First Girl Gone(79)
A narrow walk led from the back door to a pile of firewood. It had been shoveled recently. Probably how Gibbs heated the place. Chopping wood all year round to get through the winters. He’d never had steady employment, as far as she knew, certainly nothing since Allie went missing. He’d mostly kept to himself in the years since. Perhaps he always had.
She pictured him again as he’d looked in the interrogation room: a bewildered man who seemed out of place under the bright lights. Frail and old. On the other hand, she’d seen the way he’d manhandled the two men at the Lakeside Tavern a few days ago. He hadn’t seemed nearly so feeble then.
Her boots pounded up a set of concrete steps as she made her way to the door, footsteps echoing funny in the quiet. She squatted and brought her tension wrench to the deadbolt. With that in place and providing torque to the plug, she raked the tumblers with the tool in the opposite hand, slowly getting all the pins out of the way.
When Charlie felt the last pin give up, she twisted the tension wrench, and the bolt snicked out of the way. She pulled on a pair of gloves and wrapped her fingers around the doorknob. The warped door resisted slightly as it released from the jamb and then swung inward. This was it.
Pushing to her feet, she felt woozy, as if reality was just catching up with her. Now that she stood staring through the doorway into the dimly lit kitchen, her heart began to race. She swallowed hard and braced herself to cross the threshold. Hands and arms tingling. This time she couldn’t push the feelings away so easily.
She hung there for a moment, waiting. It seemed like the perfect time for Allie to return, to squeal with delight at the dangerous, illegal thing Charlie was doing. Instead, there was only the silence of the empty house laid out before her. Eerie.
Duffel bag dangling from her outstretched arm, legs feeling strangely numb, Charlie stepped through the open door.
Chapter Sixty-Three
The hinges on the door squealed as Charlie shut it behind herself. She hesitated there on the rubber mat, taking in her surroundings while her heart chugged away in her chest.
She swept her flashlight across the kitchen, the circular glow revealing the room’s details a little at a time. Junk covered every surface. Dishes and cereal boxes and catalogues clustered on the counters. An overflowing garbage bin huddled near the sink.
She knew she should get started, but the stillness made her chest flutter, made her nerves twitch. It felt like being at church or at a funeral, some hushed space. Reverent and strange.
Finally she willed herself to take one step, and then another. Even though she was moving lightly, the sounds echoed in the space.
She checked the cabinets—the upper ones first and then the lower. Opening doors and peeking inside, she found the standard stuff: Ajax under the sink. Cans of Hormel chili and Campbell’s condensed soup in the cabinets. Drawers full of mismatched silverware and ancient coupon mailers. Nothing suspicious here.
Something screeched in the dark to Charlie’s right. Shrill and wavering.
She froze. Listened. Chills rippling up her spine.
When it screeched a second time, she understood. The wind was scraping a tree branch against the window, that was all. She took a breath, gathered her nerves, and moved on.
She stepped into a formal dining room, though Leroy Gibbs seemed to use it for junk storage exclusively. Stacks of paperback books intermingled with rows of empty beer cans on the old farm table.
On her way to the living room beyond, she paused in front of a series of family photos hung on the wall. Judging from the hairstyles, they were from the seventies or eighties. In the half-light, the faces looked strange. Ghostly. Milky-white. Charlie aimed her flashlight at the nearest photograph, noting the haze of dust coating the glass.
There was just enough space cleared on an ancient, floral-print sofa in the living room to seat one person. The rest was piled high with a mishmash of dirty clothes, board game boxes, and more books. Across the room, an old CRT model TV squatted beside a tower of VHS tapes. The machine was bulky and huge, the likes of which Charlie hadn’t seen in decades.
She used her flashlight to nudge the door leading to the small half-bath. She took one look and decided to let the beam of her light do the searching here. There was no way she was stepping inside the filthy space. Every surface had either yellowed with grime or been splotched black with mildew. Missing tiles stood out from the wall like knocked-out teeth. Water stains mottled the floor around the toilet. An inch or so of murky water sat in the clogged sink basin.
With a shudder, she moved to a stairway ascending to the second floor, her sense of dread only intensifying. Halfway up, one of the stairs let out a groan as she stepped on it, and she stopped dead. Waited. Let the silence fall around her again. Her breathing seemed impossibly loud as it heaved in and out, hitching funny in her throat.
Even though she knew she was alone here, every sound felt wrong in the hushed space. She couldn’t get used to the quiet.
Finally, she pressed on. Though she stepped lightly the rest of the way up, the wood still moaned in protest, every sound making her wince.
The first door at the top of the steps led to another disgusting bathroom and two garbage-cluttered bedrooms. She peered into closets and trained her flashlight on the few swaths of dingy carpet that lay bare, hoping for something obvious like a bloodstain or a hidden wall panel leading to a secret dungeon. The kind of trace evidence she’d fantasized about on her way here would be nearly impossible to find among this mess, at least by herself.