Mrs. Balsam was pleased with his work and at the reasonable price he asked for it. On the point of paying him, she said, “Oh, just a minute. While you’re here—”
The nights were turning chilly, and the wall heater in the living room had a pilot light which kept going out. While Sweet was testing it, the telephone rang. He listened alertly while he unscrewed a plate, emitting little whistles of total absorption in his job, and learned that, unlikely though it seemed, Mrs. Balsam worked two afternoons a week and was being asked to change her hours.
“Well, actually, Mrs. Williams, two to six on Fridays would be better for me, because the library’s open late that night and I could stop by on my way home and have one less errand for the weekend. Do you still want me to do Tuesdays, or do I move up to Wednesday? . . . All right, let’s stick with Tuesdays—” she sounded a little airy for an employee “—and I’ll be there tomorrow.
Tomorrow was Friday. Sweet got up from his inspection of the wall heater and announced truthfully that it needed a new thermocouple. “Run you about twenty-three dollars.”
A cloud moved briefly over the sun, shadowing the room with a suggestion of the darkness to come, and Mrs. Balsam asked anxiously, “Do you think you could do it today?”
Not even a close observer could have detected any elation in Sweet’s casual nod and glance at his watch. “I can go into town right now. I might have to try a couple of places, though. That heater’s an old make.”
“I’ll be here,” said Mrs. Balsam cheerfully. “Give a loud bang on the door when you come back, because I’m repotting some plants.”
Sweet said that he would, and called as she disappeared down the hall to the plant room, “I’d better take this one with me.”
He did take the malfunctioning thermocouple. After a swift and soundless exploration of the handbag on the floor beside the couch, he also took Mrs. Balsam’s house keys.
The next afternoon, armed with a tack hammer and a flashlight, Sweet let himself in at the patio door, instinctively quiet although he knew from the absence of the car and the unchecked roaring of the Afghan that Mrs. Balsam was gone.
The dog was enormously glad to see him, and stood breathing fondly into his ear while he knelt on the carpeting where he remembered the trapdoor to be. He had begun loosening it before he discovered the razor cut in the fleece, invisible except to someone in this closely scrutinizing position. He got the heavy door up, aimed the flashlight beam into welling darkness to orient himself, and descended the steel ladder.
Above him, the Afghan cried plaintively at this loss of a playmate. Sweet located the light switch, snapped it on, and was almost twenty years back in time.
The shelter was surprisingly cold, and had the indefinable odor of all subterranean places. The mulberry-colored wool blankets were still on the bunk beds. The shelves were bare of canned goods, but a five-gallon bottle of distilled water remained.
Bags of a moisture-absorbing chemical hung at intervals from one of the steel beams in the ceiling, and Sweet reached up and hefted one speculatively. It weighed at least a pound, and would make an ideal repository for drugs or the other items which passed into his hands from time to time and could not be marketed right away: silver and turquoise jewelry, watches; once, the entire gold supply of a jewelry-making acquaintance who thought that people might be getting tired of silver and turquoise.
Still, for all its stamped-in familiarity—it was the first and last bomb shelter he had ever encountered—something about the place puzzled Sweet. There was an electric heater: When he switched it on its coils began to tick at once. He sent a roving glance along the bench for spreading the moisture absorber to dry periodically, and on the floor at one end was a manila folder.
It was labeled “Warranties” and held documents and service contracts for kitchen appliances. One of them, covering a dishwasher, was dated 1974, and that explained the small oddity. In spite of its chill and its cellar odor, the shelter had not had the air of a place abandoned for eighteen years or even ten, because MacWillie—until the ladder got to be too much for him?—had been storing records here.
The Afghan gave an imploring bark, and although it was clearly addressed to him alone Sweet snapped off the light and mounted the steel rungs as swiftly as if it had contained a warning. He let the trapdoor down, secured the few inches of carpet he had loosened, brushed the curling gray-blue nap concealingly into place with his fingers. It was with a real sense of shock that, straightening and turning, he came face to face with himself in a narrow oval mirror, so placed that it reflected a strip of front lawn as well. Anyone approaching from the driveway—
Nobody was approaching; still, he let himself out the patio door with speed, having to thrust back in the eager face of the dog who had plainly thought they were going to spend the afternoon together.
He mused idly, as he drove home, about the extraordinary merits of the shelter, granted a homeowner of predictable habits. How likely was a woman of Mrs. Balsam’s age to navigate that ladder often, if at all? If a man had to disappear for a day or two . . .
This was akin to premonition. It was only September, and Ellie Peale would not die for some time yet.
Chapter 3
“. . .
