“Rodney Bradford just got out of prison. Are you sure your grandson is still there?” I regretted the callous words the minute they came out of my mouth, especially when I saw the uncomfortable way Harold and Cathy looked.
“We’re sure,” Harold said softly.
“George’s life didn’t turn out the way we hoped it would, but he’s still our grandson. We love him. We stay in touch with him. Why would you think this other man was our grandson?”
I shrugged. “He told me he was. He said he wanted to buy my house because he used to visit his grandparents there when he was a boy.”
Cathy looked puzzled. “We lived in that house for forty years, raised our family there. George did come to visit sometimes, but nobody named Rodney Bradford.”
“Do you have a picture of George?” Fred asked.
Cathy lifted a framed photograph from the lamp table beside her. Fred rose and took it from her then sat back down and held it so we could both look at it.
A small boy stood between smiling parents. I had no idea whether he resembled Rodney Bradford. At that age, it could have been a picture of any little kid, even Fred, assuming he’d ever been that young.
“Do you have a more recent picture?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Cathy said. “After he started getting in trouble, he didn’t want his picture taken. That’s him when he was nine, and our son, John, with his wife, Tina. That was taken just before John died in an automobile accident. The boy never stood a chance with just Tina to raise him.”
“She wasn’t a bad person,” Harold said.
Cathy nodded. “That’s true. She was a good person, but she wasn’t strong. John was the strong one, the care-giver. He was always bringing home stray dogs and cats and birds. He wanted to take care of the world.”
“He wanted to take care of Tina.”
Cathy nodded again. “John saw so much potential in her, he just wanted to help her. They dated in high school. That’s when she got on drugs the first time. John had her in and out of rehab more than once. If he’d lived, I think she would have made it.”
“She would have made it,” Harold agreed.
“But she married that awful man before John’s body was cold in the ground, and he got her back into drugs.” That awful man. We’d finally found someone the genial, forgiving Murrays didn’t like.
“We tried to help her with George.” Harold shook his head, his expression morose. “Anything we did, they undid. They didn’t want to be bothered with George. They let him run wild, do whatever he wanted as long as they didn’t have to sober up and take some responsibility. George was in trouble every time you turned around.”
“What kind of trouble?” Fred asked.
“All kinds,” Cathy said. “Fights at school—”
“When he bothered to go to school,” Harold added darkly.
“He dropped out when he was fifteen and joined one of those gangs, the Crickets or Coffins or something like that. Tina died of a drug overdose a few years later. George was nineteen then, and he seemed to straighten up for a while, like he suddenly realized where he was headed.”
“That didn’t last long,” Harold muttered.
“No, it didn’t. We were able to get him out of scrapes when he was a teenager, but after he turned twenty-one, it was a lot harder. We hired a lawyer this last time, but he’d been in so much trouble already, the best we could do was get him a lighter sentence.”
“What was he convicted of?” Fred asked.
“Possession of drugs with the intent to sell them.” Cathy sat stiffly erect and spoke the words with concise precision, as if she’d memorized them from a foreign language without fully comprehending their meaning.
I felt kind of bad that we’d forced these nice people to relive so much sadness.
Fred obviously didn’t. “If you had to pay for George’s defense, apparently he wasn’t very successful as a drug dealer.”
Cathy dropped her gaze to the floor. “I think he sampled his own wares too often.”
“So he never had a large sum of money in his possession?” Fred asked. I would have never asked that question. It seemed rude. Good thing Fred was there to do it for me.
Cathy smiled sadly and reached for her husband’s hand. “If George had ever come into any money, he’d have offered to pay us back for all the money we spent on him over the years. He’s a good boy.”
“A good boy,” Harold echoed. “Weak, but he has a good heart. He always wanted to do the right thing. He just couldn’t quite get there.”
We took our leave of the Murrays, promising to stay in touch, and they promised to visit Death by Chocolate often. I suspected they would. They really liked my cookies.
We settled into Fred’s car and drove away from quiet Summerdale.
“I like them,” I said. “They seem content and at peace with the world. Getting old doesn’t sound so bad if I can do it like the Murrays.”
Fred snorted. “Not likely. You’re much too pushy and abrasive to ever be peaceful and content with your life.”
I wanted to argue with that assessment, but I couldn’t. “That’s so sweet that they still think their convict grandson is a nice boy,” I said instead.
“They’re naïve.”
“Same difference. What do you make of all this? Think Rodney Bradford is really their grandson George?”
For a few minutes Fred focused on the road ahead, deftly but slowly navigating through the traffic as if that was his only concern, but I knew the bits and bytes in the computer that passed for his brain were spinning at warp speed. “Maybe,” he finally said. “The two of them could have somehow switched identities so George got released instead of Rodney. That would be quite a trick, but stranger things have happened in the prison system. When I get home I’ll look up his mug shot, and we’ll see who’s who.”
“If Rodney turns out to be George, it could be that he buried some drug money in his grandparents’ basement, and that’s why he wanted my house, to get it back.” I twisted in my seat, turning to face Fred, excited at coming up with something that made sense. “And that would explain why his wife…widow…wants my house! He told her about the money. I’ll bet she’s the one who killed him!”
He frowned. “Why would she kill him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he really did beat her and she decided to get rid of him so she wouldn’t have to share the money with a wife-beater.”
“Then why didn’t she wait until they got the money before killing him?”
I sat back against the plush white leather. “I don’t know. Okay, forget that idea. Can you come up with something better?”
A car pulled from a side street right in front of Fred. He slowed with no change of expression and without uttering a single swear word. “I don’t have enough data to form an opinion at this time. However, you could be right about George burying money in your basement. I think we need to dig up the floor in your furnace room.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. I turned toward Fred and studied his implacable profile, looking for any trace of a smile, any hint he was kidding. There was none. “You want to dig a hole in my basement?”
“I can’t think of another way to find out if there’s something of value buried there. If we were looking for gold or some other form of metal or if we knew that what we’re looking for was buried in a metal box, we could use a detector. But we don’t have any idea what we’re looking for, so the only reasonable solution is to dig up the floor in your furnace room.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution.”
“Good.”
Sometimes Fred fails to recognize sarcasm. Or he ignores it.
“When do you want to undertake this excavation?” I asked, hoping for a date in the distant future.
“When do you want to figure out if you’ve got a mouse or a human intruder and why everybody wants your house?”
I wasn’t crazy about spending another night worrying if I had an intruder, two-legged or four-legged, in the basement. “Tonight?” On the other hand, I wasn’t crazy about spending hours in the basement doing manual labor. “Or in a week or so.”
Fred stared at the road ahead, turned a corner and finally nodded. “We can get started tonight. This may take a while. You should probably make more cookies. Digging is hard work.”
***
I changed into old jeans and a T-shirt in preparation for braving the coal dust. I had just taken a pan of freshly-baked cookies from the oven when I heard a knock on my back door.
I knew it had to be Fred, but it was getting dark outside and my life had been a little scary the last couple of days. For a moment I stood in the middle of the kitchen balancing the cookie sheet, wavering between hanging onto that hot pan as a weapon or setting it on the counter and picking up my rolling pin.
Henry dozed under the table, his body inside a paper bag with his head sticking out. I bought him a nice kitty bed, but he prefers boxes, sacks, drawers, and, of course, my bed. He opened one blue eye, regarded me quizzically, closed that eye and gave a soft snore. If he wasn’t snarling and threatening to attack my caller, there was no danger.
I set the cookies on the counter and opened the back door.
Fred, wearing coveralls, stood on the stoop. He had a shovel in each hand and a canvas bag hanging over one arm.
“You scared me. Why did you come to the back door?” I asked, though I had no hope of getting a reasonable reply.
“Why would I go to the front door when you’re in the kitchen?”
Actually, that did sound reasonable.
“Come on in.” I stepped back so he could enter with his tools.
“George Murray and Rodney Bradford are not the same person, but they were cellmates.”
“Hack into the state prison records tonight?”
He ignored my question. “Can’t be a coincidence. Maybe George hid money in this house and told Bradford about it. Cellmates can become close friends in the restrictive arena of prison.”
The possibility of hidden treasure in my basement suddenly became real. “If we find money, do we have to give it back?”
Fred thought for a moment. “Probably.” He turned and headed for the basement door but paused at the pan of cookies. “Chopped hazelnuts?”
“Yes.”
Henry reached out a paw and lazily swiped at Fred’s leg. Fred ignored him and continued to the basement.
I locked the back door and followed Fred.
We made our way down to the suddenly-popular furnace room, and I flipped on the light. From his bag Fred produced a very bright light on a folding tripod which lit up the room like the midday sun in August. If there was so much as a needle hidden in that room, we’d find it.
“First,” he said, “we remove the bricks from that area in the corner.”
Trent had seemed interested in that area too, and I’d thought it looked more disturbed than the rest of the floor when I did my inspection. Perhaps we were onto something.
Fred dipped into his bag and brought out two pairs of leather gloves and two tools that looked sort of like spatulas. I put on gloves and took a spatula. “What do you call this thing?” I asked.
“Spatula.”
“Oh.”
We began to take up the bricks using the spatulas. They came out surprisingly easily, and I was getting excited, expecting at any moment to see the flash of gold.
An hour or a week later, depending on whether you measure time by the clock or by the torture involved, I was less excited. We’d moved bricks from about half the floor and dug through several inches of the black clay underneath to find…more black clay.
I was thrilled when Fred stopped digging and leaned on his shovel. “I think we’ve learned all we’re going to learn.”
“Well, I’ve learned that if I ever kill Rick, I’m going to dispose of his body some way other than burying him, so I suppose it hasn’t been a totally wasted evening.” I laid down my shovel and pulled off my gloves.
“What are you doing?”
“Quitting. What are you doing?”
“Getting ready to put the floor back the way it was when we came down here, only we’ll smooth it out as long as we’re here anyway.”
I looked around at the piles of bricks and dirt. “Forget it. Let’s go eat cookies. I never use this room.”
Fred began spreading the dirt around evenly. “Neither of us will be able to sleep tonight if we don’t get this room back in order before we leave it.”
“I could sleep,” I assured him.
“No, you couldn’t. Thinking about this mess would keep me awake, and I’d be banging on your door, demanding we tidy up this room. As I said, neither of us would be able to sleep.”
I glared at him but started moving dirt and bricks.
Fred produced a level from his canvas bag and used that on the floor before we reset the bricks. Mr. Perfection. Finally the room looked better than it had when we started.
He stepped to one side and surveyed our efforts. “We ought to take up the whole floor and smooth it out.”
“Not tonight.”
“All right. Get a broom, we’ll sweep up the dust and dirt and be finished down here.”
I lifted my shovel threateningly. “A broom? Sweep the floor? Now?”
He wasn’t threatened. “Yes. Want me to go upstairs and get it?”
“No.”
I started upstairs.
“Bring a duster too, for these cobwebs.”
I got the broom and the duster, and we cleaned the furnace room in the middle of the night.
“I hope you’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep now,” I said when we finished.
“I will.”
We climbed the stairs, and I locked the basement door behind me.
Henry was gone, his paper bag empty. He was probably waiting for me in my bed. Well, he was probably in my bed. As to whether he was waiting for me, whether he cared if I joined him or not, that’s always an open question with a cat.
Fred crossed my white vinyl kitchen leaving dark footprints. I hoped he wouldn’t notice and insist we clean them up that night before he could sleep.
“Bring the cookies, and let’s sit on the back stoop and talk,” he said.
“Why don’t we sit in here where the cookies already are and the air conditioning works?”
“Because we’re filthy. We’re already leaving tracks on your floor. You’ll probably have to mop before you go to bed.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that.” Right after I mop and wax the sidewalk in front of my house.
I put some cookies on a plate, grabbed two Cokes, turned off the kitchen light and followed Fred outside.
We sat on the steps of my back porch eating and drinking for a few minutes. The night was pleasant, still hot but comfortable with the sun no longer blazing. The moon hadn’t risen yet, and it was very dark. I looked around at the trees and the out-of-control shrubbery surrounding my house. In the daylight, I loved the lush greenery and the shade it gave me. In the dark it was a little spooky.
“Take this.” Fred extended his hand toward me. Even in the darkness I could see the shiny key on his palm. “I put a new padlock on that coal chute door,” he said.
I accepted the key. “Thank you. But—you don’t really think somebody climbed through there to get into my basement, do you?”
He looked at me silently for a moment, took a long swallow from his can of Coke and set it back down. “We need to talk about what we discovered tonight.”
“Fred, I was there. We discovered nothing except how hard the ground is.”
“One area was easier to dig.”
“Maybe that area in the corner was a little softer,” I admitted.
“As if the ground had been loosened recently.”
Damn. I didn’t like where this conversation was going. I grabbed my own Coke and tilted it to my mouth…but it was empty. Thank goodness I had a fresh twelve-pack in the refrigerator.
“I think someone got into your basement and dug up whatever was there. When I cut off your old padlock and opened that metal door, I found a latching mechanism that releases the wooden cover that blocks the opening on the inside. If somebody had a key to that padlock, they could get in, release the cover, let it down, slide into your basement, then climb back up again and pull that interior door closed.”
The temperature was probably in the mid-eighties, but that image sent big time shivers down my spine. “Damn! Henry was right! Somebody was in my house.”
“Anyone with a key to that padlock could have entered your basement at any time.”
I shivered again then started to get angry as the implications of that set in. “George could have buried drug money in his grandparents’ basement, hidden the key to the padlock, then told his cellmate, Bradford. Or the Murrays could have given that padlock key to Rick when we bought this house, and he kept it and used it after he found out from his client, the late Rodney Bradford, about the money buried there.”
I wasn’t sure if I preferred to think Rick or some stranger had been in my basement.
“Probably not Rick since he tried to get your house after the intrusion occurred.”
“Oh.”
“And Bradford was dead by that time.”
“So who was in my house?”
Fred shrugged. “I have no idea. It’s possible whoever was there found nothing and still needs access to your house to search further, so we can’t completely eliminate Rick.”
“We can’t eliminate anybody in this entire city except Rodney Bradford. I don’t think my clean furnace room is going to help me sleep tonight. Doesn’t make me feel even a little bit better to know an intruder won’t get his feet dirty.”