CHAPTER 28
LUCY
Uncle Crete had an Elks club meeting the first Thursday night of every month, and I figured that would be a good time for me to sneak into his house. Crete didn’t particularly like the Elks. He’d joined mostly to spite some local businessmen who would have preferred to exclude him, and he rarely missed a meeting if he was in town. I told Bess I’d call her when I got back home, and that if I hadn’t called her by morning, to worry.
“Worry like call the police?” she asked.
I shook my head, thinking of Ray Walker’s advice. “Worry like call my dad. I don’t expect anything to happen, though. I’m just going out there to see if I can find anything useful. I’ll be in and out before he gets home.”
It was a long walk to Crete’s, and the August heat was stifling even in the dark, but I didn’t want to borrow Bess’s car and risk being seen. In my backpack, I carried a flashlight, the Swiss army knife Dad had given me for Christmas, and a bottle of water. I thought it might be smart to have some sort of weapon, just in case, but I wasn’t going to haul a shotgun along. The knife would have to do. I started thinking through scenarios in which I might need a weapon, and they were all ridiculous. I was overthinking things. It couldn’t be that dangerous to sneak into my uncle’s house. We were family, after all. He’d never treated me poorly a day in my life. I shook out my arms, tried to clear my head. I was going to Crete’s house. No big deal.
But it was sort of a big deal, because even though we were family and he came to our house any time he wanted, I hadn’t been to Crete’s place in years. The house was a smaller version of ours, built for Grandpa Dane’s spinster sister. It sat empty after she died, until Crete inherited it with his chunk of land and decided to move in. When I was in grade school, Crete built a more modern addition onto the back of the house, including a deck and aboveground pool, and even though woods surrounded the place on all sides, he’d installed a privacy fence around the backyard. One day when Dad and I went over to swim, we found a bare-naked woman sprawled facedown on the deck. Dad told me to cover my eyes, but of course I didn’t. He rolled the woman over and felt for a pulse. Blood streaked from her nostrils down into her mouth, and I wondered if the blood was from snorting something or falling on her face. Dad leaned over her to listen for breath, and she came to, laughing and coughing and throwing her arms around him. As soon as Dad untangled himself, he dragged me straight back to the truck, and we left. Later that night, I heard him tell Crete on the phone that we wouldn’t be coming over to swim anymore. He added that Crete was always welcome at our house, so long as he didn’t bring a date.
When I came up on it through the woods, the house looked much as I remembered, except there was now a chain-link dog run bordering the privacy fence. Two pit bulls lunged at the walls of the pen, barking. The front door was locked, which was strange for anyone living so far out in the woods but not surprising for Crete. The windows along the porch wouldn’t budge. I climbed on top of the dog run, further aggravating the dogs, to get high enough to boost myself over the fence and into the backyard. The sliding-glass door off the deck was locked, but it looked like one of the windows upstairs was open. I let myself out of the backyard through the gate, and there, on the side of the toolshed, hung the extension ladder that had been there for as long as I could remember. I carried it to the house and ratcheted it up until I could reach the window. Luckily, the screen was flimsier than the old-fashioned kind at our house, and I was able to push the frame in with a little effort.
I hoisted myself into a sparsely furnished bedroom and popped the screen back in place before stepping out into the hall. I was looking for an office or storage room but didn’t find one on the second floor. I crept downstairs and poked around and didn’t see anything useful. I opened the door to the basement and flicked on the light. There was another, heavier door at the bottom of the stairs that closed behind me when I passed through it. I was in the new part of the basement, which was completely unfamiliar to me, so I started opening doors until I found a storage room filled with neat stacks of boxes. I immediately started prying open the boxes; they were crammed with notebooks and files. I allowed myself to believe that I would find what I’d been looking for. Somewhere in these papers, I’d discover who had rented the trailer. I just had to hurry.
I skimmed through several boxes, scanning the tabs on the file folders and peeking inside the few that looked promising. The papers were old, and I hurried from box to box, worried that they were all out of date. I was down to the last stack of boxes when one of the tabs caught my eye. Petrovich, L. Petrovich was my mother’s maiden name. In that moment, I didn’t care about the rental contracts. I didn’t care that the clock was ticking and Crete would be on his way home. I opened the folder and sat down to sort through the pages. Clipped inside the cover was a black-and-white picture of my mother, a photocopy. After a lifetime of studying the same few pictures of her, I was shocked to see a new one. She looked different. Still beautiful, of course, but missing the smile from all her other pictures. Her expression was mischievous, and her hair fell around her face in a messy, seductive way. She wore a bikini, and for the first time, I saw how she looked beneath her clothes. Seeing her that way felt almost unbearably intimate. Someone had been cropped out of the photo, leaving a phantom hand at my mother’s waist.
I had to tear myself away from the picture. There were some magazine clippings, the little ads you find in the back. Agencies that placed nannies, housekeepers, models. I unfolded a sheet of paper, some sort of questionnaire. My mother’s name was at the top, but the form was filled out in someone else’s handwriting, and I quickly realized this wasn’t an ordinary job application or medical form. Hair color: Dark brown. Hair length: Long. Eyes: Green. Height: 5′6″. Weight: 120. Chest: 34D. It was noted that she was an English-speaking American with no STDs or tattoos. A section for additional information read No family/?Orphan/?EXOTIC 10+.
I knew Crete had hired my mother through an agency. He freely admitted that he couldn’t find a local willing to do all the work he wanted for the wage he offered to pay. My uncle was always looking to save money. But he hadn’t been seeking a typical hired hand. He’d chosen the most beautiful, the most exotic. An orphan. Was that part a coincidence, or had he wanted to make sure no one would come for her, that she had nowhere else to go? I spread out the rest of the papers and had started to read what looked to be her employment contract when I heard a muffled thud.
I tensed, trying to home in on the direction of the sound, and stepped into the hall. I heard the sound again; it was definitely coming from somewhere in the basement, not overhead. I checked my watch, estimating that I had at least an hour before Crete returned. “Hello?” I said. I had no idea what I would do if I came across someone in Crete’s basement, but if there was anyone here, I hoped it was one of his drunk girlfriends—someone I could easily lie to and escape from. Maybe it was Becky Castle, if she and Crete were still seeing each other. I could make small talk about her daughter, Holly, and ask if she was still raising rabbits.
“Hello.” I said it louder and waited through the silence until I heard another thump, then another. I followed the hall until it ended in a shadowy storage area, the shelves lined with cases of beer and soda, plastic barrels of pretzels, jugs of bleach, rolls of paper towels. Had it been better lit, it could have passed for an aisle at Walmart.
More pounding came from behind the shelves, and after deciding that was impossible, I realized the original basement lay on the other side of the wall. I started pulling down bulk packages of toilet paper and detergent, and as I did, the middle section of shelving began to roll. It was set on casters. I swung it out of the way to reveal a steel door with a keypad.
My skin prickled, just like it had when I discovered the safe hidden in the floor of Crete’s office at Dane’s. Unlike the safe, this locked room made no sense. What was he going to such great lengths to hide?
“Is somebody there?” I held my breath, listening, but there was no reply. I tried the door, which wouldn’t budge. Then I heard more thuds. It could have been something mechanical, like an old pump acting up. I hadn’t heard any voices. I was letting my imagination get the better of me.
I looked at the keypad, but it offered no hints. It didn’t seem likely that Crete would choose an easy code, but it couldn’t hurt to try. I punched in 1234. A tiny red light flashed on and off to let me know I was wrong. It would have been helpful to know how many numbers were in the code. I tried 12345, just in case. Again, the red light. My next guess was Crete’s birthday. On the third mistake, the keypad made a beeping noise, and the light turned red and stayed red. Whatever was on the other side of that wall, Crete didn’t want it found. That made me all the more determined to figure out what it was.
There had to be some way in. Then I remembered there was access to the old cellar from outside, two slanted doors set into the ground at the foundation. I ran upstairs and out the door, and the dogs started barking again. I made my way around to the side of the house. The cellar doors I remembered had been torn out, and in their place was a thick slab of concrete—an awkward porch adorned with empty flowerpots.
I was running out of time, and I had to accept that I wouldn’t be getting into the locked room tonight. I needed to get out of the house, replace the ladder, and leave before Crete came back. My search hadn’t accomplished anything except to make me more suspicious. It was creepy, the way he’d brought my mother here. I knew he was in some way, directly or not, involved with what had happened to Cheri. And now this sealed room. Whatever he was up to, it didn’t look good.
I returned to the basement and hastily cleaned up the evidence of my visit. When I was done, I grabbed my backpack and opened the door to the stairs. There, on his way down, was Crete. I tried not to panic. He had caught me, and there was nothing I could do.
“Lucy,” he growled. His face burned with anger and disbelief. “I half-expected to find that Cole boy in here, after what he done at my office. I wouldn’t have pegged you to be setting off my alarm.”
An alarm? Maybe one had been triggered when I entered too many wrong codes in the keypad? Crete curled one hand into a fist, the muscles of his forearm tightening. He was my uncle, and he had never hurt me. I still wanted to believe that he wouldn’t. I repeated it over and over in my head, He won’t hurt you, but I was shaking.
“Why don’t you tell me what it is you’re looking for.”
I searched for a believable lie. “My mom … I know she worked for you. I thought you might have … mementos or something.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have anything of hers. But if that’s what you wanted, why didn’t you ask? Have I ever denied you a single goddamn thing?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was a dumb thing to do. I just wasn’t really thinking it through. I better get home.”
“Why were you trying to get into my locked room?”
I tried to sound casual, but my hands were trembling. “I thought maybe you kept your papers in there, something that would tell me more about her. Or just something with her handwriting on it.”
He looked me dead-on. He knew I was lying. “I keep valuables in there,” he said finally. “Nothing of interest to you.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t going to steal anything.”