Read Online A Door in the River by Inger Ash Wolfe - Free Book Online Page B

of the girl. Then she drove out to the Wiest house and parked on the street in front of it. Its windows were completely dark except for a glow emanating through the windows on either side of the front door. It sat, a dark silhouette under the half-moon, on its patch of land and seemed totally devoid of life.
    Hazel tested both the front and back doors and they were locked. One of Cathy’s keys worked in the back door,and Hazel went in quietly and listened. It sounded like the house was empty. She flipped a switch and the kitchen came to light.
    The table was littered with tissues beside a vase of flowers. Hazel closed the outer door and stepped into the house. A bulb buzzed overhead in the otherwise silent room. The darkly coloured flowers – tulips – were closed tightly for the night. There were similar vases on tables throughout the main floor, a total of eight in all. So after she’d swabbed down the house, Cathy Wiest had decided to anoint and fumigate it. She must had every tulip in Westmuir County.
    The kitchen was otherwise clean and there was nothing out of place on the rest of the main floor. The inexpensively furnished living room yielded nothing of interest. Their television must have been twenty years old: it had a power knob that you had to pull out and a dial with the UHF channels marked on it. This was a man who could easily have hooked up his own pirate cable or satellite but never had. The fireplace was more up-to-date than the electronics in the house. All of it spoke of a marriage where conversation was more important than sitcoms or sports: these were people who found each other interesting, for whom being distracted together was not nearly as desirable as simply being together. Hazel began to feel a note of grief creep into her thoughts as she continued to look around. To judge by the state of the house, andeverything people said about Henry, this had been a happy place. It would never be one again.
    She went to the bottom of the stairs quietly and turned on the light. The drawer from the hall table was pulled out and its contents scattered on the floor. She saw the bank packet leaning against the moulding beside the dining room entrance. There was still cash in it: she counted it out. Three thousand. Someone had taken twenty-five hundred and left the rest behind? So maybe it wasn’t about money. Or maybe that was all the girl was owed by him. For what? Drugs? A sexual service? How wild was Henry Wiest? And who was this girl who took only half the money?
    Now Hazel realized there was a sound here, hard to place – it was coming from behind one of the doors upstairs. She pushed the cash down into a pocket and climbed the stairs with her gun drawn. The noise was coming from behind a door in the hallway to her right. She stopped and controlled her breathing, holding tight to the newel post. It sounded like someone was flipping paper. But anyone who was in this house had already heard her walking through it, and that meant they intended to finish their business no matter what danger it put them in. Which meant, also, that they were going to be prepared to defend themselves. There was a metallic sound from behind the door: someone fiddling with a lock or sliding hanging file folders along their railings. She crept toward the closed door, gritting her teeth, then stood tothe side of it, her heart squeezing anxiously. “Police!” she called, her firearm up close beside her cheek. “Open this door and come out hands in front! If you have a weapon, throw it out into the hallway before you!”
    The sounds continued, more frantically now. She didn’t know if there was a window in the room, but she suspected there was, and it occurred to her that it might be smarter to rush out of the house and wait on the lawn for whomever it was to jump down. But to judge from the sounds within, confusion reigned behind the door and Hazel judged that her moment had arrived. She turned her hip and kicked the door in. It