See Something, page 22
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “That’ll give me time to catch up on a little ironing. Come with me, Katie. I’ll show you your room.” She stood and, still on his leash, Paco cocked his head and looked at me with soft brown eyes. “By the way, where does Paco sleep when you’re at home?”
“He sleeps at the foot of my bed.”
“Well then,” my aunt said, “that’s exactly where he’ll sleep while you’re here.” Brief hesitation. “I suppose he tells you when he needs to go out?”
“He does.” Katie stood, put Percy on the floor and stroked Paco’s smooth black fur. “I usually take him for a walk right after dinner and he’s good until morning.”
“I’ll walk him tonight, darlin’,” Rob said. “You get some rest.”
“Okay,” she said. “Come on, Paco. We’re going to see our new room.” Percy had already scooted out through the cat door. I walked ahead through the living room, out into the foyer, and up the stairs, Paco’s claws click-clicking on polished wood. As Rob had promised, Katie’s navy-blue suitcase was on the foot of the bed, and as Aunt Ibby had promised, there were fresh flowers in a crystal vase on the bureau.
“How pretty!” Katie clapped her hands together just the way she does on the show. “Thanks for inviting me. I know I’ll sleep like a baby in this beautiful room.” She unhooked the leash from Paco’s collar. “We both will.”
I showed her the bathroom and the closet. “Get some rest. I’ll come up and tap on your door when dinner’s ready.” I retraced my steps back to the first floor. Rob had left and my aunt was deep in preparations for her justly famous macaroni salad. “I’m going to iron a couple of blouses,” I announced. “Percy thinks the blue one makes a nice mattress.”
“That’s nice, dear,” she said, more focused on chopping celery than on her favorite niece’s overdue domestic efforts. I headed for the laundry room, where the cats had each assumed their previous positions—one under the ironing board, one resting peacefully on blue cotton. For the second time that day, I interrupted Percy’s nap. This time I put him on the floor. He didn’t seem to mind—shook himself and went directly to his litter box.
Unfortunately, he’d left some sooty little footprints on the back of my blouse. I’d need some kind of spot remover before rewashing it. Aunt Ibby is a staunch believer in the old-fashioned way—wet a bar of Fels-Naptha laundry soap and rub gently. There was a slightly used gold-colored bar of it in the soap dish over the deep sink. I reached for it and turned on the faucet.
Both cats reacted when I gasped and dropped the soap. Slowly, I picked it up and turned it over. I hadn’t been mistaken—hadn’t imagined the clear outline I’d seen there. Someone had pressed a key into the surface of that soap and the exact shape of the key remained. I could even read the backwards “Kwikset” letters on it.
What did it mean? I was pretty sure that if I got my key chain out of my bag, one of my keys would fit into the key-shaped indent on Aunt Ibby’s soap. I remembered reading somewhere that a locksmith could actually make a key from an impression like this—but that an honest locksmith would never do it. If someone went to the trouble to press one of my keys into soap in order to duplicate it, I reasoned, why wouldn’t they take the soap with them? Very carefully, I emptied a fabric softener box and placed the bar inside. Maybe Pete could find fingerprints on it—and if he could, I was sure they’d belong to Alfred Pridholm.
Once back inside Aunt Ibby’s kitchen, I grabbed my bag from the back of one of the captain’s chairs. “Calling Pete,” I explained, and ducked back into the hall. He answered on the first ring. “Are you on your way here?”
“Yes. What’s wrong?”
How does he know just from my voice when something is wrong? I answered truthfully, explaining what I’d found. “He must have been inside the house, Pete. He took my keys out of my bag. He made that imprint and left it where Aunt Ibby or I would find it.”
CHAPTER 39
I waited there in the hall, just outside the laundry room, for Pete. Both cats were awake now, both watching me. When O’Ryan stood, stretched, and trotted to the cat door, I knew Pete was about to arrive. I followed, and waited on the back steps for the familiar Crown Vic to pull into the driveway.
We hurried toward each other and met halfway along the flagstone path. He pulled me close. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Two cats rubbed my ankles. “I’m scared, Pete,” I whispered. “He’s been in my house.”
“Show me what you’ve found.” His voice was ragged.
We walked together, his protective arm around my shoulders, into the hall. The two cats tagged along behind, then turned as one, and with O’Ryan in the lead, pushed through the cat door to my aunt’s kitchen, leaving us alone with a washer and dryer, an ironing board and a soiled blouse, a basketful of Aunt Ibby’s neatly folded clean laundry, an empty deep sink, a folding table, and one defaced cake of soap. I pointed to the fabric softener box with its cute teddy-bear graphics. How inappropriate. “I put it in there. Fingerprints.”
“Good girl.” He picked up a folded white hand towel from Aunt Ibby’s basket and placed it, opened, on the folding table. Sliding the Fels-Naptha bar from its box, he peered closely at the incised key silhouette. “If someone was actually going to use this to duplicate a key, that someone would have made impressions of both sides, not one.”
“Then why . . . ?”
Pete pulled a folded plastic bag from his jacket pocket. I’d seen bags like it before. An evidence bag. Using the towel to lift the soap bar, he slid it into the bag and pressed the locking seal. “The guy seems to have a warped sense of humor.” He held the evidence bag up and turned it from side to side. “Maybe this was supposed to show you that he could get into the house if he wanted to.”
“Like signing for my drapes—and making you call out the bomb squad? And leaving the bike behind our garage?” Red-head anger rising. “If these pranks are supposed to scare me, they worked pretty well. I’m scared. And mad.”
He pulled out his phone. “I’m not about to leave you and Katie here without protection. I’ll call for someone to pick this up. I’ll ask for a fingerprint kit too, although I doubt seriously that there are fingerprints on the soap or the door handles or anything else. He’s meticulous about that. I hate to mess up anybody’s house with the powder we use if it’s not necessary. That stuff’s a bear to clean up. I’ll see what the chief says about my doing it. Has your aunt seen the soap yet?”
“No. I called you right away. She thinks I’m ironing.”
“We’ll have to tell her about this. Maybe you two can close off this room, put off using it for a little while—at least until I hear what Chief wants to do. Are your keys in that handbag?”
“Yes.” I opened the zippered compartment. “The laundry can wait, I’m sure, and we often close the door if we’re having guests, but Percy’s litter box is in here, so I can’t close it off entirely.” Pete nodded, then, turning away from me, spoke briefly into his phone in terse tones. I heard the words “evidence” and “fingerprints” and “killer.” As soon as he’d finished, I handed him the jingling ring of keys. “They’re all here. Front door, back door, garage, my living room, my kitchen, and my new office. The fob for my car and the overhead garage door opener are separate.”
“Do any of these look or feel different??” He spread them out on the towel where the soap had recently been the center of attention. “Let’s try the garage side door key first,” he said. detaching it from the ring. “It’s the only one that has that kind of a blank.” He was right. “Kwikset” was spelled out on the rounded top section.
“That key felt funny when I used it this morning. I even wiped it on my vest,” I remembered. “There was something wrong with that back door key too.” I pointed to it. “It was slippery. I dropped the whole key ring on the steps.”
“Could there have been another cake of soap out here besides the one you found?”
“Sure. My aunt buys them by the half-dozen from Amazon. There are probably some more in the overhead cabinet.”
Using the towel again, he pulled the cabinet door open. There were four of the wrapped bars among the detergents, bleach, spray starch, and fabric softeners. My heart sank. There was no way to know how many impressions he might have made. I said as much to Pete.
“Chances are he just took photos of whatever keys he wanted to duplicate. It’s easier, and a dishonest locksmith can work with pictures better than with soap. I believe the soap thing was designed to let you know he’s been in here. To scare you.”
Yeah, well, it worked. A horn sounded from outside. “Wait for me here.” He picked up the evidence bag and sprinted out the back door just as Aunt Ibby’s door swung open and my aunt poked her head out.
“Everything all right here? I heard a horn.” She glanced at the open back door. “I thought I heard Pete’s voice.”
“Everything’s fine,” I fibbed. “Another officer came by to leave something for Pete. He just ran out to get it. He’ll be right back.”
“The macaroni salad is chilling. Hungry yet?”
“Starving,” I said. “What with all the bomb scare excitement, I skipped lunch again.” I looked at my watch. “I’ll knock on Katie’s door in about fifteen minutes. I have a feeling she may have skipped lunch too.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Poor child.”
Aunt returned to her cooking and Pete arrived back beside me in the hall. “That’s done,” he said, locking the door behind him. “They’ll go over the soap and Chief will let me know about using the print kit. Shall we give your aunt a heads-up about the laundry room before Rob gets back?”
“Good idea,” I said. With a backward glance at the neglected blue blouse, I pulled the laundry room pocket door almost shut—leaving just enough room for cats—and knocked on the kitchen door.
“Come on in. It’s not locked,” she called.
Pete shook his head. Old habits are hard to unlearn. I opened the door and when we were both inside, I made a rather dramatic point of locking it.
“Oops.” Aunt Ibby looked apologetic. “I knew you’d be coming in right away,” she explained. “Anyway, you left the outside door wide open a few minutes ago.”
“But Pete was coming right back in,” I said.
“Exactly.” Big smile. “Want to help me set the table?”
“Sure. But Pete needs to tell you something first.”
So, gently but firmly, while I assembled the appropriate dishes and bowls and silver and glassware, Pete told her what was going on. She paled a little when he related the possibility that Alfred Pridholm might very well have keys to virtually every door in the house, and put her hand to her mouth and sat down when he got to the part about the defaced cake of soap.
“We’ll see to getting all the locks changed first thing tomorrow,” Pete said. “You have an excellent alarm system already in place, and I’ll be right here with you. My car is parked outside. By now he knows who I am. He knows I’m here and he knows I’m armed. He won’t try anything tonight.”
“I’m going to run upstairs and get Katie,” I said, “and I think I just heard Rob’s truck. That big four-hundred-and-fifty horsepower engine is hard to miss.” O’Ryan’s fuzzy head appeared at the cat door. He wiggled through and ran ahead of me toward the front hall.
“Where’s Percy?” my aunt asked.
“Probably curled up sound asleep on my blue blouse,” I muttered, and followed the cat.
O’Ryan stopped at the top of the stairs on the second floor while I proceeded down the hall toward the guest room. “You worried about that dog?” I asked. “Come on. Katie can control him.” On reluctant cat feet, he approached the guest room.
I knocked. Click-click. Good. Katie had remembered to lock her door. It opened a couple of inches, just enough for a dog’s nose to poke through. “Lee? Is that you?”
“It’s me,” I said. “O’Ryan is with me.”
“Stay, Paco,” came the command. The dog’s nose withdrew, O’Ryan retreated to the stairs, the door opened and Katie, looking refreshed and rested in a pink jumpsuit, stepped out into the corridor. “I had a nice nap. Is Rob back yet?”
“I just heard his truck,” I told her. Pete’s downstairs too. Guess the gang’s all here, safe and sound.” I hope we’re all safe. Katie and I started down the stairs, O’Ryan leading the way a few steps ahead of us.
“Where’s Percy?” Katie asked. “He seems to have made himself at home here already.”
“He was snoozing in the laundry room last time I checked,” I said. “I think O’Ryan wore him out with the running up and down stairs game they’ve been playing.”
“That’s good. As long as he’s happy.”
All through the Winter Street house that summer evening, everyone seemed to be relaxed and happy—men and women, cats and dog. Conversation was light and easy. Aunt Ibby’s indoor picnic meal was expectedly perfect. The TV was turned off and nobody seemed to miss the evening news. None of us even once mentioned murders—past or present. There was no talk of bomb threats or hit-and-run cars or abandoned bicycles or stolen keys. Rob took Paco for an uneventful walk after dinner.
For me, the sense of unreality hung in the air like a Stephen King mist.
CHAPTER 40
Once Pete and I were in bed, I told him about Emily’s cryptic series of numbers and punctuation marks on the notebook page. “It was something she wrote when she was still Janie,” I said. “Captain Billy calls it LORAN bearings. Something fishermen used to find their way around the ocean back before we had GPS.”
“That was along time ago,” he said. “I wonder why she wrote them down. They wouldn’t be much use to anybody these days.”
“Captain Billy knows how to convert them to GPS. He’s going to do it for me.”
“Should be interesting. You say she had that notebook when she was Janie? Before she got her memory back?” He paused. “Allegedly.”
“Right,” I agreed. “That reminds me. I’ve been fooling around with numbers myself.” I told him about Louisa’s business-card collection and the names and phone numbers I’d found. “A few of the numbers match up, but none of the names. I have no idea what it means. A dozen people with the same phone number, or one person with a dozen phones? I’ll give it to you.”
“I’ll take it,” he said. “Any other clues to share?”
I told him about my phone call to the curtain store and how they’d confirmed the bogus call asking for early delivery. SPD had already covered that too. “Now we have his voice print,” he said. “We’re checking it against phone messages Sawtelle had with the men who set up the meeting at the conservancy. I’m pretty sure we’ll have at least one match.”
With the growing pile of evidence, how come this guy is still wandering around loose?
It wasn’t necessary for me to voice that thought. I knew Pete and every member of the police department was agonizing over the boldness of this criminal and their thus-far inability to capture him.
As though he could read my thoughts, he held me close. “I worry about you every minute of every day that I’m not with you,” he whispered. “I want to be with you—I want you with me—all the time.”
I want it too. His kiss told me he already knew that. Safe in his arms, my sleep was peaceful and dream-free.
* * *
Aunt Ibby had already invited Katie to join her downstairs for an early breakfast of old-fashioned homemade oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar. O’Ryan scooted out the cat door to join them, leaving Pete and me alone in my kitchen, enjoying the last two slices of Aunt Ibby’s apple pie with our coffee. Pie for breakfast is an old and valued New England custom. Out of consideration for my two-seater, Pete had volunteered to drive Katie and Paco to work. I’d drive the Vette and they’d follow me.
I really need to think about getting a full-sized car.
Maybe.
Not yet.
It was not quite eight o’clock when we were all assembled in the downstairs back hall. Katie, Pete, and I, along with Paco, were ready to leave. The chief had agreed to pass on the fingerprinting of the laundry room, so the sliding door was open wide once again. My blouse, still unwashed and un-ironed, drooped forlornly from the ironing board. I’d already returned the dream books to Aunt Ibby, who was scheduled for a half day at the library. “I’ll wait here for the locksmith and the alarm company man before I go,” she said. “They both agreed to be here at eight. I’ll feel better when everything is secure again.”
“We’ll wait with you,” Pete said, and I knew he wanted to be sure both locksmith and alarm installer were who they said they were—unlike my phony “assistant” who’d signed for the draperies. “Lee, why don’t you back your car out now so we can get on the road as soon as I check these guys out. Don’t worry, I’ll walk with you to the garage to be sure everything in there is copacetic.”
“Thanks. I’m still a little nervous about the key thing,” I admitted. Pete made the same kind of careful inspection he’d made before. Relieved, I opened the overhead door, tossed my briefcase and handbag onto the seat, and carefully pulled the Vette onto the street, big engine purring, closed and locked the garage and rejoined the others.
“Paco needs to go out for a minute before we leave,” Katie said. “Okay if I just walk him down to the corner of Oliver Street and back?” She held a plastic bag in one hand and clutched Paco’s leash in the other. “I think he really needs to go.”
The front doorbell chimed “The Impossible Dream.” “Oh-oh,” my aunt said. “That’s the front doorbell. It’s probably one or the other of them.”
“Okay,” Pete said. “I’ll get it. Lee, keep an eye on Katie and the dog. I’ll be right back.”
Katie and Paco turned left from our driveway, walking toward the common, opposite to Oliver Street’s one-way traffic. She had nearly reached Washington Square when Paco paused to take care of business. When Katie bent for clean-up duty, a dusty maroon Chevy slowed beside her and tooted the horn—a friendly toot, not an annoyed blast—then slowed again as it approached me. The Chevy stopped beside the parked Vette, windows open. The driver wore a black knitted watch cap, completely covering his hair. He had a skinny mustache. The cruel eyes, the mocking smile were unmistakable. “Hey, sweetheart. I don’t like clowns. Or dogs.” He sped away toward Bridge Street.
