1120 Dunham Drive: A Clint & Jennifer Huber Mystery Read online

  They had talked about taking Connor to the closing; but they both finally agreed that there was no way a six-year-old could sit still in the lobby of a real estate office for two hours.

  “I mean—just a quick check.”

  “Why?” Clint replied. It was too late, really. He was already driving up the interstate ramp that would take them to Cincinnati.

  Jennifer sighed. “Oh, never mind—I suppose I’m being silly. I was just thinking—you know—if Deborah Vennekamp were to set the house on fire as a final act of defiance, or anything.”

  “If she did that,” Clint said, “then she’d go to jail. There are provisions in the contract to handle any mischief like that. Besides, I don't see her as the sort of person who would take things that far.”

  “She didn't call you any nasty names.” Then she told Clint about her exchange with Mrs. Vennekamp in the meeting room, at the end of the break.

  “Hmm. That does sound odd; and I don’t like the implied threat. But you have to remember that words are only words, after all. What’s more, Mr. Vennekamp strikes me as a perfectly rational guy, sick though he is. I can’t see him allowing anything like that to happen.”

  Clint apparently believed that no wife would do anything truly duplicitous behind her husband’s back. That was probably true in the case of his mother. Clint’s mom practically worshipped the ground his father walked on. It was hard to imagine Clint’s mother, Gladys, doing anything behind his father’s back. Anything at all…

  Some women aren’t so good, she thought. Women like me…

  She stopped herself from going down this line of thought, because she knew that it was not as simple as that. But she was struck by Clint’s simple faith in a cancer-stricken man’s ability to control his (apparently) mentally ill wife. She was relieved, again, that there were certain things Clint did not know; and these were things that she was determined he would never find out.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Anyway, the weekend is coming up, and this time next week we’ll be moved in. Maybe we can find time to check the house tomorrow.”

  9

  But they didn't check the house the next day. They were both distracted by their jobs, and taking care of Connor, and confirming the last-minute arrangements for the move. They discovered that neither one of them had called the utility companies to have the accounts switched over to their names. They had (wrongly) assumed that this was handled automatically when the house changed ownership. As they went down the items in their “move checklist”, they discovered several more items that needed to be handled as well, forcing them to scramble.

  The day after the closing, Jim Lindsay—Jennifer’s boss’s boss at Ohio Excel Logistics—summoned her into his office for a “meeting”. He sent her a message on the company’s instant messaging system, so that his name popped up on her computer screen with the words, “Got a minute for a meeting? Could you drop by my office, please?”

  Despite the interrogative form, both parties were aware that it was a command, not a request. Jennifer sighed and turned away from the trucking schedules that she had been examining on her screen, and steeled herself for the “meeting”.

  When she stood from her desk, her immediate supervisor, Angela Bauer, cleared her throat. Only the senior managers at Ohio Excel Logistics had private offices. Everyone else worked in a large, open office space.

  “Jim has asked me to go to his office,” Jennifer explained.

  Angela smirked. “I guess you'd better go, then.”

  Angela was one year older than Jennifer. She was unmarried, plain, and humorless. Although she had never articulated her suspicions, she made clear that she believed Jennifer was sleeping with Jim Lindsay. In Angela Bauer’s universe, this was apparently part of Jennifer’s long-term plan to get ahead “the easy way”.

  If Angela only knew.

  Jennifer did not react to Angela’s thinly concealed barb. She sighed and began walking toward the office. She could see Jim within the glass enclosure, discreetly watching her progress. As was always the case, Jennifer approached Jim Lindsay’s office as a slave forced into the gladiatorial games might approach the Coliseum. Or at least that was the way she thought of it.

  Jim smiled ever-so-slightly, ever-so-knowingly as she entered.

  “Jennifer, sit down,” he said, gesturing to the chair in front of his desk. Jim Lindsay was tall and in his mid-forties. He had a son and a daughter in college; but he had been divorced for the better part of ten years.

  Here we go! she thought.

  “I understand that you and Clint closed on a house last night,” Jim said, his eyebrows raised.

  “How did you know that?” she asked.

  “Oh, that sort of thing is public information, you know.”

  Jim’s revelation confirmed one of her long-standing suspicions: That her boss’s boss was spying on her, using a variety of online and offline methods. She could complain to human resources, but she had no real proof. Besides, she had her own reasons for keeping this matter to herself.

  “I guess you’re right,” she said neutrally. “I’m glad to see that you’ve mastered Google, along with your hidden video camera techniques.”

  She knew that she really shouldn't bait him like this; but she was sick of it. All she wanted was to move into her new home, and live in peace with her husband and son. Why couldn't Jim Lindsay find another hobby besides her?

  “Touché,” he said. “I’m sure Clint’s very proud of himself, finally moving into a home after so many years of marriage, with your son practically in high school.”

  “Jim,” she corrected him. “Connor hasn't even started first grade yet. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  She also knew that the walls of Jim Lindsay’s office were soundproof. Anyone who happened to walk by would see an ordinary corporate scenario—a manager discussing a confidential issue with a junior employee. Their facial expressions might hint at conflict, but that would be nothing out of the ordinary. Ohio Excel Logistics—a company engaged in the highly competitive field of transportation brokering—was a pressure cooker even without managers like Jim Lindsay.

  “Well, I’m just happy for you, that’s all,” Jim said, as if backing down.

  How could I have ever found him attractive—even if I were single? she wondered. Even for a nanosecond?

  “Thank you. May I go back to my desk now? I’ve got a ton of work, and Angela doesn't like me very much, even without me engaging in extended meetings in your office that don't include her.”

  Jim leaned back in his chair, removed a pencil from his shirt pocket, and began tapping on the desk’s blotter.

  “Jennifer, Jennifer. What is it going to take for us to be friends? We were friends once, you’ll remember.”

  “We aren’t friends, Jim. We’re coworkers. Or rather—you’re a manager and I’m a logistics planner. And you can stop already talking about us being ‘friends once’. Nothing happened, really.”

  “Oh, I somehow think that Clint would say otherwise, if he saw a certain ten seconds of video.”

  Jim had just named the source of all her anxiety over the past two years: ten seconds of video. Ten seconds of video that weren’t what they seemed, but could nevertheless destroy her marriage.

  “How long are you going to keep playing that card, Jim? It isn’t exactly a sex tape, you know.”

  Jim gave her another smile, clearly enjoying the cat-and-mouse aspect of this conversation. Jennifer had recently determined that her manager’s machinations were about much more than the normal masculine quest for sex. Slimeball though he was, Jim was a brash, decent-looking man who held an impressive job and hauled down a respectable income. He could have found other female takers. He was fixated on her because she had rebuffed him—and because he held a unique form of leverage over her (which she had given him with her own momentary lapse of reason).

  “Oh, I think it would be enough of a sex tape for Clint,” Jim chuckled. “Fair enough, Jennifer
, you can go back to your desk now. Let’s not drive Angela too crazy.”

  10

  It was Saturday—their move-in day—before they visited their new home at 1120 Dunham Drive.

  They arrived early in the morning, hours before the moving van was scheduled to arrive. They had wanted to save the expense of hiring professional movers, but there was simply no way that Jennifer could help Clint move their heavier pieces of furniture out of the condo.

  Clint’s father—now in his mid-sixties—would have helped, but he had recently been suffering from lower back pain. Neither of them had considered asking Hank Riley; they both knew that Jennifer’s father would have politely but firmly demurred. Hank did not—and never had—cared for manual labor of any kind.

  As recently as a few years ago, Clint would have been able to marshal the services of any number of college buddies. They would have made a day of it; four or five of them would have pitched in, and Jennifer would have made them all supper. The day would have concluded with a little party at the new house.

  That circle of friends had mostly drifted away, however. About half of them had moved away. Others had simply retreated into their own lives, consumed now with the duties of marriage, childrearing, and mortgage payments. This realization made Clint more than a little wistful.

  There were, in fact, a small number of them remaining in Cincinnati—a few whom he still could have contacted. A little more than two years ago, though, Clint had gone through a phase of hanging around with his remaining college friends a bit too often. The situation had come to a head at home; and Clint had since let those friendships wither, too. He had focused instead on his marriage and his relationship with Connor.

  When the minivan pulled into the driveway of the new house, where the dew was still drying on the lawn, Clint could not resist ribbing Jennifer a bit.

  “Well look at that,” he said. “Mrs. Vennekamp didn't burn the place down, after all. Looks like our new house is still very much intact.”

  “I’m telling you, that woman stared at me with a look of absolute hatred during the closing.” Jennifer shivered at the memory. Since the closing, however, she had allowed herself to tentatively accept Clint’s assessment: that they had seen the last of Deborah Vennekamp.

  “She’ll never look at you again, hon. Nor you at her.”

  During the closing they had also gained possession of the house’s two garage door remotes; but these had both been inadvertently left in Jennifer’s car. They therefore made their first entrance as the official owners of 1120 Dunham Drive through the front door.

  Clint opened the door and stepped immediately inside, expecting to be greeted by the coolness of the house’s air conditioning. Instead he stepped into a virtual furnace.

  A furnace that smelled horrible.

  “What’s that smell?” Jennifer said. She began coughing, both from the heat and from the cloying, putrescent odor.

  “I don’t know,” Clint said. He walked rapidly down the hall toward the main thermostat.

  “Here’s the problem,” he said, flicking several switches on the wall-mounted device. “The heat has been turned on.” He shook his head. “Now, why would someone do that in August?” He turned and faced Jennifer. “The heat had been set to ninety degrees—the maximum setting. I’ve turned the air conditioning on. It’ll take a while, but that will cool things off.”

  Jennifer walked past him, into the kitchen, already realizing what Clint probably knew but had not said. The heat had been turned up absurdly high on purpose. This was a housewarming gift from Deborah Vennekamp—no pun intended.

  But Deborah Vennekamp had not been content to merely turn the furnace on high during the height of summer. When Jennifer entered the kitchen, she noted that all four of the stovetop burners were bright orange.

  She rushed over to the stove and clicked the burners off in rapid succession. She also turned the oven off. Deborah Vennekamp had turned that on, too.

  Clint was beside her now. “I can’t believe this. She could have burned the place down.”

  “And you laughed at the very idea. Thought it was a joke.”

  Jennifer paused, stopped herself. This had not been Clint’s fault, and she was wrong to take it out on him. One of the former owners of their new home was deranged, that was all. She was feeling angry because Clint had not protected her from the unpleasant exchange with Mrs. Vennekamp at the closing, even though he had offered to intervene and she had explicitly told him not to.

  She was being unreasonable.

  “I’m sorry, hon,” she said. “You didn't deserve that. It’s just that—this is crazy, you know?”

  Clint nodded, allowing the unprovoked reproach to pass unanswered. This made her feel even worse about what she had said. More often than not, it was Clint—and not Jennifer—who stepped back from the beginnings of an argument, consciously avoiding escalation.

  “I know,” he said. “It is crazy.”

  “We can’t write it off as an accident, can we?”

  “No, that definitely wasn't an accident.”

  Moreover, there was still the matter of the smell: It was the deeply putrid smell of organic decay, an odor that made them both reflexively recoil. Now that the furnace and the stove had been taken care of, the problem of the smell became all the more urgent.

  “It seems to be coming from the front of the house,” Clint said. “Take a little whiff and you’ll notice that it isn’t as strong here in the kitchen. It was stronger in the front hall, near the thermostat, and even stronger right by the front door. It’s as if we were intended to smell it the instant we came in the door—”

  They both arrived at the same thought, more or less simultaneously: the front closet. Whatever was reeking so bad had to be in the front closet.

  They walked double-time toward the front of the house, Clint leading the way. The smell definitely grew more intense as they approached the door of the front closet, in the foyer of the house. There could be no doubt that this was the horrific smell’s epicenter.

  Clint reached forward to yank open the door, and Jennifer thought: Wait, maybe we should call the police! What if Mrs. Vennekamp, in the grip of insanity, had murdered someone and stowed the victim in the Hubers’ front closet?

  She did not express this thought, though, and Clint opened the front closet with a turn of a doorknob and a single jerk.

  The smell wafted out of the open space, thick and nauseating. Jennifer felt her gorge rise.

  They could both see the collection of dead animals in one rear corner of the closet: there were three mice, a grackle, a sparrow, and what looked like a frog. There was no way to know how long this gruesome menagerie had been there, but there was no doubt that the carcasses had been deliberately placed.

  This was too much. Jennifer looked at the pile and retched. Before losing the oatmeal she had eaten for breakfast, she barely made it into the downstairs bathroom, which was luckily only a few paces away.

  That vindictive bitch! Jennifer thought to herself, leaning over the commode, her abdominal muscles aching. Suddenly she found herself bereft of any sense of charity she might once have held for Mrs. Vennekamp. What the woman had done was unforgivable.

  She flushed the toilet twice and came back out into the hall. Clint, somewhat unbelievably, was already busy with the cleanup. He held a broom and a garbage bag, and he was wearing a pair of old work gloves. He must have retrieved these items from the minivan—which they had loaded with cleaning supplies, among other things—while she was in the bathroom.

  “What are you doing?” Jennifer asked.

  Clint smiled weakly. “What does it look like? I’m cleaning this mess up. I’m not going to let that woman ruin our first day in our new house.”

  “Thanks. That’s very sweet of you. But shouldn't we call the police or something?”

  “And tell them what? Tell them that when we opened up the house, the furnace was cranked up full blast, and that there were a few dead vermin in one of the
closets? There’s nothing we can prove here. All of this can be explained away, either as an honest mistake or an accident.”

  “How do dead animals find their way into a closed closet?”

  “Animals find their way into houses all the time, Jen. I’m sure it never happened at your house, because Hank had the money for a nice place that was fully insulated. But our house abutted a woods, and there were crevices where things could get inside. At various times during my growing up years, we had mice, bats, and once a raccoon.”

  “So you’re saying that you think this was an accident, that these animals walked in here and died, like in some ancient tar pit?”

  Clint sighed. “Of course not. Give me some credit. We both know that Deborah Vennekamp was behind this. But I’m talking about what we can prove—versus what we can’t prove.”

  Jennifer was torn by two conflicting reactions. On one hand, Clint was stepping up, being the man, taking care of things. On the other hand, he was taking care of them in an almost escapist manner. She thought that a complaint should be filed—with Tom Jarvis, at the very least.

  But then, she could also see Clint’s point: There was nothing here that Deborah Vennekamp was likely to be arrested for—and did she really want that, anyway?

  No, what she wanted was to forget that she’d ever met that woman, and focus on getting settled into their new house.

  “I guess you’re right,” she said. “But what about the smell?”

  Clint was leaning into the closet now, using the broom and one gloved hand to place the dead animals, one by one, into the garbage bag.

  “We have stuff that will get rid of the smell. Even though this stinks, they haven’t been here for that long, and nothing has seeped into either the wall or the hardwood floor.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “Once when I was a kid, we returned home from vacation and found that a raccoon had wiggled its way into our garage, and then into our laundry room. Don't ask me how. Anyway, it died in there, and the smell was absolutely horrible. Much worse than this. My father used some ordinary cleaning supplies and opened the windows for a while. The smell went away. You’ve been to my parents’ house hundreds of times, and have you ever smelled anything like a dead raccoon?”