Candace said, “I think I might have seen it in the car.”
“The car? How on earth could—”
A phone began to ring.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Albert said. “Can we all remember to mute our phones, please?”
Everyone pulled out their phones as the ringing continued.
“Not me,” said Dick.
“Not me,” said Rona.
The ringing was coming from somewhere else in the room. “Oh shit,” Albert said. “I think it’s mine.”
He jumped up and walked over to the table where the coffee machine was sitting, spotted his phone, and picked it up.
“Hello?” he said.
“It’s Izzy. You need to get to the hospital as fast as you can.”
Thirty-Three
Andrew
My unexpected meeting with Isabel, and the subsequent visit with Elizabeth, had thrown me off my game somewhat. I’d left the house that morning intending to visit Charlie Underwood, the exterminator who’d answered Brie’s plea for help when she thought our house might have a mouse infestation.
And, in fact, I later learned that it did. In the midst of having to deal with all the fallout from Brie’s disappearance, I began to spot mouse droppings around the house. Under the sink, in the basement where the wall met the floor, even in a kitchen drawer. I had tried to solve the problem on my own, buying traps and commercially available poison, but I wasn’t able to get a handle on the problem.
Finally, I had called Charlie Underwood.
But when he realized I was Brie’s husband, he passed on the job. He would have known, by that time, that I was Hardy’s prime suspect. She would undoubtedly have spoken to him many times in the course of her investigation. Maybe he thought I had some ulterior motive, that I wanted to pump him for details about his meeting with Brie. I supposed it was possible Hardy had warned him I might get in touch.
I just wanted to get rid of the fucking mice.
But now, six years later, I wondered if Charlie’s refusal to return to the house had any further significance. And, since I didn’t know what else to do at this point, he seemed like a good place to start.
His home was a run-down, vinyl-sided, two-story dwelling up Forest Road, before it turns into Burnt Plains Road north of the turnpike. It was set back a good hundred feet from the blacktop, and behind it sat a square, squat structure made of cinder blocks. I pulled into the driveway and parked next to a seriously rusted panel van, some of the rust eating right through the letters of underwood pest control painted on the side. The van was sitting on the rims and clearly hadn’t been driven anywhere for some time. An old, original Beetle — not one of the new, redesigned versions — was parked farther up the drive. Just as rusted out, but on fully inflated tires.
I got out, and as I approached the house noticed that the second-story windows were all boarded up. I climbed the two steps to the porch and knocked on the front door. When no one showed up after twenty seconds, I tried again. Same result.
I walked around the corner of the house and noticed that the door to the cinder-block structure was ajar. As I approached it I started to get a whiff of something that took me back to when I was a little kid, when I visited my uncle’s farm. He kept pigs, and the stench from the indoor pens could literally take your breath away.
The smell got stronger as I reached the door. I rapped on it, but since it was open, I poked my head in at the same time and said, “Mr. Underwood?”
“Back here!” someone shouted, and coughed.
Breathing through my mouth, I stepped inside. The building, maybe thirty feet square, was filled with makeshift tables constructed of sawhorses and four-by-eight sheets of plywood. The tables filled the room, spaced apart to create several aisles.
And atop every table, cages. Dozens and dozens of cages.
The room was a cacophony of chittering noises, scratching noises, scurrying noises. Each cage contained one or more animals. Rats, mice, squirrels, raccoons.
A possum or two.
As I walked down one aisle, tiny eyes fixed on me. A black squirrel gripped the wire caging of its enclosure, stood on its hind legs, and watched me as I passed. My arrival had created a commotion. Word seemed to be spreading among the creatures. Someone new was here. A stranger. An interloper.
It was a fucking zoo of pests and vermin. And they were living in their own filth.
At the end of the aisle, his back to me, was Charlie Underwood in a pair of blue coveralls. He was stooped over, and as I got closer, he went into a coughing fit. When he was done, he made a retching sound that sounded like someone trying to scoop gravel out of the bottom of a well. Then he spit something onto the floor and I felt my own stomach do a slow roll.
He turned, saw me, and said, “Help you?”
“Mr. Underwood?”
“That’s me.”
“You, uh, did some pest control at my house a few years back.”
“Don’t do that anymore,” he said, then smiled, showing off brown teeth. “Dying,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“You work with poisonous chemicals your whole life, it has a way of catching up with you,” he said, and laughed, triggering another coughing fit.
“I can imagine.” I looked about the room. “What is all this?”
“You’re not one of those fucking inspectors from the city, are you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Because they’d take a dim view of what I’m doing here if they found out,” he said, and coughed again. It echoed all the way down to his shoes. He smiled, waved his hand at the room. “They wouldn’t understand that this is a rescue operation. These are the ones I didn’t have to kill. Saved them all. Some of them, been looking after them for years.”
“These are all... pests you got out of people’s houses?”
He nodded proudly. “Lot of people, they want ’em dead, but if I can get them out alive, I bring ’em here.”
I could think of only one question. “Why?”
He blinked, a little surprised by my question. “Because they’re all God’s creatures, you know. See this rat over here? That’s Susie. Anyway, caught her at a restaurant on the green downtown. I’d tell you which one but then you’d never eat there again and they got good food so I won’t tell you. And that raccoon was living in the attic of a couple in Devon. I accidentally broke his paw getting him out, so I keep him here. Figure he wouldn’t make it out in the wild. His name is Waldo. You say I came to your place?”
“About six years ago.”
“Who are you?”
“Carville. Andrew Carville. But back then, it was Mason.”
He blinked again, taking a second to put it together. It was like watching an old computer start up.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, and coughed again. “You’re the guy. The one who killed his wife.”
“I didn’t kill my wife.”
“Yeah, well, what else would you say? Whaddya want with me?”
I had no answer ready. Now that I was here, I honestly didn’t know. “Going over old ground,” I said. “Still looking for answers. Still looking for Brie.”
“Sure you are,” he said.
“I know it was a long time ago, and that you’ve talked to Detective Hardy probably a dozen times, but is there anything you held back, anything you wish you’d told her?”
He shook his head. “Can’t think of anything. I talked to her a lot.” He grinned. “I was thinking, at one point, that maybe she thought I did it. They even came out here to my place, searched around, looking for anything, but they didn’t find a damn thing. I guess that’s when they started zeroing in on you.” He shook his head and grinned once more. “Guess you beat them on that one.”