Full Dark, No Stars

shelves. There were also several clusters of Hummel figures, and a large framed photo of Momzil a on the wal . Tess found that a touch suggestive, but it was hardly proof positive. Of anything. If there was a photo of Richard Widmark in his famous Tommy Udo role, that might be different.

“What are you smiling about?” Goober asked. “Want to share?”

“Actual y, no,” Tess said. “Where should we start?”

“I don’t know,” Goober said. “I’m just the dog. How about some more of that tasty cow?”

Tess fed him some more meat. Goober got up on his hind legs and turned around twice. Tess wondered if she were going insane.

“Tom? Anything to say?”

“You found your underpants at the other brother’s house, right?”

“Yes, and I took them. They’re torn… and I’d never want to wear them again even if they weren’t… but they’re mine.”

“And what else did you find besides a bunch of undies?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

But Tom didn’t need to tel her that. It wasn’t a question of what she had found; it was a question of what she hadn’t: no purse and no keys. Lester Strehlke had probably thrown the keys into the woods.

It was what Tess herself would have done in his place. The bag was a different matter. It had been a Kate Spade, very pricey, and inside was a sewn-in strip of silk with her name on it. If the bag—and the stuff in the bag—wasn’t at Lester’s house, and if he didn’t throw it into the woods with her keys, where is it?

“I vote for here,” Tom said. “Let’s look around.”

“Meat!” Goober cried, and did another pirouette.

- 45 -

Where should she start?

“Come on,” Tom said. “Men keep most of their secrets in one of two places: the study or the bedroom. Doreen might not know that, but you do. And this house doesn’t have a study.”

She went into Al Strehlke’s bedroom (trailed by Goober), where she found an extra-long double bed made up in no-nonsense military style. Tess looked under it. Nada. She started to turn toward the

closet, paused, then pivoted back to the bed. She lifted the mattress. Looked. After five seconds—maybe ten—she uttered a single word in a dry flat voice.

“Jackpot.”

Lying on the box spring were three ladies’ handbags. The one in the middle was a cream-colored clutch that Tess would have recognized anywhere. She flipped it open. There was nothing inside but

some Kleenex and an eyebrow pencil with a cunning little lash-comb hidden in the top half. She looked for the silk strip with her name on it, but it was gone. It had been removed careful y, but she saw one tiny cut in the fine Italian leather where the stitches had been unpicked.

“Yours?” Tom asked.

“You know it is.”

“What about the eyebrow pencil?”

“They sel those things by the thousands in drugstores al over Amer—”

“Is it yours?”

“Yes. It is.”

“Are you convinced yet?”

“I…” Tess swal owed. She was feeling something, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Relief ? Horror? “I guess I am. But why? Why both of them?”

Tom didn’t say. He didn’t need to. Doreen might not know (or want to admit it if she did, because the old ladies who fol owed her adventures didn’t like the ooky stuff), but Tess supposed she did.

Because Mommy fucked both of them up. That’s what a psychiatrist would say. Lester was the rapist; Al was the fetishist who participated vicariously. Maybe he even helped with one or both of the women

in the pipe. She’d never know for sure.

“It would probably take until dawn to search the whole house,” Tom said, “but you can search the rest of this room, Tessa Jean. He probably destroyed everything from the purse—cut up the credit

cards and tossed them in the Colewich River, would be my guess—but you have to make sure, because anything with your name on it would lead the police right to your door. Start with the closet.”

Tess didn’t find her credit cards or anything else belonging to her in the closet, but she did find something. It was on the top shelf. She got off the chair she’d been standing on and studied it with

growing dismay: a stuffed duck that might have been some child’s favorite toy. One of its eyes was missing and its synthetic fur was matted. That fur was actual y gone in places, as if the duck had been petted half to death.

On the faded yel ow beak was a dark maroon splash.

“Is that what I think it is?” Tom asked.

“Oh Tom, I think so.”

“The bodies you saw in the culvert… could one of them have been a child’s body?”

No, neither of them had been that smal . But maybe the culvert running beneath Stagg Road hadn’t been the Strehlke brothers’ only body dump.

“Put it back on the shelf. Leave it for the police to find. You need to make sure he doesn’t have a computer with stuff on it about you. Then you need to get the hel out of here.”

Something cold and wet nuzzled Tess’s hand. She almost screamed. It was Goober, looking up at her with bright eyes.

“More meat!” Goober said, and Tess gave him some.