by Jan Burke
In this photo, Rosie Thayer was smiling. The years hadn’t been as kind to her as they were to Edna Blaylock, but there was a sparkle in Rosie Thayer’s eyes that gave her image a warmth that hadn’t come through in any photos I had seen of the professor.
Pete walked back in the room and came over to his desk. He searched through the chaos on it for a moment, then turned to Frank.
“Call me.”
Frank smiled. “You’ve lost it again, haven’t you?”
Pete looked exasperated. “Just call me, damn it.”
Frank picked up his phone and punched a few buttons. We heard a muffled ringing sound. Pete went toward it, and suddenly it stopped. He turned to give Frank a dark scowl, causing Frank to start laughing.
Frank moved his thumb off the cradle and punched in the numbers once again. The odd ringing returned. Papers were flying everywhere as Pete tried to track it down. Suddenly he yanked the bottom desk drawer open, then threw some file folders onto the floor. He reached in and held up the phone in triumph.
“I forgot I put it in there for safekeeping,” he said.
Much to Pete’s dismay, I lost my struggle not to laugh. I looked over and saw that Frank was grinning. It was one of those moments when I felt so attracted to him I stopped breathing for a while. I exhaled and decided that I wasn’t going to wait to make amends. “Could we go somewhere to talk for a minute?”
He lost the grin, but said, “Sure.”
I followed him into a small interview room. “There aren’t any hidden mirrors or cameras in here, are there?” I asked.
“Not in this one,” he said.
“No recording devices?”
“Not at the moment.”
What the hell? I thought. I pushed him up against the door and then reached up and pulled his head down toward me for a kiss. He was surprised for about one-tenth of a second, then reached around me and kept it going. You’d think one of us had been overseas for six months.
“Does this mean you’re not mad at me anymore?” he asked, keeping his arms around me. “Or do we need to make up now that we’ve kissed?”
“Sorry about this morning. I just felt hemmed in. I thought you were being a little overprotective.”
“I guess I’m not quite over being afraid for you. I don’t ever want to have to go through another night of not knowing where you are or worrying about what someone may have done to you.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder. “I’ll never walk around believing ‘it will never happen to me’ — those days are over. But I can’t just crawl into a cocoon with you, Frank, and you know it. You would grow tired of it. You’d resent my helplessness.”
I felt him shaking beneath me. He was laughing. I couldn’t believe it.
“Irene, if there is one word I’ll never use to describe you, it’s ‘helpless.’”
Well, that made me feel better. “Thanks. But do you understand why I was upset this morning?”
“I think so.” He sighed. “I guess this means you’re getting back to being your old self.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
That started him laughing again, which somehow led to kissing again.
“Damn,” I said. “If we don’t stop now, I’m going to risk being the first person to be arrested for lewd conduct while visiting the Las Piernas Police Department.”
“Plead entrapment.”
“So you won’t be home until late, huh?”
He shook his head. “Believe me, I’ll be there as soon as I can. By the way — Saturday night there’s an office Christmas party. Want to be my date?”
“Sure. Are you still off this weekend?” I asked.
“Depends on what comes up, but it looks like it. Why?”
“Well, I have to work a day shift Saturday, and we’ll be with our friends on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I just wondered if I’d get you all to myself on Sunday. It’s Christmas Adam.”
“Christmas Adam?”
“The day before Christmas Eve.”
“Of course. You are one weird broad.” There was tenderness in that, so I didn’t challenge him.
I WAS WHISTLING as I drove off, at least, I was until I remembered what was up next on the agenda. I pulled over and called Steven from a pay phone. We agreed to meet at the college. I dropped by the paper to turn in the photo of Rosie Thayer, then found Lydia and quickly gave her the rundown on Steven Kincaid.
“You’re concerned about him being alone for the holidays,” she said.
“Right.”
“Invite him to join us, of course. What did I just tell you this morning?”
WHEN I REACHED the building that housed the history faculty offices, Steven was waiting outside the doors. He seemed agitated.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded. “It’s just — I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
“I guess that wasn’t very kind of me.”
“No, I’m grateful. At least I’m a little better prepared.”
“Has the college done anything at all in the way of cleanup?”
“No.” His face was set in a tense frown. “Dr. Ferguson told me that after all the rumors about her, he wanted me to have a chance to remove her belongings, especially personal things, before the cleaning crew worked on the room. I assumed he was being respectful of her memory.”
To change the subject for a few minutes, and because I didn’t know what kind of shape he’d be in later, I asked him about coming over to Lydia’s for Christmas Eve and Christmas. He brightened and thanked me, and agreed to join us.
His spirits dampened again as we made our way up the stairs to the office. The place was deserted: a few days before Christmas and grades already turned in. There was a spooky silence in the building. When we reached the third floor, he stopped and turned through a door leading out into a hallway. I saw that he had already stacked about three dozen cardboard boxes near one of the office doors. He must have spent most of the time he waited for my call by hauling boxes.
“Think you’ve got enough of these?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I hope so.”
His hand shook as he put the key in the door and unlocked it. He pushed the door open and took one step in. He froze for a moment, then swayed and whirled around. He pushed past me, a horrified look on his face. He rushed down the hall to the men’s room. Standing in the doorway, I could see why he had felt sick. It was all I could do not to follow suit.
Edna Blaylock’s office was small and narrow. There was a couch against one wall, a desk facing out toward some windows. There was a small bookcase between the couch and the desk. The other wall was covered by a large set of bookcases that were absolutely full. But there was no sense of the tranquil academic life that might have normally gone on in that office.
The room had been closed up and smelled sickeningly of old blood. And plenty of it. It was sprayed all over the walls, windows and bookcase, and large pools of it had dried in black cakes on the desk and floor. Papers on the desk were matted with it. Only the couch and the part of the bookcase nearest the door were free from the dark stains. Throughout the room, there were small signs here and there of the work of the forensics team. The room was silent, but not at all peaceful.
Steven Kincaid was wrong. Nothing I had said to him could have prepared him for this.
I felt a surge of anger. Ferguson should have at least had someone in to do some preliminary cleanup. I held my breath and went over to the windows and opened them as wide as I could. Cold air came flooding in, but it was fresh air. I looked around, then pulled a large calendar with Ansel Adams photos on it off the wall. I used it to cover up the blood stain on the desk, apologizing mentally to Mr. Adams and to the stately El Capitan of Yosemite — the photo for November. That was all I had time to do before Steven returned.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were red. He still looked shaken.
“Nothing to be ashamed of, Steven. This is worse than I th
ought it would be. Why don’t you sit down for a minute? I’ll bring in some boxes and you can work on the far end of the bookcase until you feel better.”
“It’s not fair to you,” he said, but sank down onto the couch, his eyes averted from the desk. “You didn’t even know her.”
“That’s exactly why it will be easier for me to deal with the worst of it. I won’t throw anything away, I’ll just box it up. Then you can deal with it a little at a time, as you’re able to.”
If you’re ever able to, I thought. And I wouldn’t blame him if that day never came. I got him started on his part of the task, then went to the other end of the room. I moved the calendar off the desk and set it aside. I figured the desk was the worst place in the office, and I wanted to spare Steven as much as possible.
Blood-soaked papers were stuck to the desktop. Once I had gingerly peeled them off, the surface of the desk was not so bad. A neatly clipped stack of phone message slips caught my attention. At first I thought they might be recent calls, but then I saw that some of them were quite faded. The slips were in alphabetical order, and dates on them ranged over several years.
“It was her informal system,” Steven said, seeing me reading them. “They aren’t personal friends or people she contacted often — those names and numbers are in her Rolodex.” He glanced over the desktop, then turned away from it. “I guess the police took that,” he said, not very steadily. “The message slips are resource people. Librarians and researchers, archivists and curators that helped her with specialized research.”
“Such as her research on war workers?” I asked, concentrating now on the notes Edna Blaylock had written on the bottom half of each slip.
“Maybe,” he said. He was sitting on the couch again, looking pale.
“Mind if I keep any that look interesting?”
He shook his head.
“Are you all right?”
He managed an unconvincing smile. “I will be in a minute, I think.”
One of the slips was for a man named Hobson Devoe. The name itself drew my attention, but after I read the words Knew Mom at the bottom, I pocketed it.
I looked over at Steven. He had gone back to work at his end of the room, the worst apparently having passed.
I stuffed all of the contents of the desktop into one box, then closed and labeled it with a black marking pen I found in a pencil jar. For a moment, I registered surprise that there was no picture of Steven on the desk or on any of the nearby shelves, but then I remembered that theirs was a very private relationship.
That thought led to the decision to let him be the one to go through the desk drawers; despite a niggling curiosity, somehow, I didn’t want to invade Edna Blaylock’s privacy in that way. I figured Frank’s crew had probably already been over it with a fine-tooth comb anyway. I started grabbing books from the shelves that had the worst staining.
As much to keep my mind off this grisly task as anything, I asked Steven about his family, his childhood, his interests in history. We were almost finished by the time I had learned his life story. Talking seemed to relax him a little. He even started working on the desk drawers. He asked me about how I got started in journalism, and my work. He shyly ventured to ask if I was seeing anyone, and I told him about Frank. He remembered meeting Frank.
“I liked him. He was very considerate,” he said. But that had brought us back to homicide. He opened a desk drawer and was very quiet all of a sudden. I looked over to see him holding a red candlestick — or rather, the inch or so that remained of a candlestick — in his right palm. Tears were streaming down his face.
“From a special evening?” I asked.
He nodded. “Our first. I asked her to save it. I didn’t think she had.” He drew in a breath, then covered his eyes with his left hand. I put a hand on his shoulder and he broke down completely. I’ve seen men cry before, but it wasn’t the sight of him crying that was so hard to take. It was a soft sound he tried hard to hide, the kind of sobbing sound a person sometimes makes when he realizes that no matter how long he waits, the one he loved will never again share a knowing smile or call his name from another room or weigh the bed down beside him.
He got up after a while and tucked the candle carefully into his pocket, then went off to wash his face. I finished packing up the last of the books and stuff from the desk drawers while he was gone.
“What kind of car do you have?” I asked when he returned.
“A pickup truck.”
“Thank God,” I said, looking around at the stacks of boxes. We had managed to fill all of them.
“I feel bad about making you do all of this,” he said. “You—”
“I know, I know, I didn’t even know her. I know you. Now I even know the name of your elementary school. You’ll just have to accept my help. You’re saving me from having to buy indulgences.”
“I can’t picture you being much of a sinner.”
I thought of the string of blasphemies I had uttered down in the basement of the Express that very morning and laughed. “Don’t make me confess,” I said.
I was relieved to learn there was an elevator in the building, and we used it to haul the boxes down to his truck. When the last one was loaded in, he turned to me and said, “I won’t ever be able to repay you for this. But I won’t ever forget it, either. Thank you, Irene.” He gave me a quick hug and drove off before I could tell him he didn’t owe me a thing.
It wasn’t until I got home and had sat around for an hour or two that I realized I had really overdone it. My hand was especially loud in protesting, my shoulder not far behind. I put on some soft music and tried to relax. I changed into one of Frank’s pajama tops, which came to just above my knees, and crawled onto the couch to wait for him. I tried not to think about what hurt.
When he hadn’t made it by midnight, I put ice on the hand. Still it throbbed. I finally broke down and took a painkiller. It had been a few weeks since I had taken one and I had forgotten how powerful they were. I conked out on the couch.
I don’t know how long I had slept when I felt a draft of cold air. It was dark in the living room, and I was still very drowsy. A little later, I felt a pair of strong arms lifting me carefully from the couch and murmured, “You’re home.” He carried me into the bedroom and tucked me under the covers. I heard him walking back out of the room and fell asleep waiting for him to get into bed.
Later, I finally heard him undressing. “Frank?”
“Sorry, I was trying not to wake you.”
“Thanks for tucking me in.”
“What?”
Something fell into place then. Some gnawing feeling that something wasn’t right. I reached over and turned on the light.
There was a jar of ants sitting on the nightstand.
11
“DON’T TOUCH IT,” Frank said.
Not a problem. I found myself scrambling off the bed and as far away from it as I could, into Frank’s arms. I’m not afraid of insects. I do have difficulty with calling cards left by killers.
“What happened?” he asked.
I told him about being carried into bed. “I thought it was you. He was here. He got inside the house. He touched me—”
Frank held on to me, trying to calm me down. I don’t know if I was more angry or afraid. When my composure returned, Frank called the department and asked for a forensics team. I stayed close to him as he walked into the living room. He went over to the patio door, and without touching it, pointed out that the sliding-glass door was off its tracks.
“I felt a draft,” I said.
“He jimmied it up. We didn’t set the bolt,” he said with exasperation. The door was equipped with a bolt lock that would have made it much more difficult for Thanatos to enter the house that way. But we only fastened that lock when we were leaving the house, since it would be awkward to unlatch in case of fire. We had talked once or twice about replacing the weak handle lock — the one Thanatos had overcome so easily — with one that would be both
strong and easy to open from the inside, but never got around to it.
I could tell that Frank was silently berating himself, and knew it would be useless to protest that it was a case of mutual procrastination. We searched the house together, but as far as we could tell, nothing was missing or disturbed. Unless you count me in the latter category.
Pete came over, and other officers not long after. They tried to ask questions that might elicit some description of Thanatos from me. All I was able to say was that he had been strong enough to lift me; I thought he probably had a build that was similar to Frank’s, but I couldn’t be sure.
It was frustrating for all concerned. No fingerprints other than Frank’s and mine were on the glass door. They didn’t find any prints on the jar of ants, but they took it with them. I knew Thanatos’ hands weren’t gloved when he carried me to the bed, but it came back to me that neither his clothes nor his hands were cold.
How long had he watched me sleep?
BY THE TIME everybody left, we were both worn down. We crawled into bed and held on to each other. I thought I would fall asleep quickly, but I didn’t. I could tell that Frank was still awake as well.
“You’re worrying,” I said at last.
“And I’m pissed.”
“At me?”
“No, no — why would I be angry with you?”
“Because I missed a chance to see who he is. You could have had a description of him if I had just opened my eyes. And your home has been broken into because of me.”
He pulled away to look down at me. “Our home. Right at the moment, I don’t really give a shit about the house. I’m angry because I left you here alone at night, and he could have harmed you.”
“Stop it, Frank. You know how I hate it when you try to take over for God.”
He had nothing to say to that.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Hmmph.”
I decided it was time for a change in tactics. I moved up against him in a positively nasty way, running my fingernails over his chest. He groaned and gave me a kiss. One thing led to several others, and eventually we worked off all possible tension. Just before we fell asleep, I scraped his earlobe lightly with my teeth and whispered, “Merry Christmas, Adam.”