Lye In Wait: A Home Crafting Mystery Part 2

"Yeah, I know about that stuff. But the family stuff-do we have any of that in our family?"

"Well, I can tell you my grandmother lived to be ninety-seven, which is pretty close to a hundred. And my grandfather lived to be ninety-four. Is this about Walter?"

"Well, of course it is, Mom." Erin sounded a little exasperated at the question. Then a wry expression crossed her ten-year-old face. The look flickered away, and she said, "At least it sorta is."

I said, "Walter had an accident, Bug. His age didn't have anything to do with it." I didn't know how much Meghan had told her daughter about the details of the "accident" The police had still been down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, sampling or measuring or doing whatever it is they do, when Erin came home from school. She'd wanted to go watch them, but Meghan nixed that idea.

Erin nodded. "Yeah. But him dying just made me think about other people dying, is all." She leaned over her plate and stuffed a huge dripping bite of spaghetti in her mouth.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Meghan asked.

Erin shook her dark curls. But a moment later she swallowed and said, "Walter said he used to drink a lot."

Meghan shot me a glance, and at that moment I was really glad I wasn't the mom, didn't have to handle all the tough questions. Though Erin still managed to hit me with the occasional unexpected zinger from out of left field.

"Walter was a recovering alcoholic. Some bad things can come from drinking, but you have to understand that it's a disease. It didn't make him a bad man," Meghan said.

There, I thought. I never would have handled that so well. She seemed to find just the right words.

But Erin looked stricken. "I never thought he was a bad man." Her fork clattered to the table, and she pushed her chair back. Tears welled up in her eyes. "I loved Walter. He was funny and nice and he showed me how to plant things and build things and he let me help him sometimes and he liked to talk about baseball, and... and..." She turned and fled up the stairs to her room, crying in earnest now.

Meghan shot me a helpless look, then picked up a whining Brodie from the foot of the stairs and carried him up to help console her daughter. I sat alone at the wooden table for a few minutes, poking my fork at strands of pasta. Then I got up and started sc.r.a.ping the mounds of food from the plates.

Sometimes the right words just don't exist.

FOUR.

AFTER CLEANING UP THE dishes I went downstairs. Three wholesale orders of soap remained to package, box up, and send, and I needed to make up for some of the time I'd lost that day. But once in the bas.e.m.e.nt, I knew I couldn't work down there that night. I was so tired my bones felt mushy, and the stark pools of fluorescence from the track lighting hurt my eyes.

The authorities had been very tidy; there was no indication Walter had ever been in my workroom. The gla.s.s was gone, but the spilled sodium hydroxide mixture had eaten into the rag rug and soaked into the concrete floor, creating an ugly stain. I got out the apple cider vinegar I used for much of my cleaning, poured some straight onto the stain and left it. It probably wouldn't remove the mark, but the acid would neutralize the alkaline in the lye. As I capped the bottle, I caught a whiff, and the spicy-sour smell lodged in my throat.

I tossed the rug in the garbage.

A smear of black powder came away on my hand when I closed the hasp on the cupboard. I'd have to get another lock. Besides sodium hydroxide, the cupboard contained pota.s.sium hydroxide, which is another kind of lye used for liquid soaps. I had only a small amount, as I didn't have any liquid soaps in my current product repertoire. Considering it now, I realized many of the substances I used could be dangerous. Peppermint could burn skin if applied full strength, as could clove or cinnamon oils. In fact, I didn't know of any essential oils that could be used full strength with any guaranteed safety. Only wintergreen oil is actually regulated by the FDA. But none of them could do the kind of damage the lye had done, and frankly, all were far milder than some of the chemicals you would find in a typical cleaning closet. Still, I'd pick up a couple extra locks while I was at it.

The room spanned the width of the house, and windows lined the upper halves of three walls. The front wall snugged up to a hill, so there was no front entrance to the bas.e.m.e.nt except the stairs from the kitchen above. I walked the perimeter, checking the lock on each window. I hadn't bothered with curtains or blinds, wanting as much natural light as possible during the workday. Tonight I felt the eyes out there; not benign nighttime critters going about their business, but threatening, malignant eyes. I shrugged off my heebie-jeebies. A penchant for too much Stephen King combined with finding a dead man-granted, a particularly gruesome-looking dead man-and there I went getting all spooked by the dark like some neurotic schoolgirl.

I paused in front of the window by the back door. My smudgy reflection gazed back at me from the gla.s.s. Next to Meghan and Erin, it's like I'm from a different planet, one with a stronger gravitational field. I feel stout and unwieldy, blonde and big-boned. In reality, I'm not any of those things, except blonde. At five foot six, I do have bigger bones than the Bly family-but so does a goodsized crow. When I'm out among normal people, I'm an attractive enough woman in my mid-thirties, with my long hair in a practical braid down my back and a tendency toward simple Eddie Bauer-esque clothing so I don't have to think too hard about how to put myself together in the morning.

Tonight all that showed in the gla.s.s pane was a wavering outline of my features and reflected glare from the overhead lights. And then it was Bobby Lee looking back at me, the same light hair, the same snub nose, the same genetic mix as mine, with the same sense of humor and way of looking at the world. For a moment his absence skewered through my solar plexus, and I began to close my eyes against it.

But I blinked and stood up straight again as my eyes refocused on a bright rectangle across the alley. While seeing a light on in someone's window on a dark October evening isn't unusual, this one was: this light shone in Walter Hanover's cottage.

Flipping off the switch for the tracks overhead, I peered out at the night. Definitely Walter's.

My father always left the lights on when he exited a room. So had my husband. Apparently our handyman had managed to live up to his Y chromosome, as well.

Opening the door, I stepped outside. Walter had told us he hid his spare key under a flowerpot on the windowsill. There couldn't be a better time to use it. The wind kicked up, and, as I ran through the chilly darkness, fallen leaves swirled around my tennis shoes and whapped at my legs like faint hands.

At the back door to the cottage, I saw I didn't need the key after all. Walter hadn't pulled the door closed all the way, and the wind had nudged it open a crack. Inside, I turned to shut it behind me, and my elbow hit a pile of old magazines stacked on an end table. They slid in all directions, slapping onto the floor like wet fish. I picked them up, restacked them on the table, and then gave my attention to the rest of the room.

This was the first time I'd been inside Walter's house, and I found myself at the rear of the living room. And it looked like he had done a lot of living in it. The open s.p.a.ce formed a stubby ell around the enclosed kitchen. The front door opened into a small tiled entrance. One doorway to the kitchen opened off the tile, and the second, ahead and to my right, allowed access to the kitchen from the other end of the ell. In the dim light I could just make out the shadowy plane of a countertop.

Straight ahead of me a sagging and dusty sofa hunkered under the window facing the street, the claret-colored plush rubbed off the arms and seat cus.h.i.+ons, leaving behind pink swaths like exposed skin. A coffee table squatted in front of the sofa, its fauxwood surface punctuated with dozens of sticky fingerprints between the piles of magazines and several half-full water gla.s.ses. Built-in shelves marched down the wall to my right, their original light wood darkened by age and neglect. Behind me, an ornate floor lamp with silk ta.s.sels hanging from its dingy shade emitted the light I'd spotted from my workroom. The cottage was silent except for the loud ticking of an old black-and-white clock like the ones that had hung above the cla.s.sroom doors in my high school years ago.

I took a few steps down the short hallway, flipped on the light, and peered into the bedroom. Nothing to see. A row of work clothes hanging in the closet. An unmade bed. Next to it, a grungylooking bathroom smelling of mildew and Old Spice.

Back at the built-in shelves, I poked at the spa.r.s.e detritus. Pictures and office supplies, a signed baseball, a bowl of soggy peppermint candies, junk mail, catalogs, a stuffed bear wearing a Santa hat, three screwdrivers, a pack of gum, a wooden duck decoy, a chunk of petrified wood, an electric razor with bare wires sticking out the back, a stained pad of fis.h.i.+ng flies, a book on baseball collectibles, a Bible, and among it all, the ubiquitous magazines. Walter had subscribed to everything from Newsweek and Popular Science to Sports Ill.u.s.trated and Nature, and it didn't look like he'd thrown a single issue away. Ever. Dust streaked everything, a mottled, fuzzy coating as if the items had been handled and returned to their spots with most of the dirt intact.

One of the framed photographs showed an elderly woman, dark gray eyes looking out of a face encased in crepe-paper wrinkles and topped by a thick white braid coiled into a crown on her head. She sat in a wheelchair, scowling, while someone in a poor excuse for a rabbit suit leaned over and put a fluffy pink arm around her shoulders. HAPPY EASTER FROM CALADIA ACRES was stamped in dark pink metallic type across the bottom of the photo. Caladia Acres was a nursing home on the north side of town.

Other pictures revealed a much younger Walter than the one I'd known. In one, he looked about ten, laughing open-mouthed as a beagle puppy slurped his chin. In another, Walter and two other boys who looked like him-brothers, I a.s.sumed-posed with a humongous fish, grins all around. Four earlier pictures of the gray-eyed woman, black-haired and sans Easter bunny, convinced me she was their mother. One picture showed four teenagers: Walter, two boys, a girl-sister?-his mother, and a man I a.s.sumed was his father.

His baby picture, a sepia-toned, formal studio portrait, perched on a shelf by itself. He'd been a beautiful baby, and I don't mean that in the all-babies-are-beautiful sense. While I could easily see the resemblance to the man I'd known, age and alcohol, if what Erin had said at dinner was true, had imposed their effects on his features. Nice as he may have been, I'd never considered Walter to be a goodlooking man.

I knew I should turn off the light and go back home, but my curiosity proved more powerful than my guilt. Next to the shelves, a card table covered with a mountain of loose paper beckoned to me. A metal folding chair invited me to sit down. Seconds later I'd dived in, rifling through an amazing array of unorganized information. Someone would have to step in and take care of things like the funeral. His mother might still be in the nursing home, but I saw Walter every week, sometimes every day, and he'd never mentioned her. Maybe she'd predeceased him. If not, I wondered whether she knew he was dead. Of course, the police had all sorts of ways to find out about next of kin, and they would have told her.

Many of the smaller slips were receipts. I found a few from the previous year for Caladia Acres, but the others had me stumped. They were receipts for donations. Walter had given money to the March of Dimes, Save the Children, Children's Miracle Network, and half a dozen other charities. This inexplicable generosity both shocked and touched me. I added up the cl.u.s.ter of figures in my head. The total came to over $300,000, and I doubted I'd unearthed all the receipts.

The crash of breaking gla.s.s in the kitchen wrenched me to my feet, heart pounding. I whirled, squinting into the dark. From my vantage I could see only the faint outlines of counters, the gleam of the white refrigerator. Something on the floor glittered. Feeling like the girl in the slasher films you know is going to die because she's too dumb to run when the background music sounds like that, I moved to the doorway of the kitchen, tiptoeing as if the carpet wouldn't effectively m.u.f.fle my footsteps. I must have looked like an idiot.

But I stopped berating myself when I heard the front door open and then close on a m.u.f.fled oath. A shadow pa.s.sed outside the kitchen window. Groping along the wall, I found the kitchen light switch and fumbled it on. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes. The counters were cluttered with everything from cereal and cracker boxes to coffee mugs and empty soup cans. An explosion of gla.s.s shards littered the yellowing linoleum floor, dull reflections in the weak overhead light. A s.h.i.+ver skipped across my shoulders.

"Police. Turn around slowly."

My heart, already hammering away quite nicely, thank you, took another leap in my chest. I turned to find the sandy-haired officer from that morning standing in the doorway off the alley. His hand hovered near the gun in his unsnapped holster.

"Miz Reynolds?" His palm relaxed away from his hip, and I found myself able to breathe again.

"I just saw him go by the kitchen window. Maybe you can still catch him," I said.

His voice took on an edge. "What're you doing in here?"

I gestured toward the floor lamp. "Saw the light on. Doesn't matter. But someone was in here with me, and they just hightailed it out the front way. C'mon!" I moved toward the entryway, motioning for him to follow. He didn't budge.

"Who was it?" he asked.

"I don't know. I didn't see them."

"Then how do you know someone was here?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake! I was sitting at that table and heard a crash in the kitchen. When I went to look, the front door opened and closed. Then you sneaked up behind me, which, I can tell you, did nothing for my nerves."

"So this was just before I came in."

"Yes! You saw me looking in the kitchen, didn't you?"

"Sure. Standing there in the doorway looking around. Tell me again why you're here?"

"I saw the light was on and came over to turn it off."

"Ah. And perhaps you couldn't find the switch and thought the instruction manual might be among Mr. Hanover's papers." He pointed to the card table and then to me. I looked down and realized I still clutched several receipts.

I dropped them on the table like they were on fire. "What are you doing here, Officer? Isn't your s.h.i.+ft over by now?"

"We're shorthanded-I'm working a double. And we got a call that someone was moving around in the house."

"See! Someone was here."

"Yes. Someone was" Sarcasm laced his smile. I counted myself lucky he hadn't shot me out of youthful enthusiasm.

"Listen, Officer-what's your name, anyway?"

"Owens"

"Well, Officer Owens, I saw the light and came over. It's not like I broke in. The back door was open when I got here. And Walter didn't talk about family much, so I don't know who'll be taking care of the funeral arrangements. When I saw his paperwork, I thought maybe I could find out. We were friends, Officer. And he died a horrible death in my workroom today."

"I'm sure I locked that back door when I left this afternoon."

But I thought I saw a spark of doubt in his eyes. "You were in here?"

He nodded.

"Well, if you locked the door, then someone broke in before I came over.

"Or someone had a key," he said, with a look that said it would be nice if I produced said key immediately.

"Or someone had a key." I sighed. "Look in the kitchen."

He did. I followed behind him.

"Was that broken gla.s.s all over the floor earlier?"

"No. So your intruder did that, huh?"

I could tell he thought I was responsible for the mess. But I was too distracted by the sudden, strong smell of peppermint to bother defending myself.

He switched off the lights and shuffled me out the door.

"Have you informed his mother already?" I asked once we were outside.

"They told her late this afternoon," Owens said as he carefully checked that the back door had latched behind us. "She'd probably welcome your help with the arrangements. Maybe it'll help you feel better about it, too. That lye you use is pretty nasty stuff."

The last comment made me want to kick him in the s.h.i.+n. I contented myself with a withering glance in his direction. He didn't seem to notice.

Walking across the alley to our backyard, Owens a.s.sured me he would check Walter's front door lock. Maybe take a look around the neighborhood for the person I'd heard in the house.

Yeah, right.

Back in my workroom, I checked the windows again. The exposure to the darkness outside spooked me on a deeper level now, and I didn't like the sensation. In the s.p.a.ce of a day, the feeling of safety I'd felt in my own home had vanished. I'd smelled peppermint mixed in with the lye Walter had spilled on my floor. Then that same smell in Walter's kitchen, left by someone who shouldn't have been there.

I didn't like the coincidence, didn't like it at all.

Could Walter have been driven to commit suicide?

Or perhaps, just perhaps, his death was something else altogether.

Maybe his mother really would like some help with the funeral arrangements. I'd make a trip out to Caladia Acres in the morning to see her-maybe Mrs. Hanover could tell me where the money for those donations came from.

Groaning at the thought, I realized I absolutely had to do some work tonight if I planned to take time out tomorrow to visit Walter's mother. Not down here, though. Not tonight. I loaded a large basket with bars of cut soap, handmade papers, and labels. The scent of lavender would soothe, so I'd package those first, then move on to the bars from which my special citrus blend wafted. An old movie on cable and a nice cup of chamomile tea would see me through.

FIVE.