I circled the building, hugging the outside wall, checking darkened windows for one left ajar. What I found instead was a side door that was located just across from the stairway inside the back hall. The knob turned in my hand and I pushed the door open cautiously. I peered in. Royce, in a ratty bathrobe, was shuffling down the hall toward me, slump-shouldered, eyes on his slippers. I could hear the hum of his weeping, broken by intermittent sighs. He was walking his grief like a baby, back and forth. He reached the door to his room and turned, shuffling back toward the kitchen. Now and then he murmured Ori’s name, voice breaking off. Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure. Royce must have signed himself out of the hospital after Reverend Haws paid his call. Ori’s death had pushed him past struggling. What did he care if he sped death along?
The lights from the living room gave the uncomfortable sense of other people very near. I could hear two women in the dining room, talking in low tones. Was Mrs. Emma still with Ann? Royce was reaching the kitchen, where I knew he’d turn again, coming back.
I closed the door behind me, crossed to the stairs, and took them two at a time, moving silently. I should have put two and two together when I saw that the maid’s master key wouldn’t open room 20. That room had probably been sealed off, part of the Fowlers’ apartment upstairs.
The second floor was dark, except for a window on the landing through which a soft yellow light now spilled. I was disoriented. Somehow this didn’t look the way I’d expected it to. There was a short corridor to my left, ending in a door. I crossed to it, stopped, and listened carefully. Silence. I tried the knob and pushed the door open a crack. Cold air wafted in. I was facing the exterior corridor that ran right by my room. I could see the vending machine and the outside stairs. To my immediate left was room 20, next to that room 22, where I’d spent my first night. There was no sign of a deputy on duty. Did I dare simply mosey down, use my key, and go in? What if the deputy was waiting inside?
I reached around and tried the knob from the outside. Ah, locked. Once I went out this door, I couldn’t get back in unless I jammed it open. I stayed where I was, easing the door shut. The door to my left was unlocked. I slipped inside, taking out my penlight. Like the rest of the Fowlers’ living quarters, this had once been a regular motel room, converted now to office space.
Sliding glass doors along the front opened onto a second-floor balcony overlooking Ocean Street. The drapes were open and I could make out a desk, a swivel chair, bookcases, a reading lamp. I swept the room with the narrow beam of the penlight, getting my bearings. The book titles were half fiction, half college textbooks in psychology. Ann’s.
On the desk was a photo of Ori in her youth. She really had been beautiful, with large luminous eyes. I searched the desk drawers. Nothing of interest. Checked the closet alcove, which was filled with summer clothing. The bathroom held nothing. The door that connected this room to room 20 was locked. Locked doors are always more interesting than the other kind. This time I got out my set of key picks and set to work. In TV shows, people pick locks with remarkable ease. Not so in real life, where you have to have the patience of a saint. I was working in the dark, clamping the penlight in my mouth like a cigar while I used the rocker pick in my left hand and the wire in my right. Sometimes I do this efficiently, but that’s usually when the light is good. This time it took forever, and I was sweating from the tension when the lock finally gave.
Room 20 was a duplicate of the one I’d occupied. This was Ann’s bedroom, the one Maxine was not to clean. I could see why. On the closet floor, dead ahead, was a Ponsness-Warren shot shell reloader with a built-in wad guide, an adjustable crimp die, and two powder reservoirs filled with rock salt. I crossed to the closet and hunkered down, inspecting the device, which looks like a cross between a bird feeder and a cappuccino machine, and is designed to pack a shell with anything you like. A blast of rock salt, at close range, usually ends up buried under your skin where it stings like a son of a bitch, but doesn’t do much else. Tap had found out just how ineffectual salt can be in staving off the sheriff’s deputies.
I had really hit the jackpot. On the floor beside the reloader was a microcassette recorder with a tape in it. I pressed the rewind button and then pressed play, listening to a familiar voice slowed down to a series of quite nasty gravel-throated threats. I rewound, switched the tape speed, and tried it again. The voice was clearly Ann’s, spelling out her intentions with an ax and a chain saw. The whole thing sounded stupid, but she must have had a ball. “I am going to get you. …” We used to do shit like this as kids. “I am going to cut your head off… .“I smiled grimly, remembering the night those calls had come through. I’d taken comfort from the fact that someone two doors away was wide awake like me. The square of light had looked so cozy at that hour. All the time she’d been in here, dialing room-to-room, part of her campaign of psychological abuse. At this point I couldn’t even remember when I’d had an uninterrupted night’s sleep. I was being carried on adrenaline and nerve, the momentum of events sweeping me willy-nilly down the path. The night my room was broken into, all she’d had to do was use her passkey and jimmy up the sliding glass door afterward so it would look like the point of entry. I got to my feet and checked the shelf above. In a shoebox, I found a windowed envelope addressed to “Erica Dahl” containing quarterly dividends and year-end tax summaries for IBM stock. There must have been more than a hundred such envelopes neatly packed into the box, along with a social security card, driver’s license, and passport-with Ann Fowler’s photograph affixed. The statements from Merrill Lynch showed a $42,000 investment in shares of IBM back in 1967. With stock splits in the intervening years, the shares had more than doubled in value. I noticed that “Erica” had dutifully paid taxes on the interest that accrued from year to year. Ann Fowler was too shrewd to get tripped up by the IRS.
I flashed the penlight through her living room and kitchenette, doing a one-eighty turn. When the narrow beam crossed the bedstead, I caught an oval of white and flashed the light back over it again. Ann .was propped up in bed watching me. Her face was dead pale, her eyes enormous, so filled with lunacy and hate that my skin crawled. I felt as if I’d been pierced with an icy arrow, the chill spreading from the core of my body to my fingertips. In her lap she held a double-barreled shotgun, which she raised and pointed right at my chest. Probably not rock salt. I didn’t think the spider story was going to work with her.
“Finding everything you need?” she asked.
I raised my hands just to show I knew how to behave. “Hey, you’re pretty good. You almost got away with it.”
Her smile was thin. “Now that you’re ‘wanted,’ I can do it, don’t you think?” she said conversationally. “All I have to do is pull the trigger and claim trespass.”
“And then what?”
“You tell me.”
I hadn’t quite worked the whole story out, but I knew enough to make a flying guess. Why you have chats with killers in circumstances like these is because you hope against hope you can (1) talk them out of it, (2) stall until help arrives, or (3) enjoy a few more moments of this precious commodity we call life, which consists (in large part) of breathing in and out. Hard to do with your lungs blown out your back.
“Well,” said I, hoping to make a short story long, “I figure once your daddy dies and you unload this place, you’ll take the proceeds, add them to the profits from the forty-two thou you stole, and sail off into the sunset. Possibly with Dwight Shales, or so you hope.”
“And why not?”
“Why not, indeed? Sounds like a great plan. Does he know about it yet?”
“He will,” she said.