her.
“Check to see if his feet are hurt,” I said. “I’m going to take a look in the cabana.”
I walked toward it before she could object.
“Ben?” I called from the open door. There was no answer.
I stepped inside and found myself in a small sitting room decorated in soft hues of rose and gray. A small white refrigerator hummed in one corner. To either side of the sitting room, there were changing rooms, two on each side; their open doors showed them to be empty. A short hallway led to another door, also open. Over the gray tiles which led to it, I saw a trail of bloody paw prints.
“Ben?” I called again.
Nothing but the hum of the refrigerator.
With wide, awkward strides, as if stepping on stones across a stream, I crept along, careful to avoid the blood on the cold tiles.
“Ben?” I said, a little louder.
Nothing.
But there was a smell, I realized, a smell that grew much stronger as I neared the door.
My palms started sweating, my heart drumming. I wanted nothing so much as to turn around and run out of that hallway, out to where there might be sweet, cold air-big gulps of air-air that didn’t reek of blood.
I braced my palms on either side of the doorjamb and made myself peer around the corner, look inside the room. It was a bathroom. The shower stall door had been pushed open. On the floor, lying half out of the shower stall, was a man, fully clothed. Ben Watterson. He held a gun. The back of his head was missing. It might have been in the big mess in the shower. I didn’t stick around to find out.
As I came running out of the cabana, I saw Claire, staring at me.
“Don’t go in there,” I said.
She immediately let go of the dog and started to do what I just told her not to do. She had a wild look on her face. I grabbed on to her. “Claire, don’t-”
The dog barked at me, scared me enough to make me let go of her. I don’t know if she heard me or if she heard the dog, but she didn’t move.
Finn barked at me again.
“What-?” She left it at that. I don’t think she wanted to ask the question. I might answer it.
“Let’s go into the house,” I said.
She looked at the cabana again, didn’t budge.
“It’s Ben,” I said. “I’m sorry, Claire.”
“No.”
I waited.
She just shook her head. “No. Not Ben. Not Ben. No, you’re wrong. It’s not Ben.”
“Yes, it is.”
She bit her lip, then said, “Let me see him. He might need help.”
“Claire-it’s too late. I’m sorry.”
“You weren’t in there very long. You don’t know that he’s-you don’t know! I want to see him.” She hurried toward the cabana.
“No!” I shouted. “For Godsakes, Claire, don’t-”
She stopped moving, turned toward me.
“Please don’t,” I said. “Please, please don’t go in there.”
She hesitated a moment longer, then came stumbling back to me.
“We need to go into the house,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice steady. “We need to call the police.”
“No,” she said, but let me put an arm around her shoulders.
She leaned against me, and let me guide her away from the cabana. She just stared at me when I asked for the key to the house. I finally took her purse from her, found the keys, then tried a couple until I found one that would unlock the back door, which led into the kitchen. She stood nearby, petting the dog. “Good boy, Finn,” she said, at least half a dozen times.
As I opened the door and fumbled for a light switch, the air was suddenly pierced with an obnoxious whooping noise, quickly followed by horns and bells.
“You set off the alarm,” she said dully, and pushed past me to enter a code on a keypad. Blessed silence returned.
She turned on the kitchen lights and went to a wall phone, pushed an auto-dial button, and said, “This is Mrs. Watterson, that was a false alarm.” She gave them a code word, then hung up.
“Do you need to use the phone?” she asked, as if she hadn’t just missed a perfect opportunity to contact the police.
“Yes,” I said, and dialed Robbery-Homicide.
“FRANK’S NOT HERE,” Detective Jake Matsuda said when I identified myself. “He got called out on a case.”
“This is about something else, Jake.” Aware that Claire was listening to every word I said, I tried to give him as much information as I could without being cruel to her. He told me he would send someone right out.
“You want me to page Frank?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks. Could you let him know that it may be a while before I’m home?”
As I hung up, I noticed that Claire had started shaking. Her face was colorless.
“Sit down,” I said, afraid that she might faint. She took a seat at the kitchen table, and Finn immediately sprawled out at her feet, head between his paws. “Can I get you something?” I asked her.
She looked out toward the backyard. “It might not be Ben,” she said.
“How about a glass of water?” I went to get it without waiting for an answer.
I’ll confess that I thought about calling the paper-a reporter’s impulse when the town’s leading banker kills himself. Already, I was wondering what had led Ben to pull the trigger. But looking at Claire as she took the glass of water, I couldn’t bring myself to make the call.
“Why?” she said.
“What?”
“I heard what you told the police. Why would Ben want to kill himself?”
“I don’t know, Claire. I was just wondering about that myself.”
“Everyone will wonder, won’t they?”
“Yes.”
Once again, she stared toward the backyard. She reached for the glass of water but knocked it over, breaking the glass. “Now look what I’ve done,” she said, and started crying.
IFELT A LITTLE UNEASY with the detectives who had drawn this case. I didn’t have any problem with David Cardenas. But Frank had once knocked Cardenas’s partner, Bob Thompson, flat on his rump. Why? For making a remark about me. Not the kind of thing that will make a guy sign your dance card at the Policemen’s Ball.
Things seemed to be going okay at first. Cardenas took my statement while Thompson talked to Claire in the living room. I told Cardenas about the dog, and he had me show him the car window, and from there, to retrace most of my steps as I told him what had happened. He didn’t force me to go inside the cabana again; a photographer and other technicians were at work in there. When they first arrived, Claire had been forced to calm Finn, who grew upset as other strangers came near the cabana. A uniformed officer was petting and cooing to him now, as a technician took a sample of hair from the dog’s paw.
“The dog stayed outside, with Mrs. Watterson, when you went in to look?” Cardenas asked me.
“Yes.”
“About where was she standing then?”
I showed him. “About here.”
“Was there a reason you asked her to wait?”
I shrugged.
He waited.
