Darned if You Do Read online

  “Here, lay still,” ordered Lars. “You’re only gonna hurt yourself more if you try to move. Listen, listen to me, you’ll be all right if you hold still. I’ll call for some backup, and we’ll get you out of here real soon. Just hold on till I get more people up here.”

  “No, no, no . . . I think . . . I think I can get out of bed . . . if you’ll lift up that end,” Tom said, sounding alarmed. He began to struggle harder.

  “Hold on, that’s not possible. We got half a big tree in here with us. Have a little patience, man.”

  “No, please. I don’t want . . . no people in my house.” The man’s voice was weak, but his desperate plea was clear.

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any choice. We’ve got to call for help.” Lars reached for the mike attached to his shoulder. “Forty, this is one-three, we have an injured adult male trapped in a bed on the second floor. Lots of debris from a fallen tree. The house is very cluttered.”

  “Ten-four,” replied a voice. “Sending a rescue squad.”

  “This is . . . wrong. Bad. I . . . can’t . . .” The man struggled to a sitting position to push futilely against the massive limb imprisoning his legs, groaning with pain.

  “Hold it, Tom! Listen to me!” Lars went to press gently on the man’s shoulder. Tom was wearing a thin white T-shirt that had seen better days, and his bones were prominent under Lars’s hand. “Lay down, you hear me? That’s an order, lay back down.”

  Reluctantly, the man fell back. “You can . . . you can lift that tree, Sergeant Larson. You . . . you’re big . . . strong,” he said. “Please, lift it . . . so I can . . . get out. Then . . . you . . . help me down . . . stairs.”

  “Nothing doing. You’re hurt too bad to be dragged off that bed and manhandled down a flight of stairs. If I try, it’ll only hurt you more. So just take it easy.”

  Tom lifted a thin arm in a pleading gesture. “Please.”

  “I’ve called for an ambulance, they’ll be here in a couple minutes.”

  “I don’t . . . need no . . . amb’lance.”

  Lars, bemused and amused in equal parts, said, “Sure you do.”

  He squatted by the bed and took the man’s big, calloused hand in his own. It was cold and clammy. Lars set his flashlight upright on the floor, and chafed the hand gently. “You’re gonna be all right, but we need some help in here to get you freed up. Just hang on, okay?”

  Through a thick lock of light-colored hair, Riordan searched the big cop’s face. “All right,” he muttered after a few moments, defeated. The room fell silent.

  But it wasn’t long before Lars said, “There now, hear that?” as a siren was heard coming up the street. “Help is here.”

  As the rescuers started arriving—firemen in big black coats and hats, emergency medics in white raincoats—their flashlights and lanterns made dizzying patterns in the clutter and destruction.

  Lars, having done his part, left the house to go on other calls.

  * * *

  EMERGENCY medical workers and a public works crew filled the space in the little bedroom. An IV line was slipped painlessly into Riordan’s arm, and a thick bandage was applied to his head wound. No one said a word about the shocking amount of clutter in the house or the weirdness of finding a whole lot of broken tree in the bedroom.

  Riordan was grateful for that, though his eyes flashed from face to face as he looked at the people assembled there to rescue him. What must they think? He was as ashamed as he was hurting.

  But the men and women around him were kind and kept reassuring him that all would be well. It took a long while, but eventually a crane was summoned to drop cables into his bedroom from outside, and lift and support the broken tree while chain saws filled the room with a hideous racket as they cut through the tangle of branches. Tom was given a pair of ear protectors, which helped to muffle the noise.

  It took over an hour to free him from his wooden prison after the crane arrived, and he was unconscious by the time they brought him down the steep and narrowed staircase and into an ambulance.

  Chapter Three

  IT was the quiet that woke Betsy. Not merely the quiet after the violent storm—which had brought both cats into the bed with her and Connor—but another kind of quiet.

  As in dead silence.

  The modern American home is full of a constant murmur of electric devices going about their business of chilling food, cooling or heating or refreshing the air, heating the water, washing the dishes or clothes, marking the passage of time.

  When all that stops, the silence can be disturbing. So Betsy, who had awakened briefly when the storm was at its crashing, booming, flashing height, woke again when true quiet fell.

  She lay still for a little while, wondering what had woken her up. Turning her head to look at the bedside clock radio, she saw nothing. The red numbers on its face had vanished.

  Ah, she thought. Power’s out. That sometimes happened during a violent storm. The outage usually didn’t last long; in fact, power might be back before daylight.

  Betsy rolled onto her back and lifted her left arm to press the little button on her Indiglo watch. Its cool green face lit up: 4:30 a.m. She sighed and dropped her wrist, letting it drift over to Connor’s side of the bed—where it found empty space. Where could he have gone? she wondered.

  Her live-in boyfriend, Connor Sullivan, was a retired sea captain. Betsy, an ex-WAVE, liked to jest that she had a weakness for anything nautical. For years he had been in charge of enormous cargo and even more enormous oil-carrying vessels as they crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, responsible for both the cargo and the crew. A habit of responsibility, powerfully instilled, lingered in him. Doubtless his sleep had also been disturbed and now he had gotten up to see how extensive the outage was and if there was other damage to the building or in the immediate area.

  Betsy waited for a few minutes, drifting on the edge of sleep. But he didn’t return. Had he dressed and gone out?

  She tried to decide not to worry about it, but the effort only made her concern grow until she was wide awake and now fully concerned. Annoyed at herself, she threw the blankets back and sat up. The red numbers on her bedside clock were flashing 7:12, 7:12, 7:12. That wasn’t the right time, of course; the flashing indicated a break in the power source and the clock had made a random guess at the time.

  Wait a minute.

  She sat still and listened. Now she heard the tiny whir of the refrigerator in the kitchen, and the faint gush of the furnace pouring heated air into the bedroom.

  The power was back on. Must’ve been a glitch, not a line down. Whew! She checked her watch again and adjusted the bedside clock to the correct hour, then lay back down.

  But still Connor didn’t return.

  What was he up to? Maybe he really had gone outdoors. There had been a terrible storm earlier—she remembered waking briefly during the night as it raged outside. Maybe he had gone out to see if there had been any damage.

  With an exasperated sigh—as much at herself for being foolish as at him for his too-strong sense of responsibility—she climbed out of bed. Sophie, the fat senior cat, voiced her displeasure with a high-pitched mew, but Thai, the young Siamese, said, “Yow!” in his deep voice and jumped down to come eagerly with her to the window. He stood up on his hind legs, forepaws on the sill, looking out just as if there were something to see.

  But there wasn’t. There wasn’t a single light on out there. The big condo across the street was barely discernible as a darker blackness against the dark sky. Even the streetlights were out.

  So why did their apartment have power?

  She went into the living room and snapped on the lights, then went to the window in the dining nook. The little parking lot behind the building was very dimly lit by a single lamp over the back door, but the steep slope it faced was a featureless blackness. At the top of the slope we
re, she knew, several houses and a gas station. But had she not known that, she would never have guessed, because nothing of them could be seen. The lights were out all over the neighborhood—maybe all over town.

  High overhead a half moon swam in fast-moving clouds, disappearing behind them even as Betsy watched, making the darkness complete.

  How weird that her building had power but nobody else did.

  And where was Connor?

  Sophie came to stand beside Betsy’s left ankle. So long as she was up, Sophie seemed to be asking, how about some breakfast?

  Betsy looked down at the big, fluffy animal with an exasperated sigh. Sophie, who was morbidly obese, had been found in a starving condition by Betsy’s sister years ago and nursed back to health. But the cat retained a conviction that privation might suddenly reappear, and was in permanent preparation for that occasion. She spent her days down in the needlework shop curled picturesquely on a cushioned chair, cadging treats from the customers. Despite Betsy’s efforts—which included a needlepoint sign hung on the back of the chair—NO THANKS, I’M ON A DIET—customers loved to slip the cat the occasional corner of a sandwich or half a potato chip or the tail end of a cookie. Betsy’s veterinarian said that, despite the animal’s weight, which varied from nineteen to twenty-three pounds, Sophie was healthy for a cat her age, which was probably close to fourteen years. So each morning and evening, Betsy fed her a little scoop of the healthiest dry cat food she could buy and let the chips fall where they may, including into Sophie’s fat paws.

  “No,” she told the cat now, “because we’re not really up, and you get fed when we get up.”

  “Meeeeeow!” argued Sophie. Her thin, high, plaintive cry sounded ridiculous coming from a cat her size.

  “Ow-rah!” agreed Thai. His cry sounded eerily like that of a human baby.

  “No,” said Betsy firmly. She did not care to establish a precedent that any time a human in the house got out of bed, the cats got fed.

  She heard the door to the apartment open and a baritone voice call, “Machree? What are you doing up?”

  “Connor! Where did you go?” He must have noticed that the lights were on. She went to greet him with a hug. He was in a thick, sky blue terry robe and black leather slippers. So he hadn’t gone outdoors.

  “Down in the basement, starting the generator.”

  “You mean it actually works? It did all this?” She gestured around the warm, well-lit apartment with its humming mechanicals.

  “Of course,” he replied, his gentle tone belying the hurt in his eyes.

  “Oh, Connor, I’m sorry! It was wrong of me to doubt you!”

  The generator had become a point of contention when Betsy and Connor had attended a farm auction—Connor loved auctions—and he had raised his hand once too often while bidding on a big, old, dusty generator and found himself in possession of it. He had had to hire someone to truck the thing to the building Betsy owned and help him wrestle it into the basement. Then, after cleaning it of dust, dirt, and worse, he’d had to construct exhaust piping for it. It had taken him a week of tinkering to get its diesel engine to run in more than fits and starts, and when he did, it was noisy, and the piping leaked and filled the basement with noxious fumes. It had taken all Betsy’s reserve not to declare the thing a failure and order it removed.

  Why didn’t she? Because he was so proud of having acquired, at a bargain price, a machine that he hoped never to need but would be priceless if he did.

  Connor had the soul of a survivalist. In the basement he also kept a big, padlocked, waterproof chest filled with water treatment pills, a serious first aid kit, and enough canned goods and dried food to keep them both fed and watered for at least a month. He kept his car in top condition and rarely let the gas gauge go lower than half empty. He was a more-than-adequate plumber and electrician, and good—no, great—at first aid.

  Betsy had found his pessimistic attitude toward civilization’s durability aggravating at times. But now that awful old generator was chugging away at so great a distance its racket could not be heard, its leak long corrected, and she was warm and able to operate her well-lit kitchen, and even open her shop for business later—much later—that morning. And the same was true of her entire building, with two other tenants in the upstairs apartments and two other businesses on the ground floor.

  “I think we’re the only point of light at this end of the lake,” Connor said now.

  “You mean you did go outside?”

  “Indeed not,” he said, raising both hands, amused. “I got out my crank-powered radio and listened to the news. This whole end of the lake is without power, trees are blocking roads, and there is flash flooding all over the county. They’re asking people to stay at home. My cell phone can’t get a signal, since there’s no power to feed to the towers out here.”

  “Wow,” she said. Connor was not saying I told you so even with the expression on his face.

  She laughed at his courteous reserve and embraced him again. “I love you,” she said. “You are amazing. And thank you for buying that horrible, noisy, smelly, wonderful machine.”

  “You are welcome. Now can we go back to bed?” he said. “I could use another couple hours of sleep.”

  Chapter Four

  AT midafternoon, the power was still out in Excelsior. Clouds had thickened again, and though the violent storms had passed, there was occasional heavy rain and a chill wind. Between that and some of the trees having been largely stripped of their leaves, suddenly it looked, and felt, like November, though it was not yet October; not a pleasant situation when houses and stores were without heat and light.

  People had begun cleaning up their yards, whether just picking up debris by hand, raking up leaves and twigs, or, sick at heart, bringing out or borrowing chain saws to cut apart a favorite tree downed by the storm. Some had to borrow or rent pumps to empty flooded basements.

  Word began to spread around town that the building that housed Crewel World, ISBNs Bookstore, and Sol’s Deli over on West Lake Street had lights and power. And in that building you could get warm things to eat and drink. So now and again people would put down their tools and come to the needlework shop for a cup of hot coffee or tea, or drop into Sol’s Deli for a hot bowl of soup and a sandwich. Even the two proprietors of ISBNs, who normally did not allow food or drink in their bookstore, bought some croissants from Sol’s and borrowed a coffeemaker from Betsy’s kitchen and offered rolls and coffee to browsers seeking a literary escape from their problems.

  The talk in Betsy’s shop was not only about whose favorite tree was down, whose roof was damaged, and whose basement was flooded, but about the strange accident that had befallen Tom Riordan. The top third of a big tree had fallen into his bedroom—while he was in bed! He had a broken leg, went one rumor. He had a concussion, went another. And a severely broken arm, plus broken ribs, and a bruised liver went a third. It was awful, they all agreed in shocked voices, and sad, and everyone hoped he would make a full recovery.

  An ad hoc Monday Bunch meeting took place at around three o’clock that afternoon.

  Everyone around the table—Alice, Bershada, Cherie, Phil, Doris, and Emily—expressed sympathy for Tom Riordan and exchanged rumors.

  Listening curiously, but contributing nothing, sat a new member, Grace Pickering. She and her sister, Georgine, had come to Excelsior in the middle of August and rented a house on a month-to-month basis. They were from Jacksonville, Florida, experienced travelers, enjoying the novelty of living in the far north. Grace liked to crochet and was pleased to find the Monday Bunch. At thirty-five, she was the older of the two sisters, attractive, with sparkling green eyes and lots of dark auburn hair that fell in an artless tumble over her shoulders. She declared that she and her sister wanted to experience a white Christmas before they moved on, probably to Santa Fe. Betsy’s store manager, Godwin, was sure there was something tragic i
n their background, because the two were so closemouthed about their past. All he knew about them was that they claimed to make a living buying antiques and collectibles and selling them on eBay. But Betsy told him not to be silly. No one who could crochet joyous fine lace like Gracie Pickering could have a secret sorrow.

  “It’s just too bad Jill isn’t here with us today,” said Bershada. “She could tell us the real facts about poor Tom.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Grace. She was wearing thick magnifying glasses and using a fine pale blue thread to crochet a microscopic doily fit for a doll’s house.

  “Her husband was first on the scene in Tom Riordan’s house,” said Emily. Seeing Grace’s puzzlement, she continued, “Oh, don’t you know Lars is a police officer?”

  “She used to be a cop herself,” said Phil. He was nearly finished with a needlepoint canvas of a fat old witch riding a bicycle.

  “No, really?” Grace looked up from her work, eyebrows raised in surprise. She’d met tall, fair-haired, quiet Jill.

  Alice said in her usual blunt way, “She could’ve told us if it’s true that his house is filled with garbage.”

  “Well, it’s not,” said Bershada. “There’s no garbage in it, just . . . things. It’s mostly old things, a lot of them not exactly useful, but it’s not garbage.”

  Emily said, “I hear there are books stacked all up and down the stairs. I don’t know how those ambulance people got Tom down from the second floor.”

  Bershada said, “Books, you say? I’d love a chance to sort those books.” Bershada was a retired librarian.

  “There’s boxes of toys, too,” contributed Phil in his loud, deaf-man’s voice. “Oil cans. Birdcages. Cases of canned cat food. Sets of china. Audiotapes. Auto parts.”

  Grace asked, “So you’ve been in there?”

  “No, but someone has, and he opened the curtains and lifted the blinds, so you can look through the dirty windows.”