Things were neater in there. The bed had been made, the floor was free of personal droppings. The closet door stood open; inside I could see a closed suitcase. The case was small, powder blue, and looked both new and expensive. I squatted and worked the catches, it wasn’t locked.
Kid’s clothing. Little girl’s.
All right, good, I thought as I straightened up. Emily must be staying here, at least. Off somewhere now with Aunt Karen — back eventually.
I searched the closet, the bureau; even got down on all fours and squinted under the bed. Emily’s suitcase was the only one, and there was no sign of anything that might belong to her mother. I returned to the other bedroom. Nothing of hers there, either. All the clothing belonged to a woman much larger and far less fashion conscious than Sheila Hunter — jeans, bargain-rack blouses, wool shirts, bulky knit sweaters. That told me something else: Karen Meineke lived here alone. The only item of masculine apparel in the room was a pair of heavy wool socks, of the type that Kerry wore during the winter.
I thought I heard something outside, hurried to the front door for a look. Imagination; the access lane was as deserted as before. Still time to comb through the rest of the place.
Two items of interest turned up in the living room. The first, in the drawer of a table next to an armchair, I didn’t like at all — a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38, all its chambers full. Loaded gun just lying around like that, with a ten-year-old in the house. Stupid and irresponsible. I stood looking at it for a few seconds. Then I emptied the cylinder, dumped the cartridges into a paper sack of garbage under the kitchen sink, and carried the piece into Karen Meineke’s bedroom and hid it on the top shelf of the closet under a jumble of caps and scarves. Let her go hunting for it and wonder how it got there, empty, when she found it.
The second interesting item I found on a shelf in a storage closet — a photograph album with cracked plastic covers. About two-thirds of it was filled, mostly with candid color snapshots. There were half a dozen professional photos, three posed portraits and three wedding pictures. Two of the portraits, judging from the head-and-shoulders poses and the subjects’ age and clothing, were high school graduation photos. The young woman in one was unmistakably Sheila Hunter, even though her eyebrows were thicker and her hair dark brown and shag cut. The young woman in the other had a round face, a pouty mouth, the same color hair worn longer. Karen Meineke. The resemblance between her and Sheila Hunter was plain enough, and the third portrait pretty much confirmed the fact that they were sisters. It was of the pair of them, their shoulders touching, their heads turned slightly so that they were smiling at each other. The resemblance was even stronger in that one.
I slid the portraits out to see if anything was written on the backs. No. The three wedding photos were of Karen Meineke and a tall man with a beard and shoulder-length hair; she appeared to be in her early to mid-twenties at the time, as did the man. The backs of two were blank, but the third — a full-length portrait of the bride and groom — bore a notation in a round girlish hand: Mr. and Mrs. Chas Willis, and below that, Yes!
I took a quick flip through the candid shots. Most were of the two sisters, some with adults who were probably their parents and other family members, ranging from infancy to late teens. The last two dozen or so were of Karen Meineke and her bearded husband; a couple of those had snowcapped mountains in the background. At random I chose four of the sisters together, from girlhood to adulthood. All had tag lines on their backs, the first two in ballpoint pen in a precise hand — their mother’s, likely — and the last two in the round, girlish hand.
Lynn’s 6th birthday party.
Ellen and Lynn, 4th of July parade.
Me and Ellen, summer ’84.
Ellen, sweet 16 and never been kissed — ha! Me 18 and still a virgin — ha!
Ellen: Sheila Hunter. Lynn: Karen Meineke.
So Aunt Karen’s name was also a new identity, no doubt adopted for the same unknown reason. Chas Willis, too? Mr. Meineke? Depended on exactly when the two of them had been married. No clue here as to Jack Hunter’s real identity; or if there was, I couldn’t pick it out because I’d never seen a photo of him.
I put the album back where I’d found it. I’d seen in here long enough; pressing my luck as it was. I checked out front — empty and quiet except for the yattering of jays in the pines — and then stepped onto the porch and shut the door behind me.
I went down and around to have a look at the outbuilding behind the house. It was bigger than a shed, but not by much, with a flat tarpaper roof — the kind of structure that gets put up fast and as cheaply as possible without a building permit. If it had a window, it was on the side opposite where I was. The door was on the back side, and for some reason it had been wedged shut by means of a two-by-four fitted slantwise from the ground to the knob. Busted latch? The length of wood was tightly jammed; I had to kick it loose. The door didn’t come open when the two-by-four popped free, so the latch was all right. And not locked. I opened up and stuck my head inside.
Karen Meineke’s workshop. Cluttered with tools and sawhorses and pieces of plywood and bars of lead, the walls honeycombed with cubbyholes that contained chunks of colored glass. And not as empty as I’d expected. It jarred me when I saw that the cold, dark room had an occupant and who it was.
Emily Hunter. Sitting hunched on a stool in one shadowy corner, like a bad little girl being punished.
She recognized me, said my name and hopped off the stool. But she didn’t move in my direction; she stood very straight, her arms down at her sides — a small, forlorn figure bundled in a fur-collared coat.
“I knew you’d come,” she said.
“Are you okay?”
“Oh, yes. Just cold. It’s cold in here.”
“Come outside into the sun.”
We went around to the front of the house. She walked close to me and stayed close when I stopped in a patch of sunlight near the stairs, as if she were afraid I might go away and leave her alone again. She was pale except for splotches of color the cold had put across her cheekbones. Otherwise she seemed all right. No visible marks on her. If there had been, I don’t know what I would have done.
She said, “My aunt’s not back yet. Good.”
“She the one who put you in the shed?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know. Not long.”
“So you wouldn’t run away or use the phone.”
“Yes.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Shopping. She won’t take me with her when she goes into town because she’s afraid I’ll say something to somebody or try to get away.”
“How many times has she locked you up?”
“One other time. Yesterday.”
I had to work to hide my anger behind a poker face. “She hasn’t hit you or anything like that?”
“No. She doesn’t like me, but she wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Why doesn’t she like you? She’s your real aunt, isn’t she?”
Emily nodded. “She hates kids, I guess. Kids are a pain in the ass, that’s what she said.”
“She live here alone?”
“Yes. She and Uncle Mike are divorced.”
“Uncle Mike. Mike Meineke?”
“Yes.”
“How long have they been divorced?”
“I think I was about eight. Two years.”
“Where does he live now?”