“Not yet,” I said. I was not pleased with the dog.
I thought of giving in and calling Frank right then and there. Let him explore the damned basement.
But what if I called Frank away from a homicide investigation only to find there was nothing more down there than a toy poodle and something like, oh, maybe a smelly old dead gopher? The woman who cried wolf. Over a poodle.
I walked over to the edge of the trap door opening. My flashlight beam showed nothing more than wooden stairs. I stepped down on one, then another, and another, until my head was just above the opening in the hallway floor. I made myself duck a little, and held the flashlight out in front of me. Cobwebs. I could hear Brutus. I lowered the beam a few degrees and saw a concrete wall. I caught a movement and gave a little yelp. But it was Brutus, sniffing along the wall, apparently unconcerned by my presence. For a few seconds, I felt a slight easing of the tension that had my stomach in knots. Brutus wouldn’t act so nonchalant if there were anyone else in the basement. Would he?
I moved the light a little to the left, and I could make out a card table, with what looked to be a bowl of fruit and a pitcher of water. Tantalus.
My mouth went dry.
I knew what would be behind me. I forced myself to take two more steps down the stairs, clinging to the handrail.
I heard a noise above me and cringed. “Molly?” I called.
I waited. Nothing.
Brutus came closer to me, his nails clicking along the cement floor.
Slowly, I turned around.
I saw the wide piece of tape first. It covered her mouth. She was bound to a large pipe against the back wall. Even in the faint light, I knew she was dead.
The trap door slammed shut above me.
12
I WAS STILL SCREAMING my head off when it opened again, not more than a few seconds later. Molly, red- faced, was leaning over the opening, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Brutus, unhappy with both of us, shot up past me and out of the basement. I gained a modicum of control over myself and did the same.
“I thought I heard you call to me,” she said, only slightly less upset than I was. “It’s so darned dark in this hallway, I accidentally knocked the door shut. I’m so sorry, honey, I know I scared the bejesus out of you. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
As soon as we were out of the house, she said, “So there wasn’t anybody down there after all?”
The optimist.
“I wish I could say there wasn’t.”
She stared at me a moment, the color draining from her face. “She’s dead?”
I nodded, then put an arm around her big shoulders and walked out to the front yard with her, leaving the gate open. I stayed there; she kept walking, her eyes on Brutus, who waited in her own front yard.
I used the cellular phone to call Frank’s pager and left a message on his voice mail, asking him to meet me at the address on Sleeping Oak. I dialed the City Desk next. Let John bitch about the order of the calls, I thought. Lydia answered on the fourth ring. I stood in the ankle-deep grass, watching Molly walk back to her house, looking twice as old as she had just moments before. I told Lydia to call the police, but to mention to them that I had already called Frank’s pager. I told her I would be waiting in front of the house. I heard John yelling, “Is that Kelly?” in the background, told Lydia I didn’t want to run up the bill, and hung up.
The phone rang almost immediately. I thought it might be John, but it was Frank.
“I’m on my way,” he said. “I’m not too far from you.”
“Hurry,” I said, looking through the gate, suddenly noticing that there were long leafy stems growing out of a place at the far corner of the yard. The stump of an oak tree.
“You think she might still be alive?” he asked.
At my feet, another trail of ants.
“No. But hurry.”
BY THE TIME I finished writing my contribution to the story on Rosie Thayer, I was fighting off a serious case of the megrims. The story itself made me feel down, but that wasn’t all that was getting to me. The general atmosphere at the paper was tense. I learned that Lt. Carlson had argued with Wrigley and others over a new issue: whether or not the police should be allowed to put a wiretap on my phone line. So far, Carlson was being forced to live with the paper’s refusal.
I felt restless and decided to get some fresh air. Let the chronicling of cruelty be left to others for a while. I put on my coat and stepped outside.
Holiday decorations lined the street, as they had since Thanksgiving. I walked aimlessly, listening to the sounds of the downtown streets — the rumble of passing traffic, snippets of pedestrians’ conversations, horns echoing off tall buildings, the sharp staccato of a jackhammer at work in the shell of an old building. I heard a street musician playing “Fever” on a flute. The same guy played this same song every day, so that by now “Fever” seemed to be the anthem of this block on Broadway. He was getting better at it. Some days I noticed the improvement, heard the notes one by one; some days the flute’s song was nothing more to me than all the other sounds of the street. As I walked that afternoon, whenever I thought of Rosie Thayer, I tried to listen for the flute again. It worked for a little while. I turned up the collar of my coat against the chilly air and kept moving.
I walked east a couple of short blocks to Las Piernas Boulevard, and then south a couple more, past the old post office and bank buildings and found myself standing in front of Austin Woods & Grandson Books, a used
