The Autumn Dead

Chapter 16

The back of my head hurt and the front of my head hurt and the side of my head hurt. There was a terrible taste in my throat and I needed to pee. Badly. The way you do when you wake at 2 A.M. from a night's drinking. I lay in a cluster of dead leaves over which a sheen of frost sparkled silver in the moonlight. My hand, for no reason I could understand, clutched a brittle brown pine cone.

I began the careful process of getting up, trying to gauge if I'd been hit hard enough to suffer a concussion, and wondering vaguely where the closest emergency hospital was.

The first thing I did was take care of my bladder. I leaned my left hand against a hardwood for support and then let go, the yellow stream raising steam and making a hard constant noise on the last of autumn's leaves. Then I took out my handkerchief and began daubing it against the back of my head. There was only a small smudge of blood on the white fabric when I held it out for appraisal. Despite a headache, I did not seem to be hurt badly. My watch said nine-fifteen. I'd been out less than fifteen minutes.

In the west wing of the house, on the second floor, I saw the arc of a flashlight splash across a pinkish wall, and then go dark. She was inside now. Busy. I wasn't going to let her get off easily. Not at all. I thought of Donna's joke-couldn't I trip the lady in leather just a little bit? I was going to trip her a whole lot.

I moved awkwardly at first, staggering a bit like a stereotypical drunk, but gradually I got used to the headache and moved with a little less trouble. When I reached the front yard, which was defined by severe flattop hedges on both east and west ends, I went up to the oak front door and tried the knob.

Locked.

I put my ear to the door. Faintly I heard the hum and thrum of a house at rest but nothing else.

I went around to the rear, to the area between the garage and back door. It was cold and my head still hurt, but I was angry with her now and I was damn well going to get to express my anger.

I tried the knob on the back door. It turned easily. I went inside, up three steps covered with a rubber runner, and into one of those open kitchens with a huge butcher-block table like a sacrificial altar in the center, and pots and pans hanging from a suspension above. They gleamed in the moonlight falling golden through the mullioned windows. I smelled paprika and cocoa and coffee. I smelled thyme and mustard seed and basil. They were feminine smells and pleasant and I wanted to stand there for hours and float on them the way I used to float on marijuana. Contact high is the term I wanted, I think.

Upstairs she bumped a piece of furniture and it was loud as a truck overturning. She was searching for something, apparently, and apparently searching desperately.

I wrapped my hand around my flashlight and proceeded through a house with accents of bricks and brass, with beams over the living room, and crown moldings everywhere. The furnishings ran to Early American but I don't mean the stuff you see in suburban furniture stores. I'm talking, among others things, two items of special note: fan-back Windsor chairs and a Chippendale mahogany slant-top desk, items antique hunter Donna would get goofy about. I'd always known that Larry Price had come from a wealthy family; I just hadn't known how wealthy.

A sweeping staircase curved up into the darkness at the top of which two long narrow windows let in light.

I moved as quietly as I could up the stairs. At the top I smelled perfume from the master bedroom that lay thirty feet away. An eighteenth-century walnut longcase clock tocked the time. I looked down the hall. Light from her flash shone in a room at the end of the hall, between door and jamb.

The clock covered any noise my tiptoe steps might have made. I was going to go in fast and make no concessions just because she was female. I was going to trip the hell out of her.

The door was open maybe three inches. I raised my foot to kick it in.

But I didn't have to. She yanked it open for me.

And then stood there with a very fancy silver-plated.45 in her hand and said, "You bastard. I should kill you right here."