I.O.U Page 15

  He was unforgiving of himself.

  Until he heard the sound of his wife’s voice inside his head. She was laughing at him, and saying, “Oh, knock it off.”

  The guilt that had been tearing at his breastbone like a serrated knife every time he breathed, dulled a little. Geof smiled to himself. But it was a close-lipped smile. He didn’t want that cold wind on his teeth.

  He walked up to the garage.

  It had become important to him to know whether the intruder had arrived before me or had followed me home. If the former, then the intruder would have had to hide and wait somewhere, either in the garage itself or in his own car, which would have been hidden somewhere, probably close by, on the grounds.

  For this search, he switched on his flashlight.

  Again, he walked our yard around the garage, still searching for some sign that a vehicle had parked there. But there was no broken grass, no faint track in the frozen dirt, no freshly broken gravel that Geof could detect, no oil or antifreeze drippings, no easy, overt sign. By the time he abandoned that search, Geof was glad to enter the comparative shelter of the garage. It wasn’t warm, but at least he was out of the wind.

  He switched on the overhead light, but, since it didn’t reveal every corner, he kept his flashlight on, as well. Where could a person hide in this garage? Behind the lawn mower? Behind the snow blower? Behind the empty gasoline can? There was no place to hide here. None at all, none, none, goddamned none. Not on the cement floor, not in the ceiling, not on the walls, not in a window well. No place to run, no place to hide.

  If there’d been somebody waiting inside here, Jenny would have seen them in her headlights, he thought. But if there’d been a car hiding behind the garage, he wouldn’t necessarily have found any track of it.

  Had he followed her home?

  Wouldn’t she have noticed headlights or an engine?

  Not if the headlights were turned off, she wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t have heard anything if she had her windows rolled up and the radio turned on. Although it hadn’t been turned to “on” when he found her. She’d been singing at the top of her lungs, she’d said. Idiot. He smiled at the thought of it.

  Maybe the bastard waited at the turnoff long enough for her to drive a ways up the gravel road. Then turned in, his headlights off, keeping his foot off the brake, maybe driving in second gear. Or maybe he only drove partway up the drive, hid his car off the road there, and walked the rest of the way. But that would have been taking the chance that Geof might have come home and caught his car—and him—dead in Geof’s headlights.

  No, Geof thought, he had to have preceded her.

  Parked outside, somewhere beyond her vision.

  Silently got out of his car.

  Quietly closed his door. Or he’d already unscrewed his interior lightbulb so it wouldn’t shine if he left his door open.

  Walked toward the garage, avoiding the gravel, keeping to the dirt.

  Sneaked into the garage, where Jenny sat in her car.

  No. That wouldn’t work. Couldn’t logically work.

  She’d have looked up. Moved. Fought. Struggled. Run away. But when he, Geof, had found here, she was lazily slumped over her steering wheel, her hands limp beside her, her hair falling neatly to the sides of her face. Nothing mussed. Nothing awry. Just Jenny, fallen gently forward to sleep.

  Oh, shit, he was forgetting the beer.

  She could have fallen asleep with the engine running. Must have, in fact. And so maybe the bastard walked in on her, saw an opportunity, and took it.

  Or…

  When the last idea came to Geof, he felt as if the wind from Nova Scotia had whipped into the garage and snaked into his clothes, chilling him all over, turning him to gooseflesh.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “He could have been in the car.”

  The bastard could have ridden home with her, could have been in the car with her all along, lying on the floor of the back seat.

  No, because then how would he get away from here? Maybe somebody else drove after him and picked him up. No, that was getting pretty complicated and the more complicated it got, the more unlikely it felt.

  Feeling frustrated and impotent, Geof walked back out of the garage and glared at the sky: “Come on. Give me an answer. Give me something.”

  He glanced over at the cottage, where we always left enough lights burning to fool almost anybody into thinking we were home. The front door knocker, a brass seashell that had been a housewarming/Christmas gift from my sister, gleamed dully under the scudding clouds. It was pretentious, according to our taste, but we had felt we almost had to put it up. He glanced away from it, and then looked back again, puzzled. Was he seeing an optical illusion? He walked toward the circle drive in front of our house and then up our front walk. He hadn’t used this door since the morning he’d come home to find me prostrate in bed, and he knew I couldn’t have used it at any time past Tuesday morning. And anyway, we wouldn’t have knocked at our own front door.

  And yet the brass door knocker, stiff in its newness, was half lifted off its base, as if in mid-knock. He knew that if you didn’t push it down, it wouldn’t fall into place of its own weight, because it was still too new, too resistent. Somebody had knocked at this front door, recently.

  He backed away and then carefully made his way back down the walk to the circle drive. He hadn’t previously paid much attention to this part of the property, because he had assumed the would-be murderer would have tried to hide his presence at the house. It had not occurred to him, before this moment, that the person might have parked out in the open, and maybe even have openly knocked at the front door. Geof ran his flashlight beam over the expanse of gravel driveway that lay before him, and almost immediately picked up in the beam a glimmer of plastic. He moved closer to find it was a cup, the kind that comes with coffee or tea that drops out of vending machines, and just the kind of detritus that falls unnoticed out of cars when their doors are opened.

  He walked, restraining himself from running, back the length of the long road to get his car—with its evidence envelopes and fingerprinting kit—but his heart was pounding with the surge of adrenaline that always accompanied a break in any murder case. A plastic cup and a lifted knocker weren’t much. But maybe they’d lead somewhere, to someone.

  When he finished with his camel-hair brush, his dusting powder, camera, and tape, Geof put on the gloves he kept in his pocket but seldom wore, and returned one last time to our garage. By then, fully frustrated by the awkwardness of having to perform evidence-gathering that he wasn’t used to doing, his feeling of euphoria had disintegrated into hopelessness. He was cold, he was tired. He was pissed at everybody as he jerked open all the doors of my car.

  He shone his flashlight inside, examining the floor carpet quarter inch by quarter inch, growing increasingly annoyed with me for the fact that I hadn’t bothered to vacuum my car for what looked to him like the last six years. (Unfair—I’d only had the car a couple of years.) He found a few coins and gum wrappers, a week-old newspaper, folded in half, and a plastic rain hat. He found one mitten stuck down between the front seats. A plastic box for a cassette tape. A pencil that needed sharpening. A parking ticket, six weeks old. (Of course, that really frosted him.) He gathered them all in a sack and brought it all back to the hospital that night. Then he walked into my room…

  And gave me hell.

  14

  “CHRIST, JENNY, HOW COULD YOU?”

  Geof’s fingers were trembling with anger and cold as he placed the brown paper bag in my lap. He held another, smaller brown bag in his other hand, but he kept hold of that one. At first he stood over my bed, looming large, and then he paced up and down in front of me, coming as close to yelling as you can in a hospital room without bringing a nurse on the run. He’d awakened me, none too gently, and then he’d exploded.

  “I told you to take a cab! Hell, if I’d known you were going to drive, I’d have dropped everything and picked you up. Why the hell
did you drive when you knew you’d had too much to drink?” (It didn’t seem like the best time to mention the Valium.) “How could you just blithely drive home, knowing you were loaded, knowing you could wreck the car, maybe kill yourself or somebody else? Were you sleepwalking? What in God’s name were you thinking of to—”

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  “That’s pretty damned obvious!”

  “I was very tired, Geof.”

  “I don’t give a shit if you were asleep on your feet, you were an idiot to—”

  “I made a mistake, Geof. I’m sorry. There were extenuating circumstances. You know what my life has been like in the past week, you know. I was exhausted. I wasn’t thinking straight, I probably wasn’t even walking straight. The booze affected my judgment. That’s what booze does! I didn’t realize what bad shape I was in. I’m sorry I was careless. But you have to stop yelling at me. You have to stop yelling at me!”

  His jaw was so tight it looked wired shut.

  He walked over and threw himself into the chair beside my bed. But he wasn’t through with me.

  “It’s goddamned freezing outside. I parked the car by the highway and I walked the whole length of our drive and I stood there outside our garage and I tried to figure out how it happened. How come, if he followed you, I couldn’t find any place for him to hide? How come, if he got there first, I couldn’t find any sign that he’d been there? The damned wind sock was sticking straight out, the wind was blowing so hard I thought my ears would freeze and drop off my head.” He held out his red, raw fingers for me to see. “It was cold, Jenny. I’m still cold. If somebody hadn’t already tried to kill you, I think I might do it myself. Christ, how could you be so stupid?”

  I knew what this was all about. It was about love and anxiety and guilt over something as small as not changing a battery in a garage door opener. But even understanding him, I didn’t see any reason why I had to take this. Just because your two-year-old loves you, doesn’t mean you have to laugh it off when he throws his blocks at you.

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” I said.

  He looked up, saw in my face what I felt, and deflated a bit. He let his breath out. He bent his head, and rubbed his poor, raw hands on his jeans. When he looked up again he appeared just slightly embarrassed.

  “Not for any reason,” I said. “Not ever.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Believe me, I am, too.” I indicated the brown paper bag he’d dumped on my lap. “What’s this?”

  Instead of answering me, he opened the mouth of the smaller brown bag and held it forward for me to look inside. “What’s this?”

  “A brown plastic coffee cup with a white rim?”

  “I found it on the gravel in our circle drive. Could it be yours?”

  “I don’t see how. Looks like one of those cups that comes out of those vending machines you find in company lunchrooms. You know? The kind where the cup comes down and then hot water comes out of one spigot and instant coffee comes out of another? We don’t have anything like that in our building.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have come to visit us since yester day morning? Somebody who would park in the circle and walk up to the front door and use the brass knocker?”

  “No. You know as well as I do that we get very few Fuller Brush men out there. Are you telling me that’s what this person did who tried to kill me? He had himself a cup of coffee, and then he just strolled up to the front door?”

  Geof shrugged. “The knocker was pushed partway up, and this cup was in the drive.” He pushed himself up from the chair. “Don’t open the other bag yet.” He strode toward the door, saying, “I’ll be right back.”

  I sat on the bed, staring at the bag, until he returned—carrying a long box of aluminum foil. “A nurse found it for me in their lunchroom,” he said, as he began to roll out a long span of foil, which he tore off. “Lift up the bag.” After I did, he spread the sheet of foil on my lap on top of the blanket. “I’m leaving, but I want you to carefully empty that bag onto this foil. Don’t let any of it fall on the bedcovers or onto the floor.”

  “What’s in here, Geof?”

  “The contents of your front and back seats.”

  He made a face, as if he’d just touched old bubble gum left on the underside of a table.

  “No editorial comments, please,” I said.

  “Don’t touch any of it. Identify everything you can. Is it yours? Have you ever seen it before? Where’d it come from and how long has it been there—a week, ten days, three generations, since the last Ice Age—”

  “Ahem.”

  “Then wrap it all up inside the foil and put it back into the bag without touching anything but the foil. Can you do that?”

  I widened my eyes. “Gee, I don’t know, Lieutenant, it may be beyond my simple powers of—”

  He leaned very close to me, until I could smell orange Life Saver on his breath, and he said in his most threatening cop’s voice, “Do not give me any crap, Jennifer Lynn. I am the one who is going back out into the fucking cold again. You are staying behind in this nice warm bed. I deserve for you to be especially nice to me. If you so much as say one smartass thing, I will tell the first nurse I see that the patient in room 1242 needs an enema.”

  “That’s coercion,” I said.

  He leaned even closer, and kissed the top of my head. “Well, just don’t say you haven’t been advised of your rights.”

  “That’s your version of the Miranda Warning?”

  Geof pointed a finger at me as he turned to leave the room, taking the smaller bag with him. “You have the right to remain silent. There’ll be somebody outside this room to watch out for you. Goodnight.”

  It wasn’t actually all that easy to funnel the contents of the bag onto the foot-wide strip of foil that Geof had spread on top of me. A few coins fell out first, followed by a pencil that wanted to roll over my legs. I stopped it in the nick of time by raising my knees to make a valley of the blanket and foil. One by one the other items tumbled out, with the exception of the folded newspaper, and I managed to keep it all off the bed covers. If any of this was evidence, I knew that Geof didn’t want my blanket or clothing fibers mixing with it to confuse the lab technicians.

  Then I set about trying to identify the stuff.

  I was delighted to see the mitten, a black one with metallic silver weaving, that matched a twin in the pocket of one of my coats at home. So that’s where the little sucker had gone, fallen down between the seats, most likely.

  The coins added up to forty-six cents and although I couldn’t really identify them as mine I guessed they had probably bounced out of the console tray where I kept loose change for bridge tolls and for buying coffee at drive-through restaurants.

  There was a plastic rain hat—one of those ugly transparent jobs that’s pleated to fit into a little pack and that has ties for fastening under your chin. (The kind you can never find when it’s raining and you just had your hair done, but which you’re most likely to be wearing when you run into an old boyfriend you haven’t seen in sixteen years.) I recognized it as the one I’d frantically searched my purse for one night when the heavens opened just as I was about to get out of my car to meet Geof at the theater.

  The plastic cassette box was probably the one that held the Joni Mitchell tape that was probably still inserted into my car’s tape player. I hummed a few bars of “Carey” (“you’re a mean old daddy, but I love you”), as I considered the lineage of the pencil that needed sharpening, the newspaper folded in half, the gum wrappers and the…

  Oops, an overdue parking ticket.

  I hoped Geof hadn’t noticed the date on it. Cop’s spouses are supposed to be more law-abiding than I was about parking tickets. He found it annoying to get an inter-office memo informing him that there was going to be a warrant put out for the arrest of Jennifer L. Cain if Ms. Cain didn’t pay her latest ticket within the next ten days. The reason he found it annoying was that h
e usually went in and paid it himself, rather than trust me to do it on time.

  The newspaper was probably mine. Couldn’t prove it, but it probably was. I tended to take the morning paper to the car with me so that if I should get stuck somewhere in my car that day with nothing to read—God forbid—I could pull out the paper and read Sam Hayes’s latest editorial fulminations.

  The pencil? Could be mine, maybe not.

  The gum wrappers, from sugarless bubble gum, were definitely not mine. They were definitely my nephew Ian’s, from those alternate Wednesdays when I drove him to soccer practice with two of his chomping, smacking, bubble-blowing buddies. I’d get them for this, those ungrateful little brats, for daring to leave a mess of paper and foil in the back seat of my immaculate car. And I knew just how I’d punish all three of them: I’d make them chew with their mouths closed. Oh, shit, what was today? Wednesday? My turn to drive? Darn it, yes, I’m sorry, Ian. I glanced over at the potted plant that looked as if it had come from the produce section of a grocery store: Is that why you’re neglecting me, Sherry, because I missed car pool?

  So that was it. Evidence examined. Most of it (fairly) positively identified, everything but the pencil. I stared at it, thinking what an unlikely “clue” it was. I mean, how threatening is a killer who leaves the stub of a yellow No. 2 pencil behind?

  Suddenly I felt as if ice water had dribbled across my shoulders. I hunched violently forward with the chill of it, nearly spilling my treasures out onto the blanket. My hands went ice-cold, too, and my feet and the end of my nose, as if somebody had opened a window, letting in a blast of frigid air. I was shaking so that I could barely manage to fold up the “evidence” inside the foil and then place it all back in the paper bag.