by Alison Bruce
I must have had that ‘my daughter isn’t leaving my side’ look on my face.
“There’s a party tonight. According to Nate, there’s also a boy she likes. My son is jealous, of course,” he said straight-faced, “but he realizes he’s too old for your daughter.”
Seth deferred his plans to take the kids to his family’s farm so I could have my children home with me for a week. For a little while, I was able to pretend that I had some semblance of control over my life. Merrick officially declared that protective custody was being relaxed. The information that had been stolen was out of date, so the spies weren’t interested in me anymore, apparently. My house was wired with security features that rivalled the Prime Minister’s home. We were allowed to go back to our lives.
For the kids, this meant reconnecting with all their friends. I insisted that their friends come over. I wanted to keep the kids close, at least for a couple of days. Since they had newly decorated rooms to show off, this was no hardship. By midday, midweek, Boone’s cast was half-filled with messages and signatures and he was determined to cover the remaining space. He was at a soccer game that a couple of his friends were playing in, under the watchful eye of one of the friend’s parents. There would be enough of his friends and their families present to achieve his goal.
Hope was at her best friend’s home, making use of the pool. After dropping her off, I used the time alone to catch up on bills and all the promotional tweeting, posting, and blogging expected of today’s authors.
I needed a break and I needed coffee. I was just debating whether to make a pot at home or go out, when Walter tapped on my back door.
“Hey, neighbour,” he said, giving me a quick hug. “How’s it going? I heard Boone broke his arm. I was on a fishing trip or I would have dropped by sooner.”
“Catch anything?” I asked.
“Nothing we didn’t eat while we were at the lodge.”
I headed for the kitchen.
“I’m making coffee, want some?”
“Only if you sit outside while we drink it. It’s a gorgeous day and you’ve been chained to your computer too long.”
I sighed but set aside my impatience. Maybe, to a retired contractor, working at a computer did seem like being chained down. In fairness, my mother had the same attitude to my writing.
I sniffed the beans in my canister and decided they were a bit stale. Instead, I used the package of coffee I had been given by the barista at a bookstore/café where I was signing books a week or so ago. I listened to the soft woof of air entering the vacuum cylinder and missed the first part of a comment Walter was making about the renovations.
“You haven’t seen it yet, have you?” I asked, once the coffee was brewing. “I should give you the penny tour.”
He was suitably impressed by the new flooring and paint and maybe a little put out that some of his repairs had been done over.
“You won’t need my help around here for a while.”
I laughed.
“It’s an old house,” I said. “I’m sure something will come up eventually—and there’s always the gardening. Even when I have time, I don’t have your knowledge.”
“Speaking of the garden, I’m pretty sure you’ve got a coon under your deck.”
I let Walter tell me all the ways I could get rid of racoons while I poured coffee and set out a few cookies on a plate. I loaded these on a tray and led the way to the deck in question, where a wrought iron table and four chairs almost filled the whole area. Beyond the deck was a lawn that usually looked unkempt, but this year was lush and well-manicured.
“That gardening book was an extravagant gift,” Walter said once we were seated. “And don’t say it’s the least you could do,” he added, forestalling that exact sentiment. “Now that my garden is in shape, I’ve appreciated having another yard to putter in. You don’t owe me a thing.”
I made a few of those inarticulate noises one makes when someone else has left you with nothing to say.
“Next year I’m going to try to recreate one of the beds in Kew Gardens. That book isn’t just gorgeous photos, it includes plans and suggested plantings.”
“Ah,” I said, hoping he meant in his yard not mine.
He chuckled.
“Not your thing, Prudence?”
“I like what you’ve done here,” I said, trying to sound apologetic for being horticulturally challenged. Actually, it was a bit too structured for my tastes, but at least the weeds were all gone.
“It’s based on an Italian garden I once visited.”
He talked about the various plants he had chosen and why. Since he used the official names, it was all Latin to me. I let the words wash over me.
“Prudence? Earth to Prudence.”
“Sorry, Walter.”
I gave him a sheepish smile
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Not that far away. Walter, what do you know about trees?”
He gave a half shrug. “I know a little bit.”
“What kind of tree would do well in this yard?”
That stumped him for a minute.
“Well, you can’t plan until next spring but now is a good time to plan. You want a bit of height? Maybe lilac? I wouldn’t suggest crab apple. You won’t enjoy raking up the apples in the fall.”
“I was thinking oak or maple.”
He shook his head.
“You have to think ahead. A tree like that would cast your whole yard in shade within a decade. That wouldn’t do much for your flower garden.”
“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t need an umbrella.”
Walter was no help at all, so I went to an arborist the day after Seth picked up the kids. Then I called the city about underground pipes and cables. Finally, to appease Walter, I got out my camera and recorded the formal garden he’d created before I cast it, metaphorically for now, in the shade. Next spring, we would plant the Red Maple I had picked out.
Meanwhile, I uploaded the images on my camera to my computer. I wanted to give Walter a collage of garden photos and, while I was at it, I decided to finally sort out my images. As I worked my way through my cache, I got to the ones I took the day after I found the body in my living room.
I had to laugh at myself. There I had been, obsessing about a bit of garbage and a trampled garden. What on earth would I have done with the photos anyway?
Then I thought, why was the garden trampled?
The garbage in the front yard had blown in overnight. I concluded this, based on the fact that the police were very careful about taking the same route in and out of the house and keeping people behind the yellow tape—including any officers who weren’t actually working on the crime scene. Besides, I was always getting crap blown onto my lawn. The juniper bushes that spread across the front of the house and partway down the edge of the drive, acted like a catcher’s mitt for windblown litter —like the coffee cups and cigarette butts of the bystanders.
I didn’t see what was going on at the back of my house, but I assumed the police took the same care not to disturb things. That meant they probably were not the ones to trample my poor excuse for a garden. The trampler was probably the guy who broke into my house, or the person who killed him.
But why go into the garden?
I had a gate that led to the driveway, but it didn’t lock. The path from the gate led directly to the stairs up to the deck and my unlocked back door. It made sense entering through the back, especially if you were expecting to have to break and enter, not just walk in. Less chance of being seen. Still, there was no reason to go to the end of the garden to stomp on a few snowdrop shoots and the remains of last year’s annuals. I looked at the photos of the crushed vegetation. There were no clear footprints. In fact, as I compared different photos, it seemed to me that the reason it was such a mess was that someone was covering up footprints by scuffing up the dirt.
That still didn’t address why they had to step into the garden in the first place.
Then it occurred to me
that maybe the police had created the scuffs when they were looking for, or removing evidence.
It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to discover anything the police didn’t already know, but it niggled at me. What I needed to do was look at the crime scene photos.
I’m a lousy liar, but I can weave a pretty good story and I learned the value of persistence from my children. When I called Detective Parrino, there wasn’t a lot I could tell him. In fact, I wasn’t sure exactly what I could talk about that wasn’t classified. I figured I was on safe ground telling him about my photo shoot and my daughter’s fascination with true crime.
“So I just want to compare the photos I took to real crime scene photos. They’re not secret, are they? I’m not asking for the ones taken of the body and my living room—you probably don’t want to release those. It’s only the ones—”
“Ms. Hartley,” Parrino interrupted, “if you want to come here, I’ll arrange for you to look at the photos on one of our terminals.”
I’m almost positive he agreed just to shut me up.
We made an appointment for the day after next. In the interim, I went over older photographs of the garden. I didn’t have any shots focussing on the back of the garden, but I found a few with my kids playing in the foreground with the back fence behind them. There were quite a few from when we first moved in, and a couple of useful shots almost every summer since. I scanned the pre-digital photos and enlarged the ones with a good view of the flower bed along the back fence. I put the lot together on a memory card and then made a cup of tea and took some painkillers for the resulting headache.
When I met Detective Parrino, he seemed to be having second thoughts about leaving me alone at a terminal. Bringing my laptop with me probably didn’t help.
“I can’t give you much time, Ms. Hartley.”
“I don’t think I’ll need much time, Detective. Mostly I’m curious about my backyard.”
He pulled up the photos. They showed footprints—most of them scuffed—on the steps and on my deck.
“How about farther into the yard—the flower bed along the back.”
Parrino scrolled through the thumbnails.
“Is this what you mean?”
The photos confirmed what I suspected. The garden was trampled before the police arrived. They also showed something my photos didn’t. The person that trampled the plants had come from my house.
Two people entered my home via the back door. On the way in, they took the most economical route. One person came out the back, trampled the garden, then apparently left via the gate.
“Why?” I mused. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“He might have tried to jump the fence, failed, and gave up. We didn’t find prints or fibres on the fence, but that only means that he was wearing gloves and he didn’t catch his clothing on the wood.”
For every photo I took, the police had taken at least three. I poured over them all, comparing them to mine, trying to see what I was missing.
“Ms. Hartley?”
Detective Parrino’s body language said what he was too polite to say himself. I had to pack up and let him get back to work. I started to shut down the windows I’d opened on my laptop. The last one to go showed of Hope and her friends with the fence line behind them.
“That’s it!”
“Ms. Hartley?”
He sounded mildly curious.
“Look at the fence behind my daughter’s head, and there behind her friend. Now look at the crime scene photos of the same area.”
The back fence was constructed with vertical boards alternating on either side of the supporting cross beams, so that it looked the same on both sides. On the group shot there were blocks under the exposed upper beam in two spots. They looked like braces and blended in with the wood. I never noticed them before but they were clearly in the photo taken last summer, and missing in the crime scene photos and the ones I took later. If you looked carefully, there was a slight difference in colour where whatever had been there, had protected the wood beneath.
I pulled up earlier photos. I archived most of my family shots on my laptop so I could show them off to family and friends during visits. The objects weren’t in the photos taken our first year in the house or the year after. There were no useful photos taken for the next couple of years, but among recent Halloween shots, I found them in a picture of Boone in his Spiderman costume, pretending to wall-crawl the fence.
“I see it, but I don’t get it,” said Parrino.
“Apparently, the murderer took something out of my garden—something that had been there for at least three years.”
“That much I get,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I don’t get what it is.”
I had an idea, but I didn’t like it.
I pulled out my phone. Merrick wasn’t available, so I left a message to call me.
“I want to email these photos to Sergeant Merrick,” I told Parrino.
“He has copies of all the crime scene photos and reports.”
I shook off the objection.
“Even so, I’d like to send him the photos we were looking at—yours and mine. Then it won’t matter where he is when he picks up his voicemail.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
Merrick checked in with me regularly, but I had been bumped down his priority list. I think it was because nothing conclusive came out of the publicity gambit. Zeke stayed in touch via email. Through him, I got the impression they were involved in a related case—but I was only guessing.
“His work takes him all over, and I’m just one case.”
I hated thinking of myself as a part of Merrick’s job, but it was the truth. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was enough for Parrino.
The detective produced a memory card and I uploaded the key photos to it. He then downloaded the images to the terminal and started composing an email. I read over his shoulder while packing up my laptop. He gave the short version of me coming to him and offered the photos for Merrick’s consideration. Once the message and attachments were on their way, I prepared to leave.
“You shouldn’t mention this to anyone else, Ms. Hartley,” Parrino said, offering his hand.
“Don’t intend to. You have my cell phone number, right? Because I’m not going home. My ex asked me to check in on his place if I had the chance. I’ll stay there tonight.”
I picked up Chinese food and barricaded myself in Seth and Sarah’s guest room with the food, a pot of tea, and a couple of romantic comedies. I was midway through While You Were Sleeping when Merrick called.
“Where are you, Hartley?”
I told him.
“Am I being paranoid?” I asked.
“He can’t be sure, the quality of your home photos aren’t good enough, but Zeke is almost positive that the objects were surveillance equipment. Probably cameras.”
“Then I’m not being paranoid.”
“No, Hartley, not paranoid. You understand the implications if the murderer placed that equipment?”
“It wasn’t a chance encounter, at Starbucks. The guy who ended up dead in my living room was looking for me.”
I took a deep breath. Chinese food had settled my nerves and I was determined not to let the Singapore noodles and General Tao’s chicken be consumed in vain. My idea had been borne out and I liked it even less than when it first occurred to me.
“Why me?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “If that surveillance equipment was in use for three years, you’ve probably been an unwitting courier in the past.”
I fought down the chicken with willpower and green tea.
“It’s a convoluted but clever idea. It’s probably one of the reasons we’ve never been able to get anything on the ringleader. Even the people who work for him don’t meet him directly.”
“Will these people think I know who he is?”
I had to wait for an answer either because Merrick didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me.
“
Could that be the reason I was attacked in the hotel?” I asked. “I mean, the murderer would know that I didn’t know what was going on—that I’d have no answers to the location of the missing data card. But someone working with Nadar might have thought I knew something.”
“That is a logical conclusion.”
He was starting to sound Vulcan again.
“The ringleader probably never showed up at the book signings because he knew where to find me all along.”
“Probably true,” he agreed.
I blew out a noisy sigh.
“It was a waste of time then?”
“Not in the least, Hartley. We’ve identified a couple of people of interest—people who might have supplied data via his delivery system.”
“You mean me. But I didn’t recognize anyone I didn’t already know.”
“Nevertheless, I want you to look at them again.”
I wasn’t sure what else to say about the situation. If we were right, I was an unwitting traitor. A dupe. All I could think of was, why me? To voice the question again smacked of whining. I might be a dupe, but I was no whiner.
“When do Hope and Boone get home?” Merrick asked.
“In two days. I don’t want them to come back to this.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll have things wrapped up here by then. For now, go visit your friend in Toronto for a couple of days. I’ll meet you there the day after tomorrow.”
“And my kids?”
“I don’t think they are in any danger. Most likely, you aren’t either as long as our broker doesn’t suspect you know he was using you. Just in case, Nate can take them camping. He was going to suggest it earlier, but I said you’d probably want to spend time with Hope and Boone before school started.”
“Good call . . . on both counts.”
* * *
The day I returned home, my ducts were cleaned. That is, the man and woman who came to my door were in the overalls of a local heat and air service company, but the ID they showed was RCMP. I was impressed with their thoroughness as they scanned my house for devices. They even cleaned my heating system. It was a great cover for checking the house, except for one thing.