Trap Door Read Free Page A

son of a bitch done that?
    “Jen?” he shouted, all possible need for stealth evaporated. Never mind the kid, who could and most certainly would be dealt with later. All Walter wanted, all his every shrieking brain cell required absolutely right now, was to see…
    His frantically searching hand found the light switch and flipped it. White light flooded the barn’s interior, from the fluorescent panels hung on chains beneath the rafters.
    Half blinded by the sudden brilliance from above, Walter turned in a helpless circle, feeling as if he’d been impaled on an icy spike.
    “Jen? Goddamn it, Jenny, I know you’re in here.”
    Frantic, he flung himself at the loft stairs, the gun all but forgotten as he tossed heavy straw bales aside.
    “Jenny?” he gasped. Then a bright scrap of cloth caught his eye. It was one of her silk scarves. She had a drawerful of the things, a tumble of them in jewel-toned colors like a sultan’s riches.
    Snatching the scarf up in both hands, he pressed it to his face, inhaling the perfume he’d smelled earlier, drunk with it as he turned. “Jenny!” he bellowed.
    No answer. Staggering forward, he peered over the railed edge of the loft, down the side wall of the unfinished office room and across the barn floor.
    Silence again. Hope pierced him; maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe this time she hadn’t been lying to him. Maybe she’d been upstairs in her bed all along. Asleep, safe…
    Then he felt it through the thin soles of his moccasins, up through the loft’s floor. An odd vibration; slow, rhythmic, and occurring in time with the sound he had heard.
    Was still hearing now.
Creak…
It came to him all at once, what the sound was. What he would find when with trembling, sweat-slick fingers he grasped the big iron handle set into the top of the loft’s closed trap door.
    Nearly weeping, Walter strained at the heavy thing, hauled it up and fell to his knees at the opening’s framed-in rim, the sweet-smelling silk scarf still clutched between hands pressed together as though in prayer. Below him through the square trap door opening lay the office room: dark, enclosed, silent.
    Or almost silent. “Jen?” Walter whispered. The soft perfumed folds of her scarf caressed his cheek. “Jennifer, honey, are you down there?”
    Creak…
The sound slowed, stopped. Steeling himself, the most respected and feared professional killer on the whole east coast bit back a whimper.
    And peered over the edge.
     
Chapter 2
     

     
    My name is Jacobia Tiptree and when I first moved to Maine, the last thing I expected was for my dead ex-husband Victor to end up haunting my house. My idea was to repair the ramshackle old dwelling and live happily ever after in it.
    Which right there was absurd. I no more knew how to rehabilitate an antique house than I knew how to jump off the rooftop of one and fly.
    Soon after I moved in, for example, I found a springy spot in the hall floor. And springiness, I’d heard, meant weakness. So I jumped energetically on the spot in order to test just how weak it really was, whereupon my foot went through and the rest of my leg followed, all the way to my hip.
    And there I stayed. I couldn’t pull my trapped leg up past the broken floorboard, whose sharp splintered ends already threatened several of my favorite arteries. I couldn’t go down, either; the floor around the hole felt solid as concrete.
    So I waited: one hour, then two. Monday, my black Labrador retriever, came and sniffed me, then went away again, bored. The trashman came, and the meter reader. Neither heard my shouts, and the mail carrier passed by without stopping.
    Finally my son Sam came home from school and found me there, furious and humiliated. “Mom,” he said gently, looking down at me and taking in the whole sad situation. “You know, I think maybe the next time you decide to make a hole in the floor… ”
    Right.
Cut it with a saw
. Although at the time I’d have preferred just using a bomb, and