Chapter Twenty

THE DEAD WOMAN’S phone rang six separate times. Shauna had counted them off as she worked through the wee hours, scrubbing, brushing, bleaching the mess in the bedroom of the big, empty house, scraping up bits of human from between the old floorboards and from the cornices. The phone’s ringtone was the mock sound of an antique telephone, high and musical. It pealed and pealed, and the silence that followed it rattled Shauna’s frantic mind. She eventually put the device on silent and slipped it into her handbag. She knew the dead woman’s phone would be full of clues pointing to where the intruders had come from, who they had been. But there was time for that, later.

When she was done with the mess and she had swaddled the pale, headless body in bedsheets, Shauna went to the kitchen. She opened the fridge and took out one of the food platters lovingly wrapped by the bossy women of her knitting circle. She brewed herself a strong coffee, then sat at the counter and ate seven sandwich fingerlings in a row, end to tip, like she was chain-smoking cigarettes. The food gave her strength. The shaking that had infected her body finally stopped, and all that was left—after the break-in, the beating, the murder, and the cleanup—was pure exhaustion. The sun rose, yet Shauna pushed on, showering, and scrubbing the blood from under her fingernails. She surveyed the huge red and blue marks blossoming everywhere on her body, the split lip, the grazes on her elbows and knees. She dressed, ignoring all of them. She went to the cupboard to get a suitcase and spied her summer duvet on the top shelf, sealed and shrunken into a wrinkled pancake in a vacuum-sealed storage bag.

By the time she’d rolled and wrestled and crammed the woman’s body into the vacuum-sealed bag, then into the zippered suitcase, Shauna was ready to collapse into the bed. She spied a silver necklace on the floor, covered in the woman’s blood. She rinsed it and put it into the pocket of her coat, deciding she would get rid of it later. Sleep was barreling into her, sucking her downward into a black and silent sea.

She woke on the bed after only an hour. She rose around eight, gasping for air.

She wheeled the suitcase to the hallway outside the garage, where the Corvette, Mark’s pale-blue truck, and her own Honda stood waiting. She chose the truck.

As Shauna was pulling down the tailgate, she realized she couldn’t lift the suitcase high enough to get it onto the truck bed. As she considered making a ramp out of some of the two-by-fours Mark kept stacked against one wall, she heard a man’s voice. She left the suitcase where it was and tucked herself into the small space behind the open door to the hall.

“Boss, I don’t know what to tell you. We’re seein’ nothing. No crime scene. No squad cars. There’s just nobody here. It’s quiet as a goddamn graveyard.”

Shauna gripped the door handle in front of her, listening to two sets of footsteps on the driveway outside the automatic garage door. She saw shadows pass on the polished concrete at her feet as the people moved around the side of the garage to the windows there.

“Yeah, of course,” the man said. Shauna knew from the intermittent silences that he was talking on a phone. “But we’ve looked in every window of the house. There’s no body in the bedroom. There’s no… no old lady. If she was here, she’s gone, or Poon was trippin’ on some pretty good shit. There are three cars in the garage. I’m taking a picture of them now.”

Shauna looked down, saw the tiny hairs on her arm rise.

“Do we go in?”

Shauna held her breath.

“OK. OK, sure. And this safe, do you know what it looks like?”

Another mention of a safe. What safe? Was Mark keeping a secret from Shauna?

Shauna almost screamed in surprise when the doorbell at the other end of the house chimed down the hall. She clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Mrs. Bulger? Are you there?”

“Hang on, hang on.” The man on the phone dropped his voice so low Shauna could barely hear it. “We got visitors. We gotta pull back.”

Shauna waited until she heard the men’s footsteps receding, then slipped out from behind the door. She walked to the foyer and saw the familiar outlines of Kylie and Don, the young do-gooders from next door.

“Mrs. Bulger—oh wow,” Kylie said. Her hands flew to her mouth when Shauna opened the door and revealed the bruises it had been too dark to see the night before. “What happened?”

“I slipped in the shower.” Shauna leaned forward and glanced toward the garages, but saw no one. No shadows, no movement. “It’s fine. Come in. Come in.”

“You look awful.”

“Thank you so much, Kylie.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I’m fine, honey. Stop fussing.”

“You really need somebody to come stay here with you, Mrs. Bulger.” Kylie’s prattling began before she’d even stepped over the threshold. Her tone was of a mother chastising a child. “Your son should be here. What’s his name? Harry? Why isn’t he here doing things like starting the car for you, making sure you don’t slip and hurt yourself like that. Jesus! That’s some bump! Don, take your shoes off, goddamn it, this is a nice place she’s got here.”

Shauna shut the door behind the youngsters and followed them as they made their way toward the kitchen like they owned the place.

“I’ll make coffee,” Don announced. “Is there any food left over from the reception? I call dibs.”

“You two go right ahead, make yourselves at home,” Shauna said. “I’m just fixing up a few things in the back here.”

She went to the bedroom and looked out the window, at the garden shed. She tried to keep her breathing regular, but every sound, every movement outside the house twisted the ball of tension growing in her chest. If the people she’d heard were still out there, they were well hidden. There was no point in alerting her young neighbors to the danger. Even if she managed to convince the couple that the voices she’d heard weren’t concoctions of her defective, ancient brain, the people would be gone, probably regrouping for another attack. Shauna needed to find this safe they were all so determined to discover, assuming there was one, before they came back again.

From the corner of her eye, Shauna saw the huge pink fluffball of Kylie’s furry jacket in the doorway.

“There you are!” Kylie said with the relief of a mother having momentarily lost her toddler in a forest of department-store clothing racks. “What are you doing, Mrs. Bulger? Can I help?”

“No, Kylie, I’m fine, really.” Shauna nudged past her and walked into Mark’s office. She went to the filing cabinet and pulled open a drawer. Hundreds of meticulously organized hanging files rattled on their rails beneath her fingertips. She scrolled through the labels. Plumbing. Electrical. Certificates. Medical. Insurance. In the distance, Kylie was blathering about her well-being, a parade of shoulds. Shauna should sit down. She should drink water. She should call a doctor. She should let Kylie take a look at her face, put ice on it maybe. Shauna found the folder she was looking for, marked Renovation/Maintenance. She emptied the contents onto Mark’s desk and leafed through the documents. There were quotes and receipts for the knockdown and rebuild of the garage, and for the replacement of two rotting window frames at the back of the house, five years earlier. Shauna pushed aside a design sketch for a pair of gates they’d had installed in the driveway. Then she found what she was looking for. A quote from a company called Davis Security that had been filled in by hand.

1 x Davis Model 488 Combination Safe

1 x in-ground installation (external shed, concrete floor)

All labor $5,200 plus tax.

Shauna smiled. She might be old, but she wasn’t befuddled. She knew her husband, knew his capabilities, his patterns, his logic. She’d been right that Mark would never have attempted to install something like a hidden safe himself, and that he’d have stowed away the quote and receipt, because he was a lifelong pack rat for paperwork. Shauna also bet that when she found the safe, which she now knew to be hidden in the floor of the garden shed, she would discover that the security code was her own birthday. A lazy choice. It was Mark’s code for everything. She puzzled momentarily over the date of commencement of work, written on the quote. It was the week that Mark had taken her to Florida for their anniversary.

Don appeared in the office doorway, armed with a brownie and a mug of coffee.

“Don, for God’s sake, can’t you use a plate?” Kylie said as she snatched the snack from his hand.

“What’s with the suitcase?” Don asked, inspecting the suitcase in the hall by the garage door. “You going somewhere, Mrs. Bulger?”

“I am, as a matter of fact,” Shauna said. “I’m off to Gloucester.”