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

  “I guess not,” she laughed. If he had decided to make the best of this, then maybe she should, too. “Okay. We’ll do it your way. What’s next?”

  “Let me finish cleaning this up and spray some Lysol. Then I think we’d better check the rest of the house. Our good friend Deborah Vennekamp may have left us some other surprises.”

  They gave the rest of the first floor a quick inspection: The living room, dining room, and the kitchen (now that the stove was turned off) were free of any visible or olfactory signs of mischief. Their impromptu inspection was reasonably thorough: They opened the refrigerator and the freezer, the pantry, and all of the cabinets and drawers. These were all places where Mrs. Vennekamp could have stowed more gruesome mementos for them to find.

  But there was nothing.

  Finally, Jennifer opened the dishwasher. The interior of the dishwasher was spotless, but it made Jennifer consider another angle.

  “What if Deborah damaged the house in some fundamental way? Like, what if she cut a water line or pulled some of the electrical wiring apart with a pair of pliers?”

  “There’s a provision in the contract that gives us forty-five days to take recourse for anything like that,” Clint replied. “We need to check all of that, but we’ll have time to do that later. Right now I’m looking for the obvious.”

  “Like more dead animals?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  They also checked the upstairs bedrooms, including the master bedroom. Jennifer could imagine Deborah placing something especially hideous in the master bedroom, so as to ruin the site of their marital bed. However, they found nothing out of the ordinary upstairs.

  “Do we need to check the attic?” Jennifer asked.

  “Maybe just a quick check. Wait here.”

  She waited while Clint hustled out to the minivan, and returned with a penlight. The attic could be accessed through a ceiling panel in the closet of the master bedroom. Conveniently, there was built-in shelving in the closet that Clint was able to use as footholds.

  He climbed back down, replacing the ceiling panel behind him.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “So what’s left?”

  “Just the basement.”

  They went downstairs, to the first floor, then into the kitchen, where the door to the basement was located.

  They opened the door and turned on the light. No suspicious smells greeted them. Clint held Jennifer back while he swept the stairs with the penlight. For a person with a truly vicious turn of mind, the stairs would have been an ideal place for various trip hazards. But once again, they were relieved to find that Mrs. Vennekamp had not risen to the occasion.

  “Maybe there’s nothing else,” Jennifer said, following Clint down the stairs.

  “Maybe not,” he agreed. “Maybe she wore herself out catching those birds and mice.”

  Nor were there any booby traps at the bottom of the stairs. Jennifer was beginning to feel secure in the conclusion that Mrs. Vennekamp really had done her worst in the upstairs hall closet. Her intention had been to register her displeasure—at the Hubers, and probably at her husband as well, who had the audacity to disrupt her life and her living situation by developing pancreatic cancer.

  Then they saw the writing in chalk on the far wall: In all caps, Mrs. Vennekamp had written, “GO TO HELL!”

  Clint shook his head, as if his capacity for amazement had already been exceeded. “I suppose that does send a message,” he said.

  “No,” Jennifer said, her voice suddenly trembling, “that sends her real message.”

  On the floor beneath the three words were three dolls: There was Barbie, along with her companion Ken. Since Ken and Barbie had been given no progeny by their Mattel creators, Deborah had chosen a different doll to represent a child: It was a Dapper Dan, a childlike plush doll that had seen its heyday in the 1960s and the 1970s.

  Dapper Dan had been crudely decapitated, along with his parents, Ken and Barbie. The symbolism here was violent and unmistakable.

  “That sick—” Clint began.

  “Do you think we should call the police now?”

  “And tell them what? Deborah Vennekamp will claim that the words have been there for years. And as far as I know, there is no law against destroying a doll.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Have it your way.”

  “What’s that suppose to mean?”

  “It means: that woman made a mess in our front closet before she gave up the house. She wrote an obscenity on the basement wall here, and she clearly intended to convey a threat with these dolls.”

  He turned around and placed both hands on her shoulders. “Jen, I know that you’re angry about all of this; and believe me—I’m angry, too. But let’s keep this in perspective: Deborah Vennekamp is a fiftysomething librarian. She’s a pathetic woman whose life is unraveling. First her husband gets sick, then she has to leave the house she loves—”

  “Clint—it almost sounds like you’re taking her side.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m simply saying that everything we’ve found here today is easily fixable. The mess in the hall closet has been cleaned up. These chalk letters will come off with one pass of a wet sponge. And we’ll throw the damn dolls away.

  “What I’m saying, Jen, is that I don’t want to let Deborah Vennekamp get under our skin. She’s gone now, she has plenty of problems of her own, and we’ll never see her again. This was her parting shot, her grand finale. This is over. Now—let’s forget about this crap, and focus on enjoying our new house. The movers will be here in a few hours. Deal?”

  Jennifer was able to grasp what her husband was saying, and even see the sense in it, at a certain level.

  But on another level, she could not escape the conviction that these dark gestures signified an underlying rage—a rage that went far beyond the ordinary, a rage that could not be explained away as a simple neurotic obsession with a house. To think otherwise was to engage in wishful thinking. They would hear from Deborah Vennekamp again.

  Jennifer Huber, though, was in the mood for some wishful thinking at that moment. This was their first day in their first house, after all.

  “Deal,” she finally said.

  11

  As it turned out, Clint was right about the smell in the front closet. The animal carcasses had produced a ghastly smell while they were there; but they had not decomposed enough to seep into the walls or the floorboards.

  Clint left the closet door open to ventilate it. He made several applications of Lysol. Then he went to Home Depot and bought some heavy-duty disinfectant and odor remover. By their first morning in the new house, the smell was gone. Jennifer hung the family’s coats in the closet without the slightest fear that any of them would smell like a dead bird or a mouse.

  She arrived at a decision: In lieu of any evidence to the contrary, the best course of action would be to assume that Clint was right, that Mrs. Vennekamp’s shenanigans were a one-time performance.

  Nor did she intend to go through the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, waiting for Deborah Vennekamp to stop by her former home and make trouble. As Clint said, Deborah Vennekamp had plenty of her own problems as it was. The older woman would move on—and so should they.

  It was the middle of their first week in their new house. Connor had started the first grade at Mydale Elementary School and was loving it.

  “We have art class two times per week!” Connor exclaimed jubilantly, as he tagged alongside Clint in the front hall, on their way out to the minivan. The school was on Clint’s way to work; and he clearly enjoyed spending the extra time each morning with his son.

  Jennifer took a moment to examine the two of them as they stood in the front doorway: Her son—now six years old, beginning the process that would lead to high school, college, a family and a career of his own. It seemed like just yesterday that they had brought the boy home from the hospital; and he was already in the first grade.

  Clint, meanwhile, looked exc
eptionally handsome in his dress shirt, tie, and blazer. But looking handsome was no difficult feat for Clint; he had pulled that off admirably even in college, when she had first noticed him in a University of Cincinnati lecture hall.

  What was noteworthy was that Clint seemed to have finally discarded his more juvenile, escapist self—the old identity that had made him cling too long to his college buddies and the lackadaisical, self-indulgent habits of his early twenties. He was a fully adult husband and father now; and at long last, he seemed to be comfortable in that role.

  She leaned over and gently tousled Connor’s light brown hair. “Have fun in art class today, Con-O,” she said, using their private nickname for him. “And mind your teachers.”

  “Mrs. Byrd is really nice!” he said, putting any fears of youthful rebellion to rest. Well, she thought, as the attitudes of six-year-old boys go, you can’t get much better than that.

  Then she stood up to kiss Clint, full on the lips. “Your mom doesn't mind picking him up every afternoon?” she asked.

  “No, Jen, Mom doesn't mind. She’s retired, and she enjoys spending the time with Con-O here. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we?”

  Jennifer nodded and let the matter go. They both worked past the hour when Connor’s school let out. It was therefore necessary for someone else to pick him up and stay with him until five-thirty or six o’clock.

  They could have hired a babysitter. But babysitters in Mydale charged what the traffic would bear in a higher income community. A babysitter’s wages would have added up quickly.

  Clint had approached his mother about spending a few hours with Connor after school each day, and Gladys had practically jumped at her son’s roundabout suggestion. She was retired after all, and what could be more enjoyable than spending a few hours each day with her grandson?

  And so it had been decided. Jennifer was grateful, as always, for another kind gesture from Clint’s parents. But it only accentuated her parents’ tendency to be distant.

  “Well, we’ll have to take your parents out to dinner one weekend soon,” she said.

  “Or you could cook for them.”

  She playfully punched Clint in the shoulder. They both knew that her cooking skills left much room for improvement.

  She arrived at Ohio Excel Logistics at 7:45 a.m. Her immediate boss, Angela Bauer, was waiting for her.

  “Do you have a few minutes?” Angela said with mock sweetness. “We need to talk about the trucking schedule you prepared for Honda.”

  “Sure,” Jennifer said. “Just give me a few minutes to boot up my computer and check my voicemail.”

  “Let’s talk first.”

  “Okay.”

  She walked with Angela toward one of the office’s private meeting rooms, wondering what Angela’s game was going to be this time. Jennifer had worked at Ohio Excel Logistics for four years. During that time, all of her bosses had given her job performance above average to excellent evaluations in the company’s biannual performance reviews. But not Angela. Since Angela had become her boss a bit more than one year ago, her evaluations had steadily fallen.

  She knew that it was personal, and she knew why. Angela made no secret of her resentment of Jennifer—a naturally pretty woman who had a handsome husband and a son. “You’re so lucky,” Angela often said, as if good luck was equivalent to cheating. Then Angela would say, with humility she obviously did not feel, “Some of us are not so lucky.”

  Gangly tall with a sloping forehead and a nose that was too long for her face, Angela Bauer was not the world’s most attractive woman. But nor was she the most unattractive one, by any means. She had notoriously horrible results with men, and made no secret of the fact that few of her dates stuck around for more than three weeks. Angela was fond of saying that men were by nature superficial, and they just wouldn't dedicate themselves to any woman who wasn't, in her words, “a Barbie”.

  It isn’t your looks, Jennifer thought, as she sat down across from Angela inside the meeting room. It isn’t your looks that keep men away from you.

  “There’s a problem with the Honda trucking schedule,” Angela said, referring to the printout she had carried into the room and placed on the tabletop between them.

  “That’s what you said,” Jennifer said neutrally. “But I wasn't aware of any complaints from our customer.”

  Ohio Excel Logistics managed the trucking schedules for a number of manufacturing firms in the Midwest. For companies like Honda, this involved considerable complexity. The Japanese automaker received hundreds of trucks per day, laden with the components and raw materials that it used to manufacture automobiles in its network of factories in central Ohio.

  “There hasn't been any complaint—yet,” Angela said. “But the problem is that you haven’t identified backup transportation options for your portion of the Honda schedule.”

  “Since when do we do that?” Jennifer asked. No supervisor—not even Angela—had mentioned this requirement before. The trucking companies that Ohio Excel Logistics subcontracted seldom missed a scheduled pickup or delivery. The only exceptions were extreme weather or the odd strike. To include backup transportation options in each trucking schedule would constitute a tremendous amount of redundant work—which would never benefit anyone.

  “Well, Mark and Amy have started doing that, as a way of being proactive.”

  “I see,” Jennifer said. Mark Olsen and Amy Barker were the other two logistics planners who worked under Angela. They had both been friendly to Jennifer at first; but they had since taken to subtly avoiding her, having seen that Jennifer was persona non grata in the Book of Angela. There was nothing to be gained by cozying up to a black sheep.

  “So you’re the only one in the group who isn’t doing that,” Angela said.

  “Okay,” Jennifer said, seeing the game but realizing that there was nothing she could do about it. Clearly Angela had coached Mark and Amy about the new “proactive” measure, while she had been left out of the loop.

  This was one of Angela’s favorite—and ingenious—ways of making sure that she would always have an excuse to give Jennifer below average to low marks on the performance reviews. Angela simply moved the goalpost at various intervals, without telling Jennifer that it had been moved. There was nothing Jennifer could do about it, really, because the company gave its team leaders and managers substantial autonomy in the management of the people beneath them.

  “So,” Angela continued. “I’m sure you’ll want to redo the schedule, so you can keep up with the rest of the group.” She slid the printout across the table to Jennifer.

  Jennifer calculated the time it would take to do what Angela asked. She would have to work late tonight—and for what? So that she could be a party to her own decline within the company—another set of low marks on the upcoming performance review.

  “Thank you, Angela,” she said delicately. “But you know, if a work rule changed, it would have been nice to know about it.”

  Angela’s smile became a set of pursed lips. “There hasn't been any conspiracy to keep you in the dark, Jen. Mark and Amy both managed to find out what was expected and to comply.”

  Jennifer realized that she could argue the point further. She also realized that her efforts would be completely futile. There was no way she could prove anything. Angela, as the team leader, would always get the benefit of any doubt.

  “I’ll have the revised schedule on your desk before I leave,” she said. “With the backup transportation options.”

  Angela nodded. Then she said: “You know, this is just my suggestion, but you probably wouldn't miss so much if you didn't spend so much time in Jim Lindsay’s office.”

  “I only go to Jim Lindsay’s office when he calls me,” Jennifer said. As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized how defensive and pathetic they sounded. They were the sort of words that would come from a woman who actually had done what Angela suspected of her.

  “That’s okay,” Angela replied. �
��I know that you and Jim Lindsay are very close.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Angela smiled innocently. She was smart enough to know that within the corporate environment, she would have to exercise caution, lest she go too far. It was necessary for her to make her accusation indirectly, leaving no doubt about her meaning while simultaneously preserving the all-important plausible deniability.

  “Go ahead and say it, Angela. We both know what you think.”

  Angela sat up straight in her chair, affecting a gesture of righteous indignation. “What exactly are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I would have to be a fool to miss the little insinuations you’re constantly dropping. You’ve made it clear that you believe I’m sleeping with Jim Lindsay. Well, I’m not.”

  “I didn’t say that you were at the moment.” Angela’s emphasis on the last three words implied that Jennifer might or might not be giving it up to her boss’s boss on a regular basis; but she almost certainly had done so at least once.

  “Nor have I ever, just so you know. Angela, if I slept with the boss and you obviously didn't, then why are you a team leader, while I’m a staff-level logistics planner? If I was going to go around sleeping with our bosses, don’t you think I’d at least want to get a little bit more for my efforts?”

  Angela made a show of sighing. “Jen, this conversation has taken an extremely unpleasant turn. I’m going to do you a favor and pretend that the last part of our discussion never took place. What I do want you to do is revise your portion of the master transportation schedule, as we’ve discussed. Now, let’s go back to our desks, shall we?”

  She realized that Angela had beaten her again, as Jim had beaten her again. She had no recourse, really. If she went to human resources and complained about the situation, Angela would immediately go into her innocent routine, claiming that she had never implied that there was an inappropriate relationship between Jim Lindsay and Jennifer Huber. And then the human resources rep would wonder aloud why Jennifer Huber would have such a notion in her mind, if her supervisor had never made such an accusation.