Lye in Wait Read online

  Since stumbling upon Walter, my thoughts had been focused in a tight beam, concerned only with tamping down my visceral reaction so I could concentrate on the practical details of how to deal with a dead body in my workroom. Now it occurred to me to wonder why he’d taken a swig of lye in the first place.

  “Wait a minute. He … he did it on purpose?” I rubbed my hand over my face. “Oh, God. He … of course … he committed—” But I couldn’t say it, struggling to swallow away the dread that settled into my chest just from thinking the word.

  Ambrose’s gaze held mine in an almost physical grip. A few beats while no one spoke, and finally he looked away. But before he did, something gentle—sympathy? kindness?—passed through his eyes. I tried not to be obvious as I let out my breath.

  He put the combination lock in a plastic bag. “I’ll be happy to drive you to the station for that statement.”

  Meghan said, “We’ll drive right over, after we freshen up and get our nerves under control. Say, in half an hour?”

  Ambrose didn’t look happy but agreed. In Meghan’s former life she’d been a lawyer—technically she could still practice—so I guessed we were within our rights. And the ugly truth was that Walter’s death, besides being horrifying and sad, could present legal issues since he’d died in her house.

  I wondered if I could somehow prove he hadn’t used my lye to kill himself.

  Zahn came back in, and Ambrose turned toward him. Meghan started up the stairs, but I just stood there, looking at our handyman still lying on the cold concrete, and hated myself and pretty much everyone else for having to think about liability at a time like this. I’d liked Walter Hanover a lot. He’d been a fixture in the neighborhood for years and had been a great help to Meghan, her daughter, and me. He lived across the alley in the former guesthouse for the larger house facing the street behind ours. A gentle soul, he worked hard and always had a cheerful word for everyone. Whatever despair had driven him to deliberately choose such a horrible death must have been grim indeed.

  My eyes felt hot. I blinked, hard.

  Freshen up, Meghan had said. Not a bad idea, come to think of it. A splash of cold water on my face and a splash of Scotch down my gullet. Or perhaps better to wait on the latter until after I’d given my statement. I trudged upstairs to find a cold-water spigot and talk to my housemate before heading over to the Cadyville Police Station.

  Below, I heard Zahn say, “For God’s sake, Ambrose. I don’t care if it is your day off—go home and change. Makes the department look bad.”

  As I walked through the door to the kitchen, Brodie’s vigorous displeasure at being shut away from the excitement drowned the detective’s response.

  Meghan and I were roommates at the University of Washington. Then she went on to law school, and I married Mike Reynolds and went to work in the administration office of the Lake Washington School District. The job was comfortable—boring, but comfortable—and I never got around to looking for another one. Then, six years into our marriage, lymphoma struck Mike a killing blow. The doctors caught it late, and only three months later I was a widow. Like finding a new job, we’d never gotten around to having children.

  Meghan married Richard and had Erin. After she passed the bar, she and her husband bought the house in Cadyville, about twenty-five miles north of Seattle, and she opened a practice specializing in contract law. Three years later, her husband turned out to be a real jerk, with both a secret gambling habit, which had drained their savings, and a not-very-discreet girlfriend.

  She divorced him, closed her law practice, and apprenticed as a massage therapist. Less than a year later, my husband died. The offer to come live with Erin and Meghan came at a miserable, lonely time in my life, so I quit my job, moved to Cadyville, and went to work at the local bookstore. I started selling my soaps and personal care products as a lark, but last year I took the plunge and quit my day job. Now Winding Road is my full-time business, and I love it.

  As promised, Meghan drove us to the police station. After a gray-haired officer took our fingerprints—just routine they told us, but it gave me the creeps—Ambrose talked to each of us separately. In addition to asking me the same questions he’d asked before about the lye, he also wanted to know about anyone who might have access to my workroom, when I’d last mixed lye for soap, and whether there had been any left over. I told him I often left the outside door unlocked and always did when Walter was doing work back there, and that I’d last mixed lye eight days before and had used it all to make that batch of soap. I told him the glass on the floor didn’t belong to us, that Walter must have brought it with him.

  Ambrose had also asked about Walter’s family and friends. Appalled at how little I knew about these aspects of his life, I found myself unable to provide any useful information at all. It still disturbed me that evening, as Meghan and I cooked dinner and discussed the police interviews.

  “So you stayed with exactly what you did and saw and kept all your opinions to yourself,” Meghan said. She smeared a dollop of pungent garlic butter on a piece of Italian bread and reached for another slice.

  “It’s not my opinion that I didn’t leave a bunch of lye sitting around for Walter to kill himself with.” I whacked a carrot in two with my knife. “If that detective would have just listened to me.”

  “Sophie Mae, tell me you didn’t piss Ambrose off.”

  I shrugged.

  Sighing, she arranged the bread on a cookie sheet and placed it under the hot broiler. Turning back to me, she said, “What happened to Walter wasn’t your fault.”

  “I never said it was.”

  She held my gaze for a moment, then shook her head and stooped to check on the garlic bread. “It was a pretty weird way to commit suicide.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The choices people make? They seem perfectly normal to them.” But I wasn’t thinking of Walter when I said it.

  She started to nod, then grimaced and ran a hand over her eyes. “Oh God. I’m such a jerk. I completely forgot about your brother.”

  I waved off her chagrin and forced a smile. Bobby Lee had killed himself so many years ago that now I could sometimes go for a week at a time without thinking of him, but all that afternoon, memories had crept around the edges of my awareness. I changed the subject.

  “So tell me, would I be in trouble if I’d left the lye out?” I kept my tone light.

  She narrowed her eyes at me. I could tell she wanted to say something else about my brother.

  “Well, would I?”

  She sighed, giving in. “You can get lye in the cleaning aisle at the grocery store. They’d have to prove criminal negligence. No prosecutor would touch it.”

  “But they brought in the forensics people and took our fingerprints,” I said.

  “They do that anytime someone dies an unnatural death.”

  “Why doesn’t that make me feel better?” I tossed the carrot scrapings in the covered crock we used to collect vegetable matter for the compost bin. “Did they ask you about Walter’s family?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you tell them anything?”

  She shook her head. “Not really.”

  The water was boiling, the steam clouding the window over the sink. She dropped a handful of spaghetti in the pot, stirring it with a long wooden fork to separate the strands. “This whole thing scares the bejesus out of me.”

  “Me, too.” I finished slicing green onions and sprinkled them on top of the salad. “I’m glad you believe I’m careful when I work with the lye.”

  “Of course I do. Do you think I’d let you make soap in the house if I didn’t have every confidence it was safe for Erin? And I’ve seen your soap-making getup: rubber apron and gloves, goggles. I’m surprised you don’t use a gas mask.”

  “I open the windows,” I said.

  “Eve
n better.” She stopped stirring, though her hand remained curled around the wooden handle. “Sophie Mae?”

  I looked up.

  “Is there any way it could have been an accident?”

  I put the salad on the table. “I just can’t see how. You have to mix the sodium hydroxide granules with water. That’s not something you do by mistake.”

  “And you’re certain you didn’t have any already mixed?”

  I groaned. “God, not you, too.”

  “Stop being so dramatic. Can’t you buy liquid drain cleaner?”

  “Sure. It’s usually colored. Blue, I think. The liquid on the floor was clear, but there may be some brands that pour clear. Still, you don’t buy liquid drain cleaner and drink it by accident, either.”

  “Hmm. Guess not.” She took the toasted garlic bread out of the oven and put it on the butcher-block kitchen table where we ate most of our meals.

  I couldn’t get the image of Walter’s grimacing, blistered face out of my mind. “I’ve heard of people drinking lye ... but why do it here?”

  “Instead of at home like any other self-respecting suicide?”

  “Well, yeah, something like that. Did it have something to do with us?”

  She blew out her breath, a sound of frustration. “No way to know now, is there?”

  “Maybe he left a note,” I said.

  She went to the doorway and called up the stairs, “Erin! Dinner!”

  Hearing footsteps on the wooden stairs from the second floor, we dropped the subject. I went to the stove and tested the pasta. Al dente. I dumped it into a colander, drained it, then drizzled a little olive oil over it and slid it back into the pot. Meghan tossed it with home-canned red sauce while I got the salad dressing out of the refrigerator and Erin washed her hands at the sink.

  I turned and saw mother and daughter from behind, one a smaller version of the other. Dark curls reached almost to their shoulders, blue jeans and T-shirts hugged their short, slender frames, and when they turned together I saw only slight variations in their almost elfin features. Meghan doesn’t wear makeup, blessed with a face that needs no improvement. Her blue eyes can get this intense look that makes me think she would have been a good courtroom lawyer if she had chosen that path. Erin’s eyes were grayer and sometimes struck me as old for such a little girl.

  Settled at the table, we loaded up our plates with food. We were having spaghetti because it was Erin’s favorite meal, and she felt pretty low about Walter. I didn’t feel particularly hungry, and I doubted that Meghan did either, but for Erin’s sake we made the effort.

  Erin swallowed a bite of spaghetti. “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m thirty-four.”

  Erin played with a piece of lettuce in her salad bowl. “How old are Grandma and Grandpa?” Meghan’s parents had moved to Taos, New Mexico four years before.

  Meghan put her piece of garlic bread down on her plate. “Grandma is sixty-three and Grandpa is sixty-six.” She waited for the next question.

  “Sometimes people live to be a hundred, don’t they? But usually not that long. Is there any way to tell how long someone’s going to live?”

  “Not really. Some families have genetic tendencies toward certain diseases, and how someone takes care of themselves—not smoking, eating right, that kind of thing—can affect how long they live.”

  “Yeah, I know about that stuff. But the family stuff—do we have any of that in our family?”

  “Well, I can tell you my grandmother lived to be ninety-seven, which is pretty close to a hundred. And my grandfather lived to be ninety-four. Is this about Walter?”

  “Well, of course it is, Mom.” Erin sounded a little exasperated at the question. Then a wry expression crossed her ten-year-old face. The look flickered away, and she said, “At least it sorta is.”

  I said, “Walter had an accident, Bug. His age didn’t have anything to do with it.” I didn’t know how much Meghan had told her daughter about the details of the “accident.” The police had still been down in the basement, sampling or measuring or doing whatever it is they do, when Erin came home from school. She’d wanted to go watch them, but Meghan nixed that idea.

  Erin nodded. “Yeah. But him dying just made me think about other people dying, is all.” She leaned over her plate and stuffed a huge dripping bite of spaghetti in her mouth.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Meghan asked.

  Erin shook her dark curls. But a moment later she swallowed and said, “Walter said he used to drink a lot.”

  Meghan shot me a glance, and at that moment I was really glad I wasn’t the mom, didn’t have to handle all the tough questions. Though Erin still managed to hit me with the occasional unexpected zinger from out of left field.

  “Walter was a recovering alcoholic. Some bad things can come from drinking, but you have to understand that it’s a disease. It didn’t make him a bad man,” Meghan said.

  There, I thought. I never would have handled that so well. She seemed to find just the right words.

  But Erin looked stricken. “I never thought he was a bad man.” Her fork clattered to the table, and she pushed her chair back. Tears welled up in her eyes. “I loved Walter. He was funny and nice and he showed me how to plant things and build things and he let me help him sometimes and he liked to talk about baseball, and … and …” She turned and fled up the stairs to her room, crying in earnest now.

  Meghan shot me a helpless look, then picked up a whining Brodie from the foot of the stairs and carried him up to help console her daughter. I sat alone at the wooden table for a few minutes, poking my fork at strands of pasta. Then I got up and started scraping the mounds of food from the plates.

  Sometimes the right words just don’t exist.

  After cleaning up the dishes I went downstairs. Three wholesale orders of soap remained to package, box up, and send, and I needed to make up for some of the time I’d lost that day. But once in the basement, I knew I couldn’t work down there that night. I was so tired my bones felt mushy, and the stark pools of fluorescence from the track lighting hurt my eyes.

  The authorities had been very tidy; there was no indication Walter had ever been in my workroom. The glass was gone, but the spilled sodium hydroxide mixture had eaten into the rag rug and soaked into the concrete floor, creating an ugly stain. I got out the apple cider vinegar I used for much of my cleaning, poured some straight onto the stain and left it. It probably wouldn’t remove the mark, but the acid would neutralize the alkaline in the lye. As I capped the bottle, I caught a whiff, and the spicy-sour smell lodged in my throat.

  I tossed the rug in the garbage.

  A smear of black powder came away on my hand when I closed the hasp on the cupboard. I’d have to get another lock. Besides sodium hydroxide, the cupboard contained potassium hydroxide, which is another kind of lye used for liquid soaps. I had only a small amount, as I didn’t have any liquid soaps in my current product repertoire. Considering it now, I realized many of the substances I used could be dangerous. Peppermint could burn skin if applied full strength, as could clove or cinnamon oils. In fact, I didn’t know of any essential oils that could be used full strength with any guaranteed safety. Only wintergreen oil is actually regulated by the FDA. But none of them could do the kind of damage the lye had done, and frankly, all were far milder than some of the chemicals you would find in a typical cleaning closet. Still, I’d pick up a couple extra locks while I was at it.

  The room spanned the width of the house, and windows lined the upper halves of three walls. The front wall snugged up to a hill, so there was no front entrance to the basement except the stairs from the kitchen above. I walked the perimeter, checking the lock on each window. I hadn’t bothered with curtains or blinds, wanting as much natural light as possible d
uring the workday. Tonight I felt the eyes out there; not benign nighttime critters going about their business, but threatening, malignant eyes. I shrugged off my heebie-jeebies. A penchant for too much Stephen King combined with finding a dead man—granted, a particularly gruesome-looking dead man—and there I went getting all spooked by the dark like some neurotic schoolgirl.

  I paused in front of the window by the back door. My smudgy reflection gazed back at me from the glass. Next to Meghan and Erin, it’s like I’m from a different planet, one with a stronger gravitational field. I feel stout and unwieldy, blonde and big-boned. In reality, I’m not any of those things, except blonde. At five foot six, I do have bigger bones than the Bly family—but so does a good-sized crow. When I’m out among normal people, I’m an attractive enough woman in my mid-thirties, with my long hair in a practical braid down my back and a tendency toward simple Eddie Bauer-esque clothing so I don’t have to think too hard about how to put myself together in the morning.

  Tonight all that showed in the glass pane was a wavering outline of my features and reflected glare from the overhead lights. And then it was Bobby Lee looking back at me, the same light hair, the same snub nose, the same genetic mix as mine, with the same sense of humor and way of looking at the world. For a moment his absence skewered through my solar plexus, and I began to close my eyes against it.

  But I blinked and stood up straight again as my eyes refocused on a bright rectangle across the alley. While seeing a light on in someone’s window on a dark October evening isn’t unusual, this one was: this light shone in Walter Hanover’s cottage.

  Flipping off the switch for the tracks overhead, I peered out at the night. Definitely Walter’s.

  My father always left the lights on when he exited a room. So had my husband. Apparently our handyman had managed to live up to his Y chromosome, as well.

  Opening the door, I stepped outside. Walter had told us he hid his spare key under a flowerpot on the windowsill. There couldn’t be a better time to use it. The wind kicked up, and, as I ran through the chilly darkness, fallen leaves swirled around my tennis shoes and whapped at my legs like faint hands.