Lethally Blond (6 page)

It was no problem finding Dabbet. As Beverly had told me, it was only a short hike from the center of town, and I bet myself that as a boy Tom had probably walked it. Dabbet Road, a dirt one, was longer than I expected, maybe half a mile, and before long I was being jounced along the deep gouges under a dense canopy of maples and giant firs.

The first thing I spotted was a barn, a low, long gray one at the very end of the road. Then suddenly the house appeared, off to the right, a big old clapboard. Beyond that on the road was a small white cottage, probably a guesthouse, its back to the road. And right in front of it was a black Audi.

CHAPTER 5

I
turned off the ignition and just sat in my Jeep for a minute, feeling my heart thump. I had found Tom. In the end, it hadn’t taken all that long or been a particularly wearisome quest, but as of yesterday it had seemed it might be impossible. With the only clue being a single phone call from along the thruway, I had felt as if I were searching for someone lost on a catamaran in the Atlantic. But now here he was, just yards away from me.

I felt relief and an unexpected prickling of tears in my eyes. I also felt weird as hell. What was I supposed to do
now
? Wouldn’t Tom be pissed that I’d just shown up out of the blue? What if he was holed up with some new chick, working his way through the
Kama Sutra
? But I couldn’t turn around and just head back to Manhattan. Not without telling him that Chris and Harper were concerned about him. Not without making sure he was okay. Because there was still the chance that something wasn’t right.

I slid out of the Jeep and slammed the door hard. Better, I thought, to make noise and not catch him totally unaware. Because his car was pulled up tight to the cottage, I figured he must have been staying there. I wondered if the main house seemed too big to him or if it was too full of memories. I took a breath and started down a slate path that ran along the side of the cottage, its blue gray slabs almost obscured by yellowed tufts of grass.

Rounding the bend in the path, I saw that the front of the cottage faced the woods. It looked like something out of a storybook, with a narrow porch running along the width of the house and white curtains lining the windows on either side of a blue Dutch door. But as I stepped closer, I could see that the cottage was slightly worse for wear. The gray paint on the porch floorboards had mostly worn off, and the two wicker rockers were badly weathered and saggy in the seats. I glanced over toward the main house, whose front also faced the woods. It seemed even more forlorn than the cottage. The shutters had all been removed and lay stacked against the side of the house. Even from where I stood, I could see that it was in desperate need of a paint job.

I turned back to the cottage and mounted the steps, which creaked with each footfall. I rapped on the blue door. Once, twice, three times. No answer. Off in the woods, a bird screeched—a hawk, I thought—but no sound came from within the cottage.

“Tom,” I called out. “Hey, Tom.”

Still no answer, just a screech from the hawk again. I glanced behind me. The sun had begun to set, and the woods were becoming a smudge. It would be dark before long. I wondered if Tom was over in the big house—playing Mr. Fix-It.

Before heading over there, I gave the door one more rap, and then purely owing to my can’t-keep-my-damn-nose-out-of- anything instinct, I tried the handle. It was unlocked. I gently pushed the cottage door open and stepped inside.

“Hey, Tom,” I called out again. “Tom, are you around?” Nothing. Just the hum of a refrigerator off in another room.

The inside of the cottage had the same storybook quality as the outside. It was the kind of space that would be great to curl up in on a rainy fall day. I could see a small kitchen through a doorway on the far side, but most of the downstairs space was made up of a living room with a chunky gray stone fireplace. It was filled with an eclectic mix of dark wood tables and chintz-covered furniture begging to be flopped in. My eyes roamed the room and quickly fell on the coffee table. Several grease-stained pieces of sandwich wrapping paper lay on top, practically declaring, “Tom Fain ate here.” I stepped closer and peered at the paper. In one of the folds was a small scrap of curled dried meat—it looked days old. An open newspaper next to it was dated the Saturday he disappeared. Dread swelled in me, and I found myself thinking of something an old reporter I once worked with used to say on such occasions: “I don’t like the fuckin’ looks of this.”

“Tom,” I called out almost frantically, but not even expecting an answer now. A partially enclosed staircase led up to the second floor, and I sprinted up the steps. There were two bedrooms on either side of the small hall at the top. The one to the right was empty; the one to the left, decorated all in white, showed signs of recent occupation—a pair of large hiking boots lying sideways on the floor and a man’s shirt tossed on a chair. The white matelasse spread on the bed was rumpled, as if someone had made it hurriedly.

I glanced behind me and saw a brown leather duffel bag on the floor in back of the door. It was open but full, with a pair of jeans poking out from the top. Why, if Tom had been here for twelve days, had he worn so few of the clothes he’d brought? Just as with the sandwich paper on the coffee table, it was as if time had stopped days ago.

I flew back down the stairs and ducked into the kitchen, where the fridge hummed quietly, clueless to the fact that something was horribly wrong. On the counter I saw the plastic bag that must have once contained the sandwich and, incongruously next to it, an empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne.

I hurried outside. As much as I dreaded it, I was going to have to check the main house now. When I stepped off the porch, I swept the woods with my eyes. Off to the left I could see a ruined stacked stone wall, the one, perhaps, that Tom had posed with his parents in front of. Behind it, through the dense trees, something glinted, and I realized that it was a sliver of silver pond. What if Tom had gone swimming and been stricken with cramps, incapacitated? What if he was lying at the bottom of that pond? Conjuring up that image made me want to hurl.

As I crossed the grass, I saw that the main house was even wearier looking than I’d realized earlier—peeled paint, flower beds long gone to weeds, drooping steps to an open porch along the width of the house. Please be alive, Tom, I pleaded to myself as I crossed the lawn. To my surprise, the front door, inside a screen door, was wide open. Maybe everything was all right after all. “Tom,” I called out as I made my way to the steps.

But then the smell hit me like a bulldozer. I had smelled death on more than a few occasions—the first time as a reporter in Albany, watching as a body was hauled from the Hudson and being greeted by that ripe, nauseating whiff from twenty feet away. But this was more putrid than anything I’d ever experienced. It seemed to pour from the door like a force, and it was mixed, almost incongruously, with the awful stench of charred wood. I retched and covered my nose and mouth with my hand. Someone was dead inside the house.

I could see from the outside that the front hall was almost dark, illuminated only by the remains of daylight that seeped through the porch windows. Pulling up my shirt against my face, I stepped inside and fumbled for a light switch. I found one finally to the left, and as I flipped it, an overhead chandelier lit up, flooding the space with too bright light. I was in a large center hall, totally empty of furniture, and from what I could see, the rest of the house was empty, too, except for an odd piece of furniture here and there. The smell was nearly overpowering now. I retched again and forced myself to breathe through my mouth.

What I wanted to do was leave—no, let me rephrase that: I wanted to tear ass out of there so fast that I’d leave a trench in the lawn. But I had to know about Tom, no matter how horrible the truth was.

I did a fast sweep of the downstairs rooms, fighting the unrelenting urge to dry heave. Though the rooms were spacious, there weren’t that many of them—to my right a big dining room, kitchen, and mud room; to the left a living room and screened-in porch; and behind the living room what must have once been the library, though the bookshelves were all empty now. Against a wall in the library was a large push broom, a mop, and a two-gallon plastic bucket of dirty water. Someone was housecleaning—or at least had been.

What I didn’t find was the source of the smell. Which meant I was going to have to go upstairs.

I swung back to the hallway and began to mount the stairs. I knew I was breathing the scent of death, but what confused me was the burned notes of the smell. There’d been a fire of some kind, but
where
? At the top of the stairs, I discovered that two hallways led off from the landing. One led directly to the left. The other ran perpendicular to the stairs, toward the front of the house. The smell seemed to emanate from that direction, so that’s where I headed. Frantically, I searched for a light switch, but when I found one and flipped it, nothing happened. I kept going, though, through the fading light of the afternoon and the upward glow from the chandelier. The first room I reached was huge, perhaps once the master bedroom. Enough daylight spilled into the space for me to see even into its corners. The only objects in the room were a small table lamp sitting forlornly on the dusty floor by a telephone and, near the window, several paint cans and a paint tray. And the smell. It was huge now. There was nothing in the room that could be producing it, but on the far left wall was an open door to what had to be a bathroom. The smell from hell had to be coming from there.

I glanced reflexively behind me and listened. Then I turned back and forced myself to walk to the bathroom. Despite the fabric against my face, the smell fought its way up my nostrils, making me retch again. I noticed the Knicks cap first, lying on the old white tile floor, the window on the right opened a crack, but then my eyes flew to the sink and the mirror above it. They were spattered with what looked like dried blood, as if someone had sprayed a canister of it. And then a movement caught my attention, yanking my eyes to the other side of the large bathroom—to the tub. I turned and gasped. It was the length of a body, partially charred and decayed into a toxic soup. But the face was moving. Terrified, I stepped closer and saw that the movement was coming not from the face itself but from a swirling mass of white maggots feeding on it.

On legs nearly limp, I backed out of the bathroom, my heart beating wildly with fear. It had to be Tom in the tub. Whatever had happened to him clearly had happened days ago, yet the whole house seemed ominous at the moment, as if someone were hiding in there, watching me. I grabbed a breath through my mouth and shot out of the bedroom. I took the stairs two at a time and practically threw myself onto the lawn.

The sun had set now, and I could barely find my way as I raced across the grass. Just as I reached the side of the cottage, a light came on over the porch. I jerked my head fearfully in that direction. It was obviously hooked to a light sensor. I scrambled to my Jeep and propelled myself inside.

Locked in the car, I breathed deeply and willed myself to calm down. I had to call 911, yet I couldn’t bear the idea of waiting by the house for the cops. I decided to make the call from the place where Dabbet met the main road.

After I backed out of the driveway and began to make my way jerkily over the bumpy road, my fear gave way to grief. The body had been unrecognizable, but it had to be Tom. Had he
burned
to death? The tiles behind the tub had been singed gray and yet the tub had obviously managed to contain the fire—along with help from the slightly opened window. Was it some kind of freak accident—triggered by a combustible substance he was working with? But then why the blood near the sink? Someone must have murdered him. Bludgeoned or stabbed him and then set the body on fire with something nearby—like paint remover. Or had Tom killed
himself
? Slitting his wrists and then, when that didn’t work, setting himself on fire? What if that was the whole reason he had come to Andes to begin with? Perhaps his parents’ deaths had caught up with him again. Had the champagne been part of his suicide ritual—a toast to his life? A way to dull the pain? My stomach was sour, and I knew if I didn’t stop picturing the body, I would puke all over my car.

The road seemed even longer on the way out, but finally I spotted the main road running in front of me. I hit the brake, put the Jeep in neutral, and dug my BlackBerry out of my bag. The 911 operator picked up after two rings.

“I need to report a dead body on Dabbet Road, in the town of Andes,” I said. “It may be a homicide.”

“Is there any chance the person is still alive?”

“N-no,” I said, my voice nearly choked. She might as well have asked if there was any chance that Coldplay was about to do a concert on the lawn that night.

She asked for the exact address of the house, my name, and where I was calling from. Then she told me that she had dispatched a car from the county sheriff’s office and that it should be there within ten minutes. She advised me to stay on the line.

“No, my battery’s low,” I lied. “I’ll wait right here at the entrance of the road, okay? I’m in a black Jeep.”

I didn’t want to hold. I needed to call Chris right away and break the news to him. I had programmed in his number the other night, but my fingers fumbled like crazy just trying to bring it up. Part of me wanted desperately to hear his voice, to share my grief, and another part dreaded telling him.

He answered just as I thought his phone was about to go to voice mail, his “Hello?” barely climbing over the restaurant or bar sounds behind him.

“Can you go someplace quiet?” I shouted. “I need to talk to you.”

“Gimme a second, okay?”

I could hear the noise diminish gradually as he walked, until finally it was totally muffled, as if he had found a spot in a back corridor or down a flight of stairs.

“There, that’s better,” he said finally.

“Where are you, anyway?”

“Just a bar with one of the guys in the cast. What’s up?”

“Chris, I’ve got awful news. I think—I think Tom is dead.”

“What? What do you mean,
think
?”

“I’m at his parents’ old weekend home. Tom apparently hadn’t sold it yet. There’s a body here, in the main house. It’s not recognizable, but I’m pretty sure it must be Tom.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re kidding.”

“I’m so sorry, Chris,” I said. “I—”

“Wait, where are you, exactly? Where is all this happening?”

“I’m in a town called Andes. It’s in the Catskills, a few hours from New York.”