A Skeleton in the Closet (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) (10 page)

I stopped for a red light at the intersection of

Maple Street
and the
Silas Deane Highway
and glanced in my rearview mirror. To my surprise, the black van I had noticed at the pond was behind me. Well, not so surprising, really. Maple and the Deane were two of the major thoroughfares in Wethersfield and were heavily traveled by local residents and drivers en route from Glastonbury to Newington, as well.

The fact was that I had been particularly watchful of vehicles that seemed to be shadowing me since an incident a year or so ago. At that time, a black Trans Am, driven by an unbalanced man who believed he was protecting a lady friend, had harassed me all the way from Wethersfield to Glastonbury, attempting to force me off the road. After a hair-raising, ten-minute chase across the Putnam Bridge, I wound up churning across the front lawn of the Glastonbury Police Department, where a nice young officer discovered me having hysterics a moment later. Ever since, I had been wary.

The light changed, and I pulled across the highway and around the long curve of Maple,
then
turned right on Prospect. The van stayed with me up and down the series of grades as Prospect crossed Wolcott Hill, then

Ridge Road
. When I signaled for the right turn into The Birches, I half expected the van to follow, but it continued straight on Prospect.

I shook off my apprehension as I proceeded down the entrance road at the posted fifteen
m.p.h
. limit. By the time I reached my driveway, the van was nowhere in sight, and my heartbeat slowed as I pushed the garage door opener on my visor. As soon as I pulled inside, I shut the door again and let relief wash through me. What was my problem? All at once, having a man around the house seemed like a great idea.

It took two trips up the garage stairs into the kitchen to wrestle in all of the groceries, dry cleaning, and drugstore purchases. I hardly spent a penny all week, but on Saturday, the cash outlay was impressive. It would be nice to be sharing some of the household expenses, too, I admitted. Come this time next week, Armando would be living here. I wondered how that would feel. Would he come with me on my round of errands?

I chuckled as I remembered a couple Armando and I had seen once at the supermarket. A thin, scowling woman pushed a cart alongside the meat case. Clearly out of patience, she looked back over her shoulder at a sulky fellow lingering in the soup aisle. “Richard, are you or are you not going to participate?” the woman shrilled. Richard put down his minestrone and slouched to her side, and Armando and I couldn’t help but snicker. Now, whenever Armando dragged his feet about something, I would put my hands on my hips and bark, “Armando, are you or are you not going to participate?” It never really worked, of course, but it always gave us a laugh.

Jasmine yawned her way into the kitchen and stuck her head into one bag after
another,
her nose telling her there was fresh ground meat in there somewhere. “Yes, you’re right,” I applauded the old lady. I pulled out a package of lean beef and broke her off a chunk before rewrapping it in meal-sized portions for the freezer. She was lucky this time and swallowed the last morsel before Simon’s nose kicked in, and he appeared in the doorway. She sashayed past him nonchalantly and leaped up onto the living room sofa to clean her whiskers. Simon eyed me suspiciously. “Oh, all right, you win.” I opened one of my freezer bags and gave him just a bite. Satisfied, he trailed after Jasmine and jumped up on the sofa to snuggle against her.

On impulse I climbed the stairs to the second floor to have a last look around before move-in day. The large spare room had been freshly painted and the carpeting steam-cleaned. The closet was empty, and the walls were bare. How different it would look with all of Armando’s things inside. I knew that he was a packrat who hated to part with anything, and whatever furniture he had would be bursting with books and art supplies, magazines and papers. I also knew that his favorite place to store things was the floor and that every surface would be covered with books and papers to keep them close at hand. I thought of poor Grace, my once-a-month cleaning person, attempting to deal with this room. It might be time to give her a raise.

Wandering across the loft area that overlooked the living room below, I stuck my head into the large bathroom. A new cabinet occupied a niche behind the shower/tub combination, and another one hung on the wall next to the commode. Fresh towels hung on the rods. The mirror shone, and a new shower curtain hung from the rod. Everything was ready … except me. I wondered how long it would take me to adjust to this new arrangement. I was happy about it, I reminded myself. Really, I was. Living under the same roof would take our relationship to a whole new level, I felt sure. But I remembered how crowded I had felt by my first marriage and how much I had loved the last dozen years of peaceful solitude. Was I too old a leopard to change my spots?

Armando was devoting his weekend to sorting and packing his belongings in preparation for Monday’s move, a task I was thankful to be spared. I took advantage of his absence Saturday evening to get in some quality girl time with such activities as coloring my hair, touching up my nails and giving myself a pedicure.

I chatted with Armando briefly about halfway through my manicure,
then
checked my office voicemail and emails while my toenails dried. Margo would be spending the evening with John, I knew, and
Strutter
…
frankly,
I didn’t know what to do about
Strutter
. If she was pregnant, why wouldn’t she confide in us? And if she wasn’t, then what on earth was the matter with her? Of the three of us, it was always
Strutter
who was the
de facto
mom. She was a strong, centered, loving woman with uncommonly good sense and enormous tact. It was she upon whom we relied for sound advice, and in this situation, I could really use some. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask
Strutter
for it.

By nine p.m. I was sitting in front of the living room television pressing buttons at random on the remote control. For the umpteenth time I wondered how it was possible to have more than one hundred channels at my disposal but find nothing I wanted to watch. I was cheered briefly by a PBS special on James Taylor, one of my personal favorites; but as usual, ten minutes into the show, it was interrupted by a fundraising break.
Commercial-free television, phooey,
I thought bitterly and punched the television off. The silence was a blessed relief from the pitchman’s yammering.

I leaned my head back against the sofa and turned out the light next to me, the better to enjoy the silence. Jasmine and Simon, unaccustomed to my company on a Saturday night, were packed on either side of me, and I soon found my eyelids drooping.

With a start, I lurched out of my doze and wondered what had awakened me. The phone wasn’t ringing, but I realized that my heart was beating fast. The little hairs on the back of my neck were prickling an atavistic warning. I put my feet on the floor and listened intently.
Hot water heater humming in the basement.
Refrigerator motor.
And a soft knocking on the front door.
Knock
knock
knock
, three times, almost furtive-sounding. Hesitantly, I walked down the hall in bare feet and put my eye to the peephole in the front door. The porch light was on. A man stood on the front porch with his back to me.
Dark blue windbreaker, shaven head, jeans, running shoes of some sort.
Hands jammed deeply into his pockets.

I considered opening the door until I spotted the van in my driveway.
Black, like the one that had been behind me on the road earlier.
Instinctively, I drew back from the door and made my way soundlessly back into the living room, where I picked up the wireless phone, heart pounding.

Thus armed for an emergency call to 911, if necessary, I tiptoed back down the hallway and up the three steps to the staircase landing. From the window there, I would have a clear view of the front porch and the driveway. I stood well to one side of the window and peeked cautiously through the slats of the vertical blinds. The porch was empty, but the van remained in the driveway. Where was the driver, and why was that van on my property at ten-thirty on a Saturday night?

I sat down on the landing to ponder that question. Then I heard it—the sound of someone trying to turn the knob on the door at the back of the house. It led from the deck to the living room, and I wasn’t at all sure that it was locked. Years before, I had applied a window decal from Radio Shack proclaiming that this house was protected by the XYZ Security System or some such, but I was sure that wouldn’t fool anyone but an unsophisticated teenager.

The living room drapes were wide open, so the intruder knew full well from the blazing lights and the pedicure paraphernalia that I was at home. I drew more deeply into the shadows of the staircase landing and tried to think clearly. I could dial 911 and have the Wethersfield police here within minutes, or I could lock myself into an upstairs bedroom with the phone and attempt to get a handle on the intruder’s intentions. To my own amazement, I opted to do the latter.

The doorknob stopped rattling, and as relieved as I was to realize that it must indeed be locked, I knew I had only seconds to get a second look at Van Man before he left the deck. I flew up the remaining stairs into what soon would be Armando’s bedroom and dropped to my hands and knees to scrabble across the carpet below window height. Again keeping well to one side, I peered between the blinds down to the deck below.
Nothing.
Damn! I had missed him again. I held my breath and listened for whatever clues the house could give me about my visitor’s next move. If he broke a window pane, I would lock myself into the bedroom and punch in 911.

All was silent for a full minute. I tiptoed warily to the door of the bedroom and stopped to listen again, every sense straining. Another minute and I heard the unmistakable sound of the van’s engine turning over. Racing back down the stairs to the landing, I was just in time to see the van back quietly out of my driveway and move slowly, slowly down The Birches’ access road to

Prospect Street
. I couldn’t see the license plate, but I noted that the plastic cover on one of the rear lights was broken.

I sat down on the landing to try to make sense of this strange visitation. Should I call 911 and report the attempted intrusion? Or was it an attempted intrusion at all? The man had rattled the back doorknob. Maybe he was a neighbor attempting to stick a UPS package that had been wrongly delivered to him in my door. That could also explain why he had been driving the van in this neighborhood earlier in the day, if indeed it was the same van. That could just be my paranoia working overtime.

Could the man have something to do with those crazy letters we had been receiving at MACK Realty about the stink of abomination or whatever the writer had been raving about? Those letters had seemed to be directed at all of us generally, and this man was following only me, if in fact he was following anybody. Could my visitor be involved in whatever was happening at the
Henstocks
’ house? Again, all of us had been in and out of the house in the last few days, so why was I being singled out?

My feet were cold. I got up and returned to the living room sofa, although not before drawing the drapes tightly shut and turning on the floodlights over the back deck to discourage a repeat visit. Jasmine and Simon had altered their positions just far enough to glean maximum warmth from each other, since I had abandoned them. It was odd that the presence of a stranger on the back deck had apparently bothered them not at all. I pulled the afghan over me and resumed my musings.

The only thing I felt fairly certain of was that the van in my driveway tonight had been the same one behind me on the road this afternoon. I couldn’t explain to myself why I believed that. It was just a gut feeling. I hadn’t seen the license plate earlier,
nor
the broken taillight cover. I hadn’t been able to see the driver, because the windshield was heavily tinted – more heavily than the law allowed, if I didn’t miss my guess. That left only instinct to guide me, but my instinct was screaming that the man standing on my front porch this evening was the driver of the van behind me this afternoon. Assuming that was true, what could I logically do with this information? Call the police? And report what … that a man I didn’t know had rattled my back doorknob, and he was driving a dark-colored van with a broken taillight cover?

Briefly, I considered getting Armando’s advice,
then
discarded the idea. If I had learned anything about Armando, it was not to raise the alarm with him unless it was absolutely necessary. All I had to do was tell him some strange man was rattling my back doorknob, and he’d be having a
bona fide
security system installed in the condo tomorrow morning. No, I decided. Margo was the best one to consult on this. Southern belle she might be, but she could be counted upon not to overreact.