House of Secrets - v4 Read online

  “Your mother misses the East. Denver is just not Lillian’s speed.”

  Christine scoffed. “Neither was Albany. And apparently neither was Greenwich. In fact, even London didn’t seem to float her boat. I’m not sure that anywhere is Miss Lillian’s speed. You’re amazingly sweet to put up with her, Ben. Daddy used to say that governing the state of New York was the simple part. It was governing his wife that took all his real skills.”

  Ben’s nervous laugh betrayed his discomfort. The poor man, Christine thought. I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t know.

  Smallwood spotted the ferry carrying his cousin Joy within a minute of its leaving Greenport.

  He watched as it crossed the bay and disappeared from sight on the other side of the wooded point that jutted into the water. Smallwood’s insights about Cousin Joy had been surging through his mind for months now, his large brain gathering and processing and gathering and processing with prodigious efficiency. He had her nailed, pegged, analyzed, dissected. Gone was the sweet little girl with whom he used to spend summers out on the island. In her place was a creature Smallwood barely recognized and had come to despise.

  Smallwood had taken the train out from the city and then “borrowed” the rowboat to travel over to the island. He had come to confront his cousin with the results of his analyses. There could be no more avoiding it. Lately Joy had been refusing to even answer the phone when he called. It had been a pure fluke that she had refused his most recent request to get together by letting him know — angrily — that she was heading out that night to the house on Shelter Island.

  Or possibly not a fluke. Possibly it was all in the stars.

  The temperature had dropped in the past hour. Some fifteen minutes after the ferry docked, a car’s headlights had appeared on the hill, stopping at the very last house. Through the magic of sound on water, Smallwood had heard a pair of doors closing, followed by the tiny buzzing sounds of conversation. A man. A woman.

  Smallwood rose. Stretching his arms out from his sides for balance, he stepped from the lifeguard chair and landed softly in the sand, cushioning the drop with his knees. Lifting his feet decorously — like a slow prancing Andalusian horse — large and determined Robert Smallwood marched along the sand toward the road, feeling extremely goddamned noble.

  As Christine stepped onto the down escalator, her attention was drawn to an elderly man standing at the bottom, edging onto the moving stairs using a wooden cane. He was dressed in a plaid jacket and a red bow tie, and was stooped with age. His hair was wavy and cotton white, with salt-and-pepper eyebrows that flared at the ends. He looked like a lost vaudevillian.

  Instinctively, Christine reached for her camera and began firing off shots of the man, at the same time taking methodical steps backward so that she might stay in place near the top of the escalator. Each foot landed seamlessly on the next descending stair. Ben continued down toward the bottom.

  The man in the bow tie was hesitating at the bottom of the escalator, poking tremulously at the moving stairs with the tip of his cane, but finally he committed. Christine captured a dozen images in the space of five seconds. Then she paused, ceasing her backpedaling, and squeezed the zoom. An elegant face of thin rubbery folds filled the viewfinder. Christine tightened the frame even more. It was only the precise instant that the white-haired man looked directly over into her camera that Christine became aware of the tears of humiliation glistening on his cheeks.

  The two passed in the middle. As she reached the bottom, Christine wanted nothing else but for a second escalator to open up in front of her and take her down, down, down. She stepped over to a row of chairs and dropped into the first one she reached. The pitiable man’s mournful face filled her mind and she had an urge to go racing up the escalator, to find the man, to do… something. She didn’t budge. Her eyes fell blindly on two women seated across from her. It took the better part of a minute for it to dawn on her what book one of the two women was reading. The teary old man dissolved from Christine’s mind. She realized she was staring at the photograph of her handsome laughing husband and her mildly exploited daughter.

  Something felt terribly, terribly wrong.

  To avoid the crunching sound of gravel underfoot, Smallwood kept off the driveway. His breathing was labored, from walking up the steep road as well as from the adrenaline rushing powerfully through his system.

  The trees surrounding the house created an additional canopy of darkness. Smallwood felt as if he could swipe his hand through the air in front of him and come up with a smear of black on his fingers. The vision further suggested to him that were he to circle the house several dozen times before entering it, he could render himself an unseeable shadow form, as invisible as a gathering of wind.

  The black wind of night.

  Joy’s Miata was parked on the gravel drive. Smallwood stepped daintily over the gravel to the car and peered into the window. He was curious about the keys. The family habit when coming out to stay in the house was to forgo locks, forgo keys. The house had always been that sort of refuge from the otherwise restrictive and wary world. A place to let down your guard.

  Yes. The keys were in the car.

  As Smallwood turned to confront the house, echoes of the long-ago voices of his cousins and himself swirled deliciously in his head, and with no difficulty at all he could see Cousin Joy making one of those explosive leaps they all enjoyed making from the front porch, her ponytail rising behind her like an Indian’s feather, her bare skinny limbs flying in their four directions.

  Smallwood froze the image: Cousin Joy suspended in the air, with her little pretty face open in a shriek of delight. Smallwood stepped over to where his mind had fixed her in space. He remained there, Black Wind of the Night, wholly motionless for a full minute… two… three… gazing at his own imagination. Inches from little Joy’s face. Studying the tiny gap between her Chiclet teeth. Breathing in her imagined scent.

  Presently, Smallwood became aware of sounds. For a moment he thought the soft cooing sounds were coming from him, from his own sweet nostalgia. Then he recognized them for what they were. Not his pathetic pigeon sounds at all. Anything but. They were coming from the house.

  From Joy.

  No longer worried in the slightest about making noise, Smallwood marched to the side of the house and around toward the back. Off at the edge of the property, beyond the trees, floated the black pool of the inlet down below. As he neared the rear of the house the sounds became louder. Unmistakable.

  His… hers… his… hers…

  Theirs.

  Smallwood’s shin banged against a hard object that was sticking out of the ground. The white flash of pain fueled his surging anger. Smallwood knew what he’d hit, and he reached down and wrenched it from the ground. It made no difference to him that the metal horseshoes on the ground clanked. The couple inside the house couldn’t hear a goddamned thing other than their own animal grunts. Smallwood flipped the iron horseshoe pole deftly, catching it just at the base.

  In ten seconds he was on the back patio.

  Through the sliding glass door he could now see what he had been hearing. His breath was pouring furiously from his nostrils like that of an enraged dragon as he tried the door. It was locked. The ghostlike figures on the bed didn’t seem to notice a damn thing except themselves.

  The crash of the horseshoe pole breaking through the glass changed all that.

  Smallwood brought the iron rod down on the glass door in a swift series of blows, sweeping it in a circular motion to snap away the hanging shards. Joy was screaming. The two bodies scrambled in place, kicking the white sheets into a pile.

  Smallwood reached inside the broken glass to flip the lock. Jerking the door open, he charged forward, the iron bar lifted over his head. His naked targets were stranded on the bed. Joy the Disappointment and some irrelevant quivering dark-haired man.

  Robert Smallwood had never felt more alive or more important than he did as his arm — itself feeling
long and liquid and, in such a peculiar way, sublime — began its powerful descent.

  He hoped the stars were watching.

  “Holy Josef!”

  Dimitri Bulakov’s beer bottle fell from the bedside table and glug-glug-glugged its contents onto the floor.

  “Child of Jesus,” Dimitri muttered, lurching closer to the laptop. His hands went to the headset, pressing the miniature speakers hard to his ears.

  The laptop showed a split screen. Earlier in the day, Dimitri Bulakov had planted three fiber-optic cameras in the bedroom of the house atop the nearby hill. Two of the slender devices were located in the brass casing on the overhead fan, spaced in such a fashion that should one of the fan blades come to a stop beneath one camera, the second camera would still have a clear view of the bed below. The third filament had been run along the power cord leading from the wall outlet to the bedside clock radio and secured against the bottom of the appliance by good old-fashioned chewing gum, Dimitri’s proud marriage of high and low tech. He had learned this trick at the last full-time job he had held, that is if two and a half months could be considered full-time. Dimitri Bulakov knew electronics, but what he did not know was cooperation and playing well with others. It was the temper thing, and the drinking thing. One thing or another. Often both.

  The bedside filament also collected the audio. Both the images and audio routed wirelessly through a feeder MacBook that Dimitri had hidden under the shoes on the floor in the bedroom’s closet, and from there to Dimitri’s laptop in Room 5 of the Sunset Motel, half a mile’s distance away. With a sequence of keystrokes, Dimitri could bring to his screen either the image of the entire bed as seen from the overhead fan locations, or the tight bedside close-up on the pair of pillows. Or both images at once — hence the split screen.

  This was the configuration on Dimitri’s monitor — on the left side, two pale bodies as seen from above, contorting, and the woman’s face on the right side — when the jarring sound of breaking glass abruptly sounded. The woman’s screams assaulted Dimitri’s eardrums as the couple on the bed swiftly separated. A figure moved into the frame of the overhead shot.

  Which was when Dimitri’s beer bottle fell.

  The figure could have been a bear, it seemed so large. A white blur bled across the screen as limbs and torsos scrambled crablike up against the wall. Dimitri watched as the naked man lurched toward the intruder. But the intruder swung his arm, and the man pitched sideways and fell from the bed. The woman’s screams intensified.

  “No! Please! Robbie! No!”

  The intruder was holding something long and thin in his hand. In the dreamlike image on the screen, it looked to Dimitri like a wand. With a crack that Dimitri could plainly hear, the weapon landed on the woman’s face. Her screams died instantly. The man continued swinging his weapon furiously, bringing it down over and over. At one point, the woman’s arms seemed to float upward — it almost looked as if she were beckoning her attacker to accept her embrace — then she fell backward onto the pillows, still as a stone. On the left-hand screen, the naked man appeared, rising partway to his knees. The attacker gave an almost nonchalant backhand swing, landing his weapon on the side of the man’s head. The man dropped once more from view.

  Dimitri glanced at the computer’s toolbar: INPUT DOWNLOADING. He was getting it all. On-screen, the intruder turned back to the woman, and Dimitri tore off the headphones. He swung his feet to the carpet and lurched over to the window. Behind him, the grunting sounds were rendered cheap and tinny in the headset’s tiny speakers. Dimitri ripped the curtains aside.

  The partly hidden house on the hill was black. No suggestion of the brutality that was playing out inside its walls. Dimitri was hyperventilating, unaware of the tears that were streaming down his face.

  He waited. He was impotent to do anything else.

  Dimitri could not have said how long it took for the noises coming from the laptop to subside and then finally cease altogether. Not long. But still, too long. In its way, the silence that replaced the horrible noises was just as ugly.

  Dimitri released the curtain and picked up his binoculars. He was sweating furiously. At first he saw nothing. But then, from the rear of the house, a shadowy form appeared. It moved swiftly around to the front of the house, where it paused, its hands on its hips, stretching backward, working out a kink. The figure pulled open the driver’s side door of the sports car and squeezed in behind the wheel. Seconds later the headlights lit up a corner of the house as the car swung a tight turn to aim itself back down the driveway.

  Dimitri lowered the binoculars and watched the twin cones of light flicker deftly along the woods and disappear from sight.

  Christine Foster stood nose to nose with her reflection in the black glass of her hotel room. The snow had not let up, although now it was mixed with an icy slush, lending a sense that chunky pieces of the sky were being propelled to earth.

  Christine wanted to be back in New York. Although she hadn’t appreciated just how difficult three and a half days — now to be a full four — away from Michelle would prove, she had anticipated the challenge of spending those days with her own mother.

  She was drained.

  Twelve years distant from her marriage to Christine’s father and Lillian was still fully capable of casting herself as a person tossed blithely into exile. This was the role she relished. Sufficiently lubricated — as it seemed she’d been for much of Christine’s visit — Lillian showed no compunction about prattling away to anyone within earshot about all the charms and excitements of her former life, beginning with accounts of her fairy-tale life as New York’s First Lady and then moving on to her time as an ambassador’s wife in London. Although Lillian’s manic reminiscences gave the impression — initially — that the woman had actually enjoyed these heady days, nothing could have been further from the truth. Even in Lillian’s legendarily vivacious early years in Manhattan there had already existed a certain dark-eyed danger lingering in the young woman’s shadows. By the time Christine was a child her mother’s eccentric charms had begun to devolve into the tedium of erratic behavior and social hostage-taking. The seductive honey of Lillian’s tongue had transformed into something decidedly more acidic. The black moods had begun appearing with greater frequency. Especially after the move to London, when Christine was sixteen, Lillian blew ever hotter and colder, and Christine and her brother came to wonder whenever they heard their mother approaching just which Lillian would be walking through the door.

  Of the two siblings, it was Peter who had been more adept at accommodating his mother’s growing instability. Being more naturally possessed of an instinct about fragility, Christine’s older brother had displayed the sort of caring and forgiveness for their mother that Christine had been much less inclined to generate. Christine resented the upheaval that her mother’s petulant whirlwinds brought to the household. Peter argued that their father’s ungenerous response to Lillian’s behavior was contributing enormously to the discord.

  Christine raised a hand and placed her fingers on her reflection in the window. It was impossible for her to recall her father’s years as ambassador — nine in all — without the stinging memory of his and Lillian’s wretched return to the States. Christine had long since fled the nest, married for several years to Andy. There was general agreement that it was Peter’s tragic death, only months after Whitney and Lillian’s return from London, that had provided the final tipping point for Lillian’s crack-up. Though in Lillian’s telling of the tale, her son’s sad fate played no part. She would always contend that her collapse had everything to do with her husband’s coldness and meanness and eagerness to cast her off.

  Lillian still prized the pain. Or at least she enjoyed letting it out of its cage and taking it about for a walk. Fortunately, she now employed more serpentine ways of making her feelings known than in the past, and so her digs at Christine and Whitney and his current wife, Jenny, and pretty much the entirety of the East Coast came more in viper’s b
ites. Sharp and quick. The relative mellowing had come in part from her surprise move to Denver and her marriage to the eminently squishable Ben. But partly the change was in Christine herself, who learned over time to adopt some of her late brother’s benevolence toward the challenging woman. Lillian was not unaware of her daughter’s increased patience, and in her own way she was willing to declare her gratitude on that front.

  “You’re the real diplomat in the family, sweetheart. I understand that it’s partly because you can’t stand the thought of people not liking you. But you try. I see that.”

  Only from her mother’s tongue could a word like diplomat take on such a sour taste. Christine leaned her head against the cold glass. She wanted to be home.

  The chirping cell phone nearly made Dimitri wet his boxers. He plodded to the second bed. It was Irena.

  “I cannot talk now, I am busy,” he said into the phone, eyeing his chunky form in the dresser mirror.

  “When do you come home?”

  Dimitri always felt that his wife’s voice sounded like a mouse. When they first began seeing each other, he had loved that funny sound.

  “Tomorrow,” he said thickly. “Like I said.”

  “Dimitri, Leonard is in the hospital. It is to do with his heart again. How early can you be home?”

  Leonard was Dimitri’s brother. The two of them owned and operated a Ping-Pong parlor and tavern in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. Only thirty-seven and Leonard was already having heart problems. Partly it was the business, Dimitri was convinced. The business was not doing well. He and his brother were hemorrhaging money.

  “How is he?” Dimitri asked.

  But the little mouse insisted. “When?”