little.

  “How long do you suppose he’s been here?” Ellie asked.

  “No way of us telling. Medical examiner’ll have to do that. Poor little idiot,” I added, suddenly angry.

  Cory was his name, I remembered. Cory Trow. Because surely this was him, and after another glance at him Ellie confirmed it.

  “Lost his girl, maybe facing a prison term. Guess he figured his life was over, might as well go ahead and put the punctuation mark on it,” I said.

  And do it here, so no one could miss the significance of the act: See? See what you made me do?

  It was the selfish cry of a petulant child. God forbid that any of it was your fault, I scolded the young man silently.

  God forbid he should suck it up, take a dose of unhappiness for his mother’s sake if not his own. But then I saw something on his hand, a tiny shred of dark material.

  Was it—please, no—a bit of bloody skin? Had Cory’s death not at least been as swift and merciful as I’d at first thought?

  Maybe he’d messed that up, too, ending by clawing at the rope around his neck when it was too late. The thought made me shiver.

  “Found the phone,” Ellie reported from a far corner of the barn where a sheet of plywood on file cabinets made a makeshift desk.

  I stepped out of the room. The phone hung on the wall. Next to it leaned a wooden stepladder. “Wait a minute,” I said. Ellie’s hand was already on the receiver. “Can you bring that ladder over here first?”

  Reluctantly she set the phone down. I put the ladder under the open trap door near the dangling body.

  “Steady it for me, will you?”

  “Jake, I don’t think…” But she held the thing anyway as I took a step up, then another.

  I’ve never enjoyed stepladders, and the nearness of a dead guy didn’t make me any fonder of this one than usual. But at last I reached the second step from the top.

  Nowhere to steady myself. Just me, eye to eye with a hanged man’s hand. To which clung that little shred of something…

  Gingerly I reached out. I drew the hand into the light coming down through the open trap door.

  Below, Ellie sucked in a breath. “Are you sure you should…?”

  “Touch him?” I replied a little too sharply; gosh, this was unpleasant. “Why not? He’s a suicide. And even if he wasn’t, it’s not as if there’d be fingerprints on him.”

  Or as if they’d do anyone any good even if there were; TV dramas may be one thing but real life is another, especially in rural areas. Nobody was going to investigate this kid.

  His skin was cold, fingers rubbery-feeling. As I drew his hand farther out into the light, the body rotated toward me; I glanced up at the face again and wished I hadn’t.

  The shred of fabric clung in a hangnail on his right index finger. Blue; the fabric, I mean, although the finger was a sort of dusky slate color by now also. Tiny, delicate threads; silk, maybe.

  Meanwhile the one thing missing from the scene was a “goodbye, cruel world” note. Then I spotted that, too.

  From my perch on the ladder I could see at an angle through the trap door above. The rope was tied to a hook usually used, I supposed, to haul up those straw bales. In the loft lay more of them, mostly stacked but a few pulled down and shoved together to form what looked like a makeshift couch.

  Or a love nest, a voice in my head suggested speculatively. On one bale rested a flashlight, its lens turned toward me, unlit.

  Under it lay a sheet of paper. Following my gaze Ellie saw it, too, and let go of the stepladder, headed for the loft.

  “Ellie, wait…” But it was already too late. When she released her grip on the ladder it wobbled the tiniest bit. Not enough to shake me off, but I have the kind of equilibrium that turns a wobble into a lurch and the lurch into the kind of motion generally reserved for major seismic events.

  Released from my grip, the dead man’s hand swung back and forth in front of my face as if trying to hypnotize me. From it fluttered the shred of cloth, little more than a few threads.

  “Oh,” I said mournfully as the fabric floated away and vanished. I scrambled down from the ladder and bent to search the floor for it, unsuccessfully.

  For the one tiny bit of hard evidence, I mean, suggesting that perhaps Cory Trow hadn’t really committed suicide.

  That instead he’d been murdered.

  “Here it is,” Ellie said, coming down the loft stairs with a sheet of paper in her hand. Blue-lined and ordinary, it could’ve come from anywhere. Mindful of a hanged man still dangling a few feet from me, I peered at it.

  Printed in pencil, a couple of lines gouged into it. THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED. I HOPE YOUR ALL HAPPY. F*** YOU. CORY

  “So can I phone Bob Arnold now?” asked Ellie.

  “Sure.” Interesting, I thought while she dialed, that Cory had used a kind of paper so unlikely to be traceable, and printed his suicide note in pencil. From someone who was getting ready to do something so permanent, I’d have expected ink.

  But that was grasping at straws. “What’s wrong?” Ellie asked after speaking into the phone and hanging up.

  “Nothing. A piece of something was stuck to his fingernail, is all.” I described the delicate fabric.

  “Oh,” she breathed, looking around for it just as I had but with no more luck. Moments later the wail of a siren cut off and voices approached outside, one of them familiar: Eastport police chief Bob Arnold’s. The other was Henderson’s.

  “…crank call,” he was saying, sounding irritated. “You’re welcome to check, but I guarantee you there’s nobody in that—”

  He must’ve come home after Ellie and I left his house. The barn door opened and Walter Henderson stopped on the threshold, looking from me and Ellie to the body behind us, its dangling legs framed by the doorway of the small room. He said nothing as Bob Arnold appeared behind him.

  “Jake,” Bob said, his tone annoyed. “Ellie.”

  A line from an old TV classic echoed in my head: Lu-cee, you gotta lotta ’splainin’ to do!

  But there was nothing comic about the way the barn’s owner absorbed what he was seeing. No emotion showed on his face, not even surprise; suddenly I felt glad I hadn’t wasted time trying to decide what to say to him. Because it was even clearer to me now than before that the idea of reasoning with Walter Henderson was ridiculous.

  Silvery brush-cut hair, small neat features, pale lightly freckled skin. And those eyes, the color of sapphires, with all the human warmth of the gemstones.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said when they turned on me again.

  “Hello, Jacobia,” Walter Henderson replied. “Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it?”

  He smiled; not a pleasant expression. “In fact I’ve had some people tell me they’d kill to be in my position.”

  When I got home Bella Diamond was making coleslaw. This
time of year, when we were all so hungry for fresh stuff, she put everything but the kitchen sink into it, broccoli and carrots and in prudent doses even slices of raw cauliflower.

  She’d assembled the slivered vegetables and begun adding the dressing, a high-end bottled brand to which she added plenty of celery seed. After that she put in her secret ingredient, its identity so closely guarded by her that even I hadn’t been able to discover it.

  “Now,” she recited to herself as she always did at this stage of the proceedings. “Right before we serve it we’ll pour off some of the liquid and add a dab more cabbage. That way most of it’ll be limp and creamy, but not floppy. Just,” she finished, “the way we like it.”

  Snapping the top onto the plastic container, she placed it in the refrigerator. The round-shouldered old vintage model hummed and clattered in response to having its door opened even briefly. Then she confronted me.

  “That boy ain’t home yet,” she said, brushing cabbage shreds from the cutting board into the palm of her hand.

  “No, Bella, he’s not. And I’m afraid he’s not going to be. Ellie and I found Cory in Walter Henderson’s barn a little while ago. He’s dead.”

  Bella’s face fell, and her eyes searched mine penetratingly.

  “Oh,” she said at last. “Then I imagine things around here are going to get somewhat”—summat—“complicated.”

  Yes, I imagined they were.

  Dave DiMaio

  Miskatonic University

  Dear Horace,

  Still a few tests left to run but they’ll only confirm what we both suspected. Age of ink and paper, chemical composition of the glue, stitching thread analysis and that “leather” binding—all consistent. Let me finish up and I’ll give you a full report. Then we can decide what to tell the book’s owner; needless to say, in this case the unvarnished facts might not be appropriate.

  Speaking of which, perhaps coincidentally—though I think not—I got a call from Bert Merkle yesterday. “Just keeping in touch,” he said. I’ve heard he’s claiming he’s from Harvard now. Guess our halls aren’t ivied enough for him. But he asked about you, which seemed odd since you were never friends. He’s living in Eastport; odder still, don’t you agree?