Amanda moved at the foot of the bed. Her head was wrapped in a white towel and she was wearing my red I LOVE ARKANSAS sweatshirt. It hung down to her knees, but I let the thought linger that she was wearing nothing underneath it. She smelled of shampoo and bath soap, but that was wrong. There was no hot water in the turret. No tub, either.
I recognized the rough stone walls of the third floor but the bed was wrong, too. It was a bed, not my cot, and it was too big, the size of the bed we’d shared when we were married. I looked back at Amanda. The sleeves of my sweatshirt were gone. Cut off above the elbows.
I opened my eyes all the way. “What did you do to my sweatshirt? I paid five dollars for that because it had long sleeves.”
“You shredded the sleeves being blown into my basement.” She moved close to the side of the bed and bent down to peer into my eyes. I’d been right; she was wearing nothing but the sweatshirt.
“I demand you remove that sweatshirt and give it to me, so that I might fully inspect the damage.”
“Not now, sailor. You’ve got wounds.”
“None that can’t be immediately healed.”
“I’m going to call the doctor and tell him you’re regaining your strength, and then I’m going to make tea.”
“I’m strong now.”
She looked down. “I can see. I’m still going to call the doctor, then we’re going to have tea.”
“And cookies?”
She pulled the sheet up to my neck. “Sweets come later.”
Amanda helped me out of bed on the fifth day. I had a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, burns on both my legs, and a million cuts, give or take a dozen, from the thousand bits of pulverized concrete that had blown through the tunnel. I’d been lucky; I’d been most of the way through the cutout when the blast came, and Amanda’s foundation wall had protected me after I’d fallen into the basement. My head had stayed attached, too, in its like-new, mostly unused condition. I certainly hadn’t put any strain on it during the Gateville investigation.
Amanda held my good arm as I levered myself upright. “Was someone pounding on the front door a short time ago?” I asked, grabbing for the headboard. The round room was spinning like an amusement park centrifuge, at that moment when the floor drops away.
She made a face. “It was that horrible man again from city hall. Odd fellow, with sprayed hair and very bad, oily skin. He comes twice a day.”
“What does he want?”
“The first few times, he asked what I was doing here. He said this place was zoned for only one occupant, as if that could be true.” She looked up at me.
“What did you tell him?”
“That I’m a temporary nurse.”
“You could be permanent.”
“You don’t need a permanent nurse.”
“That isn’t what-”
She went on, ignoring me. “Then today, he asked me if I’d lost a lot of weight.” The beginnings of a smile played on her lips. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the laundry basket of ladies’ unmentionables I found under your table saw, would it?”
“I’d like to look out the window now,” I said.
She helped me hobble to the slit window. Down by the river, a man with a tan paper lunch bag sat on the bench, tapping a hardboiled egg against the metal armrest. He had gray, wiry hair, wore a brown suit, and appeared to be talking to a duck floating in the water.
“Is that Agent Till?”
“Another strange man.” She told me he’d come by every few hours during the first two days when I’d been frolicking in dreamland, demanding to speak with me. Amanda’s doctor, a tiny, peppy gynecologist-named Woody, honestly-had kept him out. She said that yesterday, day four, Till took a new tack: He brought his lunch and ate by the river. “I think he’s going to do this every day until you talk to him,” Amanda said.
“How did you know to keep him out?” I looked at her, amazed.
“You said, ‘Don’t let me talk,’ when they carried you out of my house, so I told Woody. Woody kept them out.”
I nodded. I didn’t remember. It was best.
Two days later, at a little past noon, Amanda and Woody helped me down the metal stairs and out the door. I insisted on shuffling to the river by myself, though they followed close enough to pick me up on the first bounce.
I sat on the bench.
Till didn’t take his eyes off the duck as he slid his tan paper bag toward me. “Have half a sandwich,” he said.
“What kind is it?”
“Tuna salad. My wife says I need more omega oil, whatever that is, so she makes tuna salad three days a week.”
“Is the sandwich any good?”
“It’s horrible. She uses fake mayonnaise.” He threw a scrap of his sandwich in the water. The duck circled around it, picked it up in its beak, spit it out, and flew away. “I could have demanded an interrogation, you know,” Till said. “Your little pipsqueak doctor can’t keep out the federal government. I’ve been cooperative, letting you recover.”
“I don’t remember much.”
He had to be careful, with Amanda and Woody hovering ten feet away.
“Think it’ll come back? Things you might not remember now?” He turned his head to look at me for the first time.
“Ask Woody.”
“I did. He’s a gynecologist, but he did say that after a concussion, full memory can return.”
“One can only hope, Till.”
“Mind telling me what you do remember, starting with after you heard the second explosion?”
“Amanda and I had just come out of the house. I sent her off to get you.”
“Then you went back in?”
“To find Stanley Novak.”
“That was noble.”
“I figured he was taped up like Amanda had been. I was going to free him and then we’d run like hell.”
“Risking your own life to save Stanley Novak.”
I’d considered the next part. “He helped people.” It had been true enough.
Till bobbed his head up and down in exaggerated agreement. “Ah, yes. Left the lovely Ms. Phelps taped to a chair in a house that was about to explode.”
“He was otherwise occupied.”
“Going into the tunnels to get Michael Jaynes.”
“Stanley Novak was a good man.”
Till muttered something.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Bullshit,’ Elstrom.” Till shifted on the bench so that his head was a foot from mine. He smelled like tuna and fake mayonnaise. “Small fragments of an unidentified male along with the noble Stanley Novak blew out of a sealed-up air vent above one of the tunnels. But you didn’t go into any tunnels, did you, Elstrom?”
“Just got as far as the cutout in Amanda’s basement.”
“So you couldn’t have seen what Stanley Novak was doing in that tunnel, then?”
“How about chasing down Michael Jaynes?”
“Why do you think it was Michael Jaynes who was down in there?”
“He left his fatigue jacket in Amanda’s basement. Jaynes was our prime suspect, Till, or did you forget that somewhere along the way?”
Till’s eyes were steady on the side of my face. “Funny thing about the remains of the person that was not Stanley Novak,” Till said. “He was dead.”
“So you said.”
“No. Longtime dead. Years and years dead.” He stared at the side of my face. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
I shrugged as best I could with one arm immobilized in a cast.
Amanda came up to the front of the bench. Woody hung back ten feet, but his eyes were on Amanda, waiting for a cue.
Till shook his head and looked up at Amanda. “And you, Ms. Phelps, the way you got the ambulance driver to take him here, instead of to the hospital. I’d like to know why you did that.”
Amanda smiled. “I thought he’d be safer here.”
“I was outside your house when they pulled him out, Ms. Phelps. He was cut up pretty bad.”
“The E.M.T.’s said he could be treated at home.”
“I talked to them. Both techs said you told them terrorists were after Elstrom and that he could get killed in the hospital. You also told them you would have guards here to protect him.”
Amanda smiled. She had a lovely smile.
“Where are the guards?” Till asked.
Amanda smiled.
Till turned back to me. “I like having lunch here. It’s calm, and peaceful. I might come here every day.”
“It’ll get cold soon.”
“I love the brisk days of autumn.”
“I didn’t mean that soon. I meant in January and February.” I gave him a steely look I’d practiced once in front of a mirror. “Maybe forever,” I said.
Till picked up his paper bag and stood up. “Sure you don’t want some? I left plenty.”
I shook my head.
He held it out to Amanda.
She smiled.
Till walked the five steps to the trash barrel. “I should leave this on the bench. Keep the flies away,” he said.
“One thing I forgot to ask, Till. Did you ever get the lab results on what blew up my shed?”
He paused, his lunch bag poised over the barrel, and he grinned. “Solvents. Paint thinners, turpentine, gasoline.”
“No D.X.12?”
He dropped the bag in the barrel. “Rest up, Elstrom. I might be back.” He started up toward his car.
“One can only hope,” I said after him.
Amanda helped me stand. She waved Woody off, and we walked slowly up toward the turret.
“Did I really say, ‘Don’t let me talk’?”
“You told me you didn’t want to talk under sedation. I calledLeo as they were rolling you up to the ambulance. He said if you were thinking clearly and could convalesce at home, it would be better for you. He said with the money that’s going to be lost at Crystal Waters, and the lawsuits that are sure to be filed against the Board, the Board will be going to the ends of the earth to get out from under any negligence claims. Leo thought they’d start by trying to blame you for an ineffective investigation. Leo said you’d be in court for the rest of your life.” She paused. “You know what I think, Dek?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“I don’t think you were thinking of your own skin, or what was left of it.”
We got to the door of the turret. “Poor Stanley,” I said.
“That’s what I believed, and it almost got you killed.” She held the door open for me. “But you’re the only one who will ever believe that now.”
The next week, the Bohemian came down to the bench by the river carrying a slim box wrapped in silver paper. “Vlodek.” He rolled the name. “You look horrible. Much worse than you sound on the phone.”
With effort, I slid down a bit on the bench so we could both watch the river. He sat down.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Right as rain,” he said. He looked it. His skin was back to its usual prosperous bronze. “Miss Terrado, my accuser, got arrested for shoplifting the day before yesterday. ‘Heiress Caught Stealing,’ the paper said. After detailing her growing eccentricities, the reporter, a nice boy, the nephew of a friend, devoted some space to Miss Terrado’s preposterous accusation against me, noting that the F.B.I. anticipated the matter would be dropped.”
He started to hand me the slim, wrapped box, saw the cast, and said, “A token, Vlodek. Allow me.” He slit the paper with his hugethumb, removed the top of the box, and held it out for me to see. It was the largest fountain pen I’d ever seen. “A 1928 Parker Duofold, in Blue Lapis. I restored it myself.” He set the pen down. “You can use it to endorse this.” He pulled a Crystal Waters Homeowners Association check from his suit-coat pocket and held it up.
“Two thousand?”
“The association is virtually bankrupt, and with the lawsuits-”
I imagined he had to shake Ballsard pretty hard to come up with the two thousand. “It’s fine,” I said.
He smiled, relieved. “Your suggestion that I visit the Novak house was most productive. I met with Mrs. Novak’s sister, who is now her guardian, and presented her with a letter from Bob Ballsard, assuring her that the Board will begin paying Stanley’s pension immediately and will also expedite her claim against his life insurance policy. Mrs. Novak will want for nothing in her current home, poor woman.”
“I’ll bet Ballsard was most enthused about writing that letter.”
“As you predicted, but he was persuaded when I told him I had every hope of recovering all the extortion money. Besides, as you also pointed out, Stanley dying a hero might minimize claims against the Board for negligence.”
“You looked around Stanley’s garage?”
“Mrs. Novak’s sister was quite cooperative once she realized I was acting in their best interests. She gave me the key and told me to take anything that belonged to Crystal Waters. It was in the attic of the garage: five hundred and ten thousand, untouched.” He patted my good shoulder. “As you requested, I told the Board only that I recovered the funds through a confidential source.”
“That ten thousand-”
“-did not have a bill newer than 1970.” He beamed. “And the five hundred thousand was still in the attaché case. I don’t think he ever opened it.” He watched me.
“Attaché-” I started to stutter. “Son of a bitch.”
He patted my good shoulder again. “Perhaps surveillance is not your forte.”
“Thank you, Anton.”
“You’re a moral man, Vlodek. I like that.” He stood up. “I told the Board you would be discreet.”
He took a step toward the street but then turned. “I meant to bring you a bottle of ink for your new pen, but there are so many colors. I didn’t know which you’d like.”
I waved my good hand. “Anything will be fine.”
The Bohemian glanced over at Amanda, planting bulbs for the spring by the base of the turret. She was wearing my cutoff red sweatshirt. “I think red, perhaps,” he said. “Red is such a vibrant color.”
I followed his eyes. “Red is perfect.”
Leo drove me in the pink Porsche with the top down. “It’s silver rose, not pink,” he said again.
“Pink enough, Leo.”
“Endora likes it.”
“And for that it must be treasured.”
He did some fancy downshifting, just to show me he could, and pulled up to the entrance to Gateville. A Maple Hills squad car was parked by the guardhouse, its uniformed officer talking to a guard. The guard came over to the Porsche.
“Brumsky and Elstrom,” Leo said, handing up our driver’s licenses. “Anton Chernek arranged it with Mr. Ballsard.”
I loosened the chin cord and pulled off the tan big-brimmed Tilley hat Amanda had bought me to keep the sun off my stitches. The guard checked our faces against the license photos, and handed them back with photocopied waiver forms that absolved the Board of responsibility for anything that occurred during our visit, like us getting blown up by an undiscovered cube of D.X.12. We signed the forms and handed them back.
“Jeez, put the hat back on, Dek,” Leo said as we started up. “You look like Frankenstein, post op.”
I pulled on the Tilley as Leo turned left and started clockwise around Chanticleer Circle.
At first blink, the houses at the east end of Gateville looked the same: big and blessed in the sun. But then the uncut grass, untrimmed shrubs, and scattering of fast-food wrappers, dropped by the curious and blown over the wall, popped out like black teeth on a beauty queen. Nobody was at home in Gateville anymore.
We circled slowly around the east end and started up the back stretch. Around the bend ahead, the mounds of blackened bricks and charred wood looked like World War II photographs of Dresden, the day after the Allies had flown over and obliterated it.
“Jeez,” Leo said, stopping the car. He shut off the engine.
For a time we sat in his open convertible and looked at the rubble at the west end.
“What finally made him set the plan in motion?” Leo asked, when the silence got too loud.
“Our divorce.”
“Atta boy, Dek. Suck up the guilt for this, too.”
“It’s true enough, Leo. Obviously, the Board’s rejection of his request for a loan, and then his son’s death and his wife’s deterioration, were the reasons. But they festered, and might not have gone any place, except that Amanda and I divorced, and she went to Europe for what was to be at least six months. God knows he’d had the motive; now he had the means and opportunity. He’d never forgotten the letters, blueprints, and D.X.12 that were in the tunnels with Michael Jaynes. Now he had the keys; he was supposed to check on the house. He cut into the tunnel and began blowing things up.”
“And hired you to misdirect the investigation that was sure to come, by feeding you clues about Michael Jaynes.”
“He controlled the investigation every step of the way. Usingthe old notes was genius, because it forced everyone’s attention back to 1970, to someone who had worked building Gateville. When that looked to be a dead end, he fed me Jaynes’s name to keep me going.”
Leo turned from looking at the ruined houses. “And when that lagged, he set you up to take the fall.”
I shook my head. “He didn’t set me up.”
“What about the money missing from the Dumpster? Stanley had to know you would stake it out, even if you didn’t tell anybody beforehand.”
“Sure, but he couldn’t know I’d admit to being there. Nor could he anticipate I’d be so lame as to fall asleep and admit that, too. My announcing that I’d been there but didn’t see the money disappear made me look worse than stupid; it made me look like I was lying and stupid. That’s what got Till interested in me in the first place. He thought I was covering up the fact that I’d grabbed the money myself. I dug my own grave on that one.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It made me look like I was lying-”
“That’s not what I meant. What happened to the money?”
I gave him my happiest grin. I knew what was puzzling him, but I wanted to savor the sensation of knowing something he hadn’t worked out.
“The money never went to Ann Sather’s,” I said.
“Jeez-” he said, and then the confusion left his face. He smiled.
I blurted ahead, though he already knew what I was going to say. “Even if I’d brought binoculars, I wouldn’t have caught it. Stanley came to the drop with a white bag full of food scraps he’d picked out of Ann Sather’s Dumpster a few days before and had kept refrigerated at home. Only he’d put the white bag inside a black bag. Assuming that I would be watching, he made a show of leaning into the Dumpster, like he was jamming the black bag allthe way in so he could close the lid. What he was really doing with all that fumbling was ripping the black outer bag off and balling it up in his fist. It was just thin plastic. Then he drove away with his wadded-up black plastic bag, leaving behind a white bag full of nothing but authentic Ann Sather kitchen garbage. He figured when I saw no one come for the black bag, I’d rummage in the Dumpster. I wouldn’t find the money, but worse, I would realize that if I told anyone that the money had disappeared right under my eyes, they wouldn’t believe me. They’d think I took it. I must have really shocked him when I told everybody I’d been watching the Dumpster but had fallen asleep. That was a bonus for him; it made me look even more guilty.”
“That wasn’t setting you up?”
“No, because he never expected me to admit I was there.”
“What about blowing up your shed? That wasn’t a setup?”
“It was time to get me out of the picture, because I was making too much noise about doubting the bomber was Michael Jaynes. He needed more time to string out the bombings, to make the Members suffer slowly, like he and his wife had, watching their son die. But he didn’t use D.X.12 on my shed, Leo, which would have tied me to the Gateville bombs much more closely.”
“Jeez,” Leo said.
“That’s it exactly,” I said. “Jeez.” I looked down the street at the ruined houses.
“So he was never looking for money?”
I shook my empty head in my Tilley hat. “It was too late for money. His son was dead, his wife was headed for an institution. No, he wanted to punish the Board, and the Members, by destroying all of Gateville.”
“Wanted it bad enough to kill.”
“No. I saw his face when he learned that that family had come home from Door County and was in the house he’d blown up.” I pointed at the pile of rubble that had once been the dead family’shome. “‘Bastards,’ Stanley said that night. I thought he was referring to more than one bomber, but it was actually a slip. Stanley was referring to the Board, blaming them for the family’s death just like he did for the death of his son.”
We sat for a while then, in the sun, without speaking, like we were waiting in a graveyard for a grounds crew to come to cover new graves.
“Drive on, Jeeves,” I said finally.
Leo put the Porsche into gear and eased up Chanticleer toward the turn.
“What’s going to happen here?” Leo asked.
“This last batch of destroyed houses will be scraped away. Their owners, including Amanda, are the lucky ones. They’ll get insurance money to buy someplace else. I don’t know about the others, because technically their houses have not been damaged. The Board will plant grass and trees, like they did earlier, to try to perfume the development, but it won’t work. The story is out. No one wants to live in a minefield.”
“What about the report in the paper that said the whole development would be rewired? Won’t that end it?”
“That’s just whistling past the graveyard. The D.X.12 is still here. They’ve found a lot of it, maybe even all of it. But even if they bulldoze all the houses, they’ll never know if they missed one tiny cube. That’s what makes this place a ghost town for a long time to come.”
Leo started the Porsche and crept along in first gear. “So Stanley Novak got what he wanted?”
“More like what he needed.”
Leo nodded at the justice of that, and we continued around Chanticleer Circle until we got to what was left of Amanda’s house. Two men in white hard hats stood in front of the pile, next to a dump truck loaded with debris. Only the front wall of Amanda’s house remained.
Leo put the Porsche in neutral. “She sure had a lot of guts, bullying those E.M.T.’s to go in to get you, even as the roof was coming down.”
“Never underestimate the force of Amanda’s determination.”
“Is she going to be staying a while in Rivertown?” Leo kept looking straight ahead, but I could see him smile. When he got that big slimeball grin on his face, I could swear his lips touched the lobes of both his ears.
“She bought a condo downtown. She’ll be moving out in a month.”
“No grand reconciliation?” The disappointment in his voice was genuine.
“She’s leaving the hot water heater, the portable shower, and the big bed. She’ll be back to visit.”
“Still…”
“She says we’re too young to get married.”
“You’re both looking at middle age.”
“She’s right, Leo.”
The men climbed into the cab of the dump truck.
“Big greed,” Leo said. “It’s always big greed.” He turned to look at me, his eyebrows riding high on his forehead.
I looked at my watch. “Fire it up, Leo. Amanda wants me back by three.”
He slipped the shifter into first gear. “What’s the rush?”
“Amanda said we’re having sweets.”
Jack Fredrickson
Jack Fredrickson's first Dek Elstrom mystery, A Safe Place for Dying, was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best First Novel. His short fiction has appeared in the acclaimed Chicago Blues and in Michael Connelly's Burden of the Badge anthologies. He lives with his wife, Susan, west of Chicago, where he is crafting the next Dek Elstrom novel.