CHAPTER 10

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT TO THE REDEEMER’S LAW PROJECT, YOU ARE COMING INTO THE STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS. YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE WILL BE FAR LESS CONFUSING IF YOU USE THE CHAPTER INDEX ON THE RIGHT TO GO BACK TO THE INTRODUCTION. OR AT LEAST TO THE PROLOGUE.

-- DAN

CHAPTER 10

At 12:22 that afternoon, Diedra Shikari stood in the hallway outside Matt Sinclair’s apartment and stared at the door. She held a stack of honeycomb air filters in one hand and a sheaf of work orders attached to a clipboard in the other. Leon, the man her mother had hired to handle maintenance in the building, was at that moment across town on a loading dock, arguing about refrigerators. Her mother would have let the air filters go until Leon got back, but Diedra saw no reason to wait. She shifted the clipboard to her other hand, where she could just barely hold onto it with her thumb, and rapped on Matt’s door a second time.

“Mr. Sinclair?”

No one answered. Rain lashed the window at the end of the hallway, and the lights dimmed for a second as another wave of thunder crashed over the building. Electric blue-white flashed again, and Diedra smiled.

She loved thunderstorms. As a child at home, back in Florida, when her mother sat agonizingly still in her armchair and tensed her muscles against the next boom of thunder, Diedra always went to stand at the sliding patio doors, face pressed against the glass. She reveled in the storm. She loved the saturated feel of the air, the way the trees whipped in the driving wind. She loved the sound of the thunder itself, from the single basso booms to the high, brittle, crackling crashes that lasted several seconds at a time. The thunder always kept her company.

Now, in the hallway, despite the storm’s companionship, she felt a little paranoid. She imagined Matt Sinclair just inside the apartment, watching her through the fish-eye lens of the peephole. Her cheeks heated up again.

Rarely did she bungle anything as badly as she’d bungled meeting Matt Sinclair. She could only imagine what she must have looked like. Probably some sort of art groupie—or, worse yet, a puppy dog, yapping at his feet. No wonder he practically ran away. She would have too, in his place.

She set down the stack of air filters and dug the huge jumble of keys out of her jeans pocket.

The door opened smoothly, and she poked her head inside. “Mr. Sinclair? Are you here? I need to replace your air filter.”

No one answered. She stepped inside.

The LaCroix Apartment Building housed two kinds of apartments: small one-bedrooms and minuscule one-bedrooms. Matt Sinclair occupied one of the small one-bedrooms, but judging from the decor and amount of furniture he owned, could have lived comfortably in a minuscule. No lights burned, but she saw well enough not to trip over anything, despite heavy, charcoal-and-black draperies that blocked out nearly all of the storm-filtered sunlight.

A striped cloth couch and matching chair, both tasteful but not very expensive, formed a sparse conversation corner against the far wall. A 19-inch TV sat on an old typing desk, positioned so that someone could watch it while lying comfortably on the couch. She didn’t see anything like a DVD player or a stereo. Diedra wondered if, like one of her former boyfriends, Matt Sinclair preferred to keep all his expensive electronics in his bedroom.

A glass-topped table stood near the kitchen alcove, but the four chairs surrounding it didn’t look as though they’d been moved in months. His sink stood empty and scrubbed clean.

She stopped, surprised to find herself building a mental image of Matt Sinclair based on how he kept his apartment. She hadn’t done that with any of the other tenants since she’d taken over for her mother, and she’d had to visit quite a few of the one hundred twenty apartments in the building.

Of course, none of the other tenants were anything like Matt Sinclair. She closed her eyes and remembered his paintings. They were like...she searched for comparisons. Beautiful music. Perfect champagne. They were like expressions of the best qualities humanity had to offer.

The memory made her squirm a little.

Now, though she tried to deny it to herself, she felt a serious thrill, being in his apartment alone. She set the stack of air filters against the wall beside the door, picked up one of them and went to the utility closet that housed the AC/heating unit. It was near the door to the bedroom, next to a slightly narrower door, which she knew opened onto a coat closet.

She had her hand on the utility closet doorknob when she glanced toward Matt Sinclair’s bedroom. Its door was pulled to, but not shut completely. A sudden thought made her twitch.

What if he didn’t use a studio?

What if he painted here?

Biting her lower lip, Diedra went to his bedroom door, feeling more and more like an intruder. Yet the thrill was still there, and growing stronger; she put her ear to the door, sure that Sinclair was gone but fearful enough to make doubly certain before truly invading his privacy. Finally she sucked in a deep breath and pushed open the door.

She stayed that way, rigid and staring, for a full minute.

A tremendous clap of thunder sounded, as if to punctuate her emotions, and her hand fell away from the knob and the air filter dropped to the floor. The maintenance chores forgotten, Diedra took a few small, hesitant steps into Matt’s bedroom, her breath shallow and fast. The door, not hung quite properly, swung shut behind her and tapped against the door frame.

A huge painting rested on an easel beside the window. Illuminated only by the storm’s thin, gray light, its details remained stunningly clear. It nearly touched the floor and stood almost as tall as she did, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

The rest of the bedroom registered on her mind only peripherally: a narrow twin bed, a battered chest-of-drawers, a small night table that held up a reading lamp. A three-legged stool sat in front of the easel, and orderly stacks of painting materials rested on a small work table a few feet away. Tube after tube of oil paint pointed in rows to a coffee can frenzied with different styles of brushes. Beyond that sat a complete set of Design Markers, each one upright in the stand, bristling like the mature version of a box of Crayolas.

But the painting, not its surroundings, demanded her attention and took away the air from her lungs.

“Wow.”

She’d taken a class in college, “Criticism of the Arts,” and for a semester had forced herself to come up with words that would “codify the physical expressions of the minds and hearts” of a selected group of artists. Sometimes she did it successfully, sometimes not, but she’d left the class believing she could verbalize something about any creative subject.

Nothing came to her now except awe and a growing spike of fear.

The painting depicted a small house, a cabin really, at the edge of a vast, snowy forest. Yellow-orange light like that of a fireplace shone from the windows, but reached no further. Icy blue dominated the work, utterly defeated the light of the fire and beat it back into the house.

Diedra saw something in the painting.

She blinked, searched the canvas for an actual image of what she knew was there. She frowned and backed away a step.

On the surface, the painting was simply a photorealistic depiction of a cabin near the woods, nothing more. But the longer she stared at it, the more convinced she became that something lived there, in the woods.

Ridiculous. What am I thinking?

But something was there. Something lurked, waited patiently, waited and watched. The firelight from the house wasn’t enough to keep it back. The safety of the house was an illusion, a shell of false hope. Something lurked in the woods, something that hated...something that would act. Soon.

She could feel the cold from the snow all the way into her bones.

Thunder hammered at the building, and this time Diedra stifled a scream.

A sharp click sounded out behind her, from the apartment’s living room, and for an instant she thought she might faint. Panicked and light-headed, she looked wildly around, searching at the same time for a place to hide and for something she could use as a weapon. A closet with two folding metal doors took up most of one wall, but she knew the doors would squeak if she tried to open them, and anybody in the living room would hear.

Footsteps drew closer. Feet brushed across carpet. Right outside the bedroom door.

Diedra backed swiftly into the corner, squeezed behind the easel and crouched down. She didn’t want to be anywhere near the painting, and shuddered as the edge of the canvas touched her skin, but she held tenuously to a sliver of rational thought, and even more than the painting itself she feared whatever it was that crept through the apartment.

For long seconds, as the footsteps drew nearer, she knew beyond doubt that the thing in the woods had come out after her, come right out of the painting and followed her, and tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes.

The footsteps stopped, and she realized with a thump in her stomach that whoever made them now stood before the air filter she’d dropped, staring down at it. She pictured the head swiveling around, searching for the intruder who obviously hadn’t left the apartment.

Diedra’s heart began to ache, her limbs glistened with panicked sweat, and she felt intensely queasy.

The bedroom door swung open, and she saw, beneath the easel, a pair of feet enter the room. She silently, carefully exhaled. The feet, clad in athletic shoes and white socks, looked completely harmless. Not the clawed feet of a supernatural beast. Not cloven hooves: just Reeboks. What sounded like car keys clattered on the chest-of-drawers.

She almost giggled. Edging ever so slightly to one side, she peered out from behind the easel.

Matt Sinclair was home. Dressed in baggy gray sweats, he held a dark bundle of some kind under one arm and moved the other arm in circles, as though trying to work out a muscle kink. He seemed to have been sweating, though his shirt wasn’t wet.

Diedra pressed herself against the wall and closed her eyes for a moment, letting herself de-fuse. Of course it was Matt Sinclair. It was his apartment, wasn’t it? In a rush she grew acutely conscious of how stupid she’d been, jumping and hiding because...why? Because she’d been frightened by a painting. A painting! Oil smeared on canvas! What an idiot!

Her terror switched to embarrassment. She’d set her mind to figuring out how she could salvage even a single scrap of personal dignity from the situation when she heard another door open, and realized she might not have to try. Mr. Sinclair looked as though he were about to step into the bathroom.

She waited, hoping he’d be neurotic enough to pull the door closed even though he believed himself to be alone in his own apartment. If he did, she thought she could creep out silently, and he’d never have to know she’d been there. The air filter wouldn’t get installed, no, but if he called to ask about it she could tell him she’d been there earlier and gotten distracted, maybe gotten a call on her pager about some maintenance emergency. She had a way out, an easy and clear one, if he only closed the door. Excited, she silently planted one hand on the floor, ready to spring up and wriggle out from behind the painting as fast as possible.

She risked another peek.

Diedra tried to keep her breathing even and silent, and succeeded, barely. Setting the bundle aside, Sinclair had taken off his sweatshirt and was unlacing his sneakers. He straightened, stepped out of the sweatpants, and stood in front of his dresser, clad only in a pair of gray jockey shorts. Diedra stared, almost as enthralled by Matt Sinclair’s body as she had been by his painting, though in a sharply different way.

She’d never before seen a man in real life she would have described as magnificent.

She stopped breathing again as he turned slightly toward her and she saw his chest. Two circular scars, each about the size of a dime, marred his upper left pectoral muscle: gunshot wounds. They looked old. Her eyes widened as she judged the distance from his heart to the nearer scar. Matt Sinclair was very lucky, she thought, to be alive today.

Moving to the closet, Sinclair opened one of the metal doors—which squeaked loudly—and dropped his sweats into a hamper. Then he returned to the chest-of-drawers, picked up the bundle he’d brought in with him, and entered the bathroom. The door clicked shut behind him, and a few seconds later water started running and music came on, small and tinny. Probably a shower radio, Diedra thought. The tone of the water changed as it switched from faucet to shower head, and Diedra unfolded herself from behind the easel.

She crept out of the bedroom, didn’t spare even a thought for actually installing Sinclair’s air filter—and stopped dead, looking at the stack of filters still leaning against the wall beside the door.

Her story of getting distracted wouldn’t hold up very well if Sinclair had seen the filters when he came in, but then found them missing when he got out of the shower.

But then, if the emergency that called her away were pressing enough, she might have left all of them behind, and could possibly chalk it up to simple forgetfulness. Or, maybe, Sinclair hadn’t noticed them when he came in. If that were the case, she could take them with her now and possibly get the rest of them installed before five o’clock when the office closed.

Trying to decide what to do, she turned the doorknob, and with a start realized it wasn’t locked.

She let go of it.

Matt Sinclair had returned to his apartment while she was inside, so he would have found his door unlocked when he tried to open it. Yet he’d shown no signs of alarm when he came in, and she hadn’t heard him make any phone calls, to the police or otherwise. Had he not realized his door was unlocked?

Unless he came back, tried the door, found it unlocked...and came into the apartment anyway, fully conscious that someone was there, but acting as if nothing were amiss.

Why would he do that?

Had he seen the air filters, deduced that it must have been Diedra in the apartment, and decided to play a game with her? She glanced back over her shoulder at the bedroom, scowling. The shower still ran, the tinny music still played. She recognized “These Boots are Made for Walking” by Nancy Sinatra, a perennial favorite on a local AM station.

Had undressing in the bedroom been a display meant for her?

Or was Matt Sinclair so forgetful that he might leave his apartment and simply forget to lock the door?

Then she noticed something, a tiny detail, but striking: the coat closet, the one she had noticed earlier, stood open about four inches. She was absolutely certain it had been closed, latched, when she came in. Against her better judgment, she quickly crossed to it, opened the closet and looked inside.

It was empty. Nothing on the floor, nothing on the single shelf. Even the light bulb was gone.

All right. So Sinclair came in, grabbed something out of his coat closet and took it into the bathroom? That bundle?

Diedra couldn’t think straight, and tried to keep from shuddering as she left the air filters where they were and hastily left Matt Sinclair’s apartment. More out of reflex than anything else, she locked the door behind her.

As she hurried away down the hall, huge raindrops spattered like a shower of rocks against the window, and another detail struck her: Matt Sinclair’s sweatsuit hadn’t had a single spot of rain on it.

# # #

Twenty minutes later Diedra sat in the office and stared at the paperwork covering her desk. Badly rattled, she’d returned to familiar surroundings seeking a sense of security, but hadn’t really found one. She couldn’t stop thinking about it—Matt Sinclair, his apartment, the painting, the closet.

Get a grip, Diedra. You’re freaking out. Why are you freaking out? Nothing happened!

But she couldn’t stop freaking out. She could only acknowledge to herself that she was freaking out.

The LaCroix had no gym, no laundry facilities. Sinclair would have had to come in from the outside. But no one not wearing a full rainsuit could have avoided getting at least partly wet, and she hadn’t seen any rainsuits while she was in his apartment. Was that what the black bundle was? But why would he have wadded it up and carried it into the bathroom with him?

The phone rang, startling her.

“LaCroix Apartments, how may I help you?”

“Um, hi, this is Matt Sinclair, in apartment 9H.”

Diedra took a deep breath. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I came home a while ago and found some new air filters lying on the floor. Did you want me to replace the old one? I didn’t see a work order anywhere, so I didn’t know if someone was coming back, or what.”

His voice over the phone sounded open and polite. Diedra couldn’t hear any unpleasant undertones, no smugness, nothing accusatory. Her mind whirled.

“Oh,” she began, and tried her best to sound genuinely surprised. “I did forget to put that one in, didn’t I? Sorry about that. Let’s see...” She shuffled papers around on the desk. “When would be a good time for you that I could come back and do that?”

“I could do it, if you’d rather not. It’s no trouble. I mean, it’s just an air filter.”

“Oh, sorry, but I have to do it. Insurance reasons.” That much was true. The tenants weren’t supposed to do any of their own maintenance beyond changing light bulbs. But as she said the words, she realized she’d set it up so she would have to go back to his apartment.

What am I doing?

She thought Matt actually sounded pleased. “Well, right now would be fine, I guess. If it’s okay with you.” A pause. “Listen, I’d like to apologize for how I acted. When I paid my rent, I mean. I didn’t mean to wig out like that.”

“Oh, uh...” She faltered for a second. “No problem. Don’t worry about it. Um. Well...I guess I’ll be right up.”

Numbly Diedra turned on the answering machine, locked the office door behind her, and headed for the elevator.

# # #

At that moment Ichabod’s latest transmission went out, and caught the Plowman in the shower. No projection: just a voice in his brother’s head. “I think I’ve got another one for the list,” Ichabod said. He gave the Plowman Diedra Shikari’s name.


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