Ripped plastic sheeting billowed in and out from the two large side windows facing the drive, catching the wind like sails on a sloop. Dark splotches of moss and mildew spotted the siding where the wind had torn off the green shingling. The cottage looked like it had been abandoned for years, except for the tire tracks in the snow on the drive. There were plenty of those-and they were new since the last snowfall.
I got out and went up the two front steps to knock on the front porch glass. I waited a minute, knocked again, then stepped down. Nobody would live in such a house, not with torn sheeting slapping against broken windows, fanning in the cold.
I started toward the back of the house. Beneath the plastic-sheeted windows, my shoes crunched on bits of broken glass. They lay everywhere across the driveway, sparkling like strewn diamonds, even though the day was overcast.
At the rear, more plastic sheeting had been duct-taped to the back door window.
A carriage-sized garage leaned at the end of the drive. Its swing-out doors were bowed, sunk in the middle, but arcs had been swept in the snow in front of them. They’d been opened recently. With a lift and a tug, the left door opened easily.
An old metallic-blue Dodge Aries sedan was parked inside. Big, irregular spots of rust marred the roof, hood, and trunk, as though acid had been spilled on the car and eaten the paint. There was no license plate on the rear bumper.
The driver’s door was unlocked. I pulled out the ring of Louise Thomas’s keys and slid in. Even in the cold, the interior smelled of damp and must. The first auto key slipped easily into the ignition. I gave it a turn. The engine fired instantly. I looked at the gauges; the gas tank was full, the battery was charging. I shut off the engine.
The fit of the car key confirmed it: I’d found Château Louise Thomas.
The dome light showed a car interior that was immaculate. There was no clutter on the upholstery or floor. The glove box was empty. I felt under the front seat, touched metal and a thin plastic. I pulled out a supermarket bag containing a screwdriver, a license plate-white and green and orange, from Florida-and two shiny screws. The plate had a renewal sticker that would not expire until October.
I got out and walked around to the back of the car. The paint on the vinyl bumper where the license attached was clean. Louise Thomas had recently removed the plate I’d found under the front seat. I used the other car key to open the trunk, but there was nothing in there except a well-worn spare tire. I closed the trunk, locked and shut the driver’s door, and walked back up the drive, crunching glass as if I were walking on granola.
The third key turned the porch door lock easily. I opened the door, stepped inside.
I saw blood.
Three
There wasn’t much of it, just a dozen rust-colored splotches, the size of dimes, spread far apart on the walls and across the scuffed gray-painted floor. Four more drops had dried on the square windowpanes that faced County Road 12. Combined, it wasn’t enough to indicate a slaughter, but as I moved around the tiny porch, the few spots of dried blood chilled me more than if I’d found great, caked puddles of it. The splatter pattern, sprayed so wide, showed panic. Fast, frantic panic.
The only furniture was a wicker sofa, backed against the wall that separated the porch from the rest of the house. I got down on my knees to look closely at the small dark specks on the faded foam cushion. It was mildew, not more blood.
The porch key also unlocked the white-painted door that led inside. The living room was cold, colder than outside, and dim in the gauzy light wavering through the opaque plastic sheets undulating against the broken windows. I felt for a light switch next to the door, flipped it, but nothing came on. The power had been shut off.
As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, dark furniture shapes, lying at wrong angles, began to materialize in the middle of the room: a small sofa, a tipped-over reading chair, a lamp, and a table lying next to it. I stepped all the way in. My shoes ground bits of glass into the carpet.
The room had been attacked. As on the driveway, shards of broken glass glinted in the dim light. Dozens of sheets of newspapers lay everywhere, on the floor and across the tilted sofa and overturned reading chair-strewn about by the wind from the shattered windows. Or by someone in a hurry.
A sliver of daylight showed from an almost-closed door to my right. I stepped carefully through the rubble and pushed it open.
The bedroom had been savaged like the living room. White bed-sheets and a blue blanket lay balled in one corner, a mattress and box spring had been dropped back askew onto the wrought-iron bed frame. Against the far wall, the drawers had been jerked from a dresser and upended onto the floor, spilling out proper, no-frilled white panties and bras, some dark sweaters, and a couple of sweatshirts. Scattered over it all, as in the living room, were dozens more sheets of newspapers. In the bedroom, though, the windows were tightly shut; the wind hadn’t blown the newspapers around.
There was blood, another dozen of the dime-sized spots, on the floral wallpaper and the bare plank floor.
Looking strangely untouched, a small, old oak library table with a pedestal base sat under the window. On it was an ancient manual typewriter, an Underwood.
I knew a girl once, a blond girl with a boy’s name, who had an old Underwood Number Five, just like the one on the table. I’d been with her when she bought it. I helped carry it home, watched as she scratched her initials on the bottom of it with a fork, to make it her own.
For a time, years ago, I’d hunted those typewriters. I’d prowled antique stores, resale shops, scrap metal dealers, anyplace I could think of, looking for an old black Underwood like the one that sat on the table. I’d given it up, finally, but I’d never quite healed. Even now, years later, my breath still caught every time I came across one.
I reached to touch it, but stopped. There was one obscene drop of blood on the knurled wheel that turned the platen.
Blood on the porch. Blood in the bedroom. Aggert had said nothing about a crime. I wanted to leave that house; lock it up and hurry away. But I would wonder. Every night, for the rest of my life, I would wonder.
I eased the typewriter onto its side. The rails underneath the machine were smooth, the black paint shiny. Mercifully, they were unmarked. I turned it back over, right side up.
My teeth started to chatter. It was the cold in the house, I tried to tell my head. The cold, and the blood. But my head wasn’t buying: The cold went deeper than that, deeper than my skin, my muscle, and my bones. It was the cold of an old memory.
I buttoned my coat all the way up, kicked at the newspapers littering the floor as I left the bedroom, and crossed through the living room. I didn’t care where I stepped. What happened in that frozen little house was for cops, not me. I’d been hired only to execute a will.
The kitchen at the back of the cottage had been trashed, too. Metal cabinet doors, blue-enameled but chipped, and worn to bare metal around the pulls, yawned open, their contents swept out. Pots and a pan, silverware, and two shattered mugs lay on the green linoleum floor, on top of spilled flour and sugar and the oozing contents of a dozen opened cans of mixed green and orange vegetables, sliced peaches, and what looked like chunks of pineapple. There were sealed cans lying in the mess, too; dozens of them with generic labels. In the middle of it all lay an impossibly yellow box of Cheerios and a black banana, a breakfast for a dead woman. If the house hadn’t been as cold as a refrigerator, it would have stunk to hell.
The bathroom was next to the damaged back door. A stand-up fiberglass shower, a tiny porcelain sink set in the corner, and a toilet had been jammed into a space no bigger than a modest closet. The mirrored door hung by one hinge from the medicine cabinet. An opaque glass jar of cold cream and a lavender toothbrush lay on the floor, mixed in with the shattered pieces of the porcelain toilet lid. I didn’t go in to look for blood. I’d been hired to execute a will.