Defense for the Devil Read Free Page A

Monday morning, and we’d leave right after my mother and father did. They took the girls down to California with them to spend a month. They adore their granddaughters. Irene and her crew came early to clean up the place; high-school kids would be around to collect chairs and tables I’d borrowed from the school, and everything would be ready for customers on Tuesday. So I went to Portland and spent the day with Laurence. He had a show in a gallery that I wanted to see; he’s an artist. Anyway, we took all day, had dinner on the way back, and got home about eleven. Irene and her husband met us at the door. Tom’s a deputy sheriff. My house had been torn apart.
    “He had ripped open mattresses, chairs, couches, dumped things out of drawers, torn clothes out of closets, broken things. Every room was a disaster.” Her hands were clenched hard and her voice was vehement now. “That bastard destroyed everything he could get his hands on.”
    “Easy,” Barbara murmured. “Back up a second. How? When? I thought the place was crawling with people?”
    Maggie shook her head. “Irene said she got through at two-thirty, and the kids were done loading stuff in their trucks before that. She left a lot of windows open to air the place out; she said people had been smoking, and I guess they had been. Anyway, she left it airing out at two-thirty, went back at eight-thirty to close up, and found the mess. She called her husband, and he brought in the sheriff. By the time we got home, no one was there except Irene and Tom, who was going to spend the night and make sure no one did any further damage. Tom said I couldn’t stay, and Laurence couldn’t. Even his apartment was a wreck! We would have to go to the hotel in Folsum. I couldn’t move anything or touch anything until the insurance adjustor inspected it all and the sheriff’s office investigated. They said it was malicious vandalism, and I didn’t tell them about Mitch. I was too… I couldn’t say anything,” she said. “I actually couldn’t speak. We all went to my room, and suddenly Irene shoved me into the bathroom and I threw up. I could hear her telling Tom to leave me alone a minute. I looked in the hiding place where I put Mitch’s stuff, a little space you can get to from the bathroom. Everything was still there.” She started to pick up her glass but pushed it away instead. “That was yesterday.”
    “Intermission,” Barbara said quietly. “You want a glass of wine?”
    Maggie nodded. Barbara stood up and went back to ask Laurence if he wanted wine, beer, anything else. He didn’t. He was drawing in a small sketchbook. Taking her time, she went to the kitchen, where Martin and Binnie were hard at work preparing entrees. “Sorry,” she said. “Martin, could we have a couple glasses of chardonnay?”
    “You got it,” he said.
    She returned to the table. Maggie was standing at a window, gazing out over dazzling white cafe curtains. Barbara watched her for a moment, then made a noise moving her chair, and Maggie jerked and returned from wherever she had been.
    “All right,” Maggie said as she came back to the table and sat down again. “Today. I was up really early making phone calls to head off customers; Tom let me take the reservation book. And I had to find rooms for my guests. The insurance adjustor couldn’t get there until ten or eleven, and I couldn’t touch a thing at the house, so I was still in the hotel, in the coffee shop, when a man approached me and said he wanted to talk to me. I told him some other time. I really didn’t have time.”
    Martin brought out their wine, and she said thank you and sipped hers gratefully. “The man said his name was Trassi, and he wanted to talk about Mitch. I hadn’t told a single person that I had seen Mitch. No one. I still haven’t, until now,” she added.
    “He said Mitch worked for a company in Southern California, and he had been sent to their Seattle branch with important papers. He said