As she gazed around she noted there were four homes on this short dead-end street, one next to Oxblood’s and two across the narrow, disintegrating macadam. Smoke was curling up from the chimney top of one of them while the other sat silent and dark. The home next to Oxblood’s had a Range Rover from the 1980s parked out front and a muddy ATV parked next to a tree. A horse whinnied from behind the structure. A crow flapped its wings and lifted off from the branches of a sprawling southern magnolia set in the front yard and taking up far too much space.
Clarisse parked her car and got out. She was dressed casually in jeans and low boots and a fleece-lined jacket. Her bag was slung over her shoulder. Inside the bag was a cylinder of potent pepper spray that she’d had in her checked bag. She never went anywhere without it. Because you just never knew who you might run into who would require an eyeful of it.
From her bag she pulled out an iPad. An element of cover but also a useful tool if need be. She slipped on fur-lined leather gloves. She stood next to her car and checked out the four houses: Oxblood’s and the other three.
She headed up to Oxblood’s place, approaching from the rear. She knocked but there was no answer. She peered in one of the windows and saw a dingy interior with furnishings that looked like carryovers from several generations back. She knocked on the front door and got the same result. There was a decrepit John Deere tractor parked right behind the house. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.
She headed to the house next door. There was permanence there, she concluded, not a trap.
I hope.
Chapter 35
The woman who answered her knock was in her late sixties and looked like she had spent most of her life outdoors doing things that required a lot of physical labor and determination. Her frame was blocky and strong. She had on faded jeans encasing thick legs, dirty muck boots, and a light blue cotton sweater with several holes in it. A pair of leather work gloves stuck out of her front jeans pocket. Her white hair was pulled back in a tight knot. Her face was lined and absent of any artificial coloring.
“Yes?” the woman said, her voice as husky as she appeared.
Clarisse held up her iPad. “Hello, I’m here taking surveys of certain people for my company. My information tells me that Daryl Oxblood lives in the house next door. We were supposed to meet today, right now in fact, but I knocked and no one answered.”
“What company?”
“Online marketing.”
“I doubt Daryl owns a computer. It’s not really his thing.”
Without missing a beat Clarisse said, “That’s why I was sent out, to meet with people like that. They have no online presence and that’s in line with the audience we want to survey.” She glanced over the woman’s shoulder and saw the desktop unit on a farm table in the small kitchen visible from where she was standing. “I take it you don’t suffer from that affliction.”
The woman said, “I suffer from an affliction. It’s called having to spend too much damn time on my computer. Whatever happened to a phone call or meeting someone for real?”
“I sympathize. I’ve been trying to get my own screen time down from a ridiculously high level. But Mr. Oxblood doesn’t indulge, which is why we so wanted to talk to him.”
The woman now looked over her shoulder at Oxblood’s place. “His truck is there, which means he should be, too. It’s the only vehicle he has.”
“And he lives alone?” She glanced at her iPad screen, which was blank. “At least that’s what our records show.”
“That’s right. His ma died, oh, four years ago. Daryl’s never been much of an outside guy, if you know what I mean. He would have never left the house if his mother hadn’t made him go out and get a job. Just sit in his room and do God knows what.”
“What exactly does he do?”
“He’s actually good with anything mechanical. And there’s a lot of stuff around here, farm equipment mostly, that constantly needs fixing.”
“I saw the John Deere tractor in his backyard. It looks like it needs a lot of work.”
The woman smiled. “I guess it’s ‘do as I say, not as I do’ with old Daryl. He makes all our stuff run good and doesn’t lift a finger for his own.”
Clarisse had frozen for a moment on the woman’s first words. The same tagline in the secret room where Harry Langhorne had died.
“If he’s an introvert he might not want to open the door to a stranger.”
“You said you had an appointment with him?” the woman asked.
“Yes, but he doesn’t know what I look like. I called out and said who I was and why I was here, but no one responded.”
“Now that is strange.”
“Maybe if you...”
The woman stepped out, and Clarisse followed her over to Oxblood’s. The woman knocked hard on the door. “Daryl, it’s Barbara. You okay? There’s a lady here you have an appointment with. Daryl!”
No sound came from within. Barbara looked at her. “Okay, now I’m getting a little worried.”
“What should we do?”
“I think we’re justified in going in and seeing if he’s okay.”
“Maybe we should call the police.”
“Hell, the county sheriff’s department’s the law around here and they got a lot of ground to cover. So by the time they showed up we could have taken Daryl to the hospital, if he’s fallen and hurt himself.”
“Okay, but how do we get in?”
Barbara scooted back to her house and came back waving a key. “He has one for my place if something happens to me, too. Way it is out here.”
“I’m sure.”
Barbara unlocked the door, and they walked into a house that was filled with junk and clutter.
“He really let the place go after his ma died. He makes decent money, but Daryl has never been much of a housekeeper. Hell, neither am I.”
“I’m sure,” Clarisse said, her gaze roaming around the small space. “Maybe upstairs?”
There were ten steps up, and on the fifth one Clarisse reached into her bag and gripped the pepper spray. On the ninth step her hearing was as concentrated as was possible.
When they reached the second floor Barbara turned right.
“He’s usually up here reading comic books and such. His ma used to complain.”
“And his father?”
“Never knew him. He died before they moved here.”
“How long have the Oxbloods lived here?”
“Nearly twenty years. I’m born and bred.”
Barbara knocked on the door and got no answer. “Daryl, if you’re in there, say something or we’re coming in.” She looked back at Clarisse and shrugged. “He’s overweight and has diabetes and he’s not good about taking his insulin. He’s not that old, around forty, but maybe a heart attack?”
“One way to find out.”
Barbara gripped the doorknob as Clarisse got ready to deploy her pepper spray. She didn’t expect to find her adversary inside, but stranger things had happened to her.
The door opened and Barbara stepped through.
“Oh my God,” she cried out.
Clarisse pushed past her and looked at the bed.
The dried, congealed blood was everywhere, and the assailant long gone.
She made a sweep of the room and then stepped closer to the corpse on the bed, avoiding the spots of blood on the wooden planks.
“Is this Daryl?” she asked.
Barbara hung back by the door. “Y-yes. All that blood. What the hell happened? Did he have some sort of accident?”
She looked at the cut that ran from one earlobe to the other.