“Maybe you should tell her not to dye her hair red. She’ll probably look prettier as a blonde.”
“I’ll tell her, but she’s stubborn. She’s determined to marry Peter, and she’ll probably be willing to do whatever it takes to do so. Well, MOM, I have to go. See you later.”
“You won’t be late, will you?”
“Of course not. You know me. I would never want you or daddy to worry.”
“And you would never go to a hotel room with a man and get yourself pregnant, would you?”
“Me? Never. I want to become famous, and I’ll never be famous if I have to drag a child around with me.”
Henrietta sighed as she watched Celia sail through the front door. Famous. What a foolish notion. In her days, it was your duty and foremost desire in life to find a good husband, settle down and have a bunch of kids. And then, raise them as cheerfully as your outlook in life permitted. Famous! She shook her head. At least Celia didn’t seem to entertain any notions of marrying that looser Charlie Fox. As likable as he seemed, she was pretty sure he was a dead end.
Chapter 40. The Dream
The phone had been ringing for quite a while, but Henrietta was having a hard time detaching herself from her dreams.
George Baxter was wearing a tux and a mask, and she was young again. The room, large, romantic, full of flickering candles, was full of beautiful people dressed in colorful costumes, and she was wearing one too. She kept wanting to go to the mirror to look at herself, but every time, George Baxter would pull her back to his chest and hold her tight as they danced.
“You look ravishing tonight, Henrietta. How I wish this evening would never end,” he said more than once as he twirled her around and around the ballroom. He smelled good, too. He wore a bewitching after-shave that made her giddy, and his mysterious dark eyes stared at her hypnotically through the slits in his mask.
“I have to go and look for my husband,” she kept saying, turning her head, looking for him.
“Don’t bother, my love. It’s just you and I tonight.”
Henrietta tried to wake up, but the haunting music of her dreams and the warm body of her lodger kept pulling her back. But the phone kept ringing. It was just never going to stop.
She finally put her naked feet on the cold floor and walked over to the telephone. “Hello,” she said several times, but nobody would answer. Eventually, when she had determined to put the phone down, someone spoke.
“Your husband, Mrs. Jones. I need to talk to your husband,” the man said in an ugly and menacing voice.
“I don’t think he’s home. He said he had plans for this morning,” Henrietta told him. “But I’ll go check.”
Padding on naked feet, groggy, shivering in the cold house without her robe, she went from room to room, calling out to Alfred, but the house was quiet as a mausoleum. Alfred wasn’t home.
She went back to the phone and picked it up, but the person who had called was no longer there. She wished she had asked earlier who was there.
When much later on in the day, she sat with Alfred at the kitchen table, she had nothing concrete to report.
“All he said was that he wanted to talk to you.”
“Are you sure, my dear?”
“Of course, I’m sure. He did call me Mrs. Jones, so do you think this is one of your old acquaintances? He sounded very unfriendly.”
“Are you implying he was one of those troublesome people from my youth? I doubt it. They're probably all dead.”
“And you haven’t gotten yourself into any kind of trouble since then?” Henrietta asked, anxiously. It was always at the back of her mind, Alfred and his old gang, getting back together to cause mayhem.
“No trouble, my dear. I promise you.” Alfred held his breath and tried to look innocent. Then, Henrietta left the room, and he breathed again.
Chapter 41. Rosalie
The next morning, Alfred and Henrietta were sitting quietly at breakfast, Alfred reading the beloved Morning News, and Henrietta checking her phone messages. Like any long-married couple, they didn’t even acknowledge each other.
The grandfather clock tick-tocked and echoed through the quiet house when the silence was broken by the heart-rending sound of an upstairs door being slammed, and furious footsteps running down the stairs, across the house, and into the kitchen where they sat, staring at the intrusion.
“MOM, dad, Rosalie has vanished!”
“Calm down, Celia,” Alfred said and patted the chair next to him. “Come, sit down and tell us what happened.”
But Henrietta knew. All of a sudden—after never having had one single premonition in her whole life—Henrietta knew.
“She died her hair red, didn’t she, Celia?” she asked, trying to sound calm and reasonable next to her two unsuspecting loved ones.
“Yes, MOM, she did. Why are you asking?”
But Henrietta didn’t answer. She looked poignantly at her husband, and he too understood, and returned her look, his own eyes full of horror.
“Why are you guys staring at each other like that and not answering me? Why?” Celia asked.
Henrietta and Alfred shared another look and she nodded, and he said, “All right, I better tell her.”
“Tell me what? What?” Celia asked, getting louder and louder. “I’m worried sick. Just tell me what you know.”
“Come and sit down, Celia. And Henrietta, be a dear and pour her a strong coffee. Listen, I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to panic,” he said gently, and Celia sat down between him and Henrietta and sipped on her coffee obediently.
Henrietta watched Celia and Alfred sadly as he told his daughter about the murders and the red-haired victims. It disappointed her that young people had to hear such horrors and be unable to remain safe in this horrible world.
When she had been young, things had been so different. People were honorable, even strangers. Her family never locked the front door, nor did they have any bars on windows in any of the houses they had lived in. Things left forgotten outside would never be stolen, but you would find them safe and sound the next day when you went in search of them.
She watched Celia as the terror crept through her. Celia now knew that she would probably never see her friend again. One by one, the killer was targeting redheads. Would he have known—or even cared—that Celia’s pregnant friend was not a natural redhead but had dyed her hair?
Celia’s eyes grew bigger and wider. Poor child. She would never be young and innocent anymore.
“Call Charlie. He has a friend at the police station. You have information about her that might help them,” Alfred told her, and Celia nodded.
Henrietta picked up the dirty dishes and took them to the sink. While she washed them, she heard Celia on the phone with Charlie, and then she came into the kitchen and asked for a hug. Henrietta was not a hug-type of person, but this time she took the young woman in her arms and held her while she cried. There was really nothing that could be said.
Rosalie had been missing for two days. There was now zero chance that they would find her alive. She thought about the baby that would never be born, and the baby she wished she could have had. And then she remembered that she too had been a redhead once and wondered if it would be so terrible to die. She sighed when Celia let go and ran upstairs to get ready. Then she went back to her dirty dishes.
Chapter 42. Tailing The Lodger
Around five in the afternoon, Henrietta hung up her apron and her kitchen towel and stood quietly in the kitchen. Celia was out to dinner with Charlie. Alfred was snoring gently upstairs on the couch, and she had just heard footsteps on the stairs. George Baxter was going out.
This time, she would follow him. She couldn’t stand not knowing any longer.
As soon as the front door closed, she hurried to the living room and put on her coat, hats and gloves. These were items she had never worn in years, so the lodger wouldn’t have possibly seen her wearing them. Should he ever turn around and see her walking behind him,
he would never recognize her.
The night was unexpectedly bright. It had been raining, and the wet streets were shiny with the reflection of streetlamps, and car lights, and the lights coming from the fronts of the houses and from their windows. Henrietta hadn’t been outside at night in a very long time, and it surprised her how busy it was. Of course, it was only like half-past five, but the sky was already dark, and there was a feeling of the unknown in the atmosphere. To her, it was already night-time.
George Baxter appeared to be in no hurry. He crossed Ember Street diagonally, avoiding the traffic, and entered the park. He was easy to follow. He wore a long coat whose bottom flapped in the wind, and he had on this odd, unusual hat that was rounded at the top and make him look like a foreigner.
The cars honked wildly when she hurried across the busy street, and for a second, she worried that the lodger would turn around and see her, but he never did. He serenely continued on his walk and was soon heading for the back of the park, away from the hot dog stands and the roasted chestnut vendors
Henrietta wasn’t so fond of parks. She didn’t like it that they were so secretive, so full of hiding places, and so very big. She liked the River Walk, the openness of it, and how you always felt safe.
But she wasn’t about to back down. She was going to see this to the end. She also noticed that tonight, George Baxter was carrying his beat-up leather briefcase, the one she had looked for so diligently the other night.
She had reason to ponder about that briefcase because he was so guarded about it. How he had reacted the first night when he thought he had lost it, and how well he hid it in the room since she had looked for it everywhere. What was in it that needed to be hidden? That was the question that she wanted answered.
So, where did he keep it? Under a loose floorboard? Behind the armoire? She knew the attic like the back of her hand. There was no place where she hadn’t looked, yet he had managed to hide it. What was so special about it that it needed hiding? And why was he carrying it now?
Henrietta was so busy thinking about these things, that she almost missed it when the lodger took a sharp right at the end of the path. Very little light filtered through to where Henrietta walked. There were overhead lamplights—and bright ones at that—all over the place, but that was mostly at the entrance, where most people tended to congregate, not back here, on the route that she was following.
The cement path eventually gave way to gravel, startling Henrietta when she heard the noise that her boots were making as they crunched the pebbles underfoot. The lodger obviously heard as well, because he stopped and turned around, and she had barely enough time to duck behind a tree trunk, ever so grateful that her coat was black, and so were her hat and gloves. She held her breath until she heard him resume his footsteps, and then she stuck her head out from behind the tree to peek.
She exhaled, relieved. There was no way she would be able to explain herself to the lodger, and then he might decide to move out of her attic, and she would lose the financial security that his regular payments had improved her life with. And she would lose him. It was a daunting thought.
From then on, she walked on the grass, keeping close to the shrubbery. It was intensely dark and intensely quiet at the back of the park. No noise of cars honking or buses revving their engines intruded into the solitude of the night. Not even the hooting of the owls, deep into hibernating sleep.
Hypnotized by the monotonous regularity of George Baxter’s footsteps, she was caught by surprise when he took another right turn, and within a few feet they were out of the park, and Henrietta was back in the city, but on the other side of it.
The lights blinded her and disconcerted her after that long walk in the penumbra. Still a good piece ahead of her, she sighted the lodger, who again stepped fearlessly into the traffic, not even looking right or left, and crossed the street with his long strides and his flapping coat, and Henrietta found herself struggling to follow. This was a busier street than her own. Long lines of people stood at the corner by the bus stop, jostling for space, impatiently shoving each other, looking tired and gloomy. Exasperated taxis and buses honked at each other and at the pedestrians rushing back and forth across the street at the red light.
This too distracted Henrietta, and she realized she was about to lose the momentum of the pursuit. Already the light had turned green for the traffic, and her chance of crossing the busy street and remaining alive passed. She stood, anguished, by the zebra at the light, and she watched George Baxter’s long coat flapping around his legs as he kept on walking. Then, a couple of buses stalled right in front of her, and by the time they moved on, she couldn’t see the lodger any longer. She wanted to cry. She had lost him.
She crossed the street anyway, when the light turned green, and she walked around for a while, but this was downtown, and a place she was unfamiliar with.
Finally, knowing that she was risking getting seriously lost, she turned around, and moodily headed back home.
Chapter 43. Rosalie Still Missing
Henrietta found Celia crying in her bedroom, slumped on the bed.
“There you are, mom. Where have you been? I looked all over for you.”
“Out, my dear,” she said, realizing that she had to come up with an excuse for having been gone so long.
“But where?”
“Hmm, I needed some special ingredients for a new recipe. Do you have any news about Rosalie?”
“No. Charlie took me to the police station, and I told them what I knew. Oh, and nobody has heard of Peter either.”
“Well, that’s rather interesting. Could they have run away together?”
“Without telling anyone? Without telling me?”
“I don’t know, Celia.”
“I’m so worried about her.”
“I know. I am too. Let’s hope they just went somewhere together for a few days and we’ll see them again soon.”
She thought those words would console Celia, but the girl just threw herself back on the bed and began crying again. Henrietta walked out of the room and gently closed the door.
She could hear Alfred fussing in the kitchen, cooking something that didn’t smell too enticing. She did not have the patience to deal with Alfred at the moment. She went to her room and lay down on the bed.
She felt languid and dull. She knew it was the pall of depression sinking down on her. She hadn’t been this depressed in a very long time. She put an arm on her eyes and welcomed the darkness. Rosalie had either eloped with Peter or was dead. She felt the foreboding again. She knew that Rosalie was dead.
She was exhausted after the long walk, and she relaxed in the cozy warmth of her bedroom. She almost dozed off. But the doorbell rang. She waited to see if Alfred opened the door, but he mustn’t have, because, after a minute or two, the doorbell rang again.
She frowned. Couldn’t Alfred do something right for once? She propped herself up on an elbow and tried to gather herself up from the bed to go downstairs, but she heard Alfred’s heavy footsteps and finally a loud I’m coming, and she threw herself back on the bed.
Was that Charlie at the door? It didn’t sound like him. This voice was deeper and angrier, and uncomfortably unfamiliar. Was that an argument they were having? Henrietta tried to care but the waves of depression kept washing over her, sinking her deeper and deeper. She closed her eyes.
Nobody needed her. Alfred and the other man would be perfectly fine without her. She dozed off a bit, and then she woke suddenly when she smelled something burning, and she heard voices exclaiming loudly when the smoke alarm came on.
But she wasn’t very interested. She was too tired to care. Alfred could solve a problem without her for once. She chuckled mirthlessly and turned to her other side. All the things Alfred would have to learn to survive on his own if she died. She pulled the comforter on herself and closed her eyes, and within seconds, she was asleep.
Chapter 44. The Altercation
Henrietta opened her eyes and found he
rself surrounded by a deep, disquieting darkness. She looked at the clock on the nightstand and saw that it was half-past two. The middle of the night. Something had awakened her.
She put her robe on and slipped her feet into her slippers. Then, she silently left her room. The landing was dark, except for what little light filtered through the curtains from the street. And the whole place was freezing cold as if the heater had stopped working.
She hurried across the corridor to check on Celia. She opened the door quietly and peeked in and saw her stepchild bundled peacefully under her pink comforter. Then, she went to the couch to check on Alfred, but he wasn’t in his place. Surprised, she turned on the lamp closest to her. The pillow and blankets were on the sofa, nicely folded, just as she had left them in the morning. But they hadn’t been slept in. Intrigued, she headed for the stairs. The cold draft by the stairwell took her by surprise, and she shivered.
As it had become her habit, she looked up toward the attic and waited. She could barely hear it, but if she listened carefully, she could distinguish the unmistakable drone of George Baxter’s voice. Was he still up? Reading drearily from the Bible those awful verses written against women? Henrietta shook her head. Why did he hate women so much?
She took the steps carefully, holding onto the banister, still groggy from sleep. And the further down she went, the colder she got. A current of air, rushing freely through the house. How strange that was. Alfred must have left a window open, she thought, or perhaps the back door after throwing the trash out. She shivered, and she pulled the robe tighter around her shaking body.
Walking downstairs in the dark, her arms outstretched like a blind woman, she went straight to the kitchen and to the back door, where—through the kitchen window—a streetlamp provided some weak illumination. She found everything closed, everything in order, and everything silent. More and more intrigued, she headed toward the front of the house, suddenly fearful that the front door might have been left open all night. But now that she was approaching the entrance, she heard another sound—coming from outside—that of two men talking a sotto voce, and if she wasn’t mistaken, one of them sounded like her husband.
The Stranger in the Attic Page 8