Burn 2 (9 page)

“What are you doing here, Mr – ?” She left the question open. She was still on her guard.

“I’m Stefan Stoffler,” he said.

When she didn’t say anything, he added, with a worried frown, “Did your father say anything about me?”

She shook her head.

He held her eyes for a minute. Then he said, “Ah, in which case, perhaps I should explain my presence then. I am a guest of your father’s. He
said I could live her until I find more . . . permanent accommodation.”

“Oh, really?” She wa
s neither believing nor disbelieving. Her father did have guests now and again. “In that case, sorry to have troubled you.”

She found it strange that her father should have put up such an old man in a cabin far away from town. What if he needed medical assistance? What if he had an emergency? And his old legs surely couldn’t have found the steps to that porch easy to climb.

Still, she bid her farewell to Mr. Stoffler and drove off. But the seeds of disquiet were planted.

*

She did not confront her father about it. But she decided to investigate on her own. So she went back to the cabin to spy on Mr. Stoffler. She knew the lay of the land in and out – where to hide comfortably and where not to be noticed.

The old man, she noted, could not be confined for too long in the house. Due to sheer boredom, he took walks.
For such an octogenarian – or older – he was relatively healthy. Abby waited till he was out of the house and gone for a while through the trees before making her move.

She had the key to the cabin, of course. She sprinted lightly up the steps. Her hands
were trembling as she fumbled with the key. She almost dropped it, but caught it in time. Then she let herself in. The door opened with a whine.
Too loud,
she thought. But the old man did not appear, and she closed the door behind her and locked it.

Her heart was beating painfully against her ribs.

What exactly was she looking for? She didn’t know, but she had a hunch. She could not see any of his belongings in the lounge, and so she went to the bedroom. The cabin had two bedrooms on the same floor, and Mr. Stoffler occupied the larger one.

His suitcase was on the floor. She saw boxes of medicines being spread across the table. Naturally, he would have a lot of diseases having lived to that age, or at least require a flotilla of pills to keep him alive. A
n open briefcase lay on the bed, and it was this she rifled through. She was careful to note the position of the documents.

She caught sight of a black-and-
white photograph midway into the pile.

Her face turned ashen as she picked it up to study it.
The photo was yellowed and extremely dated. A row of Nazi officers posed in front of the camera with the Swastika hung on a wall behind them.

Her grandfather, as a young man, was seated in the first row – handsome, probably all of twenty years old, and smiling.

She wouldn’t recognize Mr. Stoffler when he was younger, but she was willing to bet he was one of the men in the photograph. She turned the photo and read the faint pen marks on the back. The writing was in German, and she saw the names of the officers written there. As she suspected, Stoffler was among them.

As was her grandfather’s real name: Holter.

The truth dawned on her. She was from a family of former Nazis. And her father was hiding a probable Nazi war criminal.

Devon
takes two steps at a bound up the staircase to his apartment. He can only hope and pray Abby hasn’t left.

The front door is deceptively closed. Of course. He doesn’t expect her to
fling it wide open to welcome him with open arms, does he now? He rings the doorbell, and he can hear the buzzer inside humming away. It was strange to be ringing the doorbell to his own apartment, but he doesn’t want to startle her too much.

It is only after she doesn’t reply for a while that he inserts his own key into the l
ock and opens the door.

The lamps are all on at full blast.

“Abby?” he calls, striding inside.

She is not in the lounge and she is not in the bedroom either. Nor is she in the bathroom.
He looks around. Her jacket is gone, and so is her purse. He walks to the closet and yanks the doors open. Her clothes are still hanging on the rack and her underwear neatly folded in the closet space he gave her. So she hasn’t packed. Naturally, she doesn’t have a suitcase.

He checks the top shelf for
his
battered old suitcase, the one he packed all his stuff in when he first ran away from home and his mother and came to New York City. It’s still there, so Abby hasn’t taken it either.

Cursing, he tries her cellphone again, but it goes straight to voicemail.

“Abby,” he whispers, fearing the worse.

After all, how well
and how long did he really know her? He doesn’t know her state of mind when relationship turmoil happens. He doesn’t really know how she would react in a certain situation. He knows how
he
reacts – badly. And this is the culmination.

He has to find her.

Trouble is – where would she go? As far as he knows, she doesn’t have any real friends in New York City other than him. He doesn’t think she will go to Billy Dee.

His cellphone rings, and his heart leaps.

Abby!

He looks at the display, but is dismayed to see that it isn’t her. Instead, it is an unfamiliar number.

“Hello?” he says hesitantly, expecting the worst. It could be the hospital, calling him to let him know she is in Emergency, being tended to after she had run out into the street and was hit by a speeding cab.

“Devon?” Patricia Chalmers’ crisp voice sounds on the other side. “Are you occupied this moment? We have to talk.”

*

Devon sits across his lawyer at
the quiet diner. It is quiet at this time of day. Pat Chalmers wears a professional-looking suit and skirt over her cerise blouse.

“You came from court?” he asks her.

“Yes. We are trying to avoid that for you. I have news from the coroner’s office.”

Devon tenses.
Whatever it is, it can’t be good.

“What
news?”

“They found traces of sperm inside Rachel’
s vagina.”

He is thunderstruck.
“But I wore a condom.”

“I know.” She gazes at him plaintively.
“There’s that issue you told me about. The one you wanted to keep secret from both Abby and the police.”

He feels
his whole world spinning.

“What happened exactly?” she asks.

He pauses, remembering.

“We were in the playroom. She had just finished
spanking me with the paddle.”

A man at the next table looks up, overhearing, and gives Devon a funny stare.

Devon flushes and continues, “She untied me and asked me to go with her to the bedroom. I was hard. I had been hard throughout the play session.”

“Go on.”

“She asked me to lie down on the bed. At first, I thought she was going to tie me up again.” He is embarrassed because the man at the next table is eavesdropping on every word. He lowers his voice. “But she didn’t. She came back with a condom, which she put on me.”

“So she put the condom on you? You didn’t do it yourself?”

“Not this time.”

“It was her condom?”

“Yes. I think so.”

Pat leans back. “Figures. She might have pricked a hole in it.”

Devon swallows. He feels immensely bad over the whole thing.

Pat says, “It doesn’t look good on you. The police are thinking
you lied. Which you essentially did.”

“I didn’t
lie. I just omitted a portion of the truth. Besides, I was clear with the police that I don’t remember everything.”

“You said you wore a condom, and yet they found your sperm inside her.
”

Devon is suddenly extremely tired. He rubs his eyes.

“OK, I’ll come clean to them.”

“Remember, I advised you earlier to – ”

“I know, Mom. Just leave it, OK? I have just too much on my plate right now. Abby is missing.”

Pat’s eyes go round. “How so?”

Devon briefly tells her about their fight and what Abby had earlier revealed about taking a job with Rachel Krieg.

“I don’t know her that well,” he admits. “I know she’s my girlfriend and everything, but we don’t really know that much about each other. I mean . . .
she knows what I moonlight as. And she obviously knows about Rachel and me. But I don’t know anything about Abby’s past. And now I learn she’s some rich kid trying to get out of a bad home. But I don’t know exactly what happened except for those burn marks on her palms. I – ”

“No, Devon,”
Pat interrupts. “There are other implications to this. This puts Abby as a murder suspect as well, in addition to yourself.”

Devon is stunned.

Then . . . yes, he understands it. Abby would have a motive – in the eyes of the police.

Jealous of her boyfriend’s
liaison with a beautiful, successful older woman, she befriends the older woman on the street and follows her to her store. Seeing the ‘SALES REP VACANCY’ sign on the window, she applies for the job and uses her superior knowledge of ceramics to land it.

Thereafter, in a fit of rage, she follows her boyfriend to his rendezvous with the older woman, who is now her boss. The elevator security is on the fritz, and s
o she manages to get upstairs to the twenty-second floor. She waits till her boyfriend has finished his session with the older woman, and goes in to confront her boss. They have an argument, and Abby brains her boss with the vase.

It is extremely tangled, but Devon can clearly see what the police would make of all this.

“She would never do it,” he says hotly. “Abby is not a murderer. She was home when I got back, asleep in bed.”

“It’s only your alibi for her. Did you go back to your apartment immediately?”

“No. I wandered around for a bit and had a drink.” He wanted to digest what Rachel asked of him and the final fight they had over it.

Pat says, “The police could also
suspect that the two of you collaborated on the murder of Rachel Krieg, and that you both are covering for each other.”

“It’s not true!”.

“I’m just telling you the way it is.”

Devon abruptly gets up. He takes out his wallet and extracts t
wo ten dollar bills from it. He lays them on the table.

“I can’t deal with this right now. I have to find Abby. She’s not answering her cellphone and I’m going batshit crazy.”

Pat holds his eyes. “I don’t know Abby all that well, but I have a hunch as to what happened to her.”

She reaches
for her cellphone.

“And I know just who to call.”

Devon and Pat race out into the sidewalk and hail the first yellow cab that approaches. They both get in.

Devon says
to the cab driver, “To the corner of thirty-third and seventh.”

He is bunching his fists so hard that he can feel the little indents on his palms from his fingernails.
Please, please let her be OK
, he prays.

Pat senses his consternation.

“I don’t think he will hurt her, Devon. Not if he answered Dresschler’s call. He is her father after all.”

The cab speeds off. The driver is
from one of the African states, Devon can see from his license which is plastered on one side of the dashboard.

Devon says,
“I know. But there’s so much we don’t know as to what happened between them.”

He can’t forget the burn marks he has seen on Abby’s palms.
Who would burn their own daughter?
He doesn’t even know if Abby has been a victim of incestuous molestation. All sorts of dark thoughts tumble in his head, each worse than the previous one. All he knows is that he wants to protect Abby against that man . . . that
monster
. . . and he will
kill
to do it.

Kill.

The word petrifies him all of a sudden.
This is what got you in trouble in the first place
. Is he capable of killing? And the police are asking . . .
has
he?

This
is so much of a mess. So much they have to put right . . . together.

The cab can’t get there fast enough. Traffic lights seem to tur
n red as soon as they approach, causing him to want to beat his fists on the glass separator between the driver and them. Frustration gnaws at his every fiber. The streets of New York City have never seemed to him more crowded, and the pedestrian crossings at the end of each block never more overflowing.