Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  By the time he’d put a stop to it, finally, the house was crammed to the ceilings and the checking account she still had access to was nearly depleted. If he hadn’t managed to trick her into signing a power-of-attorney form, she’d have spent all they had. Which was what that final quarrel had been about …

  But no, he refused to think about that. Instead, by the glow of the tiny flashlight he aimed around the dilapidated kitchen in the vacant house, he checked yet again to make sure all evidence of his presence there had been removed.

  Even the black plastic trash bags that he’d tacked over the windows were rolled up and pushed in behind the chunks of broken plaster above the window frames, unnoticeable. Later he would be able to pull them down again.

  Later, in the dark … Anticipation quickened his pulse, made his fingertips prickle with the urgent desire to be at work.

  Patience, he counseled himself.

  It would be only a few hours now, he knew. Only a few hours until the reward for all his planning and preparation would finally come. Finished with the towelettes, he stuffed them into his jacket pocket for later disposal.

  Hurry … Because by now they’d be hunting for him again, searching all the places they’d looked in before, and even more of them. An event like last night’s wouldn’t go unpunished.

  Or at least they would try. And sure enough, even as he thought this a car pulled up in the street outside. Hurrying to the front room, he peeked out and saw the plump cop he’d encountered the first night he was here, who’d gotten between him and the black-coat crew.

  Steven smiled reminiscently as the cop got out of his car and stood eyeing the house. With a hand on his sidearm, he started up the cracked front walk.

  Naturally the cop would come here first; it was right across from where the stabbing incident had happened. And the cop wasn’t a fool.

  Not a complete fool, anyway … Steven rushed to the kitchen again, hesitated at the cellar door that opened blackly onto a rectangle of nothing. Only darkness, and a drop …

  He jumped. Landing with a thud that knocked the breath out of him on the moldy mattress he’d placed here to break his fall—

  The cellar, he’d discovered upon closer inspection, was not empty after all—quite the reverse. People had been tossing items they didn’t want anymore down here for quite some time.

  —he writhed inwardly at the stinking dust that rose up from the squalid bedding, imagining the dust mites in it. Then, as the sound of the cop’s feet on the broken back steps sounded hollowly and the unhinged door scraped heavily across the floor above, Steven shone the penlight around again.

  Reassuring himself that yes, the ladder was still down here, so he could get back up again. Of course it was; where would it go? Everything is fine, he recited to himself silently, only his nerves making him doubt.

  But just as the cop entered the house, he realized: The mattress. Lying there so conveniently under the door opening, its presence would suggest something to the cop if he looked down.

  Steven jumped off the thing as if it were radioactive, then gripped the ropelike handles fastened to its sides. Above, the cop crossed the kitchen, his weight making the floor creak.

  As each step sounded, Steven dragged the heavy mattress across the cellar’s rough dirt floor a little more, away from the doorway overhead. Finally the cop paused.

  Holding his breath, Steven flattened himself against the grimy cellar wall. His stomach roiled with the filthy contact.

  Cobwebs, insects, mouse droppings … A flashlight beam stabbed down at an angle where the cellar steps had been. Now they were nothing but a jumbled pile of lumber; he had shoved them away so he could spread the mattress he’d found.

  The flashlight snapped off. The cop moved toward the front of the house, then up the stairs to the second floor, where the ruined rooms had once been bedrooms.

  There was a thud, and a low, scraping sound as the cop moved some heavy object. Crouched in silence, resisting the strong urge to squirm with the grit and filth silently sifting down from the disturbed floorboards, Steven began to sweat.

  He hadn’t thought the cop would show up so soon. But this would pass. It would, he insisted to himself.

  Unable to resist, he aimed his penlight up, to make certain again that nothing horrible hunkered on the thick beam just over his head, that no many-legged insect was about to drop onto him, or worse.

  Then: Huh, he thought. That didn’t look good.… The beam stretched the length of the cellar, ancient and huge, ten inches thick at least. Papery strips of bark still clung to it, and the gouged marks of hand tools showed on its rough sides.

  But it was also cracked. And although Steven’s experience with anything house-maintenance-related was limited to lightbulb changing and, in a pinch, snow shoveling, even he could see that the fracture was more than a cosmetic defect.

  Way more … He frowned as, two floors above, another thud was followed by a muttered curse. It sounded as if the cop had fallen over something.

  Or into something. Steven smiled distractedly for a moment at the thought of the cop going through a rotted floorboard, crashing back down into that ruined kitchen, and ruining himself in the process.

  But then his gaze was drawn back to that broken beam again. He let his eye follow its sagging line to … there:

  A deep notch, running almost all the way through. Originally it had been cut to make room for the big pipe that ran beneath.

  And he was no expert—the opposite, in fact—but to him it looked as if the cut had weakened the beam.

  Ruined it, even. The crack went through the thinned part of the wood, and the rest of the beam bowed downward. Substantially downward, he thought, making it easy to imagine that at the slightest excuse, the whole floor above him could come crashing suddenly down.…

  The whole house, even. Suddenly all he wanted in this world was to get the ladder; lean it in the doorway, whose gray glimmer in the darkness looked like salvation to him all of a sudden; and scamper up to safety. Because that wasn’t safe, couldn’t be …

  Footsteps stomped across the kitchen floor again, startling him. He’d been so focused on that precarious beam, he’d forgotten to listen. But now there the cop was again, inches from his head.

  The footsteps stopped. The cop was listening. Steven snapped the penlight off, closed his eyes and held his breath, just as he had when he was a little boy, right after his father died.

  Right after his mother started getting really …

  Crazy. She was loony tunes, wackola, and so are you. Bad, dirty, and …

  No, I’m not! he nearly screamed, so near to weeping suddenly that his nose stuffed up and his throat thickened with tears.

  But no. He wasn’t, and he wouldn’t. He was fine, he was …

  His fingernails dug so painfully into the palms of his hands that he felt certain they must be bleeding. Then the cop started walking again overhead.

  Creak … creak … Steven let his breath out cautiously as the footsteps moved away, crossing to the window by the old sink and scuffing through the grit on the floor.

  He’d been smart not to sweep it, though the dirt on it was a torment to him. The old trash he’d left littering the floor and the mouse droppings were even more revolting. But everything here had to be just as they expected, even the filth.

  Now the rough cellar wall dug into his back as he waited to learn: despite all Steven’s care, had the cop still figured out something?

  Or … smelled something? The moist towelettes, Steven thought with a burst of fright; their antiseptic scent would clue the cop in, if he caught a whiff of them.

  He closed his eyes again, the slow moments passing one by one as he waited. But then his lids snapped painfully open at a new sound, even more startling because it was unfamiliar: snap-popple-snap-hissss!

  Then came tinny voices: the cop’s radio, Steven realized in a wash of relief, and now the cop was talking into it as he moved around in the house.

  “
Yeah, I’m over here on Washington Street, went through the old Diamond place. It is a mess, yeah. It’s a damned shame about these old buildings.”

  Steven couldn’t see much in the pitch darkness of the cellar, but he could still feel the notched-out beam overhead, poised to crush him.

  “It’s about ready to fall down any minute, from the looks of it,” the cop said.

  You don’t know how ready, Steven thought. It was no wonder that the kitchen floor sagged so badly, that the plaster had …

  In the midst of this thought, it hit him, what he would do if he were the cop. Too late …

  The footsteps were moving again, across the floor as the cop went on talking. “When I get done here—”

  The footsteps approached the cellar door. The cop’s voice got louder, then louder still …

  Steven scrambled under the old mattress still lying on the dirt floor, still too near the door opening.

  “—I’ll check a few more,” the cop said as he stuck his big flashlight through.

  “… gotta be somewhere,” said the cop. His flashlight beam stabbed the gloom, picking out rusty tools, the broken staircase pieces, the hulking remains of an ancient furnace.

  Go away, Steven thought as the flashlight beam found some busted-up lawn chairs leaning against the disintegrating carcass of a moldy recliner. Go away, go—

  The footsteps receded. The hiss-and-pop static of the cop’s radio shut off abruptly. The broken back door let out an agonized creak, then a thud as the cop shoved it shut.

  But … It could be a trick. Not until he heard footsteps going away down the front walk, then the squad car as it roared roughly to life, nearly died, and finally caught again before pulling away did Steven crawl out from under the mattress.

  Shuddering, he bit back a moan of horror. The smell was bad enough, mold and damp mingling sourly with some other stink that he didn’t even want to try to identify.

  Worse, though, were the soft crumbly bits of its stuffing clinging to him from head to toe. He brushed frantically at them with both hands, praying that they weren’t really moving, oh God they’re really …

  But they weren’t. When he snapped the penlight on again, he saw that they really were only stuffing bits, just little crumbs of soft yellowish foam rubber, nothing more.

  Nothing worse … So just take it easy, he told himself as he aimed the light around the dank cellar. The ladder he’d spotted earlier was the only thing here that wasn’t old and ruined beyond repair.

  A stepladder—perfect. He aimed the light back at the broken beam again, confirming that it was cracked all the way through, one half sagging a good inch or more lower than the other.

  But that didn’t matter anymore; he was hiding, not buying the place. With the cop gone, his heart rate was settling, too.…

  Because he wouldn’t be here for long. He aimed the penlight carelessly at the next beam over … and froze, a slow, delighted smile spreading over his face even with those bits of mattress fluff still clinging to it.

  Because what the penlight found were hooks. Great big rusty iron ones, a whole row of them, with square-headed spikes driven through eyeholes in their shafts, fastening them to the beam.

  Lined up there in the gloom, the hooks looked like the props from some ultra-low-budget horror movie, the kind that featured college kids, a maniac, and a chain saw all trapped in a cabin.

  One, two, three … four hooks, he counted, each rustier and uglier than the last, in the basement of an abandoned, falling-down old house that the cops had already checked—

  He couldn’t help it; he laughed out loud. Because it didn’t get any better than this, did it? The police chief had been here; he said there wasn’t anyone in here.

  So they wouldn’t be back. They’d be looking elsewhere, while he—oh, it was perfect.

  It was just too perfect. In the cellar’s far corner, under a pile of musty old curtains, he’d stashed all his stuff, his pack and floor tarp and the bag with his few remaining groceries in it. He’d planned to hoist them up the stepladder once the search of this house was done, back into the ruins of the kitchen.

  There, with the windows covered and the hunt for the missing woman going on everywhere but here, where she actually was—

  Because maybe he hadn’t had time to learn much, but he had absorbed one rule about hideouts from his old man: the best ones were the ones that had already been ruled out twice.

  —he’d execute the final activities of his mission.

  And of her life. Now, hoisting the stepladder, he placed it under the cellar door. It didn’t go quite all the way up, but it would do; he was a young man, and agile enough.

  He could make it from the top of the stepladder to the door and through it. As for Jacobia Tiptree, well …

  She wouldn’t be going up again, anyway, would she? The minute he’d seen the hooks, he’d known that hauling all his stuff back up the ladder was going to be unnecessary, as well.

  Because down here was better. Rummaging in the pack, he brought out a coil of clothesline. With his jackknife he cut off three lengths of it, made a noose at one end of each—that Cub Scout experience, again—then tied slipknots at the other ends and hung them one apiece on the iron hooks he’d found, tugging on them to tighten them.

  By the time he was finished, his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the cellar, but he realized he would have to cover up the grimy cellar windows, too, before night fell. If enough light came in now for him to see by, then it could leak out. And—

  Candles, he would have to bring all the candles down here. Dozens of them, but that was all right. He had time; that broken beam had held up this long.

  It would last for another night. Meanwhile, between now and nightfall he could wash again, eat up the rest of the peas and crackers he’d brought with him, even have a short rest. But for now …

  Now he examined his handiwork. Three ropes, each with a loop at its end, hung from the iron hooks.

  Two cuffs and a collar. Perfect, he thought, beginning his climb up the ladder.

  Absolutely perfect.

  “WADE’S NOT GOING TO LIKE IT,” DECLARED ELLIE AS JAKE hauled the first of two cast-iron porch railings across the back lawn.

  They needed painting, to go with the newly painted porch. And the only sensible way to do it was with a spray can.…

  But in Jake’s experience, a can of black spray paint near a white clapboard house was certain disaster. So she’d set up some wire tomato-plant cages to lean the railings against, far enough from the house so that even she couldn’t have an accident with the spray paint.

  Well, probably she couldn’t. And anyway, Wade wasn’t here. “And don’t you try to talk me out of it, either,” she told Ellie determinedly.

  Tomato-plant cages, when you lined up enough of them, were surprisingly strong, and it didn’t matter if they got black paint accidentally sprayed on them.

  But that wasn’t what she meant. “I’ve already told the rest of them, and they’re all on board.”

  Sam, her father, Bella … Surprisingly, Bella was the most enthusiastic of the three. Or maybe it wasn’t; the mess in Wade’s workshop had struck at the heart of all Bella held dear: order, cleanliness, and Jake’s own safety.

  Not in that order. But right now, Bella was up there wiping off all Wade’s tools one by one with a soft cloth; she’d already done the windows and the floor.

  “All I need now is for you and George to help, too,” said Jake.

  “Your dad’s even going along with this?” Ellie hauled the second cast-iron porch railing across the lawn to the tomato cages, then checked to be sure that the fastener screws for both railings were still safely in her pocket.

  “He wasn’t at first,” Jake admitted, surveying the rest of the equipment. Big sheet of cardboard, check; big box of latex gloves, check. She glanced at the house, whose white clapboard back wall was so tall, it appeared to lean down at her.

  “But when he heard what went on here last night
, he was all for getting one of Wade’s shotguns and going out after the guy himself.”

  Both ridiculously early risers, Bella and Jake’s father had come home from St. Andrews that morning just after Bob Arnold had departed.

  “What about Sam?” Ellie asked. “Because the very idea of you wandering around downtown alone, just waiting for some nutcase to grab you—”

  “He didn’t like it, either. But the whole point is that I won’t be alone,” said Jake, shaking a spray can of Rust-Oleum hard so the metal ball inside bounced, to mix the paint.

  “Step back,” she warned, because Ellie’s dungarees were old and faded, but over them she wore a white cotton peasant blouse with red embroidery on it, an obvious black-paint magnet.

  Next she pulled on a pair of the latex gloves, held the sheet of cardboard behind the first porch railing with one hand, and pressed the sprayer button with the other.

  “I won’t be alone,” she went on as black aerosol hissed from the can, “because you’ll all be strategically stationed.”

  Paint blackened the cardboard she’d positioned behind the porch railing, and the glove on the hand she was using to position the cardboard with, too. And as if by an afterthought, some paint did manage to reach the railing itself.

  Which was the difficulty with spray paint. “I will be lollygagging,” said Jake, stopping to shake the paint can again, but not for too long; if she did, the nozzle would clog up.

  “Strategically lollygagging,” she emphasized. Then: “Remind me again why I’m not using a brush?”

  A globby blob of black paint spat out of the nozzle and began dripping down the railing—the other difficulty.

  “Because I am,” said Ellie, stepping forward briskly to dab at the drip with one. “Anyway, I assume you’re going to do all this tonight when everyone’s downtown, waiting for the fireworks?”

  “Correctamundo,” said Sam, coming out the door and across the lawn to inspect their progress.

  Ellie looked disapproving. “I’m amazed you’d let your mother go down there unprotected,” she told Sam, “knowing how …”