X

  When I heard Henry’s car pull in, I went out to the garage and helped him carry in his grocery bags. By then, the plumber was standing by with a list in hand and an expectant look on his face.

  “You want me to take Edna’s groceries over so the two of you can talk?”

  “I’d appreciate it,” he said as he passed me a loaded plastic bag. “I packed her items separately along with her receipt.”

  “Be right back.”

  I scurried around to the front of the studio and passed through the squeaky gate. I took a short left and traversed the Shallenbargers’ walk to the front door. Their lawn wasn’t large, but the grass seemed to be in good shape. I couldn’t remember seeing their sprinklers on, so they must have been watering when the sun went down as we’d all been advised. I rang the bell, and while I waited, I made an idle check of the grocery receipt—$25.66—before I returned it to the bag.

  When half a minute went by without a response, I knocked.

  Shortly afterward, Edna opened the door and peered out at me. “Yes?”

  I held up the bag. “The items you asked for. Receipt’s in the bag.”

  “Thank you,” she said as she took it. “Tell Henry how much I appreciate his kindness. He’s considerate of others.”

  “How’s Joseph feeling?”

  For a fraction of a second, her look was blank, and then she caught herself. “Better. I fixed him a bowl of soup and now he’s having a rest.”

  “Good to hear.” I expected mention of reimbursement, but it didn’t seem to occur to her. When she moved to close the front door, I caught it by the edge.

  “You want to pay him in cash or write a check?”

  She dropped her gaze. I wondered what I’d have seen if she’d continued to make eye contact. She smiled with her lips together, creating a dimple in each cheek. The effect was curious. Malice surfaced and then disappeared.

  “You didn’t tell me how much it was,” she murmured, as though the fault were mine.

  “Receipt’s in there if you want to take a look.”

  “Of course. If you’ll wait, I’ll find my pocketbook.”

  She took the bag and retreated, leaving the door ajar. I could hear her steps receding on the hardwood floor. When she returned minutes later, she handed me a twenty-dollar bill and a five. No change and no receipt, which meant I couldn’t call her on the fact that she’d shorted Henry by sixty-six cents.

  • • •

  On my way back to the studio, I saw McClaskey and Henry seated at his kitchen table with their heads bent together. I was fuming about Edna’s mistreatment of Henry, but if I brought it to his attention, he’d wave the matter aside. Sixty-six cents was minor. He’d never make a fuss about something so insignificant, and he’d never believe she’d acted out of spite that was actually directed at me. He was good-natured and generous. As is true of many such souls, he assumed others operated out of the same good will that motivated him.

  I could feel the office beckon. Lately, I’ve noticed an impulse to retreat to a place where I feel competent. Though I was reluctant to admit it, in addition to being annoyed with Edna, I was irritated with Ruth. I had a hypothesis that made perfect sense, and she wasn’t buying it. It was obvious someone was sniffing around the edges of her life. Of course, I had no proof it was Ned Lowe. I’d debunked “George Dayton’s” phony claim, but neither of us knew who he really was or why he’d gone to such lengths. Beyond that, I had no support for my suspicions about the junk man. It meant little that his phone was not in service. His business might be seasonal, and undercapitalized at that. He was a citizen with a big truck and a willingness to dirty his hands.

  This is the downside of intuition: when it feels so exactly right, other people’s skepticism is infuriating. Once again, I was reminded I hadn’t been hired to do anything and I wasn’t getting paid. I thought I was being “helpful,” which is usually a mistake. If I wanted to prove my point, I’d have to tackle the list and fill in the blanks. I had the name Susan Telford in Henderson, Nevada. I also had Janet Macy in Tucson and Phyllis Joplin, Ned’s second wife. I might start with her. Perdido was twenty-five miles south. I’d pick up a phone number for her from directory assistance as soon as I had a minute.

  I parked in the short drive that ran between my bungalow and the one on my right. I let myself in and picked up the mail strewn on the floor just inside the door. The air smelled unpleasant. There was the strong overlay of scorched coffee, and I chided myself for forgetting to turn off the machine the day before. I caught a whiff of another odor suggestive of plumbing issues. Meanwhile, the message light was blinking on my answering machine. I tossed the mail on the desk, leaned over, and pressed Play.

  “Hi, Kinsey. This is Taryn Sizemore. Sorry I missed you, but I was hoping to stop by your office this morning. It finally dawned on me there’s no reason in the world I shouldn’t talk to you about Ned. Apologies for the paranoia, but I’m afraid the man has that effect. If you’re tied up, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll be there as soon as I’m finished with my ten o’clock appointment. My number in case you don’t have it is . . .”

  I was busy jotting down the number, so it took me a moment to register my surroundings. I set the pen aside, and when I looked up, I uttered a yelp of dismay. Every item on my desk—including papers and pens, my blotter, my calendar, and the telephone—was off by two degrees. File drawers were open half an inch. The window blinds had been raised and secured at an incline. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but believe me, it is. As was also true of Ruthie, I like things squared up. Being tidy is essential to my peace of mind. In the chaotic world of crime and criminals, maintaining order is my way of asserting control.

  I made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn.

  My entire office looked like a playful, slightly destructive breeze had rippled through, lifting items and setting them down askew. None of the angles matched. My copy machine was canted to the right. My two visitors’ chairs faced opposite directions, but only by three inches. Even my desk had been offset, leaving shallow indentations where the legs had formerly rested on the carpeting.

  I went to the door and took in the sight of the outer office. Textbooks were tilted this way and that. My crummy travel posters had been removed from the wall and then retaped off the true. I walked down the short corridor to the bathroom, where the disarray continued. The small venetian blind hung from the box bracket on the right-hand side of the window frame. The entire roll of toilet paper had been unraveled and lay on the floor in a loose mound. The lid to the toilet tank was cockeyed, the seat was up, and a bar of hand soap floated on the surface of the water in the bowl.

  I moved on, a whisper of dread roiling in my gut.

  In the kitchenette, the back door stood open and all of the cabinet doors yawned, though the contents hadn’t been displaced. As it turned out, I hadn’t left the coffee machine on at all. Someone had filled the apparatus with an inch of water and then run a brewing cycle. The result was a layer of heat-laminated sludge in the bottom of the glass carafe that must have sat on the burner for hours. I flipped the button to the Off position. I’d probably have to toss the carafe, as there was no way I’d ever scrub it clean. The roll of paper toweling had been removed from the holder and now rested in the sink, where the hot water faucet had been turned on to a trickle. I turned the water off, wondering how much my water bill would jump in consequence.

  I removed the plastic wastebasket from under the sink, intending to toss in the sodden roll of paper towels. As usual, I’d lined the waste bin with a plastic bag to simplify trash removal. A small gray mouse leaped ineffectually up the sides of the bag, frantic to escape, but unable to achieve sufficient purchase. This was made all the more problematic by the fact that the same man who’d gone to such lengths to touch everything I owned had also defecated in the bin.

  17

  I took the wastebasket out the back
door, laid it on its side, and watched as the mouse skittered off and disappeared into a patch of grass behind the bungalow. Gingerly, I removed the plastic bag and deposited both the bag and its unsavory contents in the rolling garbage bin. I returned to the kitchenette and locked the door, using the hem of my T-shirt to preserve any latent prints the intruder had probably been too smart to leave behind. I went into my inner office and sat down.

  This was the long and short of it, at least in my analysis: The mouse was free, so good news on that score. If I notified the police—a decision I hadn’t arrived at yet—it would not be because I expected anyone to be charged with breaking and entering, vandalism, or malicious mischief. Shitting on a mouse is not expressly forbidden under California law. A nice officer would arrive in response to my 9-1-1 call and he’d write up an incident report, much as the nice officers had done when Ruthie made a similar call. No APB would result. A forensic specialist would not perform a DNA analysis on the turd left in the wastebasket, nor would the turd data be entered into the National Crime Information Center database for comparison to criminal turds nationwide. Whether I called the cops or not, I’d have to have my locks changed and an alarm system installed. I had no doubt my intruder and Ruthie’s were the same man. Prove it, I could not, which meant I had no recourse. I was royally pissed off.

  I heard the door open in the outer office.

  “Kinsey?” The voice was Taryn Sizemore’s.

  “Just the person I was hoping to see.”

  She appeared in the doorway and then stood transfixed as she took in the sight. “Oh, wow. Poor you. Ned Lowe’s been here.”

  “Thanks. I’d be interested in your reasons for saying so.”

  She wore a starched white cotton shirt with the collar turned up, belted over tight jeans. Big bracelets, big earrings, high-heeled boots with buckles up the sides. I could still see the roller shapes in her shoulder-length curls. I’d look ridiculous in that outfit. She looked great. I envied her black leather shoulder bag, which was bigger than mine and appeared to have more compartments.

  She dropped her bag on the floor. “It’s his style: hostile and aggressive. Wherever he is now, he knows what he’s done to you and he’s happy with himself. You’ll never walk in here again without bracing yourself on the off chance he’s been in while you were gone.”

  “What a shitheel.”

  “This is just for openers. There’s probably more where this came from.”

  “Oh joy.”

  She chose one of the two visitors’ chairs and took a seat, pausing to align the chairs so they were parallel. Her eyes strayed to the window blinds. “You mind?”

  “Have at it. Eventually, I’ll tidy up, but I thought I’d sit here and appreciate the care and planning that went into this.”

  She crossed to the window and adjusted the blinds, corrected the blinds on the other window, closed the file drawers, and then sat down again. “You must be his type, the same way I was.”

  “That makes three of us, including Pete’s widow, Ruth.”

  “He paid her a visit, too?”

  “She found her door standing open when she came home from work. Scared the hell out of her. I can’t figure out how he knew about me. It looks like he’s been getting into her place to listen to phone messages and diddle around with her things, but that doesn’t explain how he came up with my name and address.”

  “It’s probably something obvious, but you’ll worry about it for days, which is all part of his plan. Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?”

  “Who cares? I’m glad to have company while I’m freaking out.”

  “I should let you decompress.”

  “I don’t want to decompress. I want to call the police.”

  She slid her watch around on her wrist so she could check the time. “Call ’em later. Took me eight minutes to walk over here. We’ll assume another eight on the return. I have a client coming in on her lunch hour, so I need to get back in time to intercept her.”

  “I hope you’re here to help.”

  “I am,” she said. “Feels odd, though. I’m not used to being on this side of the confessional.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “I’m tired of having Ned rule my life. You want to know about my relationship with him, I’m happy to oblige.”

  “Ready when you are.”

  “Fine. Let’s start with the lawsuit and why I settled instead of fighting the good fight. I had a nervous breakdown when I was eighteen. The doctors decided on a diagnosis of clinical hysterical personality, derived from the Perley-Guze checklist: fifty-five symptoms, any twenty-five of which had to be present in at least nine of ten predetermined symptom groups. Can you believe this shit? I was having extended panic attacks that presented as psychotic breaks. I was in the hospital for two weeks and I came out on a cocktail of prescription medications. Once they got the mix right, I was fine. Chat therapy, of course, but that was more to benefit the psychiatric staff, composed of—guess what? All guys.”

  “And that’s what Byrd-Shine came up with when they did the deep background on you?”

  “Oh yes. They turned up the name of the hospital, admission and release dates, my doctors’ names, and all the drugs I was on.”

  “How hard did they have to dig? You must have had friends willing to supply all the nitty-gritty details.”

  “That was my assumption. None of my friends were sworn to secrecy, but I assumed I could trust their discretion. What a disappointment.”

  “So what was the big deal? You spend two weeks in the hospital and then you’re fine. Where could Ned’s attorney go with that?”

  “Character assassination. He’d paint me as a basket case—unstable, vindictive, and paranoid. I was suing Ned for emotional harm. All Ruffner had to do was to point out how nuts I was and Ned became the victim of my delusional state.”

  “Didn’t you have proof he harassed and threatened you?”

  “I had phone records, but no witnesses. I didn’t realize how carefully he set me up.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I had all the notes he left on my car and my front porch and my mailbox and anyplace else he could think of that might unnerve me. You wanna know what the notes said? Things like ‘I love you.’ ‘Please forgive me.’ ‘You mean the world to me.’ ‘I wish you’d let me get close.’ I could see how it would look to a jury. I’d have been burned at the stake.”

  “How’d you get involved with him in the first place?”

  “We worked for the same company. I was marketing. He was outside sales.”

  “Wasn’t that a no-no?”

  “Yes and no. Generally, it was frowned on, but the policy wasn’t spelled out in any great detail. As long as we didn’t let the relationship impact our work, everybody looked the other way.”

  “How long did you date him?”

  “A year and a half. The first six months were great, then things started to get weird. Ned’s a photography buff, so he wanted to take pictures of me, which doesn’t sound bad on the face of it, but believe me, there was some kind of pathology at work. He insisted I wear this special outfit, along with a wig and makeup. I could see what he was up to: turning me into someone else. I’m just not sure who. He also had sliiightly kinky taste when it came to sex.”

  “Oh please, no details,” I said in haste. “Had to be about control, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely. And that was just the beginning. He became obsessed with what I did and who I saw and whether I talked to friends about him, which I didn’t. I didn’t dare. He checked phone bills and read my mail. If I mentioned someone else at work—male or female—he was all over it. ‘What did you talk about?’ ‘How much time did you spend?’ ‘If everything was so innocent, why wasn’t I included?’ On and on it went.

  “He’s the master of escalation. Any p
rotest I made, any step I took to protect myself, he upped the ante. At one point I got a temporary restraining order, and you know what he did? He called the police and claimed I’d thrown a pipe wrench that hit him in the head. He was bloody and he had a knot the size of my fist, but he did it to himself.”

  “The police actually showed up?”

  “Of course. I was arrested and put in handcuffs. I spent eight hours in jail until I got someone to post bail. After that, at the slightest provocation, he’d threaten me with the cops.”

  “And you were still working with him?”

  “Uh, no. What happened was I went to my boss and told him what was going on. I got fired. Ned got promoted.”

  “Can we talk about the settlement? I don’t mean to put you in an awkward position.”

  She dismissed that. “Not a problem. Honestly. I’ve thought about it and I can’t see that I’d be in jeopardy even if you broadcast details, which I don’t think you’d do. At the time, Ned scared the shit out of me, but I see now he was more frightened of me than I was of him. The settlement was seventy-five.”

  “Thousand?” I asked in disbelief.

  She nodded.

  I said, “Oh, man. That’s not good. If you’d told me five grand, I’d have said it was a token payment, Ned trying to get you out of his hair. Seventy-five thousand sounds like a payoff motivated by guilt. He must have thought you had him by the short hairs, or why cough up that much?”

  “Not my attorney’s response. He told me it was a good deal. More than I’d have gotten from a jury even if they’d sided with me, which he didn’t think they would. He urged me to take it.”

  “I’ll bet he did. He wanted to make sure you could pay his bill, which must have been substantial.”

  “He took fifteen thousand off the top.”

  “How does Pete fit into this? You said he showed up a year ago.”

  “He came to apologize.”

  The four words were not what I’d expected. “Apologize? For what?”