My furnace arrived at eight o’clock two mornings later. The driver helped me to slide it into place behind the table saw and the two white plastic lawn chairs that were the first floor’s only other adornments. After he was gone, I lifted off the cardboard box as gently as if I were unwrapping a giant Fabergé egg and sat in one of the chairs to imagine the squat beige wondrous thing humming come November, warming every cragged chunk of limestone on all five of my round floors. The thought continued to warm me in the cab all the way to Midway Airport.
The Halvorson address was ten minutes from Tucson International. I motored up silently, having rented a mostly electric Prius at the airport as a sort of cap-and-trade restitution for the occasionally oil-vaporizing Jeep I drove at home.
I’d gotten enough Internet views of the neighborhood to feel like I’d been on the block many times before. Type in an address and see enough in an instant to zero in a missile; such fast availability of images from satellite peepers used to bother me. Now I’m troubled more by how easily I get seduced by it and how little I worry about the future as drones seem set to darken the skies in unfathomable numbers.
The Internet photos had shown Halvorson’s stucco cottage to be jammed in tight in a row of identical white cottages but they hadn’t shown its dinginess. Its stucco-board siding was more gray than white, except close to the ground where it was brown from dirt splashed up by rain.
The front yard had no grass but rather a scrabble of gravel, hard dirt and three discarded Coke cans. A ‘For Sale by Owner’ sign was stuck in the middle of it, slapped with a ‘Price Slashed’ sticker. Both the sign and the sticker looked new.
I parked the Prius across the street and walked up like I was in a buying mood.
No one answered the bell. I knocked. No one responded to that, either. I headed around to the back.
There was a side window on the one-car attached garage. I rubbed away enough of the dirt to look in. An old beige Chevrolet Impala was parked inside. Both right-side tires were flat.
I walked around to the back. The window on the kitchen door was covered with fresh plywood. I knocked.
‘You got to call the number,’ a man said from next door. He was Mexican, hand polishing a steel car wheel on a portable workbench.
‘I was just passing by and saw the sign.’
His eyes narrowed. The man knew how to smell a lie.
‘You got to call the number,’ he said again.
‘There’s a car sitting on flat tires in the garage. Is anybody still living here?’
‘Call the number, man.’ He bent back to the wheel but not so low that he couldn’t keep an eye on me.
I went to the front and called the number on the sign. The owner said he lived close by and would be there in five minutes. He pulled up in a pale blue minivan in four.
He was gray-haired, wore a shiny tan shirt, black jeans and nervous hope on his face. ‘You’ll love this house.’ His hands shook as he unlocked the front door.
‘Nobody’s home?’
‘It’s priced lower than right,’ he went on quickly, like he was afraid I’d bolt. ‘I know a banker. You got any kind of credit, you can move right in.’
We stepped into a small living room. The floor was glazed brown tile. A grease-stained, two-seat orange couch and a cracked black vinyl recliner better than the blue one I had at home were pushed against a windowless side wall. A low, plastic wood-grain table where a television might have once sat was set against the back wall, absolutely devoid of dust. Despite being in dry desert air, the house stunk of dampness and bleach. It had been scrubbed recently.
‘Is the place unoccupied?’ I asked.
‘You can move right in,’ he said. Then added, ‘I just cleaned,’ like my nose didn’t work.
The smell of bleach was giving me a headache. No landlord was that thorough. He hadn’t just cleaned; he’d tried to eradicate something. I wondered if that explained his bad nerves.
‘You had a tenant?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.
‘Gone.’
‘When did he leave?’ I started toward the back of the house. The smell of disinfectant was strongest there.
‘Recent,’ the owner said, following.
I got to the kitchen. The refrigerator door was rusted at the bottom and a ragged corner of the white laminate counter was broken off. ‘What about those?’ I asked, pointing to tiny scratches on the brown-painted back door an inch above the threshold. The exposed wood was raw and clean. The scratches were fresh.
‘I can fix.’ His eyes were restless, looking everywhere but at the scratches.
‘And that?’ I pointed to the fresh plywood screwed to the kitchen door.
‘Punks broke in. I got to get new glass.’
‘Does the Impala in the garage come with the house?’ I smiled like I was making a joke. A car sitting flat, not drivable, was bothersome.
He forced a smile so broad it must have hurt his ears. ‘I’m having it towed this afternoon.’
‘You want nothing to do with it?’
‘Ain’t mine to do nothing with.’
Except to tow, to make it go away. ‘You’re sure your ex-tenant doesn’t want his car?’
‘Maybe it don’t run.’
No tenant leaves behind a car. Even as scrap, cars were always worth something.
There were two bedrooms. The largest held a double bed stripped to its stained mattress and a chipped dresser. A spot on the beige carpet was almost white. It had been scrubbed recently.
I went to the closet. Not even a hanger remained. Maybe that was odd, maybe it was not, but it seemed like further proof that the whole house had been hurriedly emptied and scrubbed down in a panic.
‘Place comes with the furniture,’ the landlord said.
‘Yours?’
He nodded.
The second bedroom was completely empty, too, except for the lingering smell of much bleach.
We walked to the front door. ‘How much?’ I asked, because I remembered it was what potential buyers asked.
‘I’ll cut you a huge deal.’ Faint sweat had broken out on his forehead.
‘Throw in the car?’ I asked, again like I was joking. The car nagged. It shouldn’t have been left behind.
His face remained tight. ‘Like I said, it’ll be gone.’
We drove away at the same time. When he turned left, I turned right and doubled back. I wondered if he’d remember he’d been too nervous to give me a sale price.
‘What do you know about the guy who lived here?’ I asked the man in the back yard next door.
‘You ain’t interested in buying anything, are you?’
I pulled a fifty out of my wallet and handed it across the chain-link fence. ‘Just information.’
He took the fifty but kept it visible in his hand like the deal was still pending. ‘About what?’
‘Anything you know about the guy who lived here, Gary Halvorson.’
‘That his name? I don’ even know that and I been here a year. He wasn’t sociable.’
‘The landlord says he’s gone.’
‘He’s always gone. Salesman, maybe.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘I never seen him, but the guy who owned my house before me seen him once or twice a long time ago. He has bright red hair. There is something strange, though …’ He let the thought dangle, like bait.
I produced another fifty but held onto it.
It prompted more words. ‘A couple of weeks ago, about three in the morning, I hear glass breaking outside. I put on pants, a shirt, go out front. Next door, the front door is wide open and two kids, teenagers, are running down the street. I called the cops.’
‘Sounds like they didn’t stay inside long.’
‘From the time I heard the glass until I was out the front, seeing them running away, was only a couple minutes.’
‘Why break in only to run out so quickly?’
‘Maybe nothing there. Maybe not.’ He paused to let his eyes caress the fifty in my right hand.
‘Halvorson never came around, afterward?’ I asked, not ready to pony up more.
‘Just the owner. Next night, he’s there with mops, buckets, you name it.’
‘That was two weeks ago?’ The house must have been shut up tight ever since for the bleach to still smell that strong.
‘Then there’s that other thing …’ He let his voice taper away so I could focus harder on him eyeing the fifty in my hand.
I held tight.
‘The owner, after the break-in … real strange, you know?’ he said, coaxing.
I didn’t know, and wouldn’t, unless the second fifty changed hands. I handed it over.
He jammed the second bill into his jeans. ‘The owner, he’s in there for hours, but after all that cleaning he hauls out only two plastic garbage bags. And he don’ leave the bags at the curb, even though pick-up is the next morning. He puts them in his van to get rid of them elsewhere.’
‘He didn’t want someone poking through them?’
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’
I had an inspiration. ‘Did the house go up for sale right after the break-in?’
He rubbed his right thumb against his first two fingers, looking for another fifty.
‘I gave you a hundred already,’ I reminded him.
He grinned; he’d tried. ‘Sign went up the next day.’
‘Without asking Halvorson?’
‘Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Maybe there’s no lease and it don’ matter.’
‘I might take one more look inside.’
He shrugged and bent back down to the wheel he was polishing; the hundred dollars I’d passed over would also buy blindness. I popped the back lock with a credit card and went inside.
I headed into the garage first. It smelled faintly of gasoline. The Impala’s driver’s door was unlocked. The inside dome light didn’t go on when I slid inside. The battery was dead.
The glove box contained nothing but a bill of sale dated almost twenty years before. The car was almost ten years old when Halvorson had bought it from a private party. I put the bill back.
I went back through the kitchen, into the master bedroom and turned on the light in the closet. Things can get forgotten in closets when not even a coat hanger is left behind. I felt along the top shelf and came away with dust. The landlord must have been in too much of a hurry, cleaning, to think of the shelf.
There was dust on the second bedroom’s closet shelf as well but the rest of that room had been scrubbed like all the others.
I went back to the kitchen. The fresh scratches on the base of the door could have come from anything. So, too, could the tiny reddish brown residue caught against the threshold beneath them. I ran my rental car key over it and came up with enough to tap onto the white counter. It could have been ketchup or a hundred other normal red-brown things.
I looked around the kitchen floor more closely. There were several other faint traces of the same brown or red residue along the cabinet baseboards.
Maybe if the next-door neighbor hadn’t said he’d never seen Halvorson. Maybe if the kids who’d broken in hadn’t run out almost right away. Maybe if the Impala hadn’t been left behind. Maybe if the landlord hadn’t been in such a hurry to scrub away whatever he’d found. Maybe if he hadn’t hauled away what little had been left behind, rather than leave it at the curb. Maybe if the dust wasn’t so thick on the closet shelves, as though it had been ages since anything had been placed on them.
Maybe if the next person on Rosamund’s list hadn’t just been blown up.
I looked again at the tiny speck on the counter.
I began opening cabinets. Unlike those in the closets, the kitchen shelves had been wiped down and smelled strongly of the bleach. Fortunately, one held a paper towel core with one last sheet stuck to it. I used it to pinch up the little clump of reddish brown material from the counter, folded it twice over and put it in my pocket.
Maybe I wouldn’t have, if it didn’t look so much like blood.