Kraniak pointed to the Tercel. “Yours?”
“A rental.”
“Why’d you hit the kid?”
“He was talking tough. When he took his hands out of his pockets I thought he was getting physical.”
“Yeah,” Kraniak said meaninglessly, and went down the porch steps. Dave followed him.
Virg was on his feet now, favoring the left, his mouth twisted with pain, leaning on the girl. She had an uninteresting face and a lot of stringy hair poking out from under the hood of the slicker. She looked mad.
“That man hit my brother!” She pointed dramatically to Dave. “For no reason! Just up and hit him and threw him off the porch—”
“We saw, so calm down. Mr. North, meet Virg and Kathy Howard.” Kraniak pointed to the MacDonald house. “They live down at the end of the block.”
“Virg is seventeen and a high-school dropout.” The younger officer’s nametag said Haddad. “His sister’s fifteen and got a head cold so she stayed home from school. So she could go out and play in the nice sunny weather.”
Virg waved a free hand at Dave. “We saw this guy drive up in a rented car and go into the old guy’s place to rip it off.”
“Yeah,” Kathy said, pausing to blow her nose on a damp tissue. “Prob’ly going after that lockbox.”
“What lockbox?” Kraniak said.
“The one the paper talked about,” the girl said impatiently.
Both officers looked at Dave.
“I never saw the paper,” Dave said. “I just flew in from San Diego. My grandfather’s lawyer told me the old man tried to speak in the ambulance. The only word anyone could get was ‘lockbox.’ Then he died.”
“He’s dyin’, it’s the last thing on his mind!” Virg insisted. “That makes it important.”
“Who to?” Kraniak said. “Meet Mr. North, the old professor’s grandson. He’s got legitimate business in that house and you don’t. Get it through your heads, you guys. You can’t afford to get one inch out of line.”
“But it’s okay for him to attack me?” Virg protested. “We were just worried about the old man’s property.”
“File a complaint,” Kraniak said. “Then he’ll file a cross complaint — you don’t need the grief. No more dumb junk, huh? Next time we take you in. Want a ride home, Virg?”
“Not in no cop car,” Virg said.
His sister fidgeted under his arm.
“Well, I ain’t gonna carry you!”
Virg took his arm off Kathy’s shoulder, stood tall. His grin was sly and triumphant.
“Fine thing. A guy gets beat up on and the cops give the other guy a medal. Let’s go home, kid.”
They started for home, Virg barely favoring his left foot.
The squad car disappeared. Dave turned back to the house. Work to be done in there. First he’d better check around outside, see if the Howard kids had left any surprises.
Cramming his hands into the pockets of his nylon jacket, he went to the end of the block, turned right, walked along the side of the house. The windows were high, visibly latched. The ground-level windows into the basement were as dirty outside as in. He tried opening them. They were painted shut with old paint. There were no footprints in the muddy uncared-for flowerbeds between the sidewalk and the house.
From the corner of the house, he surveyed the bedraggled backyard with its cherry and walnut trees. A narrow cement path took him to the back porch. From inside, the door had seemed secure. From outside it repelled, rejected. With its blind pulled down, the grimy window was as private as death and no more communicative.
He left the porch for the next corner. The Tercel gleamed wetly. The little peak-roofed porch sheltering the side entrance offered a squat, ironic challenge. He climbed the steps, grasped the darkly corroded doorknob. The latch withdrew. The door wouldn’t budge.
He was halfway back to the sidewalk when he saw the low opening to the crawl space under the house. It was closed off by a wire-mesh screen in a heavy wooden frame. The ground in front of it was crisscrossed by heavy fresh footprints the weather hadn’t had time to obliterate.
Virg Howard’s?
Maybe he’d thought the crawl space would let him into the house where the old man had hidden the lockbox. But the screen proved immovable, the wood swollen shut, the paint flaking. No one had gotten under the house this way for years.
Maybe he should go ask the lady in the house across the street exactly what she’d seen. Mrs. Ford, Kraniak had said, in 1614.
It felt weird, approaching 1614, which had been the Tarquin house sixteen years ago. He had always done so cautiously, tension hidden behind a casual, respectful facade. What Jan’s folks didn’t know was important, and it was important to keep them not knowing it.
The house looked younger now. The neat front yard suggested a professional gardener. The sagging old front porch had been replaced by a trim new one with a composition roof and a row of big earthenware flowerpots decorating a low brick wall.
The doorway was a Gothic arch, the door iron-bound wood with a heavy brass knocker. He used it twice, lightly. In a few seconds the door swung inward the length of the security chain. Half revealed in the narrow opening was a woman with short dark hair and a neatly chiseled face who wore a bulky oatmeal-colored sweater and a full, mid-calf tweed skirt.
He said, “Mrs. Ford?” and felt suddenly — incomprehensibly — ill-at-ease.
“Yes?” Calm but cautious. A faint line appeared between her eyebrows. Her voice was suddenly tentative. “Dave?... David North?”
His mouth had fallen open. He closed it hurriedly. “Dave North, plain as day.”
The security chain rattled. The woman in the doorway pushed something into the pocket of her skirt and opened the door a bit wider.
“Hi. Remember me? Jan Ford, used to be Tarquin. What a nice surprise!”
“My God,” Dave said. “The cops said Mrs. Ford and I never... The place looks so new and...” Damn. He never floundered. He took a deep smiling breath, acknowledging the depth of his surprise. “I’d heard you moved East.”
“Went to Princeton, married a master’s candidate, American lit. He taught at NYCC for a while. New York got pretty scary so he applied to the University of Oregon. About the time he was accepted, my dad retired and he and Mom moved to Arizona permanently, so they gave us the house. Look, I’m declaring a coffee break. Won’t you join me?”
“Thank you.”
She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath before opening the door the rest of the way. He stepped into warm, dry air. The little entrance hall was hardly changed, with a hat-and-coat rack with a mirror set into it and a little shelf for gloves and things under the mirror. A small red bike was propped up on its kickstand.
“You’ve got a kid,” he said. Which was dumb. Jan was almost his age. Married for years. Of course she had a kid.
“Barbara, age seven, in the third grade.” Jan Ford closed the front door. “How about you?”
“Still single.”
“Avoiding entangling alliances.” He saw a brief smile. She went through the arch into the kitchen, switching on an overhead light. He followed, remembering the kitchen as dark and cozy, but found himself in a room as sunny and light as was possible on a cold gray day in November. The walls were a yellow so soft it was almost white.
Jan put a filter into the top of a hand-thrown pottery coffee maker. “I’m sorry about your granddad, Dave.” She switched on an electric kettle. “Why don’t you take off that wet coat and hang it in the hall?”
He did so. When he got back she was spooning dark pungent coffee into the filter. Her hair was short, soft around her face. Little gold-mounted cat’s-eye studs winked from her ears. When she rolled the coffee bag closed and put it in the refrigerator, the full tweed skirt swayed as she walked. She looked totally gorgeous. Always graceful, she had a new calm stillness. New to him anyway. She had filled out a little, but maybe only in her face. It would be fun to talk this Jan out of these clothes and find out... Of course, a kid and a husband complicated things.