Not a Sound

by Heather Gudenkauf

  I get into my Jeep and contemplate my next move. I should go home. Stitch is restless from being cooped up in the car and at the clinic all day and I should take him for a run, but I keep thinking about Peter McNaughton and his strange behavior at Gwen’s funeral. Why would he take off in the middle of the services? What was it about seeing me that made him run? Could he have been up to something more nefarious than putting flowers where Gwen was found? Maybe searching for evidence that he left behind?

  I pull out my phone and quickly check Gwen’s Facebook page for any additional posts from Peter. There are dozens more comments on what a lovely funeral it was though none are from Peter, but I see I have a message from Chris, my old nursing friend.

  Hi, Amelia. It’s good to hear from you. I can’t believe Gwen is gone! I saw you at the funeral but I couldn’t find you after the service. Poor Marty and Lane. Have they arrested anyone? As for Peter McNaughton, Gwen and I went to high school with him. You were off to college by then. Peter went to a fancy private boarding school until his family’s finances tanked and he had to come back to Mathias and attend public school like the rest of us regular folks. From what I remember, Peter came in the middle of our junior year. Once all the money was gone, Peter’s mom refused to leave the house and Peter’s father dealt with it by drinking bottle after bottle of fancy wine from his own private reserve.

  I can relate except I could only afford the cheap stuff.

  Peter was (is!) definitely weird. He was made fun of a lot at school. Kids weren’t very nice to him, but I have to say he wasn’t easy to like. Always hanging around uninvited, creepy.

  I’m still on the skilled care floor at Mathias Regional. How about you? Don’t be a stranger.

  Chris

  Well, this explains a lot. Before I can change my mind, I put the Jeep into gear and start driving toward Mercer Street. Everyone in Mathias is well acquainted with Mercer Street and the beautiful three-story, mid-Victorians there. The McNaughton house is constructed out of finely cut ashlar and was erected by descendants of the family during the Civil War. The front and side porches with their Tudor-style wooden arches must have once given it a genteel charm. Large double windows with broad cornice stone lintels and stone sills are dressed with heavy drapes making it impossible to see inside, but I can’t help but get the sense that someone is watching me from within. The crowning glory of the structure, an octagonal belvedere with windows on each side, sits atop a hipped roof made of slate. Now it’s just a run-down old house with a sagging porch and peeling paint where a formerly wealthy old man lives with his creepy son.

  I park my Jeep down the street and wait. Growing up, there were all manner of ghost stories surrounding this house, the most chilling being that a young woman, a great-great-aunt of the McNaughtons, sat staring out the windows of the belvedere waiting for her true love, a soldier in the Civil War, to return home to her. He did come back, but too late. Despondent from being separated from her soldier and believing that he would never come back, she climbed through a window and threw herself from the peak.

  Whenever I think of this story, I can’t help thinking about Jake’s wife, Sadie. Right up until the moment she leaped from Five Mines Bridge they had seemed so much in love. Always laughing, always touching each other as if one of them might suddenly drift away.

  A few cars drive by and I pretend to be talking on my cell phone. If a concerned neighbor knocks on my window and wants to talk to me, I will have a difficult time explaining why I can’t hear them but appear to be having an intense conversation with someone on my phone.

  Thankfully, no one gives me a second glance and after about an hour I’m about ready to call it a day and head back home when a battered silver BMW circa 1970s passes me with Peter McNaughton behind the wheel. He pulls into the long driveway, parks and steps from the car, clutching a paper grocery sack to his chest. Without looking around Peter makes a beeline toward the detached garage. He steps out of my line of vision, and I scoot the Jeep forward a few feet, hoping that Peter won’t notice.

  He’s unlocking the walk-in door to the garage when he pauses. He cocks his head as if hearing a far-off sound. He looks around, his eyes darting from side to side. He pushes the door open and then freezes. I follow his gaze as he turns toward the house, a look of grim resignation on his face. Standing on the porch is a frail old man with the pinched look of someone who has never been content. The elder McNaughton, I conclude. The two exchange words and though I have no idea what they are saying, it’s clear that neither of them is happy.

  Peter holds up his finger as if telling his father that he’ll be just a moment and the old man’s expression becomes mutinous and his mouth opens and closes in what I’m sure is a venomous tirade. Peter’s slim frame quivers in agitation as he sets the sack just inside the door and then shuts it quickly behind him. With his head down, he scurries through the front yard and up the porch steps to where his father waits. Peter goes into the house and after a brief moment returns carrying a heavy jacket and what I think is a black-and-gray knit scarf. Peter helps his father into the coat and begins to wind the scarf around his neck. I think of what Jake said about Gwen having been strangled and I shake away the grotesque image of Peter looming over Gwen’s nude body, scarf in hand.

  Leaning heavily on his son, the old man continues his diatribe as they cautiously make their way down the rickety front steps. Peter keeps his mouth firmly shut, but I can tell his silence comes at a cost. Matching his father’s shuffling gait, he guides his the old man to the passenger seat of the BMW.

  Once his father is inside and the door is shut, Peter pauses and looks around. He looks desperate, as if he wants to run, to disappear, and for a second I think he’s going to spot me watching him but he doesn’t. He’s too absorbed in his own thoughts, his own personal prison, and briefly I feel sorry for him, but then I remember his strange behavior and I remember Gwen. What was in the paper sack that he placed in the garage? Why did he look so secretive? Peter moves to the driver’s side of the BMW, gets inside and backs down the driveway and disappears down the street.

  It’s beginning to get dark and almost as if on cue, lights are turned on within the homes and curtains are being drawn. A car with a pizza delivery sign strapped to the roof drives past and pulls into a driveway two houses down. Stitch lifts his nose, suddenly alert. It’s his suppertime.

  What would Jake say if he knew I was sitting here waiting for a man I don’t even know because he bought flowers for a woman I haven’t talked to in two years? He’d shake his head in exasperation and tell me to leave the police work to the police. What would David say? He’d think I was crazy. He would think twice before letting Nora spend more time with me.

  I start the car, determined to drop this whole thing. It’s none of my business, I lost touch with Gwen a long time ago, had shut her completely out of my life, like I had so many others. I need to focus on the here, the now. I can’t rejoin the living when I’m spending so much time thinking about the dead.

  But something stops me from pulling away from the curb. Instead, I put the Jeep back into Park, grab Stitch’s leash and we both get out of the car.

  The street appears deserted but I have no way of knowing if someone is peeking out from behind a curtain. I bend down as if to clip the leash to Stitch’s collar and whisper in his ear, “Volno.” Go ahead. Stitch trots ahead of me and up the McNaughton driveway. “Volno,” I call again, hoping that none of the neighbors speak Czech. As long as I keep moving toward the garage and giving Stitch the command he’ll keep heading that way. I stop and as if exasperated, put my hands on my hips. “Stitch, volno,” I call. Stitch, excited about his newfound freedom, scurries even farther away from me and begins sniffing at the scraggly holly bushes that edge the side of the garage.

  I catch up to him and make a quick scan of the street as I stretch the sleeve of my coat over my hand to avoid leaving any fingerpr
ints and then twist the doorknob. It swings open easily. I call to Stitch and we both slip inside, and I shut the door.

  The garage is windowless, pitch-black and is creepy as hell. For me, the only thing worse than not being able to hear is not being able to see. A wave of vertigo nearly knocks me on my face and I grab the doorjamb to steady myself. The dizziness hits me sometimes, when I least expect it. In the early days, alcohol helped. Well, not really helped, but there is something infinitely more pleasant about a room spinning from the effects of wine than of my damaged vestibular system.

  I fumble for my phone and use it as a flashlight so I can at least see a few inches in front of me. I slowly move the beam chest high around the perimeter of the wall in search of a light switch and find one just to the left of the door. I flip it on, and light floods the building.

  To my surprise the interior of the garage is in absolute pristine condition. It certainly isn’t the torture chamber that I envisioned but almost as disconcerting there are none of the usual functional items associated with a garage. There are no rakes or shovels propped up against the walls. No garbage cans or recycling bins. No dusty or cobwebbed corners. There is no telltale oil stain blooming across the concrete floor. In fact, it doesn’t look like a vehicle has been stored in here for years.

  “Sedni,” I tell Stitch, and he sits directly in front of the door. “Pozor.” Suddenly, Stitch is alert and fully focused on the door. Vigilantly, he will guard this spot and let me know if anyone is approaching. Unless something else catches his attention, of course.

  A large mahogany desk sits in a corner along with a matching chair. They look like antiques, valuable. Beneath the desk and chair, covering the concrete is an old Persian rug. Just to the right of the desk is a tall bookshelf lined with books and photo albums. Next to the bookshelf is a compact minirefrigerator and sitting at an angle toward the desk is a space heater. Weird. It looks like Peter made the garage into his home office. Really weird, especially given the size of his house. Surely there must be space for Peter to have his own office there. Unless he wants to be assured privacy.

  I have no idea how long Peter and his father will be away so I have to hurry. Stitch is already on his feet and distracted, sniffing at the paper bag Peter set on the floor before he left. I squat down and cautiously peer inside to find four bottles of a locally brewed beer, a few Granny Smith apples, a banana, three rolled-up newspapers and a bag of chips. Groceries. Okay, I’m an idiot. Of course a grown man who still lives with his cantankerous father would like a little privacy once in a while. It makes sense that Peter would come out to his man cave, sit at his desk, drink his beer, eat his Doritos and read the newspaper.

  I should just leave but my curiosity gets the best of me and I once again tell Stitch to sit and watch and he complies with what I think might be a roll of the eyes.

  I leave the sack where it sits and cross the garage to Peter’s makeshift office. The top of the desk is bare except for a desktop computer and a small table lamp with a brightly colored stained glass shade. To my untrained eye my bet is on Tiffany. I pull open one of the desk drawers and find what one would expect: pens, pencils, scissors, a glue stick, tape, a stapler. The difference being that instead of a tangled jumble of office supplies found in most drawers, Peter has a spot for each in a custom-made desk organizer. Each compartment labeled with a sticker in case one would forget just where the paper clips might go.

  I turn to check on Stitch and he’s where I left him guarding the door. I open the next drawer. Peter appears to use this one for his personal files. Each is labeled and organized alphabetically. I tell myself that I’ll just take a peek inside the final drawer and then I’m out of here.

  I open the drawer and find newspaper articles. I pick up the stack. There are dozens of them all held together with a paper clip. The one on top is Gwen’s obituary from our local paper. Not odd in itself, people cut obituaries out of the paper all the time. It’s the accompanying articles that cause my heart to skip a beat. Most are from the Mathias paper but some are from newspapers as far away as Des Moines, Omaha and Chicago. They all refer to Gwen, her murder and the investigation. Some take up more than one page, some are only a few sentences long. Peter McNaughton, murderer or not, at the very least has an unhealthy obsession with Gwen.

  The minutes are ticking by. Peter and his father may have run a quick errand and could be back at any moment. I try to arrange the clippings as neatly as I found them and return them to the drawer. I turn my attention to the bookshelf and from the titles I learn that Peter has an affinity for photography, string theory and true crime. Again, everything is organized alphabetically and by subject. The dust jacket of one of the books on the bottom shelf seems slightly off. I bend down for a better look. Beautiful Symmetry—String Theory and the Universe by Virgil Todd. It’s subtle, but the dust jacket is too small for the book it covers. With difficulty, I pull the heavy book from the shelf and set it on Peter’s desk. I peel away the jacket to find a large, worn, brown leather scrapbook. I peek over at Stitch again. He’s still in his designated spot. Relaxed but watchful.

  On the first page is a birth announcement proclaiming the arrival of a six-pound-three-ounce baby boy to Warren and Veronica McNaughton. It is accompanied by a photo of the young family. Veronica is sitting in a chair and holding Peter, and Warren is standing directly behind her, his eyes focused on a spot beyond the camera, one foot jutted out to the side as if already fleeing the frame. Veronica is a frail, birdlike woman with dark, serious eyes.

  The following pages are much of the same. Family photographs highlighting birthdays and holidays. I frown, confused. Why would Peter feel the need to hide the scrapbook behind a physics book jacket? It doesn’t make sense.

  I flip to the middle of the book. There are several photos of a group of about eight boys in their early teens. They are all dressed in pants and navy jackets with an insignia of some kind. Probably the crest of the fancy boarding school he attended before the family finances went belly-up. It takes me a moment to find Peter among the group. He looks happy, like he belongs.

  Next comes a series of school pictures. Peter smiling from the page before is gone along with his school uniform. These must have been taken after he left the private school and had to attend public school like the rest of us. In his place is an awkward, scowling young man with his mother’s serious dark eyes and his father’s nervous energy sitting just below the surface of his skin.

  I turn to the next page. Peter is older by a few years in this photo—sixteen or seventeen. His hair is longer and curls around his ears. A smattering of acne mars his forehead. He’s dressed in a black tuxedo and stands stiffly next to a girl of about the same age.

  It’s the image of the girl that makes my heart skip a beat. It’s Gwen. Younger by twenty-five years but it’s definitely her. She’s wearing a tea-length midnight blue taffeta prom dress and a wrist corsage made up of calla lilies and baby’s breath. She is smiling brightly, completely at ease while Peter looks like he could throw up.

  Had Peter and Gwen dated at one time? I couldn’t quite picture it. Everything I knew about Gwen led me to believe that she was popular, outgoing, confident. I flip forward a few more pages and there is only one more picture of Gwen and Peter together. They are dressed in graduation robes and mortarboards and from the medals hanging from ribbons around their necks it looks like they were valedictorian and salutatorian of their graduating class. Again, Gwen is beaming but Peter looks ill at ease and casts a longing look toward Gwen. After all these years could Peter be obsessed with Gwen?

  I answer my own question when I turn the page and find the first article about the murder when no victim had been named yet. Did he cut out this article after the public learned that Gwen was the woman killed or did he already know? The collection of news clippings and the flowers, calla lilies no less, left at the crime scene would surely point to this. Plus, I still couldn�
�t quite reconcile why in the world Peter would run from the funeral after seeing me.

  I look over at Stitch fully expecting him to be sprawled out across the floor fast asleep. Instead, he’s standing fully alert with ears perked up and twitching.

  Someone is coming.

  Though I’m tempted to take it with me, I replace the dust jacket on the scrapbook and return it to its spot on the shelf. Trying to move as lightly as possible I hurry over to the light switch and flip it to the off position. I find the garage doorknob and hesitate. Should I make a run for it or move slowly and creep back to my car? I take a deep breath as I turn the knob and open the door as little as possible, and letting Stitch go in front of me, squeeze through the opening and quickly shut the door behind me. The BMW is in the driveway, lights off and for a second I’m sure I’m caught but then I see Peter helping his father up the porch steps. If he looks left I’m caught and once McNaughton Sr. is through the front door, I’m sure Peter will come back out to the garage to finish whatever he started.

  My best hope is to divert Peter’s attention from the garage until I can slip away. “Stitch, vpred,” I whisper and point. Stitch tears off in a silver streak across the front yard and Peter and his father both swing their heads to the right. I don’t even hesitate and take off running toward the back of the house. My plan is to go around the perimeter of the McNaughton house and meet up with Stitch on the other side. Just a lady whose dog got away. No big deal.

  I move swiftly around the house, ducking low when I come to a window just in case someone inside happens to look out. I do catch a glimpse inside the home and am shocked by the stark contrast of the obsessively clean garage and the McNaughton house. It appears to be inhabited by hoarders. Stacks of newspapers, boxes and magazines are piled chest high. Black garbage sacks are strewn around the room haphazardly. Jesus, no wonder Peter hides out in the garage. I can’t imagine living in such conditions.