Closet Full Of Bones

by A. J. Aalto

  “It was no joyride,” she acknowledged, and resumed sipping her tea.

  “Did that on your way out?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Hit the landing wrong and just…” He made a whistling noise. “Sailed down those stairs and hit the concrete, huh? Says you dislocated your right shoulder, tore your rotator cuff, nerve damage, multiple bruises and contusions, minor skull fracture?”

  “A lot of stairs,” she said. “I hit a few on the way down.”

  “Your sister called an ambulance,” he said.

  “Of course. Wouldn’t you?”

  He sensed her stiffening towards defensive, so he nodded and backed off, sipping his tea and taking a moment to let her relax. When he saw her shoulders release, he said, “You and your sister seem to have a very close relationship. I envy that. My sister and I don't get along.” He rolled his eyes. “Can’t even be in the same room for Thanksgiving, Christmas. We visit my mother on separate days.”

  Gillian’s flat gaze said she wasn’t buying what he was trying to sell. She sipped in silence. He cut it.

  “Gillian, do you know where Mike Deacon is?”

  “As I told Detective Sauffs, I think one of his criminal friends probably did something to him,” she said. “I don’t hang out with criminals, so I have no idea who they are or what they might have done.”

  “Would you say you got along with your sister’s new fiancé?”

  “Not hardly,” she admitted, much as she had to Ray Sauffs years ago, “but I kept the peace for Frankie.”

  “Why would your sister tell the detective that you and Mike got along well?”

  “Frankie sees the world through rose colored glasses,” Gillian answered easily, and he heard the truth. “Her world is butterflies and flowers blooming, and even when her sunny days turn to storms, those storms are beautiful. That’s why…” She choked off whatever she’d been about to say, then continued, “Truly ugly things hit her hard. She never expects the worst. She just can’t see them coming.”

  Like you do, Dean finished mentally. “How do ugly things hit you, Gillian?”

  “Like a flight of stairs.” She left that hang as the air chilled between them. “They very rarely surprise me,” she said, and a knowing look told him that she knew damn well he was the same in that respect; a loud and clear let’s-get-real tilted the side of her mouth.

  “If I get a search warrant for your sister’s house,” he said, lowering his voice to serious, “am I going to find anything that implicates either of you in his disappearance?”

  “Would you like to search my house, constable?”

  “I think it’s odd that you hurt yourself the same day this man disappeared,” Dean told her honestly. “I think it looks bad.”

  “It didn’t feel good, I assure you.”

  “Did you have company on your fall, Gillian?”

  “If I did,” she fired back, “then surely the ambulance guys would have taken us both to the hospital, doesn’t that make sense?”

  “If they saw a second body, yes,” he agreed. “If that second body had been dragged off into another place…”

  “You think my tiny sister dragged a two hundred pound man up all those stairs by herself and hid him?” She gave a derisive snort. “Apparently, you don’t know my sister. She doesn’t do physical labor. There’s no way she would have thought of such a thing, never mind managed it.”

  “Maybe she had help.”

  “Yes, I got off the floor with my dislocated shoulder and torn muscles and skull fracture to help her hide a body,” she said, dripping sarcasm. “Instead of just calling my husband, a police officer, to report an accident and get help.”

  “I have no doubt, that if you had been conscious, you’d have done it the right way,” he said, feeling like he was definitely onto something. “But you weren’t conscious. And she panicked. And he was dead. But you needed help. So she dragged him off somewhere, and hid his body, and then called you an ambulance. And then she tried to wake you so she could tell you not to say anything about Mike Deacon and the fall. There’s a nurse on record saying you didn’t speak to anyone the entire time you were in hospital. They were concerned that might be the effects of a head injury, but I think you were clenching your jaws around a secret, a secret you could tell me right now.”

  “Sorry, it’s a stretch,” she said. Her hand went up to that right eyebrow again to knead it. “There’s no space for nefarious acts in your timeline. My sister’s first instinct in a panic would be to call me. Since I was the one who was hurt, she called an ambulance. Frankie wouldn’t leave me writhing in agony or bleeding on the floor to focus on him. Also, there’s no place to drag a man’s body. A tiny furnace room barely big enough for the furnace, hot water heater, and a big water softener. A storage room full of boxes. Your scenario just doesn’t work.”

  “Where was your sister when you fell?” he asked.

  “She had popped into the bathroom at the top of the stairs after saying goodbye.”

  “Mike Deacon hit you, is that it?”

  Gillian let out a harsh ha! “If I killed every man who hit me, officer, there would be a pile of dead bodies in my wake.”

  Goosebumps prickled on his scalp and crawled over the back of Dean’s skull. “He threw you down the stairs and then came down to finish you off,” he tossed out. “You had no choice but to defend yourself.”

  “With what?” she asked. “One arm and no weapon, and I took out a big man like that? Can you actually picture that?”

  “If it was an accident,” he pushed, keeping his voice insistent but warm and friendly, “and you took Mike Deacon down those stairs with you, I may be able to help you. But you have to come clean. You’ve got to help me out here.”

  “There was no accident,” she said.

  About that, he thought she was being completely truthful, and it threw him off his stride for a moment. He recovered while she refilled his teacup from the pot, his gears turning. “If it was self-defense, if he attacked you, I can also help…”

  “I don’t need any help,” she said.

  Again, he felt she was being truthful, and his hope of solving the case started to rattle a bit like the teacup on his saucer when he tried to pick it up. “You’re telling me that Mike Deacon was not in Frankie’s house when you fell?”

  “I don’t know when Mike Deacon arrived at my sister’s house, but I know I wasn’t there when he came or left,” she said.

  More truth, Jagger thought miserably, though he did not miss the specific, exacting way she had phrased things.

  “Whether he’s gone, or not gone, or here, or somewhere else, I just don’t give a shit anymore. Life goes on, constable. Mike Deacon is not my problem.” She went to one of the boxes near the cupboards and took out a box of cookies, brought them back to the table. “Now, if you’re finished accusing my baby sister of hiding corpses, I can offer you an oatmeal cookie, but beware: they’re raisin, not chocolate chip. I bought the wrong ones.”

  She swung the open end of the pack at him and he selected one, careful not to drop too many crumbs on her table. “Raisins. That might be an indictable offense.”

  “You caught me. Mea culpa.”

  He answered her switch of a smile with a wary one of his own. “Can you think of anything else I might not have asked that could be helpful in finding Mike Deacon?”

  She looked down at the table, tracing the pattern in the polished pine for a few moments. He thought she was thinking about saying something helpful, finally, and found himself holding his breath. She had just lifted her fern green eyes to meet his when the kitchen window exploded loudly and a brick slammed into the drywall next to her head.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Sunday, November 2. 1:00 P.M.

  Gillian Hearth had the worst self-defense instincts of any person under attack he’d ever seen. She didn’t duck, she didn’t flee, she didn’t scream. Frozen in place with her unblinking eyes wide and her hand clutching her teacu
p like she could use the dainty porcelain as a weapon, she just sat there as the second brick whipped into the window, missing her head by centimeters. Jagger dove out of his chair and tackled her to the floor, no time to be gentle with her injured shoulder, wanting her out of the firing range.

  Once she was under the table, he barked, “Stay down,” and sprang to his feet to bolt out the front door.

  He was in time to see a fleeing figure — baseball hat, jeans, old white running shoes, blue t-shirt, five-ten, one-sixty or less — cutting through a neighbor’s yard on the diagonal to jump in a dark grey sedan with the engine running. Dean pelted down the street to see if he could catch sight of the license plate as the brick-thrower sped away, but he only got make and model. Digging out his phone, he called it in as he jogged back to the house to check on Gillian.

  He found her with a broom in her hand, silently sweeping up chunks of drywall, brick bits, broken glass, and a shattered teacup — she’d dropped hers when he grabbed her, Dean supposed, though he noticed then that his was also broken, having toppled from the table. He took the broom and told her softly, “Let’s leave that for the moment so we can get some pictures for the report, okay?”

  “Of course,” she said, blinking at him with a stunned expression. “I should know better.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Do bricks come flying through your windows often enough that you know the routine?”

  Gillian looked at him for a long beat and then started to laugh tiredly. “No, this is a first for me. Hopefully, it’s the last.”

  “We need to teach you how to duck and cover,” Jagger said seriously. “He could have caved your head in.”

  “He?” Those green eyes sharpened. “You saw him? It was definitely a guy?”

  “Yes,” he said, thinking the suspect was either male or a very boxy-shaped female. “Do you know who it might be?”

  She did. He saw that in her face. She wasn’t going to say his name. He saw that, too. To his own surprise, he heard himself asking, “It wasn’t Mike Deacon, was it?”

  “You just spent the last hour suggesting that my sister had something to do with concealing that guy’s body,” Gillian said, her gaze incredulous. “Is he back from the dead to chuck rocks at my head, constable? Make up your mind.”

  “Help me make up my mind, Gillian,” he replied. “Who broke your window?”

  “Just some asshole,” she said.

  “Which asshole?” Dean demanded. “Give me a name.”

  “An asshole by any other name--”

  “Yes, you’re very clever,” Dean interrupted. “You’re quick and witty, and you’re avoiding my question. Drop the verbal sleight-of-hand and level with me. Let me help you.”

  The way she looked away from him, like she was trapped and desperate for escape, troubled him. He knew that look; she wanted to say more. This was a frightened woman, but a proud one, too, a tough nut to crack, as his mother would say; proud women only get tougher when the stress piles on, she’d tell him. The woman before him had a stubborn streak, even as she cradled her right arm. He might not have realized that he’d hurt her when he’d put her on the floor if he hadn’t looked specifically for it. She was very good at keeping this pain off her face.

  “After we get this reported, I’m going to run you into the ER so someone can have a look at your shoulder,” he said. He fully expected her to refuse him, so when she nodded quietly, her eyes filling with tears for the second time since he’d got there today, he knew how badly she must be hurting.

  “Do you want me to call someone for you?” he asked. “Someone to sit in the waiting room with you? Your sister?”

  “No,” she said. “Not Frankie. She’s been through so much lately and she’ll only freak out.”

  “I could sit with you,” he offered.

  “Constable Jagger, I doubt we’re destined to be the best of friends, you and I,” she said with a sad flicker of a smile.

  “I dunno,” he said, “I can hold up my end of a conversation without being crass or indecent. I’m a relatively inoffensive fellow.”

  “An inoffensive fellow who accuses me of murder,” she added. He opened his mouth to point out he’d never gone that far, but she was talking over his attempt. “You could call Paul Langerbeins for me, if you’d be so kind? His card is in my wallet; it should be in my purse in the living room.”

  He turned to step into the room to grab the closest purse he saw, a slim black patent leather clutch. Inside, he didn’t find a wallet, just a jar of Tylenol and a jar of Aspirin, and in a rush, he understood the young man he’d passed on his way in; if there really was Aspirin and acetaminophen in those jars, he’d eat his shorts. Gillian Hearth had a painkiller dependency. After a quick glance, he saw a bigger purse on a pile of boxes near the front door, hanging open to display its guts — wallet, eyeglass case, pencils, assorted make-up. He brought her wallet to her and she fished out Paul’s card, though he had one of those in his own wallet.

  A patrol car rolled up to the curb and Jagger flagged the uniform, waved her in the front door while he dialed Langerbeins. Gillian was staring at the mess, still looking pale and tired. The officer took her details as Jagger recounted what happened to Langerbeins, and Paul said he’d meet them at the ER. He hung up, and after a minute’s consideration, he made another call, this time to his brother-in-law, Ed.

  “Yo, dickface,” Ed answered. “Get that nose job yet?”

  “Hey, thanks,” Dean said. “Wish I could reply freely.”

  “Sucks to be you, copper.”

  Dean could picture Ed’s smug grin. “Uh huh. Look, you got a couple of extra sheets of plywood lying around?”

  “Stupid question,” Ed grumbled. “When do I not?”

  “Mind throwing a couple in the back of your truck and heading up the north end to seventeen Red Maple Drive? It’s one of the firelanes past the old church, there.”

  “Can’t get there until after four,” Ed said, “but yeah, sure.”

  “Could I trouble you to screw them up over a broken window for me? No one will be here. Doesn’t have to be fancy, just temporary until tomorrow so the homeowner can call someone in? She’s on her way to the hospital.”

  “Fuck, sure.” Ed hacked, a heavy smoker’s cough. “Hope everything’s okay. Let me know if you need more than two.”

  “Two should do it,” Dean said. “Appreciate it, Ed. I owe you.”

  He hung up and noticed Gillian Hearth staring at him from around the uniformed officer’s side, considering him intensely as though she was noticing something important. In the years to come, he would look back on that intense look and wonder what Gillian might have said if she’d felt safe enough in that moment to have spoken her mind.

  Their drive to the hospital was done in silence.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Sunday, November 2. 3:55 P.M.

  Paul returned from the Tim Hortons coffee stand near the hospital cafeteria with a green tea for Gillian just in time for the porter to roll her bed back from the X-Ray department into the curtained cubby. He stood aside, leaning heavily on his good leg, nodding at a passing nurse before turning into Gillian’s room and easing into the chair next to her.

  Someone groaned in the next cubby and retched, and Paul did his best to ignore it.

  “Everything go okay?” he asked, handing her the tea.

  “I think it’s fine,” Gillian said, blowing on the steam. “Frankie’s going to be irritated that I didn’t call her.”

  “She’s got her hands full right now,” Paul told her. “Her ex-husband brought the kids down to see the new house. They’re both wearing big rubber boots they found in the sun porch off the garden, and when I left, they were playing a noisy, clomping version of hide and seek, tracking mud all over your floors.”

  That made Gillian smile and relax back into her pillows, minding her shoulder. She sipped tea and then put it down on the rolling tray table. “But filling the house with laughter. That’s a fair trade-off, in
my books.”

  Paul watched her pale eyelids flutter closed and remembered the days when his wife would say things like this, things that caught him off guard and made his heart happy; Julia hadn’t spoken a word to him in eight months, lost in her own little world since their only child, Simon, had been killed in a car accident that had left Julia blaming him, though Paul hadn’t even been in the car.

  He agreed, “We could all use a little laughter these days. Your sister especially.” It would do you good, too, he thought at Gillian as though she could hear him.

  Her smile remained, and she did not open her eyes again until the curtain parted about an hour later. Paul thought she was sleeping, was flattered by her trust in him, glad that she felt comfortable enough to rest in his presence. She stirred easily when the young ER doctor came in to discuss the results of her ultrasound and X-Rays.

  “Good news,” he said simply, “I see no damage. Very likely just jolted the old injury. I can give you a prescription for a few days of pain medication…”

  “No, that’s fine,” Gillian said, already swinging her feet out of bed. She reached for her clothing, flinched a bit, and tried it with the left hand instead. “As long as there isn’t anything broken or torn, I’ll manage on my own. Paul, would you be able to drive me home?”

  “Of course,” he said, turning his head to face the curtain as she removed her hospital gown. The doctor smiled at him, said something about a nurse and discharge papers before disappearing, and whisked off to deal with the next patient. For a minute, Paul stood with his eyes politely averted, until the sounds of cloth slipping over skin stopped. “Safe to turn around?”

  “Uh, could you help me with this sleeve? I can’t slide my arm up and in this way.”

  Carefully, he confirmed, “Eyes open or closed?”

  She chuckled to acknowledge the discomfort. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter, I’m mostly dressed. I just can’t get this one arm to…”

  He turned around and found she’d put the left arm in and her head through the neck hole of her black sweater, but the right shoulder did not want to cooperate and the sleeve dangled across her pale biceps like a panther’s tail. He ignored a flash of a plain, beige bra strap under that arm to yank the sleeve down low enough for her hand to slip in, and then eased it along her arm. Her lips crumpled inward to be pinched by her teeth, but she did not complain; the ripple of agony across her forehead did that for her. When things were settled, she adjusted the sweater at her waist with her left hand and used her right to pick up the brown paper cup of tea.