Stranglehold. Part 36

I'll be unnerved by this woman forever, she thought.

The puzzle was really something. He had it about halfway done. She was rusty on her art history but it was either Bosch or Brengel. Angels wielding swords and spears against a fleeing horde of surreal-looking monsters-toad-things, fish-things, things being hatched out of eggs. She picked up the box and read the cover and looked at the completed painting. Breugel. The Fall of the Rebel Angels. Brussels, 1562. Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts.

Pretty wild stuff.

She kissed him on top of the head.

"Hi, Mom," he said.

"Hey, you're doing pretty good there."

"Yeah, but it's taking forever."

"So? No rush, right?"

"I got one more hour and then Gramma wants the table back."

"We'll transfer it to something, don't worry. Where'd you let this, anyway?"

"Dad ... Gramma ... um, it was Daddy's."

It was as though he'd said too much. He blushed. He went back to fiddling with the puzzle.

"It was Daddy's when he was a boy?"

He nodded.

"What'd they do, pull it out of the attic for you?" He nodded again.

Silence. Silence once again.

Dammit. What the h.e.l.l was going on?

Ruth walked in with the towel.

"Here," she said. She glanced at the puzzle and smiled thinly and then she left the room.

Lydia toweled dry her hair. The towel had an unpleasant musty odor. She wondered when it had last been washed.

Whether all Ruth's towels smelled like that or if this one had been specially selected for her.

"Have you heard from your father?"

He shook his head again, staring down at the puzzle, turning a piece of it between his fingers, looking for a place to fit it in.

"Everything okay?"

He nodded.

"You sure?"

He nodded again.

"Hey. I miss you. You know? The house is pretty big and awful quiet without you."

She saw him draw a quick breath. The piece of the puzzle stopped turning in his hand. The tip of his thumb went white where he was holding it.

For G.o.d's sake, she thought. What are you doing? Torturing him?

"We'll get you back there real soon, I promise."

She ran her hands over his shoulders and kissed the top of his head again.

"Want some help with that?"

She pulled out a chair and sat down.

They stared at the puzzle and at the pieces of the puzzle. An hour later it was still not finished and they had said barely ten more words to each other.

When she went outside it was almost dark and the rain had stopped. It lay in shining black puddles on the pitted drive. She stepped around them and got into the car and started it.

As she pulled away she gazed again at the second floor window. The curtain was still. The room was dark.

But something about it felt wrong and it took her only a moment to realize that it could not have been Ruth at the window earlier because Ruth was at the door and it could not have been Robert either.

So if Harry was still at the store-as he usually was until just before dinnertime-who was at the window?

She drove by the store to check and pulled into the parking lot in front of it. She could see Harry's young a.s.sistant inside sitting alone at the register but not Harry. His pickup wasn't there. But then it hadn't been over at the house either.

She didn't like what she was thinking.

What she was thinking could make her crazy.

But it was possible. It would not be smart and arguably not even sane but it was possible.

It all depended on exactly how arrogant these people actually were. On how much they thought they could get away with.

She was going to watch this carefully. Watch it like a G.o.dd.a.m.n hawk.

Starting tonight.

Thirty-five.

Only Child

She asked Cindy to drive her there, then kill an hour and a half somehow and return to pick her up. Owen Sansom's words kept coming back to her-what we have to prove is that you're anything but unstable-so she didn't want to risk anyone recognizing her car parked somewhere along the side of the road and wondering where she'd got to or some stranger reporting it abandoned to the police. She wanted to be in and out of there undetected, completely invisible. An hour and a half seemed plenty of time to find out what she needed to know.

She changed into jeans, sweatshirt, running shoes and a dark blue jacket and made herself a bowl of soup in the microwave and drank a cup of coffee while she waited for Cindy to drop Gail off at Ed's house for the evening. When she heard the horn outside she was ready.

Cindy's car smelled like potpourri deodorizer and something like vinegar. The vinegar smell came from a gla.s.s of apple juice Gail had spilled down into the backseat a couple of months ago. Cindy said she kept on meaning to pull out the seat and clean it up and then she kept forgetting. A pair of Styrofoam dice dangled from the rearview mirror. The ashtray was full to overflowing with the filters of Virginia Slims.

Cindy was too fast a driver and probably drank too much beer for her own good. And she wasn't the neatest person in the world G.o.d knows. But she'd dropped everything for this. She was a d.a.m.n good friend.

On their way out of Plymouth and up the mountain Lydia filled her in on Robert's behavior and the figure in the window.

"You don't really think he'd be crazy enough to ..."

"I can't tell what he'd do. Who'd have thought he'd have done all this?"

"You remember at your sister's wedding? You remember it was me who encouraged you to ... Jesus! I could kick myself in the face for that!"

"You didn't know him then. Or me."

"I thought he was cute and I heard he had money. Turns out he's about as cute as a pet sewer rat."

"He did have money, though."

"Oh, yeah. I got that part right. I'm a genius. Yenta the s.h.i.thead matchmaker."

"You've made up for it a billion times, Cyn-and you know it. Just do me one more favor?"

"What's that?"

"Slow down to about a hundred-eighty, will you?"

"Just for you, doll."

They climbed up into the hills along the narrow winding road. Headlights came toward them around a bend and when the bright lights dimmed and the car pulled past them she saw that it was a police cruiser and thought she might have glimpsed Ralph Duggan behind the wheel. She couldn't be sure.

There was a stop sign about a hundred yards from the Danse house. That was where the dirt road began, just past a bridge over a stream rushing along below, flowing into a beaver pond a ways beyond. She told Cindy to pull over and stop there.

"This is where we'll meet," she said.

"I gotta tell you. Now that we got here I'm kind of worried about this."

"I'll be fine," Lydia said.

She didn't feel fine. She felt nervous as a cat lost and alone in the big city streets knowing of nowhere to go where it would ever be safe and warm again. She hoped it didn't low.

"You should have brought something."

"Like what?"

"Like a gun for chrissake! They've got guns, right?"

"They've got enough guns to start a war but I don't think me showing up with one is going to help any. I'm supposed to be Miss Emotional Stability, remember? Besides, I'm not going in there. And I don't intend to get seen. I'm looking. They're in the light and I'm in the dark, that's the whole idea."

"Right, yeah."

"Don't worry. What time have you got?"

"8:25".

"I'm five minutes slow. Okay, say ten o'clock, all right?"

"All right."

She opened the door. Cindy put her hand on her arm and stopped her.

"Hey," she said. "Good luck. I hope to h.e.l.l they just had visitors before. I hope you come up empty."

"Me too. See you in a while."

"Be careful."

The penlight was enough to get her up the hill through the spa.r.s.e woods headed toward the house. When she reached the field spread out in front of it she turned the light off and proceeded by the dim gray light of the waning moon.

There was still no sign of Arthur's Lincoln. Only Ruth's car and now Harry's pickup parked out front. The bedrooms on the second floor were dark. She could see lights on in the living room and in the hall leading in from the porch. The porch light was off. That was good. It would take a lot of seriously bad luck for them to notice her out here.

She peered through the corner window of the living room. Arthur's portrait, an oil done by a local painter, hung prominently over the fireplace. Not Harry's portrait. Arthur's. She'd always thought that pretty odd.

There was no one in the room.

She moved beyond the untrimmed hedges to the side of the house. The dining room was dark but she could see light spilling in under the door leading to the kitchen.

She went around back and moved softly up the three wooden steps and heard them before she saw them, looking in through the screen and the gla.s.s panel on the door. Harry, Ruth, and Robert seated at the table.

Arthur pacing.

Back and forth from the sink to the refrigerator.

He had a day or more growth of beard and his white cotton shirt was stained with something in front and had gone yellow under the armpits. He was waving his arms at them, shouting.

Ruth watched him undisturbed.

Harry looked troubled. Two bottles of beer sat in front of him on the table and there was another one in his hand. Robert looked scared.