Forty
Carol was waiting and ready to go when Lori pulled up
in front of the darkened cafe. Greg peered briefly from between parted
blinds in the upstairs apartment. "I told him you needed help with a
drape," Carol said. "We've got about an hour."
Lori handed Carol one of Leslie’s walkie-talkies
during the short ride to the edge of town and up the gravel road that ran
past the farmhouse. Lori pulled into the shadows of the trees at the base
of the driveway. "Stay with the car. Honk the horn twice if you see
anyone coming."
"If I see anyone coming," Carol said, "I'm going to
have a personal accident, and then I'll honk the horn twice."
Lori tested her lantern, then hurried up the darkened
drive on foot. A raccoon scampering into the underbrush startled her.
Bats dipped alarmingly close in curious examination of the intruder. Once
she had reached the darkened house, she put the walkie-talkie to her lips
and thumbed the talk button. "Can you hear me?"
“Don't take too long," came the tinny response, "I'll
freeze my butt off."
Lori slipped around the side of the house,
comfortably hidden from view by the depth of the shadows and the weeds
overgrowing the yard. Someone had locked the back door, the first bit of
evidence that Carl Adler was keeping an eye on the place after all. She
knocked out a pane of glass with the butt of the lantern, far to wound up
to turn back now. She let herself in and swept the light about. The
kitchen had been meticulously cleaned of any trace of recent occupancy.
The walkie-talkie hissed quietly to itself. "Lori?
Is everything okay?"
"Fine."
"I heard you break a window! Shame on you!"
"I'm going to check the basement," Lori said.
"Sure. The basement of a dark, deserted house. Why
not? Say hello to the spiders for me."
The basement was a tomb and far too cold for
spiders. From the foot of the stairs, she went directly to the stone
foundation of the basement and began in inch-by-inch inspection. All but
one of the walls had broken basement windows placed up near the floor
joists. The fourth wall was suspiciously paneled across its entire width.
She saw no tell-tale seams, but she bunched a fist
and pounded along its length at two foot intervals. She could tell where
the paneling sounded hollow, nailed to studs, and where it felt oddly
unyielding, glued directly onto something much more solid than an open
framework. She then searched the basement for a tool useful for prying
and settled for an old rusted hinge. On hands and knees, she dug at the
rotting wood along the cement floor. Within seconds, she had dug her way
through to rusting steel. The steel would be a door, and the false
wall blocking access to a room dug beyond the foundation of the house.
She bolted to her feet and backed away from her
discovery, hackles rising along her back. "I think I found it," she
announced to the walkie-talkie in a wooden tone of voice. Even on the
inside, she felt deadened by her victory. It left nothing in its wake but
the need for further examination.
"How nice," Carol said. "Now get your ass out of
there."
The hidden door and the chamber
beyond would have to wait for another time. For now, she
skipped up the stairs and went in search of the furnace vent through which
Ronnie had originally gained entrance. She found a vent cover pried loose
in the living room wall along the floor and knelt to shine her light into
the hole.
A wiry child could have negotiated the short length
of oversized cold air duct that glimmered in the light of her flashlight,
but not a boy of Ronnie's present size. Deformed sheet metal
indicated he had apparently tried
recently. Absently, she wondered what had motivated him to try in the
first place. Maybe noises drifting up through the register. She did not
want to think about what kind of noises they may have been.
Lori stood and considered what she had accomplished.
She had found what she had suspected she would find. It wasn't taking
much of an Agatha Christie to unravel the mystery of Ronnie's nudes.
Clues were falling effortlessly into her lap from all directions, but
would she have the time she needed to put the pieces of the puzzle
together? Carl Adler was going to notice the damage, the broken window,
the gouged paneling, and the bent vent cover. How hard would it be to
guess who had been snooping and what she had been looking for?
"Lori, get out of there now!" the radio hissed. "I'm
getting ants in my pants!"
She kept the beam of the light to the floor on the
way out, thinking that it might be seen from town. Had she been so
thoughtful on the way in, she would have seen the spidery threads
criss-crossing her path. She had broken a half dozen of them. She had
blithely stumbled through Carl Adler's string traps as oblivious as Ronnie
had stumbled through hers.
Without a way to repair the damage, she moaned in
dismay and fled the house. She ran down the driveway to the car and
managed to pull herself together before slipping back behind the wheel.
"Tell me about this room with the steel door," Carol
said.
Lori relayed the information Ronnie had given Wendy
in a clipped monotone.
"Does this let Trent off the hook?"
Lori stared at the house, a shade of a deeper black
against the night. "Carol, we'll run ourselves over a cliff like a bunch
of lemmings if we speculate too much and frighten ourselves to death."
"You mean you don't want to consider the possibility
that we've been buying groceries from a mass murderer for the past ten
year, a butcher at that?"
Lori studied Carol's silhouette in the darkness. "Do
you want me to sit here and count off some other, equally unpleasant
possibilities for you?"
Carol shook her head nervously. "Maybe not."
Lori started the car and drove back to town. Carol
hung on to the dash as the Volkswagen bounded over the rutted gravel
road. "You're too smart for your britches, Lori Malcolm. Tell me you're
going to take Trent up on his offer and move to Clayton."
"I can't." Lori anguished over her decision. "How
can I trust him?” She pulled in front of the diner and stopped.
The noisy Volkswagen idled while Carol made decisions
of her own. "Let your children know if you go anywhere. Let them know
everything you do. I want to be phoned day or night with every detail,
because if I look for you and I can't find you, even if you so much as go
to the bathroom without letting someone know, I'll call Sheriff Danielson
and I'll spill my guts. Do you understand?"
"I understand," Lori said softly.
Carol paused before leaving the car. "What if you
find those women in Ronnie's drawings are dead? Will you go to Sheriff
Danielson then?"
Lori had it all thought out. "If they're dead, we're
not safe until we know who killed them."
"Lori, it's not our job to go looking for a
murderer!"
The logic of their plight seemed simple enough.
"It is if we want to stay alive.”
