Bad Move (19 page)

So instead of a phone number, I put down my e-mail address. "Just have her contact me there and tell her I have something of hers." I left the piece of paper on the counter by the sink.

"Her driver's license."

"Sure. And a couple of other things. I think she'll know."

"Like I said, I don't think I'll be seeing her. She don't choose to drop by here."

"Maybe if you got a dog," I offered.

She scowled. I turned and went for the front door, stepping gingerly, scanning the floor from side to side, occasionally glancing overhead. There was no sign of Quincy. As I squeezed out the front door, I heard Jimmy shout from the back of the house: "Mom, get the darts!" I ran back to the car as quickly as I could.

Once behind the wheel, I looked at the slip of paper Stefanie's mother had given me. Rambling Rose Circle. When this was all over, and I'd pulled myself together, I was going to call that Carpington guy, our local councilman, and demand that a new bylaw be drafted requiring all future streets to be named "Main" or "South" or "Hill."

I opted to try her house, rather than the Valley Forest Estates sales office. It was, I suspected, long past closing time, and I didn't want this to be hanging over me until the next day. I looked in my map book again and found Rambling Rose, a cul-de-sac on the north side of Oakwood in another newly developed part of town that was even closer to the grocery store than our house. This, I was discovering, was what Oakwood was: one Valley Forest Estates after another. Thousands and thousands of acres stripped of trees and bulldozed flat so a seemingly infinite number of cookie-cutter homes could be built and moved into by families who had fled the city for the good life.

On the way, I stopped at a phone booth and looked for any Knights in the phone book on Rambling Rose, found an S. Knight at number 17, made a note of the phone number on the scrap of paper Stefanie's mother had given me, and got back into the car.

It was getting to be dusk, around 7 P. M., when I pulled up out front. It was everything you'd expect a new home in a new subdivision to be. An all-brick house devoid of any distinctive architectural touches, dropped on a thirty-foot lot. Accommodating the two-car garage and driveway meant that from the street, the house was one huge rectangular door with a couple of windows above it on the second floor. Cement patio stones ran down the left of the garage, leading to a front door.

Slim panels of opaque glass flanked the door, and the one on the left was smashed in halfway down. Someone had kicked it in, presumably, to reach inside and unlock the door. This wasn't, I told myself, as alarming as it might seem. Stefanie must have walked home, or gotten a lift, and without her keys couldn't get into her own house.

I would pay for the glass, I told myself. And any other damages, or cab rides. Whatever. Any expenses Stefanie Knight incurred as a result of my stupidity, I would make them up to her. In addition to offering blanket apologies.

I rang the bell. With the glass broken, I could hear the inside chime clearly.

When no one showed up after about ten seconds, I rang it again. Waited another ten seconds, and knocked on the door. Hard.

I crouched down and put my head in front of the broken glass. "Hello?" I shouted. "Ms. Knight? Anyone home?"

Nothing.

If I had learned anything in the last few days, it was to not go into people's homes unannounced. Even though the front door might be unlocked - even though I had a key that would open it if it wasn't - I was not setting foot in this house without an invitation.

I pulled out my cell phone and the scrap of paper with Stefanie Knight's phone number on it, and punched it in. I held it to my ear, and when I heard it ring, with my other ear I could hear a phone ringing within the house. It was like stereo.

After four rings, the machine kicked in. "Hi, this is Stef. I can't get the phone right now, so please leave a message." I opted not to.

I could have left the purse in the house, tossed it through the broken window, but anyone could break into her place now, so that didn't seem like a plan. Should I drive back to Mindy's and see if she was there, trying to get into her car? Maybe she had a spare set of keys, came home and got them after breaking the window, and had gone back for her Beetle. Or maybe she'd gone to the Valley Forest Estates office to get some help from someone there.

I could drive around trying to find her, but all roads led back here. Maybe it made the most sense to camp out front in the car.

Or, I thought suddenly, instead of a phone message, I could leave a note in her mailbox.

There wasn't enough space left on the scrap of paper, so I went back to the car, grabbed my checkbook from the glove compartment, and tore off the print-free cardboard strip at the back. I wrote, "Dear Ms. Knight: Found your purse, will drop it off at Valley Forest offices tomorrow morning. Zack Walker." And added, again, my e-mail address.

And I walked back up the driveway, around the side of the garage, and slipped it into the metal mailbox, leaving a half-inch of the note exposed beyond the flap so she'd be sure to spot it.

Okay, my work here was done. Already, I felt a weight beginning to lift.

Coming back around the corner of the garage, I happened to look down and spotted something dark and shiny. I stopped, and saw that oil was leaking out from under the double-wide garage door. There was a puddle forming, about the size of a shoe print. Whatever kind of car was in there, it was leaking badly.

But something about it didn't look quite right, so I kneeled down and touched the end of my pinkie into it, and held it in the direction of the streetlight, which had just come on.

It was red.

With my other hand, I reached into my pocket for a tissue and wiped, somewhat furiously, the blood off my finger. I must have done it five times, moving the tissue to a clean spot each time.

I paced back and forth for half a minute, wondering what to do. Down the other side of the garage was a regular door, with a window, and I held my hand up to the glass and looked in. It was dark in there, of course, with very little light getting in, but there was something on the garage floor, down by the big door, and it looked an awful lot like a person.

I ran around to the other side, to the front door, tried it. It was locked, so I reached in through the broken glass, found the deadbolt above the door and turned it, opened the door and charged in.

The route to the inside garage door, which was in the laundry room, took me through the kitchen, and I was there long enough to notice that the sliding glass door to the small backyard was smashed next to the lock. What sense did that make? Why did Stefanie need to break two different windows to get into her house?

Once I reached the laundry room, I opened the door to the garage and ran my hand up the inside wall, looking for a light switch, found it, and flicked it up.

A bare bulb over the center of the garage cast a cold and eerie glow across the room. It was cool. There wasn't much in there. No cars, not even any oil stains on the floor, a few moving boxes stacked along the back wall. There was a weed trimmer, and a lawn mower to deal with that small backyard. Hanging on hooks screwed into the wall were a garden rake, a hoe, and one of those claw things you see advertised on TV that stir up topsoil while you're still standing. Paul had made me buy him one. One hook was empty, but it was probably where Stefanie normally hung the shovel that had been used to smash in the side of her head.

She was stretched out pointing toward the driveway, the side of her face laying in the blood that was slowly finding its way under the garage door. There were gashes on the sides of her hands, perhaps where she'd deflected earlier blows from the blood-splattered shovel left on the floor next to her.

"Stefanie?" I said.

Then my cell phone started ringing from inside my jacket.

Chapter
13

"I believe," said Sarah, "That the barbecue is now ready for the steaks. I believe it's possible that the barbecue has been ready for the steaks for the better part of an hour. I would hazard a guess that we have used enough propane since you left to keep a family of four in Iceland warm for the better part of a December. The salad leaves are washed and dried and sitting in a bowl. Your children have decided that they've waited long enough to eat, and left five minutes ago with Paul's friends for McDonald's. I, however, thought it would be rude to leave and find dinner elsewhere, or cook up a steak on my own, and leave you to eat all by yourself when you came home, if you were ever to decide to do such a thing." She paused. "Are you there?"

"Yeah," I said. The splotches of blood on Stefanie Knight's off-white suit looked black as night.

"So are you coming home or what? Or should I go ahead and eat without you?"

"I think you should probably go ahead and eat without me."

I could hear Sarah breathe in, startled. "What's wrong? Oh God, have you had an accident or something?"

"No, I'm okay. I just kind of got into a thing, and I'm going to be a little bit delayed, that's all."

"What sort of a thing?" Sarah was over being sarcastic. Now she was worried.

"Uh, it's Kenny," I said.

"What about Kenny?"

"His wife. She's been sick, and we got talking, and I couldn't just walk out on the guy, you know. He needed someone to talk to."

"Oh, that's terrible," Sarah said. "What's wrong with her?"

"It's, uh, you know, a thing. One of those female things."

"Is she in the hospital?"

"Yeah, she's in the hospital. He was going to go see her as soon as he closed up the shop."

"Is she having an operation? A hysterectomy? Is it cancer?"

For a writer, I was having a hard time making this up as I went along. The black puddle on the concrete garage floor was getting larger, ever so slowly.

"I think it's some sort of an injury," I said. "She might have fallen."

Sarah was thinking. "So it's a female thing, but it might be an injury. What did she do, Zack? Fall on her uterus?"

"I could have some of the details wrong. Kenny doesn't seem to know. Or at least he didn't tell me."

I could picture Sarah shaking her head on the other end of the line. Even though she'd never met Kenny's wife (I had never met Kenny's wife; I wasn't even sure that Kenny had a wife), that didn't make her any less sympathetic.

"You're a good friend of his," Sarah said. "I mean, God knows, you're in his store all the time. You tell him that if there's anything we can do, just ask."

"I'll do that. He'll appreciate that."

"Just take whatever time you need. We'll do up the steaks when you get home."

"No, you go ahead and eat. I'm not, honestly, I'm not even that hungry anymore."

"Okay. I'll see you when I see you."

I pressed the "end" button on the phone, but I didn't slip it back into my jacket. I held it in my hand for a moment, thinking that it was time to press 911. This was no crank call. I wasn't pretending to be dead at the bottom of the stairs. There was no car hidden around the corner. What we had, ladies and gentlemen, was a legitimate emergency on our hands here.

I pressed the "9" on my phone. Then I pressed the "1." I was about to press the "1" a second time, but my index finger hung over it, half an inch away.

Just hold it a minute there, pardner. Think about this. Think about this really hard.

What would Detective Flint's first question be? How was it, exactly, that I came to be at this address, and to have found Stefanie Knight's body?

Was I a friend of Stefanie Knight's? No.

But I knew Stefanie Knight? Not really.

Then how was it I happened to be in her garage and found her body?

Well, that was an easy one. I was here to return the purse I'd stolen from her.

And slowly I pulled my finger away before I punched in the last digit of 911. I slipped the phone back into my jacket.

This was, I told myself, a very bad situation. A very bad situation that could get a whole lot worse by calling the police and hanging around to answer their questions.

And yet, didn't this go against everything I believed in, everything I'd ever told my children? How many clichTs had I uttered over the years? Here's a sampling: Don't be afraid to get involved. Treat others as you would have them treat you. Don't walk away from trouble. Own up to your mistakes.

And of course, my personal favorite: The policeman is your friend.

I was not sure, in this particular instance, that that was the case. I suspected that the policeman would not be my friend, and that by calling one, I might end up with a new roommate named Moose, who'd sleep on the lower bunk and want me to be his dance partner.

It's probably worth pointing out at this juncture that I do not have what you'd call a long history with the law. I am not the kind of person, as you've probably gathered by now, who's "known to police." I've always played by the rules, paid my taxes on time, pled guilty to parking offenses and mailed in my check within a day of finding a ticket under my windshield.

So it's safe to say that if the police were to find a woman dead in her garage, I would not be on the list of usual suspects. However, I could probably jump to the front of that list in no time by placing a call to the authorities to report the murder of a woman whose purse I had stolen only a couple of hours earlier.