The Red Hunter(71)
Claudia felt a little pulse of excitement suddenly. She turned around a couple of times, trying to orient herself. If there were a tunnel here, where would it be?
She started walking the perimeter of the large space, skimming the cold, rough surface of the walls with her fingertips.
“What are you doing, Mom?”
She walked the whole way around until she found herself standing beneath the staircase. She hadn’t noticed it because of all the debris and junk piled high in front of it. But now she realized for the first time that the empty space beneath the stairs had been drywalled in, with no access to what would have been a lot of area within.
“Help me get some of this stuff out of the way,” said Claudia.
The three of them started shoving and lifting boxes, hefting them off to the side. The beam was a bigger problem; it took all three of them to shift it over even a few feet.
The basement itself was not finished, the concrete blocks of the walls exposed. In most unfinished basements, one wouldn’t bother to drywall in just the space under the stairs—unless you were trying to create an enclosed storage area. It was just something to get moldy, to be damaged if the basement flooded, which she knew this one sometimes did. In fact, now that she’d moved the boxes, she could see the water damage down near the floor, a black and orange discoloration. No, there wouldn’t be any point in the effort or expense—unless.
“Mom,” said Raven. “What are you thinking?”
Claudia looked back and forth between the kids, who were both watching her.
“Feel like doing a little demo?” she asked.
“Demo?” said Troy, confused. “Like a demonstration? For your blog?”
“Like demolition,” said Claudia.
Raven smiled. “Where’s the sledgehammer?”
? ? ?
JOSH HAD TRIED CLAUDIA TWICE on her cell phone, then on the landline. Then, frustrated, thinking, he went to the workshop to finish up the chair he was repairing for Mrs. Crabb. He’d called Todd, who said he would go over to keep working on the town houses. Josh promised to meet him. Todd was a good guy, did meticulous work, but he was slower than molasses when he worked alone. Working on the chair helped him manage the hard pulse of anxiety. An hour passed, two. She didn’t call back.
Rhett appeared in the doorway.
“Tick tock, little brother.”
twenty-six
About a month after my parents were killed, Paul and I went back to the house. There were things there that we needed. We pulled up in the old Suburban, and Paul and I just sat there while Catcher whimpered, desperate to get out and run around his yard. When he started to bark, Paul opened the door and the dog bounded toward the house, started scratching on the door.
Catcher was Mom’s dog. He loved romping through the woods with me and Dad, but it was Mom he followed from room to room. It was beside her that he slept. He’d been pining, not eating, pacing Paul’s apartment with the limp he had now, restless and howling at every siren. Now, it was me from whom he never wanted to be apart.
Paul unlocked the front door and Catcher ran inside, tore through the house. I stood on the porch, hands dug deep in my pockets, and looked at the flat gray sky, the black dead trees, the white field of snow.
“It’s been—” Paul started. He took a hard swallow and stared off into the middle distance so long that I didn’t think he was going to finish. “Cleaned up.”
I knew he had been there a number of times. I wondered if he’d been the one to clean the place—the kitchen where my mom’s blood had pooled, the basement where my dad had been shot.
I nodded but didn’t follow him inside right away. He left me to find my own way in, which was the way I needed to do things. Finally, I stepped into the foyer. What got me was how normal everything seemed. It could have been any day. Things were just as they had always been. Mom’s house shoes were still by the door, these blue embroidered tasseled things that her world-traveling friend had sent from a distant land I couldn’t even name.
Catcher came loping down the stairs, exuberance lost. He padded into the kitchen where he stood whining at his empty bowl. I couldn’t even look at him, so clear was his disappointment. He thought she was here.
On the refrigerator hung my math test; I’d earned an A—a big deal for me in math. On the whiteboard were scribbled Mom’s notes about milk and the book she needed to get for her book club, the date of my upcoming English test—a test I never took. I didn’t know when I was going back to school.
Aborted. Our lives had come to an abrupt and brutal end. I was the only unlucky one still breathing.
I made my way upstairs to my bedroom. It was full of things—cards, stuffed animals—things that came to the hospital that I didn’t remember receiving and which must have been moved home. Paul had retrieved my clothes, some books, my stuffed unicorn Mr. Emma that I’d been sleeping with since I was little. I’d been dragging the poor thing around everywhere since the beginning of time. It was practically a rag, ripped, sewed and sewed again, chewed on by Catcher, limp from lost stuffing.
I drifted from room to room. My mother’s purse sat on her dresser, keys beside it, like she was getting ready to head out to the store. The bed was unmade. They’d been woken in the night, never returned to this room. There was a glass of water by my father’s bed. Half-empty.