The voice came again, an old man. The other was a woman, soft and indistinct, not loud enough to make out the words. The voices seemed to be coming from above, some trick of the wind, she supposed. She stood trying to think where she hadn’t searched, what she’d missed—if Maudie did have the ledger pages. If she did, did she mean to give them to the cops? Or would the old woman try to blackmail her? But for what? To stop her in case she tried to take custody of Benny? Who would want the kid?
That had been a shocker, going into the office that morning to find the ledger had been disturbed, finding proof it had been copied. No one could have done that but Caroline, she was sure that only Caroline had any suspicions about the way she did her work.
Not only had she rigged the lock to the hidden compartment each night before she left work, fixing two hairs across it, she’d sprinkled talcum powder in the seams of the ledger pages, too. The day she found the lock disturbed and found traces of talc in the seam of the office copier between the glass and the metal rim, she’d almost panicked. Had stuffed the ledger in her carryall and was nervous the rest of the day. Weeks later, after the funeral, she’d told Mr. Beckman she was leaving, that a month’s leave wasn’t enough, that she needed to get away from the city. With the office shorthanded, the quarterly taxes already paid, and the way she’d juggled the expenses from one client’s account to another, she’d gambled that no one would find the discrepancies for many months.
But Beckman Equipment couldn’t remain ignorant forever of the glitches in their cash flow. Paying one client’s bill in arrears with part of a subsequent client’s payment, and in the process skimming off cash for herself, left balances owing that did not bear close scrutiny. The minute Beckman hired a full-time bookkeeper again, the missing money would come to light and they’d go to the cops. And LAPD would pull the file on her and talk to the homicide division, follow up on the connection between her and Maudie. She still wasn’t sure what Maudie had told them about the night of the shooting. Wasn’t sure what the woman had seen, or what the kid had seen. Though who would believe a kid testifying against his own mother?
But now she’d get it sorted out. Having taken her time going through the rooms, using a small flashlight as the late afternoon light dimmed, she was puzzled as to what hiding places she could have missed. Convinced the pages weren’t among Caroline’s other things that she’d left in the garage, she’d searched all the rooms, under chair cushions, under and between mattresses, had gone through every drawer and cupboard, had rifled Maudie’s desk again thoroughly. She had even examined the Christmas tree and searched beneath its quilted skirting. There were no wrapped packages, yet. No doubt Maudie would pile gifts on the kid later. Upstairs there were just the two bedrooms, the bath, a small storeroom, and a narrow linen closet. She’d gone through them all with care. The kid’s bed was littered with sissy toys, that ratty teddy bear and other stuffed animals the boy had clung to since he was a baby, girly toys unbecoming to a boy.
If she’d had to have a child—and this child hadn’t been planned, it was Martin who insisted on keeping it—then why couldn’t she have had a boy like Kent? From the time the Colletto kids were little they’d been as bold as brass, she’d gotten along with them just fine. Though Kent was her favorite, Kent was the pusher, even more than Victor, taking what he wanted when he wanted, and exactly how he wanted, she thought, smiling.
Despite its two stories, the house was small, it didn’t take long to search. But it didn’t offer much space to conceal herself, either. The best place was the coat closet beneath the stairs. With the door cracked open, she could see into the living room, the kitchen, and through the kitchen’s glass door to the studio. The attached garage would have been an adequate place to wait for Maudie, but the outside pedestrian door was blocked with a stack of heavy crates, leaving no way to escape except through the noisy overhead door. By staying in the house she had access to the front door, the outside studio doors, or the low living room windows, one of which she’d unlocked earlier. She’d also unlocked an upstairs window. Later, when Maudie came up to search that floor, she’d been standing just outside on the roof that sheltered the front door below.
Earlier, at the bottom of the stairs, looking across the kitchen to the studio, watching Maudie at her worktable, she’d had no idea what instinct held her back, but she’d paid attention. She was nervous at the faint voices she’d heard from outside. That couldn’t be Arlie and Kent, they wouldn’t talk out loud, though they were probably already nearby, watching the target house. Maybe she’d heard some neighbors’ voices contorted by the wind, floating on the night.
As Pearl was waiting for Maudie to leave again to go pick up the child, as she seemed to be preparing to do, the sound of a car in the drive and then footsteps on the porch made her back deeper into the closet. Pulling the door to, she pushed in behind the line of hanging coats, into the smell of old wool. She heard the front door open, heard Jared call out to Maudie, heard Maudie’s step as she came out of the kitchen.
“I was just leaving to go get Benny,” Maudie said. “You missed a good dinner.”
“I’ll get him if you like. Maybe there’ll be some leftovers,” he said hopefully.
“I never saw so much food,” Maudie said. “But you’d better hurry, those cops wolf it down like it’s their last meal.”
“I’ll go get Benny, and then, early as it is, I’m hitting the hay. I’ve had a ton of homework this week, feel like I’ll never catch up on my sleep.”
Pearl heard the front door open and close, heard Maudie move away across the tile floor toward the living room, heard Jared’s car start and back out of the drive. Now, again, she and Maudie were alone. Slipping out of the closet, meaning to trap Maudie in the living room, she heard the voices again, closer. Someone was out there, and a sense of wrongness tingled through her, the feeling she got sometimes at the poker table when, despite how the cards were falling, she knew to stop betting. That instinct was at work now. If she was smart she’d go with it.
Easing open the closet door to peer out, she saw Maudie in the kitchen, sitting at the table with her back to her. Silently she slipped to the front door, cracked it open, but drew back when the voices came again, the soft grainy voice of the man and the faint laugh of the young woman. Quietly pulling the door closed, she left the house, not through the front or side door, but out the low living room window into the bushes, where she was sure no neighbor would glimpse her. Moving along close to the side of the house and then into the neighbor’s wooded backyard, she waited for her companions. She would return in a while, this time to do more than confront Maudie, this time to force Maudie’s hand.
37
FOUR HOUSES DOWN from Maudie’s stood a wood-sided Craftsman cottage, its ivory tones picked out by four decorative lamps standing among beds of pale alstroemerias that were nearly finished blooming for the winter. Grass clippings from the little lawn were scattered along the stone walk, where Alfreda Meiers or her gardener had apparently neglected to sweep. The walk was sheltered by a Japanese maple, bare now in the winter cold. Three steps led up to the cream-colored wooden porch and the pale front door that was carved with fern patterns and without any panes of decorative glass. The walls flanking the door were solid, too, and unbroken, there was only the peephole in the door itself through which to view whoever might ring the bell. A widow of twenty years, a shy, fearful woman, Alfreda kept her windows and front and back doors double-locked. She had no dog to provide protection or warning barks; she didn’t want dog hair on her furniture. She didn’t have a weapon for protection, she was afraid of guns, and she felt that even pepper spray was far too dangerous. She carried her cell phone in her pocket so that if she ever did have an intruder, she could summon help. She had two grown daughters, both married and living in Southern California. She had no desire to live with either of them, nor they with her. The girls visited their mother infrequently, and with restraint.