Mackenzie lifted one eyebrow. He was interested, or at least half interested. “Where was his own transportation? Was that the SUV? I take it that it wasn’t in front of the house when you arrived.”
I shook my head.
“So he had help, is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. And another thing—the one bright point Collins made was why anybody would choose today to enter and rob the house since it’s been unoccupied for three weeks.”
“For sale sign up yet?”
“Not yet. Not until it’s ‘staged.’” I realized what I’d said. “Well, I guess that isn’t going to happen.”
“Maybe they’d been in it a lot of times since Phoebe died. Only today, somebody else was there.”
Of course. I pondered that. Mackenzie was silent, looking off at the far wall. I realized that our conversation, since I’d come home, had been completely one-sided. Stumbling upon a murder scene probably trumps most other domestic news, but still and all, Mackenzie had a bundle of troubles on his shoulders, and he deserved more consideration.
His day had not been at all good. “Almost feels as if there’s a vendetta out for Louisiana,” he said. “You aren’t going to believe this, but a tornado hit them earlier today.”
I hadn’t seen the news and the car radio, never great, was on the fritz. “Are they—” He nodded. “Did it…?” Mackenzie’s father had owned a small hardware store for decades before the hurricane. He’d been struggling against the big-box chain stores, but he had a good reputation and a loyal clientele, all of whom would be more than happy to deal with him now—if only he still had a store. But it was half submerged in water and unsalvageable. So with a little help from his friends, and after lengthy, frustrating negotiations with the relevant government bodies, he’d relocated and begun the rebuilding process. When last I heard, the frame of the new place was up and the Mackenzie family spirits were on the rise. “The store?” I finally squeaked out. “Tell me no.”
But he nodded instead. “The winds.” Then he shook his head. “An’ a school that was goin’ up, too. None of the schools nearby are even open yet.”
The school Philly Prep was going to adopt next semester was one of those still closed. There was no habitable building and its students were scattered, living in several states, waiting to come back to homes that no longer existed. Our funds would be a drop in the bucket—and buckets and drops were not what Louisiana needed these days.
“It’s December,” he said. “Hard to believe that much time’s gone and nothing’s happening, or so far from enough is happening, and hurricane season will start again and nothing to come home to, unless you’re a fish.”
A goodly amount of acreage that had been near water was now under it. Lots of new swamps. Lots of former neighbors with nowhere to build or start over. “It’s makin’ some of the people who stayed, who are helping, reconsider. Can’t blame them. What are their kids going to do? How will they catch up? How’s my dad ever gettin’ back on his feet? Mom’s been doing relief work, whatever she can find that helps anybody. There’s precious little she can do for her own self, though. I’ve never heard them sound so without hope.”
I’d never heard him sound that way, either.
“It is supposedly impossible for people to exist in a crisis state for long without their going insane,” he said. “I learned that in Psych I a long time ago. I think of it twenty times a day now.”
I took his hand and held on tight, and hoped that communicated thick volumes’ worth of words. Not only was his family in a long-term crisis, but so was he. It was impossible to stay this way much longer. The man was overstressed, physically and emotionally.
He took a deep breath and smiled, easing the tightness around my heart a bit. “Ah,” he said. “All it takes is a world-class, history-book-making catastrophe and its unending aftermath to make you forget to nag me.”
“I never do!”
“You do, you do.”
He’d been right about people not being able to endure continuous stress. He’d gone insane. Nag? Me? “About what? Name one thing—anything! I can’t even think of anything you do or don’t do that would require nagging.”
“If I hadn’t softened you up with a reminder of what my parents and siblings are going through”—he held up his free hand to stop the protests already shaping on my lips—“you’d sure as I’m sitting here have already asked me what I’d been doing about Phoebe’s case. Am I right?”
“I don’t know. Phoebe’s case looks completely different now.”
“That’s nitpicking. Would you or wouldn’t you have asked? Even if it had changed and we had to look at all new things.”
“Asking a question is not nagging!”
“That’s the Amanda variation of nagging,” he said softly. “It’s an elegant subset of the art of nagging, but it’s nagging all the same.”
I took a deep breath. “In that case, forget about Louisiana. Forget your ongoing family tragedies! What the devil have you done about Phoebe’s case? Anything? No? I didn’t think so! I’ve asked and I’ve asked and do you ever do what you say you will? Or do you only—”
His eyes were wide open.
I laughed. “That, my dear, is nagging,” I said. “I must say it was fun. But I hope you see the difference. I merely ask questions. Fishwives nag. And I didn’t even ask questions today because I am compassionate and understanding, and I know you’re too busy between school and your family—”
“And Ozzie’s.”
“And Ozzie’s.”
“Ah, but I did work on it,” he said. “And I found out something real interestin’. And because you were so considerate—”
“And didn’t nag. Not today or ever.”
“And because you never nag, here it is: Dennis didn’t leave town Sunday.”
“That plane?”
“No plane to catch, no rush. Far as I know, he’s still here.”
“How do you know that?”
“You asked me to check up on him so, of course, I did.” He gave a golly-gee-whiz shrug and smiled.
It was difficult resisting that smile—or any of his smiles—and it was such a joy to see it because it appeared less often since the hurricane, but I tried to keep a serious business talk.
“Okay,” he said. “I was checking his credit rating, which isn’t stellar. The man does not have a head for business. I was going over his recent purchases and to my surprise, they were made here, in good old Philadelphia, the past three days.”
“Did they include a rental car?” I asked quietly.
Mackenzie nodded.
“How soon can you find out what kind?” I whispered, as if someone might have been eavesdropping.
He winked. “But you just mentioned that Merilee drives one, too.”
“But what would Merilee have to do with Toy?”
“That’s what sleuthin’s all about, darlin’. Who knows how they’re connected. That’s for you to find out.”
“Maybe there was no connection with Toy in the first place,” I said slowly. “Maybe the link was with whatever Merilee might have been searching for in the house. Toy was just in the way.”
“There you go. That’s as good a thought as any.”
The blip of excitement I’d felt dissipated. “Even if it’s a real thing, it’s all we have, and it’s so little,” I said. “It’s tissue thin.”
Another cosmic Mackenzie shrug, followed by a wink. “Don’t knock tissue,” he said. “If that’s all you’ve got holding you up, then it only means you have to build layers of it, pack it tight, and then tread gently. It doesn’t mean you can’t tread at all.”
I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but he was going to have to peddle his folksy wisdom elsewhere. I was a Philadelphia girl. Give me good, solid cynicism any day. You’d think he’d have known it and swallowed the pitiable homily before he said it.
But I didn’t say any of that, and as far as I could tell, t
hat was my greatest accomplishment for that day.
Twelve
* * *
* * *
I resorted to list-making, a favorite desperation method of untangling my brain. I headed the page: Who Wanted What?
That yielded nothing but question marks.
New page:
Q: What did Phoebe and Toy’s death have in common?
A: Phoebe’s house as their setting.
Q: Why would somebody return?
A: To get more.
Q: Of what?
A:
Q: What did he get the first time?
A: Who knows? When Sasha had found Phoebe, she’d had no handle on what might be missing, if anything was. And maybe, as Mackenzie had suggested, the thief had been back several times since, not just today.
Q: What is the point of these questions?
Had anybody looked for signs of a break-in before today? I couldn’t think why they might have, so the house could have been used as somebody’s personal department store for a while now.
But of what? Why? Sasha hadn’t noticed anything missing the night she’d found Phoebe dead, and if the two deaths were connected, and this one looked like attempted robbery, then shouldn’t the first one look like that, too?
Shouldn’t the silver have been taken the first round?
Or between Phoebe’s death and this week?
A: There is no point to these questions. They have no answers. They go in circles. They make me weary.
It wasn’t a matter of treading lightly, it was a matter of not having any idea where to tread in the first place. I backtracked instead. I’d done a haphazard job of looking into the carton Sasha had given me, and at the laptop for that matter. I’d only just figured out the password, when Toy appeared. It was time to go through everything systematically. It might be an exercise in futility, but I had no better ideas.
The carton held a lot of souvenirs: theater programs and the matchbook covers Sasha had been so excited about, clippings about art openings, invitations to weddings, cocktail parties, and lots of condolence cards the new widow had saved.
I went through that last group, wondering why I was doing so, because even I didn’t believe the killer would send a sympathy card. But perhaps it would expand my idea of Phoebe’s friends and acquaintances.
Aside from the souvenir papers, there wasn’t much. Her stationery—much of it appropriated from hotel rooms—was composed of stamps, 3 × 5 cards, a bunch of half-empty ballpoint pens, and a small cache of greeting cards waiting for occasions to send them: two expressing sympathy, two birthdays, one happy new baby, one anniversary, and three blanks. Most were too ornate and sentimental for my taste, but they echoed Phoebe’s aesthetics.
And from her refrigerator door: three cartoons that involved dogs and cats, a calendar magnet from an aspirin maker, and the clipping about a local taping of Antiques Roadshow. Poor Phoebe, but maybe it was for the best that she hadn’t been able to drag her beloved objects into the glare of the experts’ scrutiny. Aside from that, there were a few business cards: one from a manicure salon offering special prices for the new year, another from some place named “Extraordinaire!” that sold “fine objects.” An image of her home flashed through my mind—the overabundance of “fine objects.” The card seemed to signify that even too much wasn’t enough, that she was out scouting for more. I found as well a two pounds for the price of one coupon for spaghetti and a promised discount for driveway resurfacing.
A lot of nothing. I opened the laptop and looked at the icons again. I’d only gone through that one “shopping” file in her word processing program, but hadn’t looked at her e-mails, and it was time to check out the shortcut icons to three dating programs.
“Need help?” Mackenzie asked. “You’ve been sighing so much, I thought we were having a windstorm.”
My impulse is always to refuse an offer of help, and I can defend that a dozen ways, at least some of which explanations are the truth. But I was spinning wheels, and the more quickly I could get through this whole business, the better, so I stifled the urge to explain why I didn’t need any assistance whatsoever or to consider how squeezed Mackenzie’s time was and how wrong it was to bother him with this.
I thanked him and accepted his offer.
“What do you know about online dating?” I asked. He pulled a chair close to mine, and watched as I reopened the first of the matchmaking sites.
“Lots,” he said. “An’ this is good. She opted to automatically sign on.”
“And that’s good because?” I clicked the link.
“Because she told them to save her password, we can see who she’s been talking with—or, at least, the fake names she’s been in contact with. We couldn’t do that otherwise without a lot of dealing with the sites.”
“How do you know so much about this sort of thing?”
With a bemused expression, he said, as if speaking to the computer, not me, “How quickly they forget. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, I was a homicide detective.” Then he turned and spoke to me directly. “Phoebe is not the only dead person who looked for love online.”
Phoebe’s online meet-a-mate service’s “datebook” had messages from a cryptic trio. The first, HM47, said he thought they had a lot in common, judging by her profile, and he was looking forward to meeting her as soon as she got back from London.
“London?” I asked. “She wasn’t there. Sasha was.”
“Probably a lie she was using to keep anybody from expecting to meet her too soon. A kind of firewall against the impetuous.”
“It’s dated about a week before she died.”
“Could be, could be.”
“I hope that forty-seven isn’t his age,” I said. “She lied about her age and said she was in her forties.”
“Must get fairly comic at times when the correspondents meet up.”
The second message, from “Sizzler” said, “Your 2 hot! So M I! Why don’t we see what spontaneously combusts?”
I hoped Phoebe had not opted to respond to that one.
And finally, a woeful message that should have come with red warning flags attached: “Miserable till you” wrote: “I have been searching forever for my soul mate, saving myself for her, but so far, I’ve had no luck. But I looked into your eyes in the photo online (wish you hadn’t been wearing that hat so I could see more of you) and I finally knew I’d found her. When and where can we meet?” He signed himself just plain “Miserable.”
I hadn’t been around the block nearly as much as Phoebe, but I knew that the ones who needed to introduce themselves as poor, pitiful me’s, the lonely, soulful, nobody-till-you guys, were seldom good news. There was always a reason they’d been lonely for so long. They were, indeed, undoubtedly, miserable.
The other dating programs did not have automatic sign-ins, and I theorized that she’d inspected and bookmarked them for future use. Perhaps for when she had her new, hatless, updated photo from Sasha.
I showed Mackenzie the password that got us into Phoebe’s calendar and datebook. I was worried that even if there was something important in it, I wouldn’t recognize it. I had only the most cursory acquaintance with Phoebe, and that was mostly memories of two decades ago. I said something to that effect to Mackenzie, and he reminded me that investigators seldom know victims personally, and I should focus on what little I did know.
Phoebe had been a scattered sort of person back when I hung around her household. She’d had many interests, none of which, except the genealogy, lasted long. Record-keeping had not been a strength back then, and it was already obvious that it still wasn’t. The “M” on the calendar day she died had shown that people don’t change just because they buy a computer. Years ago, Phoebe left unintelligible notes for Sasha in what we’d come to call “Phoebehand” because it so heavily relied on abbreviations and symbols of her own making, including small drawings that were cute but unrecognizable. She always showed up when she said she would, and was mys
tified when we couldn’t understand her messages.
Given that messages here had to be typed out, there were no cunning little people making strange gestures, no objects depicted, no visual puns. But she’d adapted her quirky shorthand to the computer keyboard, and the abbreviations were still there, and still by and large unintelligible to anyone but, presumably, the deceased.
“So where’s the PDA?” Mackenzie asked. When he saw my puzzled expression, he said, “This program—it has a handheld part, too. You know. The little gizmo she’d carry with her in her purse.”
“Purse!” I bent over and pawed through the cartons, in case I’d actually missed seeing something as significant as Phoebe’s bag.
I hadn’t. “Never got it,” I said. Given that most women I know, and certainly I myself, basically carry their lives and brains inside their handbags, I found this incredible, both on Sasha’s part and mine. I was sure the missing pocketbook hadn’t registered with either of us, and I thought of what would have been in it: money and credit cards, keys, makeup, calendars, address books, phones, receipts, photographs, pens, notebooks—very close to everything that might yield a clue as to what had happened to her. Who had taken it?
My back was to Mackenzie. “Feel free to have any derogatory thoughts you like,” I said. “You can even think words like ‘inept amateurs’—but please don’t say them. I’m saying them to myself.”
“I was not even thinkin’ them,” he said. He had to be lying.
I phoned Sasha. “Phoebe’s pocketbook is missing,” I said.
“Which one? The woman had a shoe and bag fetish. She had thirty bags at least.”
“The one she was using the night she died.”
“She wasn’t using any. She was in her own house.”
“Sasha! The one currently in use. The one in which she kept her wallet and car keys!”
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