Chapter 11 #2
Shippy shakes his head. “You’ve got no idea, mate. There was a break-in and Bec’s stepmom—the woman who owns this house, actually—got killed. You know what? I could really go for a carbonara.”
I get a glimpse of Rob’s face as Shippy leads him into the kitchen, and he looks like he’s the one who got bashed on the head by a typewriter, although whether it’s shock at the fact that he’s agreed to stay in a house where a murder just took place or shock at Shippy’s indifference, it’s hard to say.
“Where is he going to sleep, do you think?” Dad asks Aunty Bec, nodding at Rob. “Your bed? Cozy, but you could make it work.”
“We can make up the couch.”
“It’s a shame Gertie’s room is a no-go: a free bedroom just sitting there.”
“Andy, you’ve got problems.”
“I wouldn’t sleep there, but”—Dad drops his voice—“does Rob strike you as the kind of guy who’s never slept on the mattress of someone recently deceased?”
“It’s still a crime scene. Go grab some clean sheets from Gertie’s room, though. They’re in the wardrobe. Top shelf. Try not to touch anything.”
That’s when I see my chance and nudge Dylan so hard he slides off the armchair. He looks up from the floor resentfully, and I definitely don’t laugh.
“We’ll grab the sheets,” I say, jumping to my feet and yanking on Dylan’s elbow to pull him up.
“You don’t have to do that,” Dad says.
“It’s fine.”
Dad’s expression crosses the line dividing curiosity from suspicion.
“Andy!” Shippy shouts even though he’s just one room away. “This pinot’s okay to go in pasta sauce, right?”
“Okay,” Dad says to me, leaping toward Shippy and the open wine bottle in the kitchen with the vibe of a mother rushing into a burning house to rescue her baby.
“Thanks, I guess.” Dylan and I are out the door before Dad can grab the knife from the hands of a red-eyed Rob (so on-brand for Shippy to make him cut the onions) and use it on Shippy.
“What’s this about?” Dylan says, nearly crashing into a lamp as I drag him up the stairs.
“Obviously, this is our opportunity to search GG’s bedroom without anyone busting in to ask what we think we’re doing.”
“I’m pretty sure the cops have already done that.”
“Yeah, but there might be a clue only we would understand.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know—we haven’t found it yet.”
“Flawless logic.”
Being inside GG’s room again is creepier than sleeping in a bedroom full of faceless dolls.
There’s no dark stain on the floorboards, the broken glass from the window has been swept up, and the bed has been stripped.
But the gloom in the room is real, thanks to a square of cardboard taped over the broken window, and it doesn’t entirely go away when we snap on the light.
“Okay, Enola, where do we start?”
“The wardrobe?”
Dylan starts pulling out drawers while I reach for GG’s dresses and coats, passing one after another between my hands as I go through the pockets, with no idea what I’m looking for.
Nothing that I find (three tissues, a pencil, one single gold earring) strikes me as being a clue, but I lay them out on top of the bare mattress anyway because it’s always the seemingly innocuous stuff that winds up being important, isn’t it?
“Is it weird for me to be going through her stockings?” Dylan asks, holding up a single stocking, the nude kind with a black seam. “I feel like a pervert.”
“They’re stockings—don’t make it weird. This stuff will all have to go to the secondhand shop or the dump or something.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Someone’s going to have to go through it all.”
“You could pull off these stockings,” Dylan says, waving one of them at me. “You’ve got a retro face.”
Because I don’t want to interrogate what Dylan might mean by “retro face,” I focus instead on dragging over the stool from GG’s dressing table to stand on so I can look on top of the wardrobe.
Dust lines show where the typewriter that killed GG used to live.
There’s the suitcase I noticed last time, plus a few old shoeboxes tucked toward the back: One contains stacks of photos bound together with elastic bands, another has three pairs of old glasses, and the third has a bunch of old chargers.
There’s no sign of the big cardboard box, the one that was apparently for M.
“What’s wrong?” Dylan asks, having presumably gotten a good look at my face.
“There was a box,” I say, slowly because I’m trying to think and talk at the same time, which is always a tough proposition. “GG asked me to get it down from the wardrobe the night she died. Now it’s gone.”
Dylan shrugs. “Maybe the cops took it?”
“I guess.” I don’t really get why the cops would take one box over all the others. “It said ‘for M’ or something like that.”
“Who’s Em? Emily?”
“No, M like the letter.” The box might be nothing, but I can’t let go of the idea that its absence matters. In front of Dylan, though, I play it down. I’m not sure why. “Have you found anything good?”
“A bunch of personal papers. Plus the warranty and instructions for everything Gertie ever bought.”
“Seriously?”
“There’s a receipt here for a toasted-sandwich maker she bought in the nineties. She didn’t even live here then. At some point she packed this receipt and brought it with her.”
“What about the secret drawer?”
“What’s the secret drawer?”
Classic Dylan strikes again. Do I have to do everything myself?
The door to the bedroom opens and Dad comes in with a glass of wine and an air of triumph I don’t care for.
“I knew it,” he says.
“What?” But I know what he means: GG’s papers are everywhere on the floor around Dylan, I’m rummaging through her belongings, and there’s absolutely no sign of the sheets we’re ostensibly here to collect. The only way we could look more guilty would involve a bloody knife and a headless corpse.
“The moment you offered to help, I knew you’d be snooping.”
“We’re not snooping.” Dylan would be more convincing if this defense wasn’t delivered while clutching the toasted-sandwich-maker receipt.
“Sure. And Shippy’s one of our leading thinkers.” Dad nods at the papers. “What did you find?”
There’s a moment when I could tell Dad about the box. I don’t, and like all good ideas unacted upon, it passes.
“Nothing,” I say after a pause that Dad would probably find more suspicious if his glass wasn’t half empty.
“A lot of papers,” Dylan says, pulling Dad’s focus.
“Most of it is junk, but there’s her birth certificate, marriage certificates, that kind of stuff.
” Dad crouches down next to Dylan and I see his eyes flick to the wardrobe’s ornate carving of a bird, which marks the secret drawer I never got a chance to tell Dylan about. It’s still closed.
“We’ll be down in a sec,” I say.
“Guess again. Grab the sheets and head down. I’ll tidy up so the cops don’t realize you’ve been up here trying to do their job for them.
” In case I’ve missed the point, Dad reaches up to the top shelf of the wardrobe and pulls out an unfitted white sheet and a pillow that’s slightly yellow around the edges.
Dylan gets a tartan blanket and pillowcase, and the two of us walk to the bedroom door as slowly as it’s possible to do while still meeting the definition of walking.
“Wait, Ruth,” Dad says as I go through the door, waving for Dylan to keep going. He steps out onto the landing. “How are you feeling about all this?”
“I’m okay. I mean, it’s awful, obviously, but I’m okay.” What I am is trying not to look over Dad’s shoulder at the wardrobe’s secret drawer. How could I not think of looking there right away?
“You know that the police are going to find out who killed GG.”
“Who do you think did it?”
Dad blinks at the question. “Probably some career criminal who was looking for money or jewelry.”
“Right.” I hate that Dad can’t be honest with me the way he can with Aunty Vinka and tell me what he’s actually thinking. But I can’t say that, so I settle for something I can say. “Where were you?”
“What?”
“You weren’t in your room the night GG was killed.” Dad gives me a look I don’t understand, which is weird because I’m usually fluent in Dad. “I didn’t tell the police.”
Dad opens his mouth and then shuts it again, a couple of times, like my old black moor fish before the cat killed it. “I was just checking on GG,” he says. “You haven’t been worried about that, have you?”
“No.”
“Because there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”
“I know.”
I really don’t know. If what Dad’s saying is true, it must have been his voice I heard talking to GG when I was on my way to the toilet. But his is the only voice I think I would have recognized, even at a whisper through a closed door. And if it was him, what were they talking about like that?
“I know you love mysteries, and I love that about you, but this is real life, Ruth. It’s a lot more boring than a book. It can also be more dangerous, which is my way of saying that I don’t want you doing anything stupid.”
“Like what?”
“Like searching Gertie’s room for what I imagine you would call clues.”
“That’s not—”
“Somebody killed Gertie, honey. This isn’t a game or a story. You need to leave this to the cops.”
He waits for me to agree that he’s right, of course he’s right. I wait for him to stop treating me like I’ve only recently gotten the training wheels off my bike.
“I’d better get these sheets downstairs,” I say.
Dad goes back into GG’s bedroom. He’s very clearly up to something, but aren’t we all? I watch through the gap in the door as Dad bends over in front of the wardrobe, his body obscuring the secret drawer he is obviously sliding open. It can’t entirely obscure the flutter of the paper he pulls free.
I hurry down the stairs before he can catch me, wondering not just what Dad has found (and how I’m going to get a look at it) but what has happened to the box that GG was so keen to see the night she died.
Probably, if I was paying attention, I might have a pretty good idea about that already.
Considering Dad was bang on when he accused me of looking for clues, you’d think I’d be slightly less hopeless when it came to spotting them.
Still, I bet you haven’t figured it out yet either.