“Why’s that?”
“Because he was able to clean it up,” I said. “He had time to clean it up. If Buck was bleeding seriously in here, it would be a goddamned mess, and Vinnie would have had more important things to do.”
“Okay, so then who smashed his windshield? And where the hell is he? If somebody was home, you’d think they would have noticed us by now.”
“I think you’re right about that.”
“What’s this?” Lou said. He picked up a crumpled bag from the floor and opened it. “Looks like they stopped for hamburgers.”
“That’s not like Vinnie to leave garbage in his truck. Hell, if he spent all this time cleaning up the blood…”
“He cleaned up the seat and then they stopped for hamburgers later,” Lou said, slamming the door shut and sending a few more pieces of the windshield onto the seat. “Then apparently he got somebody really mad at him. Or at least at his truck.”
I closed the passenger’s-side door and looked up at the farmhouse. It was just past the middle of the day now, and the sun was out from behind the clouds and casting a blinding hot light on everything around us. There was only the hum of insects in the grass and no other sound. That’s when I noticed that the front door to the house was ajar.
“What’s going on here?” Lou said as he spotted the same thing. “Why is that door open?”
I stepped forward, a sick feeling already rising in my gut. I was afraid to look inside the house, but I knew we had to. We were set on this course the moment we left Dukes and his neighbor in Sault Ste. Marie, and here we were almost two hundred miles away, about to find some answers whether we wanted them or not.
I saw the debris on the floor as soon as I got close to the doorway. I was looking into the kitchen, where someone had apparently taken out every single drawer and upended the contents on the tile. Silverware, paper, pencils, hand tools, electrical cords, a thousand different things all scattered around the place. I stood there in the doorway and was about to knock on the frame. As if somebody would come shuffling through from another room to greet me with a smile and to apologize for the mess.
“We have to go in,” Lou said. “You know we have to.”
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded my head.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said.
Normally, this would have set me off. Like maybe I shouldn’t sign the guest book, either? But my mind was already running ahead of me and I couldn’t help imagining the worst. I took a step inside and heard a sudden pop that made my heart leap out of my chest, followed a millisecond later by the crunch of a tiny Christmas tree light bulb under my shoe.
“Let’s split up,” Lou said.
He went left, around a staircase. I went straight through the kitchen, around the butcher-block island, marveling at the thoroughness of the job done by whoever had been here. Besides every drawer, he or she or they had opened up every cupboard and swept the contents clean. There was a big pantry with the door half open and when I looked inside I saw a riot of food boxes and cans all covered with a thin coating of flour. This was more than just a ransacking of the house. It was an annihilation.
I opened the door next to the pantry. It led downstairs to a finished basement. There was a steady hum from a dehumidifier sitting in the corner, and as I looked around the rest of the room I had to wonder how that particular machine had been allowed to keep running. The large-screen television had been pulled off the wall, and it was now lying facedown on the carpet with all of the stereo equipment piled on top of it. All of the pictures and posters and whatnot had been taken from the walls, the glass frames smashed and many of the contents ripped into pieces. As I looked closer, I saw the fragments of concert posters and photographs of old rock-and-roll musicians. I even saw the scrawled signature in one corner of one picture that I couldn’t quite make out, but it was further proof that these had been some valuable pieces at one time. But no more.
I went back upstairs. I looped around the ground floor and didn’t see Lou anywhere. What I did see was more carnage. Dining room chairs smashed over the table, a china cabinet literally tipped over with the contents spilling out into a million pieces of broken glass and porcelain.
I went up the stairs, hearing the old treads creak with every step. I found Lou in the master bedroom, looking down at a great pile of clothing that had been torn out of the closet.
“Did you find anything?” he said. “Any sign of Vinnie or Buck?”
“No. Just more wreckage.”
“What do you think the point of all this was?”
“Trashing the whole house? Either they weren’t real pleased with the owners. Or else they were just looking for something.”
“Maybe both,” Lou said. “But damn, this kinda goes beyond that, doesn’t it? This looks like pure rage to me.”
“Too bad we missed them,” I said. “We could have asked.”
Lou shook his head and scanned the clothing on the floor. There was a full-length fur coat ripped out of its protective bag. I would have bet anything it wasn’t a fake.
“Look at this stuff,” he said. “Does this look like something a real hippie would wear?”
“Yeah, I couldn’t help noticing, everything in this house looks pretty expensive. Although I did see a lot of old stuff from the sixties in the basement. Concert posters, signed photographs, stuff like that.”
“Maybe that’s where they came from,” he said. “A long time ago. But they seem to have gotten over it. I bet they own a lot of land here, to go with this quaint little four-thousand-square-foot house.”
We left the master bedroom and checked out the rest of the top floor, finding three more bedrooms and three bathrooms, each with mirror shards in the sinks. At the end of the hall there was an office, and here, finally, the intruder’s efforts seemed a little more focused. Every drawer in the desk and file cabinets was thrown open, but the papers weren’t scattered to the winds. Instead, someone had apparently sat himself down and gone through everything page by page, stacking them on the floor when he was done with each handful.
“Now all of a sudden they’re looking for something,” Lou said. “What do you think it was?”
“Who knows?” I said, carefully moving some of the papers aside as I looked through them. It was all the usual stuff you’d find in any home office. Tax receipts, insurance policies, all the mundane details of modern life.
“Maybe bank records,” Lou said, bending down to look through the papers on the other side of the room. “Or phone records. Or hell, it could be anything. Whatever it was, we don’t even know if they found it.”
I looked out the window. I saw the metal roof on one of the outbuildings. Lou looked out the same window and seemed to have the same thought.
“Why is Vinnie’s truck still here, anyway?” he said. If he was trying to keep the dread out of his voice, he was doing a lousy job of it. “If he’s gone, why wouldn’t he-”
He didn’t even finish. He didn’t have to. We both went back down the stairs and out the door. Without saying a word, he went to one of the buildings, and I went to the other. Mine was either a small barn or a large shed or who the hell knows what. There was a door on the side with a bare light bulb mounted over it. When I opened it, I had a small heart attack when a chicken screamed at me and then came strutting outside. I went in and saw a few more chickens walking around the place. There were bales of hay and a work table piled high with rusted old farm tools. Sunlight streamed through the windows and there was no sound except for the chickens’ clucking. On any other day the scene would have seemed downright peaceful.
I left the building and went to the other. As I walked through the lone door on the side facing me, I saw four bay doors that opened up in the other direction. It was a large garage, with two older cars taking up the spaces on the far end. I didn’t see Lou anywhere, until he finally appeared on the wooden ladder mounted against the wall. He was coming down from a small loft, and he looked thoughtful, not horrified. A good sign.