The house sat on top of a hill, with all but its roof invisible behind the trees. The shoreline itself was crescent-shaped, the creek cutting into the land. As I remembered it, the drop from lawn to water was a steep clay and sand bank, a wall of erosion high enough to make climbing difficult. With the family gone, there was no place for docking and no wooden steps up to the lawn. But if the rowboat could be nosed onto the tiny strip of beach, I might be able to climb upespecially if Zack gave me a hand.
I walked quickly around the Flemings’ house to the front. I heard Clyde baying before I reached the porch. He stopped, as if silenced. As soon as I rang the bell, Audrey answered the door.
“She’s gone off, hasn’t she! I knew she would. These things work in cycles.”
“No, Aunt Iris is fine,” I replied. “May I speak with Zack, please?”
“He isn’t home. I knew it was going to be a bad night,” Audrey went on, her eyes peering into the darkness behind me as if she saw signs of evil hanging from the trees. “When I took the dog out, I heard Iris screaming like a banshee.”
I was curious now. “What was she saying?”
“It was gibberish, all gibberish. The devil’s language.”
“I see. Do you know when Zack will be home?”
Audrey shook her head. “He went out with that girl.”
“Erika?”
She nodded.
“May I leave a note for Zack?” I had his cell phone number, but I wasn’t going to call him, not when he was with Erika.
“Of course. Come in. We’ll talk.”
“Thanks, but I just want to leave a note for Zack.”
I saw the change in her eyes. Lips pursed in disapproval, she let me in and begrudgingly provided pen and paper, watching my hand as I wrote. I figured that even if my note were folded and taped, Audrey would read it, so I left out details, simply asking Zack to call me no matter how late he got in.
“Please make sure he gets this tonight,” I said, handing the note to her.
When I returned to the house, I found several of the cats lounging around the kitchen and a few nuggets of fresh food scattered around an empty platter on the floor. Aunt Iris must have gotten up and fed them. I checked out front and saw that her car was gone.
For a moment I considered calling the sheriff, but what could I say — that I was worried because Aunt Iris had smashed a mirror, laid down for a nap, and then gone out?
When I left her, the violent behavior appeared to be over.
And it was, after all, nine o’clock on a Saturday night, a time when a lot of people went out. Besides, she had left the house at stranger times than this.
Of course, McManus would come if I told him I had some ideas about Uncle Will’s death, but all I really had was a pile of disjointed theories. I paced for an hour, waiting for something to happen: Zack to call, Aunt Iris to return, the images from my mother’s notebook to fall into a pattern that I understood. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer.
I searched the house for a stepladder, found a three-foot one, and carried it with a flashlight to the Flemings’ dock.
The moon, which had glowed yellow at its rising, shone whiter and more brightly now. For the next fifteen minutes I focused on the task of launching the boat and rowing it through the dark. It was hard to judge distance without being able to see the shoreline. I felt as if I had rowed miles when I finally caught the glint of moonlight on the rooftop and chimneys of the Fairfax house. I turned toward shore. As I rowed closer to the sandy bank, I pushed one of the oars straight down in the water to gauge the depth. I couldn’t touch bottom. I got goose bumps all over — I really don’t like dark water. But I continued to test every ten feet or so, afraid that if I ran the boat aground, I’d damage it.
When the depth dropped to two feet, I gingerly climbed into the dark creek. My wet shoes felt heavy on my feet and kept slipping on the river stones. The boat had an anchor, but I didn’t know how to make sure it would catch and hold in the creek bottom. I towed the boat a short distance, then carried the anchor to shore. I dug a hole, dropped in the anchor, and pushed the heavy sand over it.
By the time I had done that, the long line for the anchor had unreeled and the boat had floated away from shore. I waded out again, hating the way the currents swirled and eddied around my legs, imagining eels and other slimy things. I towed the boat a second time and shortened its rope with a knot. Then I carried the flashlight and ladder to shore and set the ladder close to the bank. Climbing to its top, I found the edge of the lawn was even with my shoulders.
I tried to pull myself up and over the edge, grabbing handfuls of grass. Tufts tore off, spraying sand in my face. I tried again and created a small landslide. Looking to either side of me, I saw that far down on the left, close to the area that became swamp, the bank dipped and was noticeably lower than where I perched. Unfortunately, the base of it was submerged, the moonlit creek lapping against it.
I climbed down and carried the ladder into a foot of water, gritting my teeth all the way. After stabilizing the ladder on the rough bottom and climbing to the top, I found I had gained only six inches on the bank. I pulled hard with my arms, my legs and elbows grinding into the sandy bank, and finally heaved myself onto the grass.
Standing up, I brushed off and climbed the hill toward a stand of trees that screened the house from the land below it. On the other side of the trees I was surprised to find a pond, obviously man-made, a perfect oval, a flawless mirror reflecting the three-quarter moon. With an entire creek below, I wondered why the Fairfaxes had bothered to put in an artificial pond.
They must really love their privacy, I thought. Then I remembered a story about wealthy people who stocked their ponds with exotic fish that they and their friends could enjoy catching. That’s when it struck me, not like a bolt of lightning out of the blue, more like a fish falling on my foot: the speckled one in the freezer, the one that didn’t look like the others Uncle Will had caught, the one that had disappeared recently. I started to laugh. What if Uncle Will had been poaching? What if, winter and summer, when the Fairfax family moved on to their other fabulous homes, he had come here to fish?
And what if someone else had made the connection and removed the evidence that Uncle Will hung out here? I stopped laughing. My eyes moved from the pond to the dark hedge set back from it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the hedge, a tall wall of clipped bushes, forty or fifty feet long. Its top, traced in moonlight, was artfully cut to form notches, like those in the battlements of a castle. My eyes dropped down to the base, where a rectangle was cut through the greenery: the doorway I had passed through two times in the last ten days. I glanced back at the pond and shivered. When the owners were gone, this was more than a peaceful spot to fish; it was a perfect place for murder.
Who knew that Uncle Will came here? Aunt Iris, and Audrey, even Elliot Gill could have known. Anyone who happened to be on the water at the right time might have seen Uncle Will arrive in his boat, especially if this was a regular habit of his. The police had found the boat adrift some distance down the creek. It had probably been cut free by his killer, so the police wouldn’t guess where my uncle had been fishing. Of course, it was possible that, as longtime neighbors, Will and Iris knew a way onto the estate that I hadn’t found; Audrey, too, as a former employee.
I passed through the door in the shrubbery and found myself in an enclosed garden, the hedge and two brick walls making three sides of the square area, the house making the fourth. Lights flicked on, outside lights — there was probably a motion sensor. I stood in the shadow of the hedge for several minutes, studying the house. Every window was dark. If there was a resident caretaker, it was likely that his windows faced the swampy or wooded sides, rather than the scenic view of pond, garden, and creek.
I surveyed the garden, which was divided by crushed stone paths into four sections with a gazebo at the center.
“Well, hello,” I said softly. To my right was a human-size rabbit, shrubbery sculpted into a tall rabbit with a humanlike stance. Next to him was another tall bush pruned into the figure of a cat, and on the other side of the garden were two more topiary figures, a caterpillar that appeared to be sitting on a mushroom and some kind of rodent — a dormouse, of course! He belonged, along with the Cheshire cat, white rabbit, and caterpillar, to Alice in
