The Menace Within

by Ursula Curtiss

  Earl MacWillie, a building contractor who had designed the shelter and done much of the work himself, had amused himself by making its access as invisible as possible, countersinking the ring in the trapdoor and cutting a flap for it of wood veneer that matched the surrounding floor. This also served to placate his wife, who had a mortal fear of the ladder and liked to forget that it existed at all.

  Both son and daughter married and departed, variously to Maryland and New Jersey. As a thirtieth anniversary present to themselves the MacWillies had the house carpeted in deep-piled gray-blue, and a week later, the other part of their celebration, boarded a plane to visit their second New Jersey grandchild. The plane ran out of runway. There were no survivors.

  Their children assumed, erroneously, that the bomb shelter was a matter of record. The bank’s appraiser, attention on square footage and depreciation, did not notice—even Mrs. Mac Willie had not noticed—the L cut with a razor in the fleecy new carpeting outside the kitchen. It was not a traffic area; it was simply a small stub extending off the dining room.

  For all MacWillie’s building expertise, the law required a plumber where there were pipes. The plumber in question had long since moved to another part of the state, but his helper had not. His helper remembered the bomb shelter very well, and, even before it became a refuge for his hunted half brother, had been using it for purposes of his own.

  There was little that was not grist to Harvey Sweet’s mill. A born opportunist who stole as naturally as he breathed, he did a little of everything—roofing, electrical work, furnace repair, drug-running from Mexico— and at thirty-seven would no more have dreamed of taking an eight-to-five job than of taking Holy Orders. Managing to parlay a piccolo confiscated from the high-school music room into a broken-down secondhand car at the age of fifteen had left its mark.

  Nature had equipped him well for his type of life. His features were regular and handsome, his clear blue eyes looked disarmingly candid, his very white teeth flashed frequently in his short woolly brown beard. Even while sliding someone else’s money into his back pocket, he had something of the air of a Robin Hood.

  In July he had brought back from Mexico not marijuana but brown heroin, the security of which, until he could arrange to sell it without danger to himself, posed a problem. His own house wasn’t safe for long. His wife worked; so did he, quite often; he had a number of friends who suspected his activities and to whom he owed money.

  The bomb shelter on which he had worked years ago presented itself as the ideal cache, if only he could get into it—but the MacWillies had been killed in a plane crash and the house was on the market, with viewers coming and going unpredictably. To break in would only focus police attention on the place. Sweet waited, unable to dismiss the shelter from his mind, and one September day when he drove by the real estate sign was gone, there was a car in the drive and the living room draperies were open, a great fringy golden dog was bounding about on the sandy rise against which the house was built.

  Further surveillance showed him that a white-haired old lady was the only occupant. The dog looked valuable. As a kind of throw-away gift Sweet was good with animals and he had no difficulty in kidnapping it, overcoming its timidity by throwing sticks for it well out of sight of the house and finally offering it a beef bone.

  His wife, Teresa, strikingly pretty and startlingly ill-natured, said when he arrived with his cargo, “Fin not going to have that thing in here.”

  “Yes, you are.” Sweet was pleasant, but this tone had more than once preceded the infliction of a black eye.

  “Where did it come from?

  “I’m keeping it for a friend. Don’t let it out, I’ll take it for a walk later.”

  Sweet watched the newspapers, and was pleased but unsurprised when, two days later, a reward was offered for the return of “Golden Afghan female, purple suede collar, lost vicinity west mesa.” He telephoned the number given, and, with the dog at the other end of a piece of clothesline, presented himself half an hour later at the door of the MacWillie house.

  The woman who let him in, and introduced herself as Mrs. Balsam when she had extricated herself from the dog’s standing, full-stretch caress, was as overjoyed as he had hoped. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to have her back. I suppose I ought to pen her, but she does love to run so, don’t you, bad Apple? Where on earth did you find her, Mr. —?”

  “Sweet. Harvey Sweet. She was wandering around in a trailer court near my house late last night, and I could tell she was lost. I was about to call the animal shelter to see if anybody had been asking about her when I saw your ad. Oh,” said Sweet, making dismissive motions as Mrs. Balsam began to address the point of a pen to a check, “l don’t want any reward.”

  She turned surprised greenish eyes on him.

  “I have a dog of my own, a setter,” said Sweet simply and falsely.

  He had intended to put her under obligation, and he succeeded. Mrs. Balsam tried to insist, and then said that he must at least let her pay for his gas, and—a fragrant aroma had begun to waft out of the kitchen— have a cup of coffee.

  From the living room, Sweet studied her as she moved lightly about on sandalled feet. She was in her sixties, he guessed, but not the kind of sixties he was familiar with: either stringy or mountainous, with babysitting for grandchildren the social event of the week. She was tanned and slender, her hair more silver than white. Her left hand dazzled when she moved it. As if aware of his scrutiny, she paused fractionally when she had turned, holding a pair of flowered pottery mugs, and cast an inspecting glance into what was obviously a mirror in the inner wall.

  It was nearly midmorning and there he sat, casual and unhurried in striped jersey and jeans. Mrs. Balsam asked with friendly curiosity what he did, and Sweet said, more accurately than she could guess, “Just about anything. As a matter of fact, I did some work on this house when it was built.”

  Here, because it was scarcely a standard feature, she would make some reference to the bomb shelter—but she only arched her eyebrows at him. “Really? That is a coincidence. It seems like a very solid house, although of course winter is yet to come.”

  Her brilliant gaze was absorbed and in-turned; Sweet could almost hear her trying to think of some work to give him by way of repayment. The dog, having finished the first wild rummaging in its dinner bowl, came and placed its long golden head on his knee, plainly regarding him as the agent of deliverance. Mrs. Balsam said suddenly, “I don’t know whether you do this kind of thing, Mr. Sweet, but . . .”

  She was, she said, going to board a mare for friends later on, but although horses had obviously been kept here at one time—there was a stable capable of holding two—the corral did not seem particularly secure to her. Perhaps he’d take a look at it.

  She led the way along the hall to a door which opened on a side patio. Sweet, instinctively cataloging his surroundings as he followed, threw an examining glance at the carpeting which covered the entrance to the shelter. How much of a problem to loosen it, peel it back, replace it—not once but a couple of times? It didn’t really trouble him, now that he had actually gained access to the house.

  The corral, partly shaded by a giant cottonwood tree, was very insecure indeed. Sweet pointed out a couple of rotting posts that would have to be replaced, and yanked at a strand of wire which broke in his hand. He agreed to shop around for materials and give Mrs. Balsam an estimate even though there was no hurry; the mare would not be arriving until the first of December.

  The Afghan accompanied him dotingly to his truck. Sweet drove away, exhilarated, the first hurdle cleared. He had a strong suspicion that Mrs. Balsam had never so much as changed a faucet washer in her life and that before long he would be doing minor odd jobs. Inside the house.

  When he returned home with the length of clothesline which Mrs. Balsam had meticulously handed back to him, Teresa was cleaning the kitchen with shattering force, furious because she was sure something was being kept from her. Like most people
given to easy rages, she had an impetuous tongue.

  “I hope you got paid something for keeping that animal and then driving all over creation with it.”

  “I did it as a favor,” said Sweet, suddenly bemused. Was it possible that Mrs. Balsam did not even know about the steel-reinforced concrete room beneath her feet? No, that couldn’t be.

  Teresa refused to leave it alone. She flung around from the sink, tossing back her long black hair, placing her hands on her hips. “That dog wasn’t something to do with Claude, was it?”

  Claude, the much younger half brother of whom Sweet was fiercely protective, was at the center of most of their frequent quarrels. After their marriage Teresa had discarded all pretense of liking him, resented her husband’s occasional financing of some small venture which always turned out to be useless, shuddered at Claude’s looks, gone so far, on one disastrous evening, as to say, “If you ask me, there’s something wrong with him.”

  From a physical point of view, it was difficult to believe that the two men had had the same mother. Whereas Sweet had an appearance of straightforwardness and quick intelligence, a hand seemed to have been passed lightly over Claude’s features while they were still malleable, flattening the nose a little, drawing the dark eyes to a narrow unreadable length, creating wide sullen cheekbones. With his peculiar litheness, and the hair he wore at a shaggy length, it would not have been surprising to see him at the edge of a forest clearing, blowgun in hand.

  Sweet, pleased with his own looks, had always felt troubled and obscurely guilty about Claude’s, and championed and indulged his half brother as a result. He had occasional moments of uneasiness about the streak of unpredictability which was beginning to show itself at closer intervals—and would then attribute this disloyalty to Teresa’s influence, and turn upon her the more furiously.

  Now, however, he only said, “Are you out of your mind? Claude’s scared to death of dogs,” and drank a quick beer and drove into town to shop around for posts and wire. The next day, he started work on Mrs. Balsam’s corral.

  Contrary to his usual practice, Sweet did not cheat his new employer out of a penny, and it was only his habitual deviousness that made him fasten two strands of wire very lightly at one corner. He had no clear motive for this, any more than he had had for inserting an empty beer can into the heating duct he had installed in an eighty-thousand-dollar house a few months earlier; it was like a form of doodling.

  Mrs. Balsam was pleased with his work and at the reasonable price he asked for it. On the point of paying him, she said, “Oh, just a minute. While you’re here—”

  The nights were turning chilly, and the wall heater in the living room had a pilot light which kept going out. While Sweet was testing it, the telephone rang. He listened alertly while he unscrewed a plate, emitting little whistles of total absorption in his job, and learned that, unlikely though it seemed, Mrs. Balsam worked two afternoons a week and was being asked to change her hours.

  “Well, actually, Mrs. Williams, two to six on Fridays would be better for me, because the library’s open late that night and I could stop by on my way home and have one less errand for the weekend. Do you still want me to do Tuesdays, or do I move up to Wednesday? . . . All right, let’s stick with Tuesdays—” she sounded a little airy for an employee “—and I’ll be there tomorrow.

  Tomorrow was Friday. Sweet got up from his inspection of the wall heater and announced truthfully that it needed a new thermocouple. “Run you about twenty-three dollars.”

  A cloud moved briefly over the sun, shadowing the room with a suggestion of the darkness to come, and Mrs. Balsam asked anxiously, “Do you think you could do it today?”

  Not even a close observer could have detected any elation in Sweet’s casual nod and glance at his watch. “I can go into town right now. I might have to try a couple of places, though. That heater’s an old make.”

  “I’ll be here,” said Mrs. Balsam cheerfully. “Give a loud bang on the door when you come back, because I’m repotting some plants.”

  Sweet said that he would, and called as she disappeared down the hall to the plant room, “I’d better take this one with me.”

  He did take the malfunctioning thermocouple. After a swift and soundless exploration of the handbag on the floor beside the couch, he also took Mrs. Balsam’s house keys.

  The next afternoon, armed with a tack hammer and a flashlight, Sweet let himself in at the patio door, instinctively quiet although he knew from the absence of the car and the unchecked roaring of the Afghan that Mrs. Balsam was gone.

  The dog was enormously glad to see him, and stood breathing fondly into his ear while he knelt on the carpeting where he remembered the trapdoor to be. He had begun loosening it before he discovered the razor cut in the fleece, invisible except to someone in this closely scrutinizing position. He got the heavy door up, aimed the flashlight beam into welling darkness to orient himself, and descended the steel ladder.

  Above him, the Afghan cried plaintively at this loss of a playmate. Sweet located the light switch, snapped it on, and was almost twenty years back in time.

  The shelter was surprisingly cold, and had the indefinable odor of all subterranean places. The mulberry-colored wool blankets were still on the bunk beds. The shelves were bare of canned goods, but a five-gallon bottle of distilled water remained.

  Bags of a moisture-absorbing chemical hung at intervals from one of the steel beams in the ceiling, and Sweet reached up and hefted one speculatively. It weighed at least a pound, and would make an ideal repository for drugs or the other items which passed into his hands from time to time and could not be marketed right away: silver and turquoise jewelry, watches; once, the entire gold supply of a jewelry-making acquaintance who thought that people might be getting tired of silver and turquoise.

  Still, for all its stamped-in familiarity—it was the first and last bomb shelter he had ever encountered—something about the place puzzled Sweet. There was an electric heater: When he switched it on its coils began to tick at once. He sent a roving glance along the bench for spreading the moisture absorber to dry periodically, and on the floor at one end was a manila folder.

  It was labeled “Warranties” and held documents and service contracts for kitchen appliances. One of them, covering a dishwasher, was dated 1974, and that explained the small oddity. In spite of its chill and its cellar odor, the shelter had not had the air of a place abandoned for eighteen years or even ten, because MacWillie—until the ladder got to be too much for him?—had been storing records here.

  The Afghan gave an imploring bark, and although it was clearly addressed to him alone Sweet snapped off the light and mounted the steel rungs as swiftly as if it had contained a warning. He let the trapdoor down, secured the few inches of carpet he had loosened, brushed the curling gray-blue nap concealingly into place with his fingers. It was with a real sense of shock that, straightening and turning, he came face to face with himself in a narrow oval mirror, so placed that it reflected a strip of front lawn as well. Anyone approaching from the driveway—

  Nobody was approaching; still, he let himself out the patio door with speed, having to thrust back in the eager face of the dog who had plainly thought they were going to spend the afternoon together.

  He mused idly, as he drove home, about the extraordinary merits of the shelter, granted a homeowner of predictable habits. How likely was a woman of Mrs. Balsam’s age to navigate that ladder often, if at all? If a man had to disappear for a day or two . . .

  This was akin to premonition. It was only September, and Ellie Peale would not die for some time yet.

  Chapter 3

  “. . . so you can see how it went straight out of my head until this minute,” said Amanda into the telephone when she had given a fast precis of events. “Were you able—you’ve found someone else, I hope?”

  “No,” said Maria Lopez.

  It was possible to sound tight-lipped over a single syllable. Amanda saw, as on a television scre
en, the packed suitcases waiting beside her neighbors’ front door; the two older children beginning to hop with impatience to the accompaniment of, “Will the airplane wait for us? Will it?”; the Lopezes glancing at their watches and going distractedly to a window to see if Amanda, who had volunteered to take their infant daughter over Christmas while they flew East for a family reunion, was home yet.

  It had seemed so simple then. Rosie Lopez was a waiflike two-year-old just beginning to walk about on little bow legs, with big mournful dark eyes and, very occasionally, an abashed smile as worth watching for as the aurora borealis or the blooming of a rare orchid. She suffered from a disease which prevented her from gaining any nourishment except by way of massive vitamin doses, and the Lopez doctor had advised against a long plane trip for her. On the other hand, it was going to be the last Christmas for Maria’s mother.

  Amanda cleared her throat. She knew where her duty lay; it was just that, at the moment, it had a last-straw aspect. “Why don’t you bundle Rosie up and bring her over? I have to wait for a dog, and if it gets very late we’ll spend the night here.”

  In order to correct any impression of lunacy, she gave clear directions, and Maria said, “Oh, Amanda, I’ll leave you all my money. We’re on our way.”

  And what, wondered Amanda as she hung up, was she going to do with Rosie when she went to the hospital in the morning? Leave her in the sixth-floor waiting room with a toy of some kind under the eye of a friendly nurse. White uniforms were as familiar to her as her own diminutive clothes, and few people could withstand her.

  Meanwhile, this interval had better be used for feeding the palomino mare. Somehow it had sounded easier in the warm and lighted hospital room. Amanda put on her coat, filled a pail with hot water in the hope of thawing the existing water in the barrel instead of uncoiling hoses, found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer, switched on the patio light, and went outside.