21
Free-range anxiety is a lot like a free-range rooster. It can move about at will, and if provoked, it just might peck you to death. My anxiety, already pushing hard against the fence, broke loose at this point and jumped the chicken wire, clucking madly and scattering feathers everywhere.
Out of sheer gut will, I got myself home in one piece so I could fall apart in private, thank you very much, with only the demon inhabiting my home as a witness. And the rats. I’d almost forgotten about the rats. They could enjoy the show, too, for all I cared.
Before I left, I asked Martinez for a copy of the interrogation tape, which he promised he would get for me, along with the copy of Pryne’s file. The cop who drove me home seemed to sense my distress. He walked, or rather slid alongside me to my door, checked the place for bogeymen, and salted my sidewalk for me before he left.
My house was cozy with the smell of chili, which I’d completely forgotten about. After I checked every lock in the house three or four times and turned on my space heaters, I pulled the chili out of the oven and spooned myself out a big helping, loading it up with cheddar cheese and sliced jalapenos for zip. I ripped open a bag of Fritos—since Fritos are made out of corn, I was counting that as a vegetable—and sat myself down to supper.
I ate like a plow horse after a long day of sod-busting. I tried to block out visions of fat cells exploding in my thighs as I crunched my way through the first handful of Fritos. I thought about the rats as I ate, wondering if they were watching me, their little beady eyes mapping out grids on my kitchen floor in preparation for a late night reconnaissance mission for Frito crumbs. The smell of chili warming in the oven all afternoon must have driven them crazy, the nasty little vermin.
Speaking of nasty little vermin, Peter Terry knew Gordon Pryne, it turned out. And Gordon Pryne clearly knew Peter Terry. I felt my stomach flip as I let this thought enter my conscious mind.
Could Peter Terry be Gordon Pryne’s accomplice? But no, it was the fingerprints that had pointed Jackson toward a second offender. I didn’t know enough about demons to know if they had fingerprints, but it seemed unlikely.
I couldn’t think clearly. The day had been too long. It would be an exercise in foolishness to let myself speculate about fingerprints and demons and stalker notes and ax murderers. I could feel my brain winding up for it, the clucking and pecking getting louder by the second, urging me to run blindly around in circles, only to get nowhere and scratch myself all to pieces on the way.
I got up from the table and paced a circuit around the kitchen instead, pausing to open the water heater cabinet. My water heater stared back at me, opaline white, a glowing, sanctimonious reminder of my obsessions run amok. I knew better than to check underneath it for rat poo. Instead, I reached out my hand, felt the heat, then shut the cabinet and cleared the table.
I cleaned the kitchen, allowing myself the small comfort of a Comet-scoured sink and a humming dishwasher, and got ready for bed, besotted with gratitude that my water heater still worked.
Sometimes Jesus just throws me a little bone.
I tossed up a quick prayer of thanks, tucked myself in, and proceeded to toss and turn for the rest of that long night.
With morning came a break in the weather, along with the general collapse of my mania. I simply could not keep it up any longer. I’d finally worn myself out.
I fixed a cup of tea and looked out my kitchen window.
The lumpy rain had stopped, and the sun was making a welcome but meager showing through the clouds. I pried the newspaper off the front porch and checked the weather. The temperature was supposed to ease all the way up to thirty-four, starting the melt that would liberate the city by late afternoon. If it froze again that night, we’d be in for another slick day tomorrow.
I sat, wrapped in one of my mother’s quilts (I still had no bathrobe), drinking tea at my kitchen table and listening as my eaves began to drip onto the hard, crunchy snow. I scribbled on notepads all morning, trying to bring some order to my thoughts and generate a to-do list.
Randy of Randy’s Right-Now Rodent Removal made an appearance just after noon. I listened grimly as he assessed my situation.
“With your rats,” he said, nodding gravely at me, “you’ve got your entry problem and your exit problem.”
“My entry problem and my exit problem?”
“Let’s start with your entry problem. By that I mean, where are they coming in? What is their point of entry?”
“They’re coming in behind the water heater.” I pointed dumbly at the hole. Was the man blind?
“Yes, but your original point of entry is what I’m asking, Miss Foster.”
“I don’t follow you, Randy.”
He took a scrap of paper and a ball-point pen from his pocket protector, clicked the pen like he was cocking a gun, and began to draw.
“Your walls of your typical house in this neighborhood are framed like this, sitting on a foundation you call a pier and beam. What you have with a pier and beam is a crawl space, some sixteen to eighteen inches in clearance, between your subflooring and your ground. We do it like this in Dallas because the ground in North Texas likes to move around a little bit here and there. A slab foundation, like you might have up in the panhandle or somewhere, would crack quick as a wink.”
I nodded, already overwhelmed with unfamiliar and, to my mind, unnecessary information.
“Now you have a concrete base on this pier and beam construction, and if you’re lucky, a high performance vapor barrier above the soil in your crawl space. If that barrier is damaged in any way,” he punched the pen at his drawing to emphasize what I hoped would be the climax of his little speech, “you can get yourself rodents, mold, all manner of problems.”
“So you’re saying my vapor barrier is damaged, you think?”
“House this age probably never had one, Miss Foster. I hate to tell you that, but it’s the awful truth.”
“So how can I find out?”
“What I’m going to do is, I’m going to slip on my coveralls and go down there and take a peek. I’ll be right back.”
He left for a moment and came back from his truck wearing a pair of filthy white coveralls with a red-and-white patch on the back in the shape of a mouse, with Randy’s Right-Now Rodent Removal stitched into it, and the motto below: “Because you needed us yesterday.”
“Where’s your trap door?” he asked me.
“My trap door?”
“House like this, you have a trap door that goes down to the crawl space. Usually in your bedroom closet. Mind if I take a look?”
I shook my head no and trundled along behind him into my bedroom. I tried not to feel violated as he opened my closet door and parted my clothes with his thick, hairy arms. He removed handfuls of blouses and tossed them on the bed. I grabbed them up and placed them neatly in stacks, holding my hand out for him to hand me the next batch.
Randy let out a mighty grunt as he eased himself down on one knee and began taking my shoes out of the closet, shoving them off to the side. I placed them in tidy rows on the hardwood floor, arranged by type and heel height.
Going through my closet tickled an inkling to return to Drew’s room. I made a mental note to go back over there and take another look.
Randy located the trap door, pried it open with the largest screwdriver I’d ever seen, and squished himself through the gap. He completed this maneuver, miraculously, without the aid of the slab of butter I’d deemed essential to get a man that size into a hole roughly the width of a couple of shoeboxes.
Frigid stale air snuck into my already-chilly house as I waited by the open trap door, peering through at the dirt below. I could see Randy’s flashlight bobbing in the darkness, illuminating cobwebs and dead bugs I was better off not knowing about. I backed away from the hole and sat on the floor by my bed.
He was back in a minute, smashing his elbows into his ribcage and puffing back up into the room in a cloud of dust.
“Miss Foster, I’m sorry to inform you that you have no vapor barrier.”
“That is unfortunate news.”
“Additionally, your foundation is cracked directly underneath your water heater. A recent crack, it looks like to me. Have you had any unusual settling in your house lately? Heard any loud creaks?”
“Something like that, yes.” My hatred for Peter Terry bloomed into a red-hot, billowing mushroom cloud in my head.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you until you address your foundation problem, Miss Foster.”
“You mean I’m stuck with the mice?”
“Rats.”
“Whatever. Can’t you just run them off or something? I thought that was what you did.”
“Well, this is getting right into your exit problem, Miss Foster. See here, right now they have both. Entry and exit. You can do whatever you want, but they will continue to enjoy full access to your property. What you have to do is seal off that crack and then address your rodent infestation.”
“Infestation? Is that an official word? What exactly is that?”
“That’s a significant rodent problem, Miss Foster, which is what you have here.” He took out his pen again. “Now what I can do,” he said, drawing me yet another diagram, “is fix a steel plate over the hole behind the water heater. And I can seal up the crack in your foundation, but it will only be a temporary fix. You’ll have to call for foundation repair for a more permanent solution.”
“That’s expensive, isn’t it?”
“I can recommend someone who’s reliable and very reasonably priced.”
“You don’t have a brother named Fred, do you? Fred’s Forever Foundation Repair?”
Randy didn’t laugh.
“In the meantime, I can leave you some glue traps,” he said sternly.
“I bought a humane trap a few days ago.”
“Caught anything?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll leave you some glue traps.”
“Why can’t you just poison them?”
“Back to your exit problem. Seal off your exit and you’re stuck with dying rodents between your walls. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”
He went to his truck again and spent the next hour drilling and hammering and applying various fixatives to my water heater closet and to the crack in my foundation, then handed me an astronomical bill, a stack of glue traps that smelled like new tires, and a business card for Metroplex Foundation Repair. I thanked him, wrote a check that almost cleaned out my teensy checking account, and sent him on his way.
I loaded my clothes back into my closet, re-sorting them by type, fabric, and color, of course, which gave my brain something to do besides worry. I found a pair of flowery jeans I’d forgotten about and a neato Bob Dylan T-shirt someone had given me last year for my birthday. I have a thing for him since I’m named after him. I showered, slipped the T-shirt on underneath a roomy sweater, and started making phone calls.
Sharlotta was first. She said I could come back tonight to take another look at Drew’s closet. I tried to reach David on his cell phone, but had to leave a message. Then I called Helene to see how her knees were, and Maria Chavez to see if she’d moved back into her house since Gordon Pryne had been arrested. I left messages for both of them. I checked my messages at the office. Nothing that couldn’t wait. I’d return the calls tomorrow when everyone was back in action. No way we’d get away with another snow day, no matter how slick the streets were. We’d already had two days off—unheard-of wealth in a Texas winter.
By the time I’d finished making phone calls and fussing around the house with chores, the sun was almost down again, the thin January daylight dimming and the freeze bringing the dripping water to a dead stop.
My doorbell rang then, and despite my recent bad luck answering my door, I ran to open it, glad for the company.
It was David, carrying a bouquet of grocery-store roses, a fluffy new pink bathrobe with matching slippers, and some news.
“Linda Fortenberry called me today.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, as I started filling a vase for the roses.
“She’s the medical examiner for Dallas County.”
I looked up.
“You met her at the Christmas party,” he said. “I had lunch with her Tuesday.”
“What did she want?”
“She owes me a favor. I asked her to call me about Drew’s autopsy.”
I turned off the faucet. “What? What did she say?”
“Drew Sturdivant was pregnant when she died.”