It didn’t work its magic. I found myself scared to turn on the television for fear the noise would block out the sounds of an intruder. But nothing happened, all evening. I was caught up in some kind of siege mentality; I got a box of Cheez-Its and a diet Coke and holed up in my favorite chair, with a book I’d read many times, one of William Marshall’s Yellowthread Street series. But even his endearingly bizarre plotting could not relax me.
I wondered if men had evenings like this.
The time passed, somehow. I turned on my patio and front door lights, intending to leave them burning all night. I switched off the interior lights. I went from window to window, sitting in the dark and looking out. I never saw anything else; about one o’clock, I heard a car start up somewhere close and drive away. Though that could have signaled any number of things, perhaps none of them concerning me, I was able to sleep in fits and starts after that.
Chapter Thirteen
IT WAS RAINING Friday evening when Martin came to supper. He had barely shed his raincoat when he gathered me up in his arms.
“Martin,” I whispered, finally.
“Humm?”
“The water for the spaghetti is boiling over.”
“What?”
“Let me go put in the spaghetti so we can eat. After all, you need to build up your strength.”
Which earned me a narrow-eyed look.
I can never manage to get all the elements of a meal ready simultaneously, but we did eventually eat our salad and garlic bread and spaghetti with meat sauce. Martin seemed to enjoy them, to my relief. While we ate, he told me about his trip, which seemed to have consisted mainly of small enclosed spaces alternating with large enclosed spaces: airplane, airport, meeting room, dining room, hotel room, airport, airplane.
When he asked me what I’d been doing, I almost told him I’d sat up last night afraid of the bogey man. But I didn’t want Martin to think of me as a shaking, trembly kind of woman. Instead, I told him about my walk, about the people I’d seen.
“And they all had a chance to kill Tonia Lee,” I said. “Any one of them could have walked up to the house in the dusk. Tonia Lee wouldn’t have been too surprised to see any one of them, at least initially.”
“But it had to have been a man,” suggested Martin. “Don’t you think?”
“We don’t know if she’d actually had sex,” I pointed out. “She was positioned to look like it, but we don’t have the postmortem report. Or she could have had sex, and then been killed by someone other than her sex partner.” Martin seemed to take this conversation quite matter-of-factly.
“That would assume a lot of traffic in and out of the Anderton house.”
“Doesn’t seem too likely, does it? But it could be. After all, the presence of a woman wouldn’t scare Tonia Lee at all. And Donnie Greenhouse said several very strange things last night.” I told Martin about Donnie’s remark that not only men had wanted Tonia Lee, and about his sighting of Idella’s car. But I didn’t say anything about Eileen and Terry; just because they were the only lesbians I knew about in Lawrenceton didn’t mean they were the only ones in town.
Aubrey would have been nauseated by this time.
“So what’s your assumption?” Martin asked.
“I think… I think Tonia Lee learned who was stealing those things from the houses for sale. I think she was having an affair with whoever it was, or he-or she-seduced her when she asked him to come to the Anderton house to talk about the thefts. Maybe he asked her to meet him under the guise of having a romp in the hay there, when he meant to finish her all along. So they romp or they don’t, but either way he fixes it to look as if they had. I’m sure he planned it beforehand. He arrives by foot or bicycle, he kills Tonia Lee, he positions her sexually to make us think it’s just one of her paramours who got exasperated, he moves her car, he goes home, he somehow gets the key back to our key board. He thinks that that way no one will look for Tonia Lee for days, days during which all alibis will be blurred or forgotten or unverifiable. Maybe he returns the key in the few minutes Patty and Debbie are both out of the front room at the office.”
Martin had been listening quietly, thinking along with me. Now he held up his hand.
“No,” he said. “I think Idella must have put back the key.”
“Oh, my God, yes. Idella,” I said slowly. “That’s why he killed her. She knew who had had the key. She got it from whoever was at Greenhouse Realty.”
That made so much sense. Idella, crying at the staff meeting right after Tonia’s body was discovered. Idella, red-eyed and upset during the days after the killing.
“It must have been someone she was incredibly loyal to,” I murmured. “Why wouldn’t she tell? It would have saved her life.”
“She couldn’t believe it, she wouldn’t believe this person did it,” Martin said practically. “She was in love.”
We stared at each other for a minute.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “That must have been it. She must have been in love.”
I thought of Idella after Martin fell asleep that night. Deluded in the most cruel way, Idella had died at the hands of someone she loved, someone of whom she could believe no evil, no matter how compelling the evidence. In a way, I thought drowsily, Idella had been like me… she’d been alone for a while, coping with her life on her own. Maybe that had made her all too ready to trust, to depend. It had cost her everything. I prayed for her, for her children, and finally for Martin and me.
I must have coasted off into sleep, because the next thing I was aware of was waking. I woke up just a little, though; just enough to realize I’d been asleep, just enough to realize something unusual had roused me.
I could hear someone moving very quietly downstairs. Martin must be getting a drink and doesn’t want to disturb me-so sweet, I thought drowsily, and turned over on my stomach, pillowing my face on my bent arms. My elbow touched something solid.
Martin.
My eyes opened wide in the darkness.
I froze, listening.
The slight sound from downstairs was repeated. I automatically reached out to the night table for my glasses and put them on.
I could see the darkness much more clearly.
I slid out of bed as silently as I could, my slithery black nightgown actually of some practical use, and crept to the head of the stairs. Maybe it was Madeleine? Had I fed her before we came up to bed?
But Madeleine was in her usual night place, curled on the little cushioned chair by the window, and she was sitting up, her head turned to the doorway. I could see the profile of her ears against the faint light of the streetlamp a block north on Parson Road, coming in through the blinds.
I glided back to the bed, very careful not to stumble over scattered clothes and shoes.
“Martin,” I whispered. I leaned over my side of the bed and touched his arm. “Martin, there’s trouble. Wake up.”
“What?” he answered instantly, quietly.
“Someone downstairs.”
“Get behind the chair,” he said almost inaudibly, but very urgently.
I heard him get out of bed, heard him-just barely heard him-feeling in his overnight bag.
I was ready to disobey and take my part in grabbing the intruder-after all, this was my house-when I saw in that little bit of glow from the streetlight that Martin was holding a gun.
Well, it did seem time to get behind something. Actually, the chair felt barely adequate all of a sudden. I left Madeleine right where she was. Not only would she very probably have yowled if I’d grabbed her, but I trusted her survival instincts far more than mine.
I strained as hard as I could to hear but detected only some tiny suggestions of movement-maybe Martin going to the head of the stairs. Despite the dreadful hammering of my heart, I said a few earnest prayers. My legs were shaking from fear and the cramped crouching position I’d assumed.