“Yes, sir.”
“Really, I think I’m OK.” Mike plopped me in the open end of the ambulance and a frowning EMT attached a blood pressure cuff. “It was just a shock.”
“What was a shock?” he asked distractedly.
Of course. He had no idea about the mirror. “Inside.” I pointed to the house. “Someone broke in. They left a message on your grandmother’s mirror. I think it was written in ashes.”
“My grandmother’s mirror is in the bedroom.” He said it soothingly, but he looked concerned. Probably about whether I’d banged my head too hard on the concrete porch.
“And now it’s in the front hall,” I insisted. “Somebody moved it. I nearly stepped on it when I walked in the door. Someone tapped out a message, maybe with the stub of a cigar. See through her.” It sounded crazy. I needed to make him understand. “But it’s gone. The message. I blew it away. The mirror broke. I’m so sorry.”
As if the message had never been there at all.
It was like watching a Transformer convert for battle. Mike barked something and two cops appeared at his side within seconds. That’s the way it was with Mike. He led and cops followed him. Anywhere.
It was, he said in one of his more revealing moments, an awesome burden, and he meant awesome as in huge. Heavy. He’d never lost a man, and I dreaded the day he did. Mike was not one for telling big stories about himself, and every day on the job in New York was a story.
I knew, only because his mother told me on our wedding day, that Mike had saved two lives before he was twelve. A cat that a teenage boy was about to hang from a tree and, a year later, a little girl who almost stepped into a child molester’s van to pet a golden retriever puppy. Mike caught her arm and yanked her back. He memorized the license plate for the cops. The guy had been listed on the Sex Offenders Registry and was hauled straight back to prison.
The boy with the cat had just looped a noose around the animal’s neck when Mike showed up. Pretty quickly, the cat was watching the action from a safe perch in the same tree that was almost his gallows. Mike was bloodied and rolling on the ground when the cat’s owner, an old neighbor lady, showed up with a can of Lysol and shot the bully in the eyes. Mike escaped with a cracked rib, a commendation from the SPCA, and free homemade cookies after school until the old lady died his junior year. His mother loved to tell the details, and I loved to hear them, over and over.
I often wondered why his mother told me about his early heroic nature on the day we got married. Whether she knew I needed saving. What has always been perfectly clear between us is that she steadfastly believes that her only son is an instrument of God. It is one thing we agree on.
A half-hour later, I sat on the sidewalk in a lawn chair Mike brought out from the garage. Two cops were loading the mirror frame, now swathed in plastic, into the trunk of their patrol car.
A tech was just finishing up dusting the front doorknob and random surfaces inside that the intruder might have touched. The lock had shown signs of being greased and picked but not enough that all of Mike’s new colleagues had swallowed my story whole.
“Probably pointless,” Mike said. We watched the lid of the trunk slam shut on the mirror. “We aren’t likely to get prints. Whoever this was probably wore gloves.” He turned to me. “Come on, let’s go in. I’m home for the night.”
At the door, the fingerprint tech slid by us shyly, offering up a sweet smile, probably thrilled about a job that involved more than a stolen car radio. She barely looked old enough to babysit, but she was professionally attired in bootie-covered tennis shoes, latex gloves, and the Texas requisite Wrangler jeans.
Mike gripped my hand as we stepped over the threshold. It was like a bitter wind had blown through our home. The space felt tighter, compressed. The air smelled metallic.
“I’ve hired someone to clean up the powder.” Trying to reassure me, as if I was actually concerned about a little more dust. “I’ve already called a place in Dallas to install a new security system for us. They do some crime scene cleanup on the side. They won’t leave until there are alarms on every window and every door. They’ll be here at ten in the morning. I can justify keeping a unit at the curb for twenty-four hours. We’ll figure this out as we go along.”
I was suddenly feeling lonely and scared, very pregnant, a lot sorry for myself and ticked off. I didn’t have alarms on every window in New York City, but I needed them here. I missed my parents desperately, with a physical ache, like I hadn’t in years.
Mike and I ventured into the kitchen, a room relatively unscathed by the day. At least I could pretend the fingerprint dust in here was flour or, in the case of the graphite on the white Formica countertop, spilled pepper.
“I changed my mind,” he said. “Let’s go out. Get a burger or something.”
The thought cheered me up a little. A two-hamburger day.
“Oh, geez, I forgot. Wait a minute.” Mike was already out the back before I could stop him. I heard his car door slam. He returned in seconds with a large cardboard box, the flaps loosely closed. He set it on the floor and opened up the top.
“I was at Caroline’s today,” Mike said. “Didn’t think this little guy should be there alone.”
I heard a low and perturbed growl. Mike reached inside and lifted out my furry orange nemesis.
18
After Mike left for work the next morning, I threw on my old pink chenille bathrobe with the torn peekaboo hole in the rear, folded my new lucky bird quilt into a precise rectangle at the end of the bed, reassured myself by confirming that the cop car was at the curb outside. Then I headed to the kitchen to fix myself a cup of decaf and a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats with fresh blueberries. Before the pregnancy, I didn’t know what a frosted mini-wheat was.
I washed the bowl and spoon and left them to drain on a faded blue dish towel, hand-stitched with a puppy face and the words IRON ON TUESDAY. The towel was a remnant of the previous owner, Mrs. Elsa Drury, who had lived in the house for forty-six years before dying peacefully in a chair by the window.
I stood in the approximate spot where Mrs. Drury met her Lord and lifted the curtain in the living room again. My bodyguard, still there.
After retrieving my purse from under the cabinet near the computer, I pulled out the copies of two of the files I had yet to read: Letty Dunn’s and Gretchen Liesel’s. According to the reminder note Mike propped by the coffeepot, it would be two hours before the alarm company showed up.
Two sips of coffee and three sentences into the life of Leticia Abigail Lee Dunn, I sensed a presence moving behind me. I jerked around, the chair leg banging against an angry yellow ball. He yelped. I yelped.
“Don’t sneak up on me, or a few of your lives will be cut short during your time here,” I warned. The cat sailed into my lap like a bag of Gold Medal Flour with legs. “Is this an apology?” I scratched tentatively behind his ear. He dug a claw painfully into my thigh.
He leapt off and wandered over to the bowl of dry food that Mike had picked up at Walmart on a midnight run. He ate grumpily. The message was clear: The food’s not great in this joint.
He jumped onto the windowsill, licking one of his lionesque paws. Caroline probably called him something cuddly, like Butterball. He was no Butterball.
I turned my attention back to Letty. I wondered if someone at the police station was reading this file simultaneously, if that person would be discreet, if the slip of a fortune in Misty Rich’s folder had fallen out and was lost somewhere in the deep green grass of Caroline’s yard. If that even mattered.