Linwood Barclay - Parting Shot

I’d startled him. He recoiled. “What?” He was wide-eyed. “All I said was ‘Oh.’”

“No, not then. Before. When we were leaving the hospital.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“As we were leaving the hospital, you said something. Around the time I had to make a call on my cell. I sent you to the car.”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

It didn’t matter. I didn’t need him to remember. I knew what it was.

“Don’t worry about it.” I studied him for another moment, then said, “Let’s get something to eat.”

Dolores Guntner’s 27 Eastern Avenue address might have sounded like a place in a residential section of Promise Falls, but it was outside the town. Eastern, as the name implied, led east out of town, and the numbers started a couple of miles outside the town limits. Out there, the houses, many of them attached to farms, were spaced far apart and back from the road.

This far out of Promise Falls, people had mailboxes erected at the end of their driveways. As Barry Duckworth drove slowly, he was looking for a mailbox name as well as a number.

He spotted a mailbox with GUNTNER written on the side in slanted peel-and-stick letters, the type you could get at Home Depot. The house was white with a black roof, a porch wrapped around two sides of the structure. About twenty yards beyond the house was a barn that, while not about to collapse, had seen better days. The once red sideboards were mostly gray, and the roof was sagging in the middle. Duckworth wondered whether it would survive a winter of heavy snow.

He parked the car close to the porch steps and mounted them to the front door. Mike had said he believed Dolores lived in the house alone, now that her parents were in a nursing home. But that didn’t mean someone might not be here.

Duckworth rang the bell. When no one came after ten seconds, he leaned on the button a second time. Again, no response.

He tried the door and found it locked. He peered through the window, saw what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary living room. Couch, comfy chairs, a television. He went down the porch steps and slowly walked down the side of the house, rounded the corner, and went up two steps to a back door. He peered through the window into a kitchen that didn’t look as though it had been updated since JFK was in short pants.

He turned the doorknob, and while the place was locked, there was some play in it. He tried again, this time putting his shoulder into it, and the door swung open.

There were no beeps, so no security system.

“Hello!” he called out. “Anyone home?”

He waited a moment. Then, “This is the police! Detective Barry Duckworth with the Promise Falls Police!”

Nothing.

He went through the house slowly, starting with the first floor. He wanted to check recent incoming and outgoing calls, but while there were wall jacks, there were no phones to be found. Duckworth guessed that after her parents went into the home, Dolores Guntner, like so many of her generation, canceled the service and relied strictly on a cell phone.

The kitchen, dining and living rooms didn’t turn up anything that caught his immediate attention. He went into the basement first, but like many farmhouses along this stretch of road, it was a far cry from a rec room with a pool table and a minibar. The floor was dirt, the ceiling exposed beams that he had to be careful not to bump his head on. Light was by way of a couple of exposed bulbs.

Duckworth peered behind old boxes and piles of junk and failed to spot anything that raised any alarms. He had his doubts anyone had been down here in a long time, except possibly to service the furnace.

He came back up to the first floor, then went up the stairs to the second.

There were three bedrooms, but only one that appeared to have been used for sleeping. One had been turned into a spillover room to hold boxes of files and old clothing and shoeboxes of photographs. He riffled through one of them, guessing them to be pictures Dolores’ parents had collected over the last half-century or more.

The second bedroom was clearly where Dolores spent her nights. The bed was unmade and a woman’s clothes were scattered on the floor.

The third bedroom also contained a bed, a single that was pushed up against the wall to allow room for a desk, a computer chair, and some bookshelves. An open laptop sat on the desk, its recharging cord attached and leading to a wall outlet off to one side. Next to the laptop was a framed picture of Dolores, looking pretty much as Duckworth remembered her from the tattoo parlor, standing between a much older couple he assumed were her mother and father.

He tapped the spacebar and the screen came to life. The background pic featured a dragon and a woman with very blonde, almost white hair. Duckworth wasn’t sure, but he thought this was a scene from that Game of Thrones TV show.

He was worried the computer might be password-protected, but it wasn’t. He pulled back the computer chair, dropped himself into it, and clicked onto the web browser. Once it had filled the screen, he clicked on the search history, crossing mental fingers that it had not been cleared.

It had not.

Dolores had traveled far and wide on the World Wide Web. Facebook pages, Twitter, local weather, celebrity gossip.

One of the sites she had been on in the last twenty-four hours had been Just Deserts. When Duckworth clicked on it, the headline that immediately popped up was “Where is the Big Baby?”

He scanned the most recent sightings of Jeremy Pilford in the Promise Falls area. Plus one out-of-focus shot in front of a hotel that was identified as being in Kingston, New York, south of Albany. That one had supposedly been taken just a few hours ago.

Duckworth said, “Hmm.”

He decided to let the computer experts examine the laptop more closely. He wanted to complete his walkabout.

When he had finished his tour of the top floor, he went back down to the kitchen and exited the house the same way he’d entered it. Standing in the fresh air, his eyes settled on the barn. As he walked toward it, he didn’t see anything to suggest this was still a working farm. No cows or pigs or chickens, and none of the deposits they left behind. Nor did he see any farm equipment. No tractor, not even a pickup truck. Maybe he’d find a vehicle in the barn.

There was a wood door built into the concrete foundation, which rose out of the ground a good five feet before the sideboards soared up toward the roof. Duckworth tried the door and found it unlocked.

He went inside. Where he had entered, the barn was open right to the sagging roof. Some sunlight filtered through the slits between the wallboards, dust mites dazzling in the streams. About halfway across, a lower level, with its own ceiling, had been built into the structure. An open door beckoned him forward.

He got to the door, stepped through the opening. The room was dark, and he looked for a light switch, finding one about a foot to the left of the door. He flicked it up.

It was a workshop. Along one wall, a wood bench and a set of cabinets that looked as though they had been taken from the kitchen of an old house and rehung there. Various tools were scattered across the top of the bench. The floor was dirt that had been packed down over several decades.

The room smelled of hay and mould and dirt and shit.

A few feet away, in the middle of the room, was a single bed.

It was an old, rusted metal bed that could be folded up and rolled away. Lying atop it was what Duckworth was willing to bet was the original mattress. It was uncovered, blue and white striped, with several small rips where the stuffing was attempting to escape. As he got closer, he could see that it was covered in stains that probably ranged from various bodily fluids to oil, varnish, coffee and booze.