CHAPTER 68
He rang the doorbell. After a minute, the door opened a crack two inches wide, exposing the living room beyond. Toys were scattered on the floor. He pursed his lips. Kids required discipline. When he became their father, there wouldn’t be any toys on the floor; that much was certain.
“Yes?” A woman peered at him from beyond the crack. “Oh, hello.”
“Hi, miss.” He smiled at her. “I heard you need assistance again.”
“Really? I didn’t call. Everything is fine.”
“That’s strange.” He frowned, glancing at the clipboard in his hand. “It has your name and address here.”
“It must be a mis—”
“Mommy,” a high-pitched voice called from behind her.
“Just a minute, sweetie,” she said, glancing backward, and then smiled at him. “I’m sure it’s a mistake.”
“Oh, okay. Uh . . . would you mind just writing on the form here that you didn’t call and signing it? My boss can be a real hard-ass.”
“Of course,” she said. “Hang on.”
She closed the door, and he could hear her removing the chain bolt. Then the door opened wide.
And he lunged inside.
CHAPTER 69
Zoe shut the passenger door, trying to focus. The video footage from the store kept running through her mind. Something in the man’s stance or the small glimpse she’d had of part of his face seemed familiar, though it had been really hard to get a good look. The video quality was low, the man’s face almost constantly hidden. Still, something nagged at her, as if he were a word at the tip of her tongue.
She shook her head and looked at the small ramshackle house. It was a tiny structure, the walls all white clapboard, the color peeling to reveal the gray material underneath. Both front windows were murky with dust. The grass in front of the house was speckled with brown dirt and covered with dry leaves. It bordered the street, but there was no fence to distinguish where the street ended and the front yard, if there was one, began. The houses around it weren’t much better.
Tatum’s friend, someone from the field office in LA, had managed to extract the license plate number from the footage they had sent him. The car, according to the DMV, was registered to Bertha Alston, and this was her home. There was a small garage behind the house, its size almost the same. Its door was closed, and it was impossible to see if a car was inside.
“Wait here,” Tatum said.
“Uh . . . no.”
“It could be dangerous.”
“That’s why I’m hanging around with an FBI agent. So I’ll be safe.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re a very annoying woman.” He began to move forward.
Zoe followed two steps behind. He signaled her to stand against the wall, and she obediently did, feeling her heart pound. Tatum leaned against the wall on the other side of the door and then knocked.
They waited. After a few seconds, he knocked again. There was no sound from within.
“FBI. Open up,” Tatum called.
The sound of a faraway airplane and the buzzing of the traffic were the only things Zoe could hear over her pounding heart.
She carefully glanced at the window. The drape was down, blocking the view into the house entirely. She wasn’t sure she could have seen beyond the dust in any case.
Tatum thumped the door again, this time with his fist.
“She’s not there!” a withered, croaky voice shouted at them from the house next door. Zoe glanced over to the speaker. A wizened walnut wearing humongous spectacles stared at them with interest. She raised one shriveled hand, thin as a broomstick, and straightened her binocular-sized glasses.
“Who’s not here?” Tatum asked.
“Well . . . who are you looking for?”
“We’re looking for Bertha.”
“Bertha’s dead. Died a few months ago.”
“Then we’re looking for whoever lives in this house,” Zoe said. “Is it her son?”
“Well, no one lives there anymore. I think her sons are trying to sell the place.”
“Do you know where they are, ma’am?”
“Well, that depends. Who are you?”
Tatum flipped his badge. “FBI, ma’am.”
She seemed far from impressed. “Well, what do you want with Bertha’s sons?”
“We just want to talk to them, ma’am.”
She nodded thoughtfully but said nothing.
“Can you tell us where we can reach them?”
“Well, I don’t really know.”
Tatum sighed.
“Are they in trouble?” the crone asked, straightening her glasses again.
“We just want to talk to them,” Tatum said again.
“Well, I always knew they’d get in trouble. You don’t get to grow up like Bertha’s kids did and turn out fine.” The hag cackled as if this were the best joke she had ever told. Maybe it was.
The woman’s speech pattern—starting every sentence with the word well—was getting on Zoe’s nerves. “What do you mean? Was she abusive?”
“Well, I don’t know what you call abusive, but she sure walloped her sons a lot. Her daughter even worse, I think. And she’d scream at them and throw things at them . . . and that was when she was sober. She got real nasty when she was drunk.”
“Ma’am,” Tatum said, “we really need to—”
“Nasty how?” Zoe asked. She felt as if this wrinkled, gnarled hag might hold all the answers. And she seemed to be happy to share.
“Well, she was damn crazy when she was drunk. Said she could hear the devil speaking to her, or sometimes it was her ex-husband. She sprayed one of her boys with hairspray once, tried to light him up with a match. It was out in the street too. I called the police.”
She said the word police strangely, pausing after saying po for a whole second, then half screaming lis. Zoe began to suspect Bertha wasn’t the only crazy person who had lived in the neighborhood.
“And, well, of course, there was the thing with her daughter. Surely you know about that.”
Her tone was gleeful, as if she knew they didn’t and was dying to tell them, but they had to ask.
“What about her daughter?” Zoe asked.
“Well, I thought everyone knew ’bout that. Her daughter died when she was thirteen. It turned out she had lung cancer, probably because Bertha kept smoking in the house. The crazy thing was, when her daughter died, Bertha didn’t tell anyone about it. Just left her there for more than a week. She said the girl was resting. Later we all found out Bertha made her sons keep their dead sister company. She locked them inside, told them their sister was finally behaving like a good little girl. And that they had to pray she’d get better. They were all locked in with that rotting body for over a week. In the damn summer.”
Zoe glanced at Tatum, and he looked back at her, his eyes full of horror. There it was.
“There was a terrible smell coming from there. I had to call the po . . . lis. They barged in, found the daughter covered in maggots, the boys half-sick, vomit all over the place, Bertha drunk and unconscious. Yeah . . .” She became silent. “Thought everybody knew about that,” she finally said.
“What happened to the sons?” Zoe asked.
“Well, they’re both still around.”
“What are their names?”
“Well . . .” The neighbor stared for a moment. “I’ll be damned. Can’t remember. One of them changed his last name; he hated his mother so much. The other kept the name. I’ll remember in a second . . .” She licked her gums and smacked them. “Nope. Nothing.”
“Do you know where we can find them?”
“Well, one of them owns a business. Some sort of handyman. An electrician, I think. Yeah, definitely an electrician.”
Zoe’s brain cells sparked, a flurry of ideas emerging all at once. Her heart raced. Lily hadn’t been saying “Hummer” or “trucker.”
“I think he’s a plumber,” she said.
“Well, I think you’re right,” the old neighbor agreed loudly. “A plumber, not an electrician. His name is—”
“Clifford Sorenson.”
“Yes. But when he was a young boy, his mom used to call him Cliff.”
CHAPTER 70