Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  But … “Steven, when you and your dad left my office that day …” she began again.

  Because if she could distract him, maybe then she could …

  Before she could finish the thought, though, a grinding and crunching of metal from just overhead stopped her.

  She cringed back with a shriek, breathing plaster dust; he didn’t move. When the sound ended and the dust cleared, the old pipes crossing the ceiling overhead had fallen.

  “Steven, did you go to a ball game? Did you have a couple of hot dogs for lunch? Or did he—”

  Did your dad haul you along to the racetrack with the five hundred bucks I gave him?

  Because that was the question she needed answered. Had she in fact been the last hope of a guy who was wising up, at last? Or had she been right? Had he taken the five hundred and blown it at the track, just as he would’ve gambled away the fifty grand if he had gotten it out of her?

  She looked up. Steven Garner Jr. was still watching her.

  Then from outside came the whine of … what? A distant engine, she realized, unable to place it at first.

  Plane, she thought, puzzled, then remembered the military aircraft scheduled to visit Eastport airspace. The flyover …

  Jet fighters, detouring on their way back to base to show respect for a fallen comrade and his grieving family—

  The engine sound increased. Alarm pierced her; they didn’t have minutes left, as she’d hoped.

  They had seconds. “Uh, Steven? We’ve got to get out of here fast.…”

  The plane was overhead. Its roar made the old house tremble. Dust sifted down; something crashed upstairs, glass breaking.

  Windows, she realized; all the remaining—

  Steven raised the gun he held. Gotcha, his smile said. She had a fraction of an instant to wonder if he really had been too frightened of the dead mouse to move.

  Or if all along it had been a trap. “Steven!” she shouted, scrambling back. Stumbling and falling, getting up and calling him to follow, but he still didn’t move, his smile unwavering.

  A smile of triumph. The plane’s sonic boom, when it came, was a thunderclap so loud that even underground, she felt it like a punch to the chest.

  And so did the old house. The whole structure shivered, the sound wave’s concussion rocking it on its foundation. Any window that hadn’t already shattered fell out of its frame and broke; a river of bricks poured suddenly through the cellar door.

  The attic pancaked thunderingly down into the bedrooms, and then into the kitchen and parlors: thudthudthud. The massive old beams in the cellar ceiling groaned.…

  And snapped, one by one in a horrifying cascade over her head, roaring toward her. The last time she saw Steven Garner, he was steadying his aim, still grimly trying to draw a bead on her.

  Then she hurled herself toward the bulkhead doors as behind her flames crackled and flared.

  Ahead, dark night spread above the cellar doors’ opening, a blessing if she could reach it. If …

  Hand over hand, she hauled herself up the concrete steps. A wave of faintness made the world spin; she crawled through it. Behind her lay only silence and the fire, burning briskly.

  A few inches more … She lay with her shoulder propped on the doorframe. Another try might do it, get her out of here and into the cool, dark night.

  If the house didn’t fall, if the fire didn’t burst out over her. If the smoke, now thickening so much faster, didn’t suffocate her.

  And if the propane still leaking down there somewhere didn’t explode again, this time for real. She got her arm up underneath her, pulled both her feet up onto the highest concrete step she could manage, and gulped in a few big breaths.

  The task was to get her body over the doorframe, then roll away. A voice came from below. “… fifth.”

  Garner. Somehow the smoke hadn’t killed him yet. He spoke again, coughing. “Alakazam … in the fifth.”

  “Steven?” she called again as she dragged her legs at last over the doorframe, landed hard on the packed earth outside.

  Yes. Thank you, she exulted inwardly. Everything hurt. She steeled herself to roll away on the grassy earth.

  To get as far as she could from whatever would happen next.

  But then it hit her, what he’d said. Which was when she knew the answer to the question she’d asked him.

  And one thing more. Why didn’t I think of that? she wondered as the astonishing truth dawned on her.

  But there was no time to think anything more. Flames burst from the bulkhead opening, spewed out, their heat caressing one side of her face.

  A siren howled somewhere as her rolling body hit something. The cold, wet grass surrounded her, feeling icy on her hot skin. Blindly she clutched the grass and hung on hard to it.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “So sorry.”

  Then she began crawling again, until a sound made her look back. A high, thin howl, like a giant teapot whistling—

  Fire exploded through the roof, a red fountain shooting at the sky. The house sagged hard; what was left of the front wall fell into the street in a shower of sparks.

  She kept on crawling, deep into the thick bushes edging the yard. Sirens screamed up out front, beacons whirling and radios spitting. Help, she thought, and went on dragging herself toward them until, through the din, one sharp pop! came from the cellar.

  Just one. But it was enough. A dull thud slammed into her eardrums, rattling her bones from within. She felt the blast in the earth she held to, clinging on with her fingers: a huge, low pulse of energy rolling beneath her.

  The world erupted in flames.

  CHAPTER

  15

  YOU KNOW,” SAM SAID THOUGHTFULLY, GAZING OUT AT THE water, “sometimes I think maybe the universe is only an experiment. Like a trial run, sort of?”

  Three days had passed since the events in the old house on Washington Street. Just that afternoon, they’d let her out of the hospital, one arm still wrapped in burn bandages and the other in a sling, her shoulder badly sprained.

  In the light of the streetlamps running along the paved path by the water downtown, Sam resembled his father: tall, handsome, deeply skeptical. “So the big Whatever It Is can decide what to leave in and what to leave out,” he said.

  Jake smiled, then winced in pain at the slight movement. Her swollen eye had reopened, though it still looked like she’d gone nine rounds with a prizefighter.

  And most of her hearing had returned. “Anyway, I don’t get it,” Sam said, changing the subject. “If his dad’s still alive, why was he trying to get revenge at all?”

  She looked down at her hands. “Sam, I told you. I’m not sure that his father is alive. The mob guys might really have killed him. Steven sure thought they did, I know that much. But—”

  Alakazam in the fifth. “But it turns out you can look up old race results online.”

  Ellie had done it, after learning from Jake that Aqueduct and the Meadowlands were Garner’s likeliest haunts, closest to the city. And the Meadowlands was a harness track.…

  “Alakazam was a filly in her second season that year,” Jake said.

  Sam looked interested. “And she won? So like you thought, he took the money you gave him and—”

  She nodded. “Bet it on a horse. Maybe he meant to take his son out, the way he said. But once he got money in his hands …”

  Just like she’d thought he would do. “She was a long shot. The horse, I mean. Twenty to one.”

  And Garner was a photographer in his day job. He could have set up a picture, made it look like he’d been murdered.

  “The thing is, he had a wife who was already mentally ill, a son who was heading that way also—”

  Recalling the look in the little boy’s eyes that day, she shivered. They hadn’t changed, either, those eyes.

  “—and some very bad guys after him,” she finished, the real question still being why she hadn’t suspected the truth before.

  But in he
r heart she knew that, too, now. “Twenty to one,” Sam repeated, and she watched him do the math in his head. “So if he bet it all …” He looked up. “Ten thousand. Not bad.”

  She nodded. “Not enough to get the loan sharks off his case. But it was enough to run with.”

  “And you think—”

  Again she nodded, this time to hide a grimace of pain as she got up. “I don’t know for sure, of course. No one ever heard from him again. But …”

  But it was what she would have done. What I nearly did …

  A husband who scorned her, a son who seemed to hate her, and a life she could so easily have left behind … I never suspected what Steven Garner Sr. did, because I didn’t want to face how close I came to doing the exact same thing myself.

  “Ouch,” she murmured aloud, and Sam looked anxiously at her.

  “You okay?” He got up and draped his jacket around her shoulders. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the warmth of his body still in it.

  “Thanks,” she said, holding back tears. So close … Out on the water, small boats bobbed, their running lights shedding red and white gleams on the waves.

  “He was badly disturbed before anything happened to his father, though, you know. It wasn’t only about what I’d done or not done.”

  After collecting his body out of the old-house wreckage on Washington Street, the New York police had shared more of what they knew of the house his mother had been found dead in: locks on the doors, bars on the windows, monitoring cameras.

  Old ones, dating from Garner’s childhood. They’d found a lot of medical bills and records, too—his and his mother’s. “It turns out that he was in fairly intensive treatment, even as a child. And he was watched constantly.”

  It was the answer to why a man would bring his son along to beg for money to pay a gambling debt. Now she knew that he’d been terrified to leave the boy at home, for fear of what the child might do.

  Or what his mother might do to him … “But when his father died—or went away, if that’s what he did—that all ended. The treatment, the intense supervision.”

  Because his mother was sicker than he was. “So,” she told Sam, “a short explanation is that he thought his father was murdered—”

  Or couldn’t face the idea that he hadn’t been, that he’d simply run away.

  “—and that it was my fault. That I deserved to suffer for it. So he made it happen.”

  Around them on the grass and perched on the massive granite boulders overlooking the boat basin, crowds had begun gathering. The Fourth of July fireworks—its first disastrous attempt had sent half a dozen men into the water but injured none—had once more been rescheduled, this time for tonight.

  “But why now?” Sam asked reasonably.

  She shrugged—ouch. “From what I can gather, he’d finally lost what little bit of self-control he had and killed his mother.”

  Her father looked up from where he sat nearby on a blanket with Bella. “And after that he had nothing else to lose?”

  Jake nodded as a cheer went up; the fireworks barge had pulled away from the breakwater. “Uh-huh. Because you know, his mother might’ve been difficult—to put it mildly—but somehow they’d found some kind of a workable equilibrium.”

  Ellie White was on the blanket, too, with little Leonora squirming next to her, waiting for the show. “Without her, all he had left was his obsession about you?”

  “I guess,” Jake replied, not really knowing whether he had missed his mother or felt sad. And there was no one left to ask.

  Sam crouched beside her. “Listen, I’m still really sorry I didn’t come down and find you right away when—”

  She shook her head. They’d been over it before. He just felt terrible about it. “Sam, there was no way for you to know. It was nobody’s fault, what happened. Just bad luck, that’s all.”

  “Here, put these on,” said Bella, handing over a pair of the earmuff-style hearing protectors Jake usually wore while using tools, everything from sanding machines to claw hammers.

  “You don’t need any more loud noises in those poor ears of yours,” Bella declared.

  “Thanks,” Jake said, taking them and putting them on, glad for the evening’s darkness suddenly. It hid the tears she’d felt springing to her eyes way too regularly in the past few days.

  Tears of gratitude for surviving, and for having this life and this family. And of sorrow for someone who, through no fault of his own, it seemed, hadn’t had any of that.

  Just then Bob Arnold arrived, looking disgusted; she pulled the headgear off. “Well, I’m done with that,” he said, dusting his hands together. “State guys took that little bastard Jerry Finnegan away with ’em.”

  He caught Sam’s interested look. “Finnegan,” he explained, “killed the girl on Sea Street after she told him about her baby on the way.”

  There’d been an autopsy, Jake knew. Bob’s face creased with distaste. “Too bad for him, his pals saw him do it. One of ’em gave him up to save his own butt.”

  “Oh,” Jake breathed, beginning to understand. “But maybe the pal wasn’t the only one who saw it?”

  Because the Finnegan boy—ginger-haired and black jacket–clad, his scowling image rose in her mind—had also been charged with placing a homemade bomb fashioned of wired-together M-80s plus a remote-controlled firing device on the fireworks barge, after his fingerprints had been found on part of it.

  But Finnegan wouldn’t have been daring enough to do that on his own. He’d have needed a reason; blackmail, for instance.

  “Yeah,” Bob said sourly. “Garner saw Finnegan beat the girl up that night. Lost his temper, beat her to death. Finnegan’s pal says that later, Garner told Finnegan to create a diversion downtown, on fireworks night.”

  He sighed tiredly. “I guess Finnegan figured the simplest way was the direct approach. Had his bomb-building instructions and another radio controller he’d gotten off the Internet, did it just like he’d done before. Then he just sneaked the stuff onto the barge. Did it while he was supposedly unloading the truck.”

  He made a face, and a slapping-something-onto-the-side-of-a-barge gesture with one hand. “Bingo,” he concluded.

  But Ellie’s brow knit skeptically at this. “I’m sorry, but that makes no sense to me. Why didn’t he just—”

  She applied a mother’s time-honored ear protection devices, her own hands, to Lee’s ears. “Kill Steven Garner?”

  She took her hands off. “To shut him up. He’d already done it once.”

  Which made sense to Jake, too, actually. But Bob just looked levelly at Ellie.

  “Well, let’s see,” he began, tipping his head in pretended thought, then gesturing at Ellie to cover Lee’s ears again.

  She did, and Bob spoke. “Twenty-five-year-old guy, dressed like an older woman right down to the hat and stockings, wounds you and your friends with a hat pin, for God’s sake, killing one of them, and you never even saw it coming.

  “On top of which,” he added, holding up a finger, “this guy also knows something very bad about you, that no one should. No one but your wounded friends. And while you’re lying there, this guy tells you about it.”

  He signaled the end of ear protection time. “Kind of spoils your tough-guy self-image for you, I’d think. I think you’d have qualms,” he finished, “serious qualms about crossin’ the guy.”

  “Yeah,” Ellie said thoughtfully. “Yeah, I’ll bet you would, if you were Finnegan. Scared witless, maybe.”

  Bob nodded just as Lee lost patience and jumped up suddenly. “Where. Are. The. Fireworks?” she demanded, each word punctuated by a stomp of her small foot.

  “Wow,” Jake sighed, not meaning Lee.

  The lab in Portland had traced the electronic communications from her laptop, discovering not much more than what they already surmised: that Steven Jr. had spent a lot of years messing around with computers, and in the process had become an expert at covering his online tracks.

&nbs
p; And at computer fraud, too—all the equipment in his pack and back at his home had been bought on fraudulent credit. Ellie settled her rambunctious daughter on her lap.

  “The other thing I still don’t get, though, is the gas explosion. I mean, there was a fire in there, for heaven’s sake.” In the Washington Street house, she meant. “So if there was going to be a blast, why didn’t it—”

  “Happen right away?” Jake’s dad finished. “I can answer that one for you.”

  He’d been back to the ruins; Jake hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to go yet. “The old propane tank out in the yard never got picked up by the company after the last people moved out,” he said.

  Out on the water, the barge jockeyed itself into position. A flare went up; several pleasure boats backed off prudently.

  “So that’s where the gas came from,” he continued as Bella leaned in against him comfortably.

  “What no one knew, though, was that the house was already scheduled to be demolished. Bulldozer. They were just planning to drive in and hit it. So—”

  “So somebody prepped it,” Jake supplied. “Went in and cut beams. Loosened it all up, to make it easier to—”

  “Correct,” said her dad. “Old place like that one. It’s stood upright a long time, stands to reason it’s not going to go over easy. Not unless you arrange for it to.”

  She nodded. Her own old house was a fine example of that. Two hundred years of everything mother nature could toss at it, including a few hurricanes …

  And including me, she thought guiltily, recalling now with a twinge the long to-do list of maintenance chores waiting for her at home. That porch …

  And dozens of other tasks. Yet there it stood. Her dad went on: “When a couple of vibrations from the fireworks blasts hit it, it was already primed to fall.”

  “Fire. Works. Fire. Works,” Leonora chanted.

  “Shh,” Ellie told Leonora sternly, but she was laughing when she said it, so the effect wasn’t very disciplinary.

  “That busted a gas pipe,” Jake’s dad said. “The house settled and must have crushed it shut again. Only a little leaked out.”