The Dead Room (21 page)

Money had been a major issue in Teddy’s life ever since his father’s arrest. Every time he picked up the phone, it was another rude stranger with a harsh voice asking to speak to his mom. He could hear her answering questions with a worried expression on her face. Her answers were usually the same, even when she started working. “Next week,” she would say. “Next month.” Or even, “I don’t have it right now. Feeding my family comes first. You’ll just have to wait.”

She was a remarkable woman. It would take a few minutes after each call, but she always had a warm smile lying around. Always a good hug for Teddy and his little sister after one of those phone calls. Sometimes her hugs were too good, like maybe she was hanging on. He didn’t really mind though. Her cheeks were soft and he loved her long brown hair and the light, clean smell of her perfume.

They seemed to be eating spaghetti more often, Teddy noticed. And when he or his sister’s clothes wore out, his mom sewed them back together or ironed on patches instead of buying something new. At night, Teddy would often sneak out to the barn and watch her paint through the window. She could only paint at night and on weekends because of her new job. He knew painting was her favorite thing in the world, the thing she called her
mission
. But she looked tired, and often times when he peeked through the window he found her crying. He knew she was lonely, the whole thing getting to her.

Still, everything at home was a lot better than school. Teddy was no longer the son of a man who built worlds. According to his classmates, Teddy was the son of a murderer and would probably grow up to be one, too. The wrath started out as teasing and occasional wisecracks. After a few weeks, he was no longer allowed to play with certain friends. Their parents wouldn’t have it. When he caught his best friend taunting his little sister at recess, calling her a stupid cunt and a convict in waiting, Teddy knocked four teeth out of the kid’s mouth before a teacher could pull him off.

His suspension lasted three days—without a lecture or admonishment from his mother, he remembered. After that, everyone pretty much left him and his sister alone. His friend’s face was the reminder. The false teeth and the hook in his lip had come from Teddy’s fist, and both remained even as they had their pictures taken for the yearbook as seniors.

Curiously, the accountant had two kids in the same school who never seemed to suffer anything at all. Even when their father was convicted of the murder and carted off to jail, everyone still seemed to think Teddy’s father was the one. Teddy couldn’t figure it out. After a few months, he thought maybe it was because they were girls. He shared three classes with one of them. Janice Sawyer acted like nothing had happened or ever would. Teddy knew it was an act because she never once looked at him after her father went to jail. Still, with everything that had gone down, he was fascinated by her performance and found it hard to keep his eyes off her.

She had natural blond hair and a certain sophistication beyond her years. She’d also matured more quickly than most of the other girls. He could remember seeing her on the first day of class in ninth grade. It looked like she’d spent the summer growing huge breasts and turning herself into a woman. Teddy found his attraction for her confusing because deep inside he hated her. Even more troubling, he noticed she wore something new every day and her clothes looked expensive. When he asked around and found out the girl’s mother didn’t have to work, it got underneath his skin.

Teddy thought about the money her father had stolen a lot. The money that had ruined all their lives. Sometimes it worked him over so hard he couldn’t even get to sleep at night. He had his theories—the most likely being that the Sawyers had buried the cash in their backyard. He often fantasized about digging it up and stealing it while they were asleep. Giving it to his mom and watching the Sawyers suffer the way his family had. One Saturday he walked over to their house and saw Janice’s mother gardening in the backyard. Teddy hid in the bushes behind a tree for two hours keeping an eye on her, but it turned out all she was doing was planting flowers.

When he came home, he found his mother in the kitchen rooting through some of his father’s old papers. She’d spent the afternoon cleaning out closets, not spying on people, and found a life insurance policy his dad had never talked about. Things changed after that and became easier. Not at first because the insurance company tried to deny that the policy was valid. Teddy was sixteen at the time and guessed the insurance company was hoping that after two years no one would bother to call and they could keep the money for themselves. But his mom called and kept calling. And when that didn’t work, she asked a friend she often painted with, Quint Adler, to see what he could do. Quint had been a family friend and owned a farm just up Sanctuary Road. His brother worked for their congressman, and Teddy guessed the call from Washington had been the real breakthrough. Still, Teddy always looked at Quint as the one person in their lives who tried to right at least part of the big wrong. Teddy was forever grateful to the man. Years later, when Quint started seeing his mother more often, Teddy was delighted. He hadn’t replaced his dad. He’d just become another member of the family.

The money hadn’t been enough to make them rich, Teddy remembered. There wasn’t enough to pay for either him or his sister’s college tuition. It wasn’t even enough so that his mother could paint during the day—she couldn’t give up her job. But it ended the rude phone calls from all those bill collectors. No one with a harsh voice ever called asking for his mother again. And if they did, Teddy had permission to hang up.

Of course, Teddy had thought the money would do more than that at the time. He’d hoped it would. But at night, sneaking out to the barn and watching his mom paint through the window, there were times when he still found her crying. The money didn’t change that. It couldn’t raise the dead or rebuild a dream that had been chopped down by the greedy. It couldn’t bring back a husband or even a father. It was just money.

TWENTY-EIGHT

He could hear her crying. The sound of his mother moved from the barn, across the snow and into the house until it reached the other side of her bedroom door. The hour seemed so late. When he opened his eyes, he saw Sally Barnett’s face moving away from his and realized she’d just kissed him on the cheek.

He was lying beneath a heavy blanket on the couch in the Barnett’s den. His shoes were off, his collar and tie loosened. Sally held a washcloth in her hand, rinsing it in a bowl of warm water and returning it to his forehead. He looked at the fire burning in the hearth, then back at her face. It had been Sally’s tears he’d heard, not his mother’s, and she looked more than just upset.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“I found you in the snow.”

He took in the news as he tried to collect himself. His arms and legs felt weighted down. He didn’t know how he got here or why, and couldn’t think through the pain eating at him from just above his brow.

“I’ve got a headache,” he said, propping himself up.

She left the warm washcloth against his forehead and rose. The kitchen was to his back, and he couldn’t see what she was doing. As he listened to several cabinets open and close, his eyes returned to the fire. The oak logs were dry, the heat reaching him with its soothing touch from across the room.

Sally sat down on the couch, passing him two Tylenol caplets and a glass of cold tap water.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Three in the morning. When you didn’t come back to the hospital, I got worried and called a cab. You were lying beneath a tree by the front door.”

Her words were barely audible, her eyes swollen with worry. Teddy swallowed the pills and noted that she was trembling. Barnett had been in an accident, he recalled. He’d come to their house to pick up some things for Sally. He remembered seeing blood all over the snow in the driveway. What happened after that wasn’t clear. It had been dark, and he wondered if he hadn’t run into a tree.

Sally took the glass and set it down on the table. Then she picked up a tube of Neosporin and a large Band-Aid and set to mending the wound on Teddy’s head.

“It just missed your temple,” she said. “Do you think you need to see a doctor?”

“I’m okay,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure. His headache seemed way too big for a couple of pills. “How’s Jim?”

“They won’t know for a few days,” she said, turning her face away. “But they think he’ll make it.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “The car crushed his legs. They won’t tell me if he’ll ever walk again. His recovery will take time, they said. A long time. I’m not very good at living on my own.”

Teddy listened to her voice trail off and didn’t know how to respond. The reality of what had happened to Barnett seemed so overwhelming. So horrible. She turned back to him, dabbing his wound with Neosporin and applying the large bandage. As she smoothed her hands over his forehead, he noticed the smell of fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen.

Sally got up and left the room. A few minutes later, she returned with two piping hot mugs.

“Jim’s a fighter,” Teddy said, trying to sound hopeful.

She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.

“If the doctor’s are saying he’s gonna make it, then he will,” he said.

She listened to him and nodded, taking a seat at the other end of the couch and sipping her coffee. Barnett was strong willed and in good shape. Teddy had spent enough time with him to know that if the man had a chance, he’d take it and run with it. While it was true that he seemed to be dipping into an unknown variety of medications recently, Teddy had never seen him do it before they took the Holmes case.

“He’s been upset lately, hasn’t he?” Teddy said.

She turned to the fire without responding, her expression blank as she stared at the flames.

“I’ve never seen him like this before,” he said. “It’s got something to do with Oscar Holmes.”

“He wants it to end quickly,” she whispered.

“That’s the part I don’t understand.”

“He’s lived a troubled life, Teddy.”

“Holmes, you mean.”

She nodded, still gazing at the fire. “His family’s been worried about him for most of his life.”

“How so?”

She paused, thinking it over. “He never seemed to fit in,” she said after a moment. “He always had to do things his own way. There have been times as an adult when he couldn’t take care of himself very well. He’s had a problem with depression, but I think Jim already told you that. His family knew it would come to something like this one day and it has.”

“Jim told me he’s known the family for a long time,” he said. “Who are they?”

She turned to him, the fire reflecting in her eyes. “Oscar Holmes is my brother, Teddy. My maiden name is Holmes.”

It settled in with the subtlety of a death ray.

Oscar Holmes was Sally’s brother. Holmes was Barnett’s brother-in-law. It settled into the room like a deeply kept secret that had just been ripped open and exposed. As far as Sally knew, her own brother had brutally murdered two young girls. And now the DA was saying there might be ten more.

Another family tragedy was unfolding, Teddy realized. He thought about Barnett’s desk drawer again—how it had become the pharmacy drawer in recent days. And Barnett’s attitude from the beginning—how he couldn’t be reached on the phone, and when he could, all he wanted was to end the case quickly and make sure Holmes got the care his family thought he needed. Barnett was the family, not a mysterious friend from childhood or a client with the firm. The murders weren’t something to be read about from the safe distance of words printed in a newspaper. Jim and Sally Barnett were part of the story, the crime, intimately connected to it by family. No wonder Barnett wasn’t seeing things clearly.

Teddy set down his coffee mug. It occurred to him that the night Holmes checked into prison he’d tried to make a collect call to his sister but she wouldn’t accept the charges. That sister was Sally Barnett. He looked at her at the other end of the couch, her head against a pillow and her eyes closed. Her breathing had quieted and it appeared as if she was sleeping. He wondered why she hadn’t taken the call that night. It seemed odd, curious. She hadn’t paid her brother a visit either.

Teddy lifted the blanket away and draped it over her. He slipped into his shoes and stood. His legs wobbled at first, and as he steadied himself and felt the ache deepen inside his head, he wondered if he shouldn’t call a doctor. He saw his coat on the chair by the fire and pulled it on. As he walked to the front door and looked outside, he noticed it was snowing again. He could see the impression his body had made in the snow right outside the door. Stepping out into the cold air, he buttoned up and looked at the marks he’d made crawling up from the driveway. The falling snow had almost filled them in. Curiously, there were a faint set of footprints running alongside the same path. He stared at them for a while, wondering what he was looking at. It didn’t really seem like he’d crawled to the door. Instead, it looked more like his body had been dragged.

The fog lifted and burned away in a single moment. He remembered the Sterling silver shot glass with tall ships and whales etched into its side. He hadn’t run into a tree. Nothing that occurred here tonight had been an accident. He glanced back at the snow falling to the ground, softening the impressions and wiping them out.