Disturbed Ground by Carla Norton Read Free Book Online Page B

seemed to him that she was always hammering, always improving. In fact, Mclntyre was not at all enamored of little old Mrs. Puente. "She could be very nice," he admitted, but he'd seen her "turn in a minute," treating the object of her wrath to "a vocabulary that could make most sailors blush."
    Some neighbors found her extraordinarily friendly, but others called her "weird" or "off the wall," noting that she was "always yelling at people if they put even a step onto her lawn."
    That temper.
    Eventually, Dorothea brought up the subject of Mexico with John Sharp, the one tenant who had a car. She suggested that they might all travel down to Guadalajara after he got his SSI payments started and asked if he would drive.
    The prospect of driving all the way from northern California into Mexico, shut inside a car for days with his dubious housemates, seemed about as appealing as self-flagellation. John Sharp was no martyr: He told her no.
    Sharp didn't socialize much with the other boarders. He found Bert uncommunicative and childlike, sitting in the living room and watching cartoons. Sometimes, tormented by voices, Bert would stomp on the floor in frustration, "having a tantrum," in Sharp's view, until Dorothea would come and calm him, uttering motherly reassurances in Spanish.
    John Sharp's vice was poker, not liquor, and the sober old gent didn't find much in common with the drinkers of the house either. But on a couple of occasions, he did enjoy standing outside and conversing with Ben Fink and his younger brother, Robert, who visited him there. Ben, who had moved into Dorothea's place in March, wasn't too bad a fellow, really. But it was mainly Robert, who looked like a rugged extra from a Clint Eastwood movie, who was sober and coherent enough to hold Sharp's attention.
    Ben Fink never really bothered anybody, and though his room was just a thin wall away, Sharp didn't spend much time with him. He knew Fink was quite a drinker, and he could hear him moving about, coming and going. Each month, after receiving his benefit check, Ben would go on a major drinking binge until the money ran out.
    In the spring of 1988, though, things were about to change.
    Sharp heard Ben Fink come to the back door, heard him fumbling with his keys. Sharp's door was open, as usual Ben staggered past, bleary-eyed, his hand wrapped around a bottle in a paper sack. In a minute, his neighbor's door closed, then he heard the familiar creak on the other side of the wall as the bed accepted Fink's weight.
    John Sharp more or less forgot about Ben until later that evening when he bumped into the landlady in the hall. Dorothea promptly told him that Ben needed sobering up. "I'm going to take him upstairs," she announced, "and make him feel better."
    Well, perhaps this particular bender had been going on a bit too long. Maybe Dorothea thought that, after three or four days of pathetic drunkenness, Ben was getting out of hand. But after that, Sharp noticed, he didn't hear or see Ben Fink around anymore. The room next door was dead still.
    About four days later, John Sharp climbed the back stairs to use the telephone, and when he walked past the spare bedroom by the kitchen, he was hit by a distinct and terrible odor. He recoiled, his nose sniffing at a memory. Years before, he'd worked in a mortuary; he knew the awful stench of death.
    Ben Fink's disappearance struck him with new clarity.
    For hours afterward, Sharp puzzled over what he should do. Should he confront Dorothea? Should he contact the authorities? But what if he were wrong? He could imagine how angry Dorothea would be, and he sure didn't want to end up back on the street….
    Dorothea Puente was soon fretting about the smell herself, telling John Sharp that the sewer had backed up, complaining that she didn't know how to get the smell out of the house. "It has ruined the carpet," she said. "I just don't know what to do."
    Soon a noisy machine was rumbling back and forth, back and forth, above the