The stairs turned at a landing, and as we reached it, the snoring grew louder. These were loud, rumbling snores. We could have stomped our way up these stairs and not wakened Mayhew.
Once we reached the upstairs hallway, Trimble paused again, making sure he could tell which room the snores were coming from. He crept ahead of me to the doorway of the bedroom on the left, where, from the soft beam of moonlight that was coming through the window, we could make out a shape under the covers, which were pulled up so far you couldn’t see any more of the person than what appeared to be a few tufts of hair. I didn’t remember Mayhew having that much hair.
Trimble pointed to the lamp on the bedside table and whispered, “Get ready to turn that on.”
I slipped my hand under the shade, found the small grooved knob, and held it between my thumb and forefinger as the snores continued to echo through the room. Trimble gripped his weapon with both hands and held the muzzle to within a couple of inches of Mayhew’s head. He nodded to me.
I turned on the light.
Trimble shouted, “Wakey wakey, Eddie!”
And Mayhew stirred suddenly, reached up an arm to pull the covers down, and, upon seeing the muzzle only inches away, screamed.
Only it wasn’t Mayhew screaming. It was a woman.
“Jesus!” Trimble shouted, moving the gun away. But that didn’t stop the woman from continuing to scream.
“Shut up!” Trimble shouted. More screaming. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
Screaming back at her wasn’t working, so he brought the gun back into play, putting the barrel right up to her nose. Trimble said, “Shut. Up.”
She managed to compose herself. She struggled to sit up in the bed, and I could now see that what I’d thought were tufts of hair were rollers. She had a good dozen of them on her gray-haired head, pinned into position. She was wearing an off-white, heavy flannel, full-sleeved nightgown, and it was fair to say that we had not caught her at her best.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Where’s Eddie?” Trimble asked.
“I just, I don’t, what do you want?”
“I just asked you, I want to know where Eddie is. He’s your husband, right?”
“Yes, he is. What do you want with Edward?”
“We want to know where he is.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. I wish I did know. If he was going to be late, he should have called me. He’s supposed to call, but sometimes he doesn’t.”
Trimble looked very tired. “Is there anyone else in the house?”
“What? No, there’s no one else. Unless Edward’s downstairs.”
Trimble sat on the edge of the bed, brought the gun down so that it was still in his hand, but lying on the covers. “Mrs. Mayhew,” he said softly. “It’s very important that we find your husband.”
“Is he in some kind of trouble? Because if he is, I have to tell you, I’m not all that surprised, the bastard.”
“If we can find him in time, maybe we can keep him out of any trouble.”
“Are you the police?”
“We are,” Trimble said slowly, “a branch of the police, but we work a little under the radar, if you get my understanding.”
Mrs. Mayhew nodded. She was starting to look a little relieved now that maybe we weren’t bad guys, as she’d first thought.
“Because your husband works for the government,” he said, “he’s been able to assist us in our investigation, working somewhat undercover himself.”
“Edward? Working undercover? He’s certainly never mentioned anything to me. But of course, he hardly talks to me about anything. I ask him, ‘How was your day? What happened? Who did you see?’ And you know what he says? He says absolutely nothing.”
“That’s good. That’s good, that he didn’t tell you. A lot of times, you figure, even when you tell someone not to tell anyone what they’re doing, you figure they’re still going to tell their wives, you know?”
She nodded.
“But now we’re into a situation where we’ve lost track of Eddie and need to locate him.”
“It’s like I said in the beginning. I don’t know where he is. Did you look downstairs? Maybe he’s just watching TV. Sometimes he sits down there all night, staring at the tube, for hours and hours and hours. And I call down, and ask doesn’t he want to come up to bed with me, and still he sits there, watching his stupid shows.”
“There was no one downstairs watching TV,” Trimble said, and walked over to the closet, opened the door. “Come over here,” he said to Mrs. Mayhew. She slipped out from under the covers, a bit hesitant at first because she was in a nightgown, but it did an excellent job of covering everything and I was betting Trimble was no more turned on by acres of flannel than I. Still, you couldn’t blame her for being worried, what with two strange men in her bedroom at two in the morning.
She looked in the closet.
“Are all your husband’s clothes here?” Trimble asked.
“Uh, gee, let me see.” She moved some hangers around, looked down at the floor. “His extra pair of jeans is gone, and I don’t think all his shirts… I don’t see his… That’s gone, too… That’s really odd.”
“Take a look in the drawer,” Trimble said.
She did, opening the second drawer down in the dresser. “My God. All his socks are gone,” she said. “And his boxers. I did the laundry yesterday and put everything in here. But it’s not here now.”
Without being asked, she went out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, flicking on the light as she entered. She opened the vanity, turned and looked at the two of us, her hand up over her mouth. “His toothbrush,” she said. “His toothbrush is gone.”
“When’s the last time you saw your husband?” Trimble asked.
“At, at breakfast. Actually, now that I think about it, he did say he had stuff to do after work tonight, and that he’d be home late. So I went to bed without him. But he never said anything about going away anywhere, about having to pack his boxers and a toothbrush. Did he have to go away on secret government business?”
Trimble said, “Your husband got a cell phone?”
She nodded. Trimble told her to call. She went downstairs to the kitchen, flicking lights on along the way, and sat down at the kitchen table, where the phone sat. She tapped in a number, held the receiver to her ear. “It says the number’s not in service. Why would it say the number’s not in service? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Maybe he’s in a bad area.”
Trimble had a look at the phone. “This is one of those new ones,” he said. “It shows who’s called you recently.”
“That’s right. Edward said we should get that, but I don’t think it’s worth the extra money.”
“And you can call up the last ten numbers that have been dialed.”
“I didn’t know that,” Mrs. Mayhew said.
Trimble took a chair across from her, swung the phone around so that it was in front of him. “I’m going to call out some numbers to you and you tell me if you know what they are.”
He did the first one.
“That’s my sister Cleo, in Milwaukee. I called her this evening, to see if she was still coming to visit in April. We’re very close, but we don’t get together as often as we’d like. She married this man, he’s not very nice, he doesn’t like to travel.”
Trimble gave her another number. “That’s Edward’s work,” she said. “I called him around three, but he was out.”
Then another. Mrs. Mayhew shook her head. “That one doesn’t ring a bell.”
Trimble hit the button that would immediately connect him to the number, waited, and then said, “Oh, hello. I was wondering, which Ramada is this? Uh-huh. Okay. I’m trying to track down a friend of mine, we’re supposed to have breakfast together. Do you have an Edward Mayhew registered there?” He nodded. “That’s great. And what room is he in? Thanks very much.”
He hung up the phone, looked at me. “Eddie’s at the Ramada. The one by the airport. I’m guessing he’s booked on a morning flight.”
“What?” said Mrs. Mayhew. “No no, you must have that wrong. Eddie’s not going away! We don’t take separate vacations! We certainly never have! What does he think he’s doing? He’s up at the Ramada, you say? He’s going to get a piece of my mind!”