Conspircaies

'Cheerful screen saver,' Jack said.

Mel programmed that herself.'

'Imagine that.'

'But here's what I wanted to show you,' Lew said, fiddling with the mouse. The apple-core shaped remnant of the earth disappeared, replaced by a word processor directory. Lew opened a directory labeled GUT.

'Gut?' Jack said.

'G-U-T. That's how Mel refers to her Grand Unification Theory. And look,' he said, pointing to the blank white screen. 'It's empty. She had years of notes and analysis stored in that folder, and someone's erased it.'

'The same people who have her, you think?'

'Who else?'

'Maybe the lady herself. She knew she was going away; maybe she copied the contents onto floppies and'— he resisted saying gutted—'cleared the contents herself to keep them secret. Is she the type to do something like that?'

'Possibly,' he said, nodding slowly. 'It never occurred to me but, yes, that's definitely something she might do. She was pretty jealous about her research—never gave anybody but Salvatore Roma so much as a peek at what she was up to.'

Roma…that name again. 'Why him?'

'As I said, he was helping her. They were in almost daily contact before Mel…left.'

Mr. Roma was looking better and better as the possible bad guy here.

'Did you contact him?'

'No. Actually, he contacted me, looking for Mel. She was supposed to call him but hadn't. He was worried about her.'

'And he had no idea where she might be.'

'Not a clue.'

Why don't I believe that?

Jack looked around the cluttered study and the missing Mel's words came back to him: Only Repairman Jack can find me. Only he will understand.

Sorry to disappoint you, lady, he thought, but Jack doesn't have a clue.

'How about friends? Who'd she hang with?'

'Me, mostly. We're both pretty much homebodies, but Mel has acquaintances all over the world via the Internet. Spent a lot of time on her computer.'

'How about her car? What does she drive?'

'An Audi. But I haven't gotten a call that it's been found anywhere.'

'No other contacts?' Jack said. He felt his frustration mounting. 'What about family?'

'Both her folks are dead. Her father died before we met, her mother died just last year. Mel was an only child so she inherited the house and everything in it. I keep telling her to sell it but—'

'She has another house? Why didn't you tell me?'

'I didn't think it was important. Besides, I searched the place just yesterday. She wasn't there. I've been there before, but never actually searched through it. I found something odd in the cellar, but—'

'Odd? Odd how?'

'In the cellar floor.' He shrugged. 'Nothing that would relate to Mel's disappearance.'

We're talking a very odd woman here, Jack thought. Two odds sometimes attract.

'Can't hurt to look,' he said, desperate for something to give him direction. 'Where is it?'

'It's a ways from here. A little town named Monroe.'

'Never heard of it.'

'It's near Glen Cove.'

'Great,' Jack said. 'Let's take a look.'

Not that he had much hope of finding anything useful, but this Monroe was back toward the city, and he had to head in that direction anyway.

But if the Monroe house yielded as much as this place, he'd have to return Lew's down payment. This was going nowhere.

Jack cast a final look at the painting at the far end of the study as he followed Lew down the stairway. His fingertips didn't hurt any longer—must have been something sharp within the paint; it simply had felt like a bite—but damn if they didn't still feel wet. Weird.

6

Monroe turned out to be a Gold Coast town, smaller and prettier than Shoreham. It had a picturesque harbor, for one thing, and no room for a nuclear plant. Jack guessed from the faux whaling-village facades on the harbor area shops and buildings that the town must do a fair amount of tourist trade in the summer. A little early for that now. Traffic was minimal as he followed Lew's Lexus through the downtown area, then uphill past the brick-fronted town hall and library, the white steepled church—a real postcard of a town. He trailed him past rows of neat colonials, then came to a development of mostly two- and three-bedroom postwar ranch houses.

Lew pulled into the driveway of a house that wasn't so well-kept. Its clapboard siding needed a fresh coat of paint; last fall's leaves clogged the gutters; dark green onion grass sprouted in the weedy, anemic, threadbare lawn. A detached garage sat to the right. A huge oak dominated a front yard that was unusually large for the neighborhood—looked like half an acre or better.

Jack parked Abe's truck at the curb and met Lew at the front door.

'Why does she keep this place?' Jack asked.

'Sentimental reasons, I guess,' Lew said, searching through his key ring. 'I've wanted her to sell it, or maybe even subdivide the lot. Be worth a pretty penny, but she keeps putting it off. She grew up here. Spent most of her life in this house.'

Jack felt a chill as they paused on the front stoop. He looked around uneasily. They were standing in the deep shadow cast by the massive oak's trunk as it hid the late afternoon sun. That had to be it.

Lew opened the door and they stepped into the dark, slightly mildewy interior. He turned on a light and together they wandered through the two-bedroom ranch.

Jack noted that the place was filled with pictures of Melanie at various ages—birthdays and graduations, mostly; no sports or dancing school shots—and always that Must-you-take-my-picture? expression. The walls of her old bedroom were still hung with framed academic achievement certificates. A bright child, and obviously cherished by her folks.

'Where's this 'odd' something you mentioned?' Jack said.

'Down in the basement. This way.'

Through the tiny kitchen, down a narrow set of stairs to an unfinished basement. Lew stopped at the bottom of the steps and pointed at the floor.

'There. Don't you think that's odd?'

All Jack saw was a rope ladder lying on the floor. A typical fire safety type with nylon rope and cylindrical wooden treads, sold in any hardware store. Other than the fact that it was kind of short and in the basement of a ranch house, he couldn't see anything odd about—

Wait. Were his eyes playing tricks on him, or did the end of the ladder disappear into the floor?

Jack stepped closer for a better look.

'I'll be damned.'

The bottom end of the rope ladder was imbedded in the concrete of the floor slab. Jack squatted and tugged on the last visible tread—no give at all. He looked back along the ladder and saw that the top end was tied to a steel support column.

'What's this all about?'

'Beats me,' Lew said, stepping closer and standing beside him. 'I've never been down here before yesterday, so I can't say how long that's been there.'

Jack scratched the front of his shirt. He chest had begun to itch.

'Can't be long,' he said, touching the nylon cord. 'This ladder is new.'

'But the concrete isn't,' Lew said. 'These houses were built shortly after World War Two. This slab's got to be