No Safe House

Forty-five Terry

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked Vince over the phone, Cynthia huddled close to me to hear what he was saying. “What money? There’s money in this house?”

“You were always one of my first choices,” Vince said. “There’s no one squeakier clean than a teacher and a wife who works for the health department. Couple of responsible, decent civic employees. Police would never search your place. Not in a million years.”

“You’ve hidden something here? In our house?”

“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. I’ll be over in a while. I’ll take it off your hands.”

“You son of a bitch. If you’ve hidden something here, you’ve put us all at risk, you’ve—”

“I told you, I’ll take care of it.”

The line went dead.

“You heard that?” I said to Cynthia.

She nodded, but then she started shaking her head in disbelief. I could see the fear in her eyes.

“It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t get it.”

“You heard what he said. Because we’re squeaky clean. Because we’re the kind of people no one would suspect of hiding something illegal. Like stolen goods. Stolen money.”

I tried to get my head around it. Was that what Vince had been getting at when he asked me whether Stuart and Grace had gone anywhere in the Cummings house? Whether they’d been looking for something other than keys to the Porsche?

“Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath.

“What?”

“That’s what he’s doing. He’s hiding his money in other people’s houses, in case the cops ever raid his place.”

“That’s insane,” Cynthia said.

“Maybe. But if there’s money hidden in this house, and we haven’t got a clue about it, maybe it’s not as crazy as it sounds.”

We both looked at each other, dumbfounded. Finally, I said, “The basement. If that bastard hid something here, it’s probably in the basement.”

I walked hurriedly out of our bedroom, Cynthia close on my heels. Seconds after we passed Grace’s room, she poked her head out and said, “What’s going on?”

Neither of us answered. I was in the basement in less than ten seconds, heading for the furnace room. It was on the north side of the house, tucked into a corner of the rec room where we watched movies. A room four by eight feet, large enough for the furnace and the water heater and a few boxes.

“It could be in here,” I said.

“I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” Cynthia said. “A box of money? You gotta be kidding me. A shoe box? A wine box? What?”

“I don’t know.”

I grabbed the first two boxes I saw, both with Magic Marker scribbling on them. One read Family Photos, the other 2007 Receipts.

I dragged them out onto the rec room floor. Once I was on my knees, I opened the flaps of both boxes and dug my hands into them, pushing aside bits of paper and photo shop envelopes of old vacation shots that we’d never bothered to put into an album.

“Grab some more boxes,” I said.

“This is nuts,” Cynthia said, but she grabbed the boxes.

There were about a dozen of them. More receipts. More photos. Two boxes of movies on VHS that we’d somehow decided to save even though we hadn’t owned a VCR in nearly ten years. Boxes jammed with CDs we no longer listened to. Essays I’d written back when I was a student at UConn. We’d scattered the contents of the boxes all over the floor, making one hell of a mess.

There was no money.

Grace was standing at the bottom of the stairs looking at us. “Have you guys lost your mind?”

“What do you want, Grace?” I asked.

“What should I do about Teresa?” she asked.

Cynthia and I looked at each other. “What?” Cynthia said.

“She’s here. She’s upstairs. Should I tell her this is kind of a bad day? Or is everything sort of good now, except for the part where that guy broke in to probably kill me or something?”

Neither of us said anything. We were still looking at each other, and I suspected we were thinking the same thing.

Cynthia said, “Tell her we’ll be right up.”

Grace said, “Okay.” She disappeared back up the stairs.

“Vince’s guy needed a key to get in here,” I said.

“And the code,” Cynthia said. “Like you said before, there’s a bunch of ways he might have got a key, but the code? Only four people should know that code.”

We went upstairs together, found Teresa standing just inside the front door. She was in her late forties, early fifties. So far as we knew, she’d been cleaning houses since she came here from Italy thirty or so years ago. Teresa still had an accent, but her English was flawless, and I knew she devoured books like crazy. We gave her all our used paperbacks when we’d read them.

“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice high-pitched. “The car! What happened with the car? Something wrong with the brakes? You almost hit the house!”

“The steering,” Cynthia said gently. “I’m going to have to get them to look at the steering. There I was, driving down the street, and the next thing I knew, I was driving right across the lawn.”

“Oh!” she said, putting her hands to her cheeks. “You could have been killed!”

“No kidding,” Cynthia said, then smiled reassuringly. “It’s been quite a day.”

“I will make some tea,” Teresa offered. “It will calm you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“I’m surprised to find everyone home. Him,” she said, pointing at me, “I figured would be here, you teachers getting the summer off and everything, but I didn’t expect to find you and Grace, too. And a car in the yard! Are you moving back in? Please say yes! I know it’s none of my business, but it pains me that you two are apart. It’s not right. What do you want me to do? I can work, or I can come back another day if there is something going on.”

“Stay,” Cynthia said. “I’m hoping you can help us with something.”

“Oh yes?” she said, her face full of expectation.

“I want to tell you what happened this morning. Why I drove across the yard.”

“It was not a steering problem?”

“No. I was driving past the house, and I saw a man.”

“A man? What man? A man where?”

“There was a man trying to get into the house. I drove right across the lawn to scare him off.”

Teresa’s jaw dropped. “A burglar? Breaking in?”

“Well, he wasn’t breaking anything. He had a key.”

There it was. A small facial tic. A small tug at the corner of her mouth. “A key? A man with a key?” she asked.

“That’s right.” Cynthia was keeping her voice soft, unthreatening. “You see, Grace was here, and she heard him ring the bell, and then knock, but she didn’t want to answer the door to a strange man, so she did nothing. But then she heard him slipping a key into the lock.”

“My God, that is awful,” Teresa said. She saw Grace standing by the door to the kitchen. “You must have been terrified.”

“Yeah, kinda,” she said.

Cynthia continued. “It doesn’t seem like this man was worried about the alarm going off. You know, there’s that little sticker on the door that says the house has an alarm system, so he had to know the moment he opened the door he’d have to disarm it. So he had to know the code. He knew he’d be able to turn off the alarm.”

Cynthia paused, getting ready to go in for the kill.

“What we were wondering was, how could this man have a key and know the code? He’d have had to get one of our keys to make a copy, and someone would have had to tell him the code.”

Teresa swallowed. She glanced left and right, starting to look like a cowering, cornered animal. “Grace,” she whispered, not to her, but to us. “Teenagers, they like to get into houses when people are away, have parties and have sex.”

“Excuse me?” Grace said. “I heard that.”

“I am just telling you what I know about kids,” Teresa said apologetically, as if it wasn’t her fault.

“So you’re guessing that’s what the man told me?” Cynthia said.

Oh, interesting. Cynthia was going to go out on a limb here.

Teresa, incredulous, said, “You talked to this man? I thought you said you scared him off. When you drove at him.”

“Oh, I scared him,” Cynthia said. “Scared him good. He was even more scared when he tripped jumping over some bushes, twisted his ankle. Terry jumped on top of him.”

I was pleased to discover I had a role in this.

“That gave us a chance to ask him a few questions,” Cynthia said. “Before the cops came and took him away. Can you guess what he told us?”

Teresa still looked like that cornered animal, but no longer cowering. She was going to come out fighting.

“He told you lies,” she said, nearly spitting out the words. “Lies and bullshit.”

“Really?” Cynthia said. “You don’t even know what he said. What do you think he said? That you let him copy our key? That you told him the code?”

“The police... did he tell the police?”

“I don’t think so,” Cynthia said. “Maybe I could keep that from happening if you fill in the details.”

Teresa weighed whether to come clean, as it were. Cynthia gave her a few seconds to think about it. The woman’s eyes softened.

Finally, she said, “He said he would never do anything bad. He said he would never steal anything, break anything. He said no one would ever even know when he was here. He just needed to get into the house.”

“Did he tell you why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Teresa said. “And I didn’t ask him. All I asked was, was he a pervert, was he going to be putting in cameras to watch your daughter have a shower or something like that.”

Grace made a creeped-out face.

Teresa added, “He was a scary man, hard to say no to.”

“Describe him,” Cynthia said. She’d seen the man who’d tried to break in, but whoever approached Teresa and the man at our door might not be one and the same.

Teresa gave a short description that could easily have been Vince. “And he had this funny bump under his shirt and his pants,” she said.

Bingo.

“He came by here one day, almost three years ago. He had been watching the house, saw me letting myself in. Talked to me when I finished and was getting my car, found out I clean your house. He said maybe I could help him. I thought he meant clean for him, but he said no, something different. He’d already checked me out, knew my boy is in prison, said he could make it hard for him or easy for him because he knew people.”

Cynthia and I exchanged a quick look. Teresa had a son in jail? Who knew?

“Said if I helped him, he’d put in a word for my Francis, and he would give me some money, too.”

“So you sold us out,” Cynthia said.

Teresa bristled. “You think you matter more than my son?”

“We didn’t know anything about that,” Cynthia said.

“Of course you didn’t,” Teresa said. “You never ask me anything about my life. I am just the person who comes into your house and cleans your mess and shit and picks up after you.”

If that made Cynthia feel guilty, it was hard to judge by what she said next.

“You’re fired.”