The Enemy at Home

When Nora opened the front door, she found Joe Strauss standing there alone.

Once again, she was the only one home. She still had on the pretty green dress she’d worn to church earlier. Jane had gone off with her friends after Mass. Chris was down the block, mowing Mrs. Landauer’s lawn. He’d just left twenty minutes ago. Nora wasn’t sure how much work he’d get done. The sky had turned dark and she could feel a storm coming—not the usual Seattle drizzle, but a potential downpour.

“Well, I picked a terrific day to move in, didn’t I?” Joe said, with a look up at the ominous clouds. “Is it at least a good time to pick up the keys?”

“I’ve got them for you right here,” Nora answered with a polite smile. She decided he wasn’t quite as handsome as she remembered from yesterday. Then again, he was dressed more casually in a wide-collared blue shirt, pleated trousers and a gaberdine jacket, so some of that polish was gone.

Nora grabbed the keys from the table in the front hallway and then handed them to him.

“Will the moving truck be coming by later?” she asked.

“No, we have what’s called a partial load,” he explained. He shoved the keys in his pocket. “As of this morning, the truck with all our furniture was in Salt Lake City. Don’t ask me what it’s doing there. The moving company told me it’ll be another two weeks before our stuff will be delivered. That’s one reason I’m glad the apartment is partly furnished.”

“Well, if you or your wife need anything in the meantime, please, let me know.”

“That’s the other thing. It looks like I’ll be by my lonesome for the next few days—maybe even longer. Veronica had to leave for Albany this morning. Her mother’s sick . . .”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Nora said. “Nothing too serious, I hope.”

He shrugged. “My mother-in-law gets sick a lot. Not to sound uncaring, but I have a feeling a lot of it is in her head. She’ll probably outlive us all.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “Anyway, it’ll just be me for a while.”

Nora found herself staring into his brown eyes. She realized that she’d been wrong before. He was just as good-looking as she’d remembered—maybe even more so.

“I’m parked on the street right now,” he said. “Is it okay if I pull into your driveway to that bay to the left of your garage while I unload my car?”

Nora was still gazing at him, thinking how, for the next few days and nights, he’d be alone in that apartment over the garage. Maybe she should invite him to dinner tonight.

“Nora?” he said. “I won’t be blocking anyone there, will I?”

She quickly shook her head. “No, that’s fine. In fact, you can make that your regular parking spot. Do you need any help moving in?”

“No, thanks. Some of the boxes are dirty from being in my friends’ basement. You look so pretty in that dress. I wouldn’t want you to mess it up. It’ll only take me a few trips anyway.”

Nora couldn’t tell if he was flirting with her or just being nice.

“Before I forget . . .” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out some money, folded up. “This and next month’s rent in advance, plus what I owe you for that long-distance call . . .”

The telephone rang.

“Pardon me,” Nora said, stepping back. “It’s been ringing all morning. The ad for the apartment was in the Sunday Times . . .” She walked down the hall to answer the phone.

Sure enough, it was some man calling about the apartment. Even though Nora told him the place had already been rented, he was one of those people who needed to hear exactly what he’d missed out on. “Well, was there a dining room? I wouldn’t have wanted it if there wasn’t a dining room . . .”

Joe sheepishly waved at her from the doorway, took a few steps inside and left the money on the third step of the front stairs. Then he backed up, ducked outside and quietly closed the door behind him.

By the time Nora got off the phone and opened the door again, she saw Joe climbing inside his car.

Leaving the front door open, she took the money off the stair step: one hundred dollars in cash. He’d overpaid her for the call to his agent in San Francisco.

Nora stepped outside, and from the front porch, watched the LaSalle pull into the driveway. She thought about going out there to tell him that he’d overpaid her, and maybe she’d offer him something to drink.

The LaSalle disappeared behind the house, and after a few moments, Nora heard the car door open and shut. She told herself to leave him alone. If he needed anything, he’d knock on the door and ask.

That didn’t stop her from peeking out the kitchen window to check on him as he started to unload the back seat of the LaSalle. Nora knew she wouldn’t be anywhere near this attentive or curious if Veronica was with Joe.

Still, when she went upstairs a few minutes later, she couldn’t resist peering out the window at the end of the hallway outside Chris’s room to check on Joe’s progress. He’d opened the garage apartment door and taken another suitcase out of the back of his car. But then he stopped, set down his suitcase and turned to glance up at the house—almost right at her.

Nora ducked away from the window. Had he seen her? She felt like such an idiot.

Five minutes later, she was still chastising herself as she stripped Chris’s bed.

Nora hadn’t washed anything yesterday. She’d merely caught up on the ironing and made room on the clothesline. Jane kept her busy with laundry, filling the bathroom hamper with clothes and bedding every few days. As for Chris, though he showered every day at school, he wasn’t as clean-conscious as his sister. Every week or so, Nora went into his room to strip the bed and go through his closet for the dirty clothes he wore again and again.

She heard a rumbling outside and wondered if it was distant thunder or Joe doing something by the garage. As much as she wanted to look out the window and check, Nora resisted. She tossed the bundled-up bedsheets on the floor and opened Chris’s closet. She gathered up his trousers and a couple of shirts he’d worn this week. Then she started working her way toward the back of his closet for more clothes that needed laundering. She found two more shirts. Near the very back of the closet, she discovered a third, a red plaid flannel. Nora started to pull it off the hanger. But it was completely buttoned up—all the way to the collar. With a sigh, she tucked all the dirty clothes in the crook of her arm and unbuttoned the red plaid shirt. As she pulled it off the hanger, something else fell to the closet floor. It must have been on the hanger—underneath the shirt.

It was a lightweight scarf—pink with black polka dots. Nora picked it up.

She recognized Connie’s bandana. She even sniffed it to make sure. She could smell Connie’s perfume.

Baffled, Nora wandered back to the pile of bedsheets on the floor and dropped the dirty clothes on top of them. But she held on to Connie’s bandana and sat down on Chris’s stripped bed. She kept staring at the scarf in her hand. How had it ended up in Chris’s closet? Connie hadn’t worn the bandana to Nora’s dinner party. There would have been no reason for her to bring it with her. That was the only time Connie had been to the house, the only time she would have seen Chris.

So what in the world was he doing with her dead friend’s scarf?

Nora sat there in a stupor, conjuring up a ridiculous story in which Connie had run into Chris and given him the scarf to remember her by. Maybe Chris had become smitten with her at the dinner party. And in typical teenage crush fashion, perhaps he’d followed her around or even gone to her apartment in Queen Anne. He could have snuck out at night to go there . . .

Chris and his nocturnal disappearances. The night Connie was murdered, Nora had discovered him coming up the front stairs, fully dressed—with his wallet in his pocket. He’d said he’d heard a noise outside. She’d had a hard time completely believing him even then. All she could think now was that, when he’d stepped outside, he’d brought along his wallet because he’d used the car to drive to Queen Anne.

Chris had lied to her.

And on the night that Loretta Bryant was strangled in Belltown, he’d claimed that he and Earl had been to Elliott Bay to watch the battleships. When Nora had mentioned it the next afternoon in front of Earl, Chris’s friend had seemed genuinely confused—like he’d had no idea what she was talking about. Chris had lied to her that time, too. He hadn’t taken the binoculars to watch the battleships that evening because he hadn’t gone to see the battleships.

Nora held up Connie’s scarf and stared at it again.

Lately, Chris seemed like a stranger to her. Between what she knew about Connie’s murder and Ray’s suspicious death, Nora had felt like the keeper of secrets these past few weeks. But she had nothing on her son. There was so much about his daily life that he wasn’t telling her—and so much about what he did at night, when she was asleep, that she didn’t know.

She had to hear from Jane about the police questioning Chris after someone had broken into a woman riveter’s apartment near Chris’s school. Chris had tried to dismiss it as nothing, but he’d practically bitten off his sister’s head for bringing it up.

Nora heard a knocking downstairs.

With a gasp, she got to her feet and quickly stashed Connie’s scarf under Chris’s mattress. Hiding the evidence, she thought. She almost tripped over the pile of laundry on the floor. Regaining her footing, she hurried out of the bedroom, down the hallway and then down the stairs and around to the kitchen. She could see Joe on the other side of the window in the kitchen door. A few raindrops hit the glass. Nora’s heart was racing as she fumbled for the lock and opened the door. “Hi, is everything okay?” she asked, breathless.

“I’m sorry,” he said, giving her a questioning glance. “Did I get you at a bad time?”

Standing in the doorway, she managed a smile. “No, I’m fine. I was just upstairs. What can I do for you?”

“One of the kitchen cabinet doors is loose, and a drawer is stuck—”

“Oh, Chris was supposed to fix those,” she said. She still couldn’t quite catch her breath. “I’ll have him come over later tonight.”

“That’s okay. I can do it. I just need to borrow a screwdriver and a hammer—and maybe some small screws.”

She nodded a few more times than necessary. “Sure, just give me a minute . . .”

Nora almost closed the kitchen door but thought that was too rude. Still, she left him standing out in the drizzle. A half hour ago, she’d had to force herself to leave him alone, and now, she couldn’t get rid of him fast enough.

She headed down the basement stairs. At Pete’s workbench, she gathered up a hammer and screwdriver and an old applesauce jar full of various nails and screws. Her hands were shaking. Just the thought that Chris might have had anything to do with the murders made her feel guilty—as if she were the one with something to hide. One more secret she’d have to keep.

She hurried back upstairs, where Joe patiently waited outside the door.

“I didn’t mean to leave you standing out in the rain,” she apologized. She handed him the tools and the jar of screws and nails. “I should have invited you to come in.”

“It’s okay,” he said. His shirt was already wet around his broad shoulders. “Thanks, Nora. I’ll bring these back as soon as I’m done.”

“Why don’t you hold on to them until tomorrow? You never know what else we missed that needs repairing.”

“Well, thanks . . .”

Nora nodded and closed the door. She still couldn’t breathe right—and didn’t think she would again until she got the truth out of Chris about Connie’s bandana.

It was like the mole on her shoulder she’d noticed last October. She’d broken out Pete’s medical books and confirmed that the brown and black irregular mark looked like the deadly melanomas pictured in the texts. She’d felt this awful dread in the pit of her stomach, but kept reminding herself that Pete would have seen the mole two months before and said something. Still, she’d felt doomed and hadn’t been able to calm down until she’d gone to a doctor, who had checked the mole and said it was nothing.

As she headed up to Chris’s room, she kept reminding herself that she knew Chris was incapable of hurting anyone deliberately. Yet, everything seemed to fall into place too perfectly—like her mole matching the ones pictured in the medical book. Everything matched: the timeline, her missing nylons, the police questioning him, and now, Connie’s scarf.

She lifted Chris’s mattress and carefully pulled out the polka dot bandana.

If he’d murdered her friend and took the scarf as a souvenir, he hadn’t been very careful about hiding it. Chris knew she sometimes went into his closet to collect his dirty clothes. He wouldn’t have left evidence of a murder someplace where she could have so easily found it.

Another thing, she’d just looked through his entire wardrobe. None of Chris’s clothes were bloodstained. You don’t stab someone in the chest and not get spattered with blood.

And why would she automatically assume that one of her missing stockings was used to strangle Connie? There was nothing in any of the newspaper accounts to indicate the stocking wasn’t Connie’s.

Nora placed the scarf on top of the bed and ducked back into Chris’s closet. She started searching through every piece of clothing. Maybe he’d hidden her nylons the same way he’d concealed Connie’s bandana. While she went from hanger to hanger, Nora wondered, if one of her nylons was actually used to strangle Connie, would the police be able to trace it to her?

She went through all the clothes in Chris’s closet and checked a large Sears box on the shelf. It was full of Chris’s old drawings and the comic strips he’d created. He also kept several board games stored up on the shelf: Monopoly, a checkers set, Camelot, Sorry! and several other games. She checked inside each box.

Opening the box for the Melvin Purvis “G”-Men board game, Nora finally found something: pictures of nude women—mostly Varga girls torn out of Esquire. There were also some black and white nudes that seemed to come from an art book. And she found Chris’s own drawings and sketches of nude women. In one picture, Nora was pretty certain he’d put Paulette Goddard’s face on Venus de Milo’s body—only he’d given Venus arms and bigger boobs. Nora told herself it was typical teenage boy stuff.

For a few moments, she felt relieved. She carefully put the pictures back in their place inside the board-game box and then returned it to the shelf with the other games.

Straightening up the closet, Nora stepped back into the bedroom. She frowned at the scarf on Chris’s stripped bed. It didn’t make sense that he had Connie’s bandana.

She started rifling through Chris’s desk drawers. In the back of the second drawer down, she found a barrette, decorated with a row of different-colored little rosebuds. It took Nora a few moments to remember where she’d seen it before. Arlene had worn it in her wavy brown hair.

Another souvenir from another dead girl.

In the back of her mind, Nora had always questioned the circumstances of Arlene’s suicide. The girl had broken Chris’s heart and then, after months of ignoring him, had invited him over. Chris had told Arlene he wasn’t going to see her, and then she’d shot herself hours later—apparently. Nora couldn’t say for sure that Chris hadn’t snuck out that night, too.

Hadn’t Ray told her that Chris was harboring some dark secret?

Setting the barrette on his desktop, Nora continued to hunt through the drawers. She kept searching—even as she started to cry. She found something else: a distinctly feminine, lacey-edged handkerchief with a baby blue M monogram. It couldn’t have been Connie’s or Loretta Bryant’s or Arlene’s. Was there another victim she didn’t know about?

Nora heard another rumble of thunder. The rain was coming down hard now and lashing against the window. She wiped her tears and, more determined than ever, finished looking through Chris’s desk. She didn’t find the nylons or anything else of interest.

Before she moved on to Chris’s dresser, Nora glanced out the window. Through the rain-beaded glass, she could see the side of the garage apartment. She spotted Joe in the window across the way. Had he been watching her?

She immediately lowered the shade.

She wondered how much Joe had seen. Then she told herself he probably had no idea what she was doing in here. He didn’t even know whose room this was. He’d probably just been looking at the rain.

Then it occurred to her. Why wasn’t Chris home yet? He couldn’t be mowing Mrs. Landauer’s lawn in this downpour.

She grabbed Connie’s scarf, Arlene’s barrette and the handkerchief belonging to “M.” Then she headed down the hall to her bedroom. She stuffed what she was beginning to think of as “evidence” in her purse.

Downstairs, she pulled her raincoat and an umbrella out of the hall closet.

Three minutes later, she was walking in the thunderstorm, listening to the rain beating against the umbrella over her head. She clutched her purse close to her side. Nora could see the closed front gate to Mrs. Landauer’s mansion at the end of the block.

She didn’t want to think these crazy thoughts for one more minute. She needed to talk to Chris now. She needed her son to assure her that all of this “evidence” wasn’t what it looked like. She needed to know that their lives weren’t ruined.

Nora reached the gate and found it locked.

The lawn looked untouched. Down the driveway, the mansion was dark. Not a single light was on in the windows.

Nora rang the intercom anyway and waited in the rain. But there was no answer.

She wondered if Chris had even come here today.

Walking home in the rain, she still couldn’t breathe right. Her stomach felt tight with dread. Nora kept telling herself she was crazy to jump to such wild conclusions. But glancing down at her purse, she thought about what was inside it, and she just felt sicker.

Once inside the house, she peeled off the wet raincoat and set it aside with the umbrella. She carried her purse with her into the kitchen, where she glanced out the window in the kitchen door.

Joe’s car was gone.

She set her purse on the kitchen table and plopped down in a chair.

She was relieved that Joe had left for a while. She didn’t want him dropping by right now.

At the same time, that left her all alone—with her thoughts.

And that was the last thing she wanted.