Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [99]
Jeannie felt herself shudder. She reached back and switched on the light. No bowling balls anywhere, and all the windows were latched shut.
“Come on, Ivan, let’s get you some milk.” She stood up, still holding him close, and started down the stairs and the hallway, snapping lights on as she went. The alarm panel downstairs still said ARMED the doors were all locked. Nobody had penetrated the embassy. She settled Ivan in his booster seat while she microwaved his cup of milk. But when the hum of the microwave finished sixty seconds later, she heard it. Rolling, then a crash. Rolling, rolling, another hit.
“What that, Mommy?” Ivan demanded. “What that sound?”
So her son had heard the rolling sound, too. It was time to get Charlie involved.
Charlie took a logical approach to the whole thing. After Jeannie had woken him, he pulled on a bathrobe and plodded downstairs, cordless telephone in hand. When they’d entered the kitchen, it was silent at first, so Jeannie was frustrated; but then the long rolling sound began again.
“Do you hear it?”
Charlie listened a minute, then said, “It sounds like something’s rolling around on the lower level.”
“Yes, yes! Exactly. And Hortense Underwood said it used to be a bowling alley.”
“Now a nanny suite.” Charlie looked thoughtful. “I can’t remember what the house inspector said about the foundation being level.”
“What does that matter?” The house inspector had been one Reeves had recommended; he’d said the house was perfect, of course.
“I do have my tennis things stored down there. Last time I was getting ready, I took Ivanhoe downstairs with me and gave him a ball to play with. It’s probably just rolling around.”
“The basement is carpeted. And the sound is too loud to be a tennis ball.”
“What else could it be?”
“Let’s go downstairs and look,” Jeannie said.
Charlie paused. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll call the police.”
That wasn’t what Jeannie had expected. She thought Charlie would have gone down with the unregistered Beretta he’d received from a client in L.A., years ago, who couldn’t come up with a cash payment; the gun that he kept fully loaded, but locked up in a safe in the bedroom. Jeannie thought Charlie would bear arms because so many of the superheroes in his games did; but then again, why should she expect heroics from her husband, eighteen years her senior and already with a slight predisposition for heart trouble?
Since the call for help had come from Goodwood Gardens, three squad cars arrived within two minutes. Six cops trooped downstairs. By then, of course, the sound had stopped. And they found nothing.
“You have reached Hodder Reeves’s answering service. Leave a message, and I will personally return your call as soon as possible. Have a super day.”
Jeannie had been calling Reeves every day for a week, but she kept getting the same recorded message; and he hadn’t called her back, not once, which seemed peculiar given all the special attention he’d lavished on her so recently. Maybe he was closing a deal with other clients. Or maybe he was worried that Jeannie had figured out he’d sold her a haunted house.
Now Jeannie understood why seven people had owned the house in ten years. Nobody could stand to keep living with the sound of German-American bowlers, night after night. Ivanhoe had dreamt about the boy in the bib again. He wanted to sleep in their room, which Charlie sternly forbade. Adding to the stress in the house, Charlie’s sexual appetite had increased—something Jeannie felt sure was connected to his witnessing Hodder touch her at the gala.
Jeannie’s men were exhausting her. If she wasn’t servicing Charlie at night, she was spending extra hours at nursery school because Ivanhoe had started to have separation anxiety. During the afternoons, when he was home, he tucked himself into the cabinet next to the stove, hugging himself while Jeannie cooked massive starchy meals she hoped would send everyone to sleep after bed.
In the few hours she had to herself, Jeannie read: