Across from the dryer was another door, to what I thought was a closet. But I was wrong. It was a small rectangular room- a pantrywith deep shelves that wrapped around three walls and a rank smell that rushed up into my face. I ran my hand along the wall and found a light switch, and I felt an icy lump land in my gut.
It was a nest.
The floor was covered by a dirty blue gym mat and a sleeping bag and piles of wadded gray clothing, all surrounded by a berm of wet newspaper, greasy paper bags, and soda bottles. There was a large electric lantern on the lowest shelf, and a red portable radio, and on the shelf above that was a heap of torn and taped and badly folded road maps. The other shelves were bare. The odor was stinging- a humid, feral mix of decayed food, body odor, urine, and feces. And there was no mistaking it for anything else; it was a concentrate of what I’d smelled that day in Danes’s apartment building, when I’d gotten onto the elevator as Paul Cortese was getting off.
“Christ,” I whispered.
I turned off the light and closed the door and went back into the kitchen, and as I did there was a flash at the windows and a deep rumbling in the sky. The lights flickered out and then came on again. I looked at my watch and looked outside. It was after four, but the sky looked more like midnight. The storm was early.
I pulled out my phone and flipped it open. No signal. I went to the window. No signal. I moved around the room. No signal.
“Shit.”
I went to the entrance hall and doused the house lights behind me.
The porch was no shelter from the sideways rain, and I was soaked in less than a minute. I turned the flashlight on and the beam leapt forward six feet and vanished in the swirling air. I went down the steps and onto a path that was fast submerging, and I headed for the barn. Gravel and mud squelched and slid under my boots. The barn was thirty yards up the path, and no more than a sketchy silhouette until the lightning. Then, for an instant, it loomed above me, stark and flat and bone white- like an X-ray against the metal sky- and then it was dark again. I leaned into the wind. My hair was plastered to my head and rain ran down my back. I pointed the flashlight at the path and avoided the larger potholes and fell only twice.
I planted my boots in the mud and heaved on the sliding door, and it moved not an inch. I tried it again with no more success, and went around the corner of the barn, to the right. The building shielded me from the wind and a little of the rain, and I stayed close as I worked my way over stones and low vegetation toward the back end. I found another door about halfway along. I played the flashlight over it. It was a wide Dutch door with black iron latches and black iron hinges, and a shiny new hasp set into the doorframe. There was a shiny new lock hanging from it. I opened my waist pack and took out the pry bar.
This doorframe was not for shit and neither was the hardware, and I put a lot of back into it and wasn’t subtle. There was a tearing sound and the hasp came away from the frame, along with some long galvanized screws. I pushed the door open and stepped in.
It was black inside, and quiet, and it smelled of damp timber, damp earth, wet hay, and compost. There was a garage smell, too, of metal and rubber and gasoline and exhaust. And faintly, below these odors, was the scent of something else. I found a switch along the wall.
Lights hung from the big central beam, but they were few and dim, and heavy shadows were everywhere. Still, the high points were plain: the black timber bones of the place and the packed earth floor; the ladder to the hayloft at the front of the barn, near the sliding door that was chained and locked; the row of open stalls on the long wall opposite me; the large open space in the middle, and the big black Beemer parked there. My heart was pounding.
I walked to the car and the smell was stronger. I walked around the car. It had New York plates, of course, and of course they were Danes’s. The window glass was fogged inside, but not so clouded that I couldn’t make out the body in the back seat.
33
He was long gone, and stewed in his own juices- bloated, loose, and coming apart. And he’d been rolled, like an obscene sausage, in heavy plastic sheeting that was sealed at the ends with duct tape. The wrapping was stiff and translucent, and it clouded any features that might have been left on the body, but through it I could see a black irregular patch where the chest used to be.
The car and the plastic had kept the animals out, but it couldn’t keep the smell in. It was suffocating and thick, and it boiled out of the open rear door and filled the barn in an instant. I closed the door and staggered back a few paces and ground my teeth to fight the heaving in my stomach. I blotted my eyes with my sleeve and pulled the collar of my sweatshirt up over my nose and stood for a while, taking shallow breaths. I thought about Nina and I thought about Billy.
“Goddammit,” I whispered.
I looked at the car. It was a crime scene- this whole place wasand I knew I should leave it in peace. But I’d left should behind a while ago- when I’d creeped the house and broken the lock off the barn door, or maybe much earlier than that. I shook my head. My vinyl gloves were wet and tearing, and I pulled them off and jammed them in my pocket. I reached into my waist pack and pulled out a fresh pair.
“In for a penny,” I said to myself.
I opened the driver’s door, and a fresh wave of dead smell rolled out. I ground my teeth against it and looked into the front seat. It was a mess. It was as if a cyclone had passed through the compartment and dropped the jumbled contents of a linen closet and a wardrobe and a medicine chest in there. Bedsheets and blankets and towels were tangled with trousers and underwear and shoes; shirts were knotted with pillowcases and socks, and the whole chaotic pile was shot through with toiletries: toothbrush, vitamin bottle, razor blades, dental floss, shaving cream. It was debris from the storm whose tracks I’d seen in the master bedroom of the farmhouse.
There was a suitcase jammed into the foot well on the passenger side. It was brown leather and expensive-looking, just like the luggage I’d seen in Danes’s apartment. There was a brown plastic medicine bottle with a white cap near the brake pedal. I knelt down and shined the flashlight beam on it. It was for a prescription antibiotic, and it was made out to Gregory Danes. The trunk release was near the driver’s seat and I pressed it and the trunk lid went up an inch.
I closed the car door and went around back. There was a flash of blue light through the high barn windows, and a sizzling sound, and an almost simultaneous crack of thunder. The building shook and I felt the pressure wave in my shoulders and I was sure that the windows had shattered. The weak lights failed and found themselves again. I looked up at the windows and saw they were intact. I lifted the trunk lid.
The first thing I saw was the missing curtain rod from the farmhouse dining room, and the missing green curtain. The rod was bent and the curtain was stiff with dried blood. Beneath it was another insane pile. Rather than linen closets and wardrobes, it looked as if someone had whirled a refrigerator together with a desktop. The food was on top- a carton of milk, eggs, butter, a foil bag of coffee, bread, a box of Swiss breakfast cereal, a bottle of red wine- all curdled and rotten and gone to mold. The smell wafted up at me, competing with- and momentarily defeating- the dead smell. It was a small reprieve. Below the food was hardware.
I saw the cell phone that was never answered, an electronic organizer the size of a deck of cards, and the laptop that was missing from the docking station in Danes’s apartment. I saw a wineglass, cracked and dark with dregs and mold, and a snarled skein of black power cables wrapped around it all. The papers were underneath.