No Safe House (13 page)

Another girl, but older, probably midteens. A poster of what looked like the latest hot boy band on one wall, and while there was the odd stuffed animal, everything was a little less “itsy.” An iPod dock on the table next to the bed, a hodgepodge of earrings and other jewelry on the top of the dresser. Bottles of nail polish remover, hairspray, body lotion.

I stood before the closet, took a breath, and turned the knob.

“Shit!”

I managed, even startled as I was, to keep my outburst to a whisper, but it was loud enough for Grace to hear.

“What?” said her voice, coming from my shirt pocket. “Dad? What’s happened?”

I took out the phone. “You know how sometimes, when we ask you to clean up your room, you just dump everything in your closet and keep stuffing it in until you can get the door closed?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not the only one.”

I put the phone back into my pocket. A stack of clothes had tumbled out and was covering the toes of my shoes. I set down the flashlight, shoveled the mess back into the closet—hoping fingerprints wouldn’t show up on a pile of jeans and tops and underwear, since I couldn’t do this with a wad of tissues in my hand—and managed to get the door shut once more.

I didn’t run into Fibber McGee’s closet in the master bedroom. And even at that moment, I thought, Where the hell did
that reference come from? I wasn’t old enough to have ever seen, or heard, the old
Fibber McGee and Molly
movies or radio shows, but it was a phrase my grandparents always used to describe a closet that was jam-packed. Whenever Fibber opened the hall closet, a hundred things cascaded out onto his head. Hilarity, evidently, ensued.

I could use a laugh right about now.

The master had a walk-in closet, so nothing rained down on me as I opened the door. It was tidier than either of the children’s closets, with nothing on the carpeted floor. Shoes, and there were dozens of pairs of them, about ninety percent of them a woman’s, were all neatly stacked on shelving. I noticed eight small rectangular impressions in the carpet, clustered in groups of two and each about the size of a domino, which, if you were to draw a line between them, would have made a square roughly two feet by two feet. Given that I was looking for a body, I didn’t spend much time thinking about them.

I left the closet and did another inspection of the en suite bathroom. Glanced into the tub to see whether anyone had been dumped there.

I reached into my pocket for the phone.

“I’m almost done,” I told Grace. “I’ll take a quick look through the basement before I come back out. Everything okay out there?”

“Yeah. So you haven’t seen Stuart?”

“Haven’t seen him or anybody else, sweetheart.”

“Thank God.”

I thought it was premature to be offering up those kinds of thanks yet, but I hoped she had reason to be optimistic.

On my way to the basement I aimed the flashlight back into the kitchen for a final sweep, then went down the last flight of stairs. In addition to the rec room, where I’d come through the window, there was a furnace room, a laundry room, and a small workshop. Tools of every description hung on one wall, a table saw, a drill press, a small lathe bolted to the workbench. An
aluminum ladder leaned up against the wall. And while there was a faint scent of sawdust in the air, there wasn’t a trace of it on the painted concrete floor.

There, on the far wall, a chest freezer.

Waist high, about six feet long. A small amber light on the side to indicate that it was running.

“Oh no,” I said under my breath. If I didn’t open it, I might end up kicking myself later. And I was not—ever—coming into this house again.

I approached the freezer, held the light in my left hand, raised above my shoulder, angled down, and lifted the top with my right.

Lots of frozen food.

As I came back out of the workshop, I felt somewhat encouraged. The home looked to me to be corpse free. Not the sort of thing generally mentioned in a real estate listing, but a good thing nonetheless.

Stuart Koch—dead or alive—was not here. But if he was okay, why wasn’t he answering his phone?

I could think of any number of reasons, but the first that came to mind was that he was a chickenshit little weasel and didn’t want to take a call from the girl he’d dragged into a terrifying situation. He didn’t have the guts to apologize. He didn’t have the guts to admit he’d done a pretty goddamn stupid thing.

I didn’t want to have to come up with another reason. That one suited me just fine.

The trouble was, it didn’t explain what had happened in this house an hour and a half or so earlier.

Something was nagging at me.

It wasn’t the business of trying to figure out what had gone down here. I’d seen something, and it was only now registering.

When I’d waved the light past the kitchen on my way down, something had caught my eye. I hadn’t really thought about it until I’d gotten to the basement.

Something not quite right. Something shimmery.

Something on the kitchen island. Not on it, exactly, but on the
side
of it.

“Are you done, Daddy?” Grace asked.

“Just another minute,” I told her.

I went back up to the first floor, stood at the entrance to the kitchen, aimed the light at the base of the island. The sides were done in paneled wood. Light in color, probably a bleached oak.

About a foot up from the floor, the finish was marred. Droplets of something that had hit the vertical plane and then trickled down.

Something, in the glow of the flashlight, that could have been, say, spaghetti sauce.

I knelt down and brought the light up close. The drops were fresh to the touch, and when I put the tip of my finger to within an inch of my nose, I detected no whiff of tomato or spices.

My heart sank. Something had definitely happened here. But—if this was any consolation—there was so little blood my guess was that whoever suffered an injury had managed to leave the scene.

The hospital. That was where we should go next. Milford Hospital.

I wiped the blood off my finger, wadded up the tissue, and stuck it into the front pocket of my jeans. Then I took the cell from my pocket.

“Hey, sweetheart. I’m comin’ out. I think we’ve got another stop to make on the way home.”

In fact, I was thinking, maybe two. The hospital would be our first, and if we didn’t find Stuart sitting in the ER, we’d go past his house on our way home.

We needed to find this kid. We needed to find him, and find out what, if anything, had happened to him.

I was waiting for Grace to respond.

“Grace? You there? I’m thinking we check the hospital on the
way home. I found what looks like just a little—and I mean just a little—blood here in the kitchen.”

Grace still had nothing to say.

“Grace?” I said. “Grace, are you there?”

Nothing.

I looked at the display on my phone. The connection had been broken. I moved quickly to the kitchen window to see whether she was still standing out back of the house.

She was not.

I brought up her number and was about to call her back when I stopped myself. If Grace had run into the bushes to hide—maybe that Milford cop had returned and was snooping around the house—and if she’d forgotten to mute her phone, the last thing she’d need would be me calling her. Even if I texted her, it would make that brief jingle and alert anyone around her.

I thought about running downstairs and scrambling out the basement window, but then reconsidered. If there was a cop wandering around, this wouldn’t be the best time to make an appearance. But then again, if someone spotted that broken window and decided to come into the house, I was trapped here.

I was not then, and never have been, adept at what you’d call grace under pressure. I couldn’t decide what to do next. I was paralyzed, terrified that whatever choice I made would be wrong.

I took a few deep breaths and attempted to focus. I needed to know what was going on, and I wasn’t going to learn a damn thing standing here in the kitchen trying to keep myself from wetting my pants.

I killed the flashlight and gingerly made my way through the living room to the front window so I could get a look at the street. No cop car, which was a blessing. Of course, my car was still sitting there, like a big blazing advertisement that read: “SOMEONE’S HERE! CHECK IT OUT!”

I detected some movement out of the corner of my eye.

Near the end of the driveway, sheltered by a tall hedge that separated this property from the next, I could make out two dark shapes.

Two people, facing each other. Talking.

I was pretty sure one of those people was Grace.

While it was too dark to read facial expressions, there was nothing about her posture that indicated this was a confrontation. The other person, who was about the same height, wasn’t waving his arms or pointing a finger.

And it didn’t look like a he, either.

Grace was talking to another girl. Or woman.

That cop she’d spotted was a woman, but this woman didn’t appear to be wearing a uniform or a heavy belt loaded down with assorted cop accessories. Plus, there was no cruiser on the street, at least not on the part of the street that I could see.

Time to find out what the hell was going on.

I returned to the basement, hoisted myself up through the open window, and got back on my feet outside the house. As I came around the corner, I could hear the hushed conversation of two people whispering.

Grace glanced my way. “Dad!”

She ran toward me. The other woman didn’t move.

She put her arms around me, her head on my chest. “I thought you’d never get out of there.”

“Your phone,” I said, not taking my eyes off the woman.

“Oh,” she said, glancing at it, still in her hand. “I must have hit the button or something.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“It’s okay,” Grace said. “You know I told you I made another call before I called you, soon as I got out of the house. I mean, I kept trying Stuart, but I called someone else, too.”

I eased myself out of Grace’s embrace and walked in the
direction of this mystery woman. I kept the flashlight off and down at my side, hoping that once I’d closed the distance, I’d be able to get a look at this person.

I stopped when I was within two feet of her.

“Hey, Teach,” she said.

“Jane,” I said.

Jane Scavullo.

CYNTHIA
Archer had been in Nathaniel’s apartment only five seconds when she realized she didn’t have her cell phone. Cynthia was not necessarily expecting Terry to call her about Grace, or anything else for that matter, but she wanted the phone with her just in case. So she ran back across the hall for the phone, then reentered Nathaniel’s place.

She’d told herself she had a good, and perfectly innocent, reason for accepting his invitation for coffee. She needed the distraction. Chatting with Nathaniel would keep her mind occupied with something other than Terry and Grace, and what might be going on that they didn’t want her knowing about.

It had nothing to do with the fact that he was an attractive young man. Let’s face it, a
damaged
attractive young man. He had more baggage than the lost and found at LaGuardia. And that short episode with Orland—the poor man—had been unsettling.

Nathaniel, reaching into the cupboard for two coffee cups, said, “It was nice to meet your husband, um—”

“Terry,” Cynthia said.

“Yeah, Terry. I hope I didn’t interrupt something when you guys were talking on the porch there. I didn’t realize—I mean, I never notice things like rings on fingers, so I didn’t even realize you were married. And you know, considering that you’re living here by yourself—but that’s none of my business anyway, so—Jesus, I’m rambling.”

Cynthia smiled. “That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

“He seems like a nice guy.”

“He is.”

“Grab a seat,” Nathaniel said, pointing to the small island in the kitchen nook. There were two stools tucked under the counter overhang. Cynthia pulled one out and perched her butt on the edge, one foot resting on the rung. At the island sink Nathaniel filled a glass carafe with cold water, turned around, and poured it into the top of an electric coffeemaker on the opposite counter, then slid the empty carafe into the base.

“I drink it, but the whole idea of decaf just seems wrong,” he said. “Like wine without alcohol. Cake without icing. Sex without orgasm.” He glanced at her. “Too far?”

“Yeah, the cake thing was a bit much,” Cynthia said.

“Thing is, decaf is all I can drink this late. It’s hard enough for me to sleep, and the last thing I need is to be more jittery.”

“What’s given you the jitters, aside from Orland?”

He forced a laugh. “Nothing really. Just—I was heading back, and I kind of let it rip on the turnpike, cruising around ninety, and I glanced in the mirror and thought I had a cop behind me. ’Bout had a heart attack. It was a Charger—the cops use them a lot for their unmarked cars. But it turned out just to be some guy.”

“Where were you driving back from?”

“Nowhere. A lot of nights, I just drive. Think about things. What used to be, and like that.”

“You know, I really think I should give Barney a call,”
Cynthia said. She’d already put his number into her phone. She brought up her contact list, tapped the screen, and put the phone to her ear.

After three rings, “Hello?”

“Barney? It’s Cynthia? Over on—”

“I know.”

“Sorry to call so late, but there’s something I thought I should let you in on.” She told him the story.

“Oh no,” Barney said. “Orland’s been okay for a while, but he must be taking a turn for the worse. The other day, I went to call on him, heard him talking to somebody, but when he opened the door, there was no one else there and he hadn’t been on the phone, either.”

“He was looking for his wife,” Cynthia said.

“She’s been dead thirty years, at least. He could hurt himself if he’s starting to lose it.”

“That’s why I called. I was thinking, he leaves something on the stove …”