if Robin was home yet from the university. It was going to rain later, and the day was cooling off rapidly. The sky was a dull uniform gray.
I pulled on my jacket finally and was heading out on my own when his big car pulled in. Robin unfolded from it with an armful of papers. Why doesn’t he carry a briefcase? I wondered.
“Listen, change your shoes and come with me,” I suggested.
He looked down his beaky nose at my feet. “Okay,” he said agreeably. “Let me drop these papers inside. Someone stole my briefcase,” he said over his shoulder.
I pattered after him. “Here?” I said, startled.
“Well, since I moved to Lawrenceton, and I’m fairly sure from here in the parking lot,” he said as he unlocked his back door.
I followed him in. Boxes were everywhere, and the only thing set in order was a computer table suitably laden with computer, disc drives, and printer. Robin dumped the papers and bounded upstairs, returning in a few seconds with some huge sneakers.
“What are we going to do?” he asked as he laced them up.
“I’ve been thinking. How did the murderer get into the Buckleys’ house? It wasn’t broken into, right? At least the papers this morning said not. So maybe the Buckleys left it unlocked and the killer just walked in and surprised them, or the killer rang the doorbell and the Buckleys let him-or her-in. But anyway, how did the killer approach the house? I just want to walk up that way and see. It had to be from the back, I think.”
“So we’re going to see if we can do it ourselves?”
“That’s what I thought.” But as we were leaving Robin’s I had misgivings. “Oh, maybe we better not. What if someone sees us and calls the police?”
“Then we’ll just tell them what we’re doing,” said Robin reasonably, making it sound very simple. Of course,
But I had to go. It had been my idea.
So out of the parking lot we went, Robin striding ahead and me trailing behind, until he looked back and shortened his stride. The parking lot let out in the middle of the street that ran beside Robin’s end apartment. Robin had turned right so I did, too, and at the corner we turned north to walk the two blocks up Parson to the Buckleys‘. Perhaps as I’d driven past the Buckleys’ on my way home to lunch the day before, the Buckleys were being slaughtered. I caught up with Robin at the next corner, shivering inside my light jacket. The house was on this next block.
Robin looked up the street, thinking. I looked down the side street; no houses faced the road. “Of course, the trash alley,” I said, disgusted with myself.
“Huh?”
“This is one of the old areas, and this block hasn’t been rebuilt in ages,” I explained. “There’s an alley between the houses facing Parson Road and the houses facing Chestnut, which runs parallel to Parson. The same with this block we’re standing on. But when you get south to our block, it’s been rebuilt, with our apartments for one thing, and garbage collection is on the street.”
Under the gray sky we crossed the side street and came to the alley entrance. I’d felt so pursued and viewed yesterday, it was almost eerie how invisible I felt now. No houses facing this side street, little traffic. When we walked down the gravelled alley, it was easy to see how the murderer had reached the house without being observed.
“And almost all these yards are fenced, which blocks the view of the alley,” Robin remarked, “and of the Buckleys’ back yard.”
The Buckleys’ yard was one of the few unfenced ones. The ones on either side had five-foot privacy fences. We stopped at the very back of the yard by the garbage cans, with a clear view of the back door of the house. The yard was planted with the camellias and roses that Mrs. Buckley had loved. In their garbage can-what an eerie thought-was probably a tissue she’d blotted her lipstick with, grounds from the coffee they’d drunk on their last morning, detritus of lives that no longer existed.
Yes, their garbage was surely still there… everyone on Parson Road had garbage pickup on Monday. They’d been killed on Wednesday. I shuddered. “Let’s go,” I said. My mood had changed. I wasn’t Delilah Detective anymore.
Robin turned slowly. “So what would you do?” he said. “If you didn’t want to be observed, you’d have parked your car-where? Where we came into the alley?”
“No. That’s a narrow street, and someone might remember having to pull out and around to get past your car.”
“What about at the north end of the alley?”
“No. There’s a service station right across the street there, it’s real busy.”
“So,” said Robin, striding ahead purposefully, “we go back this way, the way we came. If you had an ax, where would you put it?”
“Oh, Robin,” I said nervously. “Let’s just go.” We were leaving the alley as unobserved as we had entered, as far as I could tell, and I was glad of it.
“I,” continued Robin, “would drop it in one of these garbage cans waiting to be emptied.”
That was why Robin was a very good mystery writer.
“I’m sure the police have searched them,” I said firmly. “I am not going to stand here and go through everyone’s garbage. Then someone really would call the police.” Or would they? Apparently no one had spotted us so far.
We’d reached the end of the alley, at the spot we’d entered.
“If you wouldn’t park here, you might just cross the street and go through the next alley,” he said thoughtfully. “Park even farther away, be even less likely to be seen and connected.”
So we slipped across the narrow street into the next alley. This one had been widened a little when some apartments had been built. Their parking was in the back, and in the construction process a drainage ditch had been put in the alley to keep the parking lots clear. There were culverts to provide entrances and exits to the lots. I thought,
This alley too was silent and lifeless, and I began to have the unsettling feeling that maybe Robin and I were the only people left in Lawrenceton. The sun came out briefly and Robin took my hand, so I tried hard to feel better. But when he crouched to retie his shoe, I began looking in the ditches.
Certainly the culvert right by us hadn’t been disturbed. The water oak leaves that half-blocked the opening were almost smoothly aligned, pointing in the same direction, by the heavy rain of the night before last. But the next one down… someone had been in that ditch, no doubt about it. The leaves had been shoved up around the opening so forcefully that the mud underneath had been uncovered. Perhaps the police had searched, but of course none of them were as short as I was, so they weren’t at an angle to see a little gleam from inside the culvert, a gleam sparked by the unexpected and short-lived sunshine. And their arms weren’t as long as Robin’s, so they couldn’t have reached in and pulled out…
“My briefcase?” Robin said in shock and amazement. “What’s it doing here?” His fingers pried the gold-tone locks.
“Don’t open it!” I shrieked, as Robin opened it, and out fell a bloodstained hatchet, to land with a thud on the packed leaves in the ditch.
Chapter 14
While Robin stood guard over the horrible thing in the alley, I knocked on the door of one of the apartments. I could hear a baby screaming inside, so I knew someone was awake.
The exhausted young woman who answered the door was still in her nightgown. She was trusting enough to open the door to a stranger, and tired enough to accept my need to use her telephone incuriously. The baby screamed while I looked up the number of the police station, and kept it up while I dialled and talked to the desk
