Death's little helpers

32

I bought coffee and doughnuts on Tuesday morning, from a place that made them fresh and that had managed to eke out a few batches in the intervals between power failures. The old-timers behind the pink Formica counter had a Pittsfield station on the radio, and the announcer told us that the storm had downed trees and power lines all over Berkshire County. We were advised to expect sporadic blackouts throughout the day and- based on the latest forecasts- more storms by evening. In the meanwhile, he said, road crews were out in force, making what progress they could with chain saws and cherry pickers.

I’d passed some of those crews earlier that morning, when I’d driven north and east of town to case Calliope Farms. I’d found the place on an otherwise empty stretch of muddy washboard, off something called Roaring Brook Road. It was near the Housatonic River and at the base of a steep, densely wooded hillside that I knew from the map I’d bought in town was part of October Mountain State Forest.

The house and barn sat on a rise, well back from the road, behind a ragged stone wall and beside an unmown meadow. There was a white wooden post with a white wooden sign at the head of the gravel drive. The blue script letters were faded but legible: Calliope Farms. The drive was rutted and empty but for puddles, and the house looked closed up. I’d driven by slowly and kept on going for a mile or so. Then I’d turned the car around and waited ten minutes and driven by again. Nothing had changed when I passed the second time except my stomach, which felt tighter and more uneasy.

Jane was getting out of the shower when I returned with breakfast.

“The lights keep going on and off,” she said, as she wrapped herself in one of the inn’s terry robes.

“Reliable sources tell me they’ll be doing that all day.”

“That’s what the spa people said when I called. And without power they can’t heat the seaweed or something, so it’s no wrap for me- and no real estate either. It looks like it’ll be a bonbon day after all.”

“Sounds appealing.” I put the coffee and doughnuts on the bedside table and picked up my overnight bag. I unzipped the side compartment and took out the black waist pack. Jane blew on her coffee and watched me carefully. “I just need you to give me a lift,” I said.

It was after two when we turned off Roaring Brook Road and onto the washboard track. I killed the music and a few minutes later we rolled slowly by Calliope Farms. The driveway was still empty. Jane pulled over about a quarter mile past the white sign. Her face was tense.

“Leave your cell phone on,” I said. “I’ll call when I’m done and I’ll meet you back here.”

Jane flipped her phone open. “My signal’s spotty.”

I opened mine. “I’m okay if I point in the right direction.” I reached behind my seat and grabbed the waist pack.

“If you want me to, I could wait,” Jane said. “In case you knock and he happens to be there.”

I smiled and shook my head. “If he’s there, I’m going to have a talk with him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to talk?”

“Then I’ll be calling you pretty soon.”

Jane pursed her lips. “What if somebody else is at home?”

I smiled a little harder. “I’ll call you when I’m done,” I said.

Jane nodded but looked no less worried. “Well, be quick about it, okay? I don’t want to be sitting in that turret by myself if there are more of those storms coming.” I opened my door and Jane caught me by the sleeve and pulled me toward her. “Just be quick,” she whispered, and kissed me.

I climbed out of the car and waited while Jane turned around and drove off. Then I headed up the road to Calliope Farms.

The sky was a low restless mix of blue and white and stony gray, and the light shifted quickly from daytime to evening and back again. Wind seemed to blow from all points of the compass, by turns warm and cool, in light breezes and heavy gusts. Water fell from the leaves of the maples and lindens across the road and tumbled through the heavy undergrowth and ran in a stream along the roadside. Everything smelled of wet wood and grass and earth. The temperature was in the low sixties and I should have been warm enough in jeans and a sweatshirt, but somehow I wasn’t. I shook my arms out and flexed my fingers.

I buckled the waist pack around me and thought about what Jane had said and wondered again if I should have brought my gun. But my carry permit was no better here than it was in Jersey, and the Massachusetts laws were even stricter. Besides, I wasn’t planning on throwing down with anyone. If someone was at home, I’d talk- assuming they were in a talking mood. If they weren’t, I’d leave without a fuss. If no one was around, I’d get in and out as fast as I could. By the time I made it to the signpost I’d convinced myself, again, that I didn’t need the Glock.

The drive ended in a rough circle of packed earth and gravel, bordered by wet lawn and maple trees. The farmhouse was straight ahead. It was two neat stories in white clapboard, with green shutters, a green shingle roof, and two brick chimneys. There was a flight of wooden stairs from the path to a deep porch and the front door. The barn was to the left and set farther back from the turnaround. It had a low stone foundation, and its sides were wide white vertical boards. It had a hayloft and a big sliding door- both shut- and only a few windows, all high off the ground. The meadow I’d seen from the road stretched out beside and behind it.

I got closer to the house and saw that shades were drawn on all the windows. I climbed the porch steps and peered through the front door glass, but it was covered in a white curtain and I couldn’t see a thing. I pressed the bell, heard it chime someplace distant, and waited. After a minute or two I pressed it again. And again. Then I knocked loudly several times, and called out hello. And then I opened my pack.

The hardware and the doorframe were for shit, and I was inside in less than two minutes with no damage done. I closed the door behind me and looked down a dim hallway that ran through the house all the way to the kitchen. The walls were pale yellow, and the wide plank floors were dark and smooth. A stairway climbed along the wall to the right. The wind picked up outside and I heard raindrops tapping at the windows, but nothing else. Light filtered through curtains and shades, but it was gray and somehow subterranean. I pulled on vinyl gloves and sniffed the air. It was musty and damp and smelled a little of ammonia, but of nothing worse. I took a deep breath and a quick walk around and satisfied myself that no one was home. Then I took it from the top.

The attic was small, unfinished, drafty, and damp, and it was lit only by a single bulb and by the gray light that came in through the dormers. I pulled out my flashlight and flicked it on. Besides some storm windows and broken screens, and a box of moldy paperbacks, it was empty. The rain was steady now and loud above my head. I went down the narrow stairs to the second floor and into a bedroom.

It was simply furnished with a pair of wrought-iron beds and a bureau in green painted wood. There were green chenille spreads on the beds, with bare mattresses underneath. The floor was partly covered with a green and gray hooked rug, and a large aerial photo of what looked like the Tanglewood grounds hung on the wall. The windows looked out on the back of the house, on lawn, a small grove of apple trees, and the dark wooded hillside beyond.

The next bedroom was outfitted as an office, with oak file cabinets, a rolltop desk, and an oak swivel chair. There were framed New Yorker covers on the walls and dust and empty space in the cabinets and desk. There was even less in the small bathroom next door.

Next door to that was the master bedroom. I stood at the threshold and looked it over and felt my pulse quicken. It was larger than the other rooms, and it had a little more furniture: a big cherrywood bed, a cherry bureau, a small black writing table and chair, a hooked rug on the floor, a black-framed mirror on the wall. But where the other rooms had been tidy and battened down, this one was scrambled.

The king-sized mattress was stripped bare and lay askew on the bed frame. All but one of the bureau drawers stood open and empty, and that one was missing. I found it under the bed, and it was empty too. The closet door was ajar. There was nothing inside but a few hangers scattered on the floor, next to a pillow. The mirror was crooked and cracked.

The master bath was more of the same. It was larger than the one in the hallway, and equipped with expensive new fixtures that looked very old. But all the drawers and cabinet doors hung wide and gaping, like a lot of missing teeth. I went downstairs.

There was a study off the entrance foyer to the right. It was a narrow room with windows that looked onto the front porch, and it was furnished with a pair of green love seats, an oriental carpet, and Joseph Cortese’s music collection. The collection of vinyl, CDs, and DVDs filled six built-in floor-to-ceiling cabinets, and made what I’d found at Danes’s place look like a starter kit. The sound system occupied a seventh cabinet, and it was arcane and ominous-looking. The speakers were hung on the walls, along with a dozen photographs of a smiling Joseph Cortese, standing with musicians and conductors and friends. I’d seen two of the photographs before- one at Danes’s apartment and the other at Nina Sachs’s.

The living room was across the hall, and it connected through a wide entranceway to the dining room in the rear of the house. The furnishings were casual and comfortable-looking- slipcovered chintz sofas, fat leather chairs, a cherry coffee table, and brass lamps. There was a small linen chest beside one of the sofas, but it held nothing more than a deck of playing cards and a box of matches. Behind its brass screen, the fireplace was clean and empty.

I heard a rumbling sound, and the dim light coming through the shades grew dimmer. I went to a window and looked outside. The sky was a tumbling mosaic of gray on gray, and rain was falling even harder. Leaves were flying sideways from the trees.

I stood at the entrance to the dining room. A four-branch brass chandelier hung from the ceiling, above an old oak table and six oak chairs. There were three windows on the back wall and a connecting door to the kitchen on the right. There were moss-green curtains on wrought-iron rods over two of the windows. The third window, near the kitchen door, was covered only by a roller shade.

I pushed up a wall switch, and the chandelier came on. It shed a thin yellow light from bulbs shaped like flames. I crossed the room and looked at the bare window frame. There were empty ragged screw holes in the upper left-hand corner, and in the upper right were the bent remains of a bracket. The smell of ammonia was more pronounced. I knelt down and played my flashlight along the floorboards. There was a long irregular patch of wood that was scuffed and scratched and lighter than the rest of the floor. The ammonia smell was even stronger, and there was a smell of bleach too.

I took the putty knife out of my waist pack and worked it into the gap between the floorboards. I brought it out and there was something grainy, crumbly, and nearly black on the end. I shined the light along the irregular patch, in the seams between the floorboards. They were mortared with dried blood.

“Goddammit,” I said aloud. My voice sounded shaky and strange in the empty house. I got to my feet and went into the kitchen.

The kitchen was large and well appointed, with limestone countertops, glass-fronted cabinets, a green tile floor, and a pine table. I flicked on the overhead light. There was nothing in the big sink, but there was a new-looking coffeemaker on the counter and opened packages of paper plates and cups and plastic cutlery in one of the cupboards. The other cupboards were bare, and so was the refrigerator.

A half-glass door at the far end of the kitchen led to a mud room, with a washer and dryer, a utility sink, and a door to some wooden steps and the back lawn. There was a plastic gallon bottle of bleach in the sink, and another of ammonia. Both were nearly empty. There was a metal bucket beneath the sink with a big scrub brush inside. Its worn bristles were stained a dark brown.

Across from the dryer was another door, to what I thought was a closet. But I was wrong. It was a small rectangular room- a pantrywith deep shelves that wrapped around three walls and a rank smell that rushed up into my face. I ran my hand along the wall and found a light switch, and I felt an icy lump land in my gut.

It was a nest.

The floor was covered by a dirty blue gym mat and a sleeping bag and piles of wadded gray clothing, all surrounded by a berm of wet newspaper, greasy paper bags, and soda bottles. There was a large electric lantern on the lowest shelf, and a red portable radio, and on the shelf above that was a heap of torn and taped and badly folded road maps. The other shelves were bare. The odor was stinging- a humid, feral mix of decayed food, body odor, urine, and feces. And there was no mistaking it for anything else; it was a concentrate of what I’d smelled that day in Danes’s apartment building, when I’d gotten onto the elevator as Paul Cortese was getting off.

“Christ,” I whispered.

I turned off the light and closed the door and went back into the kitchen, and as I did there was a flash at the windows and a deep rumbling in the sky. The lights flickered out and then came on again. I looked at my watch and looked outside. It was after four, but the sky looked more like midnight. The storm was early.

I pulled out my phone and flipped it open. No signal. I went to the window. No signal. I moved around the room. No signal.

“Shit.”

I went to the entrance hall and doused the house lights behind me.

The porch was no shelter from the sideways rain, and I was soaked in less than a minute. I turned the flashlight on and the beam leapt forward six feet and vanished in the swirling air. I went down the steps and onto a path that was fast submerging, and I headed for the barn. Gravel and mud squelched and slid under my boots. The barn was thirty yards up the path, and no more than a sketchy silhouette until the lightning. Then, for an instant, it loomed above me, stark and flat and bone white- like an X-ray against the metal sky- and then it was dark again. I leaned into the wind. My hair was plastered to my head and rain ran down my back. I pointed the flashlight at the path and avoided the larger potholes and fell only twice.

I planted my boots in the mud and heaved on the sliding door, and it moved not an inch. I tried it again with no more success, and went around the corner of the barn, to the right. The building shielded me from the wind and a little of the rain, and I stayed close as I worked my way over stones and low vegetation toward the back end. I found another door about halfway along. I played the flashlight over it. It was a wide Dutch door with black iron latches and black iron hinges, and a shiny new hasp set into the doorframe. There was a shiny new lock hanging from it. I opened my waist pack and took out the pry bar.

This doorframe was not for shit and neither was the hardware, and I put a lot of back into it and wasn’t subtle. There was a tearing sound and the hasp came away from the frame, along with some long galvanized screws. I pushed the door open and stepped in.

It was black inside, and quiet, and it smelled of damp timber, damp earth, wet hay, and compost. There was a garage smell, too, of metal and rubber and gasoline and exhaust. And faintly, below these odors, was the scent of something else. I found a switch along the wall.

Lights hung from the big central beam, but they were few and dim, and heavy shadows were everywhere. Still, the high points were plain: the black timber bones of the place and the packed earth floor; the ladder to the hayloft at the front of the barn, near the sliding door that was chained and locked; the row of open stalls on the long wall opposite me; the large open space in the middle, and the big black Beemer parked there. My heart was pounding.

I walked to the car and the smell was stronger. I walked around the car. It had New York plates, of course, and of course they were Danes’s. The window glass was fogged inside, but not so clouded that I couldn’t make out the body in the back seat.