The Back Door of Midnight ds-5 Read online

  “We have plenty of food,” she replied.

  I eyed the two pieces of slimy meat she had just laid on her bread and the mayo jar with yellow, crusty stuff inside the rim. “Thanks, but I don’t want to be mooching off of you. I bought one of those already-cooked rotisserie chickens.

  Want to try it?”

  Without waiting for her response, I slid her sandwich plate to the side and placed the plastic container with chicken in front of her. She studied it for a moment, then picked up the butcher knife she’d been using and hacked off a leg.

  “Where will you be working, Anna?”

  So she did know who I was. “At a store called Always Christmas.”

  “Marcy’s shop. That’s very nice.”

  She sounded normal, making me wonder if she had taken some kind of medicine. I thought it took longer for psychiatric drugs to work.

  “I hope you remembered to get Dr Pepper,” she said, watching me put away groceries.

  “I did. Want some?”

  “No, thank you,” Aunt Iris replied. “I have private matters to attend to.”

  I opened the refrigerator and moved to one side all the stuff I planned to throw out when she wasn’t looking.

  “It’s unfortunate,” she said.

  “What is?” I asked, wiping off the cleared shelf with a dishrag.

  “I really can’t say. They are private matters.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll be in my office.”

  I pulled my head out of the refrigerator in time to see her slip a key into the door that led from the kitchen into the next room, the one I’d found locked last night. Curious, I followed her to the door to see what was there.

  Two of the room’s walls had glass-fronted cabinets with counters beneath, the kind you see in an old science lab.

  There was a desk, what looked like an examining table, and an old-fashioned scale. A bookshelf just inside the door was crammed with worn volumes on the care of horses, cows, sheep, and, yes, goats.

  “Was this my great-grandfather’s office?” I asked.

  Aunt Iris swung around. “I told you some things are private!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, taking a step back.

  She sat down at the desk, which was topped with a collection of candleholders, all of them covered with wax, their candles burnt down to the metal. What did she do in here?

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “I can hear you prying. It’s nobody’s fault.”

  “It isn’t?” I replied, not sure what she was talking about.

  “Of course not,” she said. “People just die.”

  “Sooner or later.”

  “On your way out, Joanna, close the door behind you.”

  Obviously, I was supposed to leave. I returned to the kitchen but kept the door cracked between us. A minute later she closed and locked it — I heard the double click. Oh, well.

  I fixed myself a salad and ate the other chicken leg, listening for movement inside her office, hearing nothing.

  Thinking about the melted candles, I sniffed but couldn’t smell anything burning. While she was occupied with

  “private matters,” I cleared the gross stuff out of the fridge, triple bagging it, then took it out to a set of heavy-duty trash cans next to Uncle Will’s pickup. On my way back to the kitchen I saw that Iris had closed the shutters in her office.

  Once inside again, I called to her. “Aunt Iris?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Aunt Iris, can I help you with anything?”

  “No, these are private matters.”

  Tomorrow I was buying several smoke detectors. “All right. I’m going down to the dock for a while.”

  Sitting on the dock, I turned my back to the house, but I couldn’t shut her out of my mind. According to her lawyer, there were a lot of decisions to be made. Turning eighteen in a month and being the one-and-only “next of kin” to Aunt Iris, I would have to make choices that were far beyond my own experience. Ms. Nolan had strongly suggested that I call Mom. I would, but after her vacation. Tomorrow’s text message would be “GETTING 2 KNO AUNT IRIS + LUV THE CREEK.”

  Lost in thought, I didn’t notice the steady sound of flicking water coming from the left, not until cool drops were flicked at me.

  “Earth to Anna,” Zack called.

  I turned and saw him treading water about eight feet from the dock. His wet hair was slicked straight back and dripped down his neck, almost touching his shoulders.

  Some people look weird wet and slick, but not Zack.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi! Come on in,” he invited. “Water’s great.”

  “Looks great, but no thanks.”

  “Come on,” he coaxed.

  “I’m not wearing a bathing suit.”

  “So?”

  “So,” I said firmly.

  “Do you like boats? I’ve got a rowboat.” He pulled a tan arm out of the water to gesture in the direction of the Flemings’ dock. “Want to use it?”

  I had always wanted to take out a boat — I mean a real one, not the purple sea dragons that I had pedaled in the Baltimore harbor. Floating around on an evening like this. .

  “I’ll row for you.”

  “I can row myself,” I said — not that I ever had.

  “Okay. There’s a gate through the hedge, close to the house.”

  I glanced in the direction of the Flemings’ dock, then back at the gate.

  “Meet you over there,” he said, and swam toward his own dock.

  Well, how hard can rowing be? I asked myself as I crossed from one yard to the other. It was a children’s song — Row, row, row your boat. But when I walked out on the Flemings’ dock, I had second thoughts. There was an expensive-looking cabin cruiser tied next to the rowboat, and I imagined myself rowing into it. These things didn’t have brakes.

  Zack was floating on his back. When he saw me looking at the cabin cruiser, he righted himself. “Do you like big boats? Our sailboat’s at the marina. We can’t get its mast under the bridge.”

  And where do you keep your oceangoing yacht? I felt like asking. I stared down at the water. I didn’t remember the boats in Baltimore’s harbor sitting that many feet below the dock.

  Zack swam closer. “Want some help getting in? Tide’s low.”

  “I can manage it,” I assured him, and jumped. I landed squarely on both feet, the force of my leap making the boat rock wildly. I rocked with it and grabbed the piling to which the boat was tied, holding on to it like a cat clinging to a tree.

  When I peeked at Zack, he had ducked under the water.

  From the bubbles coming up, I knew he was laughing.

  “Next time,” he said, when he’d surfaced, “you might want to sit on the dock and ease yourself down to the boat.”

  “I might.”

  “Why don’t you put on the life jacket,” he suggested, “just in case the coast guard comes by.”

  The coast guard wasn’t coming by; Zack thought I needed something to keep me afloat, and he was probably right.

  I let go of the piling, sat down, and pulled on the clumsy padding. Slipping the oars in the oarlocks — that was surprisingly easy to figure out — I was about to shove off when, just in time, I remembered I was still tied to the piling.

  Now, that would have been embarrassing.

  I quickly leaned forward and untied the rope, trying to look as if I knew what I was doing. When the difficult knot finally came undone, I noticed Zack once again making like a submarine, sending up flurries of bubbles. I bit my lip.

  He surfaced choking. I pretended not to notice.

  “You know,” he said, “if there is only one rope, it works better to free the loop attached to the dock. That way, if you dock somewhere else, you will still have a rope in the boat.”

  I glanced at the rope, which dangled forlornly from the dock. “Fortunately, as it turns out, I will be coming back here.”

&nbs
p; He grinned. “Fortunately.”

  I pushed off from the piling, letting the boat float itself away from the dock and cabin cruiser, then picked up the oars and started rowing. It wasn’t as easy as I had thought.

  Sometimes I lowered the oars too deeply and could barely drag them out of the water; other times I skipped them along the surface, dousing myself. My right arm was stronger than my left, which meant I rowed in circles. Since I had already proven I didn’t know what I was doing, there was no point in worrying about how I looked to Zack. I kept rowing. I rowed till my shoulders and arms ached, determined to master the skill.

  Zack left me alone, watching me from time to time but saying nothing as he swam around and floated on his back.

  Perhaps he read my body language and knew I wouldn’t welcome his help.

  Finally, with the skin on my hands rubbed raw, I had to stop. I floated about, watching how the sun melted in a pool behind the bridge, leaving the western sky a fiery pink, enjoying the sounds — the voices and laughter that carried across from the other side of the creek. The floor of the boat was gritty. I brushed off a spot and lowered myself onto it, resting my back against one of the two seat slats, cushioning my spine with the life vest. I could have floated out there all night, watching the sky fade to lilac.

  “Hello!” Zack had popped up like a smiling porpoise and was hanging on to the bow of the boat, his arms and shoulders resting along the boat’s edge. “Permission to board, Captain?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he heaved himself over the side of the boat — wet, muscular shoulders and arms, powerful legs. I stared at him, pulling myself up onto the boat seat. Stop looking at him, I told myself. But it was hard not to, since he took up most of the space in front of me.

  “Switch places,” he said. “Take it slowly, Anna, okay?”

  “Sure.” For a moment we had a slow dance in the middle of the boat, he steadying me with his wet hands and laughing when I bolted for the other seat. “You’re determined to sink this thing!”

  He sat down in the rower’s seat and picked up the oars. “I thought you might like a tour of our neck of the creek. A quick one, before it gets dark,” he said, glancing at the sky.

  His eyes were the color of the sky at twilight. There was a soft light in them, like the last bit at the end of the day. As he rowed across the creek, I forced myself to look at the shoreline rather than him.

  “That’s a little park,” he said, pausing a moment to point, “used mostly by people from Chase College. The campus is back in that direction. The pavilion belongs to them, but everybody uses it to picnic. Those docks are for their crew and sailing teams.”

  Beyond the college waterfront we passed a large house with terraced gardens, then crossed over the creek to glide by another estate. Estates, crew teams, a guy rowing me around — I felt as if I had slipped between the pages of a British novel.

  “That’s the Fairfaxes’ place.”

  “I can see the roof above the trees. That’s a lot of roof!”

  “The house is large,” he said, as if he didn’t live in a manse.

  “There’s no dock,” I observed.

  “They like their privacy. You can’t see it well in this light, but they let the lower part of their grounds on each side go wild and marshy, so you can’t walk — you can’t even wade the shoreline all the way through. They own several houses and are here only in the fall and spring. They put out a floating dock then. It’s Marcy’s family,” he said. “Her adoptive family.”

  “Her adoptive family?” He had hit a nerve. “Meaning not her real family?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Meaning just her adoptive family, which is something less than being her birth family?”

  He frowned. “I didn’t mean that at all.”

  “Then why even mention it?” I asked. Let it go, Anna, I told myself, but I couldn’t.

  “Because Marcy mentions it — a lot.” He had stopped rowing and was studying my face, as if trying to understand.

  “You’re adopted,” he guessed.

  “Obviously.”

  “Your family must miss you,” he said.

  If he thought I was going to give him the details of my family life, he was wrong. We floated in silence.

  “You said they were on vacation. Where?”

  “Massachusetts.”

  “So, do you have any brothers and sisters?” Halfway through the question, he hesitated, as if he thought I might jump down his throat again.

  “Two sisters and a brother.” The boat rocked gently, the water lapping against its side. “How about you?”

  He shook his head. “Just Dad. And Marcy.”

  “I like Marcy,” I said.

  He looked surprised. “You do? You’ve met her?”

  “I’m working for her.”

  “You’re what?!”

  “She hired me today.”

  He grimaced. “Well, good luck.”

  “I’m surprised your friend didn’t tell you that I stopped by her shop.” The tone of my voice gave away my feelings about his friend.

  “What friend?” he asked, caution seeping into his voice.

  “The guy at Tea Leaves. The guy who followed me down to the park, then up High Street. Either he’s a lousy stalker or he was trying to intimidate me.”

  Without comment, Zack picked up the oars and started to row.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did he do that?”

  Zack’s face was a mask, his eyes avoiding mine, which was a mistake: As long as I wasn’t looking in his eyes, I had a fighting chance against the spell they cast.

  “What is your friend’s connection to the fire?” I persisted.

  “What is his connection to my uncle’s death? What’s yours?”

  He rowed in silence. We rounded a bend in the creek, and his home slid into view.

  “Tell me what you know,” I demanded.

  “It’s complicated, Anna.”

  “There’s nothing like facts to make things simpler.”

  But he wouldn’t answer me. Letting one oar drop, he steered with the other as we drifted toward the Flemings’ dock. His long fingers caught the rope that I had so carefully untied. While he secured the boat, I unfastened my life jacket.

  “You have three choices,” Zack said. “You can climb without my help and scrape your knees. I can give you a push from behind. Or I can climb out first and give you a hand from above. Which would you like?”

  “A hand from above.”

  He scrambled out of the boat, then extended his hand, pulling me up easily.

  “Anna.” He stood so close, I could smell the creek on him.

  “Take care of Iris. And let the police take care of the rest.”

  Mere closeness was as dangerous as his eyes. “Is that advice or a warning?” I asked.

  “Both.”

  nine

  I WALKED TOWARD the gate in the hedge alone, veering from Zack’s path as soon as I could. I heard a dog barking, a shrill whistle, then the sound of a door closing. The yard was suddenly quiet.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  The voice came from behind me, and I jumped, letting go of the gate I had just opened.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” the woman said. The voice was that of an older woman. In the thin light coming from the Flemings’ windows, her hair looked white, a fluffy halo around her head. “You’re Joanna’s daughter.”

  “Yes. I’m Anna.”

  “I saw you with the goats yesterday.”

  I remembered the stocky figure in the black-and-white uniform. “And I saw you,” I told her. “Do you work for the Flemings?”

  “My name is Audrey Sanchez.”

  She said it as if that should mean something to me. It didn’t. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Are you psychic, Miss O’Neill?”

  “My last name is Kirkpatrick now,” I said, but smiled, relieved to know that something as silly as that was on her mind. “And no, I’m not.
The farmer refused to leave until he got some advice, so I pretended to do what Aunt Iris does.”

  “What Iris does is wrong.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It is an unnatural ability,” the woman said. “Iris’s knowledge is unholy. It is against God’s laws. Her ways are the ways of the devil.”

  For a moment I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well. . well, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and I suppose that’s yours.”

  “And God’s,” she replied.

  “You talk to him directly?”

  “Every day.”

  “In prayer,” I said, hoping that was all she meant. If she imagined it was by Verizon, Aunt Iris wasn’t the only loony on Oyster Creek.

  “I can tell you are an innocent girl,” Ms. Sanchez said, “and that concerns me. You need to be careful.” There was genuine worry in her voice. “This is a house of evil.”

  “Oh!”

  “It is so easy to stray.” One doughy hand massaged the other as she spoke. “William strayed.”

  “Uncle Will?”

  “He was once righteous and God-fearing, but he turned toward the darkness.”

  “Really.”

  “If he hadn’t, he would not have suffered a fiery death.”

  I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Psychics are the tools of the devil. Perhaps you weren’t aware of it, but William protected Iris. He was in league with her and therefore brought on his own death. It was the only thing that could save him — fire here rather than fire hereafter.”

  By that, I assumed she meant hell. “I see. Well, thanks for the advice. I’m getting a lot of it tonight.” I pushed open the gate, but the woman caught it, pulling it closed.

  “What was Iris burying today?”

  I faced her. “When?”

  “About ten o’clock this morning.”

  Right after I went out.

  “She had a jar,” the woman went on.

  “Oh, that. Uncle Will’s ashes — at least she thinks they are.

  Where did she put them?”

  “Behind the old kitchen.”

  Close to Uncle Will’s den. That made sense.