Home for a Spell

by Madelyn Alt

  He was right. Probably. I was just having some difficulty at that moment grasping how, when what could be a crucial piece of evidence in a murder investigation was missing.

  “Maggie. Look.” Liss had moved over to the window. Because the shades were pulled high, I could see the backyard clearly—the big oak tree in the center spreading shade all around with its sheltering arms, the old livery barn-now-garage off to the right, the tumble of wild roses along the fence in the back. It was so bright and pretty, with the breezes rustling through leaves and swaying branches, the filtered sunlight dappling the ground. A world apart from the strangeness.

  “No,” Liss said, gently nudging me. “There.” She pointed toward the ground. Or, more important, to what was lying on the ground. The first thought my scrambling brain came up with was Minnie, that Minnie had been up to her tricks . . . but Minnie was here. Inside, behind the closed window.

  “Tom . . .?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Tom, the screen to the window. It’s on the ground. And the window isn’t latched.” I had made sure to latch it last night. I know I had. Was it a window Marcus had opened while he was working this morning?

  “Just stay on the line. Christ. Have you checked the house?”

  I shook my head, not even caring or thinking that he couldn’t see me. “No. There was no indication that someone might have been in here.”

  “I want you to close yourself in the computer room until I get there. Does it have a lock on the door?”

  Too late. “Liss is already checking the house,” I told him, just seconds after she had slipped away into the hall. “I don’t think anyone is here, honestly. Why would they be? They have what they came for. I doubt they’d stick around.”

  Because that was it, really, wasn’t it? Whoever it was who was watching us in the computer room last night, they had known where to find it. The footprints beneath the window. They had been watching us, and now they had what they wanted. Had they been watching today for a time when we had both left the house? It seemed almost certain to me. I was at work, as usual. As soon as Marcus left, they made their move. Pretty gutsy, in broad daylight, but then the yards between properties were fenced and somewhat overgrown with tall bushes and vines. And since most people were at work, maybe it wasn’t such bad thinking after all. Because most people around here don’t have security systems and security cameras to worry about, they just locked their doors and their windows . . . if they thought about it at all.

  Security . . .

  My eyes opened wide as the precaution I’d taken as a vague afterthought last night suddenly returned to my thoughts. In my mind’s eye I saw myself as I had walked around the house, checking window lock after window lock, curtain after curtain and, as I moved past Marcus’s cameras, I saw myself switching them to “On” on a whim. Just in case. Because you never knew.

  “Cameras!” I blurted out loud.

  “What?”

  “Hang on!”

  I clicked the button for speaker phone, and clamping the phone in between my lips, I made my way toward the camera on the side of the house where, if anyone were to get to the backyard, they’d have to pass at some point.

  “Maggie, what is going on? Do you have me on speaker?”

  “Mm-hmm.” I unhooked the camera from its tripod and flipped open the side-panel display screen. “Han’ on a se’ond.”

  “It’s all clear in here, ducks.” Liss came up behind me to see what I was up to. She watched as I started rewinding back through the recording of the last sixteen hours.

  Outside we heard a car pull into the drive. Too fast. The tires squawked in protest.

  “I’m here,” Tom said into the phone. “Let me in.”

  Liss scurried to get to the door, while I kept rewinding, ever so slowly. Back, back, back . . .

  “What are you doing?”

  Tom was at my shoulder, but I wouldn’t take my eyes from the screen. “I turned this on last night, after you left. I just remembered. I was hoping . . . maybe . . . that I had caught whoever it was on camera.”

  “Well, look at you. When did you get so smart?” Tom asked.

  I made a face. “I will pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  Tom and Liss hovered over me, one at each of my shoulders, watching the screen as intently as I was.

  And there it was. Just prior to the noon siren, not ten minutes after Marcus had texted me that he would be leaving for the afternoon, looking like a normal, everyday woman about town.

  Yes, woman.

  Dressed in yoga pants and a zip-front workout jacket, with a baseball cap pulled down low, she might have been anyone out for an early afternoon jog. Except she walked past the window coming from the direction of Marcus’s backyard as though she owned the place. I didn’t see the hard drive in her hand, but she could easily have slipped it inside the jacket for safekeeping. The camera lens angle was wide enough that we could see her jogging nonchalantly away from the house and down the sidewalk. I was betting she’d had a car parked somewhere nearby.

  Tom was shaking his head. “Alexandra Cooper.”

  I nodded, feeling a little dazed. “Alexandra Cooper.”

  Chapter 18

  I was having some trouble processing the image we were all seeing on the screen. What would Alexandra Cooper want with the hard drive recovered from Rob Locke’s private room at the New Heritage apartment complex? What could be so important that she would first take it upon herself to linger in secrecy, watching us, waiting for the opportune moment to make her move, and then to strike, by invading Marcus’s house and home office in order to steal a key piece of evidence in a murder investigation?

  What the hell was she thinking?

  Next to me Tom reached for the radio clipped to his shoulder. “Dispatch, Fielding.”

  Through the radio came a squelchy sound that cut out to the words, “Go ahead, Tom.”

  “Dispatch, request a car be sent out to New Heritage apartments, number—” He looked at me, eyebrows raised in question.

  “1C,” I told him.

  “Apartment number 1C, that is number one Charlie, to pick up suspect Alexandra Cooper from her home and take her into custody. I’ll be heading over to the high school, in the event that the suspect has headed into her place of employment.

  “Roger that, Tom.”

  “Dispatch, this is in connection to the Locke murder investigation. Officers should use all precautions.”

  “Understood, Tom. Clear.”

  Tom turned to me. “Maggie, I—”

  “I know, Tom,” I cut in swiftly. “Go. We’ll be fine here.”

  He nodded, striding toward the front door. Liss and I trailed behind him, as though by remaining in his presence as long as possible we could lend him the protection of our mutual energies added to his own.

  He swung the heavy wooden door inward and began to open the screen door, pausing to turn back toward me. “I’ll—”

  Whatever he had been about to say was cut off by a flash of silken blackness that swept past his feet.

  “What the—” he said at the exact time I cried out, “Minnie!”

  My escape artist of a cat had taken advantage of Tom’s diverted attention to make a bid for liberty, happiness, and the pursuit of fine, feathered friends.

  A pained look crossed Tom’s face, followed by one of sheer impatience. “Sonofabeehive,” he muttered, obviously torn between the call of duty and the instant urge to run after my rascally, wayward feline.

  I shook my head. “Go. We’ll get her.”

  “Sorry,” was all he could say before he took off for his car, starting it and throwing it into reverse in a singularly coordinated movement. “Hope you catch her,” he said just before he peeled out of the driveway, leaving Liss and me in suspended motion on the bungalow’s deep-seated front porch.

  Just for a moment. And then we, too, launched ourselves into motion.

  “You check the front and the neighbors’s yards,” I r
ecommended, “and I’ll head toward the back and the garage.” Truthfully I suspected that was where she was heading. The window she loved best, after all, faced the backyard and a trio of bird feeders. I was hoping that was foremost in her fuzzy little brain when she decided to make a blazing run for glory.

  I kept my eyes peeled as I crutched-hopped my way up the driveway, peering beneath bushes, behind perennials, and in the twisting branches of the aged crabapple trees that separated Marcus’s driveway from the neighbor’s property. No Minnie. Undaunted, I kept going until I stood beneath the giant oak tree in the center of the backyard. The going was slower back here on the uneven ground, but even more worrying, the grassy area beneath the feeders was devoid of any sign of a glossy black furball with jewel-color eyes avidly watching the flurry of wings above.

  I was starting to get worried. Where could the little rascal have gone?

  Turning in a slow circle to survey the yard in overview, I decided the best place to check next would have to be the old livery barn, aka the Man Cave. It was a place I didn’t frequent often, since it was most definitely male-centric. But it certainly would offer a mischievous kitten with plenty of hidey-holes in its dark interior, and with the door standing ajar just a mite, it seemed a no-brainer.

  “Minnie,” I called as I approached the gap between the big double doors. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty . . .”

  Shifting myself sideways to get out of the way, I started to pull the door on the right to swing it all the way open. Its hinges complained, giving a rusty squawk, but it hit the wall with a soft thwump. Dust motes rose all around me in the filtered sunlight coming through the leafy bowers of the giant oak.

  I thought I heard movement inside, but the lack of windows ensured that the inner sanctum remained sacrosanct.

  There. I heard it again.

  “Come here, girl,” I called, shifting myself forward so that I could reach for the door on the left. “Here, kitty . . .”

  As I closed my fingers around the handle and began to pull, the door’s center of gravity seemed to shift. And because it did, it seemed to be swinging toward me faster than I could step out of the way.

  Correction: “Seemed to be” wasn’t quite what I would call this. It moved toward me as swift and hard as if it had been shoved by some unseen force on the other side.

  And that was because it had been.

  I realized that just as the door smacked into my right crutch, knocking it into me and my overgrown, sparkly, bedazzled cast. The impact was just enough to throw me off balance and knock me for a loop in one awesomely grandiose, butt-crunching sprawl that raised even more dust into the air and sent my crutches flying. My legs flew out from beneath me as my tailbone hit the dirt, sending exquisitely sharp pain zinging through me. I sat there a moment, stunned, while the dust settled around me . . . until I became aware of the figure that was standing over me, just as quiet. Just as stunned?

  Talk about déjà vu . . .

  Only not . . .

  I blinked into the glinting sunlight. “Ms. Cooper?”

  It was. Alexandra Cooper, in the flesh.

  For a moment time seemed to stand still as we stared at each other. My mind was whirring. She’d already broken into Marcus’s home and stolen the key piece of evidence in a murder investigation. The question was why? And a close second would be, how far was she willing to go to protect whatever secret she was keeping? Because something big must have driven this usually very collected high school teacher to go to such lengths.

  Her attention flickered away from me. To the left. To the right. Her tongue poked out to wet her lips. My heartbeat rose to a roaring level in my ears when her gaze transferred back to me, because what I saw in her eyes didn’t look quite human.

  The roaring got worse when I watched her hand stretch, ever so slowly, for something that was leaning against the wall just inside the door. Whatever it was, I knew it couldn’t be good.

  That thought was enough to jar me out of my momentary disconnect. In the same instant I saw her pull an old garden rake into view, my own scrambling fingers had found my nearest crutch.

  I don’t know if I anticipated her swing or if my intuition just switched into high gear of its own accord as a self-defense mechanism, but as I lifted my crutch and pulled it around toward me, it caught the force of her strike full on. The aluminum vibrated with the shock of the blow, sending pulsations ricocheting up my arms so strongly that the crutch fell from my suddenly numb fingers. My eyes locked with hers. Another defense mechanism, as though I could hold her in place, motionless, harmless, if I could just keep up with that strange, intense contact. I knew I needed the crutch for protection now more than ever, but I was afraid to tear my gaze away, afraid that she would strike again in that lost moment.

  Such cold eyes, filled with an empty, intense void.

  My groping fingers closed around the crutch just as she abruptly lifted the rake high overhead for a second blow. Too late, the fear inside me whispered as I watched the beginning arc of the rake’s iron teeth. Too late . . .

  I closed my eyes, not wanting to watch it come near. And so, I’m sure you can understand why when I heard the bone-crunching thud and didn’t feel it, I was completely confused.

  My eyes flew open to the completely befuddling image of Cooper laying inert on the ground and Liss standing over her, the rake now in her hands with the flat of the iron tines pressed against Cooper’s throat.

  “Maggie, dear, why don’t you call Officer Fielding while I keep an eye on things here, hm?”

  Yeah. I think I could do that.

  It was all over before we knew it.

  The details came out so quickly. While Liss was saving the day in pure John Wayne fashion, the officers Tom had sent over to the New Heritage apartment complex were discovering a few things of their own in Ms. Cooper’s apartment. Things like an envelope full of glossy photos of herself. And then there was the laptop on her dining room table, which coincidentally enough still happened to be opened to an Internet search on how to permanently destroy the data on a hard drive. The girl was set. Or she would have been if the cameras hadn’t caught her in the act.

  The only problem was, the girl . . . wasn’t.

  A girl, I mean.

  Oh, I know. I had no idea. I’m not sure how any of us were supposed to have known, or even could have known.

  Even worse, no one found out until Tom took her down to the police station to question her.

  Him.

  Whichever.

  It kind of all came out from there, though. She wouldn’t answer their questions at first, but sometimes nature has a way of ensuring justice will be served. Or maybe it was just the caffeine in the coffee. It’s really hard to keep up the pretense of living as a woman when you aren’t allowed to use the ladies’ room without a witness and you still have all your male parts. And with Alexandra, it was all just that. A pretense. A life lived as a lie because of the lie that was her life. A life that insisted that she had been born male, when she had felt female from her earliest memories of existence.

  We didn’t have all of the pieces when we found Alexandra’s image on the video camera. We only knew that she had, for reasons known only to her, overheard Tom making arrangements with Marcus to access the hard drive, and she must have stalked us back to the bungalow from there. Stalked us, staked us out, and when the coast was clear and we were both out of her way, she made her move.

  His move.

  Is there a guide to political correctness these days? Because this day-to-day change stuff is crazy-making. Who keeps track of these things?

  It was self-preservation, you see. Because she had no idea what was on that drive. She had no idea it even existed. She had thought that, by destroying the computer in Locke’s office, she would be wiping out the very existence of any and all remaining evidence he might have had that he had been holding over her head.

  Locke knew about her, you see.

  Oh, not when he first offered her the lease
. He had no idea who she was. But she knew him. They had gone to the same high school, lived in the same neighborhood in nearby Fort Wayne. She had heard of his history for the distribution of child pornography and had heard that he had “turned over a new leaf,” at least according to his family. Not that that meant anything. But he didn’t recognize her—mostly because she had gone to great lengths to perfect her appearance and gestures and body language in order to live life as a woman rather than as the male she had been born, to forge a new life for herself, filled with people who didn’t know her. People who would accept her for who she really was. People for whom the old adage “What you see is what you get” is accepted as universal law.

  Small-town folk.

  Stony Mill kind of peeps.

  Here no one questioned that she might not actually be everything she said she was. She grew out her hair into a thick mane of which any woman would be proud, changed her name from Alexander to Alexandra, assiduously removed body hair on a daily basis, and was never seen without sturdy foundation garments and a face full of makeup so carefully and skillfully applied that no one could tell where the makeup ended and the skin began. And she became . . . female. For all intents and purposes. Like an actor deeply immersed in his craft, she lived as a female every day of her life, without fail. Everything was perfect.

  Until Locke started up his old tricks again.

  At least it wasn’t with underage girls this time. He did have that going for him. Or maybe he’d just decided it was too big a risk. Locke was the one who insisted there be no children under the age of eighteen in the complex. But then, he knew he had had “security” cameras installed with the renovations. No one seems to know when the idea struck him, but strike him it did. He handpicked his tenants carefully, enticed them with special rent deals subsidized (knowingly or unknowingly—that is still up for debate at this telling) by Harding Enterprises through ownership of the property itself. And with his ties to an organization the men in his family had belonged to for years, he found a ready supply of customers for his . . . entrepreneurial vision.