essential.
Tom Landulf, whose first book had been published only fourteen months previously and who had died three months thereafter, had lived outside of Smokeville, along a winding state route, where houses were few, the sea beyond view, and the forest everywhere encroaching.
On the Internet, Penny found a recent magazine story about the case and its aftermath, in which a Realtor suggested the property might not sell for years. Potential buyers were reluctant to live in a place where extremely violent murders had occurred.
The house stood back from the road, cloaked in fog. We almost missed it. The Realtor’s sign near the mailbox caught our attention.
I didn’t want to park in the driveway. If a car pulled behind us, we might be boxed in even though we had four-wheel drive.
In front of the property, neither shoulder of the two-lane blacktop was wide enough to allow me to park off the pavement.
After continuing north on a gradual downslope for about three hundred yards, past a meadow only glimpsed between white curtains of mist, then past a length of bearded forest, I came to a wide lay-by on the right. I was able to get forty feet off the pavement, where the fog would shroud the vehicle from what little traffic might pass.
My intention was to go alone, but Penny responded as if I had proposed to strip naked and walk into a lion’s den, while leaving her and Milo staked out as sacrificial lambs.
“I’m just going to go in there and prowl around,” I said. “I can do that best alone. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
“We won’t know what we’re looking for, either,” she said. “If the three of us don’t know what we’re looking for and we look for it together, we’ll find it or we won’t find it quicker than you would or wouldn’t find it on your own.”
“That sounded like something I would say.”
“I know. We’ve been married too long.”
“Look, Penny, the police have already been through the place. If there were anything to find, they would have found it.”
“Then why did we come all the way to Smokeville?”
“To meet the locals who knew Landulf. The house is secondary.”
“Then don’t go in, and we’ll all not go in together.”
A back door opened, and we turned to look at Milo.
He said, “I’m going in, and I’m going to pretend you came with me, while you can sit here and pretend I stayed with you, so then we’ll have gone in and not gone in together.”
After telling Lassie to stay, he got out and closed the door.
I said, “He sure does have the Boom family hardheadedness.”
“You mean the Boom family determination,” Penny said.
We got out, locked the Mountaineer, and left Lassie to guard it. If she wanted to squeeze into the glove box, that was her business.
The fog seemed to penetrate my flesh and lick its cold tongues in my bone marrow.
Milo zipped up his quilted jacket. On the long-sleeved black T-shirt he wore under the jacket, white letters spelled FREEDOM.
Penny checked under her blue blazer and I reached under my corduroy sport coat to be sure that our shoulder rigs were snugged, pistols ready. Each of us had a spare magazine.
Nevertheless, I felt like a mouse. I think she did, too.
Because I didn’t want to be seen approaching the former Landulf residence, we avoided the paved road. I led the way and Milo took middle position through the trees for about fifty yards, after which we came to the long meadow that gradually sloped toward the south, where we should find the house on the higher ground.
A vehicle went by on the road: engine noise and headlights. The fog prevented me from identifying category, make, or model.
In the drowned light, under the hundred-fathom weight of the threat that hung over us, trudging up the meadow, I felt like a deep-sea diver making his way toward a sunken ship, seeking something of value in the wreckage.
The house loomed out of the murk, a handsome Victorian wrapped by a veranda. A garage stood separate from it.
I intended to break a window, but Penny said, “Better knock.”
“If there’s anybody here, it’s a ghost.”
“Just to be safe—knock.”
We climbed the front steps. Finding a doorbell, I rang it.
Just as I was about to turn away, a light came on behind the curtained glass panels that flanked the door.
“Uh-oh,” Penny said.
The door was opened by a sixtyish man who looked as if he had hound dog in his heritage. His eyes were large