Free Lethally Blond by Kate White Page B

cottage had the same storybook quality as the outside. It was the kind of space that would be great to curl up in on a rainy fall day. I could see a small kitchen through a doorway on the far side, but most of the downstairs space was made up of a living room with a chunky gray stone fireplace. It was filled with an eclectic mix of dark wood tables and chintz-covered furniture begging to be flopped in. My eyes roamed the room and quickly fell on the coffee table. Several grease-stained pieces of sandwich wrapping paper lay on top, practically declaring, “Tom Fain ate here.” I stepped closer and peered at the paper. In one of the folds was a small scrap of curled dried meat—it looked days old. An open newspaper next to it was dated the Saturday he disappeared. Dread swelled in me, and I found myself thinking of something an old reporter I once worked with used to say on such occasions: “I don’t like the fuckin’ looks of this.”
    “Tom,” I called out almost frantically, but not even expecting an answer now. A partially enclosed staircase led up to the second floor, and I sprinted up the steps. There were two bedrooms on either side of the small hall at the top. The one to the right was empty; the one to the left, decorated all in white, showed signs of recent occupation—a pair of large hiking boots lying sideways on the floor and a man’s shirt tossed on a chair. The white matelasse spread on the bed was rumpled, as if someone had made it hurriedly.
    I glanced behind me and saw a brown leather duffel bag on the floor in back of the door. It was open but full, with a pair of jeans poking out from the top. Why, if Tom had been here for twelve days, had he worn so few of the clothes he’d brought? Just as with the sandwich paper on the coffee table, it was as if time had stopped days ago.
    I flew back down the stairs and ducked into the kitchen, where the fridge hummed quietly, clueless to the fact that something was horribly wrong. On the counter I saw the plastic bag that must have once contained the sandwich and, incongruously next to it, an empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne.
    I hurried outside. As much as I dreaded it, I was going to have to check the main house now. When I stepped off the porch, I swept the woods with my eyes. Off to the left I could see a ruined stacked stone wall, the one, perhaps, that Tom had posed with his parents in front of. Behind it, through the dense trees, something glinted, and I realized that it was a sliver of silver pond. What if Tom had gone swimming and been stricken with cramps, incapacitated? What if he was lying at the bottom of that pond? Conjuring up that image made me want to hurl.
    As I crossed the grass, I saw that the main house was even wearier looking than I’d realized earlier—peeled paint, flower beds long gone to weeds, drooping steps to an open porch along the width of the house. Please be alive, Tom, I pleaded to myself as I crossed the lawn. To my surprise, the front door, inside a screen door, was wide open. Maybe everything was all right after all. “Tom,” I called out as I made my way to the steps.
    But then the smell hit me like a bulldozer. I had smelled death on more than a few occasions—the first time as a reporter in Albany, watching as a body was hauled from the Hudson and being greeted by that ripe, nauseating whiff from twenty feet away. But this was more putrid than anything I’d ever experienced. It seemed to pour from the door like a force, and it was mixed, almost incongruously, with the awful stench of charred wood. I retched and covered my nose and mouth with my hand. Someone was dead inside the house.
    I could see from the outside that the front hall was almost dark, illuminated only by the remains of daylight that seeped through the porch windows. Pulling up my shirt against my face, I stepped inside and fumbled for a light switch. I found one finally to the left, and as I flipped it, an overhead chandelier lit up,