Jan Burke - Dear Irene

“He does seem to be well known around here.”

She cackled at that. “I’ll just bet everyone you talked to griped about him. He’s a barker, I admit it. He’s very protective of me. He’s usually good about being quiet at night, but for the past week or so he’s been a little bothersome.”

“The past week?” I asked, suddenly feeling a chill in that warm kitchen.

“Oh, about that long, I guess. Something just got into him. Middle of the night, two, three in the morning, he starts barking. ’Bout to drive me crazy.”

The hair on the back of my neck was rising. “Do you remember which night he first started barking?”

She thought for a moment. “Wednesday, maybe?”

Wednesday night. The night Rosie Thayer had disappeared.

“No idea what he’s barking at?”

“The top of the hill, for all I can tell. I get up, I turn the lights on, ask him what’s the matter, let him out in the backyard, show him there’s not a living soul to be found. He stops barking, follows me back into the house, hops back up on the bed, and looks at me like I’m crazy to be up at that time of night. And he’s probably right.”

She was disappointed when I said I’d have to be going. I gave her one of my cards and thanked her for her help. I started to leave, and felt myself losing my nerve.

“Molly, I have an unusual favor to ask.”

She looked up from studying my card. “Sure, honey, what is it?”

“I need to look around the Nelson place. Would you watch me from your window for a few minutes? I mean, just in case anyone else happens to be there…”

Her eyes widened. “Holy smokes, I just got it! You think she might be in there. You’re the one he’s been writing to…”

“Yes. The house is probably empty, he’s probably miles away, but just in case-”

“I’ll get Brutus on the leash and come with you.”

She refused to hear my objections.

I had expected Brutus to be nipping at my heels, but the leash seemed to change his personality. As we neared the house at the crest of the hill, he pulled like a huskie in his traces. Molly sneezed once, twice, three times. “What’d I tell you?” she said, reaching for a handkerchief.

From a distance, 1647 Sleeping Oak appeared to be a modest, white wood-frame house. Grass grew up around the ankles of a “For Sale” sign in the big front yard. The lawn was due for a mowing and the windows were dirty, but otherwise it looked as if it had been a place someone cared about not so long ago.

Molly kept sneezing, her eyes red and watery now. When I suggested that she just wait for me back at her house, she gave me a congested version of “not on your life.” I walked up the steps and knocked on the front door, not expecting an answer. Brutus suddenly started going berserk, making me wonder if someone was waiting inside. He would alternately bark and wheeze as he strained against his rhinestone collar. I walked over to one of the larger windows at the front of the house and looked in. I saw a sun-faded beige carpet in a bare room. Dark marks and nail holes outlined the places where pictures had been taken down. The stigmata of an abandoned home.

“I don’t think anyone’s here,” I said over the dog’s barking, hoping to God I was right. “But would you mind letting Brutus off his leash? Maybe he can show us what’s got him so worked up.”

“I guess I can catch him again,” she said, unsnapping the leash as he twisted in impatience. He bolted around the corner of the house, stopping at a wooden gate. He looked back at us, yapped, then suddenly disappeared. We could hear him in the backyard.

“Brutus!” Molly cried, but he just yapped louder.

As we came closer, we could see that Brutus had wriggled through a hole in the ground beneath the gate; apparently a project he’d worked on during his previous visits. The gate had a latch with pull string on it. I tugged on the string and cautiously stood aside as the gate swung open. I peered into the backyard. No one there but Brutus.

Still, there were signs of another presence having preceded me – something much larger than Brutus. The grass was taller in the backyard, almost to my knees. Molly and I cautiously followed the pathway of flattened grass toward the sound of Brutus’s toe-nails, scratching furiously.

He seemed determined to burrow through what once had been the entrance to a basement. The weathered doors had been nailed shut long ago; rusting metal bands bolted across their width further secured them.

“Brutus, get back from there!” Molly said, picking him up and suffering another sneezing fit. He squirmed in her arms for a moment, then resorted to whining.

“Is there another entrance to the basement?”

“Oh sure,” Molly said, talking rapidly, nervously. “The Nelsons boarded this one up long ago. Most of us did that – to make the houses more secure, I guess.” She stopped to blow her nose. “We all built staircases and an entrance from inside the house. Some people had a door going off the kitchen, like mine. Others had trap doors in the floors. The Nelsons had one of those. Put in a laundry chute, too. I thought that was overdoing it.” She sneezed. “Kids throw clothes down the chute, they land all over the place. I always made my kids carry their clothes down the stairs. It was good for them.”

I wasn’t listening very carefully. I was watching the crevice near the edge of one of the doors. Ants were streaming in and out of the basement. An army of them. And there was a faint but distinct odor in the air, one that made my hopes plummet.

“Maybe you should take Brutus home now, Molly.”

She looked at me in surprise, then looked down at the doors. “Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lordy-Lord-Lord-Lord. She’s in there! Call her name, maybe she can answer you.”

I tried it once, but my voice caught. “Molly, go home, please. I’ll come over in a while. There’s… there’s a smell.

“I don’t smell anything.”

I looked over at her, but didn’t say anything.

“Even with all that sneezing, I’d smell a dead body! Besides, if there is a smell, you don’t know that it’s a comin’ from her! Could be a cat, or a possum or something else dead.”

She was right, of course. I couldn’t see into the basement.

She was waiting for me, silent and afraid, but her eyes pleaded with me to do something. Brutus yapped once, then stared at me in much the same way.

I looked at the trail blazed by our unknown predecessor and sighed in resignation. “Try not to step on the flattened grass,” I said, knowing she would follow me. I made my way alongside the trampled path, which led around the corner of the house to a set of concrete steps. At the top of the steps was the back door. It wasn’t wide open, but it hadn’t been closed hard enough to latch.

Sometimes the last thing on earth you want to do is the very next thing you need to do. My curiosity demanded I go into the house, see for myself what was in there. My fear, or perhaps my common sense, said to let someone else take care of it.

“She might still be alive,” Molly said.

Curiosity had an optimist on its side. It always does.

I climbed the steps and used the toe of my shoe to budge the door. It creaked open, and I stood staring into an empty kitchen, yellow linoleum peeling and stained where a stove and refrigerator had once hidden its faults. The counters were bare, the sink empty. I waited. Silence.

Brutus’s sharp yap behind me came close to scaring me right out of my skin. Just as I had decided to listen to the pessimist within me, the dog wriggled free and scurried through the open door, into the house, and out of sight.

“Brutus!” Molly wailed.

“Stay here,” I told her, blocking her attempt to follow the dog. “If I’m not back out in five minutes, or if you have any inkling that something’s happened to me, get the hell out of here. Go home and call the police. Don’t come in looking for me or the dog.”