Bones(64)

I reached down and opened the door. She said, “I didn't think you were coming,” in a voice that was too calm, too controlled. She was one breath this side of a scream and two breaths short of hysteria.

“Did you check on your husband, Mrs. Kiskadon?”

“No. I've been sitting here waiting.”

“You should have gone in—”

“I can't go in there,” she said.

“You have to.”

“No. I can't go in there, don't you understand?”

“All right.”

“You go. I'll wait here.”

“You'll have to give me the key.”

She pulled the one out of the ignition and handed me the leather case it was attached to. “The big silver one,” she said. “You have to wiggle it to get it into the lock.”

I left her, went around the Ford and over onto the porch. I had just put the house key into the latch when I heard the car door slam. I didn't turn; I finished unlocking the door and pushed it open and walked inside.

Silence, except for the distant hum of an appliance that was probably the refrigerator. I went into the living room by a couple of paces, half-turning so that I could look back at the doorway. Lynn Kiskadon appeared there, hesitated, then entered and shut the door behind her.

“I couldn't wait out there,” she said. “I wanted to but I couldn't. It's cold in the car.”

I didn't say anything. Instead I went through into the hallway and along it to the closed door to Kiskadon's den. There wasn't anything to hear when I put my ear up close to the panel and listened. I knocked, called Kiskadon's name, and then identified myself.

No answer from inside.

Lynn Kiskadon was standing behind me, close enough so that I could hear the irregular rhythm of her breathing. There was a knot in my stomach and another one in my throat; the palms of my hands felt greasy. I wiped the right one on my pantleg, reached out and turned the doorknob. Locked.

I bent to examine the lock. It was the push-button kind that allows you to secure the door from either side. I straightened and looked at Mrs. Kiskadon; her skin seemed even paler now, splotched in places so that it resembled the color of buttermilk. “He might not be in there,” I said. “He might be somewhere else in the house. Or outside.”

“No,” she said. “He's in there.”

“I'll look around anyway. You wait here.”

“Yes. All right.”

It took me three minutes to search the place and determine that Michael Kiskadon wasn't anywhere else on the premises or in the yard out back. The knots in my stomach and throat were bigger, tighter, when I came back into the hallway. Lynn Kiskadon hadn't moved. She was standing there staring at the door as if it were the gateway to hell.

I said, “No other way inside except this door?”

“No.”

“What about the window?”

“You'd have to use a ladder from the yard.”

“Do you have a ladder?”

“Yes, but it's not high enough. We always hire somebody to do the windows, you see. There's a man who comes around, a handyman … he has a very high ladder.”

“Mrs. Kiskadon, the only way I can get in there is to break down the door. Do you want me to do that?”

“Yes.”

“You're sure?”

“Yes. Go ahead, do it. Break it down.”

I caught hold of the knob. And a thought came to me: This is the way it was thirty-five years ago, the night Harmon Crane died. I shook it away. One sharp bump of my shoulder against the panel told me it was a tight lock and that I wasn't going to get in by using that method. I stepped back, used the wall behind me for leverage, and drove the sole of my shoe into the wood just above the latch. That did it. There was a splintering sound as the bolt tore loose from the jamb-plate, and the door wobbled inward.

This is the way it was that night thirty-five years ago.…

I stayed in the doorway, trying to shield Mrs. Kiskadon with my body. But she pushed at me from behind, hit me with her fist, came past me. When she saw what I saw at the opposite end she made a thin, keening noise. I caught hold of her, but she fought loose and did a stumbling about-face and tried to run away into the hall. She didn't get any farther than the doorway before both her voice and her legs gave out. She fell sideways into the jamb, hard enough so that her head made an audible smacking noise against the wood.

She was on her knees when I got to her, shaking her head and moaning. But she wasn't hurt and she wasn't hysterical; just disoriented. I picked her up without resistance and carried her into the living room and put her down on the couch. She stayed there, not looking at me, not looking at anything in the room. I waited a few seconds anyway, just to make sure, before I went back into the den.