“Truth is, we never do know people, not really. Even those closest to us, those we love...”
“Go to hell,” I told him. The officer and the woman were heading up to the house. I turned around and walked off toward the darkened front room.
“It was a good job. Dan was making good money, for a handyman, that is. He liked it here and he liked her, Miss Sophie he called her. I think she was a little sweet on him, too, which was kind of weird, you know, her being so much older than him. But anyhow, after he didn’t show up, well, we’d had a fight, so I didn’t... But all the other times when we had a fight, he came home in a week or so. I figured he was staying with a friend, but when I finally called...”
I sat in the dark just outside the kitchen in a chair still covered by a sheet and listened. They were questioning her here. I wasn’t surprised; Jake often did things in an unorthodox way. Sometimes, he said, people need to be questioned where they feel comfortable and safe; other times they need to be brought to the station. All depends on the circumstances and the situation.
“So Jack, that’s the friend, he says he hasn’t seen Dan in a couple of weeks, though Dan did leave him a message, he said. Wanted to borrow Jack’s truck, and he’d let him know when, that he’d make it worth his while. I met the woman, the one who killed herself? You think I didn’t get sick when I heard she did that? I thought then maybe she had fallen in love with Dan, the old bag, and after she killed him, she took her own life. I called you people; I asked questions. I reported Dan missing; you got records of that. I reported him, but...” The woman started to cry.
As I leaned forward in the chair, my hands crushed together, the candles in the windows came on. They saw it from the kitchen. Jake quickly explained that they were on a timer.
“But he was careful, he... Dan was no carpenter or electrician or nothing like that, but he knew how to do things. He said it was good money here and a lot of work, enough to keep him busy all winter. He was even going to ask if we could stay here through till spring, that she could take a little out of his pay, if she wanted. It’s a nice house, better than where we were staying, but then we had a fight...”
“What did you fight about, Miss...” Jake asked.
“Oh, nothing important. I drink a little, I say things I shouldn’t. Mostly about money and him helping out with the bills. I let him stay with me for practically nothing. I mean, I used to let him stay...”
“We need to find this Jack, the friend with the truck,” I heard Jake say, not to the woman, but to the officer with him.
“I already asked about that,” the woman interjected. “Jack didn’t know why he wanted the truck, just that Dan said to be ready at the end of the month, that he had some stuff he wanted to haul away. Probably just junk, trash, who knows? Dan was a good guy; he didn’t mind doing dirty work for other people, just so long as he got paid for it.”
“It’s an egg,” I murmured. I got up, went into the front room, and took the squares of paper from the shelf and looked at the fourth clue again: “Of course, it’s an egg, and birds lay eggs, so HS stands for...” I’d done this before, run through every kind of bird I could think of with a name beginning with H. “Hawk. Hen. Harrier, which I think is a bird, maybe not. Two words. Hard... high... ho... ham. Damn it, when I think of the letter H, I just think of house! House?” I looked around the room, then down at the cat now sitting on my feet. “Sammy, where can I find a picture of a house sparrow egg around here?”
Twenty minutes later I had my treasure, two movie passes tucked into Audubon’s Birds of the World, the chapter on egg identification.
“Yeah...” I muttered to an attentive Samson, “too bad I don’t have a girlfriend to use them with.”
“Of course I’m sure it was October thirty-first when he came by. Trick-or-treat. I had to go buy candy. And there I am out in the yard planting crocuses, and he shows up with a truck at the Carter house. I came over to talk to him — Franny wasn’t home — but he was very rude to me. He said he was one of Dan Church’s friends, but no, he never gave his name. I told Franny about it later, but she just shrugged it off. I told her she had to be careful. There’s a lot of antiques in this house and it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that Dan Church was planning to steal her blind when she wasn’t looking.”
“Did Mr. Church ever say anything to lead you to believe he was stealing from Miss Carter?”
I wandered into the kitchen slowly, softly. Dan Church’s girlfriend was gone, replaced with Jean Pritchard. Though Jake’s eyes lifted to me briefly, he gave no sign I was unwelcome. He turned his attention back to the woman.
“You were saying, Mrs. Pritchard?”
“Well, Daniel Church and I, we seldom spoke.” Jean Pritchard was a bit flustered. She looked at me suspiciously, then said to Jake, “I never trusted him. Just one look at him and I could see he was no good. He had a shifty look in his eye. I read just the other day that we should trust our instincts more, and mine told me not to trust Dan Church.”
“If you saw this man, Mrs. Pritchard,” Jake said with labored patience, “you would recognize him?”
“The man with the truck? Of course I would.”
“No word from Frances?” I asked. I had my books all spread out in the waning afternoon sunlight; I had my snacks ready to eat; I had the Christmas candles on; I had an affectionate cat rolling into a ball between my outstretched legs. I was on the floor, facing the sun, facing the street and the naked sycamores in the front yard.
“New York City’s finest are in the process of interviewing her neighbors. It seems that Frances Carter has walked off the face of the Earth.” Jake sat down on a hassock next to me, then reached out to touch the cat. “And I have something for you. Totally unofficial, Herbie, and the only reason I’m in this house now is because you have been left in her absence owner of Frances Carter’s house.”
He reached inside his jacket, pulled out two sheets of ordinary copy paper, and placed them down on top of my history text. On one was the familiar outline of a small yellow square shape about two and half inches on each side. On the other was a picture of a chain with a small curved object hanging from it. If this were to true size, the object was about three inches long and looked like a miniature horn. It was off-white in color.
“So Frances Carter left a little treasure hunt for your amusement. What are the chances her sister did the same thing with Dan Church?”
I looked up at Jake, then back at the first paper. On it, written in plain block capitals, was: IV S H E D CELLAR. The letters H E D had been underlined and were written in a different handwriting.
“Is it clue number four?” Jake asked.
“I don’t — where did these come from?”
“The small piece of paper and this object, which is probably a key chain, were both found in Dan Church’s clenched fist. The clues Frances Carter left for you were numbered, correct?”
“Yeah.” I felt like something was stuck in my throat.
“It looks like someone might have wanted Dan Church to go down into that cellar.”
“Or he had a list, Jake, and the fourth thing on that list was to... well... do some work...”
“In an empty root cellar? Because that’s what it is. Nothing down there but some rotten wooden shelves and a few empty Mason jars. Where are your clues, Herbie? We need to look at them.”
He took them all away, the four I had and the books I’d found them in, even the two movie tickets. But after he’d gone, I found a notepad in the kitchen and from memory wrote down exactly what Jake had shown me on the photocopy: IV S H E D CELLAR. It was unmistakable. Someone had given Dan Church, or Dan Church had found, a slip of paper, or maybe he had written it himself, or maybe...