Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  Her fists clenched, flexing her numb fingers and stretching her wrists against their too-tight tape bonds, as she watched his shoes move away across the scarred kitchen floor.

  The floor was also littered with trash and plaster, and pierced along its exterior walls by old heat pipes, plumbing pipes, a drainpipe, a gas pipe—

  She felt her eyes widen. All at once an alternative reason for her nausea occurred to her.

  Correction: it slammed into her like a highballing freight train. Gas …

  Now that she’d smelled it, it was obvious: the unmistakable rottenegg stench of propane. Just a tiny whiff of it mixed in with the other bad smells, and only down here, by the floor.

  Because as she happened to know after Bella insisted she learn all about it before trading their old electric stove for a new, gas-powered one, propane was heavier than air.

  And that’s why he hadn’t smelled it. The leak must’ve just begun, maybe during the fireworks explosions. As if to confirm this, more plaster fell; at the same time, a low, ominous groan issued from somewhere below her, probably in the cellar.

  No no no—but as fresh fright cleared the cobwebs from her brain, she realized it could be true.

  The house must’ve already been in bad shape, some big beam rotted through or cracked, or maybe even cut when somebody was installing one of those pipes.

  The notion that a beam was only as strong as its narrowest width had never penetrated some of those old do-it-yourselfers’ heads, as she’d learned to her sorrow in her own old house.

  But even as she tried battling panic with practical thoughts, a worse thought arose: that more than one beam had been cut, and not long ago, either.

  That the house had been deliberately made unstable … Her wrists strained wildly against the tape again and her breath came fast, shuddering in and out through her nostrils uncontrollably.

  Because she could suffocate with her face down here on the floor. Or the house, recently prepared for demolition—even as she thought it, she knew it must be true—could collapse on her.

  Alternatively, it could explode if he switched that battery lamp on in here again. Or—she stiffened, listening—Garner could just come back and kill her himself.

  Which, from the sound of his footsteps returning in darkness, he was doing right now. And she couldn’t tell him about the gas, or the collapse potential of this old death trap, either.

  Because he still hadn’t taken the tape off her mouth.

  HE GOT HER INTO THE CELLAR BY DRAGGING HER ACROSS the floor to the open doorway by her feet and pushing her through it. She hit the stepladder’s top platform with her bound-together wrists and slid headfirst down the step edges to the bottom, landing hard on her chin and elbows.

  “Look out below,” he called down, and she rolled hard away, trying to hook the stepladder’s leg with her foot. But before she could, he was beside her again.

  Getting up, he brushed fussily at himself. The sharp smell of spray cleaner drifted to her nostrils again.

  So that’s where it came from, she thought. What she didn’t smell here was the gas leak. Not yet …

  But if it wasn’t stopped, it would pool on the kitchen floor and eventually stream down through the open cellar door as if it were a liquid, which was just what it would behave like, filling the cellar.

  Unless it got ignited first. She’d have told Garner about it, but he still hadn’t removed the tape. And despite what he’d said about having a chat, she didn’t think he was going to.

  He planned to do all the chatting. She wished she thought it was all he was going to do.

  But she knew better.… There was another lamp down here; he switched it on.

  But nothing happened. Raising the lamp, he sent its yellow glow into the cellar’s far corner; mice squeaked and vanished up into the walls, and she saw a shudder go through him.

  There was something hanging around his neck on a thin strap, but she couldn’t tell what. Then she saw the other thing, just over his head:

  A massive old support beam, semi-round and with its sides still bearing the marks of hand tools and some century-old shreds of bark. But it bore a new mark as well: the unmistakable cut of a chain saw, like a thin slot running almost all the way through.

  To get it ready to knock down all at once so the house lot could have a new, easy-to-care-for home built on it by people from away, someone had nearly severed it. They’d done the same to all the other beams down here, too, she saw as she scanned them with her one good eye.

  But at least the bulldozer wouldn’t be coming today. And her nausea had passed, now that she was breathing clean air again. Yet another low, agonized groan from the building she was trapped in, though, cut her relief short.

  This old house wasn’t just collapsing.

  It was collapsing now.

  He heard it, too, and a flash of uncertainty crossed his face as he ducked involuntarily, glancing up, frightened. But then the groaning stopped again, and he hurried over to where she lay, holding the lamp high to peer down at her.

  Desperately, she used its light to scan the cellar’s recesses for something she might use, or for some route of escape. Craning her neck as he hauled her up, though, she saw nothing.

  Someone had cleaned this cellar, scavenging it for antiques or salvage before tearing the place down, probably, leaving only junk: a flattened garden hose coiled on itself like a deflated snake. A broken screen door, its old metal screen blackened and in tatters.

  More mice skittered somewhere as he dragged her to her feet. “Do you remember me?” he asked in a conversational tone that was much worse than any threat because it was so insane. This guy had more loose screws than Wadsworth’s hardware store, she thought.

  “I’m the kid whose dad you killed. He asked you for help and you wouldn’t help him.”

  It wasn’t that simple, she thought, and then she spotted it: a thin line of light. Toward the front of the house …

  No, the side. The streetlights reached that far, and the bulkhead doors were there, she recalled; she’d passed the house many times before now, and had seen them.

  So that must be where the light came through.… “They shot him. The very next day, he disappeared on his way somewhere. They found his car later.”

  He gave her a hard shove. He either hadn’t noticed the light leaking in through the cellar doors or didn’t care. The latter, she thought; his lamp wasn’t bright enough to be seen from outside.

  And no one would be looking here anyway. Bob Arnold had already checked this house himself after she and Ellie had been inside; he’d think that was enough.

  Garner held her up with one hand and propelled her forward with the other. Toward those cellar doors, as luck would have it, but it wouldn’t do her much good being near them if she couldn’t get to them, would it?

  And he wasn’t letting go. He’d hung the battery lantern from a hook nailed into one of the overhead beams—not the cut one.

  Not that it really mattered. Low, grinding complaints and protests coming from all the beams, plus the crash of more old plaster upstairs, told her an important support beam had come undone somewhere. Sooner or later, the rest of the house would follow; its owners were figuring on later.

  But her money was on sooner. As she watched, a beam resting on one big foundation stone shifted minutely, exposing fresh yellow wood. On the plus side, she still didn’t smell propane.…

  Yet. The battery lantern made a circle of dim light on the dirt floor. “So first, I’m going to take a few pictures of you.”

  That thing around his neck on the strap was a camera, of course. “Don’t worry, nothing salacious.”

  Yeah, right, that’s what I was worried about. The thin line of light through the cellar doors was like the promise of heaven. If she could just get to the doors …

  She looked around, puzzled. He had seemed so determined to get her here, but she still couldn’t understand why.

  Why here? But then … Then she looked up a
gain, not at the beams but at what was fastened to them.

  Which was when—with a drowning sensation of horror—she finally understood.

  THE MOMENT HE SAW HER SPOTTING THOSE BIG IRON HOOKS nailed to the beam above her head was like Christmas, his birthday, and the first day of summer vacation all rolled into one.

  Because he’d done it, he’d put that look of horror on her face. Made her feel like his father must have when he knew that the end was not only near but that it had arrived.

  And that it was bad.… But now was no time for gloating. A few things still needed to be accomplished, fast. Before she got over being stunned at what was in store for her.

  So first things first: he seized her wrists, cut the tape on them with a swipe of his pocketknife, and shoved her hands up through the clothesline nooses he’d suspended from the hooks.

  Now she was held securely, perched on tiptoe to keep herself from having to hang by her arms. Next he set up his camera, stationing it on an upended crate he’d found shoved into a corner of the cellar earlier.

  He’d brought a remote shutter-firing device for the camera; now with it clutched in his hand he posed gleefully next to her and pressed the button.

  There, a record of his triumph. The cellar was still dark, damp, infested, and grimly filthy—stinking, too.

  But right now, it was the only place he wanted to be. “You should have given it to him. The money, I mean.”

  In answer she kicked at him, wiggled, and angled her head at the cellar door opening he’d pushed her down through.

  “No, no,” he replied calmly, for there was no need for any agitation or anxiety now.

  Not on his part, anyway. “I’m afraid you’re not going to be going back up there,” he said. “You might as well forget it.”

  The way he’d had to do.

  Sometimes right after his dad died—after he was murdered, his mind shouted now as it had then; his mother hadn’t shielded him from any of the details—he’d lie in bed at night trying to imagine it.

  What his dad had been put through, what he must have thought about it. Steven’s own small body had twisted into the various positions he supposed his father’s must have been made to assume, ending with the slump-shouldered final one.

  In that way he would put himself to sleep night after night, his own slumber coinciding with what he imagined as the moment of his father’s demise. In the morning, he would start over again:

  Yes, Mother. No, Mother. By his scuttling obedience putting off her first screaming fit of the day, her first attempt to stab herself with kitchen scissors, her first drink.

  Later, as a teenager, he got better at managing her. And as a grown man, better still …

  Much better, he thought calmly as Jacobia Tiptree rolled her good eye and tried to speak from behind the tape on her mouth. She really did seem very worried about something.…

  Good, he thought. As she should be. “My mother had a serious personality disorder,” he said. “She’d do crazy things … take off all her clothes and walk out into the street. Call the police and say I was trying to kill her.”

  He shook his head, remembering, hiding a smile. They should have listened.… “It was okay while my dad was alive. He’d settle her down. Keep her,” Steven added, “from doing things to me.”

  She kicked out at him and jerked her head at the door again. But it was only natural for her to protest.

  He wanted her to, in fact. “But afterwards, it was another story.” He heard his own voice harden. “Then no one stopped her.”

  Well, someone finally did, he amended silently. But by then it was too late.

  “So, you see, it wasn’t just his life you ruined. You thought he wasn’t worth fifty grand, and who knows, maybe you were right. After all, he was just another loser, wasn’t he?”

  She glared one-eyed at him. In response, he took yet another photograph of her. “For my collection,” he confided.

  But as he set the camera down, something small and soft fell from a beam above to his shoulder and skittered across his neck.

  “Gah!” he exhaled shudderingly, flinging himself around to get it off, get it off of himself—

  Clapping his hand wildly to his back, he found the mouse and flung it, saw it land in the lamplight and run squeaking into the gloom in the cellar’s recesses. Gasping, he put his hands to his knees and tried to catch his breath.

  Then he glared furiously at her. This was all her fault. His father’s death, his mother’s deterioration, his own emotional disfigurement. For that was what it was, surely; normal boys had normal emotions, they didn’t grow up the way he had.

  First terrified of their moms, then caretakers of them. Normal boys didn’t live with their mothers long into adulthood, enduring a madness so profound, just being around it was toxic.

  Until finally, after years of frustration and loneliness, of hearing her babbling and suffering her suspicions, he’d put an end to it all, and who could blame him?

  And then, of course, he couldn’t call anyone to help him with her body, since if he did, how would he explain …

  No. He shook off those old thought patterns and addressed his prisoner again.

  “The men who killed him? They tortured him first. To make an example of him.”

  She went very still. He let the moment lengthen, savoring it. “But,” he added at last, “I’m not going to do that to you.”

  Her good eye rolled. Oh, thanks.

  Even in the state she was in, he felt her sarcasm, and he had to hand it to her, she didn’t cave in easily. There was some backbone there, some personal stamina.

  “Well,” he amended, “not a lot of torture.”

  Steven liked to think that at the end, his father had been at least that brave, too. But he knew better. The photographs his father’s killers had taken had eliminated any such illusions.

  “After all,” Steven told Jacobia Tiptree sincerely, “I’m not a monster.”

  As if to prove it, he produced the final piece of equipment he’d brought along, stashed in his pack until now: a silver-plated .22 revolver and six bullets.

  He’d had them for years. He’d known they were in his dad’s dresser drawer, and as soon as he’d learned that his father was dead, he’d retrieved them.

  At the time, it had been to keep his mother from killing him with them, in one of her then-intermittent attacks of paranoia.…

  The stench around him was so intense, it interrupted his thought. God, but it really smelled terrible in this cellar. Rot, mice, and something else even worse: rotten eggs, maybe.

  He wrinkled his nose, and at the gesture she began kicking and moaning urgently at him, trying to communicate something to him. Maybe she smelled the odor, too?

  “Don’t worry,” he consoled her. “I know it’s awful. But you won’t have to put up with it for long.”

  Well, not too long. He brought the gun out where she could see it, slotting the bullets into the chambers.

  “I’ve always loved this gun. Not only was it my dad’s, but I also appreciate the simplicity of it.”

  He held it up. “D’you know how it works?”

  Now he recognized the smell, the rotten-egg aroma of a gas leak. The pipes in this place were old, and even he could tell that the building itself was in bad shape structurally.

  Especially that beam. And there was an old propane tank in the backyard. So it made sense, what had happened. In a way, it was even convenient.

  He just didn’t feel like dealing with the facts. “Pressing on the trigger pulls the hammer back,” he said.

  He held the weapon out so she could see it better. “When the hammer is released, it flies forward, striking the bullet and exploding the charge inside. It’s that explosion in a confined space that—”

  Drives the bullet forward, he was about to finish. Although in this instance, the bullet might end up being beside the point.

  If he waited long enough, the spark from the gunfire would explode the leaked gas;
not part of his original plan, but—

  Well. It wasn’t as if he had a lot to go back to, was it? He supposed that was why he hadn’t done much about making a getaway plan: because deep down, he’d never intended to escape.

  Overhead, something shifted with a low grating sound like a … well, he didn’t know what, but it was big. And it wasn’t good.

  Grit and sawdust rained down into the cellar, at first just a little and then suddenly more. A lot more …

  The ceiling overhead dropped suddenly about four inches, with an avalanche of debris following it. He coughed, unable to see in the sudden amber dust cloud filling the cone of lantern light.

  A long, agonized creaking and crunching sound seemed to last forever; suddenly he was not quite so ready to die as he had been just moments ago.

  The sound ended abruptly. There was complete silence. Then with a huge crack! the beam just over his head snapped downward, more debris pouring through and the adjacent beams moaning with the sudden added strain.

  And then … nothing. The house shivered and was silent. Steven held the gun in one hand and brushed ineffectually at his face and arms with the other.

  All quiet … but the smell of gas was stronger now.

  Much stronger.

  CHAPTER

  14

  HE HADN’T FIGURED IT OUT YET, THAT WITH THE PARTIAL collapse of the house, the cellar ceiling had dropped. That meant the beam she hung from had sagged; her feet were flat on the floor now.

  Not that it was doing her any good. Her left eye was swollen shut, her right half-blinded by fallen grit. Both arms were numb, and her neck was so stiff, she couldn’t lower her chin.

  On the other hand, the pair of clothesline nooses that he’d put her wrists into were slack now. She could’ve slipped out of them easily.

  The question was, then what? The building was collapsing and the cellar filling with gas that would snuff her life out if she breathed much more of it even without an explosion. So the answer would’ve been obvious if it weren’t for that gun he had: run.

  He did have it, though. She kept her hands held high so as not to clue him in that she didn’t need to, that there was plenty of slack to slip out of her bonds whenever she wished.