Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

I smiled and shook my head. “If he’s there, I’m going to have a talk with him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to talk?”

“Then I’ll be calling you pretty soon.”

Jane pursed her lips. “What if somebody else is at home?”

I smiled a little harder. “I’ll call you when I’m done,” I said.

Jane nodded but looked no less worried. “Well, be quick about it, okay? I don’t want to be sitting in that turret by myself if there are more of those storms coming.” I opened my door and Jane caught me by the sleeve and pulled me toward her. “Just be quick,” she whispered, and kissed me.

I climbed out of the car and waited while Jane turned around and drove off. Then I headed up the road to Calliope Farms.

The sky was a low restless mix of blue and white and stony gray, and the light shifted quickly from daytime to evening and back again. Wind seemed to blow from all points of the compass, by turns warm and cool, in light breezes and heavy gusts. Water fell from the leaves of the maples and lindens across the road and tumbled through the heavy undergrowth and ran in a stream along the roadside. Everything smelled of wet wood and grass and earth. The temperature was in the low sixties and I should have been warm enough in jeans and a sweatshirt, but somehow I wasn’t. I shook my arms out and flexed my fingers.

I buckled the waist pack around me and thought about what Jane had said and wondered again if I should have brought my gun. But my carry permit was no better here than it was in Jersey, and the Massachusetts laws were even stricter. Besides, I wasn’t planning on throwing down with anyone. If someone was at home, I’d talk- assuming they were in a talking mood. If they weren’t, I’d leave without a fuss. If no one was around, I’d get in and out as fast as I could. By the time I made it to the signpost I’d convinced myself, again, that I didn’t need the Glock.

The drive ended in a rough circle of packed earth and gravel, bordered by wet lawn and maple trees. The farmhouse was straight ahead. It was two neat stories in white clapboard, with green shutters, a green shingle roof, and two brick chimneys. There was a flight of wooden stairs from the path to a deep porch and the front door. The barn was to the left and set farther back from the turnaround. It had a low stone foundation, and its sides were wide white vertical boards. It had a hayloft and a big sliding door- both shut- and only a few windows, all high off the ground. The meadow I’d seen from the road stretched out beside and behind it.

I got closer to the house and saw that shades were drawn on all the windows. I climbed the porch steps and peered through the front door glass, but it was covered in a white curtain and I couldn’t see a thing. I pressed the bell, heard it chime someplace distant, and waited. After a minute or two I pressed it again. And again. Then I knocked loudly several times, and called out hello. And then I opened my pack.

The hardware and the doorframe were for shit, and I was inside in less than two minutes with no damage done. I closed the door behind me and looked down a dim hallway that ran through the house all the way to the kitchen. The walls were pale yellow, and the wide plank floors were dark and smooth. A stairway climbed along the wall to the right. The wind picked up outside and I heard raindrops tapping at the windows, but nothing else. Light filtered through curtains and shades, but it was gray and somehow subterranean. I pulled on vinyl gloves and sniffed the air. It was musty and damp and smelled a little of ammonia, but of nothing worse. I took a deep breath and a quick walk around and satisfied myself that no one was home. Then I took it from the top.

The attic was small, unfinished, drafty, and damp, and it was lit only by a single bulb and by the gray light that came in through the dormers. I pulled out my flashlight and flicked it on. Besides some storm windows and broken screens, and a box of moldy paperbacks, it was empty. The rain was steady now and loud above my head. I went down the narrow stairs to the second floor and into a bedroom.

It was simply furnished with a pair of wrought-iron beds and a bureau in green painted wood. There were green chenille spreads on the beds, with bare mattresses underneath. The floor was partly covered with a green and gray hooked rug, and a large aerial photo of what looked like the Tanglewood grounds hung on the wall. The windows looked out on the back of the house, on lawn, a small grove of apple trees, and the dark wooded hillside beyond.

The next bedroom was outfitted as an office, with oak file cabinets, a rolltop desk, and an oak swivel chair. There were framed New Yorker covers on the walls and dust and empty space in the cabinets and desk. There was even less in the small bathroom next door.

Next door to that was the master bedroom. I stood at the threshold and looked it over and felt my pulse quicken. It was larger than the other rooms, and it had a little more furniture: a big cherrywood bed, a cherry bureau, a small black writing table and chair, a hooked rug on the floor, a black-framed mirror on the wall. But where the other rooms had been tidy and battened down, this one was scrambled.

The king-sized mattress was stripped bare and lay askew on the bed frame. All but one of the bureau drawers stood open and empty, and that one was missing. I found it under the bed, and it was empty too. The closet door was ajar. There was nothing inside but a few hangers scattered on the floor, next to a pillow. The mirror was crooked and cracked.

The master bath was more of the same. It was larger than the one in the hallway, and equipped with expensive new fixtures that looked very old. But all the drawers and cabinet doors hung wide and gaping, like a lot of missing teeth. I went downstairs.

There was a study off the entrance foyer to the right. It was a narrow room with windows that looked onto the front porch, and it was furnished with a pair of green love seats, an oriental carpet, and Joseph Cortese’s music collection. The collection of vinyl, CDs, and DVDs filled six built-in floor-to-ceiling cabinets, and made what I’d found at Danes’s place look like a starter kit. The sound system occupied a seventh cabinet, and it was arcane and ominous-looking. The speakers were hung on the walls, along with a dozen photographs of a smiling Joseph Cortese, standing with musicians and conductors and friends. I’d seen two of the photographs before- one at Danes’s apartment and the other at Nina Sachs’s.

The living room was across the hall, and it connected through a wide entranceway to the dining room in the rear of the house. The furnishings were casual and comfortable-looking- slipcovered chintz sofas, fat leather chairs, a cherry coffee table, and brass lamps. There was a small linen chest beside one of the sofas, but it held nothing more than a deck of playing cards and a box of matches. Behind its brass screen, the fireplace was clean and empty.

I heard a rumbling sound, and the dim light coming through the shades grew dimmer. I went to a window and looked outside. The sky was a tumbling mosaic of gray on gray, and rain was falling even harder. Leaves were flying sideways from the trees.

I stood at the entrance to the dining room. A four-branch brass chandelier hung from the ceiling, above an old oak table and six oak chairs. There were three windows on the back wall and a connecting door to the kitchen on the right. There were moss-green curtains on wrought-iron rods over two of the windows. The third window, near the kitchen door, was covered only by a roller shade.

I pushed up a wall switch, and the chandelier came on. It shed a thin yellow light from bulbs shaped like flames. I crossed the room and looked at the bare window frame. There were empty ragged screw holes in the upper left-hand corner, and in the upper right were the bent remains of a bracket. The smell of ammonia was more pronounced. I knelt down and played my flashlight along the floorboards. There was a long irregular patch of wood that was scuffed and scratched and lighter than the rest of the floor. The ammonia smell was even stronger, and there was a smell of bleach too.