Mike Carlyle made it easy for me. He stood in the entrance to his lumberyard talking to a customer. He glanced at my ragtop as I drove by but didn’t seem to find it interesting enough to glance for long.
As I drove out to his place, I noticed all the early spooks appearing all over town, jack o’lanterns and cardboard witches in windows, and a few scarecrows on front lawns.
Halloween. With the smoky scent of autumn on the air, it made you want to be a kid again when the most frightening thing you had to face was boogeymen you could buy at Woolworth’s. I thought of Linda.
A cancer ward was about as scary a thing as I could imagine.
The Carlyle house was one of those new ranch styles that sprawled over half an acre in a valley. The wine-colored house was surrounded by jack pines that hid it almost completely when you approached, as I did, from the west. A long metal rail ran in front of the place up on the roadside to keep cars from sailing off the asphalt and smashing into the house below.
I found a small park a quarter mile away and walked back. I didn’t want to advertise I was coming so she’d have time to hide.
The sun was just beginning to set. A yellow school bus roared past, scattering dust and gravel. The air was brisk and clean. I always told big city people that I liked living in a small city because I was so close to the outdoors.
But I didn’t get outdoors all that much.
The drive was a long slope of gravel leading to a two-stall garage with one car in it and a huge water tank. I went past them and on to the house.
No dog. Out here, on the edge of town and on every farm, there’s a dog. There are just enough prison breaks, just enough roaming intruders to make a dog a good investment. But there was no dog.
I knocked on a screen door that ricocheted each time I struck it. Nothing. But the car in the garage told me she was in there.
I walked around the house peeking in windows. The furnishings were new but not expensive or noteworthy. Just good solid stuff. There was a cuckoo clock somewhere that celebrated the half hour. Four-thirty.
I went back to the screen door. Tried the front door behind it. Unlocked. I pushed in and called her name several times. There was an interior silence that bothered me, and as I looked around at the furniture, the silence became more pronounced.
I tried to put the size and ferocity of Mike Carlyle out of my mind. Cute little tricks-kicking guys in the balls chief among them-cd buy you a few cheap victories from time to time. But not with men like Carlyle. You’d never get close enough to kick him.
I decided an inspection was required and I decided that it was best if I could pull it off in less than. 0000038 seconds.
I went room to room and found nothing other than the same good solid unremarkable furnishings I’d found in the living room. The bedroom wall was interesting. Several framed photos of Brenda in various bikinis over a span of several years. Kind of a grotto to one sexy body.
She’d put on weight at about midpoint in the span of pictures but it was the kind of weight that somehow only enhanced her sexuality. I got a pleasant little ache in my groin looking at the later ones. Mike was nowhere to be found in the photos.
I found her in the john and even though she was naked I didn’t get any little ache in my groin, pleasant or otherwise.
She’d been taking a bath when somebody had struck her on the side of the skull, much as Sara Griffin had been struck. The bath water was filthy with her blood and the pink-tiled bathroom stank of her dying and her death. Her left hand, resting on the edge of the bathtub’s side, was crabbed into a claw. Her green eyes glared up at me. A tiny trickle of blood had wormed its way from her nostril to her upper lip.
You could see the wide swaths of dried soap and water on the sink, walls, doorknob. The place had been wiped down thoroughly.
I haven’t seen that many corpses in my young life but I’ll tell you one thing, that old Irish maxim is true. When you see a dead person, one of your first thoughts is how you’ll look when you’re dead. There’s your mortality staring right up at you.
After that moment passed, I realized two things.
I needed a cigarette and I needed to get out of this house.
As I got to the end of the hall, a heavy vehicle popped gravel and came to a rumbling stop somewhere near the front door. Mike and the big Chevrolet pickup he drove for the lumberyard. I was sure of it. I went to the curtained front window, peeked out. He had just left the truck, toting a large cardboard box in both hands.
I had some alternatives. I could hide, I could run, or I could confront him.
Just as the front door was shoved inward, I thought of a fourth alternative. There was a black telephone sitting on a dry bar. I picked up the receiver and dialed the police station.
Mike Carlyle saw me just as Mooney, the asthmatic man who answers the phone in the daytime, wheezed, “Police station.”
“Mooney, this is Sam McCain. Tell the chief that I just found Brenda Carlyle dead in her bathtub. He’d better get out here fast.”
Carlyle dropped the heavy box on the floor and made a sound deep in his throat that combined shock and rage and loss. The noise paralyzed me, forced me for the first time to see him as a human being, the eloquence of his stunned pain.
Then he came rushing at me.