Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  “Thinking about it.”

  “Where are you living now?”

  “In the city.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Downtown.” It was all true; she just hadn’t said what city.

  “I used to live in the city,” the woman said. “I’d never go back.” She stubbed the cigarette out under her heel, straightened her hair and led Nina to the door. She tried several brass keys before finding the one that fit. They went inside.

  “Very nice,” said the woman, looking around. “Very, very nice.”

  Nina and the woman walked around the ground floor. It was nice: pine floors, a stone fireplace in the living room and another in the dining room, high ceilings, a big kitchen with up-to-date machinery, nice rugs, nice furniture, including a steel and glass coffee table with a vase of dead flowers on it and a book: How To Survive the Coming Depression.

  “It really is a dream,” said the woman. “This one’s going to go quick, even in this lousy—” She stopped herself and picked up the hall phone. To Nina she said, “I don’t even know the list price.” Into the phone she said, “Hi, it’s me. Is Mrs. G. around?… I’ll wait.”

  While the woman waited, Nina walked up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. She saw the baby’s room, where Laura’s body had been found: crib, stuffed animals, books, some that she had chosen—Go Dog Go, Madeline, Goodnight Moon—and Laura’s room: all drawers and closets neatly closed, bed neatly made, covered with a floral bedspread. It was a nice house that hadn’t been lived in, not even when Laura was alive, except perhaps for the two days that Clea was there.

  Nina went to the window and looked down at the backyard. It was a big backyard with a plastic chaise longue, covered with dead leaves, under an elm tree; perhaps the same chaise longue where Laura had fallen asleep with Clea in the carriage nearby.

  Nina turned from the window. The bedside phone caught her eye. A pen and a notepad lay beside it. Nina riffled through the pages. They were all blank, but she noticed faint impressions on the top one, left by the pressure of the pen writing on the page that had been above it. She tore off the top page and held it to the light. She saw her own phone number traced on the paper. Laura must have called her from this room when she left her message.

  I had a thought after you left.

  And then what? Crumpled the page with the number and tossed it into the wastebasket? Nina checked the wastebasket. She found a Toblerone wrapper and an empty caffeine-free Diet Coke.

  Nina left Laura’s room and climbed the stairs to the third floor. At one end were two small rooms, bare and unfurnished; in the middle was a bathroom that looked unused: no towels, no shower curtain, no toilet paper; at the other end was the turret room. The door was closed. Nina opened it.

  The turret room was equipped as an office. It had file cabinets, computer, printer, a desk. All that Nina took in on an unconscious level. What she was conscious of, first and solely, was the man sitting at the desk.

  Nina made a startled noise. The man, whose back was to her, slowly turned in the chair. He was an old man, with soft white hair, a patrician face and clear blue eyes. He had some papers in his hand. He laid them on the desk, smiled at Nina and rose to his feet.

  He was an old man, but tall, with broad shoulders and a big frame. Still smiling, he moved toward her. He had big hands, veiny and liver-spotted. Nina smelled pesticide, and thought at once of garden shears.

  “Yoo-hoo!” called the real estate woman. “Are you up here? I’ve got to get go—” The real estate woman entered the room and saw the old man. “Yikes,” she said. “Who are you?”

  The old man stood still. “Who am I?” he said. He regarded them calmly, first the other woman, then Nina. “A duly constituted representative,” he said.

  “Huh?” said the real estate woman.

  “Of whom?” Nina asked.

  The old man laughed, briefly, but a laugh that sounded pleased, as though he would have expected a question like that from her. For a moment Nina wondered if he was senile. Then he said, “The attorneys acting for the estate. I am responsible for the inventory of all possessions, goods and chattels.”

  “Oh,” said the real estate woman. She turned to Nina. “Sorry—I got a little mixed up about how the house came on the market and all. It seems there was a … passing away, or something like that.” She looked to the old man for help and got none. Then she poked about in her bag, came up with a notebook, flipped the pages and said: “You’re with Mullins, Smithson and O’Leary? That’s who contacted us.”

  The old man nodded. “I am in the hire of those fine gentlemen,” he said. He was answering the real estate woman, but his eyes were on Nina.

  “In what capacity?” Nina asked.

  The question sounded abrupt and a little rude. The real estate woman must have thought so: she looked at Nina closely, as though trying to see her for the first time. But the old man was unperturbed. “I am the appraiser,” he answered.

  The appraiser wore charcoal gray wool trousers and a heavy tweed jacket with shoulder patches. He might have been a gentleman farmer, or a model in some fashion magazine for the very old and well preserved. “But,” he continued, “you have the advantage of me.”

  “Come again?” said the real estate woman.

  He had chosen an expression Nina had encountered only in nineteenth-century novels. Somehow it made her aware of the slight accent in the man’s speech, faint and indistinct rhythms which didn’t quite match the English lyric.

  “I’m asking,” he explained, “who you might be.”

  “The real estate agent,” said the real estate agent. “And this is …”

  “A prospective client,” said Nina.

  “Ah,” the appraiser said. “How quickly everyone moves these days.”

  “You can say that again,” the real estate woman told him. “How soon do you think everything will be cleared out? So the house will be empty, and all.”

  “Soon,” replied the old man. “Very soon.” He slid his big hands into his pockets and looked out the window at the backyard. He seemed to be thinking. Nina and the real estate woman waited for him to say something. At last he did: “Please don’t let me detain you, ladies.”

  The real estate woman checked her watch. “I am running late.” She turned to Nina: “If you’ve seen enough for now?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man kept gazing out the window. Nina and the real estate woman went downstairs. They were in the front hall, steps from the door, when Nina said: “One second. I just want another quick look at the backyard.”

  “Well, I’m really—”

  Nina ran through the kitchen and the laundry room, into the little mud room leading to the back door. The door had a brass lock, a chain and a heavy sliding bolt. Nina unlocked the lock, unhooked the chain and slid the bolt open. Then she hurried back to the front hall. The real estate woman regarded her for a moment and then smiled.

  “You like it, don’t you?”

  Nina realized her face was flushed. “It’s very nice,” she said.

  “You’ve got good taste. And I haven’t even gotten your name yet.”

  “Nina,” said Nina. “I don’t have my card on me. Why don’t you give me yours and I’ll get in touch?”

  The real estate woman’s mouth opened as if to raise an objection, but she just said, “I’ll look forward to hearing from you,” and handed over her card. “It’s three-fifty, by the way.” Outside, she got into her car and drove away. Nina got into hers and drove around the block. She parked a few hundred feet from Laura’s house and sat in the car, not sure what she was doing or why.

  In less than five minutes, a taxi pulled up in front of Laura’s house. Laura’s door opened and the appraiser came out. He strode down the walk—he moved vigorously, with spring in his calf muscles, like an actor playing an old man, after the director yells “Cut!”—and got into the taxi. It rolled away.

  Nina got out of the car. She walked to Laura’s hous
e and around to the side. A picket fence enclosed the backyard. Nina glanced around, saw no one, hitched up her skirt and climbed the fence. She glanced around again, again saw no one and moved quickly to the back door. She turned the knob.

  The door was locked.

  Nina stood before it. Her heart pounded, as though it had suddenly developed the capacity to reason things out ahead of her brain, and had already comprehended what she was still groping toward. Once more, she looked around. She saw: the backs of other houses—decks, porches, balconies, all unpeopled on a working day in early December; other yards, some with scattered toys and sandboxes, some bare; and a fat crow perched on one of the top branches of Laura’s elm. She heard a power saw, far away, distant traffic, an airliner high above.

  Nina took off one shoe: a sensible loafer with a hard leather heel. She cocked it before one of the lowermost windowpanes in the door, ready to do something unsensible with it. Standing there at Laura’s back door with the shoe in her hand, Nina felt a strange excitement, part fear but part power: the sense that she was taking action for the first time, was about to do something to get her baby back. Not talking to worn-out police detectives, or exposing herself to TV cameras, or paying ransom to pathetic scammers—but performing a forceful, violent, even criminal act. A criminal act had been performed on her; this somehow was an appropriate response. Nina banged the heel of her shoe against the windowpane.

  It didn’t break; it didn’t even crack. Perhaps she didn’t have the makings of a forceful, violent criminal; perhaps Laura had installed special glass. But Nina didn’t consider walking away. Suddenly heedless of possible witnesses, she took a big windup and swung the shoe with all her might. The glass shattered, spraying the mud room with exploding shards. It made a deafening noise. The crow in Laura’s elm took flight, cawing in panic.

  Afraid to turn around, conscious now only of the wild beating of her heart and the unsteadiness of her hand, Nina reached through the hole, unlocked the brass lock, unhooked the chain, slid back the bolt and opened the door. Then she slipped on her shoe and stepped inside Laura’s mud room, crunching glass beneath her feet.

  Every sound she made seemed as loud and clear as if it had been digitally recorded and played back to her through earphones: the crunching glass, a creak on the stairs as she climbed them, a squeak of the drawer in Laura’s desk in the turret room as she pulled it open.

  Nina was thinking of the papers in the appraiser’s hands, and she found plenty of papers in Laura’s desk: spreadsheet printouts, memos she had prepared on cocoa production in Ghana, Brazil, the Ivory Coast, letters from cocoa exporters and cocoa importers, reports to clients, a notebook filled with nothing but dates and figures. What she didn’t find was anything to do with the Cambridge Reproductive Research Center.

  Laura’s computer was an IBM clone, much like Nina’s at the office. Nina switched it on, called up the main menu, checked the file directory: all cocoa, cocoa, cocoa. The drink that sitcom moms fix on cold days when Junior and Honeybun come home from school. Nina shut off the computer and searched the house.

  She found things that interested her, like an old high school yearbook with a picture of Laura as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz; things that upset her, like a four-year-old letter from a man named Philip, who had written: “Please try to understand that this doesn’t mean I don’t like you, because I do, and what we had together was great and will always mean a lot to me, but surely an intelligent woman such as yourself can see that people sometimes grow apart and change. No one is at fault. I just want to try seeing other people for a while and it’s my fondest hope that …” and gone on like that until he ran out of clichés and signed himself, “respectfully and fondly, Philip”; and things she would rather not have seen, like a collection of auto-erotic gadgets neatly packed in a leather case in Laura’s bedside table. But she didn’t find anything that would help her.

  Nina was standing in the front hall, unsure what to do next, when the phone rang. It made her jump inside her skin. At first she ignored it, but it rang and rang and didn’t stop. She decided to pick it up and listen, but say nothing. And she did so, but whoever was on the other end was silent too, and listening. Nina could hear breathing, not deep, but regular and even; electronic puffs and sniffs that came to her ear with that CD clarity that every sound seemed to have since she had committed her criminal act. Nothing was said.

  Nina hung up. The plastic phone glistened with the sweat of her palm.

  Nina returned to the mud room, found a broom and a dustpan, swept up the glass, dumped it in a bag under the sink that contained a Toblerone wrapper and an empty can of caffeine-free Diet Coke. Then she went to the hall and called Hal Palmeteer’s office.

  “Dr. Palmeteer’s office,” answered the receptionist.

  “There’s a broken window at Laura Bain’s house,” Nina said. “Tell Dr. Palmeteer to have it fixed.”

  “What?” said the receptionist. “Who is this?”

  Nina hung up. She went out the front door, walked half a block to her car, past a boy on a skateboard and two girls carrying schoolbooks and cracking gum, all of whom were probably anticipating cocoa, got into the car and drove to the airport. No one clapped the cuffs on her, no sirens tried to terrorize her, no one looked at her twice. Crime was easy. It just didn’t pay.

  Nina caught a shuttle full of business people at the end of their day. Some kept working, some had a few drinks, some simply sat looking worried. Nina had a few drinks. Too many, perhaps.

  Jules the doorman had been drinking too. Nina found him slouched on a chair in the lobby with an empty pint in his lap. She banged at the door until his eyes flickered open; he pushed himself up and staggered over, letting her in. His jacket was stained and his breath smelled of vomit. He mumbled something she didn’t understand.

  “You’d better get it together, Jules,” Nina said, “or the management’s going to do something.”

  Jules’s mouth opened and closed a few times, like a guppy gasping on the floor beside its aquarium. “I like you Mish Kishener,” he said. “You’re nishe to me. But manishmen can shove it upitsh ash.”

  Nina rode the elevator to her floor. She walked down the hall, turned the key, entered her apartment. She switched on the lights and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.

  She had almost finished drinking it when she noticed her little electronic typewriter on the kitchen table. She didn’t remember leaving it there. Moving closer, she saw there was a sheet of paper in it. She pulled it out, a sheet of Kitchener and Best letterhead, and read:

  I cannot live without my precious baby. Please, please don’t think too badly of me.

  At the bottom of the page was her signature, written in blue ink. “Nina Kitchener,” it said, each letter shaped exactly as she always shaped it. Nina was still staring at the sheet of paper when she smelled pesticide. She turned in time to see a big liver-spotted hand right in front of her. Then her whole face was covered: eyes, nose, mouth. She started struggling, at the same time smelling another smell that drowned out the pesticide, a new smell that reminded her of high school chemistry classes.

  Then all her senses shut down.

  MATT

  26

  Did the inhabitants of North Andros like Hew Aikenfield, baronet? Matthias would have said so, but they didn’t attend his funeral in great numbers: not Constable Welles, not Moxie, not people who had known him all their lives. Maybe it was just the weather: a raw December morning, with a northeast wind blowing dark clouds across the sky.

  Reverend Christie’s Church of Eternal Life stood on one side of the Conchtown road, a dirt track leading south out of Blufftown. On the other side was the Happy Times Bar. The bar was a small shack, made of tar paper and scavenged bits of lumber; the church, not much bigger, was a concrete block structure, painted turquoise. The bar was turquoise too: there had been a few cans of paint left over. Both buildings were owned by Reverend Christie.

  Behind the church, and predating it, the b
ar and all the other buildings in Blufftown—only the well near the flame tree in the center of the village was older—lay the graveyard. There Reverend Christie supervised the lowering of Hew into a hole—shallow because the limestone foundation of the island reached close to the surface—dug between a grave marked BABY PINDER and another too eroded to read. Then Reverend Christie lifted his eyes to the clouds and addressed God. Perhaps taking a global view and realizing he had to compete with all the other funerals going on in the world at that moment, Reverend Christie spoke in a loud voice, almost a bellow.

  “Thank you, Lord, for giving us the gift of death,” he said. No one was shocked by this introduction: it was the reverend’s standard oration. He went on to explain that death was the sweet release from the hardship of life and thus a sign of divine mercy; some in the little group of listeners appeared to agree, nodding and murmuring in the pauses he left for nodding and murmuring. But Hew himself served only as a starting point and Matthias soon found his attention weakening.

  After the speech, a boy ran an extension cord into the church and returned with Reverend Christie’s amp. The reverend plugged in his box-shaped Bo Diddley model and accompanied the singing of “Ain’t Givin’ Up, No Way.” Reverend Christie played well, not as subtly and imaginatively as Krio, but well enough to incite a few restrained dance movements in the graveyard. Death, whether good or bad, slipped into the background. The mourners segued into “Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus” and went out on “Amazing Grace.”

  The reverend walked over to Matthias and shook his hand. “We should have sung ‘La Vie en Rose,’” Matthias said.

  “How does that one go?”