'Just tired is all.'
'You sure?'
Brolan nodded. 'Let's go inside and get something to eat.'
'Like the old days.'
Brolan smiled. 'Yes, like the old days.' And for one of those rare moments, he felt sentimental about his ex- wife. She'd always been their babysitter; Brolan and Foster would stagger back to Brolan's, and she'd fix them a midnight breakfast and they'd sit up till dawn drinking coffee and sobering up and making plans for the agency they were going to start someday.
'That sounds good,' Foster said, and then promptly banged his head against the roof of the car as he tried to get out.
The moment Brolan opened the kitchen door and walked inside, he knew for sure something was wrong. This time he had a reason for his paranoia.
Flakes and flecks of dried autumn leaves were scattered across the landing floor. He flipped on the light leading to the basement.
He could see the leaves on each step of the staircase.
Somebody had been in here and recently. This was the cleaning woman's afternoon. She would have worked the place into a spotless condition. Certainly she wouldn't have tracked in leaves without cleaning them up.
'What's the hold up, ole buddy?' Foster said behind him.
Brolan continued to stare down the steps.
His sense of dread was almost overwhelming now. Something waited for him in the basement. Something…
'Why don't you go over and sit down?' Brolan said to Foster, trying to sound calm.
'By myself?'
'Sure. I just want to check out a couple of things, and then I'll make us some breakfast. How's that sound?'
Foster shrugged. 'Great, I guess.' He looked around the kitchen. It had been designed for a real cook. A butcher-block island with a huge iron rack held a battery of pots, plans, and utensils; while such perks as a new dishwasher, two big pink sinks, and enough fine china to make a duchess jealous filled the rest of the space. All this stuff had been left here by the guy who'd fled after taking Chapter 11. He'd told Brolan that in LA only wimps cooked.
Foster tottered over to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair with some difficulty, and then, with even greater difficulty, sat down.
Foster looked over at Brolan and waggled his fingers in a kind of Oliver Hardy gesture. Then he promptly put his head down on the table and went to sleep, like a schoolboy who could no longer endure the physics lesson.
Maybe it was better that Foster was out, Brolan thought.
Brolan walked over to the drawers built into the cabinet. He looked at several butcher knives before selecting one with a stout wooden handle.
He turned and went back to the steps leading to the basement.
Shaking his head, feeling sluggish from the alcohol he'd had earlier in the evening, he descended the steps.
On his way down, he had an almost comic sense of himself and what he must look like at this moment. An advertising exec all dressed up from a party carrying a butcher knife in his right hand. Must be a melodramatic sight.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he felt again that he was being watched. But by whom?
The basement was strictly standard issue, a part of the house none of the previous occupants had really done anything with. There was a large room-invariably referred to as the 'rec room'-that held a lumpy J. C. Penney couch that had been new about the time the Beatles were first appearing on Ed Sullivan; there was a Motorola black- and-white TV console, a small bookcase filled with Reader's Digest condensed books, a poster of a psychedelic rock group circa 1970, and a stack of record albums that ran to the Partridge Family and 1910 Fruit Gum Company. Presumably, kids had lived in this house once.
The other parts of the basement consisted of a laundry room with matching white Kenmore washer and drier, a huge sink, and an entire shelf filled with empty and never-used preserve jars that were now covered with dust.
After checking out both the rec room and the laundry room, Brolan realized there was only one place left.
He tightened his grip on the knife.
The final room was the furnace room. A large green Lennox squatted there. Brolan peeked his head in, flipped on the light, and looked around. The furnace looked familiar. Nothing funny there.
And then he saw the freezer.
Tucked into the corner of the furnace room was a long, white chest freezer which one of the previous occupants had left filled with everything from boxes of Libby's broccoli to Birds Eye peas.
Except now the contents of the freezer were no longer inside the freezer-now they were piled neatly on the floor all around the freezer.
Something else was inside the long, white chest now.
Brolan knew for sure because down the white side of the freezer ran red, red blood.
The furnace made a popping noise kicking in. Brolan jumped and gasped, terrified. His heart pounded.
He looked once more at the contents of the freezer placed all over the floor, everything from a huge turkey to a fish with its head still on.
Then he looked back at the red blood dripping down the white side of the freezer.
He took three steps over to the white chest and pulled open the lid.
The odd thing was how comfortably she seemed to fit inside there, almost as if this were a coffin and not a freezer at all. She was completely nude and only now beginning to show signs of the freezing process, ice forming on her arms and face. But he could tell she hadn't been in here long because of the smells. The blood. The faeces. The bodily fluids and juices. These still smelled oppressively fresh.
And of course he recognized her. No doubt whatsoever who she was.
He remembered their confrontation last night, and her throwing the drink in his face.
And tonight she ended up here. Dead. In his freezer.
Again Brolan was struck by the comic aspect of all this. Who the hell would empty a freezer and put a corpse into it? Who the hell hated him enough to do this?
He found himself staring at her again. One of the wounds had been across her wrist, and it was this wound from which the blood had been dripping, apparently after being banged on the edge of the freezer.
He wanted her to talk. He wanted her beautiful eyes to open, and he wanted her to talk, and then he wanted her to listen. He wanted to say this was all some terrible mistake and he was sorry and wouldn't she please put her clothes on and go home. Please.
Upstairs he made a double-strength pot of coffee, eight eggs in a big electric skillet, six pieces of toast and then-as an afterthought-six strips of bacon. He tried not to notice how badly his hands were shaking.
After getting the food on, he went to work on Foster. He shoved his hands under Foster's arms and half dragged the man into the nearby half bath where he threw cold water on his face, squirted some toothpaste in his mouth, and then filled his hand with a cup of coffee. He forced Foster to drink the coffee before they left the bathroom.
Back in the kitchen, Brolan shoved the food at Foster and said, 'Eat.'
'Jesus Christ,' Foster said, more sober now but cranky as hell. 'What's going on, anyway?'
'Just eat. Then I'll tell you.'
'Aren't you going to eat?'
Brolan looked at his food. 'Uh, no.'
'Why not?'
'Not hungry.'
