The Soul Hunter (22 page)

I sat, wrapped in one of my mother’s quilts (I still had no bathrobe), drinking tea at my kitchen table and listening as my eaves began to drip onto the hard, crunchy snow. I scribbled on notepads all morning, trying to bring some order to my thoughts and generate a to-do list.

Randy of Randy’s Right-Now Rodent Removal made an appearance just after noon. I listened grimly as he assessed my situation.

“With your rats,” he said, nodding gravely at me, “you’ve got your entry problem and your exit problem.”

“My entry problem and my exit problem?”

“Let’s start with your entry problem. By that I mean, where are they coming in? What is their point of entry?”

“They’re coming in behind the water heater.” I pointed dumbly at the hole. Was the man blind?

“Yes, but your original point of entry is what I’m asking, Miss Foster.”

“I don’t follow you, Randy.”

He took a scrap of paper and a ball-point pen from his pocket protector, clicked the pen like he was cocking a gun, and began to draw.

“Your walls of your typical house in this neighborhood are
framed like this, sitting on a foundation you call a pier and beam. What you have with a pier and beam is a crawl space, some sixteen to eighteen inches in clearance, between your subflooring and your ground. We do it like this in Dallas because the ground in North Texas likes to move around a little bit here and there. A slab foundation, like you might have up in the panhandle or somewhere, would crack quick as a wink.”

I nodded, already overwhelmed with unfamiliar and, to my mind, unnecessary information.

“Now you have a concrete base on this pier and beam construction, and if you’re lucky, a high performance vapor barrier above the soil in your crawl space. If that barrier is damaged in any way,” he punched the pen at his drawing to emphasize what I hoped would be the climax of his little speech, “you can get yourself rodents, mold, all manner of problems.”

“So you’re saying my vapor barrier is damaged, you think?”

“House this age probably never had one, Miss Foster. I hate to tell you that, but it’s the awful truth.”

“So how can I find out?”

“What I’m going to do is, I’m going to slip on my coveralls and go down there and take a peek. I’ll be right back.”

He left for a moment and came back from his truck wearing a pair of filthy white coveralls with a red-and-white patch on the back in the shape of a mouse, with
Randy’s Right-Now Rodent Removal
stitched into it, and the motto below: “Because you needed us yesterday.”

“Where’s your trap door?” he asked me.

“My trap door?”

“House like this, you have a trap door that goes down to the crawl space. Usually in your bedroom closet. Mind if I take a look?”

I shook my head no and trundled along behind him into my bedroom. I tried not to feel violated as he opened my closet door and parted my clothes with his thick, hairy arms. He removed
handfuls of blouses and tossed them on the bed. I grabbed them up and placed them neatly in stacks, holding my hand out for him to hand me the next batch.

Randy let out a mighty grunt as he eased himself down on one knee and began taking my shoes out of the closet, shoving them off to the side. I placed them in tidy rows on the hardwood floor, arranged by type and heel height.

Going through my closet tickled an inkling to return to Drew’s room. I made a mental note to go back over there and take another look.

Randy located the trap door, pried it open with the largest screwdriver I’d ever seen, and squished himself through the gap. He completed this maneuver, miraculously, without the aid of the slab of butter I’d deemed essential to get a man that size into a hole roughly the width of a couple of shoeboxes.

Frigid stale air snuck into my already-chilly house as I waited by the open trap door, peering through at the dirt below. I could see Randy’s flashlight bobbing in the darkness, illuminating cobwebs and dead bugs I was better off not knowing about. I backed away from the hole and sat on the floor by my bed.

He was back in a minute, smashing his elbows into his ribcage and puffing back up into the room in a cloud of dust.

“Miss Foster, I’m sorry to inform you that you have no vapor barrier.”

“That is unfortunate news.”

“Additionally, your foundation is cracked directly underneath your water heater. A recent crack, it looks like to me. Have you had any unusual settling in your house lately? Heard any loud creaks?”

“Something like that, yes.” My hatred for Peter Terry bloomed into a red-hot, billowing mushroom cloud in my head.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you until you address your foundation problem, Miss Foster.”

“You mean I’m stuck with the mice?”

“Rats.”

“Whatever. Can’t you just run them off or something? I thought that was what you did.”

“Well, this is getting right into your exit problem, Miss Foster. See here, right now they have both. Entry and exit. You can do whatever you want, but they will continue to enjoy full access to your property. What you have to do is seal off that crack and then address your rodent infestation.”

“Infestation? Is that an official word? What exactly is that?”

“That’s a significant rodent problem, Miss Foster, which is what you have here.” He took out his pen again. “Now what I can do,” he said, drawing me yet another diagram, “is fix a steel plate over the hole behind the water heater. And I can seal up the crack in your foundation, but it will only be a temporary fix. You’ll have to call for foundation repair for a more permanent solution.”

“That’s expensive, isn’t it?”

“I can recommend someone who’s reliable and very reasonably priced.”

“You don’t have a brother named Fred, do you? Fred’s Forever Foundation Repair?”

Randy didn’t laugh.

“In the meantime, I can leave you some glue traps,” he said sternly.

“I bought a humane trap a few days ago.”

“Caught anything?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll leave you some glue traps.”

“Why can’t you just poison them?”

“Back to your exit problem. Seal off your exit and you’re stuck with dying rodents between your walls. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

I would.

He went to his truck again and spent the next hour drilling and hammering and applying various fixatives to my water heater closet and to the crack in my foundation, then handed me an astronomical bill, a stack of glue traps that smelled like new tires, and a business card for Metroplex Foundation Repair. I thanked him, wrote a check that almost cleaned out my teensy checking account, and sent him on his way.

I loaded my clothes back into my closet, re-sorting them by type, fabric, and color, of course, which gave my brain something to do besides worry. I found a pair of flowery jeans I’d forgotten about and a neato Bob Dylan T-shirt someone had given me last year for my birthday. I have a thing for him since I’m named after him. I showered, slipped the T-shirt on underneath a roomy sweater, and started making phone calls.

Sharlotta was first. She said I could come back tonight to take another look at Drew’s closet. I tried to reach David on his cell phone, but had to leave a message. Then I called Helene to see how her knees were, and Maria Chavez to see if she’d moved back into her house since Gordon Pryne had been arrested. I left messages for both of them. I checked my messages at the office. Nothing that couldn’t wait. I’d return the calls tomorrow when everyone was back in action. No way we’d get away with another snow day, no matter how slick the streets were. We’d already had two days off—unheard-of wealth in a Texas winter.

By the time I’d finished making phone calls and fussing around the house with chores, the sun was almost down again, the thin January daylight dimming and the freeze bringing the dripping water to a dead stop.

My doorbell rang then, and despite my recent bad luck answering my door, I ran to open it, glad for the company.

It was David, carrying a bouquet of grocery-store roses, a fluffy new pink bathrobe with matching slippers, and some news.

“Linda Fortenberry called me today.”

“Who’s that?” I asked, as I started filling a vase for the roses.

“She’s the medical examiner for Dallas County.”

I looked up.

“You met her at the Christmas party,” he said. “I had lunch with her Tuesday.”

“What did she want?”

“She owes me a favor. I asked her to call me about Drew’s autopsy.”

I turned off the faucet. “What? What did she say?”

“Drew Sturdivant was pregnant when she died.”

S
he was only four weeks along. She may not have even known she was pregnant. The ME’s office was running DNA tests to begin the process of identifying the father.

I was back at Drew’s apartment within an hour, poking through her closet and digging through her drawers, with Sharlotta’s toe shoes thumping against the floor in the next room and Melissa the redheaded bunny rabbit hopping around my feet.

Once again, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I made myself hold back and observe without jumping to any conclusions about anything I saw. It’s an old therapy trick. Curiosity is the key to learning anything about anybody. If you allow yourself to indulge in a little unfettered curiosity, even the most stubborn, predetermined conclusions tend to evaporate pretty quickly, opening up any number of possibilities you may have otherwise overlooked.

Drew had the wardrobe of an anarchist. An anarchist with talent and a quirky sense of style. Almost everything she had was black or camouflage fabric, with whimsical dashes of Drew-like originality thrown in. A bright yellow fake fur collar was sewn on to a ripped denim jacket with poetry written on the back in black Sharpie. Lace spilled from the pockets of a pair of camouflage painter’s pants. Delicate pink ribbony trim was sewn on to a black leather micro-miniskirt.

She owned only five pairs of shoes—admirable parsimony in the birthplace of Neiman-Marcus. (We take shoes seriously here in Dallas.) There was a pair of black stack-heel Mary Janes, two pairs of combat boots—one red leather, one black and scuffed—a pair of black sneakers, and a pair of black ballet flats.

Necklaces and scarves hung on plastic racks just inside the closet door. I ran my hand along the scarves. A faded black leather newsboy cap hung on a peg.

The top shelf of her closet was stuffed with cardboard liquor boxes. I climbed onto her desk chair and pulled them down, one by one.

The boxes, stained and weakened by time and use, held Drew’s childhood. Stuffed animals and dolls were packed in one. Another held her school papers and report cards from the Jesus commune. The report cards bothered me. In addition to the usual marks in writing, math, and history, there were courses with names like “Biblical Behavior,” “Spirit-filled Living,” and “Submission to Authority”—as though such things could be mandated and quantified. Drew’s grades were abysmal, as mine would have been in such a militaristic, follow-the-dictator environment.

The report cards stopped coming after her sophomore year. I guessed that was about the time she got married.

The next box held what looked to me like early sewing projects. One smock-like number, the original design surely intended to serve as a sweet little outfit for a young girl, was stained with red ink blotches and scrawled with the words “Daddy’s little girl.” The shoulder buttons were little metal skulls.

I looked up as Sharlotta entered the room with two mugs of hot tea and a carrot for Melissa.

“Valerian,” she said, handing me a mug. “Good for the nerves.”

“Thanks. I guess it’s okay to cook tea, then?”

She smiled with those fabulous teeth. “Technically this is an herbal brew rather than tea. With herbs, you really shouldn’t
boil the water all the way. It bruises the leaves.”

I took a sip. It tasted sort of weedy.

She pointed at the jumper I was holding. “What do you think?”

“I think Drew had some unresolved anger issues.”

She laughed. “You got that right. That’s from seventh grade home economics. She got kicked out of class for that.”

“What happens to you when you get kicked out of class at the Jesus commune? Do you have to go to hell without passing ‘go’ or something?”

“Close. You get K.D.”

“What’s that?”

“Kitchen duty. Up at 4:30 a.m. to grind the wheat and make bread for 150 people.”

“You guys ground wheat and made your own bread?”

“I had my first slice of store-bought bread when I was seventeen years old. The year I left.”

“What did you think of it?” I asked.

“Not nearly as good as homemade. But sweeter.”

“All that processed flour, I guess.”

“No. Because no one got punished to make it.”

“I saw her report cards. Who decides what biblical behavior is?”

“Not us, that’s for sure.” She climbed on the chair and pulled down the last box. “This is the one you should be looking at.”

She sat down on the floor, cross-legged, pulled the flaps of the box open, and handed me a stack of photographs.

I sat down next to her and studied the first one. It was the face from the newspaper photo, but much younger, with wispy black hair and sad, lonely eyes.