Артур Порджес - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 121, No. 2. Whole No. 738, February 2003

Then the front door banged open. Muffler Man stood there, dwarfing the frame, a key in his right hand and a look of triumph on his florid face.

“Only idiots leave an extra key above the mantel,” he said.

She pressed the phone on, dialed 9-1-1 with her thumb. He crossed the living room in two strides, entered the breakfast nook, then the kitchen, and yanked the phone out of her hand before it rang once.

Muffler Man shut the phone off, then flung it across the room. “Where is he?”

She shook her head, moving backwards, feeling naked in her robe.

“Don’t play innocent, you bitch. You people are destroying my life.”

He backed her against the counter. She could reach the full, hot pot of coffee, and the knives beside the sink, but she wasn’t sure she was fast enough to use them as weapons without him turning them against her.

“We haven’t done anything,” she said. The sound of the shower still hummed down the pipes. Rick was oblivious.

“Haven’t done anything,” Muffler Man mocked. He was so close now that his belly brushed against her robe. “We never got any right-to-cure notices. We never even got late-payment notices. And my wife looked — she has a record of when she made payments on-line. I don’t know how you did it, but you made it so they thought we didn’t make any payments. And she’s checking now to see if you’ve been doing the same for the house.”

“I don’t know why you think we’d do something like that.” Ada’s mouth was dry. She thought of the files, hoping that her knowledge wouldn’t show on her face. She tried to move sideways, down the counter, but Muffler Man put an arm beside her, blocking her.

“Don’t you?” His eyes narrowed. “Your husband is the one who’s been complaining all the time. Too much noise. You know, I’ve been checking this out. He always complains about noise.”

“Get away from me,” she said. “This is my house. You have no right to be here.”

“There are more complaints on file under his name in this city than for anyone else, you know that? And when we moved next-door, he started in on us. We’re not doing anything wrong, lady. We don’t make a lot of noise. Your husband’s just sick.”

“Please,” she said again. She couldn’t stand having him this close. “Go away.”

Muffler Man leaned even closer, his eyes bulging out. She reached for the coffee pot, but he grabbed her arm. His fingers dug into her flesh, pinching the nerve endings against the bone. She cried out, then bit her lip, not wanting Rick to hear.

Somehow she knew it would be worse if Rick overheard.

She twisted, trying to get away, but Muffler Man’s grip tightened even more. Their gazes met for a moment, and in his she saw a fury so deep that it terrified her.

Then, without even thinking, she brought her knee up and slammed it into his groin.

He yelped with pain, let go of her arm, and doubled over, clasping his hands over his balls. She whirled, grabbed a large flowerpot, and smashed it on the top of his head.

The pot shattered. He staggered and fell, thumping against the floor so hard the house shook.

Upstairs, the shower shut off.

“Ada?” Rick’s voice sounded far away and worried.

Muffler Man scuttled backwards, blood and dirt running down his face. He managed to rise and totter out the open front door.

“Ada?” Rick’s voice was closer now.

She tightened the belt on her robe, felt her hands slip on the flannel, and looked down and saw her fingers were covered in filth. She stepped gingerly over the clay shards, bits of dirt sliding beneath her toes.

The dirt didn’t show up on the shag carpet, but the blood did — a little trail of it, leading to the front door.

She followed the blood as if it were breadcrumbs and when she reached the door, she slammed it shut, bolted it, and rested her forehead against it.

Outside, she thought she heard the faint wail of sirens.

“Ada?” Rick was behind her. She could smell the faint scent of Ivory soap. She turned.

He was wrapped in a towel, his chest hair still wet and matted, water dripping off his legs onto the dirt- and blood-covered carpet.

“Ada?”

He seemed hesitant, and she suddenly realized that he thought she had done this in some fit of anger, a psychotic break that hadn’t surprised him at all.

“It was the Muffler Man,” she said, and slowly sank to the floor.

The police arrived less than five minutes later. It seemed that a 911 operator was supposed to scan all phone numbers that came into the center, even if no one was on the other line. Then the operator tried to call back. If she got no answer, she dispatched a squad car.

Muffler Man had broken Ada’s phone. She couldn’t have answered, even if she’d wanted to.

Rick insisted that Ada press charges, and the police officers agreed. Ada had protested weakly that pressing charges might make the situation worse, but no one listened to her.

The officers arrested Muffler Man.

Ada felt no safer.

Rick wanted Ada to stay home, but she had to get out. She didn’t want to rehash the morning’s events. She wanted to be alone.

The shop was quiet. She kept the Closed sign up and the door locked. Instead of working out front as she usually did, she worked in the tiny supply room.

She hated the supply room. The fluorescents washed out color and made everything seem slightly dirty. When she examined fabric and paint swatches, she did so in the front, by the large windows that let in a great deal of natural light.

But she felt like hiding after that morning. Her hands were still shaking — and her mind wouldn’t quit racing.

She didn’t want to believe Muffler Man; she hated him for what he had done that morning, for the fear he’d made her feel. But hatred was such an easy emotion. She’d seen Rick succumb to it over and over again, and his hatred prevented him from seeing the complexities around him.

She’d been able to see those complexities. She could see them now.

Like Muffler Man’s kindness to his children, the way he would hug them when he came home from work, the fact that he never raised his voice to them or to his wife. He never even lost his temper — until he had come to Ada’s door just a few days ago.

Ada went out front, dug through her desk, and found the bottle of Tums. It was nearly empty.

She made herself chew two — the chalky cherry taste uncomfortably familiar — and then grabbed the disk she had labeled 1996. For a moment she stared at it, black and innocent in the palm of her hand. Then she closed her fingers around it and carried it to the laptop she’d set up in the back.

If she were being honest with herself — and she was, at least today — this was the reason she had come to the shop. Not the fear she’d felt at home, not her anger at Rick for making the morning’s attack about him instead of her, not even the horror she felt at the possibility the incident might happen again.

No, the reason she had come here was simple: She wanted to see if Muffler Man’s accusations were correct.

She scooted a metal folding chair in front of the makeshift desk, put the disk into the laptop’s drive, and called up the files.

She found a map to Charles Urbanick’s life: his credit history; the public records of his home purchase, his marriage, and a previous divorce (amiable, by all accounts); newspaper articles on his success as a Little League coach; and so much more.

But the file that sent a chill through her had nothing to do with Urbanick’s history. It had to do with his present.

In a folder marked “Plan A,” Ada found a Quicken file for a savings account Rick had promised to close a year before. The account ledger had monthly transactions, several deposits of set amounts — $1,500, $400, and some smaller ones, all less than $100.