Walking back through the attic, he kept his eyes to the floorboards-still not detecting any critter presence by smell, sight, or sound. And then there it was, just as he was about to climb back downstairs. On a draft, he caught just the lightest odor of something foul, the curling, unmistakable scent of death.
He looked around a bit more, moving boxes, garment bags thick with old clothes, and accordion files bloated with yellowed papers, but the beam of his flashlight revealed nothing. If something had crawled up here and died, he’d have trouble finding it in all this clutter. He’d have to wait until the scent got worse. Luckily, the weather was warm. By tomorrow, late afternoon, it’d be ripe. He’d follow his nose.
He climbed downstairs to find Mrs. Monroe where he’d left her.
“Find anything?”
“Well, no. But I do smell something. So I’ll set a couple of humane traps and come back tomorrow afternoon to see what we’ve got. I suspect raccoons.”
She nodded but looked skeptical. She followed him down the stairs and out to the truck, where he got the traps. He should have been up-selling her, telling her she had an infestation, getting her to sign a contract for more service than she needed. There were bonuses in it for him if he did the sales job as well as the trapping work. But he just didn’t have it in him. He didn’t have that sales personality, that ability to see a need, a fear, or a desire, and then manipulate it. His father was a salesman, always knowing how to mold himself to please, to work a room, to schmooze with a client. But the gene didn’t pass on to Charlie. He could only be himself.
Back at the office, he’d tell them that she was difficult and they’d leave her be. There were enough suckers out there. The difficult ones weren’t worth it, especially these days, when people could post their discontent online. He’d come back and check the traps when he was done for the day tomorrow, write her a bill for the service.
In the late dusk, Mrs. Monroe didn’t seem as tough as she’d appeared inside. She cast a worried glance back at the house, holding the paperwork he’d handed her.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Monroe. I’ll get rid of whatever you have up there.”
She gave a little laugh. “At this age, it takes more than critters in the attic to worry me.”
But he could tell it was bravado. In the rearview mirror, she was just a tiny, frail shadow in the gloaming.
5
Maggie found the house dark and quiet. She closed the door that led from her office suite to her home and locked it, feeling a familiar mingling of relief and a mild flutter of nervousness. Closing this door and turning the dead bolt was something she made sure she did at the end of every day, a way of leaving her work behind. Some days this was easier than others. It was a door that she discouraged Jones and Ricky from walking through. They were to call her on the phone if they needed her. And they, surprisingly, respected that-though Ricky was not above pounding on the door when he’d seen a client drive away and knew there wasn’t another patient inside. Mom, I need some money! Mom, I can’t find my Ramones T-shirt! Jones liked to refer to it as the shrink zone. There was some resentment there, she knew, even though he had suggested that they build the addition rather than lease office space somewhere. Dr. Willough thought that she should have an off-site office, that a simple doorway wasn’t enough to protect patient privacy, to achieve the crucial separation of family and professional life. But, especially when Ricky was small, Maggie found the convenience of being steps away from her home and family very comforting-between patients she could do a load of laundry, run a quick errand, read her son a story, and give the part-time babysitter a break.
“Hello?” she called, walking into the kitchen.
She’d expected to hear the television on, or the pumping bass from the stereo in Ricky’s upstairs bedroom. She’d even thought she might see Jones sitting out by the pool, their bottle of wine already open, her glass waiting. But no. The sun had already dipped below the horizon and there had been no one home to turn on the lamps against the evening. She felt a low-grade anxiety, a nagging loneliness.
She moved through the rooms, flipping switches, filling the house with the light and warmth she needed, turning on the small, new flat-screen on the kitchen counter just to hear the sound of the local news. When the house seemed more alive, she felt better.
She peered into the refrigerator and fooled herself for a moment, thinking she might actually get creative and cook something. But since she hadn’t been shopping and Jones had polished off all the leftovers-not just the lasagna but also the black bean soup she’d made earlier in the week-she gave up the idea quickly. The refrigerator offered only some wilting carrots and a bag of prewashed organic lettuce, a package of cheddar cheese, some tubs of Greek yogurt, and half a bottle of pomegranate juice. Of course, there were always the staples-milk, eggs, bread, butter, all varieties of condiments. She’d never allow the refrigerator to be completely empty. Her mother had never run out of these things, not once in Maggie’s childhood. Always be prepared to make an omelet or a grilled cheese sandwich. And always buy a roll of toilet paper when you do your shopping, even if you don’t need it. That way you never run out. Elizabeth’s household wisdom: there was no shortage.
But it was good advice; Maggie had followed it, even in college. As a cook, a wife, and a mother, she held herself to at least that standard. Even now, she had cupboards full of more toilet paper than they’d ever need.
“Why do we have so much toilet paper everywhere?” Jones always wanted to know.
She picked up the phone and dialed his number, but her call went straight to voice mail.
“Where are you?” she said. “I was thinking of ordering a pizza and salad for dinner. Sound good? Call me.”
Then she dialed Ricky. Voice mail again.
“What do you think about pizza for dinner? Maybe you want to invite Char?”
It was probably a bad idea given Jones’s mood and the whole tattoo thing. But so what? If Ricky and Jones didn’t fight about that, they’d fight about something else. Maybe they’d be on better behavior with a guest at the table. They could all have a meal in relative peace.
She ordered two pizzas from Paesano’s (Jones and Ricky preferred Pop’s, but she thought it was too greasy), one plain, one pepperoni, and a large Greek salad, got hung up on the phone exchanging niceties with the owner, someone she’d gone to high school with, Chad Donner. She might even have kissed him once-she had a fuzzy memory of some indiscreet moment at an unsupervised Halloween party. At any rate, he always made goofy jokes and exuded a lonely energy when she stopped in to pick up a meal or if he answered the phone at the restaurant, as though he remembered something that was important to him but that she had long forgotten. When she hung up, feeling vaguely bad, her thoughts returned to Marshall.
When Marshall had left her office, it was as if he’d taken all the air with him. She’d sat stunned and breathless, though she couldn’t have said why precisely. It wasn’t as if he’d raged, or lost control, or even moved physically toward her. But she’d felt a malice radiating off him in palpable waves. When he was gone, she’d called the high school and happened to catch Henry Ivy during his break.