burlap tarps and mounded in the bed of the pickup.
He stared at the low ceiling, which was the floor of the loft that overhung two-thirds of the garage. Windows in the higher space faced the house, providing an excellent vantage point.
Someone had known when Mitch had come home earlier, had known precisely when he had entered the kitchen. The phone had rung, with Holly on the line, moments after he had found the broken dishes and the blood.
Although an observer might have been in the garage, might still be here, Holly would not be with him. He might know where she was being held, but he might not know.
If the observer, whose existence remained theoretical, knew where Holly could be found, it would nevertheless be reckless for Mitch to go after him. These people clearly had much experience of violence, and they were ruthless. A gardener would not be a match for any of them.
A board creaked overhead. In a building of this vintage, the creak might have been an ordinary settling noise, old joints paying obeisance to gravity.
Mitch walked around to the driver's door of the Honda, opened it. He hesitated, but got in behind the steering wheel, leaving the door open.
For the purpose of distraction, he started the engine. The garage door stood open, eliminating any danger of carbon-monoxide poisoning.
He got out of the car and slammed the door. Anyone listening would assume he had pulled it shut from inside.
Why he was not at once backing out of the garage might puzzle the listener. One assumption might be that he was making a phone call.
On a side wall were racked the many gardening tools that he used when working on his own property. The various clippers and pruning shears all seemed too unwieldy.
He quickly selected a well-made garden trowel formed from a single piece of machined steel. The handle featured a rubber grip.
The blade was wide and scooped and not as sharp as the blade of a knife. It was sharp enough.
Brief consideration convinced him that, although he might be able to stab a man, he should select a weapon more likely to disable than to kill.
On the wall opposite from the gardening implements, other racks held other tools. He chose a combination lug wrench and pry bar.
Chapter 12
Mitch was aware that a kind of madness, bred of desperation, had come over him. He could bear no more inaction.
With the long-handled lug wrench clutched in his right hand, he moved to the back of the garage where steep open stairs in the north corner led in a single straight flight to the loft.
By continuing to react instead of acting, by waiting docilely for the six-o'clock call — one hour and seven minutes away — he would be performing as the machine that the kidnappers wished him to be. But even Ferraris sometimes ended in junkyards.
Why Jason Osteen had stolen the dog and why he, of all people, had been shot dead as an example to Mitch were mysteries to which no solutions were at hand.
Intuition told him, however, that the kidnappers had known Jason would be linked with him and that this link would make the police suspicious of him. They were weaving a web of circumstantial evidence that, were they to kill Holly, would force Mitch to trial for her murder and would elicit the death penalty from any jury.
Perhaps they were doing this only to make it impossible for him to turn to the authorities for help. Thus isolated, he would be more easily controlled.
Or, once he acquired the two million dollars by whatever scheme they presented to him, perhaps they had no intention of releasing his wife in return for the ransom. If they could use him to knock over a bank or some other institution by proxy, if they killed Holly after they got the money, and if they were clever enough to leave no traces of themselves, Mitch — and perhaps another fall guy that he had not yet met — might take the rap for every crime.
Alone, grieving, despised, imprisoned, he would never know who his enemies had been. He would be left to wonder why they had chosen him rather than another gardener or a mechanic, or a mason.
Although the desperation that drove him up the loft stairs had stripped away inhibiting fear, it had not robbed him of his reason. He didn't race to the top, but climbed warily, the steel bar held by the pry end, the socket end ready as a club.
The wooden treads must have creaked or even groaned underfoot, but the chug of the Honda's idling engine, echoing off the walls, masked the sounds of his ascent.
Walled on three sides, the loft lay open at the back. A railing extended left from the top of the stairs and across the width of the garage.
In the three walls of the loft, windows admitted afternoon light into that higher space. Visible beyond the balusters — and looming above them — were stacks of cardboard boxes and other items for which the bungalow provided no storage.
The stored goods were arranged in rows, as low as four feet in some places, as high as seven in others. The aisles between were shadowy, and every end offered a blind turn.
At the top of the stairs, Mitch stood at the head of the first aisle. A pair of windows in the north wall directly admitted adequate light to assure him that no one crouched in any shallow niche among the boxes.
The second aisle proved darker than the first, although the intersecting passage at the end was brightened by unseen windows in the west wall, which faced the house. The light at the end would have silhouetted anyone standing boldly in the intervening space.
Because the boxes were not all the same size and were not in every instance stacked neatly, and because gaps existed here and there in the rows, nooks along each aisle offered places large enough for a man to hide.
Mitch had quietly ascended the stairs. The Honda below probably had not been running long enough to raise significant suspicion. Therefore, any sentinel stationed in the loft would be alert and listening, but most likely would not yet have realized the immediate need to be elusive.
The third aisle was brighter for having a window directly at the end of it. He checked out the fourth aisle, then the fifth and final, which lay along the south wall in the light of two dusty windows. He found no one.
The intersecting passage that paralleled the west wall, into which all the east-west aisles terminated, was the only length of the loft that he had not seen in its entirety. Every row of boxes hid a portion of that space.
Raising the lug wrench higher, he eased along the southernmost aisle, toward the front of the loft. He found that the entire length of the last passage was as deserted as the portions he had seen from the farther end of the building.
On the floor, however, against the end of a row of boxes, stood some equipment that should not be here.
More than half the stuff in the loft had belonged to Dorothy, Holly's grandmother. She had collected ornaments and other decorative items for every major holiday.
At Christmas, she'd unpacked fifty or sixty ceramic snowmen of various kinds and sizes. She'd had more than a hundred ceramic Santa Clauses. Ceramic reindeer, Christmas trees, wreaths, ceramic bells and sleighs, groups of ceramic carolers, miniature ceramic houses that could be arranged to form a village.
The bungalow couldn't accommodate Dorothy's full collection for any holiday. She'd unpacked and set out as much as would fit.
Holly hadn't wanted to sell any of the ceramics. She continued the tradition. Someday, she said, they would have a bigger house, and the full glory of each collection could be revealed.
Sleeping in hundreds of cardboard boxes were Valentine's Day lovers, Easter bunnies and lambs and religious figures, July Fourth patriots, Halloween ghosts and black cats, Thanksgiving Pilgrims, and the legions of Christmas.
