Jack stared at the mess. An icy feeling of dread crept up the back of his legs and into the base of his spine. He took one shallow breath before he crossed the kitchen, sneakers crunching on the mess, to peek into the office. He knew, by the cold breeze that chilled his face, what he would find there.
The sliding glass door to Tory’s office lay in great transparent shards across the carpet. Her desk drawers were all pulled out, papers and pens and paper clips spilled everywhere. The file cabinet, too, had been opened, but had been empty, all the client files removed. Tory’s private filing cabinet was also open, the files tossed this way and that. It looked as if the pictures had been thrown at the wall, and the standing lamp pushed over.
Someone was looking for something, no doubt, as with the mail. But someone was also angry. Furious. You didn’t have to be a therapist, Jack thought, to see it. There was so much unnecessary destruction. It was excessive, melodramatic. It was as if someone had indulged in a giant temper tantrum.
As he turned, with glass crunching underfoot, he heard something else, some faint bump or creak. He froze, listening. He felt like a deer caught in headlights, not knowing which way to jump. The sound—if sound it had been—didn’t come again, but Jack’s nervous system was screaming alarms now. He seized the phone from Tory’s desk, and punched 9-1-1 at the same time he strode toward the living room.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” The woman’s voice sounded slightly bored, and Jack, staring at the wreckage of the sound system and the bookcases in the living room, could barely speak.
“I—someone has—there’s been a break-in,” he finally said. The word seemed meaningless as he spoke it, a word meant for broken windows or jimmied door locks, stolen computers or television sets. The devastation around him was so thorough, and so hateful, that he didn’t think he knew the right word to describe it.
They exchanged a few words, he and the 911 dispatcher. Someone, she told him, was on the way. Jack stood at the bottom of the staircase, surrounded by the ruins of his mother’s house, and dialed the Binghams’ number. There was no answer. He left a terse message, trying to sound as calm as he could, but asking for Chet’s help.
He heard the siren coming up the hill from town, and he crossed the mess of the living room to open the front door. The revolving lights on the patrol car flashed through the bare limbs of the trees, ghost lights in red and blue. The siren grew louder and louder as the car turned into the driveway and raced up the hill. When the patrol car stopped, gravel sprayed over the lawn. The siren ceased with a loud chirp, but the lights still spun, red, blue, red, blue, casting garish reflections across the dark windows of the house.
It seemed inevitable that the officer who climbed out of the patrol car was Ellice Gordon. The tingle in Jack’s skull began the moment he saw her pacing toward him, carrying an enormous flashlight, its light dancing across the dark grass. He watched her come, his pulse pounding at the base of his throat. He had to force himself to stand where he was, to stand as tall as he could.
“Officer,” he said, when she was close enough. He wished Chet had been home when he called. And he wished the sheriff’s office had sent any other deputy but this one.
“Hi, Jack,” she said. The look she turned up to him was unreadable. Her hair was so short beneath her sheriff’s cap that in the darkness he could not have distinguished the color. She came up on the porch, and he remembered how tall she was. “You told the dispatcher you had a break-in?”
Wordlessly, he pushed the front door open, and stood aside for her to go in. He followed, and flicked on the overhead light. It was a chandelier, with five small bulbs around a large central one, and its light threw the whole mess into sharp focus.
The deputy whistled, a long, low sound. Beside her, Jack surveyed the wreckage afresh, and his skin began to burn with fury.
Ellice Gordon said, “Any idea who would want to do this?”
Jack blurted, without thinking, “Are you kidding? Whoever did this is out of his mind! I don’t know people like that!”
The deputy turned her head slowly, looking down at him. Her pale eyes had a flat look to them, as if no light reflected from her irises. He felt caught by her gaze, like a rodent mesmerized by a snake. “Tell me what happened,” she said. Her voice was flat, too, unemotional.
“I don’t know what happened. I was downtown this afternoon, picking up—doing some errands, groceries, that sort of thing. When I came home—” He gestured with his hand, and saw that it was shaking.
She saw it, too. “No need to be frightened, Jack. Not now.”
His jaw began to ache. He said through gritted teeth, “I’m not scared. I’m pissed.”
She nodded. “Sure you are. I would be, too.” She flicked off her flashlight. She walked forward to the kitchen door, where glass and porcelain bits sparkled in the light. She glanced toward the office, taking in the smashed glass door. “You found a way to lock it, I see,” she said in an offhand fashion.
“Yeah. Didn’t do much good.”
She turned toward the staircase. “Any damage upstairs?”
“I haven’t been up there. I—” He was going to tell her he thought he had heard a noise, but now he didn’t want to say it. It made him sound like a scared kid. “I just thought I should call you guys first.”
“Smart. I’ll go up and have a look, if that’s okay.”
“Sure. Yeah.” Jack stayed close behind her as she climbed, her long legs taking the stairs two a time. He wondered if she’d been upstairs before, if Tory had invited her up, or sent her up after a session. There was no reason for that he could think of. If clients needed a bathroom, they used the powder room off the office. The deputy seemed to know where she was going, though, passing his room with a cursory glance, pressing on toward the doorway of his mother’s bedroom.
She stood there, turning the flashlight in her fingers. He looked past her shoulder. Nothing was broken here. At first glance, in fact, it looked undisturbed, as if whatever maelstrom had hit the downstairs had not reached to the second floor. “He didn’t bother up here, I guess,” Ellice Gordon said.
“I guess,” Jack said.
“So, it looks the same to you as when your mother disappeared?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
The deputy took a last look at the bedroom, then turned away and started downstairs. She pressed a button on her shoulder radio and started talking to someone.
Jack was about to follow her, but first he took a closer look at Tory’s bedroom. He’d been trying to keep things clean here, but he wasn’t the greatest duster. In fact, he’d told himself to get in here with a cloth and polish her bureau, the marble top of her bedside stand, the curtain rods and windowsills. There had been dust on the surfaces, and there still was. There were tracks in it, though. And there was a smudge on the mirror, one he could see even from the doorway.
“Hey, Jack,” the deputy said from the bottom of the stairs.
His head buzzed now so he could barely hear her. He turned and looked down.
“You shouldn’t stay here alone,” she said.
Was it a warning, or a threat? He didn’t like it, either way. He said, “I’m not going to leave the house empty. Especially now.”
“He could come back,” she said. Was it his imagination, or did her hand twitch above the gun in its holster at her hip?
“Yeah. But I’m not going.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she made a gesture that seemed to say, “Up to you.” “You need to go through the mess, see if you can figure out if anything’s missing.”
“I will.”
“We’ll make a report for your insurance company. You’ll get an incident number.”
“Aren’t you going to—I don’t know, check for fingerprints or something?”
Her smile was patronizing and dismissive at the same time. “It’s not like on TV, I’m afraid,” she said. “Unless someone’s hurt, you know—or there’s a really big theft—we don’t do
that. Actually,” she added, shrugging, “we’ll probably never get this guy. It’s too bad, but it’s the way it is.”
That didn’t sound right to Jack, but he didn’t know how to press her. He also didn’t know who the insurance company was, but he figured he could find it, somewhere in the trashed office. Kate would help—again. And Chet would help him repair the door.
They would want him to come and stay with them, of course, and it was tempting. It would be great to sleep one night without jumping at every creak the house made. His mother would want him to go to the Binghams’.
He wouldn’t do it, though. He’d be damned if he’d give in to whoever did this, whoever was watching his mail, spying on his house. He stood in the front doorway, watching the deputy back and turn her patrol car. He didn’t move until her taillights disappeared down the slope.
When he was alone again, Jack turned on the outside lights, and went out into the cold to the garden shed. There was a hatchet there, on the wall next to Tory’s array of other tools—pliers, loppers, a shovel and a rake, a saw, a hoe, various trowels and hammers and wrenches.
He paused a moment, remembering how deft she was with all these things, how competently she had built raised boxes, repaired broken steps, cultivated her garden. Why had it irritated him so? It wasn’t as if she had a choice. There was no one else to do those things for her. It would have been nice, he thought wryly, to have her able hands here now, to help him sweep up broken glass, sift through shards of porcelain and pottery for anything worth saving, and figure out whether it was possible to put the house to rights again.
He sighed, took down the hatchet, turned off the light in the shed, and went into the house through the shattered glass door. All he could do for tonight was to lock the office from the kitchen side to keep the heat in. He had brought a frozen pizza from the grocery store, and he could bake that, then close up the kitchen, too, and isolate the living room with its intact windows and unbroken door. Sleep, he was sure, was not going to come tonight.
All of Tory’s pretty china was ruined. From the jumble of kitchen things he dug up a paper plate that wasn’t covered in flour or fragments of glass, and put the pizza on that. He carried it into the living room, the hatchet under one arm, and arranged himself on the couch with the pizza on the coffee table, the hatchet next to it. Before he ate, he went back to the office for the baseball bat, still lodged firmly in the track of the sliding door, and for the phone. He brought them back with him to the living room, locking the office behind him.
He didn’t turn on the television, or play music. He concentrated on listening, on watching the driveway for any movement. He ate his pizza, and drank a soda. At eleven, he turned out all the lights, pulled a knitted afghan over his legs, and sat in darkness in the crook of the couch.
He had expected to be nervous through the long hours of the winter night. Instead, strangely, he found himself thoughtful, remembering things he usually tried to put out of his mind. He thought of Tory’s face the day he had left for college, the determined smile as she waved good-bye, the proud, pained set of her shoulders as she turned back to her car, alone.
He had wanted, suddenly, to jump out of the train car and call to her, to tell her—what? There were no words. He was an eighteen-year-old guy who had been mean to his mother for years, and he didn’t know why.
He was mean to all women, in fact. He never meant to be. He often liked a girl very much—at first. But one date, or two, at most three—just about the time the girls began to think there was something special between them—his liking would change to restiveness, to resentment, to chafing against their expectations. He couldn’t understand it, but he thought it was something about restriction. About interference. Or control.
He had felt that way about Tory. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t— it wasn’t real, he thought now. It was superficial, but he hadn’t known what to do about it. It was all mixed up with the Garveys, with the contrast between their family life and his own. It was all mixed up with wondering about his father, then being ashamed of him. There was something beyond that, though, something he couldn’t put his finger on. And now, this sheriff’s deputy—all of his unease about women seemed to focus on her, seemed to be concentrated in her.
Who the hell was she? Why did he dislike her with such intensity?
Find Mom, he thought. I need to find Mom. I can’t move forward until I do.
In the stillness, drowsiness began to overtake him. He let his head fall back against the couch cushions, and his eyelids drooped. Whatever the intruder had been looking for, it seemed clear he hadn’t found it. That was why the destruction was so devastating. Whatever it was wasn’t in the house, and the intruder had indulged in a spasm of anger and resentment.
Jack settled further into sleep, weary of trying to parse it all. Just send me a clue, Mom. One hint. I’ll come for you, I promise—if you could just—
Just what? She must have a reason for staying out of sight, for letting everyone—even her son—think she was dead. She never did anything without cause. It was one of the most impressive things about her, that everything she did was planned, organized, well thought out. She must have a reason for this, too, a damned good one. He wished he knew what it was.
18
Forse la perla è già trovata?
Perhaps this pearl has already been found?
—Rance, La Fanciulla del West, Act One
“You must have news for me.” Tory pushed the door open, and Hank Menotti followed her into the cottage. The dog went straight to the kitchen and stood waiting beside the stove, his flag of a tail waving, the corners of his mouth turned up in his canine smile.
“I see he’s made himself at home,” Hank said.
Tory made herself speak as casually as she could. “Yes, he seems to be comfortable.”
“That’s good. The thing is, the microchip company can’t reach the dog’s owners.”
A little rush of hope spurted through Tory’s breast. Impulsively, she said, “I want to hear about it, Hank. Can I offer you a drink? I only have red wine, I’m afraid.”
“I’m Italian,” he said, with a deep laugh. “I love red wine.”
She brought out the two vintage glasses she’d gotten at the antiques store, and pulled a bottle of wine from the cupboard. Hank reached to take it from her, and when she took the corkscrew from a drawer, he held out his hand for that, too. For an awkward moment she was dumbstruck at the simple, chivalrous action of a man opening a bottle of wine for a woman.
She blew out a breath to settle herself, and he gave her a questioning look. “Are you okay? Were you worried?”
She took the glass he poured for her, and gestured for him to follow her into the living room. She had laid a fire earlier, and now she put a match to it. When it was burning, she took the armchair, and he sat on the couch, arranging his long legs beside the little table. She said, “I thought, when I saw you in the driveway, that you must have found the dog’s owners.”
The dog, giving up hope of food for the moment, settled himself beside her chair, his chin over her right foot. Hank looked down at him, and smiled. “No,” he said. “The number they had is out of service, they tell me. I learned a bit about him, though.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. Mixed breed, as we thought. Golden retriever and one of the big terriers, I’d guess—Airedale or wheaten, something like that. Neutered, which we knew. He’s four years old.”
“Are they still looking for the owners?” Tory reached down to stroke the dog’s head. It had become, already, an automatic gesture.
“Unless the owners think to contact them, probably not. The company looked up the address, and there’s someone else living there now.”
“It’s just strange that he would end up here, all on his own.”
“Things happen. Dogs can get confused when they’re staying in a rental house or a motel. Sometimes—although I hate to say it—their owners abandon them. Leave them along the road,
so they don’t know how to get home.”
“That’s awful. Surely no one would leave a nice dog like this one.”
“He does seem like a good guy,” Hank said. “He certainly likes you.”
“Well, I saved him, I guess.” Tory’s cheeks warmed. “I’ve never had a dog before. I don’t really know how to—well, how to do anything!”
“You’re doing great. And at least we know his name now.”
“That would be good! I didn’t want to choose a name until I knew what would happen. I keep calling him Dog.”
Hank said, “They named him Johnson.”
The dog lifted his head, cocking it to one side and fixing Hank with a puzzled gaze.
Tory said, “Johnson? How odd.”
“You wouldn’t believe what some people name their pets.”
“It’s not that.” Tory put her wineglass down, and eased her foot out from under the dog’s head so she could get up and go to the counter where she had put a small plastic bag. She drew out three CDs. “I found these at the library’s used-book sale,” she said, holding them up. They were all operas, Mozart and Verdi and Puccini. She slid the Puccini out of the pile. “It’s Fanciulla del West,” she said.
Hank leaned back on the small sofa, crossing one leg over the other. “Now that is odd,” he said. “Dick Johnson, if I remember correctly.”
“Exactly. The hero. Minnie’s lover.” Tory laid the case aside, and came back to sit down in the armchair once again. She bent over the dog and lifted his chin on her hand. “Is your name really Johnson? Do you like it?”
The dog’s tail beat against the floor. When she released him, he put his head over her foot again. It was possessive, in a way, but it was also comforting.
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