The cabbie seemed to sense their hesitation as Wally and the others looked up at the quiet home, which was completely dark.
“They don’t know you’re coming?” he said.
“Not exactly,” Wally said. The situation was not what she had hoped for, obviously, but she was not about to be deterred.
“I can wait,” he said. “The brothers might not even be home.”
“No, thanks,” Wally said. “We appreciate it, but we could end up being here awhile. Fantasy Island cab, right? We’ll call if we need a ride back to the ferry.”
The driver shrugged and passed her a business card. “Cool.”
Wally paid him and the crew climbed out of the cab. The driver did a three-point turn on the narrow dirt road and disappeared back the way they had come.
Wally and the others faced the Hatch home.
“Maybe he was right,” said Tevin. “It doesn’t look like anyone is home.”
They entered through the gate and walked the fifty feet of upward-sloping lawn to reach the front porch of the Hatches’ house, then climbed the stairs to the front door. Wally rang the doorbell, which they could hear echoing through the house. When there was no answer, she knocked as well. No one came to the door, and there was no indication that anyone was home.
“Damn it,” Wally said.
They followed the porch—which wrapped all the way around the house—to the back deck and peered through French doors into the back rooms. The place was very sparsely furnished. Next to the kitchen was a family area with an old dining table and a sofa turned toward a TV screen. To one side was a wood-fired heating stove, with the glow of a flame just visible inside. There were no other signs of anyone being home.
Wally tested the handle on one of the French doors, but it was locked. She walked around the rear wall, testing more doors and windows, and found an unlocked window above the kitchen sink.
“We’re going in?” Jake asked.
“Just me,” Wally said, feeling herself slipping into commando mode, tense in a good way and ready to go. She had work to do inside the house and didn’t want to have to worry about the crew while she was into it.
“Why’d we come all the way up here, then?” Jake asked, annoyed.
“I know, but if this goes wrong, I’ll need you guys free to help me out. Please stand watch and let me know if anyone shows up, okay? Just pound on the back door or something if you need to get my attention.”
Jake was still annoyed, but Wally’s argument was reasonable enough. She handed her shoulder bag to Ella and shoved the unlocked window open. She hiked herself up and through the window, supporting her weight inside by grabbing the edge of the kitchen sink and sliding all the way in until she was crouched on the kitchen counter. She then jumped down to the floor, and the sound of her boots echoed through the house. She slid off her boots and left them sitting by the kitchen counter, beginning her quiet search of the house in stocking feet.
Much like the outside appearance of the home, the inside was tidy but run-down. Wally passed through a closed door into the living room, which was a good thirty degrees colder than the kitchen area. Obviously, the only heater being used in the house was the woodstove, and the doors to that area were closed to keep the heat in the essential living area. There was no furniture in the living room. Wally got the sense that the Hatch brothers had been selling off the furniture, one piece at a time.
She returned to the kitchen, where she began checking the cabinets. There she found enough food to last quite a while, but all of two categories: staples like rice and oatmeal in bulk sizes and various foods that must have been foraged from the area: berry preserves, root vegetables. It seemed to Wally that the Hatch brothers were nearly destitute, saving money everywhere they could—they were struggling to hold on to their family home.
Wally found a narrow servant’s staircase next to the kitchen and climbed up to the second floor. There she arrived at a long hallway that stretched the entire width of the house, with doors leading into six separate bedrooms, including two “master” suites, one at either end of the house. These two large bedrooms were the only ones with any furniture: each had a bed—mattresses on makeshift platforms—and side tables with lamps. In each closet was a meager but practical selection of men’s clothing.
She was just about to exit the second bedroom when she heard the sharp sound of something hitting the window beside the bed. She stifled a little yelp at the surprise of it. She looked out the window, and it took her a moment to find her crew, crouched beyond the fence at the edge of the property, probably forty feet away from the house. The three of them wore identical looks of alarm, and suddenly Wally heard the sound of a door closing downstairs, followed by the sounds of boots—two sets?—patrolling the first floor of the house. Wally looked at the crew again, and Tevin gave her a signal, holding up two fingers to signify two people downstairs, then changing the signal by pressing the two fingers together until they became the “barrel” in a hand gesture that meant
gun.
Shit
. The Hatch brothers were home apparently, and, for some reason, they were carrying weapons. Had they been alerted that she had broken in? Wally felt a surge of distress but made a sign to the others that they should stay where they were. She thought about calling the police, figuring that getting busted would be better than getting shot by the Hatch brothers as a burglar, but then realized that her cell phone was in her shoulder bag, now outside with Ella. The only phone she had seen in the house was downstairs in the kitchen.
Then Wally remembered her boots. Sitting to one side of the kitchen floor, near the window over the sink. Had she closed the window behind her? Suddenly she couldn’t remember.
Possibilities raced through her mind. Should she just call out in surrender? Let the brothers know she was there and apologize, explaining that she was innocently searching for her Russian mother and got carried away when they weren’t home and …
no
. No way. If she spooked them badly enough, they might take a shot at her—but even if that didn’t happen, they would be so angry with Wally for violating their privacy that they would never help with her search for Yalena. So far, the Hatch brothers were still her only decent lead.
Shit
.
One set of footsteps—heavy, male, moving at a cautious pace—began climbing the main staircase, headed up in Wally’s direction. Wally hustled down the hall as quietly as she could, headed for the back staircase—the one she had used coming up. Though her stocking feet were quiet, the ancient floorboards squeaked slightly under her. The footsteps on the main staircase suddenly halted and remained completely still. Wally slid to a stop and froze. The man on the main staircase didn’t move for almost ten seconds—listening?—but finally continued upward, and Wally sped along the last section of hallway until she reached the narrow back staircase. Quickly she hurried downward and then stopped at the bottom of the stairs, alert.
There were still two sets of footsteps moving in the house: the ones upstairs walked the width of the house with occasional pauses and redirections, clearly searching the upstairs rooms. The second set of steps was still downstairs, moving slowly, opening closet doors, searching every inch of the place. From her position at the bottom of the rear staircase, Wally could see her own pair of boots sitting where she had left them on the kitchen floor, undisturbed. She realized that she had placed them mostly out of sight, halfway concealed by the kitchen counter and easy to miss if someone wasn’t actually looking for them. Wally also noticed that she had in fact closed the window behind her. So, what had tipped off the Hatches that someone was in their house? Why were they searching for an intruder?
Wally needed to get the hell out of that house. From her hiding place at the bottom of the servant’s staircase, she cautiously emerged into the kitchen, making her way quietly across the linoleum toward her shoes, but suddenly the sound of the downstairs footsteps changed direction and headed toward the kitchen, toward her. Wally spun around and raced back to the cover of the staircase, ducking in just as the downstairs man stepped into the kitchen.
Wally heard the man stop and look around the kitchen. She heard a squeak as he opened one of the kitchen cabinets. Wally took a chance and peered out, getting a look at him from behind. He was dark-haired, average height but sturdily built. Salt-and-pepper hair, closely trimmed, wearing jeans and a black leather car coat and carrying an intimidating handgun that Wally recognized as a .45 automatic—Jason, her adopted father, had insisted that Wally take a series of classes on handling guns.
As she watched the man search through the cabinets, Wally suddenly realized that this was not one of the Hatch brothers at all, but an intruder like herself. But if he wasn’t looking for her, what
was
he looking for?
The man continued searching and suddenly his attention was drawn toward something Wally had not noticed in the dining area next to the kitchen. He approached a collection of photographs that were pinned to the otherwise empty wall, old black-and-white photos yellowed terribly with age.
The man concentrated his attention on two of the photos. One photo was of a small white rowboat, empty, sitting on a beach at the edge of a dark sea. The second appeared to be of a young couple and—was that a small child with them? The family of three stood in front of some sort of rustic farmhouse. The man reached for the second photo—of the young couple and small child—and pulled it off the wall, looking at it more closely.
“Yalena,” he said out loud, with a Slavic accent.
Wally’s heart was suddenly in her throat. The stranger had spoken her mother’s name.
At that moment the doorbell rang—sounding incredibly loud in the quiet, barren house—and the man turned his attention toward the front of the house, allowing Wally a clear look at his face, in profile. She gasped. The man was older now, a little gaunt, and his eighties-style hair and sideburns were cut back, but there was no question in Wally’s mind. This was the man whose photograph was included in the Brighton Beach file:
This is a most dangerous man,
Yalena had written on the back of the picture.
If you see him, you must run
. What had been instantly menacing in his photograph was evident now also, but to a greater extreme: a sense of danger and violence radiated outward from him, merely punctuated by the weapon in his hand. He grabbed the photo off the wall and stuffed it in his pocket.
“Gost!”
the man barked in Russian. Visitor, Wally understood.
And now, to Wally’s horror, the footsteps upstairs moved to the rear staircase—the same servant’s staircase where Wally was now hiding—and began climbing downward. Toward her.
Shit
. Wally had no idea what to do. The man from above was halfway down the stairs when the man in the kitchen began moving toward the kitchen door that led to the entrance hallway and to the front door. Moving cautiously, the man shifted his gun hand behind his back, peered down the hallway toward the front door, then exited the kitchen on his way to check who might be at the door. Once he was gone, Wally jumped out of the staircase and lunged to her left, into a space between the staircase and the refrigerator where a set of old mops and brooms were stored. Wally leaned into the vacant space as far as she could, just barely out of sight, as the second man appeared from the staircase and moved swiftly past her at a distance of less than two feet. Wally held her breath, and thankfully he did not discover her.
The second man was very young—late teens, Wally guessed—taller and slimmer than the other, with long black hair trailing down to his shoulders. In his right hand he held his own weapon, a 9mm automatic. The younger man followed the course of the older, exiting the kitchen in the direction of the entrance hallway, and as soon as he was out of sight Wally sped across the kitchen floor—sliding in her stocking feet to avoid making any sound—to the kitchen counter, where she picked up her shoes in one swooping motion and hustled to the French doors at the rear of the room, unlocking one and fleeing out to the back grounds, careful to close the door quietly behind her.
Once outside, Wally heard a low whistle come from the side fence of the property, where she had seen her crew crouching out of sight. They were still there, motioning for her to hurry. Wally traversed the yard and leapt over the fence, tumbling down in the brush beside her friends.
“Are you okay?” Ella asked in a panic.
“I’m fine,” said Wally, breathless but feeling a sense of relief. “That was you guys who rang at the door?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “We did a ring-and-run to distract them.”
“Wally,” Tevin said, “we’re so sorry. Those guys snuck up to the house from the side yard. We didn’t see them until they were at the back door.”
“It’s okay, you did great,” Wally assured them. “Let’s just get the hell away from here.”
The four of them crashed through some brush into a neighbor’s yard, staying low, then moved directly toward Crichton Road. Wally got her shoulder bag back from Ella and was just reaching for her phone when the Fantasy Island cab pulled onto Crichton Road and slowed down to park in front of the Hatch home. Wally stepped into the street and waved the cabbie over. He accelerated and pulled up in front of the neighboring house, where they were waiting, and signaled them to jump in. They did, and he drove off.
“Thought I’d check back in case you needed a ride,” the mellow young cabbie said. As he looked into his rearview mirror, seeing all four of them breathless and looking spooked, he asked, “How was your visit?”
The cabdriver
dropped them off at the Shelter Island marina for their return trip. Wally thanked the cabbie and tipped him lavishly.
“Wow,” said the cabbie, reacting to the extra fifty bucks. “Are you sure? It was just a few miles.”
“I’m sure. Thanks again.”
He shrugged and smiled, pocketing the tip. “You’ve got my card.” He gave her a winning grin and drove off.