Murder Beyond the Grave Read online

  As if he needs another reminder of the difference between what he has and what he wants, Danny watches as a red Ferrari zips into the parking lot and parks next to his van. The two vehicles couldn’t look more different. His van is dingy and dented, with rust growing on the doors and a filthy film on the windshield. The Ferrari is gleaming and red, as if its owner washes and waxes it every time he takes it out for a spin.

  When the driver steps out, Danny can’t believe it—it’s the same man he’d seen on the drive here. The preppy man with glasses at the house where the kids were playing in the sprinkler.

  The man walks in the door and starts down the aisle, whistling without a care in the world. Danny stares at him.

  When the man comes to the counter with a few bottles of cleaning products and a package of sponges, he nods at Danny and says, “Afternoon.”

  The manager comes back to the counter and tells Danny that he’ll ring the customer up quickly and then take care of Danny’s refund.

  “Getting your boat cleaned up?” the manager says politely.

  “Yes, sir,” the man says enthusiastically. “Gonna take my boys out tubing this afternoon.”

  The man says he has a thirty-foot, five-hundred-horsepower speedboat.

  “The kids love it,” he says, taking his receipt and heading out the door.

  Danny and the manager both watch as the Ferrari glides out of the parking lot.

  “I wish I had that kind of money,” Danny says.

  “You and me both,” the clerk says, handing Danny a check. “Do you know who that is?”

  Danny shakes his head.

  “Stephen Small.”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  The clerk explains that the Small family just sold its media empire for sixty-four million dollars. He doesn’t know how much Stephen Small got, but it has to be a decent chunk. He says that Stephen Small recently bought the B. Harley Bradley House.

  “You know, that fancy house over in the historic district? The one Frank Lloyd Wright designed?”

  Danny knows the one.

  “Some people have it all, don’t they?” the clerk says, shaking his head in wonder.

  “Not me,” Danny groans, and tucks the measly refund into his jeans.

  As he walks out the store, the manager calls after him, “Gotta make your own destiny, man.”

  CHAPTER 10

  DANNY DRIVES AROUND, thinking.

  He has no destination in mind. He just doesn’t want to go home yet. He can’t stop thinking about why some people have so much and other people have so little. Why does a guy like Stephen Small get to drive around in a Ferrari and take his family out on a speedboat when Danny has to swing a hammer under the hot summer sun for meager wages?

  Danny doesn’t stop to consider that he was born into a life of privilege and squandered his opportunities. He focuses only on how little he has now and how his father won’t even give him a loan.

  It’s not fair, Danny thinks.

  At a stoplight, he glances in his rearview mirror and notices a black sedan two cars behind him. The windows are tinted, and he can’t see the driver.

  Didn’t he see that car earlier today?

  He can’t be sure, but he thinks he spotted the car on his way to his parents’ house. He quickly takes a right, and the sedan does, too, even though its signal wasn’t on while it sat at the light.

  Could it be Mitch’s guys?

  Or the cops?

  Danny takes another quick right and looks in his rearview mirror. The car rolls through the intersection without taking the turn. Danny breathes a sigh of relief, still studying the rearview mirror. He looks up in time to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting a car stopped in front of him.

  Am I just being paranoid? Danny thinks.

  When traffic begins moving again, Danny speeds out of the neighborhood, checking and rechecking his rearview mirror. He takes a circuitous route to make sure no one is following him anymore.

  By the time he pulls up in front of the town house, Danny has made a decision.

  Gotta make your own destiny, the manager had said.

  Danny plans to.

  He finds Nancy sitting on the couch watching a videotape of Crocodile Dundee. Their air conditioner isn’t working, and she looks miserable in short cutoff jeans and a tight T-shirt. Her hair is damp around her forehead, and there are sweat stains on her shirt. There is fresh polish on her toenails and wads of cotton wedged between each toe.

  “Honey,” she says. “Do you want to go get some ice cream? It’s hotter than blue blazes in this house.”

  “I need to run to the lumberyard,” Danny says. “We can get ice cream along the way, if you’d like.”

  “What do you need at the lumberyard?” Nancy asks, pulling the cotton balls out from between her toes.

  “I’ve got an idea for a new woodworking project.”

  “Is it something you can sell?” Nancy asks, standing up and slipping her manicured feet into a pair of flip-flops.

  “Not exactly,” Danny says. “But I think it could make us some money.”

  CHAPTER 11

  WHILE DANNY IS looking for the supplies he needs, Nancy wanders through the hardware store. She passes through the paint section, imagining a new color for Benji’s room. Then she looks at some trim and imagines it lining the floor in their living room. She arrives at the appliance section and examines a row of dishwashers, looking at the prices. She wants badly to ask Danny if there’s any way to buy a new one. Layaway? A credit card? She hates washing dishes by hand. But she knows what Danny will say.

  The same thing he says when she suggests she go back to work.

  No.

  No, no, no!

  There’s no talking to him. It’s always his way or the highway.

  She wanders through the store, looking at faucets. They could use a new one of those too. Theirs is always leaking all over the kitchen counter. She exhales deeply, thinking about all the things she can’t have.

  Life had been so easy when Danny was dealing. He’d always had plenty of money for anything she wanted. Dinners in nice restaurants. Jewelry and flowers. It was a good life—much better than working two jobs before Danny came along—but it was a life that always made her feel guilty. She’d made mistakes in the past, and she liked a good party as well as the next gal, but she was trying to be a good mother. What kind of mother lets her drug-dealing boyfriend pay for the roof over her child’s head?

  The answer: yours truly, Nancy Rish.

  The guilt had eaten her up, and she’d pushed for Danny to quit dealing. She isn’t sure why he finally decided to quit, but he did. She’d initially been skeptical that he would be able to stay clean, but so far he has. It’s been seven months, and times have been tough for them. But it looks like Danny isn’t going to backslide to his old ways.

  She tells herself she got what she wanted. She needs to be okay with washing dishes by hand and doing without the unnecessary purchases she used to make. She decides she’ll tell him that they don’t need to go get ice cream. She doesn’t want him to stress about money. She can do without.

  She finds Danny in the plumbing section talking to an employee about plastic tubing. What the hell is he planning to build?

  Danny tucks three long pieces of PVC tubing under his arm and grabs a couple elbow joints. The pieces of plastic pipe flop under his arms as he walks to the front of the store. On his way, he grabs a package of caulk and a set of door hinges.

  At the counter, Danny charges the purchases to his boss’s account. Nancy isn’t sure if Danny worked this out with his boss ahead of time. It occurs to her that it’s possible that his boss purchases so many supplies at the store that he won’t even notice an extra charge. She chooses to believe Danny has turned over a new leaf. She needs to stop doubting him.

  As they’re walking out the door, Nancy tells him that she has decided she doesn’t want ice cream.

  “Fine,” he says, pulling the van around back to the
store’s lumberyard.

  She wants him to recognize the sacrifice she’s trying to make, but he seems too preoccupied. It hurts her feelings and she almost blurts out that she’s changed her mind and wants ice cream after all. But just because Danny doesn’t appreciate the sacrifice she’s trying to make doesn’t mean she shouldn’t make it. She needs to be supportive, whether he notices or not.

  Danny shows an employee his receipt. The two men load two sheets of plywood and six two-by-fours into the back of the van.

  “What the heck are you building?” Nancy asks when he climbs back into the driver’s seat.

  “You’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 12

  NANCY DUMPS SPAGHETTI noodles into a pot of boiling water. The water bubbles up and spills over the side, hissing as it hits the open flame of the burner. Next to the pot on the stove is a pan of simmering marinara sauce. She dips a wooden spoon in and gives it a taste.

  Satisfied, she turns to Danny, who is sitting at the kitchen table next to Benji, and says that dinner will be ready in ten minutes.

  Both Benji and Danny are drawing. Using crayons, Benji is drawing a dinosaur fighting a robot. Using a mechanical pencil, Danny seems to be drawing designs for whatever it is he hopes to build. He takes a slug of his beer—his third since they got home—but doesn’t take his eyes off the illustration.

  Danny and Benji look cute together, both locked in concentration. Nancy’s heart swells. She has long had her doubts about Danny as a father figure. But now that he is no longer dealing drugs, she feels like he could be a better role model for her son.

  It is nice to see him engrossed in something. She doesn’t know what the heck he is planning to build—he still hasn’t told her—but it’s a relief just seeing him focused on something besides how difficult life has been lately.

  Curious about what he’s doing, Nancy tries to sneak a peek at the drawing. He’s sketched out some kind of box, with the two-by-fours serving as the frame and the plywood serving as the walls. Danny has no background in technical drawing as far as she knows, but it looks like he’s done a decent job of illustrating his design. He’s even included measurements for the dimensions of the box. Next to the box, he’s drawn what appears to be the PVC pipe. She can’t quite figure out what the PVC pipe is for. It looks like it comes out of the box, but there’s nothing in the drawing to indicate what it connects to.

  “Honey,” Nancy says, placing her hand on Danny’s shoulder, “did you hear me? Dinner’s almost ready.”

  Danny jerks his head up, as if coming out of a trance.

  “I’m not hungry,” he says. “I’m going to skip dinner tonight. I want to go ahead and get started on this.”

  He grabs his piece of paper and rises. He opens the refrigerator and pulls out two more bottles of beer. Before heading to the garage, he stops and gives Nancy a peck on the cheek.

  At first, she feels a stab of resentment. If she’d known he wasn’t going to eat with them, she and Benji could have just eaten leftovers. She wants life to be as normal as possible around here. She wants them to act like a family. If Danny is running off to do something without explanation, that seems more like the Danny of old. But the kiss on the cheek—that quick act of tenderness—erases her bitterness. Despite all the pressure he’s under, Danny can still take the time to make her feel special.

  As she and Benji eat their spaghetti, they can hear a power saw running in the garage, biting through plywood and two-by-fours. Then Danny begins driving nails into the wood. Nancy tries to make Benji laugh by slurping her noodles up. He gives her a half-hearted smile, but he keeps looking distractedly toward the garage.

  After dinner, Nancy and Benji decide to watch a movie. They turn the movie up loud so they can hear it over the racket. At some point halfway through, Nancy realizes that the banging and sawing have stopped. After she tucks Benji into bed, she goes out into the garage to investigate.

  Danny is nowhere to be found.

  But the box he was building is there. It’s about six feet long, three feet wide, and two feet deep, with a hinged lid. The edges are caulked, so the box will be watertight, except for a two-inch hole in the lid where it looks like the PVC pipe will connect.

  Nancy can’t figure out what Danny could possibly mean to use it for. What is he planning to put in it?

  The damn thing’s big enough to hold a person.

  She presses the button and raises the garage door. Danny’s van is missing from the driveway. She steps out onto the concrete and looks up and down the street. The heat has finally broken, and the cool air feels refreshing. But Nancy has a sinking feeling. Again, disappearing in the middle of the night without explanation is behavior typical of the old Danny.

  She forces the doubt away.

  You just need to trust him, she tells herself.

  CHAPTER 13

  DANNY SITS IN his van down the street from Stephen Small’s house. His eyes are bloodshot. He has a cigarette between his lips. The van’s window is open, but the smoke pools in the ceiling. Danny takes a drag and jettisons the butt out the window.

  He glances around to make sure no one is watching him; then he lifts a pair of binoculars and spies the Small house. The Smalls aren’t particularly careful about closing their shades at night. Danny can see into their house quite well. Through an upstairs window, he sees both parents tucking their twins into bunk beds.

  Danny can’t stand the look of this guy, with his receding hairline and goofy aw-shucks smile. He’s probably never had a hardship in his life. His wife isn’t bad-looking. Maybe a little homely. But she could do better than him, if he wasn’t rich, that is. That has to be the reason she’s with him.

  After they tuck the boys in, they go to their other son’s room. Danny can’t see well into this one, but he imagines them going through a similar ritual.

  One big happy family.

  It makes Danny sick.

  He has two children from a previous marriage, and now Nancy wants him to be a surrogate father to her son. He loves his children, and Benji is a cute kid. But the responsibility that goes with children is just exhausting.

  He had liked living in a separate house from Nancy. He was able to go back and forth between the houses whenever he wanted. It was the best of both worlds. He had a girlfriend, but he could live like a bachelor half the time. If he had Stephen Small’s kind of money, he’d pay someone to tuck his kids into bed at night so he could go out and party.

  After the other son’s light goes out, Nancy Small heads to what Danny assumes is their bedroom. Stephen trots downstairs and appears briefly in front of the glass window on the front door. He’s checking to make sure the door is locked, Danny thinks.

  Stephen makes the rounds through the house, turning off lights; then he heads upstairs. He joins his wife in their bedroom and closes the curtains. Danny can’t make out anything but blurs behind the white drapes. Then the lights go out. The house is dark. Quiet.

  Danny moves the binoculars over the rest of the property. He studies the detached garage. To leave the house, Stephen Small has to walk from one building to the other.

  Danny wonders if the side door to the garage is unlocked. He doesn’t want to risk checking. There’s too much at stake for him to get caught snooping around the property.

  Danny starts the engine and slowly drives down the street.

  He doesn’t turn on his headlights until he is well past the house he’s been spying on.

  CHAPTER 14

  September 1, 1987

  NANCY SITS WITH Benji at the kitchen table, helping him read a picture book. Their empty dinner plates have been pushed aside, and it’s nearing Benji’s bedtime. But school hasn’t started yet, and she wants to cherish this moment. This is a new book they picked up from the library, one that’s more challenging than books Benji read in the past. He needs her help as he reads.

  Nancy doesn’t mind helping him. In fact, she enjoys it. She has already promised that once school starts, she will help him wit
h his homework whenever he asks. She wants to set a good example for the school year.

  When they get to the last sentence, Benji looks hard and then carefully sounds out the words.

  “You did it!” Nancy says, grabbing him by both shoulders.

  Benji has a sheepish smile.

  Nancy tells him to go put his pajamas on and brush his teeth. She’ll be in to tuck him in soon.

  She takes their dinner plates and scrapes the remnants into the garbage. She debates for a moment whether to let them sit in the sink overnight or wash them by hand now. The dishwasher is still broken. She takes a deep breath. No point putting it off until tomorrow.

  As she’s filling the sink with soapy water, she hears a noise and turns to see Danny sauntering in. She hasn’t seen him all day.

  “Hey, hon,” she says. “There’s still a little bit of dinner. Want me to make you a plate?”

  He doesn’t answer, and Nancy takes a moment to really look at him. His skin is flushed, and his eyes are dilated and wild. It doesn’t look like he has brushed his hair in days. For that matter, it doesn’t look like he’s slept in days.

  At first she thinks he must be high on cocaine, but she isn’t sure. She’s seen him stoned plenty of times, but he’s never looked quite like this. He seems stressed out—to the point he’s about to snap.

  He opens the refrigerator and scans its contents.

  “Hon,” Nancy says, this time louder. “I made dinner.”

  “I’m not hungry,” he says dismissively.

  He grabs a half-full gallon of milk and walks over to the sink. He starts pouring the milk into the soapy water.

  “What are you doing?” Nancy says.

  She’s going to have to drain the sink now and start over.

  “I need some water,” Danny says, as if that is explanation enough.