Page 83 of Take Your Breath Away

“I’ll take a look at it, okay?”

“Well, if you’re going to do more lines for her, what about me?” asked Alice. But she was smiling wryly, and Albert was pretty sure she was giving him the gears.

“Why don’t I give everyone twice as many lines and we can have a three-hour play instead of ninety minutes?” Albert said, making a joke to disguise the fact that he was getting pissed off with the lot of them. Wasn’t there a line in an Elmore Leonard novel, something about how movies would be so much easier to make if you could do them without actors?

“Okay,” he said, “let’s do this.”

He directed everyone to a long folding-leg table, the kind one would find at any flea market. Everyone dropped into some cheap plastic chairs and, armed with copies of the script, prepared for the run-through.

Albert, nodding at Constance, said, “Let’s start with your line at the top of page eighteen.”

Constance found the page, cleared her throat, and, raising her chin as if getting ready to belt out a tune, said, “Has anyone seen my garter belt?”

Candace said, “I think I might have seen it in the car.”

“The car? How on earth could—”

A phone began to ring.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Albert said. “Can we all remember to mute our phones, please?”

Everyone pulled out their phones as the ringing continued.

“Not me,” said Dick.

“Not me,” said Rona.

The ringing was coming from somewhere else in the room. “Oh shit,” Albert said. “I think it’s mine.”

He jumped up and walked over to the table where the coffee machine was sitting, spotted his phone, and picked it up.

“Hello?” he said.

“It’s Izzy. You need to get to the hospital as fast as you can.”

Thirty-Three

Andrew

My unexpected meeting with Isabel, and the subsequent visit with Elizabeth, had thrown me off my game somewhat. I’d left the house that morning intending to visit Charlie Underwood, the exterminator who’d answered Brie’s plea for help when she thought our house might have a mouse infestation.

And, in fact, I later learned that it did. In the midst of having to deal with all the fallout from Brie’s disappearance, I began to spot mouse droppings around the house. Under the sink, in the basement where the wall met the floor, even in a kitchen drawer. I had tried to solve the problem on my own, buying traps and commercially available poison, but I wasn’t able to get a handle on the problem.

Finally, I had called Charlie Underwood.

But when he realized I was Brie’s husband, he passed on the job. He would have known, by that time, that I was Hardy’s prime suspect. She would undoubtedly have spoken to him many times in the course of her investigation. Maybe he thought I had some ulterior motive, that I wanted to pump him for details about his meeting with Brie. I supposed it was possible Hardy had warned him I might get in touch.

I just wanted to get rid of the fucking mice.

But now, six years later, I wondered if Charlie’s refusal to return to the house had any further significance. And, since I didn’t know what else to do at this point, he seemed like a good place to start.

His home was a run-down, vinyl-sided, two-story dwelling up Forest Road, before it turns into Burnt Plains Road north of the turnpike. It was set back a good hundred feet from the blacktop, and behind it sat a square, squat structure made of cinder blocks. I pulled into the driveway and parked next to a seriously rusted panel van, some of the rust eating right through the letters of underwood pest control painted on the side. The van was sitting on the rims and clearly hadn’t been driven anywhere for some time. An old, original Beetle—not one of the new, redesigned versions—was parked farther up the drive. Just as rusted out, but on fully inflated tires.

I got out, and as I approached the house noticed that the second-story windows were all boarded up. I climbed the two steps to the porch and knocked on the front door. When no one showed up after twenty seconds, I tried again. Same result.

I walked around the corner of the house and noticed that the door to the cinder-block structure was ajar. As I approached it I started to get a whiff of something that took me back to when I was a little kid, when I visited my uncle’s farm. He kept pigs, and the stench from the indoor pens could literally take your breath away.

The smell got stronger as I reached the door. I rapped on it, but since it was open, I poked my head in at the same time and said, “Mr. Underwood?”