The Boy Who Appeared from the Rain
Page 26
Rock music blared through the walls. Fingers tucked inside thin gloves, clean and black, tapped the beat on an immaculate oak table as the black-hooded figure surveyed the room. It belonged to Hugh McWrait, the man listed first on the paper the figure had found, the man who would be the first to pay. It was the man's very own bedroom, spacious and opulent, with its own kitchenette, wine cabinet, and oak dining table tucked off to one side.
Somewhere in this room there would be money hidden. Inexplicably, rich people always kept a stash in their bedroom. The figure would find it, and McWrait would pay for his interest in the boy.
That McWrait was hosting a Sunday evening party in his great hall was fortuitous. That his sentries at the front door had been amenable to a small…contribution…was doubly so. A few hundred dollars had permitted the figure entry, and once inside the great hall, it had been simple enough to slip away from the party and into the living quarters of McWrait's mansion. A brief search had turned up this room, and now the figure stood at the table, trying to guess where a man of McWrait's flamboyance would conceal his cash reserves.
The walk-in closet seemed too obvious; any ordinary thief would have ransacked it first and likely found little of value. No, McWrait loved indulgence, but for all his excesses, he also esteemed finesse. His personal treasure trove would be somewhere simple and inconspicuous.
The figure checked the tall, oak wardrobe beside the bed. McWrait apparently had a taste for oak. The garments inside—suits and sweaters, mostly—were exquisite, but a careful investigation around them revealed no secret compartments, no detachable panels. The figure closed the wardrobe.
Perhaps the cupboards in the kitchenette. Again, though, a quick but thorough search uncovered nothing. He knelt beside the oak table and peered up at its underside; once, last year, he had discovered a wad of cash strapped in such a place at the home of another man who was wealthier than he had a right to be. But here, the table concealed no secrets.
The rock music suddenly blared louder—someone was opening the bedroom door. The figure jumped to his feet and darted toward a sliding glass door that looked out onto a wooden deck and a fabulous nighttime view of Puget Sound west of Seattle—but too late.
"Hold it!" a man's voice cried as the bedroom door swung fully open..
One gloved hand on the handle of the sliding door, the figure turned. The man entering the room was McWrait himself, in his mid-fifties and somehow looking both rich and disheveled, the top buttons of his dress shirt unfastened as he stumbled into his bedroom. His eyes were too wide and his face was too merry; even from across the room he reeked of alcohol. A martini in his left hand sloshed as he stepped into the room and did not quite manage to remain entirely within the confines of its glass.
"W-What are you doing in here?" McWrait stammered, his enunciation slurred. "You don't clean the room during the p-party!"
The figure narrowed his eyes at McWrait, assessing the danger. He knew he should run while he had the opportunity, before McWrait called for the guards who policed his estate. But the man appeared to be too drunk to recognize a thief in his bedroom tonight, and another chance to search this room would be hard to come by—so the figure risked remaining a little longer.
McWrait took a clumsy sip of his martini and pointed a finger in the figure's general direction. "You're the—the new guy," he mumbled, as if to himself. "You don't know!" He thrust a fist into the air as if to make some proclamation. "You don't know that house staff do not clean during the party! You wait on—the—guests."
The figure's eyes widened now at the other man's display of inebriated bravado.
McWrait grinned at the figure. "Why do you w-wear that hood over your head? Are you really that ugly?" The man bellowed out laughter at his joke. Then his face darkened and his laughter broke off suddenly. "Turn around!" he ordered.
The figure merely stared at him.
"Around! I need to get something…personal. For my girlfriend. And you mustn't look…" McWrait chuckled as if this were a great game.
The figure played along, but kept his hand poised on the sliding door handle as he turned his back to McWrait; a quick escape could become necessary in a hurry if the "something personal" McWrait reached for turned out to be a weapon.
McWrait squatted beside his bed; the figure could see him reflected clearly in the glass door. There were drawers built into the frame beneath the bed, and McWrait drew out the one in the middle. Without glancing back to check on the black-gloved figure, he removed it completely, then reached into the space it had vacated and felt around inside the frame. He located what he desired and pulled it out—a large manila envelope. From it he withdrew a bracelet glittering with diamonds that, given McWrait's fortune, were assuredly real; then he returned the envelope to its place, reset the drawer, and stood again.
"Now you may look," he told the figure, as if doing him a favor. The figure turned back toward him. McWrait stepped unsteadily to his bedroom door. "No more cleaning, my man. To the party!" He glanced back as he reached the corridor, then shut the door behind him, leaving the black-gloved figure alone again.
The figure waited just a moment to be sure McWrait was gone, then quickly reenacted the man's removal of the drawer and the envelope—McWrait's bedroom treasure trove. The figure searched it swiftly, but it was not what he had expected—no cash, no valuables now that the bracelet had been removed. Instead, it contained a single sheet of paper with two lines of handwriting scrawled on it. The first line offered only the words, "store #1," "office," and "ships." After these came a series of five numbers separated by dashes—a combination for a safe, perhaps.
The figure smiled, pleasantly impressed. McWrait did not keep his treasure trove here in his room, after all. He owned several stores, and his treasure would be in the first, inside the office—somewhere near ships? This was an intriguing mystery.
The figure drew a tiny notebook from the pocket of his jacket and copied down the information, then replaced McWrait's paper within the manila envelope, which he returned to its hiding place. When he had settled the drawer back into its proper position, he slipped across the bedroom and out the sliding glass door into the night, eager to search out and claim McWrait's treasure.
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