A Safe Place for Dying (24 page)

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Authors: Jack Fredrickson

BOOK: A Safe Place for Dying
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“My wife's trapped inside—”
“Be quiet,” Other said from the front seat.
Blonder had reached whomever he called. “Yes, sir, I think he was attempting to escape.” He listened, then said, “He said to tell you he knows where the bombs are.” He'd called Till. There was another pause. “We'll be right there.”
Blonder clicked off and nodded to Other. Other started the car and nailed the accelerator, throwing me back against the seat like a bottom-heavy punching dummy.
He sped west on Thompson, toward Gateville.
As on the night of the last house bombing, the road was blocked just past the crest of the hill by a Maple Hills squad car and white sawhorse barricades. Unlike the last time, there were no flames shooting into the sky at the base of the hill. From a distance, Gateville was a cluster of trailer searchlights, surrounded by a halfmile-wide ring of dark landscape. Till had cut the power to the area all around Gateville.
Two blue-uniformed young police officers, holding yellownosed flashlights, stood in front of the barricade. Agent Other slowed to a stop and held his I.D. out the window. One of the officers approached the car.
I rocked forward as best I could. “Can you tell me if a brunette in her midthirties tried to get through here in the last couple of hours?”
The officer bent down to peer through the back-door window, saw the way my arms were pinned behind me, and looked at Agent Other. Other shook his head. The Maple Hills officer nodded and handed back Other's I.D., ignoring me. Other put the car in gear and started down the hill.
Blonder was back on the phone. “Yes, sir. Still cuffed.” He listened for a minute, nodded at nobody, and thumbed off the cell phone.
Agent Other had to pull off the road well before the entrance. Ahead of us, fire engines, ambulances, several squad cars, at least three tow trucks, and, at the very end, a lone yellow cab were lined along both sides of the blocked-off highway. Forty or fifty people milled around on the pavement, talking. A couple of them smoked. Most were in uniform: firemen in opened yellow slickers, police in dark blue, paramedics in white or light blue. Those wearing civilian clothes I guessed to be forensic technicians waiting for orders, or reporters with enough connections to get past the police barricade. I scanned them all slowly. Amanda wasn't there.
I twisted on the seat to look at the compound to my left. Behind the brick wall at the east end, the sky and the tops of the houses were white, almost colorless, from the glare of the portable searchlights.
I pressed my face against the glass. The lights were all at the east end. I turned my head to check the northwest quadrant, where I'd told Stanley to tell Till to begin the search.
The sky above Amanda's house was black.
They were searching at the wrong end.
I pushed myself forward and tried to sound calm. “Till is looking in the wrong place.”
Blonder spoke without looking at me. “Agent Till will come out when he can.”
“The bombs are at the west end, in the tunnels.” I spoke to the back of Blonder's neck, slowly, making each word distinct.
This time both of them turned around.
I wanted to scream at their young, unmarked faces. “I left a message for Stanley Novak to search for tunnels in the west end. The bombs are there.”
Blonder's eyes were unblinking. “How would you know that?”
“Get Stanley Novak.”
Blonder and Other looked at each other. Other shrugged. Blonder got out of the car and hurried across the highway to two Crystal Waters security guards standing a few feet from the entrance. He said something to them, and the two guards turned to look at our car. Blonder said something more, and then all three walked quickly across the highway to the Crown Victoria. One of the guards bent down to look at me through the side window. I recognized him from last Halloween. He'd been the guard that had pulled off my Wendell Phelps mask.
He moved to the open driver's window. “Mr. Elstrom,” he said.
“Get me Stanley Novak.”
“The agent here tells me you know something about tunnels?”
“I left a message for Stanley.”
“What tunnels would those be, Mr. Elstrom?” the guard asked.
“Has my ex-wife been here?”
He made no secret of studying my red I LOVE ARKANSAS sweatshirt. “Are you here because of a marital issue?”
“Has Amanda Phelps been here?”
“No one's been allowed in since five this morning.”
The other guard bent down. “Actually, that's not true,” he said
to the first guard. “Miss Phelps phoned the guardhouse from the barricade a couple of hours ago, demanding to be let through. Said she had to remove some paintings. She insisted we call Stanley. We did, and he OK'd her coming through. He said he'd meet her at the guardhouse.”
“Where are they now?”
The guard shrugged.
“Let me out. I need to talk to Stanley.”
Blonder bent down to the window. “In a minute. You told Stanley Novak to search the west end first?”
“I left a message on his cell phone early yesterday morning, telling him about the abandoned tunnels at the west end. Then I talked to him. He was going to tell Till. Let me out.”
Blonder straightened up, and he and the two guards stepped away from the car. Blonder got on his phone and spoke for a minute. I heard the word “tunnel” three times. Blonder came back to the car. He opened the rear door.
“Agent Till wants you to wait for him in the guardhouse.”
I slid out of the car and wobbled to stand up. “How about the handcuffs?”
Other looked at Blonder, who nodded. Other took out his key and removed the cuffs.
My arm throbbed as I raised my hand to point at the end of the row of cars and trucks parked along the road. “Is that my wife's cab?” I asked the Gateville guards.
“Don't know,” the first one said.
“Amanda may be inside.” I started for the cab.
Blonder held out an arm to stop me.
“She can tell us where Stanley is,” I said, thinking no such thing, hoping she'd gotten rebuffed at the gate and was fuming in the cab, with a dead cell phone.
Blonder dropped his arm. With him at my left, Other on my
right, and the two security guards following, we moved quickly down the line of vehicles.
The cabbie was slumped back behind the wheel, asleep. I looked past him. The backseat was empty.
I reached in and shook his shoulder. “Did you drive a woman here tonight?”
“Hey.” His eyes popped open, startled by my hand still on his shoulder. “Easy.”
“Did you bring a woman here tonight?”
He straightened up on the seat, rubbing his eyes. He looked over at the meter. It was running. He smiled. “She told me to wait.”
“Where is she?”
“In there.” He pointed at the entrance to Gateville.
We hurried down to the guardhouse.
“Where's Stanley?” the first security guard asked the man at the console. The console was dark. The only light came from a portable electric lantern.
“Around someplace. Haven't seen him in a while.”
“You hear anything about any tunnels in Crystal Waters?” the first guard asked.
The console guard shook his head. “There are no tunnels here.”
“Did Amanda Phelps get in here tonight?” I asked the console guard.
The console man shook his head. “Strangest thing. She's almost always gone. Then tonight, of all nights, she shows up, demanding to get some stuff out of her house. Stanley kept telling her, ‘No way,' over and over, but she wore him down. You know Stanley: anything for the Members. He finally folded and took her up himself.”
“When was that?” I asked.
The console guard checked the log sheet on the masonite clipboard. “One hour and forty-eight minutes ago. Funny, I didn't see them come back.” He reached for the console microphone. “Stanley,
come in, over.” He waited a minute and repeated it. “Stanley, come in, over.” He pushed the talk button again. “Cassidy, you there, over?”
“Cassidy to base, over,” a voice crackled back.
“Where's Stanley, over?”
“Haven't seen him, over.”
The console guard checked the other guards. No one had seen Stanley.
I looked out the window, toward the dark, west end of Chanticleer Circle. “I'm going up to Amanda's house.”
“You'll do no such thing.” Blonder gestured to a chair. “Park it right there until I come back with Agent Till.” Other took out his handcuffs and jangled them in his hands. Blonder put his hand on my shoulder, hard enough for me to realize he could push me down one-handed.
“You'll be back right away?”
“He wants to talk to you about those tunnels,” Blonder said.
I sat down. After a glance at Other, Blonder paused at the door and spoke to the console guard. “Mr. Elstrom is a material witness. He can't leave.” He went out the door and started running toward the lights at the east end of Chanticleer Circle.
Ahead of him, a small army of men with hand shovels worked slowly in the bright lights, poking and digging around the foundations and across the lawns. Their silhouettes were black against the glare of the lights. They looked like ghost soldiers, burying their dead.
“How long have they been working down at that end?” I asked the console guard.
“Since first thing this morning.”
“They haven't been up by the Phelps house?”
The console guard shook his head. “They won't get up there for a couple of days.”
“Try radioing Stanley again—”
The sky to the west lit up a fraction of a second before the guardhouse windows blew in. A roof of a house hung suspended for an instant, then it began spewing out a thousand glowing embers, just like the Farraday house on the videotape. The guardhouse shuddered, rocking on its foundation. Next to me, Agent Other swiped at the back of his neck. It was a lazy move, confused, as if he were swatting a mosquito at a summer picnic. Then blood spurted from between his fingers. I turned for help from the guard. He was on the floor beneath the console, not moving.
I turned back to Other. He had his hands locked behind his neck, stanching the flow of blood. “I'm just cut. Get out of here.”
I ran out into the smoke and the fire in the sky. The smell of chemical explosives, thick and sweet, hung everywhere. Behind me, a hundred men were yelling, their shouts lost in a muddle of noise, as, outside the wall, the fire trucks and the ambulances rumbled to life.
I ran up Chanticleer toward the hail of embers that was falling into the flames at the northwest bend of Chanticleer. Amanda's house was around that bend, obscured by two dark houses on my left.
If her house was still there.
I tripped, on a curb or a yard stone, fell to my elbows. I got up. Pain ran down my leg; wet and raw. I'd been cut. I ran on, screaming into the night, pleading with every deity I knew.
Let her be alive.
Amanda's house loomed out of the smoke, dark against the backdrop of leaping fire. Its massive double front doors gaped open, sprung out on their hinges like huge hands, framing the black mouth of the entry. In the pulsating orange light from the inferno next door, the house looked like it was screaming.
Stanley's station wagon was parked in the driveway, colorless, strewn with charred pieces of wood and roof tile and ash. I pulled open the front passenger door. It was empty. I ran up the brick walk to the entry.
“Amanda? Stanley?” I yelled. There was no light inside; none of the windows faced the flames. I shouted their names again, holding my breath to hear above the pounding in my chest and the rumbling of the motors at the other end of Gateville.
Only cold air came back at me from the darkness inside.
I stepped into the foyer. Grit crunched under my shoes like I was walking on pulverized glass. I turned to shut the ruined doors to the noise outside so I could hear in the house, but they'd been knocked loose on their hinges and wouldn't pull back. I moved further into the foyer.
Something creaked above my head, and suddenly a curtain of coarse grit, some of it the size of hailstones, started raining from the ceiling. I threw up my hands to shield my face and slammed back against the wall, eyes shut tight. Dust filled the foyer. Then, just as suddenly as it started, the shower of grit stopped. Coughing, I peered through my fingers. Barely visible in the faint light from outside, a massive crack, two inches wide, had split the ceiling, running from above the entry doors into the blackness of the center hall. It had been plaster that had fallen, bits and chunks of it. The blast next door had shaken Amanda's house loose on its foundation.
The jimjams started in my head, taunting:
Why was the station wagon still in the driveway?
I tried to force them away. The station wagon meant nothing. They could have left on foot, carried the art the few hundred yards to the guardhouse. Simpler, and quicker because they wouldn't have stopped to load the car.
The jimjams tittered:
Why haven't they been seen?
I squinted across the foyer, to the darkness where the center hall was. Thirty feet into that hall, then into the living room, to the wall above the fireplace, and I'd know the Monet was gone. Then I could run.
I started moving along the foyer wall.
POP. POP. Loud, like gunshots, from upstairs. I stopped, pressed back against the foyer wall.
POP. POP. Closer now, right above my head, but not gunshots. Worse. They were nails, ripping out of the walls upstairs. The house was coming down.
Behind me, the orange glow beckoned through the open, ruined front doors. Perversely, it was now a beacon to safety. I turned away from it.
POP, this time followed by the long rip of wood splitting.
I turned and pressed my chest against the wall, hoping it was safer there, away from the center of the falling ceiling. Following
my outstretched fingertips like a blind man, I pushed into the dark along the foyer wall. Fist-sized chunks of plaster nudged at my feet. I kicked at them, unseeing, sending them skittering noisily across the ceramic tile. The rubble on the floor was getting thicker the farther I got from the support of the outside walls.
I got to the entrance to the hall. Ten shuffle-steps, then twenty; my hand found the edge of the arch to the living room.
Something heavy crashed above, a ceiling joist or a roof rafter. I pressed under the arch, holding my breath, certain whatever had broken loose was going to come through the hall ceiling. A minute passed, then another. The house settled and went still.
I moved around the arch, following the wall into the living room, struggling to remember the location of every chair, table, and sofa.
My fingers nudged cold, curved metal. It was the first of a pair of wall sconces, directly across the room from the Monet. I moved faster along the wall, sure now of where I was in the room. I touched the other sconce, then next to it, the lined brocade fabric of the living room draperies. I felt past the window and found the frame of a small print. It wasn't valuable; she could have left it. The wall ended. I turned right. Five more paces and my hand struck something, knocking it to a soft thud on the thick carpet. A pewter candleholder, late seventeenth century. Valuable, but not something she'd grab in a crisis. I moved on.
My foot kicked a table leg, setting something wobbling. I stabbed my hand at the noise in the dark, found the lampshade, stopped the wobbling. It was the Chinese red lamp on the wine table. Below the small Renoir oil.
My fingers moved up the wall, tentative, afraid, and too quickly found the little bumps on the beaded frame. The jimjams danced on the skin of my scalp.
Shut up,
I heard myself shout, maybe aloud, maybe only in my mind. She could have left the Renoir, if there'd been no time. It was not the grand prize.
I was almost there.
If there were ever a fire, I would get the Monet out of the house before I'd call the fire department.
Five steps and I bumped the glossy, carved wood of the fireplace mantel, the fireplace she would never use because of the risk of smoke. Palms curled, I worked my fingers upward, willing them to find nothing but the smoothness of bare plaster.
I touched wood.
I felt along the gilded surface, needing to distrust my touch, to be wrong, but there was no doubting the double curve or the intricacy of the outer edge. My fingers came to the lower right corner, followed the odd angle. The hexagonal angle.
The Monet was still on the wall.
The jimjams roared.
She and Stanley had come into the house. The car on the drive and the yawning entry doors had told me that.
But they'd never left.
A staccato burst of
pops
from upstairs echoed through the house like machine-gun fire. Then the rips came, four or five of them, each one long and loud and groaning, like the bones of the house were being ripped out by some giant, unseen hand. Something crashed and shattered on the foyer floor.
I tried to take deep breaths, tried to think. Amanda and Stanley had come to the house. They'd unlocked the doors. There'd be time, they would have thought, time to get it all; the Monet first, of course, but the Renoir, too, then the Remington bronze, the other oils.
She hadn't even gotten to the Monet. She'd been stopped the minute they had entered the house—and been kept from leaving.
The house groaned.
I put my ear hard against the wall, heard the distant sirens, the idling diesel engines, sounds transmitted from outside. Mixed in with them, I thought I heard the almost imperceptible sounds of wood and steel shifting. But maybe that was the sound of my own fear.
I could hear no voices.
There was no time now to hug the wall. The house was coming down. I started into the center of the living room, arms outstretched like a fool playing at blind man's bluff, kicking at the dark first with one foot, then the other. A dozen steps and I found the arch. Far to the right, down the hall, a faint orange haze came from the foyer. I turned to the left, toward the kitchen. Amanda kept a flashlight there, in a drawer next to the sink.
I followed the hall as quickly as I dared, finger touching the wallpaper in front of me. A right turn and I saw more orange light, stronger, flickering from the doorway to the kitchen.
The kitchen windows faced the burning house next door. The blinds were drawn, but enough light crept between the slats to make out the outlines of the counters. I walked across the room. More grit, more chunks of plaster. Every ceiling in the house was falling. I felt along the granite countertop, covered like the floor with fallen plaster, following its edge to the cold steel of the stainless refrigerator, then to the sink. I reached down and found the drawer handle on the lacquered birch front. I pulled it open. The round black rechargeable flashlight was in front.
I switched it on and aimed it low, sweeping across the debris on the kitchen floor—and stopped.
Blue pant legs powdered talcum white by plaster dust. Silver tape at the ankles, below the knees, and around the chest, binding her upright to the bentwood kitchen chair. Arms taped together behind the chair back. Funny bracelet with a single charm, a gold question mark, dangling loosely on an unmoving wrist. I'd given her that bracelet.
And, grotesquely, a brown paper shopping bag, a hole ripped for a mouth, jammed on her head. A wet splotch of something red seeped through the paper above the left ear, where it pressed against her skin. She didn't move.
Two steps and I ripped the bag up and off. Aimed the flashlight
at the far wall, enough for me to see, but not enough to blind her. Bent down to look in the eyes I saw every night when I couldn't sleep. Sparkling eyes, laughing eyes. But not now. Now they were lifeless, unseeing, the blacks of the pupils crowding out almost all of the brown. My heart chattered. They were dead eyes.
Something was jammed in her mouth.
I dropped to my knees, holding the flashlight under my chin so she could see my face as I worked the fragment of towel out of her mouth. She was as rigid as stone. Then her eyelids fluttered, closed, jerked open to look again, and comprehended. Her breathing came faster then, and she started making rapid sideways motions with her eyes, wildly trying to see around the room. “Don't talk,” I whispered.
I got up, stepped quickly to the knife block on the counter, and took the first one my fingers closed on. I cut away the tape from her legs, waist, chest, and arms.
“Don't talk until we're outside.” I reached for her arms.
She stopped me, pulling my head down with cold hands. “Stanley,” she whispered in a cracked, dry voice. “Stanley.”
“We have to get out of here.” I put my arms around her and pulled her up. Caught again the scent of her perfume, felt the familiar weight of her. For one crazy moment, I didn't want to move.
“Can you walk?” I said into her ear.
She nodded.
I held her for the first slow steps, then moved in front of her so she could walk with her hands on my shoulders. The flashlight beam was dimming as we followed it out of the kitchen and down the hall. She dropped her hands away when we got to the living room arch.
“No,” I whispered behind me, but she had already turned. I hurried to catch up to her, aiming the weakening beam in front of us as we crossed the living room to the Monet. “Just that,” I said. She nodded.
She'd never installed security hangers, saying once that she couldn't bear the thought of a thief damaging the Monet trying to get it off the wall. I handed her the flashlight, reached up, and took it down.
The flashlight was dying as I followed her out of the living room.
Pop. Pop. POP.
I grabbed her arm and pulled her under the arch.
“What is that?”
“Nails from the roof.”
The upstairs went silent. We hurried out from the arch, through the hall and the foyer, and out into the orange light. She looked down Chanticleer and stopped.
A hundred yards east, a small knot of men, some holding flashlights aimed at the ground, had stopped behind two idling fire trucks. She stared at the cluster of men standing in the flashing red lights, then looked at the flames leaping from the shell of the gutted house next door. She turned to me, a question forming on her lips.
“Not now,” I said. “Come on.” I reached for her arm.
She stepped back, touching her head where the blood had dried. The words came in a rush. “I made Stanley take me up here when I found out about the bombs. He didn't want to. He said it wasn't safe.” Her eyes locked on mine. “I made him, Dek. I made him bring me up here.”
“Did Stanley hit you?”
“Stanley?” Her eyes flickered from me to the knot of men down the road and back to me. “Why would you think—”
“He's got to be in this, Amanda.” Saying aloud for the first time what had been working at me since I realized Till didn't know about the tunnels. “Did Stanley hit you?”
“I don't know who hit me.”
Again I reached for her with my free hand. “No,” she screamed, taking two full steps back. “Can't you understand? I made Stanley take me here. We were finding our way in the dark, to the kitchen to
get my flashlight, when something hit me. Stanley must have been hit, too. It couldn't have been Stanley.”
“We've got to find Till.” This time I got her arm. I started pulling her with my free hand, toward the street, toward the men and the fire trucks stopped a hundred yards down Chanticleer.
The new blast flared high into the air, showering sparks into the night. At first I thought it was from the house next door, but then my eyes registered the dark space between the two fires. It was another house, the one beyond the burning pile next door. Something clattered behind us. I turned to see one of Amanda's front doors break away from its top hinge and fall to the ground.

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