Death by Chocolate Snickerdoodle, page 19
“Yup. Might want to keep your own car locked,” he said.
He knew a lot about bombs and bomb making, having been in his youth a master of the craft.
“Here,” he said, handing me a small plastic device with a button on one end. It appeared to be made from two TV remotes duct-taped together, and if I knew my dad, it probably was. “Use this to start your car, instead of the key,” he said. “It’s a remote switch. I wired it into your ignition system.”
Like I say, a master.
“Stand back when you do it, though,” he added unnecessarily. “Just in case.”
Oh, you betcha. The first time, anyway. “Thanks,” I said as we went into the kitchen, where Ephraim picked blueberries from his cereal with one chubby hand and flicked them across the table with the other.
One hit the back of Wade’s newspaper with a milky splat, but Wade didn’t flinch, being by now a hardened veteran of the multigenerational breakfast table.
My dad tucked into his rye crisps, cottage cheese, and slices of red tomato. Ellie buttered toast slices, added them to a plate of bacon and eggs, delivered the plate to me, and put hot coffee in front of me.
After last night, I thought just shooting it into a vein might work better, but after I applied myself to my cup in the normal way and to the good breakfast that Ellie had made for me, I felt halfway human.
“We still going rose-hip picking?” Mika asked, chewing her egg sandwich.
Despite what had happened the night before, she meant it, and that’s my family in a nutshell.
“Oh, yes,” Bella replied, putting two apples and a paring knife into the picnic basket she’d gotten from the hall closet.
In there already I recognized a quartet of wax paper–wrapped sausage rolls, some fat slices of cake, and—I blinked in surprise— two splits of what looked very much like champagne, plus little clear plastic cups to drink it from.
“Just let me fill these thermos jugs with coffee,” she said. The jeans and sweatshirt she wore were a sharp departure from her usual faded cotton housedress. “And then we can get going.”
I hadn’t thought Bella was coming along. After all, who’d be doing the babysitting? But as I began to say so, she shot me a look that could’ve fried more bacon and eggs, so I shut up about it.
“Don’t you forget what I told you,” said my dad, and Wade looked up from his newspaper.
He held an arm out; I got up and stepped into his embrace. The night before, he’d listened patiently to my story of all that had happened recently, asked appropriate questions, and offered one stern piece of advice: “Don’t be alone with anybody.”
It’s those unwitnessed moments that’ll get you in trouble, he knew, so no more strolling through the puckerbrush with guys like Devon Sipp, for instance, or taking late-night cemetery tours with Perry Wilson.
Not until I’d told him what we were doing this morning—and especially that we’d be together doing it—had he relented a little, and Be careful, was all the warning his pale blue-gray eyes conveyed now.
And then the four of us—me, Ellie, Mika, and Bella—were out the door, into a crisply brilliant fall morning, with orange leaves rustling in the maples and the chrysanthemums by the back porch beaming bright yellow in the slanting sunshine.
The air smelled faintly of gasoline and burnt rubber instead like grass fires for once. Feeling a little foolish—it really was a beautiful day—I pressed the button on my dad’s remote gadget, and when (a) my car started and (b) nothing blew up in our faces, we all got in.
“So, Bella, why are you so set on rose-hip picking today?” Ellie wanted to know as we drove off down Key Street.
“It’s the season for them,” she replied shortly.
She had more reason than that; I could tell by the way she kept her lips pressed tightly together and her hands clasped in her lap. But she wasn’t telling, or at least not yet, so I drove us along the waterfront to the beach access she’d been talking about the night before, where we parked and got out.
Up on the road, a long driveway led somewhere I couldn’t see, but here a stony path from the parking area led between a high, grassy bluff and a granite outcropping that jutted out to the beach. On it we made our way between bleached, gnarly chunks of driftwood and lumpy swaths of dark green seaweed spread out on the sand like tangled yarn skeins.
“Heaven,” Mika opined, spreading her arms wide to take in the blue water, white-topped waves, and the crying gulls wheeling overhead with the sun on their wings.
The smell was like cold salt water dosed with iodine, with a whiff of fish threaded through it. Even Bella softened when the shore perfume hit her. I put an arm companionably around her, and she walked alongside me to the water’s edge.
There little waves foamed like lace. Bella leaned warmly against me, which surprised me, since ordinarily, she wasn’t the least bit cuddly.
“So why did you bring us here?” I asked. “It’s because of Perry Wilson somehow, isn’t it?” I guessed.
But instead of answering, she slipped her shoes and socks off, handed the footwear to me, and waded in.
Behind us, Mika and Ellie had spread a blanket on the little beach and were weighing the red plaid fabric down at the corners with our bags and the picnic basket.
“My friends and I used to come here,” Bella said, trudging back up through the soft sand toward me.
Her feet were already blue, and her calves were reddening from the frigid water. But she didn’t seem to care. Back at the blanket, she sat to brush her feet off, then pulled her socks on. She had, I reminded myself, lived by this cold water all her life.
“We picked rose hips all along here back then, too,” she said, waving up at the bluff’s sharp slope rising behind us.
Beach roses, eight feet high and as lushly thick as jungle vegetation, grew all up and down the slope, creating a nearly solid wall of glossy green bushes bristling with viciously sharp thorns and loaded with shiny bright red fruit.
All four of us owned leather gloves, gifts from husbands who seemed to think steel-toed work boots were good gifts, too. And now that I’d plucked broken glass out of a window with the gloves on, and managed not to break any bones while dropping that very same window onto my fortunately steel-toe-booted foot, I tended to agree, but that’s another story. As for this one . . .
“These rose hips are as big as golf balls,” said Ellie as she snipped another stem-load of the fruit. One of the canvas tote bags we’d brought along was already nearly full.
Mika had been snipping fast and steadily, as well, but I could tell from the distant look in her dark eyes that she was thinking of something else.
“Did you hear from the college?” I guessed aloud quietly. “About the job?”
She nodded, brushing back the shiny black hair swinging in her face. “I start next week. If . . .” She angled her head toward Bella, who seemed thoroughly in her element here, moving confidently among the thorny bushes. “I’m afraid it’ll break her heart when I get somebody else for the kids. I mean, she looks good here, but . . .”
It was true: Bella looked nimble as a mountain goat right now. But here in the sunshine at the edge of a saltwater bay, we all felt ten years younger, didn’t we?
And besides, a pleasant couple of hours’ worth of fresh air and exercise were not at all the same as a whole long day caring for an infant and a toddler. An active toddler . . . Heck, I’d had only one of them in my life, and that alone had nearly killed me.
“Sam?” I suggested.
He loved fatherhood and was fully capable of caring for his children. None of us worried about that. But . . .
“We’ve gone over our finances some more,” said Mika. “If Billy’s not back soon and Sam doesn’t replace him, it looks like Sam will need to give up a third of his customers at least.” She took a breath, her gloved hands moving efficiently with the snippers and her tote bag filling steadily. “And he says he won’t replace Billy until he’s sure Billy won’t be back.”
My own hands stopped moving. Back in the bad old days, Sam had got dragged in on drunk and disorderly charges so often that he’d started putting notches in his bed’s wooden headboard each time it happened.
When he’d finally got sober, that bed looked like an army of beavers had gotten at it. But now he’d become a good father—and, it seemed, a very good friend to Billy Breyer.
A loyal friend . . .
“I see,” I murmured to Mika, and the rose hips shimmered briefly through my proud tears. So I hadn’t done it all wrong, apparently.
“Which means Sam will have to work full-time at whatever’s left to try to make up for Billy not being there,” Mika went on.
That took Sam out of the “taking care of the kids” picture, I realized. Just then Bella came over to us.
“D’you girls want to see something from the good old days?” she asked. “Right up there?”
She pointed toward the top of the bluff, where the corner of a red-tiled roof showed. A narrow path led up to the structure. This, I felt suddenly sure, was why Bella had brought us here.
A steep path. More thorny rosebushes, too.
Lots more.
* * *
Climbing the thorn-infested hill, I squinched myself together into the smallest shape humanly possible, trying not to get slashed, punctured, or both.
Unsuccessfully, I might add. Ouch.
“Bella?” She was right behind me, I could tell by the stomping and the huffing and puffing.
“What?” she wanted to know crossly, and speaking of various infestations, there seemed to be way more biting red ants than we needed around here. Way more.
Meanwhile, Ellie climbed on ahead of us, agile as a monkey and with her step full of a truly irritating amount of vim and vigor.
Seriously, people, keep all that radiantly well-oxygenated good health of yours at home, won’t you? But I digress. “Bella, are you sure you know what’s up there?”
“Of course I am.”
Wincing, I licked a bleeding thorn scratch, while ahead of us Ellie hoisted herself up over the bluff’s edge and vanished.
“Go on,” Bella urged me impatiently, and not much later she helped me up over the edge by shoving me from behind, then scrambled up on her own and got to her feet. Not prettily, and not without effort, but she did it. Meanwhile, I sat there gasping and hoping that I didn’t pass out.
“Hey, you guys!” Mika had made it over the bluff, too, and now she gestured for us to come see the rest of the building whose roof we’d glimpsed earlier.
Behind thick, overgrown masses of yellowing grass the place was nearly hidden from view. But parting the vegetation revealed a low, modern-looking structure with huge windows facing the water, a place that would’ve looked more at home on the California coast than it did on this easternmost stretch of coastline. Also, it looked as if it hadn’t had so much as a gutter rehung or a dab of paint slapped onto it in at least forty years.
I spotted Mika on the long deck overlooking the bay. Bella and Ellie were just joining her there. I followed.
“Some view,” I said, waving backward at the water and sky. A red-and-white tugboat putt-putted its way around the island’s south end, toward the cargo port. Beyond, rafts of gulls lifted and settled.
But my companions weren’t looking that way; instead, they bent over a heavily warped piece of plywood nailed over one of the house’s big windows.
When I drew nearer, Ellie looked up at me. “The warp made a gap,” she said.
“And there are skylights everywhere, so we can see in,” said Mika as I bent to peek past the warped plywood into the house, then stepped back, with the hairs on my arms prickling.
It was dim in there, the skylights obscured by grime and decades of seagull droppings. But there was enough light to see that the walls were papered with newspaper clippings. And photographs, lots and lots of . . .
Ellie and I exchanged “Who knows?” glances and followed Bella around the side of the house, through more hip-high grass, until we came to a small door, which obviously led down into a cellar. A very old padlock, rusty in the extreme, secured the door to its frame. Bella contemplated it.
“I promised I’d never tell,” she murmured, seemingly to herself. “And I never did. I’ve kept my promise for all these years. But now . . .”
My heart sank. Was this what she’d brought us here for? Because if she had, then never mind if she had a key; it wasn’t going to work. The lock was too old, too neglected, too rusty. Maybe if you soaked it in lubricating oil, I thought, but even then, it probably wouldn’t—
Bella reached out and, with housework-roughened fingertips, plucked the padlock hasp’s big screws from their screw holes, rocking them around a little so they’d slip out of the rotten old wood more easily.
Then the lock’s hasp came entirely away from the door, and the door opened, just as she’d known it would. This, then, was her secret, that she could get in here anytime she wished.
A stale damp-concrete smell floated out of the darkness. Bella snapped a flashlight on, ducked in through the low entrance.
“You planned this, didn’t you?” I accused her as she waved the rest of us in. Cool dampness chilled my sun-warmed arms as I stepped through the doorway.
Faint shrug from Bella. “I told you my friends and I used to come here. One of them, Patty Montague, lived in this house before Perry’s folks bought it.”
We all went down; I glanced around a little nervously in the basement gloom, hoping there were no long-dead bodies down here. I’d made no progress in figuring out where the one under Alvin’s porch had come from, and that made me wonder what large, obvious fact I was missing.
Meanwhile, just being here seemed to have given Bella new energy. Leading us up some wooden stairs, she went on, “But her folks fell on hard times, this place got foreclosed on, the city bought it, and there was talk of tearing it down. Making a park.” With the view and the beach access, it would be a great one. “But the city didn’t want to lose the property taxes,” she said, “and at the last minute they sold to the Wilsons instead.”
She pushed open a wooden door at the top of the stairs—its bottom edge scraped the floor with a harsh squeal—and revealed a gray rectangle of space. I stepped into it, Ellie aimed her flashlight past me, and then, with a sudden thudding of my heart, I leapt back, startled by the dozens and dozens of photographs tacked to the walls.
All of the same two girls . . .
A creepy feeling came over me. The pictures, some in color and others in black and white, were mostly snapshots, but a few had been professionally taken: graduation portraits and so on. Tacked to the walls or taped. Some were newish; some faded and yellowing.
“Eek,” Mika breathed softly from behind me.
“No kidding,” I said, still staring.
Suddenly all I wanted was to get out of here as swiftly and efficiently as possible and then take a hot shower. But . . .
“Do I know them?” I wondered aloud.
Both girls were in their late teens or possibly their early twenties, blond, narrow faced, and thin lipped, with extremely pale skin and whitish eyelashes.
“They look like . . .” I said. Albino rabbits was what they resembled, with the kind of fair skin that burned to a crisp in ten minutes’ worth of bright sunshine.
Gazing around wonderingly, Bella walked farther into the room, whose once modern Scandinavian-style furniture now looked like the stage set for a sixties sitcom: landline phone, tweedy upholstery . . . even the TV was built into a wooden console, along with a radio and turntable.
“We used to watch cartoons in here,” Bella said, smiling distantly. “And even after Patty’s family moved away, the rest of us used to sneak back in.” Her smile faded. “I promised I’d never come in here with anyone else, though,” she said, then turned to me.
“Anyway, the other day I came over here to check the rose-hip situation, to see if there were enough to make it worth us coming to pick them.” Nostalgia softened her tone. “And, of course, once I was here, I couldn’t resist trying to get a look inside the old house.”
“I’m sorry? You climbed that hill by yourself?” I asked. Because doing it with the rest of us was one thing, but . . .
“Oh, no. There’s a driveway. I just drove in and parked,” she replied, and of course, at this news I didn’t just throttle her. Hey, I love steep, hot, thorny, exhausting, red ant–infested hills, and I wouldn’t have wanted to avoid this one by coming up via the other, easier way . . .
“I didn’t want anyone to see our car,” she explained, and that confused me until . . .
Just then Ellie returned from checking the rest of the house. “So you saw all this?” she asked Bella, waving her hand around.
The girls’ faces smiled from everywhere, even the ceiling. Bella nodded, biting her lip. “It’s awful, isn’t it?” she whispered.
It sure was, and my next thought was that somebody should warn those two girls, whoever they were. “I still don’t get why you brought us here to see it, though,” I said.
Bella looked stubborn. “Do you remember when Perry Wilson came to the door?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered slowly, “of course I do, but . . .”
Mika moved, wide eyed and tight lipped, toward the basement door, uncomfortable and wanting to get out of here right now. I always said she had good sense.
“And did you see his arms?” Bella demanded, as if something about them had been so obvious that even I must have noticed.
“I saw them, but I didn’t really pay much attention to . . .” But then the light dawned. “They were scratched up, weren’t they?”
I glanced down at my own arms. After that climb up through the roses, they looked as if cats had been attacking them. Just like Perry’s. “You looked in here, saw this whole weird shrine, or whatever it is, and came home with scratches yourself.”
She nodded slowly. “And that night, his arms were all clawed-looking. Plus, I felt like I’d seen a ghost, because here . . .” She waved a bony hand at the photographs. “Because you just tell me now,” she demanded, “who do those girls remind you of, white eyelashes and all?”
