Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

“Yeah. So you haven’t seen Stuart?”

“Haven’t seen him or anybody else, sweetheart.”

“Thank God.”

I thought it was premature to be offering up those kinds of thanks yet, but I hoped she had reason to be optimistic.

On my way to the basement I aimed the flashlight back into the kitchen for a final sweep, then went down the last flight of stairs. In addition to the rec room, where I’d come through the window, there was a furnace room, a laundry room, and a small workshop. Tools of every description hung on one wall, a table saw, a drill press, a small lathe bolted to the workbench. An aluminum ladder leaned up against the wall. And while there was a faint scent of sawdust in the air, there wasn’t a trace of it on the painted concrete floor.

There, on the far wall, a chest freezer.

Waist high, about six feet long. A small amber light on the side to indicate that it was running.

“Oh no,” I said under my breath. If I didn’t open it, I might end up kicking myself later. And I was not — ever — coming into this house again.

I approached the freezer, held the light in my left hand, raised above my shoulder, angled down, and lifted the top with my right.

Lots of frozen food.

As I came back out of the workshop, I felt somewhat encouraged. The home looked to me to be corpse free. Not the sort of thing generally mentioned in a real estate listing, but a good thing nonetheless.

Stuart Koch — dead or alive — was not here. But if he was okay, why wasn’t he answering his phone?

I could think of any number of reasons, but the first that came to mind was that he was a chickenshit little weasel and didn’t want to take a call from the girl he’d dragged into a terrifying situation. He didn’t have the guts to apologize. He didn’t have the guts to admit he’d done a pretty goddamn stupid thing.

I didn’t want to have to come up with another reason. That one suited me just fine.

The trouble was, it didn’t explain what had happened in this house an hour and a half or so earlier.

Something was nagging at me.

It wasn’t the business of trying to figure out what had gone down here. I’d seen something, and it was only now registering.

When I’d waved the light past the kitchen on my way down, something had caught my eye. I hadn’t really thought about it until I’d gotten to the basement.

Something not quite right. Something shimmery.

Something on the kitchen island. Not on it, exactly, but on the side of it.

“Are you done, Daddy?” Grace asked.

“Just another minute,” I told her.

I went back up to the first floor, stood at the entrance to the kitchen, aimed the light at the base of the island. The sides were done in paneled wood. Light in color, probably a bleached oak.

About a foot up from the floor, the finish was marred. Droplets of something that had hit the vertical plane and then trickled down.

Something, in the glow of the flashlight, that could have been, say, spaghetti sauce.

I knelt down and brought the light up close. The drops were fresh to the touch, and when I put the tip of my finger to within an inch of my nose, I detected no whiff of tomato or spices.

My heart sank. Something had definitely happened here. But — if this was any consolation — there was so little blood my guess was that whoever suffered an injury had managed to leave the scene.

The hospital. That was where we should go next. Milford Hospital.

I wiped the blood off my finger, wadded up the tissue, and stuck it into the front pocket of my jeans. Then I took the cell from my pocket.

“Hey, sweetheart. I’m comin’ out. I think we’ve got another stop to make on the way home.”

In fact, I was thinking, maybe two. The hospital would be our first, and if we didn’t find Stuart sitting in the ER, we’d go past his house on our way home.

We needed to find this kid. We needed to find him, and find out what, if anything, had happened to him.

I was waiting for Grace to respond.

“Grace? You there? I’m thinking we check the hospital on the way home. I found what looks like just a little — and I mean just a little — blood here in the kitchen.”

Grace still had nothing to say.

“Grace?” I said. “Grace, are you there?”

Nothing.

I looked at the display on my phone. The connection had been broken. I moved quickly to the kitchen window to see whether she was still standing out back of the house.

She was not.

I brought up her number and was about to call her back when I stopped myself. If Grace had run into the bushes to hide — maybe that Milford cop had returned and was snooping around the house — and if she’d forgotten to mute her phone, the last thing she’d need would be me calling her. Even if I texted her, it would make that brief jingle and alert anyone around her.

I thought about running downstairs and scrambling out the basement window, but then reconsidered. If there was a cop wandering around, this wouldn’t be the best time to make an appearance. But then again, if someone spotted that broken window and decided to come into the house, I was trapped here.

I was not then, and never have been, adept at what you’d call grace under pressure. I couldn’t decide what to do next. I was paralyzed, terrified that whatever choice I made would be wrong.

I took a few deep breaths and attempted to focus. I needed to know what was going on, and I wasn’t going to learn a damn thing standing here in the kitchen trying to keep myself from wetting my pants.

I killed the flashlight and gingerly made my way through the living room to the front window so I could get a look at the street. No cop car, which was a blessing. Of course, my car was still sitting there, like a big blazing advertisement that read: “SOMEONE’S HERE! CHECK IT OUT!”

I detected some movement out of the corner of my eye.

Near the end of the driveway, sheltered by a tall hedge that separated this property from the next, I could make out two dark shapes.

Two people, facing each other. Talking.

I was pretty sure one of those people was Grace.

While it was too dark to read facial expressions, there was nothing about her posture that indicated this was a confrontation. The other person, who was about the same height, wasn’t waving his arms or pointing a finger.

And it didn’t look like a he, either.

Grace was talking to another girl. Or woman.

That cop she’d spotted was a woman, but this woman didn’t appear to be wearing a uniform or a heavy belt loaded down with assorted cop accessories. Plus, there was no cruiser on the street, at least not on the part of the street that I could see.

Time to find out what the hell was going on.

I returned to the basement, hoisted myself up through the open window, and got back on my feet outside the house. As I came around the corner, I could hear the hushed conversation of two people whispering.

Grace glanced my way. “Dad!”

She ran toward me. The other woman didn’t move.

She put her arms around me, her head on my chest. “I thought you’d never get out of there.”

“Your phone,” I said, not taking my eyes off the woman.

“Oh,” she said, glancing at it, still in her hand. “I must have hit the button or something.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“It’s okay,” Grace said. “You know I told you I made another call before I called you, soon as I got out of the house. I mean, I kept trying Stuart, but I called someone else, too.”

I eased myself out of Grace’s embrace and walked in the direction of this mystery woman. I kept the flashlight off and down at my side, hoping that once I’d closed the distance, I’d be able to get a look at this person.