Trap Door

by Sarah Graves

  I’m afraid I can’t agree with your thoughts re misleading the book’s owner, though. For one thing, she must decide whether or not to go on living in the house where it was found. I think we’ve got to play it straight with her.

  But all that is a topic separate from what is to be done with the book itself. One potentially good result of telling the owner all we know about it might be that she won’t want it back.

  Meanwhile Lang says nix on the vacation idea for now. He’s deep in research—sends bookishly distracted greetings.

  Horace

  You don’t think she did it, do you?” Ellie asked the next morning.

  I pretended to consider. “Killed Cory? Hmm, a professional killer with a fine personal motive versus his own mother.”

  There’d been no car parked at her house, and even if there had been, Henny hadn’t had time last night to get into one and come after me. “Nope,” I said.

  I was perched on a stepladder smoothing patching compound into the holes created when I’d pulled the plastic down from the kitchen window frames a day earlier.

  “And you’re sure it was deliberate? Someone actually tried to hit you?” Ellie pressed me.

  “Oh, of course someone did,” I said crossly. The patching compound, a gray substance with the consistency of loose mud, had a habit of dripping off the putty knife before I could smoosh it into the hole. Some of the compound fell in a glob to the hardwood floor behind the washing machine. But I could remove it later—fortunately, patching compound cleaned up easily if you let it dry thoroughly—with one of the stray socks huddled together back there, too; so that was where my good gray argyle went.

  “The car swerved all the way over across the road to get at me,” I said, finally managing to get a small dab of the patching compound onto the woodwork, approximately where it belonged. Awkwardly I smoothed it in.

  “If there hadn’t been a big enough crevice in that granite along the street, I’d be as mushy as this stuff now,” I added, waving the putty knife.

  Not smart. Some of the patching compound flew off the knife and onto the windowpane, and the rest went in my hair. And hair is the one thing even dried patching compound doesn’t like to clean up out of.

  “Somebody knows we’re snooping,” I declared. What else could explain two recent attempts at vehicular homicide?

  Careless driving, maybe; still, I thought odds were against a pair of such similar accidents so close together.

  “Well then, have you told Bob Arnold about it? Because if someone’s going around trying to run you and Sam over with cars,” said Ellie, “Bob’s the first one who ought to know.”

  “Sure, call the cops.” I clambered to the floor under Cat’s cross-eyed gaze. She’d adopted the new refrigerator without any hesitation; it was the looking down upon people she enjoyed, not a particular spot from which to do it.

  “I should tell Bob,” I went on, “that someone tried hitting me, and just by coincidence somebody did almost the same thing to Sam, only a night earlier.”

  Cat looked scornful. “And I should also tell him how sorry I am that no, I couldn’t recognize the car again.”

  Its headlights had blinded me. “Nor did I get a look at the driver, and I didn’t get a plate number, either, not even part of one. And neither did Sam.”

  In Cat’s opinion, if you couldn’t leap gracefully from things, then you shouldn’t get up onto them. Helpfully she demonstrated the technique by launching herself acrobatically, landing on my shoulder with every single one of her sharp claws fully extended, and teetering there for an excruciatingly painful moment before exiting the room.

  I let loose some of the curses I’d practiced while working on the old refrigerator. But there was no point to chasing her; if there had been, her nine lives would’ve been used up years ago.

  “I don’t know, though,” Ellie said, packing oatmeal cookies into a plastic box. At the last minute she’d decided a sheet cake wasn’t enough dessert for Cory’s memorial, set to start in twenty minutes.

  I wiped the thickest globs of patching compound out of my hair with a wet paper towel as she went on. “What if his mom got fed up with him, maybe decided she deserved payback for all the heartache he’d caused her, got him to Henderson’s barn somehow?” she speculated. “It’s an awful idea, but…”

  Yes. It was. “But she would have understood the suicide limitation on the policy,” I said. “Or assumed it. That kind of thing is common knowledge to most people, wouldn’t you say?”

  Just maybe not to a teenaged wise guy like Cory, with so little real-world experience or idea of how anything worked. “As for that fabric I spotted at her place, if it was the same stuff I saw on his hand, he probably got it snooping in her things, looking for money,” I said. It was the reasonable explanation. “Hooked a scrap of it on his finger-nail, it was still there when he went to the barn.” Because he hadn’t been in the nail-cleaning habit either, I recalled.

  “I used to hide money from Sam all the time,” I added. Although in the end my own wallet had been the best hiding place; after a while of finding only a few pennies for his trouble, Sam had stopped looking there. Even today I kept my walking-around cash in my pants pocket.

  “You know,” Ellie said, surveying my patch job on the window frame, “if you just smoothed that some more with the edge of the putty knife…”

  “Yes, and if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a tricycle,” I responded irritably, still rubbing my cat-scratched shoulder. And then I saw it, over by the sink where my dead ex-husband used to stand with a cup of coffee, criticizing me while scanning for tasty edibles he could pluck up and devour.

  A Victor-ish shape. Resolutely I scraped patching compound from the putty knife into the wastebasket, and when I looked again the shape had disappeared.

  “We should go,” Ellie said. She hadn’t noticed anything. “I’d like to get all the food on the tables before they start.”

  For the event she wore a lime green turtleneck under a denim smock, red-and-green-striped leggings that would’ve turned my calves into tree stumps but on hers looked divine, and blue suede clogs.

  “Okay.” I surveyed the kitchen. Cat Dancing had returned to the top of the refrigerator; thumping from above said my father was on the roof again, and the dogs snored in their beds.

  And Wade was at work, while Sam was I-didn’t-know-where: situation normal. “I guess I can leave for an hour without the whole house falling down completely in my absence,” I said.

  As if in reply a horrific crash came from upstairs, followed by a cracking sound, a much larger thump, and a string of profanity that put my refrigerator-inspired curses to shame.

  All suggesting that my father had just fallen through the roof into the attic.

  “Leave me alone,” he groused minutes later as Bella dabbed blood from his forehead. “I’m fine. Damned rotten sheathing.”

  Luckily the attic had contained a pile of old mattresses some earlier tenant had thought too unattractive to use but too good to throw out. And he’d landed on them.

  Mostly. “Hush up and sit still,” Bella told him, inspecting the gash over his eye. “You look,” she allowed reluctantly, “as if you’ll live through the day.”

  “Hrmph,” he growled at her. He was the kind of person who if he suffered a calamity and survived, all he wanted was for you to forget it.

  But I was the kind who if he tore so much as a hangnail I had to keep an eye on him for an hour or so, to reassure myself. So over his grumpy protests we took him along to Cory’s memorial gathering, where as usual he gravitated to the prettiest female in the room.

  “My goodness,” Ellie said at the sight of Walter Henderson’s daughter Jennifer flirting shamelessly with my father. “Sociable, isn’t she?”

  The church hall with its white wallboard interior, low ceiling, and green tiled floor still smelled faintly of baked beans and dishwashing liquid from the fund-raising community supper held there the night before. The church ladie
s had helpfully left all the tables up, decorated with centerpieces of construction-paper spring flowers that the Saturday-afternoon Bible-study children had made.

  “That’s putting it mildly,” I replied. Tall, blonde, and so tan that she made the rest of us look like we had blood diseases, Jen Henderson resembled an ad for vitamin supplements. Or surfboards.

  Or both. She was wearing a pale blue cashmere sweater over a white wool skirt so short that I could have used it for a belt. While Ellie went to cut more cake for the memorial service attendees, I approached Jennifer; my father retreated tactfully.

  “I know who you are,” she said when I introduced myself and offered condolences on the death of her friend.

  She wore unusual perfume, a faintly exotic-smelling blend of sandalwood and lime, and she’d inherited her father’s eye color: cool blue sapphire. “You and that other one,” she angled her head at Ellie, “you’re who found him. But he was no friend of mine,” she added. “Don’t get the wrong idea about that.”

  Those amazing eyes hardened at some thought she didn’t share with me as around us the few others in attendance—teachers from the high school, a gaggle of rowdy, dungaree-clad young men, a dozen other adults who I guessed might be schoolteachers’ wives and husbands—mingled in quiet conversation. But no one looked as if she could be Cory’s rumored wife.

  “I don’t even know why I came,” Jen declared. “What a waste of time.”

  I was starting to think so, too. Some of Cory’s buddies had begun engaging in horseplay near the refreshments table. My dad ambled over and with a few words urged them in the direction of the cake; sullenly, they complied.

  Then another girl approached us: mid- to late twenties with a jaunty, confident way of moving and short dark hair done up in purple-streaked gel spikes.

  “Hello,” she began amiably, grinning at me. “I’m Ann Radham, Jen’s hipster sidekick.” She had multiply pierced ears, a tiny gold lip ring, and horn-rimmed glasses on her snub nose.

  “Don’t mind her,” Ann added to me as Jen glowered. “She’s irony-deficient.”

  “I want a drink,” Jen Henderson declared in petulant tones, ignoring her friend’s quip and looking around fretfully as if wondering why, now that her wish had been so clearly expressed, the beverage didn’t appear.

  “Later,” Ann told her comfortingly. “Go and talk to people, now, like we said you would. Just make conversation. It’ll look weird if you don’t.”

  So that was the plan: social damage control. I wondered why either of them cared. But Jen obeyed her friend, her sun-streaked hair moving glossily on her shoulders as she turned away.

  One of the teachers stepped to the front of the room and began reciting an earnest homily about “our friend Cory.” But Cory’s actual friends, a spray-can-huffing, video-game-addled bunch of knuckleheads if I ever saw any, stared as if a Martian had stood up and begun quacking incomprehensible syllables.

  “Jennifer’s feeling tense,” Ann Radham said apologetically. “This has all been a shock.”

  “I suppose.” I let skepticism creep into my tone. To shock Jen Henderson you’d need the large, economy-sized brickbat, I’d already decided.

  Ann glanced at me. “Not everyone swims in the deep end of the pool,” she said, acknowledging my unspoken assessment. “But Jen’s a good kid. She just thinks everyone blames her now. For what happened to Cory.”

  I thought about that while taking in Ann Radham’s remarkable costume: a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt and pearl-buttoned sweater, baggy painter’s pants whose multihued stains looked deliberately applied, and turquoise jelly shoes. Her earrings, peeping beneath spikes of that eye-catching purple hair, were Betty Boop figurines, and on her wedding finger was a Captain Marvel decoder ring.

  My own slim jeans, white shirt, and penny loafers suddenly felt terminally dowdy, especially with the patching-compound hair decoration I wore. “Should they?” I asked. “Blame her?”

  Ann made a disparaging face. “Of course not. That’s ridiculous. The criminal charges were all her father’s idea, that whole stalking thing. She just went along with it because he told her to—I mean, he is her dad. As for Cory killing himself…”

  Across the room one of the knuckleheads appeared at Jen’s side and began talking to her, probably on a dare. Smirking, he bounced on sneakered heels while his pals looked on, elbowing one another, massively entertained. After a moment of this Jen turned coldly away, which to his pals seemed the most hilarious thing of all.

  “Cory was a strange ranger,” Ann said. “Jen just liked him for a while ’cause he thought she was so glamorous. Like a movie star, you know? And he thought she was smart.”

  At my look she went on, “Yeah, maybe Jen’s no intellectual giant but just look at his friends. It’s like the cast of Dumb and Dumber over there.”

  “You’ve got a point.” While I watched, Ellie tried her luck at talking to one of the boys: no dice. Maybe if her voice had come out of an Xbox or Game Boy, they’d have paid attention to it. But otherwise, as they say, fuhgedaboutit.

  On the other hand here was Ann herself: smart, friendly, maybe willing to converse in a little more detail about Jennifer Henderson.

  I broached the subject delicately. “Come on,” Ann replied, unfooled by my approach. “If you’re thinking she had anything to do with…”

  “To do with what?” Jen demanded, at my elbow suddenly. And without waiting for an answer, “I’m going to get the car, this is too boring. You can come or not,” she added rudely to Ann Radham, “but I’m out of here.”

  Her good looks and long, athletic stride turned heads as she departed. “Do you know anything about the wife Cory’s supposed to have had?” I asked Ann. “Or a baby?”

  The growl of a sports car engine sounded outside, followed by an imperious-sounding horn toot, sharp as a summons. Ann wadded her napkin into her styrofoam cup, ignoring my questions. “Got to go.”

  “Duty calls, eh?” I said lightly, but putting an edge into it. One thing was already clear; Ann was second banana in this friendship.

  If it was a friendship; something didn’t mesh about the pair. Ann paused, eyeing me. “Like I said before, Jen’s a nice girl. Going to college on a softball scholarship this fall; she wouldn’t have been keeping in touch with Cory anyway once she got there. She’s a pitcher, got a fifty-five-mile-an-hour fastball, if you can imagine.”

  I could; as a physical specimen, Jen Henderson rocked.

  “And I don’t know what you two are up to,” Ann went on, glancing over at Ellie, “but she’s a fun kid. And if you think there’s anything else going on, you are so on the wrong track.”

  “Your loyalty is admirable.” But I must have looked unconvinced. Ann shook her head; the Betty Boop figurines danced.

  “I’ll be at the Bayside later if you want to talk,” she said.

  Oh boy, did I.

  At the time, the Bayside Café on Dyer Street was the place where Eastport’s young smart set would meet to eat, drink, and socialize. An old tube-tired Schwinn bike leaned against the wall outside and a poster on the door still listed the live music acts that had been scheduled for the previous Sunday evening.

  To my surprise Ann Radham’s name was on the poster. As I entered she looked up from behind what appeared to be all the percussion instruments in the world, on the tiny stage tucked into one corner at the front of the café.

  Ranged within reach were base, snare, and tenor drums, crash and suspended cymbals, maracas and gongs and what I thought might be a set of temple blocks, plus more I didn’t recognize.

  “Jennifer get her drink?” I asked.

  Ann nodded. “We went back to her place, she’s got a stash of those little bottles they give you on airplanes.”

  At my raised eyebrows she added, “I never get asked my age, and I don’t drink anyway, so I save them for her.”

  She picked up a pair of drumsticks and began tapping a rhythm out quietly while I glanced around, taking in the casual, post-l
unch atmosphere and the smell of fresh-baked chocolate brownies, a specialty of the house.

  “My bike outside?” she asked, and I indicated that the Schwinn was still there; no sports car for Ann, apparently. The perks of friendship didn’t extend quite that far.

  The Bayside’s tables and chairs were all old-fashioned wooden kitchen sets, painted bright white and mostly occupied now by the café’s usual daytime crowd: laptop-carrying, alternative-music-listening young consumers in the eighteen-to-thirty-five range, Internet-savvy and fully aware that their tastes in everything from art to xerography now ran most of the economy.

  Over the past couple of years Eastport had become a magnet for these young adults, their arrival mirroring the back-to-the-land movement here in the sixties, only with electronics. Just as pleased with themselves about it, too, but not in an unpleasant way. It seemed part of this group’s collective persona in fact, that they were all so darned nice; right now, for instance, a third of them were chatting amiably on cell phones, not a raised voice in the bunch.

  It made me yearn a little for the good old days of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols, if you want to know the truth. And speaking of famous musicians, Ann Radham finished a muted but powerful minute-and-a-half solo performance that if you closed your eyes, you’d have thought it was Buddy Rich.

  I was blown away and said so. “Thanks. That and a buck fifty will get me a cup of coffee,” she replied, getting up from behind the drum kit.

  She seemed at ease with me already, but why wouldn’t she be? Ann Radham might be quirky but she was also clearly the kind of girl who’d had a good, strong sense of herself by about age two, I estimated admiringly.

  “Come on, I gotta eat something,” she declared, gesturing for me to follow her.

  We crossed the well-lit room with its soft-drink bar, wide-screen TV tuned soundlessly to CNN, and open kitchen at the back. While she ordered I got coffee from the self-serve counter and took it to a table up front by the big window.