“I’ll try to get it to you tonight, Alison. But no promises. Give me a couple of hours, okay?”
“Okay,” she says, flashing him a coquettish smile. “Thanks, Stevie.” She stands on tiptoe and plants a kiss on his cheek. Then, after shooting a smug glance at me, she struts down the driveway.
Hurley walks over to me while I do my best impression of someone who hasn’t seen or heard a thing. I keep my eyes diverted, afraid to look at him. “When was the last time you ate anything?” he asks.
“I’m not sure. Breakfast I think. But I’m not hungry.” An historic moment.
“You should eat something anyway.”
“Maybe later.” I am pouting and determined to disagree with whatever he says, angry over the cutesy little exchange I observed between him and Alison.
“Okay,” he says with a sigh. “Come on. I’ll drive you home.”
“Thanks, but I can drive myself. Besides, I don’t want to leave my car here.”
“I can have one of the uniforms drive it for you.”
“That won’t be necessary. I’m fine. Really.”
“Then I’m going to follow you home.”
Obviously he doesn’t realize that I’ve already made the burgundy-and-gray van and know he’s been having me tailed for the past several days. Still, when I think about him following me home tonight, I find I kind of like the idea. “Okay,” I say, giving him a tired smile.
The sight of Hurley’s headlights in my rearview mirror makes me feel warm and tingly all over. I imagine what might happen when we get to the cottage. I’ll invite him inside, of course. Good manners dictate as much. After that, who knows what might happen. And if he wants to call and talk to Alison Miller, I’ll find a way to let her know where he is. In fact, maybe I’ll encourage him to call her from my place so I can hear every word he says.
But my fantasy blows to pieces as I pull into my driveway and watch Hurley drive on by, honking once as he passes. He’s probably on his way to meet Alison, I think, and the idea crushes me.
Once inside, I decide a nice, hot, soothing bath sounds wonderful, so I strip out of my clothes and put on my robe. The pile of dirty clothes in the corner of the bedroom is getting pretty high, so I throw a load into the washer. Then, rationalizing that I need something cold to balance out the heat from the bath, I dig a new carton of Cherry Garcia out of the freezer and settle in on the couch with it and a spoon.
Inevitably my mind wanders back to the afternoon’s events and the image of Sid sitting in that chair, his head in his hands, his posture slumped and defeated. That image is in stark contrast to the man I knew, the man whose vivacious humor and gentle manner have charmed me for years.
Then I flash on the empty, dull-eyed expression I saw on Gina’s face as she sat in the same chair and, oddly, this disturbs me even more. Something about the way she was sitting there seems wrong. I can’t put a finger on anything specific, but it keeps nagging at me.
I try to shake it off by focusing on Rubbish instead, who is playing with a mangled tampon he most likely fished out of the bathroom garbage. I laugh as he bats the tampon across the rug and hunkers down, his pupils huge and dark, his little ass wiggling. Then he springs in for the kill, grabbing the tampon between his feet and rolling with it. He tosses it away, hunkers down again, and repeats the attack. At one point he manages to push the tampon under the corner of the rug, where he then spends several minutes trying to get at it from above. Finally he gets wise and burrows his way under, creating a tiny, wriggling hump in the rug.
And that’s when it hits me. It’s not the way Gina was sitting in the chair that bothers me, it’s what happened when she got out of it.
I have to go back to the house. I run into the bedroom to dress, only to realize all of my bras are in the washing machine. After digging around in the few clean clothes I have left, I choose the loosest-fitting top I can find, not wanting to advertise the fact that I am braless. Minutes later, I am headed out of town, stopping briefly at the Quik-E-Mart to buy a disposable camera.
The Carrigan house is dark when I pull up out front but there is a police car parked in the drive. Sitting inside it is Brian Childs. The front door to the house is sealed shut with crime scene tape. Brian gets out and walks over to me as I climb out of my car.
“What are you doing back here?” he asks.
I show him my camera. “I need to get some shots of the den,” I tell him. “For Izzy.”
“We already took a bunch,” he says. “Can’t you use those?”
“I suppose we can, but Izzy likes to have his own. And this way, we don’t have to wait for you guys to make copies,” I explain. I hold my breath, hoping Brian will go for it.
“Okay,” he says with a shrug, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I follow him onto the porch, where he slices through the tape and peels it away. “I’ll replace this when you’re done,” he says. “And I’ll have to record that you were here,” he adds. “Scene preservation, you know.”
“No problem,” I tell him. If my suspicions are right, by the time anyone else learns I was here, it will be a moot point. As soon as he has the door unlocked, I scurry down the hall and enter the den. I grimace at the lingering scent of dried blood that hangs in the air, and when I flip on the light switch, I see that the room doesn’t look any different than the last time I saw it.
I turn back to Brian, who has followed me. “I need to close the door so I can take a shot of this end of the room,” I tell him, and as I hoped, he backs up. “It’ll only take me a minute,” I promise, closing the door before he has a chance to come inside.
Immediately, I move over to the chair, standing in front of it and digging into my memory. Just as I thought, the edge of the Persian rug is up against the front legs of the chair. But I’m certain that when Sid was sitting there, the chair had been angled toward the desk, the two back feet resting on the hardwood floor, the two front ones resting on top of the rug. I remember how Gina nearly fell when I helped her up because her foot became entangled in the rug’s edge. And I remember how the curled-edge fell back down, stopping in the position it’s in now.
Obviously, the chair had been moved between the time I saw Sid in it and the time I saw Gina in it. I recall the noise I heard not long after Gina entered the room, the faint
I reach down and pull back the edge of the carpet, peeking underneath. There, about a foot and a half from the edge, is a small defect in the hardwood, a metal ring set into a hollow in the floor. I kneel down and study the ring more closely, realizing it’s a handle. When I grab it and pull, a six-board section of the floor opens up, revealing a large, velvet-lined space beneath. Molded into the velvet are three imprints, each one bearing the recognizable shape of a gun. Next to the empty imprints is the real thing: a cold, deadly-looking pistol.
A loud noise out in the hallway startles me and I jump, letting the section of floor fall back into place. I hear the door to the den open and start to turn, but I’m not quick enough. From the periphery of my vision I see something coming toward me just before I feel a crashing pain on my head. For an instant I see a flash of bright, blinding light, but after that, there is nothing but darkness.
Chapter 34
I can’t remember ever feeling so cold. My teeth are rattling and every muscle in my body is trembling as I try to shiver my way to warmth. I am curled into a fetal position and I try to tighten it, to pull all my parts closer together so they can warm one another. But the movement sends shock waves of pain from my head down my neck and back, making me moan.
“Ah, good. You’re awake.”
Slowly, carefully, I open my eyes, wincing as the room’s light pierces its way through to my brain. Fuzzy shapes come into view, familiar shapes. Sid’s den. I place one hand on the floor and, bracing myself against the pain, I push myself into a sitting position. Gina is standing in front of me, a gun in one hand. It doesn’t take me long to figure out where she found it or what she intends to do with it.
Seeing the direction of my gaze, Gina holds the pistol up for a moment, eyeing it appreciatively. “Is this what you were looking for?” she asks.
“Apparently,” I mumble.
“Too smart for your own good, aren’t you?” she sneers. “I knew you would figure it out sooner or later. That’s why I came back here to watch the house. I thought you might show up.”
