SPEED LIMIT 20, the sign said.
Fuck it.
No fire trucks on the street or along the driveway. No police cars either.
Maybe this was nothing. He was overreacting, no emergency at all, no gas leak at all, a false alarm.
No. A false alarm, there would have been an answer, one of the calls he’d made.
Gas leak for real. Eddie came by, got the kids out of there and Cassie too, saved them all, thank God for that traitorous bastard, a bastard but my bastard, maybe turned out to be a real friend after all, maybe I owe him an apology.
Eddie’s GTO in the driveway, parked behind the van. Cassie’s red VW convertible too. It didn’t compute. Cassie came over, Eddie too, both of their cars here, the van here too. That meant no one drove the kids away, thus the kids are still here and Eddie and Cassie too, so what the hell, then?
He raced up the stone path to the house, noticed all the windows were closed, the house sealed tight as if they were already out of there, on vacation, and as he approached the front door he smelled rotten eggs.
The gas smell.
It was for real. It was strong too, if he could smell it out here. Very strong. That odorant they add to natural gas so you know if there’s a leak.
Front door was locked, which was a little strange if everyone had just run out of there, but he didn’t linger on that, totally single-minded. He grabbed his key ring, got the door open.
Dark in here.
He yelled out, “Hello? Anyone here?”
No answer.
The rotten-egg smell was overpowering. More like skunk, maybe. A wall of odor, sharp as a knife, nauseating.
“Hello?”
Faint noises now. Thumping? From upstairs? He couldn’t tell, the house was so solid. He entered the kitchen, but no one there either.
Distant bumping sounds, but then footsteps nearby, and Cassie appeared, walking slowly, looking worn out, a wreck.
“Cass,” he said. “Thank God you’re here. Where are the kids?”
She kept approaching, one hand behind her back, slowly, almost hesitant. Her eyes sleepy, not looking at him, her stare distant.
“Cass?”
“Yeah,” she said at last. “Thank God I’m here.” Flat, almost affectless.
He heard a high-pitched mechanical beeping coming from somewhere. What the hell was that?
“Where is everyone?”
“They’re safe,” she said, but something in her tone seemed off, as if she wasn’t sure.
“Where’s Eddie?”
A beat. “He’s…safe too.” She drew out the words.
He stepped toward her to give her a hug, but she stepped backward, shook her head.
“No,” she said.
“Cassie?”
He felt the twang of fear even before his brain could make sense of it.
“You’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to open some windows, call the fire department. Jesus, this is incredibly dangerous, this stuff is unbelievably combustible. Where are Luke and Julia?”
The high beeping was getting faster, higher in pitch, and Nick realized the source was a device on the kitchen counter he’d seen before, a small yellow box with flexible metal tubing coming out of it. What was it, and what was it doing there?
“I’m glad you came home, Nick.” Her eyes were smudged, looking like black holes. They darted from side to side. “I knew you would, though. Daddy protects his family. You’re a good daddy. Not like my daddy. He never protected me.”
“Cassie,” he said, “what is it? You look so frightened.”
She nodded. “I’m terrified.”
He felt his skin go cold and goosefleshy. He saw it in her eyes, that same absent look he’d seen before, as if she’d gone somewhere else where no one could reach her. “Cassie,” he said in a gentle and firm tone, hollow inside, “where are my children?”
“I’m terrified of me, Nick. And you should be too.”
With her left hand she reached into the pocket of her denim shirt and pulled out an object that he recognized as Lucas’s Zippo lighter. The lighter decorated with a skull crawling with spiders and surrounded by spider webs, a real stoner lighter. She flipped the top off, one-handed, and her thumb touched the flint wheel.
“No!” Nick shouted. “What are you doing, are you crazy?”
“Come on, Nick, you know I am. Can’t you read the writing on the wall?” She began singing softly, “Oh, I ran to the rock to hide my face, the rock cried out ‘No hiding place.’”
“Where are they, Cassie?”
The electronic beeping, rising all the while in pitch, had now become a steady high squeal, almost ear-piercing. He realized where he’d seen that yellow box before: in the basement, placed there by the gas company serviceman. A combustible gas detector. Supposed to warn you about gas leaks. Beeping got higher and faster as the concentration of gas in the air increased. A steady squeal meant dangerous amounts of gas. Combustible levels. Someone had taken the device upstairs from the basement, and he now knew who.
“I told you, they’re safe,” she said in a flat voice, and her other hand, the one she’d been keeping behind her back, came around to the front now, gripping the huge carbon-steel Henckels carving knife from the kitchen knife rack.
Heart thumping a million miles a minute now. Oh sweet Jesus, she’s out of her mind. Dear God, help me.
“Cassie,” he said, moving closer, his arms outspread to give her a hug, but she raised the knife and pointed it at him, and with her left hand she held up the lighter, thumb on the wheel, and said, “Not another step, Nick.”
The guard’s face appeared behind the tempered glass of the security booth at the entrance to the Fenwicke Estates.
His voice squawked through the intercom. “Yes?”
She flashed her police badge. “Police emergency,” she said.
The guard looked at it through the glass and immediately activated the security gate.
“Jesus, Cassie, please don’t—”
“Oh, I really don’t like this part,” she said, and at that instant he noticed the red slick on the knife blade, still wet.
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The high wrought-iron gate began to open, but so slowly, so agonizingly slowly. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and finally she said, “Please, speed this up. There’s no time to waste.”
“Sorry, I can’t make it go any faster,” the guard said. “That’s as fast as it goes. I’m sorry.”
“Put the knife down, Cassie,” Nick said, all forced calm, voice soft and wheedling.
“When I’m done with my work, Nick. I’m very tired. I just want to finish. It has to end.”
“Your work,” Nick said numbly. “Please, Cassie. What have you done with them?” Fear rose in him like a flood tide.
Please God no not the kids no oh Jesus Christ no.
“Who?” she said.
No please not that dear God not the kids.
“My…family.”
“Oh, they’re safe, Nick. Like a family should be. Safe. Protected.”
“Please, Cassie,” he whispered, a catch in his throat, hot tears in his eyes. “Where are my kids?”
“Safe, Nick.”
“Cassie, please tell me they’re…” He stopped, couldn’t say alive, couldn’t allow himself to think the word, even, because its opposite was unendurable.
She cocked her head. “You can’t hear them? Banging away? They’re locked up nice and safe in the basement. You can hear it, I know you can.”
And he could, now that she pointed it out, hear a distant thumping. The basement door? He almost gasped in relief, his knees buckling. She’d locked them in the basement. They were alive down there.
Where the gas was coming from.
“Where’s Eddie?” he managed to say.
Oh God please if Eddie’s down there he’ll get them out, he’ll figure out a way, he can bust through a locked door, pick it. Fucking windowless basement. Vent grates are too small to cli
mb out of. But he’ll figure it out.
She shook her head. “He’s not down there. I never trusted him either.” She waggled the lighter, the skull leering at him.
“Don’t do it, Cassie. You’ll kill us all. Please don’t do it, Cassie.”
She kept waggling the lighter back and forth, back and forth, her thumb at the flint wheel. “I didn’t ask him to come. I told you to come. Eddie’s not family.”
His eyes frantically scanned the kitchen, then stopped when he saw a shape on the lawn outside the kitchen doors. Through the glass of the French doors he recognized Eddie’s body.
He saw the blood-darkened front of Eddie’s pale shirt.
The contorted position. The unnatural splay of the limbs.
He knew, and it was all he could do to keep from screaming.
Audrey couldn’t stand how slowly the gate was opening, almost deliberately so, as if the residents of the Fenwicke Estates were never in a hurry, because haste was unseemly.
Move it! she screamed in her mind.
She gripped the steering wheel, tapping at the gas pedal.
Faster!
She knew what was going to happen, what the poor demented soul was doing, as she’d done before. Somehow Cassie Stadler had gotten into the Conover house—well, that couldn’t have been too hard, right? She and Conover had become intimate; maybe she had a key—and something had happened to set her off, make her feel rejected. Cassie Stadler was a borderline personality, Dr. Landis had said, with a dangerous psychotic component. An obsession with family, with inclusion, and rejection always propelled her into a towering irrational rage.
Cassie Stadler was going to incinerate the Conover home.
Audrey prayed that the children weren’t home. It was early in the afternoon—maybe they were still in school. Maybe the house was empty. The worst that could happen, then, was that the house would be destroyed.
Maybe no one was home. She prayed that was so.
“Put down the lighter, baby,” Nick said, voice silky, all the fake affection he could summon. “Is this about Maui? Because I didn’t invite you?”
Fuck the knife. He’d lunge at her, grab it.
The lighter? All that took was a flick of her Bic. Could happen by accident. That he’d have to be careful of.
“Why should you invite me on a family trip, Nick? I mean, it’s just for family, right? I’m not family.”
He understood. He realized that he didn’t know her, had never known her, that he’d seen in her only what he wanted to see.
She’d said as much, hadn’t she? “We don’t see things as they are,” she’d said once, quoting someone. “We see things as we are.”
But he knew enough about her to understand what she was saying now.
Audrey could smell the natural gas as soon as she got out of the car.
She saw all the other vehicles in the driveway, two of them belonging to Nicholas Conover, the other she didn’t recognize. Not Bugbee’s. He was all the way across town. It would take him a while. She hoped he knew to get here fast, sirens and lights on.
Her instinct told her not to go in the front door. She had to obey her instinct, times like this.
She took out the pistol from her shoulder holster under her jacket and began walking across the wide expanse of lawn, so very green, heading toward the back of the house where she could enter unnoticed.
She chose the right side of the house, where she remembered the kitchen was. As she rounded the house she noticed a figure standing in the kitchen, a small slender figure, and she knew it was Cassie Stadler.
And then she saw the body sprawled on the lawn.
Running now, low to the ground, she approached the body.
A terrible bloody mess. Sweet Jesus. It was Edward Rinaldi, and it looked as if he’d been disemboweled.
His eyes open, staring, one hand curled by his abdomen, the other outstretched toward the kitchen. Blood-soaked beige knit shirt crisscrossed with slashes as if from a knife.
Most of his shirt front dark with blood, which pooled on the green lawn.
She dropped to her knees to feel for a pulse.
She wasn’t sure.
If there was a pulse, it was so slow she couldn’t detect it. Maybe there was a pulse. Maybe not.
She touched his carotid artery and felt nothing, and she knew for certain the man was dead.
Nothing she could do for him. She set down her pistol, took out her cell phone, got Bugbee on the first ring.
“Alert the ME,” she said. “And body conveyance.”
She was frightened as she’d never been frightened before, and she’d been through some horrific crime scenes. She got up and ran around to the back of the house.
“God, I wasn’t even thinking,” Nick said, shaking his head. “I was in such a rush to just get the kids out of town, get us on a vacation, I really fucked that up. I mean, I really blew it.”
“Don’t, Nick,” she said, but he saw something flicker in her eyes, as if maybe she wanted to believe.
“No, seriously, I mean, how could it be a true family vacation without you? You’ve become such an important part of the family, babe, you know that? If I hadn’t been so distracted with everything that’s been going on at work, I—”
“Don’t, Nick,” she said a little louder, her voice still petulant. “Please.”
“We can still be a family, Cass. I’d like that. Wouldn’t you like that?”
Her eyes glistened with tears. “Oh, Nick, I’ve been through this before, you know. I recognize the pattern.”
“The pattern?” Heart thwacking, because he saw that faint glint of hopefulness in her eyes go dark like the last winking of a dying fire.
“The first signs. It’s always the same. They take you in and make you feel like a part of everything and then something always happens. There’s like a line you can never cross. A brick wall. It’s like the Stroups.”
“The Stroups?”
“One day, no reason, they say I can’t keep coming over, I’m spending too much time over there. Lines are drawn. They’re family, you’re not. Maybe that’s the way it has to be. But I know I can’t go through it again. It’s too much.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, baby,” Nick said. “It’s not too late. We can still be a family.”
“Sometimes a world has to come to an end. So new ones can come into being.”
The electronic squeal, steady, earsplitting.
Audrey considered, then rejected, entering through the French doors that led into the kitchen. No. She’d have to approach with some stealth. She raced to the next set of French doors, but they were locked too. Was there no basement entrance, bulkhead doors or whatever?
There didn’t seem to be.
A hissing sound drew her to the far side of the house near the pool fence. She saw pipes—gas pipes, she realized. Some kind of metal objects were lying on the ground next to the pipe stand, and a crescent wrench. Valves or something. They’d been removed, and maybe that was why the hissing was so loud, like the flow had been turned up full, maybe.
The gas pipes had to lead into the basement, she knew, because that was always where they went.
Over the hissing she could hear a shout. It was coming from a grate about twenty feet away.
She ran to the grate, put her face against it, the skunky, metallic smell of gas nauseating her. “Hello?” she called out.
“Down here! We’re down here!” An adolescent male voice. Conover’s son?
“Who is it?” Audrey said.
“Lucas. And my sister. She’s got us locked in here.”
“Who does?”
“That crazy bitch. Cassie.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“I don’t know—just, shit, will you help us? We’re going to fucking die down here!”
“Stay calm,” Audrey said, though calm was the one thing she didn’t feel. “Listen, Lucas. Help me out. You can help me, okay?”
“Who’re you?”
/> “I’m Detective Rhimes. Listen to me. How’s your sister doing?”
“She’s—she’s scared, what the fuck do you think?”
“Julia, right? Julia, can you hear me?”
A small, frightened voice. “Yes.”
“Are you getting enough oxygen?”
“What?”
“Stand over here by this grate, sweetheart. Make sure you get enough air from the outside. You’ll be okay.”
“Okay,” the girl said.
“Now, Lucas, is there a pilot light down there?”
“A pilot light?”
“Are you near the water heater? There’s usually a pilot light going on the water heater, and if that ignites the cloud of gas, the whole house is going to blow. You’ve got to turn it off.”
“There’s no pilot light.” His voice was faint, distant, as if he’d gone to check. “No pilot light. She must have put it out so the gas wouldn’t ignite too early.”
Smart kid, she thought. “All right. Is there a shutoff for the gas line? It would be on the wall where the gas pipes enter.”
“I see it.”
“You see the shutoff?”
Footsteps. “No. I don’t see a shutoff.”
She sighed, tried to think. “Are any of the doors to the house open?”
“I—I don’t know, how would I know?” the boy replied.
“I think they’re all locked. Is there a key hidden somewhere outside, like under a rock or something?”
She heard a jingling, and a small steel key ring poked up through the slats in the grate. “Use mine,” the boy said.
Thumping from the basement, frantic, the noises reassuring because they were alive. Now in the few seconds of stillness Nick could faintly hear Lucas’s voice yelling. They were alive. And desperate to get out of there.
“I’m going to call United right now,” Nick said. “I’ll get you on our flight no matter what it costs. First class if you want it, but you probably want to sit with us in business class.” He thought, Don’t pick up the phone, even as a pretense. The phone could ignite the gas. He remembered reading somewhere about a woman who had a gas leak and she picked up the phone and called 911, and an electric arc from the phone circuit sparked and the house exploded. “The kids would love that. You know they would, baby.”
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