Chapel sat with me on the back porch while Burchett and his crew did their work, and that was when I told him about my two stalker incidents.
“You were abducted at gunpoint and you didn’t think to call me?” He looked like he was on the verge of a seizure. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I didn’t fucking know you existed,” I reminded him.
“Tell me you at least called the police.”
“They thought I was full of shit. They didn’t go so far as to actually say it, but it was pretty evident that that’s what they thought. They told me it was probably a mugging gone wrong or something like that.”
“A man points a gun at you, puts you in the back of his truck, strips you, and they call that a mugging gone wrong?” Chapel shook his head.
“They wanted me to go to a doctor, have a rape kit done.”
“Did you?”
“I wasn’t raped. The only time he ever touched me was to get me into the truck.” I thought about it for a couple seconds, then said, “Maybe that’s why, you know? He wasn’t about me, he was about the cameras. Maybe that’s what he was doing, why he was in the house last night.”
“Maybe, but then why the whole bit with the truck and the clothes the first time?”
“I don’t know.”
“You called the cops after last night?”
I shook my head.
“You should have called the cops as soon as you were out of the house.”
“They didn’t seem to take me real seriously the first time.”
“You should have called them, anyway.”
“So we’ll call them now.”
“You could, but with the discovery of the cameras, we’ll have the same situation we were talking about at the office. Unless you’ve changed your mind about the media.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then we don’t call the cops at this juncture. We’ll see what Rick finds, take it from there.”
I didn’t say anything, and he went back inside, to follow Burchett and his people around, leaving me alone. After a few minutes I went down to the music room and grabbed the Taylor, then returned to the porch. It seemed best to stay out of everyone’s way.
I played for a bit, but nothing sounded right, and after a while I gave up. Once I started thinking about the pictures again, about all the people who had seen them, and all the people who would see them, and it was enough to start me feeling good and sorry for myself, and it almost brought tears.
But it brought a memory, too, of being maybe seven or eight years old on a late summer afternoon, the coolness of our tract home in Gresham. Tommy, still in his work clothes, caked in a mix of dried sweat and cement dust. He’d bought a six of Coors and a pack of Marlboros, and dropped himself on the couch to smoke and drink and listen to music on the hi-fi, and I was sitting with him, my head against his chest as we listened to Gordon Lightfoot singing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
And Tommy had gotten all weepy at the end of the song, and I’d asked him why someone would make a song like that, about something so horrible and sad.
“Because sometimes making a song about something sad is the only way to understand it,” he’d told me.
It made me wonder if Tommy ever had a song he wanted to write.
Chapel and Burchett came outside together a little before three that afternoon to give me the joy.
“We’re done with the sweep, miss,” Burchett told me. “If you want to see what we’ve found?”
“Not if I’m going to be photographed doing it.”
He grinned big. “Made sure that won’t happen, miss.”
“You should see,” Chapel told me. “It’ll help you decide what you want to do next.”
I had several ideas of what I wanted to do next, but I kept them to myself, since mostly they consisted of violence and alcohol, not necessarily in that order. I got off the steps and dusted my butt off, then nodded for them to lead the way.
We went through the kitchen, where Burchett’s colleagues were packing their gadgets into shiny metal containers not unlike my flight case. The scary woman watched me as I followed Chapel and Burchett, and I wondered what her problem was, then wondered if it was that she’d seen the pictures, and so didn’t ask.
Burchett led the way to the music room in the basement, and we started there, working the same path they’d presumably taken in their search. He pointed out each pink flag, even though they were easy enough to spot. It was an alarming education.
One flag in the music room. One flag in the downstairs bathroom, in the medicine cabinet over the sink, so that anyone looking—or grooming—in the mirror would be seen. One flag in the downstairs guest room, positioned so it could catch anything or anyone that happened onto the futon. Two flags in the kitchen, presumably in case things got exciting while I was fixing a late-night snack. Two more in the living room. Two in the master bathroom: one of them angled to catch anything happening in the shower or tub; the other one, and Burchett was impressed by this, set in the outlet between the mirrors over the sinks.
The last three flags were all in my bedroom. One directly over my bed. One in the wall just over the headboard. The last one in the outlet by the bureau, to catch me in the mornings when I picked out my day’s lingerie.
“And you know what the irony of this is?” I said to them, standing in my bedroom, looking at all of the little flags. “I fucking hate pink.”
Chapel smiled thinly, but Burchett laughed out loud.
“Fred says that some pervert pulled a gun on you when you got into town Monday morning. Says he got you into his truck and had you give him your clothes, that right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you think that same guy was in your house last night?”
“Maybe, I’m not sure.”
“Any sign of a break-in?”
I shook my head.
Burchett scratched his beard, craned his head back to look around my bedroom again. “You started renovating about when?”
“When I left on tour.”
“And they finished when?”
“Last month, the beginning of September. I’m not positive of the date.”
Burchett looked at Chapel. “That’s when this was done, Fred. Our pervert must have gotten himself onto one of the crews working here, maybe working with an electrician. Hell, he could be the electrician. Gives him access to the whole house, lets him wire everything just the way he wants. He probably got a copy of the house key from the contractor or someone.”
“Then why the hell did he do all that stuff Monday morning?” I asked.
Burchett reached for the Leatherman on his belt, snapping out the Phillips head, then leaned past me and began unscrewing the cover to the outlet by my bureau. Chapel and I waited, watching. It didn’t take him long, and he hummed while he worked. Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire.”
When he removed the cover, he pointed to a portion of the wall, just above the lower outlet. There was a black smudge on the paint, a teardrop shape.
“Scorch mark,” Burchett told us. “The camera shorted. He must have been trying to replace it.”
“And if he’d been listening for news of when she was going to return home, he’d have known she was on her way,” Chapel said.
“But he got me outside,” I said. “He wasn’t inside.”
Burchett began replacing the plate over the outlets, his brow furrowed. “Maybe there were two of them, working together. You get one in the house when you come home, the other is outside waiting. He sees you, panics, thinks he can’t let you go inside. That would explain why he dropped you off here when he was through. All he wanted to do was keep you occupied for an hour or so.”
“There’s the little detail where he had me strip for him.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t touch you, right? And if he has your clothes, you’re less likely to make a break for it, irrational modesty being what it is. He takes your clothes, you’re going to stay put until the danger is so great your modesty comes second. For most people, by the way, the point when their modesty stops being first is normally right after too late.”