Maude Crane’s house was exactly the shade of pastel green as Val’s. Made Carver wonder.
The house was angled on a wide corner lot strewn with small citrus trees, most of which bore oranges or grapefruits. Some of the fruit lay rotting on the ground. The drapes were closed on all the windows except for the standard bay window in the dining room, and there appeared to be a large potted indoor plant before that window that blocked the view out or in.
Carver sat in the parked Olds and studied the house. After a while in his business, you developed an instinct. There was something about the house that didn’t feel right.
Then he realized what it was. There was mail visible in the box by the door, and the screen door was slightly ajar, as if the postman had run out of room in the box and had been stuffing mail inside the outer door.
As he planted his cane and levered himself up out of the Olds, Carver noticed that the grass, though of uniform height, needed mowing. He limped across the sunbaked lawn in a path directly to the porch, each step raising a cloud of tiny insects, a few of which found their way up his pants legs to where his ankles were bare above his socks. The yard was as unyielding beneath the tip of his cane as if it were concrete; it hadn’t been watered for a long time. There was a medium-size sugar oak near the corner of the house, its leaves perforated until they’d been turned into fine lace by insects. Florida in the summer belonged to the bugs.
His suspicion was confirmed. The space between the screen door and the green-enameled front door was stuffed with mail. Bills, advertising circulars, a few letters. There was a scattering of small, glossy mail-order catalogs. A pretty blond woman squeezing some kind of exercise device between her thighs was on one cover, smiling up at Carver as if she might be doing something naughty.
There was a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head on the door. Carver banged it loudly and waited. He wasn’t surprised when there was no response. The lion roared at him silently.
He stood on the porch and glanced around. There was no one in sight. He felt like the only living and moving figure in a painting. The orderly retirement community might as well have featured crypts instead of houses.
He chastised himself for the thought. Get up in your sixties, seventies, or older, it was apparently silence and order you preferred. That was how it seemed to work. He’d know for sure soon enough.
The slam of a door made him turn.
A woman had emerged from the house next door. She was heavy and trudged with effort but determination, wearing paint-smeared white overalls and carrying a screwdriver. A pair of rimless glasses rode low on her wide nose and she squinted over them in the bright sunlight. Her bulldog features tried a smile but it only made her uglier as she got near Carver.
“You David?” she asked.
Carver shook his head no.
The woman seemed to have known he wasn’t really David, but she said, “Thought you might be David Crane from Atlanta. Maude’s nephew. She was expecting him. I’m Mildred Klein from next door. Some way I can help you?”
“I was looking for Maude Crane.”
“I figured that, you being on her porch and all.”
Ah, the neighbors watching out for one another. The old tended to band close together like any other minority group. The paranoia wasn’t completely unjustified.
“Do you know where I can find her?”
“Maybe she drove on into Orlando to shop,” Mildred said. “She does that now and again.” Her grip on the screwdriver’s yellow plastic handle tightened, as if she were ready to use it as a weapon if necessary. “You selling something?”
“No, I’m-” Carver suddenly became aware of a sound that had been on the edge of his consciousness, like something electrical buzzing inside the house. “You hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Carver put his ear to the door. The buzzing was louder. He moved away and leaned on his cane, motioning for Mildred to listen.
Without taking her gaze from him, she mimicked his actions at the door, pressing her ear close to the wood. She nodded, puzzled. “I hear. Something running in there.”
“Maybe an electric alarm clock,” Carver said.
“Maybe.” But Mildred seemed doubtful. It didn’t really sound like an alarm clock.
“We should look,” Carver said.
“None of our business.”
“If Maude left something on, you can turn it off. I’ll wait out here.”
“What makes you think I can get in?”
“I figure you’re her closest neighbor, and you came over here looking out for her, so maybe she gave you a key in case of emergency.”
“You see this as an emergency?”
Carver stirred the clutter of mail with his cane. The girl with the exerciser between her thighs smiled up at him, trying to reassure him there was nothing in the world worth his worry. “Maude mention to you she was taking a trip?”
Mildred looked uncertain, sliding her glasses higher on her sweat-glistening nose as if to see Carver better. They immediately slid back down. “She usually tells me when she’s gonna be gone more’n a day,” she admitted.
Carver said again, “I’ll wait out here if you want.”
Mildred hefted the screwdriver in her hand. “Who’d you say you were?”
“My name’s Fred Carver. I’m working for a woman named Hattie Evans.”
Something shadowed Mildred’s face. She’d heard of Hattie. “Don’t know her,” she said.
“I need to talk to Maude,” he said simply. “Maybe she’s sick in there and hasn’t been able to get to the door or phone. It happens, doesn’t it?”
“It happens.” She glared at him as if sizing him up finally, then moved over a few feet and stooped down and picked up one of several rocks lining the flower bed near the porch. It was about six inches in diameter. Apparently she’d found him wanting and decided to crush him.
But instead of hurling the rock at Carver, she opened it like a hinged box and removed a key.
“Looks real, don’t it?” she said, as she replaced the now obviously lightweight fake rock.
“Fooled me.” He stood back as she unlocked the door and shoved it open, poking her head inside to yell for Maude Crane.
Immediately she backed reeling out onto the porch, as if someone had punched her in the face. The screwdriver clattered on the concrete floor and she stood gaping at Carver, sickened and terrified.
He caught a whiff of the stench that had struck her like something solid.
Mildred tried to speak but no sound emerged, only a string of saliva that glistened on her chin in the sun. Carver helped her walk twenty feet away from the door, where she sat down with her legs spread wide on the hard ground and vomited.
After a while, he rested his hand on her damp back. “You gonna be all right?”
She nodded, staring at the mess on the grass between her legs. Her glasses had somehow gotten spotted.
“Don’t try to get up,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Another nod.
He set the tip of his cane and limped toward the open door, a metallic taste at the edges of his tongue.
Ten feet away he took a deep breath and held it, then quickened his pace. He shoved the mail aside with his cane and hobbled into the house.
The air-conditioning was off and the place was even hotter than outside. In here, the faint buzzing he’d heard on the porch was a din, with a frantic rising and falling pitch. This time of year especially in Florida, he knew what it was.
A dark cloud of flies swarmed relentlessly in the center of the dining room, feeding on something dangling from the chandelier.
The something was Maude Crane.