THE HANDLE OF the sledgehammer was bright yellow plastic, a detail preposterous to Richard, who had paced up and down the length of the relevant aisle at Home Depot trying to find something less painfully embarrassing until the department manager had insisted that he make his choice and leave—it was closing time, nine o’clock.
Standing on the doorstep of Zula’s apartment at nine fifteen, gripping the ridiculous implement in brand-new, ergonomically designed work gloves (an impulse purchase, yanked from an aisleend display as the manager had harried him toward the checkout counters), he realized why he didn’t like it: the thing looked like a T’Rain sledgehammer. The realization struck him with such force that it queered his first blow, which caromed off Zula’s doorjamb and nearly took out his knee. Then he got a grip, not only on the yellow plastic handle, but on himself, and swung again, getting his hips into it and striking true. The door practically exploded. Supposing Zula turned up all right, he would have a talk with her about the virtues of physical security and devote an afternoon to beefing up her door.
Or her replacement door, to be precise, since there wasn’t much left of this one.
“You can turn down the stereo now,” he said to James and Nicholas, who were five steps below him, cowering as one. James and Nicholas, a gay couple, lived downstairs of Zula and, as it turned out, had taken an almost parental interest in her welfare. Earlier today, back in the—ha!—long-forgotten hours when Richard had attempted to do this through official channels, they had assured Richard that he should get in touch with them at any time of the day or night if there were anything they could conceivably do to help him get to the bottom of Zula’s disappearance. Three minutes ago, Richard had put their offer to the test on multiple levels, knocking them up late in the evening to see how they would feel about some really loud banging and splintering noises from upstairs. As it turned out they had been as good as their word and had even offered to turn up their stereo for a while in case that would help cover any noises that might disturb the nocturnal peace of neighboring properties. A foolish reverence for official cop procedures did not, apparently, go hand in hand with gayness.
And neither did having a missing niece.
“I’d really appreciate it if you could turn it down,” Richard said, and then James and Nicholas understood that he just wanted them gone for a minute or two. They turned their backs on him and padded down the carpeted stairs. They occupied the first two floors, and Zula the third, of a big old house on Capitol Hill: Seattle’s most oddly named neighborhood, in that Seattle was not a capital and had never been graced with anything resembling a capitol.
This bit—walking into the apartment and turning on the lights—was by far the worst for him, just because of what he was afraid he might find. Growing up on a farm had exposed him to a few sudden and unpleasant sights that he had never been able to clear from his memory. But Zula stabbed or strangled on the floor of her apartment would, he knew, be the last thing that came into his mind’s eye at the moment of his death; and between now and then it would come to him unbidden at unforeseeable moments.
Instead all he found was a furious cat, yowling and stalking around an eviscerated cat food bag whose contents had spilled out onto the floor. A toilet drinker, by process of elimination. Other than that, all was orderly: no food left out, no lights left on. He checked her closet and noted that her winter coat wasn’t there, saw no skis or any of the other stuff she’d brought on the trip to the Schloss. All of which confirmed the suspicion, which had been pretty strong to begin with, that she had never come back to her apartment after that trip.
This didn’t mean she was alive, or even well. But it alleviated the most horrible of his fears. Whatever had happened to her couldn’t be as bad as what he had been bracing himself for ten seconds ago.
And it gave him something to write home about. Or whatever the Facebook-era equivalent of that was.
He pulled out his phone, ignored four new text messages from his brother John, and thumbed one out: IN Z’S APT. ALL NORMAL.
John, still in Iowa, seemed to think that Richard would forget the seriousness of the situation without frequent reminders. The cursed invention of text messaging had removed any inhibitions John might ever have felt about what he still denominated “long-distance” telephone calls. On the upside, it enabled Richard to fire off status reports like this one without having to make personal contact.
To John’s credit, though, he had, after a grumpy word or two from Richard, named himself the family’s single point of contact with Seattle. So at least Richard didn’t have to explain his progress, or lack thereof, to everyone, all the time. That chore was being handled by John, using a Facebook page.
Richard hadn’t checked the page yet—it seemed wrong to be facebooking at a time like this—but he supposed it must contain a lot of detailed information about just what the Seattle Police Department were and were not willing to do in response to a missing persons report. For Richard had made what now seemed like an unrecoverable error by contacting the authorities first and filing same. This had placed him into a mode where all he could really do was nag the officer who was responsible for the case; and said officer had already explained that, unless there was evidence of an actual crime, there was not much they could do in the way of direct, proactive investigation.
He thumbed out a P. S.: Z NEVER CAME BACK HERE AFTER B.C.