No Safe House

Fourteen Terry

“I kind of blanked out, you know?” Grace told me, sitting in the car next to me as we tried to find the home she and Stuart had broken into. “Next thing I knew, I was out of the house. I guess I dropped the gun somewhere. Or maybe back in the house. Probably in the house, because it would have been hard to hold on to when I was crawling out of the basement, you know?” She was thinking. “Unless I put it on the ground outside before I got out. Maybe I picked it up and then threw it in the bushes on my way to the gas station.”

“Think, Grace. It’s important.”

She turned away, dropped her head, studied her hands. “I don’t know. The house. I’m pretty sure. I remember when I tried to open the front door, I think I was using both hands.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s good.”

But then she added, “I think.”

I slowed the car when we got to the intersection of New Haven and Gulf. “Which way did you come from?”

She pointed right, onto Gulf. “Down that way. That much I know.”

I put on my blinker and lowered my speed to allow Grace a chance to refamiliarize herself with the neighborhood. The first cross street we came to was George.

“Was it down here?” I asked, pointing left. Then, glancing in the other direction, “Or that way?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Everything looks the same.”

That was true. At night, with only a few streetlights to distinguish one house from another, I could understand her difficulty.

“Maybe when I see his car,” she said, “then I’ll know if we have the right street.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know, but it was old and really big. And sort of brown. I think I’d know it if I saw it. He didn’t park it right out front of the house. It was a few houses away.”

I drove past George. I passed Anchorage on the left, and shortly after, Bedford on the right.

“Wait,” Grace said. “I remember that.” She was pointing at a yellow fire hydrant. “I remember running by that.”

“So you must have come up Bedford,” I said, making a right.

“Yeah, I think I came along here.”

I barely had my foot on the gas. “Recognize any of these houses?”

She shook her head but said nothing. “Where’s his car?”

“This might not be the right street, hon.” We’d reached another street that came up from the south to join Bedford. Glen Street.

“Here!” she said. “I remember that sign. It was Glen. I’m sure it was Glen.”

I turned the wheel hard to the left. Glen took a gentle bend to the right a short distance ahead.

There were no big old cars parked along the street. There were no cars parked on the street at all. The homes along here all had driveways large enough to accommodate more than one car, so there wasn’t much need for people to leave vehicles on the street.

In a few seconds, I realized we had no place else to go. Glen dead-ended.

“If it’s on this street, then we must have passed it,” I said.

“I keep looking for the car. There’s no car.”

“Maybe Stuart’s okay and he went home,” I said, desperate for any positive development.

“Maybe,” she said.

I did a three-point turn at the end of Glen. “Okay, so study the houses on the way back, see if any of them look like the place.”

I was also trying to take some comfort from the fact that the street was not overrun with police cars, their lights flashing. If something had happened along here, it sure looked as though no one had any inkling of it yet. And a gun going off — someone would have heard that, right? Called the cops?

Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of times, people hear one shot, wait for a second, and when another one doesn’t come, they go back to sleep.

“Tell me about the house,” I said.

“It had two floors, and you couldn’t see the garage from the street because it was tucked around the back. It could be that one, or it could be that one, too, or — Cummings!”

“What?”

“That was the name. That was the name of the people who live there. Stuart said it was Cummings.”

I stopped the car, got out my cell, and opened the app that allowed me to find addresses and phone numbers. I entered “Cummings” and “Milford.”

I looked up from the phone, and then at the first house Grace had pointed to. “It’s that one.”

I killed the lights and the engine. “Let’s have a look-see.”

I grabbed a flashlight I kept under the seat. Grace was out of the car by the time I got around to her side. Tentatively, the two of us walked up the driveway.

“I never wanted to do this,” Grace whispered, taking hold of my arm, clinging to me. “You have to believe me.”

I said nothing. There was a part of me that wanted to go ballistic. To ask her what the hell she’d been thinking. To scream at her until I went hoarse. But not now. It was important that we both make as little noise as possible. Lectures would come later, but I feared a stern talking-to was going to be the least of Grace’s worries.

“Where did you go in?”

“Around back,” Grace said. “Stuart knew this trick, this thing he did, so the alarm wouldn’t come on. He was pretty good at it.” She turned to see whether I was looking at her, and I was. “Maybe he’s done stuff like this before.”

I still resisted the urge to scold, but my look conveyed the message. Her head slunk down lower on her shoulders.

Once we were around the back and the double garage was visible, I clicked on the flashlight. First I shone it through the garage windows, saw a red Porsche and another car in there. I’d wondered whether, after Grace had fled, Stuart had continued with his plan to take the car.

Assuming he was okay.

The fact that the car was there was not a good sign. But then again, was it a bad sign?

I turned the flashlight on the house and saw the open basement window. The first thing I looked for was a gun on the ground.

No sign of one.

“That’s where we got in,” Grace said.

I got close to the window, shone the light down into the basement, saw some shards of glass down there on the carpet.

“Let’s see if we can look inside without going in,” I said. I wanted to look through the kitchen windows. Most houses had the kitchen at the back of the house. The first-floor windows sat up some, the sills hitting me around the base of the neck. Low enough to get a peek.

There was flagstone right up to the wall’s edge, so I didn’t have to step into any gardens to put my face up close to the glass. A set of blinds covered the entire window, but they were turned to let the sun in, so I was able, at least in theory, to peer between the slats. I held the flashlight over my shoulder and angled it to shine light through them and into the house.

It worked. I was looking at the kitchen. There was a large granite-topped island, a fridge on the far wall.

“Can you see anything?” Grace asked.

Problem was, from my angle I couldn’t see below the level of the countertops. If someone was on the floor, I wasn’t going to be able to tell from out here.

“Not really,” I said.

There was one obvious solution, of course: call the Milford Police. They’d be able to get into this house without going through a basement window. They’d know how to contact the security firm that monitored the house. They’d know how to handle things properly.

They’d also have questions for Grace. About her and her boyfriend’s plan to steal a Porsche. About breaking into this house.

On the off chance that things were not as bad as they seemed, I wanted to keep the police out of this mess as long as possible. Preferably forever. I had a feeling Grace would accept whatever punishment her mother and I dished out if it meant she wasn’t spending time behind bars.

Stop going there.

I lowered the flashlight and backed away from the house a couple of steps. “I really can’t see anything,” I said. “And that’s just the kitchen. Maybe whatever you heard happened someplace else.”

I had to make a decision. Call the police, or—

“I’m gonna have to go in,” I said, glancing over at the open basement window.

“I can’t,” Grace said, eyes wide with fear. “I can’t go in there.”

“I’m not asking you to. You stay by the window. Better yet, call me on your cell. We’ll be connected the whole time I’m in there.”

We both got out our phones. I instructed her to mute the ring, and I did the same. Grace dialed mine, it buzzed in my hand, and I accepted the call.

“Okay. If there’s a problem out here, you just give me a shout.”

She nodded as I slipped the phone into my shirt pocket. Close enough that if she called out to me, I’d hear her.

I got down on my hands and knees and worked my way back through the open basement window.