by Penny Drake
“Dishwasher is broken,” Slava commented.
I checked the stairs with my flashlight. No tripwires or weakened risers. “I’ll go up first,” I said, and slipped upward without waiting for a response. I was kind of hoping Ms. Hawk would be impressed with my bravery, though she didn’t say anything. The creaking footsteps had stopped, and the rotten smell gained serious strength. I was about a third of the way to the landing when I saw a human-shaped shadow flicker up near the landing.
“Terry!” Ms. Hawk shouted. “Look out!”
A metallic crash boomed above me, and an avalanche of pots and pans cascaded down the steps. I didn’t even think. I leaped over the half wall into empty space, catching the banister as I went over. With an ear-shattering howl, the cast-iron avalanche swept past me down the stairs. I hung by one hand, my feet dangling a good ten feet above the ground. Ms. Hawk and Slava had already jumped aside. Pots, pans, and lids hit the wooden floor at the bottom of the stairs with the sound of a thousand knights in armor slamming into the enemy. My hand started to slip. By a miracle, my other hand still held the flashlight. I checked the area below me. Boxes. No telling what was in them or how fun it would be to land on them. They could be filled with skewers and knives, for all I knew. I tossed the flashlight over the rail onto the stairs, then flung my free hand up so I could get a double-grip on the banister. My shoulders were screaming at me that this kind of activity wasn’t in their contract. I gritted my teeth. My feet scrabbled at the smooth plaster of the half wall and found no toe-holds.
My sweaty hands started to slip. I heard desperate clanking as Slava and Ms. Hawk shoved pots and pans around in an effort to clear the stairs so they could get to me, but in a few more seconds I was going to plunge down into those boxes, and something told me they weren’t for storing pillows. I drew back one leg and kicked the aging plaster as hard as I could. I heard a crack. I kicked again. My left hand slipped off the banister. I flung my arm back up and regained a tentative hold.
“We’re coming!” Ms. Hawk shouted. “Hold on, Terry!”
I gritted my teeth and focused like Kyosa Parkinson had taught me. My world narrowed. No sound but my breathing. No sensation but my heart beating. No problem but the plaster at the end of my boot. I thought of all my strength drawing into a single point in my foot. I drew back my leg and kicked.
My steel-tipped toe smashed through the wall and I was standing, however precariously, on the edge of the hole I’d created. Holding on was much easier now. A moment later, Ms. Hawk and Slava pulled me over the half wall and onto the stairs. A mound of cookware lay at the bottom, though plenty of pans were left on the steps. I sat down on shaky legs and took a swig from my water bottle. It was almost empty.
“Very exciting,” Slava said. “Much better than grading stupid essays.”
“That wasn’t an accident,” Ms. Hawk said.
“I know,” I said, retrieving my flashlight. “I saw a shadow at the top of the stairs.”
“Uncle Lawrence!” Slava boomed. “We’re friends! Belinda send us to check on you! Is all right you come out!”
My first instinct was to shush her. Then I grimaced. Our presence here was definitely not a secret. Why not shout?
No one answered. The stairs were much clearer now, and we got to the third floor without any more trouble. The air was even stuffier up there, and the smell was enough to curl my nose hairs. Ms. Hawk fished a crisp, white handkerchief out of her pocket and tied it around her face. No one carries handkerchiefs in this day and age—except Ms. Hawk.
The third floor was another long corridor, though I saw what looked like side niches and hidden nooks. You were supposed to fill them with comfy chairs so you could steal a few moments with a book or hold a private conversation. These nooks were crammed with still more stuff. Wine bottles made a glass jumble in one, old stereo speakers were stacked in another. At the end of the hallway, I saw a shadowy, uneven mountain. I couldn’t make out what it was—we were back to near blackness except for the flashlights. The stench was awful.
Slava went straight to the first door. “I think smell is coming from here.” She twisted the handle before I could say anything, then made a disgusted noise. “Locked.”
I checked. Slava was right—the smell was stronger over here. I took shallow breaths and tried to breathe through my mouth, though the ambient dust made that difficult.
The door was solid, but I thought I felt it give a little when I pushed. I glanced at Ms. Hawk, who shrugged. I motioned Slava away from the door.
“What you do?” she asked.
“I’m going to break it down,” I said.
“Huh,” Slava snorted.
“What?”
“That door is laughing at you. You hit it, you bounce off like tennis ball.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I said. “It’s all a matter of focus.”
“I see you focus,” Slava said. “I see you focus on cherry cheesecake after supper. I see you focus on movies with Orlando Florida. I never see you focus on smashing down door.”
“It’s Orlando Bloom,” I said. “And don’t you diss my brown-eyed boy toy, radiation girl. Just stand back and watch.”
“Huh,” Slava snorted again.
I stood in front of the door and focused, as I’d done on the stairs. No sound but my breathing. No sensation but my heart beating. No problem but the door before me. I thought of all my strength drawing into a single point in my foot. I cocked a leg, drew back, and kicked.
The shock jolted me from skull to coccyx. I stood there for a moment, one foot on the ground, one planted against the door. Then I made a small, squeaky noise and fell backward. Ms. Hawk caught me. I swore I heard wooden laughter.
“Don’t say it,” I groaned to Slava.
“I would not,” Slava replied airily. “I am very good friend.”
Ms. Hawk set me upright. Once she was sure I was all right, she stood in front of the door and gave it a long look. The dark oak had a dusty boot print on it, but looked otherwise completely unfazed. My head and spine throbbed. Maybe we could find a sledgehammer among the tools in the basement. Or maybe we could—
Ms. Hawk’s scream raised the hair on my neck. Her foot lashed out and crashed into the door. Wood shattered, and the door burst inward with a bang. I stared at Ms. Hawk, mouth agape. The white handkerchief tied around her lower face made her look like a karate bandit.
“You loosened it for me, Terry,” she said charitably.
“I am good friend,” Slava muttered. “Very, very good friend. I don’t say nasty things to my friends.”
“Thank you,” I drawled.
The moment the door opened, the smell intensified, as if the room had exhaled the world’s worst bad breath on us. I stopped breathing through my nose entirely, dust or no dust, but that only helped a little. My lunch churned around inside my stomach.
The room was absolutely black. My flashlight beam speared the darkness and came to rest on a twin-sized bed. A long shape lay beneath a blanket. At the foot of the bed sat a wheelchair. Uncle Howard’s, no doubt. Someone would have to check that bundle. The thought of twitching the blanket aside to expose what lay beneath made my skin crawl like it was covered with cold worms. I looked over my shoulder at Slava and Ms. Hawk. Slava gave me a wide-eyed look and backed away.
“Not my job,” she said. “You get paid for looking, not me.”
“If you don’t want to, Terry,” Ms. Hawk said gently, “I’ll go take a look.”
That gentle tone of voice did it for me. What was I, a little kid? As if I’d never looked at a dead body before! I’d seen my ex-husband dead in coroner’s drawer with a ligature mark on his neck, for God’s sake. I’d watched Saving Private Ryan. Twice! I marched into the room, banged my shin on a pile of newspapers, and fell against the bed. My hand sank into the bundle beneath the blanket and came away wet. I set my mouth and whisked the blankets aside.
A pair of cloudy eyes behind coke-bottle glasses stared up at me from a blacken
ed, decaying face.
“It’s Uncle Howard,” I said, and threw up.
***
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the hallway with my head between my knees and a water bottle in my hand. Slava was kneeling next to me, her hand on my shoulder.
“Just breathe,” she was saying. “My mother always say, ‘If you don’t breathe, you die.’”
“I feel stupid,” I said, trying not to sob. “It’s just a…a dead body.”
“Is disgusting, rotten body,” Slava said. “If you see nasty body like this and have no reaction, then you are stupid.”
“She’s right about that,” Ms. Hawk said. She had shut the bedroom door and was leaning against it. “I feel a bit queasy myself.”
“There, you see? The great Diana Hawk says is okay. You feel better now.”
I did feel better. I swished a little water through my mouth and spat it onto the floor, then used some to rinse my hand. After a moment, Slava hauled me to my feet. Sweat and dust sludged into an itchy paste on my skin, and my stomach quivered. I wanted nothing more than a cool, relaxing shower, an Orlando Bloom DVD and a drink that would burn all the way down. And some cherry cheesecake.
“We should go out and tell Belinda,” I said. “And call the police.”
“Yes,” said Ms. Hawk. “But I want to know the why of a few things. Like why Uncle Lawrence didn’t call the police himself when his brother died in there—it’s clear he passed away some time ago. I also want to know who started that avalanche and just where Uncle Lawrence is.” She pulled her handkerchief down and gingerly sniffed the air. “I also want to know why the smell gets worse farther down this hallway.”
Me, I didn’t want to know, but gave no sign of that to Ms. Hawk. “Let’s get this over with,” I said instead, and headed carefully down the hall. We passed more junk and more closed doors, all of which we ignored. Our footsteps creaked on the bare wood floor, but we didn’t speak. I found myself mulling over the points Ms. Hawk had brought up. Why hadn’t Uncle Lawrence called the cops after Uncle Howard’s death? A number of explanations went through my head, but most of them brought up more questions. Probably Uncle Lawrence was dead, too, and we were smelling his corpse right now.
The huge shadow I had seen at the end of the hallway began to resolve itself. It was a mountain of magazines, some bundled, some loose. They were piled to the ceiling in an uneven pyramid, completely blocking the rest of the hallway beyond. I shined my light over it. It looked…out of place. All the other piles of reading material had been almost tidy, if dusty and neglected. This was random chaos.
“What is that?” Slava said, pointing down to my feet. I pointed my flashlight beam downward. Sticking out from the bottom of the pile was a human hand.
Chapter Four
A shutter clicked and a light flashed. All three of us spun around. A male figure with a camera in front of its face stood behind us. Before I could react, another flash blasted straight into my retina, filling my eyesight with a red haze. As a result, I only heard what came next: a crack, a yelp of pain, a meaty thud and a strange crunch.
When my vision cleared, I saw Ms. Hawk standing over a prone man. She held a digital camera in one hand and was grinding her heel against the floor with a gritty, sandy sound.
“Hey!” the man protested from the floor. “My memory stick!”
Ms. Hawk dropped the camera onto his chest without comment. He grunted, but caught the object before it slid away.
“Get out,” Ms. Hawk told the man in a voice that would have chilled a polar bear.
“Look, I just want—”
“Get out,” Ms. Hawk repeated. “Or I’ll have Terry here do something even worse. Her imagination is more colorful than mine.”
Even though I knew Ms. Hawk was just saying that to scare the guy, I felt my chest puff up a little. “I think I saw a box of rusty skewers in the kitchen,” I lied.
The guy sat up. “All right, all right. Violence isn’t the answer here.”
“You expect me to burst into song?” I asked. “That might be even worse than the skewers.”
“God forbid.” He tried to inspect the camera for damage, then gave up in the dim light. “Can you help me up, at least? Jesus, I’m going to have bruises in places even my doctor doesn’t check.”
“I can check, if you like,” Slava said.
I sighed and reached down to give the guy a hand. A hand. Just like the one sticking out from the monstrous pile of magazines. My stomach turned and I swallowed. Funny as Slava might find it, I didn’t want to heave all over the guy. He grabbed my hand in a firm dry grip and came upright, straight into Ms. Hawk’s flashlight beam.
Oh my.
Okay, let’s get one thing straight. I like men. I like the way they look, I like the way they move, I like the way they smell. I like to watch a well-dressed masculine figure in a candlelit restaurant. I like to see a tousled, scratchy face on the pillow come morning. And every day I thank God and the FDA for reliable birth control.
The moment I realized this guy was a photographer sneaking around taking pictures of squidgy corpses and mangled hands, I imagined a piggy-eyed, weasel-faced guy with receding greasy hair and acne on his nose. Instead I got gold hair, sea-green eyes and a long jaw that screamed for a finger to stroke it. He had the lean, lithe build you earn through honest physical activity instead of in a gym, and he looked to be somewhere in his early thirties. His red polo shirt and brown khakis were streaked with dust. A belt similar to mine was hung with photography equipment. And just below the belt…
I yanked my eyes back upward. Had he caught me checking? I doubted it—Ms. Hawk’s flashlight was still shining in his face. He was probably half blind. I flushed anyway, and my face grew hot.
“Thanks,” he said, and I realized we were still holding hands. I dropped his.
“Yeah,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”
He stuck his hand back out. “Zack Archer. I’m a photographer.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” I said, ignoring the gesture. Gorgeous or not, a photographer wasn’t someone Hawk Enterprises wanted to mess around with. Ms. Hawk kept a low profile for herself and the agency, and I suspect she cashed in a lot of favors to keep us out of the news.
Zack flashed a white smile that turned his face into pure sunshine. I became acutely aware of the grime encrusting my skin and the sweat plastering my hair to my head. Sexy I wasn’t, but Zack looked thoroughly edible, even covered in dust. The dirt just made me want to give him a nice long bath. I told my hormones to take a hike, but all they did was jump up and down and complain that it had been way too long since they’d gotten any decent exercise.
“I’m here to take photos,” he said, holding up the cameras. “Pho-tos. I can spell it for you, if you want.”
“We aren’t stupid,” Slava said. “Answer question before I go KGB on your ass.”
“Who do you work for?” Ms. Hawk interjected.
“I work freelance,” Zack said. “I do a lot for Reuters, and my stuff’s been in Time and Newsweek. Right now I’m hoping for the Detroit Free Press.”
“Why not the National Inquirer?” I asked nastily, just to prove that I had no interest in jumping him then and there.
Zack curled his lip. “I’ve got better things to do than dangle from a helicopter hoping to catch Taylor Swift bonking someone in her back yard. Look, this house is an unofficial Ann Arbor landmark. I figured there might be a story in it, so I came out to check around.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You just happened to come out today. When we were here finding dead bodies. Amazing luck you have.”
“Yeah,” Zack said easily. Then, “Hey! What are you implying?”
“Please leave, Mr. Archer,” Ms. Hawk said in a deadly-even voice. Her crackling presence filled every corner of the dusty hallway, making everything else seem small and insignificant. I would have fled. Zack, however, turned to face her.
“You gonna call the cops?”
; His tone held a hint of sneer, and I got pissed. My hands balled into fists and I started forward again. Ms. Hawk made a small gesture. I pulled myself up short. Slava gave me a hard look, but I kept my eyes on my boss.
“The cops can’t do anything,” Zack continued, completely unaware that death—or least great pain—was breathing down his collar.
“They could arrest you for trespassing,” Ms. Hawk said. “Or on suspicion of murder.”
“Doubtful,” Zack said. There was that near-sneer again. “Trespassing charges are hard to make stick when the owners aren’t…available to press charges. And judging from the smell, these guys have been unavailable for a long time. Besides, I was in Alaska until three days ago. No way I could have killed them.”
“I didn’t mean you might have killed them,” Ms. Hawk said. “I meant you tried to kill Terry with that pan avalanche.”
“Yeah!” I said, surprised this hadn’t occurred to me.
“You’re reaching,” Zack said. “The hall in front of you is completely blocked by…by stuff. I came up behind you, on the pan staircase. I couldn’t have pushed the pans, then snuck down past you to come up the stairs a second time. You would have seen me.”
You could see the implications of this statement steal over everyone’s faces, one by one. Ms. Hawk got it first. Slava got it a second before Zack and I did.
“Okay, who wants to say it?” I said.
“Only other stairway down is blocked by mountain of magazines,” Slava said. “That mean person who started pan avalanche still upstairs. With us.”