A Crack in Everything Read online

  She studied the slashes of color. “I know,” she crowed.

  Lauren and I exchanged smiles, then I groaned and got to work while Lauren went to make iced tea, a delaying tactic no doubt. From my chair, I could see most of the kitchen. Enameled pots dangled off a ceiling rack that swayed every time Lauren walked past. “Is that hanging from Roddie’s mountain rope?” I asked when she returned with tea, apple juice, and three tall glasses of ice.

  “Yes, indeedy.” She poured juice for Delia and tea for me, ice cubes cracking when she hit them with a spout of boiling pekoe. “Before he left, he ran around the house testing it on everything in sight. He really likes the way it looks on the rack.” She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Even gave some to Delia’s camp for their swings. When Roddie gets obsessional, I just stand by till he lets go. Like this interest in politics.”

  “You think he’ll let go?”

  “I think he’ll try for alderman, and if he wins, Congress. One or two terms each. It’s the game that interests Roddie.”

  Me, too, I wanted to say. I loved grassroots campaigning, the analyzing, the strategizing. I even loved composing lists and thinking about the soap operas behind them: Will ninety-five year old Nathaniel Loveland be voting this year? Why are all the voters on Oakman Circle unaffiliated?

  While Lauren watched, I sorted carrier routes, number by stupefying number, but before I could demonstrate how to unstick labels and attach them to surveys in a single motion, she’d devised an efficient sweep of her own. Her movements had economy and grace, two qualities that don’t always go together; in minutes she’d labeled and stacked a neat pile of twenty-five. Then her cell phone rang, and she carried it into the den.

  Delia and I worked steadily with our crayons and elastics, and by the time Lauren came back, we’d organized the first lot. “Um, Susan?” She gripped the back of a chair, her color high, as if she’d just chugged a secret tipple from a hidden bottle. “Are you busy tonight?”

  I hedged in case she wanted a fourth at bridge, or yet more help with the surveys. “I’ll be at my office most of the evening. Was there something you needed?”

  “Oh, not really.” Her eyes strayed from my face to Delia to the surveys. “Do you think we could delay the mailing? The boys won’t be home till next week…and…well, they really wanted to help.”

  “Next week’s okay.” I hefted my bag, wondering if she’d meant to say something else. “One thing that does need doing quickly is the finance report. Odette thinks Roddie’s got more contributors’ names here at home.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Delia followed us into the den, sucking her thumb with a noise like a plunger while Lauren rooted through Roddie’s desk. Dozens of names turned up. “Great,” I said. “I’ll work them into the list.”

  Back in the hall, Lauren opened the front door; immediately, Delia yelled, “Don’t go!”

  “I’m not going anywhere, sweetie.” Lauren pulled her close.

  “Not you. Her.” Delia pointed a damp thumb at me.

  “I second that,” Lauren said. “Why don’t you stay?” She and Delia stood in the doorway, looking so lonesome in the waning light I almost changed my mind.

  “How about a margarita? I’ve got organic tequila and fresh limes.”

  “Could I take a raincheck?” I patted my bag. “If I don’t get Roddie’s finances organized tonight, I’ll lose my momentum.”

  Outside, the sun was an orange ball streaked with pencil clouds, the air more humid than before this morning’s drizzle. From the steps, Lauren and Delia watched me get into my car. When I looked back, they were still there, leaning into each other. I tootled my horn. Lauren waved, then stopped to smooth her daughter’s baby-fine iridium hair.

  On Commonwealth Ave. something pink on a telephone pole snagged my eye: Froy.

  ***

  At the office, I plugged Roddie into my quirky system for tallying donations and donors and manipulating the data into various purposeful lists. Some would call it a spreadsheet. I liked to think of it as my random access attic, in two dimensions. By the time I closed up shop for the night, I’d done everything but print a copy for Odette because I’d run out of paper, which was something that never happened to consultants with secretaries.

  Twenty minutes later, I was in my driveway, happy to see low wattage timer-lights in every downstairs window, which meant my landlords had gone to Vermont for the weekend, or longer. Maybe long enough for me to grub up my rent without touching Chaz’s retainer.

  Though I could have parked in their space, out of habit I pulled beside the hedge, a dense border of evergreens that hid the bungalow on the other side. The entire neighborhood seemed abandoned tonight, dimly lit and eerily quiet. Even the cicadas were silent, and as I trudged past the lawn, I was glad for the roof lamps that popped on and lit my way.

  At the bottom of the driveway a shape glimmered in the moonlight: the garden gate, as I perfectly well knew, but I halted in my tracks like Bambi scenting a lion. The evergreens started to churn, and I reared back, ready to race for my car, just as two cream-colored cats streaked down the driveway: Pasha and Soukie, the neighbors’ Persians. They flickered in and out of the hedge like heat lightning, finally scuttling under the gate. Damn cats.

  At the side door, I dug out my key. A familiar scent, cloves or carnations, stirred in the air near my head. I started to turn.

  “Don’t move.” Iron fingers gripped my neck. “Unlock the door.”

  “Who are you? Get away from me!”

  “Open the door! Do it!”

  I jabbed my elbow back, and a fist punched my spine. “Susan,” the voice hissed in my ear. “Do it or I’ll shred you.” Something sharp ripped across my shirt, and now my breast was on fire. The key fell from my fingers and hit the sidewalk with a sound that burned through my veins.

  “Pick it up.”

  I couldn’t breathe or move.

  “Pick it up or I’ll kill you!” He dug his fingers and thumb into the hollows beneath my ears, and I closed my eyes against the pain.

  “Let me go!”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Unlock the door!”

  I grabbed his wrist and threw myself forward. “Help me!” I screamed, my life a fraying thread in furious hands. “Please! Somebody help me!”

  Voices. Doors banging. “What’s going on? Where’s Pasha and Soukie?”

  Suddenly released, I collapsed, and my attacker vanished before my neighbors made it around the hedge. They called 911, and while I waited in their kitchen, sipping coffee, pressing towels to my wounded breast, letting Pasha and Soukie nose my ankles, terror faded and survivor’s euphoria seeped in. Luck was with me tonight. I had resisted and lived.

  “He tried to force me inside,” I told the police when they arrived.

  “Can you describe him?” The droopy-jowled older one talked; the younger one took notes.

  “He kept behind me. I didn’t see anything.” I was certain of nothing, not his height, or the scent of his cologne, or if his voice was familiar, or if he was a he. “I did notice that his wrists were bony. But his hands were ferocious.” Had the same hands murdered Torie?

  “Anything else?”

  “He knew my name. This wasn’t a random attack.” I told them about finding Torie’s body, and the note keeper wrote it down.

  Though it hurt like hell, the cut wasn’t deep, and I refused an ambulance. So they drove me to Falkman’s ER where I cracked jokes while a harried physician gave me a tetanus booster and brought out the sewing kit. How many doctors does it take to patch one small breast? I couldn’t come up with a punch line.

  Back home, survivor’s euphoria clung like a second skin. Even so, I roamed the apartment, checking closets and cupboards, wedging chairs under doorknobs. After I’d battened my hatches, I swallowed a pill from the hospi
tal and crawled into bed, where my bruised spine shifted for a sweet spot that didn’t exist.

  While I waited for the pill to work, a scent like roses drifted in from the window, along with a faint sound of crying, and curtains like gauzy bandages billowed in a cold night wind. Shivering, I struggled out of bed and took down the fan and looked outside. The air was hot and silent and smelled like grass. Then it hit me. There was no garden on this side of the house, no roses heavy with scent, no curtains on the windows. No one crying but me. I’d fallen asleep and dreamed a Demerol dream.

  And if I had died?

  From my night table I took out the photo Earth Trek Magazine sent me three years ago, after Nepalese militia found Gil’s backpack in a village hut and human bones in a stream. I studied the crowded street in Kathmandu, in the foreground Gil’s tired, unsmiling face. His dark eyes drew me in. Death brought him near tonight.

  Chapter Nine

  Him Again

  Time rattled past like a freight train, and I was the track, beaten, bruised, flat on my back. Fires raged inside my breast, and I couldn’t shake off my dreams. The telephone rang, and I picked up slowly, coming fully awake at the sound of Michael’s voice.

  “I heard. Are you all right?” Diffident, but not altogether cold.

  “I survived.”

  He waited a beat then said, “Why take that tone, Susan?”

  “I’m not feeling too great. What can I do for you?”

  “We have to talk, about the attack on you, and…look, Charles Renfrow is dead.”

  I stared at the bare window, the sun shining so fiercely it doubled my pain, the pressure of gauze on every tight ugly stitch. Chaz dead? It made no sense, didn’t even have the logic of dreams. We’d talked yesterday, or was it the day before? Or had I been sleeping for weeks?

  “What…what day is it?”

  “Sunday morning,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

  I’d slept round the clock, but sleep hadn’t mended me. I reached for the Demerol, and half an hour later, when Michael rang the bell, I was able to float down and let him in. We faced each other at the foot of the stairs.

  “Susan,” he said. Nothing else. Tuesday’s remoteness was gone from his eyes, so gentle now I might have fallen into his arms. He moved toward me.

  I stepped back, my heel hitting a riser. “What happened…tell me.”

  There is no way to soften murder, and Michael didn’t try. “He was strangled.”

  The pill kept me from flinching, but not from seeing the picture he sketched in quick dark strokes: Chaz sprawled across his desk, all irony gone from his eyes. I leaned on the banister, then sank to a stair. “When?” I whispered.

  “We’re not sure.” Michael sat on the tread below mine and told me how Chaz’s housekeeper had found him at six this morning. How some kind of cord or rope had abraded his neck. How the medical examiner determined he’d been dead at least seven hours, and maybe much longer. “Right now, that’s all we know.” He shifted, and his warm hand found my bare foot. “Ice,” he said. “Let’s go up.”

  In the living room, I nested on the sofa among pillows he propped around me. He settled himself near the defunct fireplace in the worn brown chair he’d always favored. “I have a couple of questions if you’re up for it.”

  “Ask away, but I only met Chaz a week ago.”

  “He told me you were helping his company.”

  “Not his company, that’s kind of a quibble.”

  “Can you give me specifics? Tyre says you refused to discuss it.”

  I smoothed a puckered edge of my robe. “I’ll bet even the sergeant’s heard of attorney/client privilege,” I said. But the dead have no privileges. I told Michael about the mayor of Telford, his war on NGT. “Chaz planned to run against him, and I’d agreed to advise his campaign. In that sense, I guess you could say I was working for NGT.”

  “Was there a contract?”

  “A handshake. Some things aren’t worth pursuing in court.”

  Michael patted his pockets and brought out Old Golds, a sealed pack he ripped open with his thumb, the scent of tobacco as pungent as hay in the warm room. When I said feel free, he lit up, inhaling so deeply the tip grew a long ash, which he flicked on the hearth.

  “Did Torie know why Renfrow hired you?”

  I shrugged against a pillow. “Chaz wanted to keep it secret until he’d filed his nominating papers, but word always gets out.”

  “So Torie, lots of people, may have known.”

  “Sure, but…Michael, are you suggesting Chaz and Torie were murdered because of his campaign?” My hand hesitated over my bandaged breast. “That I was a target?”

  “Let’s just say I’m worried about you.”

  “Believe me, there were easier ways than murder to derail Chaz.” Like an EPA investigation. I filled Michael in about Beauford and Chaz, the charges and counter charges. The grudge. “Chaz said NGT is clean, that Beauford Smith was spreading rumors and lies.”

  “What’s your take on Smith? Could he have been angry enough to murder Renfrow?”

  “Beauford? Forget that. He hoped the EPA, not murder, would shut down NGT. The Beauford Smith I know is essentially honest, and harmless.”

  “Except on ice.”

  “You know he plays hockey?”

  “Renfrow’s wife told us. We interviewed her this morning.”

  “Ex-wife.”

  “Wife. The divorce hadn’t gone through. Said she and Renfrow planned to reconcile.

  I felt oddly deflated. “He told me he was divorced.”

  “He exaggerated.”

  “He lied.”

  Michael flipped through his notebook. A line of smoke from his cigarette rose straight up and vanished near the ceiling. “Ms. Lang also informed us that your boy Beau dated Torie Moran.”

  “That I didn’t know.” Why, I wondered, was Johanna Lang keeping tabs on Torie’s love life? “Maybe Torie was the source of those rumors. She could’ve passed Beauford gossip he misconstrued.”

  “The thought had occurred to me. Any reason why he’d want to kill you?”

  “Of course not. And by the way, he was out of town on Monday, and flew to Brussels on Tuesday.”

  “We’ll be checking. How long have you known him?”

  “About two years.” I told Michael how Beau and I had talked software at a fundraiser. “I ended up creating an interactive Flash file for him, for Web ads. After that, we were best buddies for about six weeks. When his candidate won, he sent me flowers.”

  “What kind of flowers?” There might have been the slightest edge to Michael’s voice.

  “Orchids.” I smiled. “Tiny white ones.” And no, Michael, we didn’t date.

  He crushed out his cigarette. “Think you can tell me about the attack? If it wouldn’t upset you?”

  “I can try.”

  But upset me it did, and Michael too, in a way.

  “He sprang out of nowhere,” I said in a shaky voice. “I can still feel his fingers digging into my neck.” A couple of tears dribbled down, and Michael passed me a Kleenex. When no more words would come, he reached over and pressed my hand. “Well,” I said after awhile, “at least you know it wasn’t Chaz who attacked me.”

  “He might have. We don’t know what time he died.”

  “You didn’t like him, did you.”

  “Not much.”

  “Whoever attacked me was wearing bay rum.” And then, perversely adding weight to Michael’s speculation, I said, “Chaz used it.”

  “Bay rum? On sale at a drugstore near you?” He ran two fingers over his amused lips, avoiding the mustache. “Own a bottle myself.”

  “It wasn’t you. I’d know you anywhere.”

  The look he gave me then was as unre
adable as Chaz’s smile. We fell into an uncomfortable silence, and I regretted my candor. Michael’s Kleenex had been an act of pity, nothing more.

  “Want me to make coffee?” he said.

  “I’m fresh out. There might be tea.” I tried to get up, but my legs wouldn’t let me. “If you don’t mind looking.”

  He practically leaped out of his chair, as if he couldn’t wait to get away from me. “Still in the cupboard over the fridge? Or have you moved things around since…”

  “Since you dropped out of my life?”

  He stopped in the doorway. “Was I ever in your life?”

  I rested a hand on my throat, the fluttering pulse. “We were learning about each other, Michael.” I closed my eyes and gave myself over to Demerol. “That takes time.”

  “Time?” His voice was a murmur inside a shell.

  Clear as a dream I saw him walking into my life, tall, a little thin, that air of reserve. A privacy conference had drawn us to the same lecture at the Copley Plaza where a professor was addressing a crowd on Internet data thieves. Michael strolled in late and took the last chair in the last row, next to me. We glanced at each other and boing…two kindergarten kids. I liked him right away, and he liked me, and I had yielded to my warm, fuzzy feelings. I hadn’t examined them at all. I offered him a Lifesaver—he dug down for a lime—and after the lecture, we drank coffee together in the hotel restaurant. Three frozen years began to roll off my spine.

  “You must feel pretty efficient,” he said to me now.

  I opened my eyes. He was bending over me, so close his nicotine breath warmed my cheek. My mind wandered to his new mustache. Was it scratchy, or soft?

  “All the action you can pack in a day.” His voice dropped in that way I remembered, when something annoyed him. His lips hardly moved. I wished he’d shut up. Kiss me.

  “Conferences, candidates. Dinners with clients. Must make you feel like you’re getting somewhere.”

  I leaned forward, then fell back on the pillows. “Are you telling me you resented my work? My pathetic, grubbing real estate closings and vote countings?”