“See anything?”
“No.” He spotted the phone on the table. “Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re fine,” he said, as though he knew I hadn’t reached Lauren.
Any pretense of patience gone from my voice, I asked, “What can I do to help, Bill? You said this was about Mallory. Tell me what’s going on or I’m leaving.”
Certain sounds are as clear as photographs. Glass breaking is one of those sounds. The stark retort of shattering glass filled the house.
“Shit,” Bill said. He stood.
I stood, too. “Where?” I whispered.
“Sounded like the basement.”
I wasn’t so sure, but it wasn’t my house.
He moved toward the stairs. “I’m going down. Probably just some neighbor kid trying to scare me. It’s been like that around here.”
“I’ll call nine-one-one.”
“No, this is my home. No police. I’ll handle it. Stay here.”
He flicked on a light and disappeared down the basement stairs. I spotted a rack of knives on the kitchen counter and shuffled a little closer to them.
Before I reached the counter, all the lights in the house flashed off, at once.
70
I stumbled back toward the table to grab my phone and as I reached out I managed to push it over the edge onto the floor. The phone clattered and slid away into the darkness. I dropped down to my hands and knees to try to locate it.
“Alan!” Bill stage-whispered from the basement. “Down here, please, hurry.”
“I’m calling for help.”
“Please, it’s Mallory!”
The tunnel? I scrambled to my feet and felt my way toward the basement stairs, found them, and slowly started descending. A solitary step into the basement I ran into someone. The shock of the collision took my breath away.
“It’s me,” Bill whispered. I could feel his breath on my face. “Come on.”
He took my wrist and led me across a room and through a doorway. “This is where the glass broke, I think.”
I couldn’t see broken glass. But then, I couldn’t see much. “You said it was Mallory. Where is she?”
“What are you talking about?”
What? “Where’s the tunnel?” I asked.
“In the crawl space.”
Somewhere nearby, a door closed in the house. Bill released my arm and stepped away from me, back toward the door we’d just come through.
I moved in the same direction.
“Shhh,” he said.
“Is there a phone down here?” I whispered.
“Quiet. I need to listen.”
The door at the far side of the room we were in opened slowly. A figure paused in the doorway-a black silhouette against an almost black background. Burnt food on a cast-iron skillet.
Mallory? No. Too large, too masculine.
Bob? Maybe.
I was about to call Bob’s name when the person’s right arm began to rise and a brilliant flash blinded me and a deafening roar blasted my ears. Before I could even process the first explosion, another one erupted. Then, I thought, another. The figure’s knees began to buckle and he grasped at the door frame with both hands.
The support did him no good. A second later he heaved forward and collapsed to the floor.
My hearing temporarily gone, my eyes useless in a basement dark as a moonless night, I was most aware of the smell of the burnt powder from the gun. I was trying to figure out what had just happened. Bill touched my arm and forced a flashlight into my hand. I flicked it on and saw the gun he was holding. It was a revolver. A big thing.
“Over here,” Bill said. I pointed the light in the direction of his voice. He’d stepped away from me and was standing in front of a gray electrical panel. With the benefit of the illumination he reached up and pulled hard at the main power circuit.
Instantly the lights in the house came back on.
With great relief I realized that I didn’t recognize the man in the heap at the foot of the stairs. It definitely wasn’t Bob.
The butt of a pistol had come to rest two inches from the man’s nose. Had the man been holding it? I didn’t remember hearing it clatter to the floor. I said, “Who is it? Do you know him?”
Bill moved closer. “It’s Doyle.”
He didn’t sound surprised.
71
I was.
“Doyle’s already dead, Bill.”
“That must have been somebody else they found in the mountains. That’s Doyle, right there.”
I used the toe of my shoe to move the pistol away, knelt, and placed my quivering fingers on the side of the man’s neck. I couldn’t find a pulse. I thought of Hannah a month before, the same fingers, the same result.
“Who was it that they found near Allenspark?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Doyle’s dead for sure, now. For me, that’s nothing but good news.”
Bill wasn’t upset.
“Why… did you shoot him?”
“He broke into my house. You saw that.”
“He’s been in your house a dozen times. Why did you shoot him?”
“You saw what happened. A broken window. An intruder in the dark. He was going to shoot me. Us.”
He stressed the words “intruder” and “dark.” I thought his explanation sounded rehearsed and I immediately questioned whether Bill knew that Doyle was going to be in his house, in his basement. “Did you know he was coming over?”
Bill didn’t answer me. “Did you? Did you know he was coming over?”
He still didn’t reply. I thought, Damn, make my day.
You set this up, you bastard.
Car thieves steal cars. Bank robbers rob banks. For Bill, this was the white van and the orthodontist all over again.
I started up the stairs to get my phone to call 911. When I was about halfway up I heard a woman’s voice. “Willy? You down there? What was that noise?”
72
Willy?
Rachel.
“Rachel? Baby?” Bill said.
This time he sounded surprised.
73
Sam didn’t arrive first-some patrol cops did-but he was there within fifteen minutes.
He wasn’t happy to find me in Bill Miller’s house.
He wasn’t happy to hear Bill Miller claiming that he and I had been having a psychotherapy session when we heard the glass break. He wasn’t happy to hear me concur with Bill that what he had told me prior to the shooting had to stay confidential.
What was Sam happy about?
I think he was reasonably pleased that Rachel Miller was there, and that she was insisting that her daughter, Mallory, was fine. “She’ll be here any minute. Any minute,” Rachel kept saying. “Don’t worry, don’t worry.”
Before he and I were separated by the cops, Bill readily admitted shooting the intruder in his house, whom he continued to insist was the man he knew as his next-door neighbor, Doyle Chandler.
Sam parked me in the Millers’ living room. “You okay?” he asked.
I said I was.
“Good. What about Rachel?” he said to me. “How did she look to you? As a shrink.”
“From what little I saw, not too bad. I suspect she’s on her meds. I’d have to evaluate her to be sure, but she looks much better than I would have predicted.”
“Do you believe what she’s saying about Mallory?”
“I think she believes what she’s saying about Mallory. It’s either delusional, or it’s not. I don’t know her well enough to tell you which.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
“There’s a chance she’s telling the truth, Sam. That’s a good thing. Hope, right? Has she said how she got here?”
“ ‘With Mallory and her friend.’ I’m thinking Bob, the Camaro guy.”
“You never found him this morning?”
“No.”
“Is Bill claiming the shooting was a ‘make my day’ thing?”