key to Deedra’s apartment, the one she’d given to Marlon Schuster. Becca and I had made him give it up. Becca hadn’t asked for it; that was unlike her. She was so careful about details. I would take it over to her.
Then I remembered I was supposed to go to the Drinkwaters’ this morning instead of the next day, and I glanced at the clock. No time to stop by Becca’s now. I thrust the key into the pocket of my clean blue jeans, the ones I’d pulled on for today, and I started the washer. I had to get moving if I was going to clear all my hurdles this morning.
As if to punish me for asking for a different day, Helen had left the house a particular mess. Normally, the Drinkwaters were clean and neat. The only disorder was caused by their grandchildren, who lived a few doors down and visited two or three times a week. But today, Helen hadn’t had a chance (she explained in a note) to clean up the debris from the potted plant she’d dropped. And she’d left clean sheets on the bed so I’d change them, a job she usually performed since she was very particular about how her sheets were tucked. I gritted my teeth and dug into the job, reminding myself several times how important the Drinkwaters were to my financial existence.
I gave them extra time, since I didn’t want Helen to be able to say I’d skimped in any way. I drove from the Drinkwaters’ home directly to Albert Tanner’s smaller house in a humbler part of Shakespeare.
Albert Tanner had retired on the day he turned sixty-five, and one month later his wife had dropped dead in Wal-Mart as the Tanners stood in the checkout line. He’d hired me within three weeks, and I’d watched him mourn deeply for perhaps five months. After that, his naturally sunny nature had struggled to rise to the surface of his life. Gradually, the wastebaskets had been less full of Kleenex, and he’d commented on how his phone bills had dropped when he called his out-of-town children once a week, rather than once a day. In time, the church women had stopped crowding his refrigerator with casseroles and Albert’s freezer filled up with Healthy Choice microwave dinners and fish and deer he’d killed himself. Albert’s laundry basket had gotten fuller as he showered and changed more often in response to his crowded social calendar. And I’d noticed that his bed didn’t always need making.
As I let myself in that morning, Albert was getting ready to take his wife’s best friend to an AARP luncheon.
“How does this look, Lily?” he asked me. He held out his arms and unselfconsciously offered himself up for inspection. Albert was very shaky on color coordination, a sartorial problem he’d left to his late wife, so I was often asked to give advice.
Today he’d worn a dark green golf shirt tucked into pleated khakis and dark green socks with cordovan loafers, so it was easy to nod approval. He needed a haircut, but I figured he knew that. I was only willing to give him so much monitoring. Carry it too far, it amounted to mothering. Or wifing.
In a few minutes he was gone, and I was going about my business in my usual way. I knew Albert was actually pleased I would be here when he had a solid reason to go out; he didn’t like to see me work, felt uncomfortable with me moving about his house. It made him feel like a poor host.
As I was dusting the family room, where Albert spent most of his time when he was at home, I automatically began the familiar task of boxing his videos. Albert Tanner was a polite and pleasant man, and seldom made truly big messes, but he had never put a video back in its box in the months I’d worked for him. Like Deedra, he taped a lot of daytime television to watch at night. He rented movies, and he bought movies. It wasn’t too hard to figure that if Albert was home, he was in front of the television.
When I finished, I had a leftover video box. A quick scan of the entertainment center came up empty; no extra tape. I turned on the VCR, and the little symbol that lit up informed me that Albert had left the tape in the machine, something he did quite often. I pushed the EJECT button, and out it slid to be popped into its container after I checked that it had been rewound. If it hadn’t been, I would have left it in the machine on the off chance Albert hadn’t finished watching it.
As I opened the cabinet door in the entertainment center to shelve the movies, I had a thought so interesting that I put the movies away with no conscious effort. Maybe that was where the missing tape was-the tape of Becca that she’d left in Deedra’s apartment. Maybe it was in Deedra’s VCR. As far as I knew, no one had turned the machine on since Deedra had been found dead.
That would be the last tape Deedra had watched. I am not superstitious, especially not about modern machinery, but something about that thought-maybe the mere fact that I’d had it-gave me the creeps. I remembered my dream all too vividly.
What it probably was, I figured as I folded Albert Tanner’s laundry with precision, was the tape of Deedra’s regular Saturday-night shows. She’d had company (Marlon) for Saturday night and Sunday morning, and after she’d come home from church Sunday and after she’d talked to her mother on the phone, she’d be anxious to catch up on her television viewing. She’d play her tape. Or maybe she’d had time to watch all she’d recorded and put in the tape of Becca for some reason.
I wondered if Lacey would want me back anytime soon to finish packing Deedra’s things. I could check then.
The key was in my pocket.
I could check now.
I’d been so virtuous and self-protective in turning in my copy of Deedra’s key to the police, but here was another key that had almost literally dropped into my hands.
Would it be wrong to use it? Lacey had given me the videos, so there should be no problem with me taking one out of the machine, presumably. The problem lay in using this set of keys to enter.
It would be better to have a witness.
I went home to eat a late-ish lunch and observed through my kitchen window that Claude was stopping in at his apartment. I watched his car turn in to the back of the building. That solved my problem, I figured; what more respectable witness could there be than the chief of police?
Claude was opening his door as I raised my hand to knock fifteen minutes later.
He jumped a little, startled, and I apologized.
“How was the trip?” I asked.
Claude smiled. “It was great to get away for a few days, and we tried a different restaurant every meal. Unfortunately, my stomach’s been upset ever since.” He grimaced as he spoke.
After we’d talked about Hot Springs and the hotel where he and Carrie had stayed, and about how much of his stuff he had left to pack up to move into her house, I explained my errand while Claude absently rubbed his stomach. He listened with half his usual attention.
“So,” Claude rumbled in his slow, deep voice, “you think this tape is the one Becca is missing?”
“Might be. And she and her brother are leaving on vacation tomorrow, I guess after the funeral. Would you mind just going in the apartment with me to see?”
Claude pondered that, then shrugged. “I guess that’d be okay. All you’re doing is getting the one tape. If there isn’t anything in the machine?”
“Then I’ll shut the door behind me and take these keys to the sheriff.”
Claude glanced at his watch. “I told Jump I’d be in sometime this afternoon, but I wasn’t real specific. Let’s go.”
As we went to the stairs, through the narrow glass panes on either side of the back door, I saw the Whitleys getting out of Becca’s car. They’d been to the gym, I figured from their clothes. Becca’s hair was braided. The brother and sister were talking earnestly.
By the time I heard them coming in the back door, we had unlocked Deedra’s apartment and stepped in.
Half-dismantled, dusty and disordered, the apartment was silent and dim.
While Claude fidgeted behind me, I turned on the television and the VCR. The voice of the man on the Weather Channel sounded obscenely normal in the dreary living room, where a few boxes remained stacked against the wall and every piece of furniture subtly askew.
The tiny icon lit up. There was a tape in the machine. I pressed the REWIND button. Within a second or two, the reverse arrow went dark, and I pushed PLAY.
John Walsh, host of
Well. I was already mad. I started to pop the cassette out and give up on my search for Becca’s tape, but instead I thought I’d fast-forward through the commercials and see if there was something else on the
