by Madelyn Alt
“Nothing, really.” I tucked my hands between my knees and sat up as tall as I could. “I had a little fainting spell and bumped my head. That’s all.”
“Fainting spell, hmm?” He came near me and took a small pen light out of his pocket, switching it on with a flick of his thumb. He held it up in front of my eyes. “Look off to your left, please. Mmhmm. Now your right. Good. Now, what do you suppose brought on this fainting spell?”
I shrugged, knowing there was no way I was going to tell him the truth. He wouldn’t believe it anyway, so there was no sense in making myself look like a loon. “I don’t know. I guess I shouldn’t have skipped lunch today, huh?”
He took out his stethoscope and warmed it in his palm before placing it above my breast. “Any chance you could be pregnant?”
I coughed, embarrassed to admit it. “Um, no. No chance at all.”
“Okay, okay. I had to ask.” He used his big hands to probe against the glands beneath my jaw and in my neck. “You’ve been feeling all right lately? No inner ear problems, no headaches, nothing at all to report?”
“No headaches before I bumped my head, but I have a little one right now. Nothing else to report.”
“Mmhmm . . .”
While Dr. Phillips scribbled on my chart, I turned my attention back to the photo of the lake house. The water was so smooth, it was really rather amazing. I could see the outline of every leaf on every tree, the detail of the bark on each tree trunk, the glimmer of clouds skipping across the sky above.
“That’s a beautiful lake house you have, Dr. Phillips.” And just for the heck of it, I wondered aloud “Don’t suppose you have a boat.”
“Hmm?” he said distractedly. “My boat? Well, it’s not entirely mine—I own a part of it with a couple of my friends—that’s them there.” He pointed to a picture lower on the wall. I could just make out a few middle-aged men—doctors probably—on . . . a pontoon boat. My heart started pounding when I saw the first few letters of her name. S . . . H . . .
I squinted, trying to make out the rest.
“I just call her my Shangri-La on Lake Casper,” he continued. “It’s a silly thing, I know, but I really think that place is just about perfect.”
Shangri-La. Of course. I breathed a sigh of relief. “It sure sounds perfect.” I looked closer at the picture he’d indicated. “That almost looks like Randy Cutter.”
“You know Randy?”
I nodded. “From the store.”
“We’ve been friends for years. He loves fishing just as much as I do. We try to get out whenever we can. Not often enough with my schedule here and at the hospital.” One last flourish of a scribble. “Well, young lady, there doesn’t really appear to be anything wrong with you. Plain acetaminophen for the headache. If it doesn’t improve, or if you begin seeing double, get ahold of me through the physicians’ after-hours desk at the hospital. Other than that, a good night’s sleep should do the trick.”
“Thanks, Dr. Phillips.”
“You’re quite welcome. Take care.”
Marcus was pacing by the time I came out. “How’d everything go?” he asked me, taking my elbow and escorting me toward the door.
“Fine, fine, everything’s good.”
“See you later, Marcus!” Katie was calling as the door shut behind us. I guess I didn’t rate a good-bye.
“Soooo,” I drawled as he hurried me along, “I guess Katie’s going to be hitting the bars, looking for love, hmm?”
“Very funny.” He stopped suddenly on the sidewalk, looking stricken. “Oh, crap. All I have is my bike. Do you need me to call Liss to come pick you up, or do you think you can hold on to me long enough for me to get you back to your car?”
“Well, I am pretty feeble, I know, but I think I can manage for the ten-minute ride across town.”
Sarcasm was apparently lost on him. “Good, good. It’s going to be pretty cold, too. Damn, I should have driven the truck today. Sorry about that. Anyway, here you go.”
He handed me the spare helmet he kept strapped to the back. I took it gingerly. I looked terrible in helmets, hats, anything that flattened my hair to my forehead. It was the one bit of vanity that I almost always catered to. Combined with the bump, this helmet was a recipe for disaster. “Ow.”
“Sorry, forgot about the lump. How is it?”
“Throbbing, but so long as you don’t run into anything, I think I’ll be fine.”
“You question my driving? Foolish mortal.”
He nearly killed himself kick-starting his bike. Bemused, I glanced up and nearly wet myself laughing. Katie was hanging out the glass door, calling something to him and waving like a madwoman. As we zoomed out of the parking lot, I couldn’t stop giggling. “What was she saying?” I yelled over the engine.
“Don’t ask!” he yelled back.
Back at the school, Christine opened right up for Marcus—no lock shenanigans in sight. I waved Marcus away and closed the door myself. He nudged his bike up beside me and motioned for me to roll down the window.
“I’ll follow you home.”
“You don’t need to, I’ll be fine.”
“Humor me, wouldja?”
It didn’t appear that I had much of a choice. He’d have followed me anyway.
On Willow Street, he pulled up behind me as I came to a halt behind Dr. Danny’s omnipresent Jag. Before I could set foot from the Bug, he was there, ready to open my door.
“Goodness, a girl could get spoiled with all this attention.”
“Shut up and enjoy it,” he growled, putting his arm around my waist again and slinging mine around his shoulder.
“Marcus, someone’s going to think I’ve broken something,” I said, laughing. “I’m not an invalid, you know. In fact, I’m feeling fine now. Just a little headachy.”
“I repeat: Shut up and enjoy it.”
I’ve always been a practical girl. I had the full attention of a hot guy. So I shut up. I enjoyed it.
Marcus took charge of the keys before we reached the sunken stairs to my basement apartment. The stairs were too narrow to allow both of us down together, so I let him go first, feeling my way down at a more leisurely pace. At nearly six-thirty, the sun had long since set. The stairs were a well of darkness, the security light having apparently taken a holiday.
“Maggie. Go back up.”
The sudden change in Marcus’s voice stopped me in my tracks. “What’s wrong?”
“Get the hell up the stairs, Maggie,” he said in a voice terse enough to chill my blood.
I couldn’t move. I stayed there on the fifth step, frozen in time and space, my heart in my throat as I watched Marcus burst through a door that had been left ajar by someone other than me.
Within moments, he was back out of the apartment and pulling me along behind him up the stairs to Steff’s apartment. I thanked my lucky stars that it was too early for us to have interrupted much—Steff answered the door within seconds. Her hair was a teensy bit mussed, but only a best friend would notice the difference.
“Maggie! What’s going on? Are you okay?” Steff looked back and forth between me and Marcus, alarm pinching her cheeks pale.
Marcus didn’t wait for me to answer. He pushed me half into Steff and caught the door handle, pulling it closed as he told her, “Call the police. Someone’s broken into Maggie’s apartment.”
“Marcus, wait—”
It was too late, unless I meant to follow him, and the fierce look on his face had been enough to prevent that. I glanced at Steff, and it occurred to me that Dr. Danny hadn’t made an appearance yet. “Where’s the squeeze?”
“Sleeping. Long day at the ER,” she said, running to grab her phone to dial 911. “You would not believe the crazy things people have been doing! To themselves and to others. It’s just plain wacko.” She stopped, staring at the phone in her hand as though trying to remember why she had it. “I’m sorry, Mags. You must be all up in arms over this whole thing. After what happened last fall!”
“What on earth is going on outside?” Dr. Danny emerged from deepest slumber at last, rubbing his eyes and jawline with the heels of his palms. He yawned, big enough to make his jaw crack.
Steff went and put her arms around his waist. “Someone broke into Maggie’s apartment,” she told him. “Can you believe it? By the way, it’s about time you two met. Danny, this is Maggie O’Neill, my best friend. Maggie, this is Dr. Daniel Tucker, my genius boyfriend.”
I dragged my gaze away from the window long enough to size him up. Tall, good-looking, boyishly rugged. Nice. As usual, Steff had impeccable taste. I nodded at him. “Charmed.”
“A pleasure. Well, it would be under better circumstances. At the moment, all I can think of to say is, I’m sorry,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder, the briefest of touches, and in that instant I sensed great compassion in him. The medical profession had chosen well. So had Steff. She could do a lot worse than to hold on to this one. I made a mental note to pin her down on the subject later. But just now . . .
I buttoned up my coat. “I’m going down there.”
“Maggie, wait,” Steff said, grabbing my sleeve. “Do you think that’s wise?”
“What can happen with two cops on the premises?” I left the two of them scrambling for their own coats and hightailed it down the steps before anyone else could think to stop me.
Elevated male voices slowly reached my ears, as though carried aloft by the popping red-blue lights. I shivered as the cold tried to invade the confines of my coat, listening.
“I’m telling you, we just arrived. The apartment was like that when we got here.” Marcus, sounding frustrated. “No one was around. And by this time whoever did it is long gone.”
“You didn’t see anything. Hear anything.”
My footsteps faltered on the steps as I recognized Tom Fielding’s voice, terse and commanding as he stepped into his favored role as keeper of the collective peace in Stony Mill. I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me that Tom might be the one to respond to our SOS tonight. Holding on to the railing with an iron grip, I peered cautiously over to the ground below. I might have known—the two of them were standing nose to nose, their stances stiff with dislike. A second cop was poking around in the winter- dessicated landscaping. Not one of them appeared to have noticed they had company in the body of a relatively calm and able-bodied victim.
Marcus pointed his nose even farther into Tom’s face. “Why don’t you go find who did this? Take a run around the neighborhood. Ask the neighbors whether they saw anything? Do. Your. Job.”
Uh-oh. Time for this able-bodied victim to open mouth and insert body between two hardheaded men.
The door was yanked open above me. “Maggie! Don’t go down yet,” Steff called. “Wait for me!”
The stairs reverberated as she hopped up and down on one foot trying to get her other boot on. Dr. Dan grabbed the back of her pants to keep her from pitching forward.
I sighed as two faces swung upward. So much for the element of surprise. “Is it safe to come down?” I called.
Tom gestured the all clear, so I hurried down, Dr. Dan and Steff hot on my heels. “Is it bad?” I asked. “My apartment, I mean.”
“It’s been completely tossed.” Marcus put his arm around me. “It’s pretty much a mess.”
I saw Tom’s gaze light briefly upon Marcus’s hand on my shoulder before dropping down to the notepad in his hand. “Maggie, I’ll need you to walk through and see if you can identify whether anything is missing.”
“You think this was a burglary?”
Tom shrugged. “What else?”
What indeed? But I didn’t exactly have high-class digs or top-of-the-line things. Who in their right mind would want to steal from someone like me? It didn’t make sense.
My eyes widened when they finally allowed me into my apartment. I followed Cop No. 2 down the steps while Tom spoke into his handheld radio mike. Steff grabbed my hand from behind as I stepped into the main room. Tossed, Marcus had said. It was an apt description. Ransacked might have been better. Completely and utterly demolished might be the best yet. There wasn’t a single drawer that hadn’t been dumped, a single shelf that hadn’t been swept to the floor, a single closet whose contents weren’t strewn one by one across my room. Even the mattress and box springs had been pulled from the bed and were now resting haphazardly against the wall. Under ordinary circumstances I might have been embarrassed by the colony of dust bunnies that had taken shelter beneath my bed, but there was nothing ordinary about what had happened here.
Someone had been in my home. The sense of violation and vulnerability was overwhelming.
Slowly, painfully, I moved through the rooms, trying to assess the damage. There was surprisingly little, other than the mess factor. Things had been rummaged through and strewn about, but nothing had been broken.
More strangely, nothing seemed to be missing. “Nothing?”
I shrugged helplessly at the disbelief in Tom Fielding’s voice. “I don’t have much to begin with, and it’s all there. No. Nothing is gone.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and flipped his clipboard shut. “Which leaves me with only one question.”
“Why.”
“Yeah. Why. Why you, Maggie? Why your place?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah? You sure about that?”
The answer that eluded us came much sooner than we might have thought. Sometime after Steff, Marcus, Dan, and I began the unenviable job of sifting through my ransacked things and trying to make some semblance of order from the chaos, and while Tom completed his paperwork standing at my kitchen table, a call came through the radio Tom had hooked back on his belt.
“Fielding. You reading me?”
He glanced over at me. I had been surreptitiously watching him for a few minutes, hoping to get a chance to talk to him in private before he left. Pretending to be engrossed, I busied myself replacing the kitchen utensils in the big brown bean crock that usually kept them corralled.
His voice kept purposely low, he muttered into the walkie-talkie, “Yeah. Whatcha got?”
“You’re not gonna believe this. I think we got the guy.”
“Come again?”
“This guy was sitting in his car just down the street, watching us down here. I kid you not. He didn’t even duck down when I drove past, the dumbass. Guess he thought he looked normal enough. Forgot all about the fact that he was wearing a ski mask.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Just like some goddamned cat burglar, straight out of the movies. Look, I’m taking him in for questioning. Meet me down at the station, why don’t you. My guess is, those boot prints we found outside of Miss O’Neill’s windows are going to be a perfect match.”
“Who is it?” I heard Tom ask in a hushed tone.
“Name’s Cutter. Randall J. Cutter. Owns a shop down on River Street.”
Tom’s attention whipped my way when I sucked my breath in through my teeth. “Copy that,” he said, while his brow furrowed and his eyes assessed me curiously. “I’ll meet you there just as soon as I get things wrapped up here.”
I waited for him to sign off, my thoughts moving a mile a minute. Randy Cutter? He did this? But why? How? I couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around it. Randy Cutter was a businessman, a former vet, an upstanding member of our community. I’d seen him nearly every day for the last few months, performing his ritual sidewalk sweeping. He’d never made any untoward comment, never looked at me sideways other than to wave hello. I mean, I’d seen him, just the other day at Annie’s café. We’d exchanged pleasantries, the same as always . . .
Tom, I came to realize, w
as watching me. “I guess you heard that,” he said with his usual economy of words.
I nodded, still frowning.
“Got anything to add?”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand it. Randy Cutter? I just don’t get it.”
“You want to tell me what kind of contact you’ve had with him?”
“From the store, mostly. Your usual stuff. Most of the people who work down on River Street know each other. Randy’s store is right across from Enchantments, so we’d see each other on the sidewalk from time to time. But that’s about it.”
“When did you last see him?”
I didn’t have to think. “I saw him at Annie’s café. Yesterday. I was just finishing up lunch and he came in as I was leaving. Before that, I guess it was the Little Nipper the other night. I don’t think he saw me, though. He seemed pretty down in the dumps.”
Tom frowned. “The night I was there?”
I nodded. “Amanda’s body had just been found, remember? Everyone in town was feeling pretty down that day.”
“And that’s it? There’s nothing else?”
“Nothing that I can think of.”
“Hmm.” He marked something down in his flip pad. “What do you remember about yesterday at Annie’s? What were you doing?”
“Nothing. Honestly, Tom. I was getting ready to leave, and I asked Annie if I could use her phone . . . I needed to find Marcus for some help with . . .” My voice fell away as the moment came rushing back to me. “He was listening to us,” I said as realization struck. “Oh my God, he was listening to us.”
He took a step toward me, the very stance of his body watchful. “Listening to you . . . why?”
Feeling as though I was moving through a dream, I went to my purse and pulled out the original CD Marcus had just given back to me. I held it out to him.
He looked down at the face of the teen singing sensation in bemusement. “Thanks, but . . . it’s not really my kind of music.”
“No, it’s . . .” I opened the case and extracted the real treasure. “It might be important to your case.”
“My . . . ?” The cloudy look he was so good at had returned. “You mean the Roberson investigation, don’t you.”