Fifteen minutes later, Sergeant Mike O'Malley and a police cadet who didn't look old enough to be an Eagle Scout met me at Babe's. O'Malley and I didn't exactly go way back but we'd gotten chummy since a garden restoration last year had me up to my elbows in dirt, some of it criminal.
He slid into the booth opposite me; the rookie stood. Babe brought O'Malley a coffee and squeezed my shoulder. "You two play nice," she said.
"This used to be a quiet town until the rough element from New York moved in," he said, taking the toothpick out of his mouth.
That was my cue that O'Malley and I were back in our wisecracking-but-I-really-like-you stage, which seemed to precede the who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are stage, followed by a repeat of stage one. It was a game I was getting used to, and each time we played it, we revealed a little bit more of ourselves. We haven't approached the F word yet, but we were moving in that direction.
"I take that as a compliment," I said.
O'Malley wasn't technically handsome, but he had that teddy-bear thing going. Some women like that. I happen to be one of them. He was very fair, with dark hair, pale blue eyes, and just enough padding to keep things warm on a cold spring night.
Not that I knew it from personal experience. There'd been something brewing under the surface when we first met, but when he was hot, I was cold, and vice versa, so nothing ever happened and we'd settled into a platonic relationship.
In the wintertime, people tend to stay put in Connecticut, at least I did. I stayed home, worked out, read, and planned my gardens for the big thaw in March. I don't know what O'Malley did, but now that the weather was warming up the locals were showing themselves again, like crocuses or carpenter ants.
Some people would have hated that enforced hibernation, but I'd spent the first thirty-three years of my life in a big city and now nothing represented luxury to me more than the sound of . . . silence. No horns honking, no cell phones, and none of their suburban counterparts—lawn mowers and leaf blowers.
O'Malley told me a police cruiser had been close to my house when my 911 call was received, so someone had already been there. No sign of the perpetrator, but I was right: the house had been ransacked.
"That much I could tell. Did you boys have to go to cop school to figure that out?"
The rookie's eyes widened.
"Ms. Holliday's our resident pain-in-the-ass. She did a little detecting about a year ago and now she thinks she's on the job."
O'Malley chugged his coffee and stood up to leave. "Are you ready to go back to the scene of the crime?" He rode with me in the Jeep and we followed the kid in the patrol car.
"Recruiting them kind of young, aren't you?" I asked.
"New program at the academy. He hasn't graduated yet, but they're going out on ride-alongs."
When we got to my place, I made a move to pick up the pitchfork I'd tossed in the mad dash to my car. The younger man tried to stop me, probably thinking it was evidence.
I looked from him to O'Malley. "It's mine. I dropped it when I was here before."
"I guess we're lucky no one was here when you first arrived," O'Malley said, "otherwise we'd be looking at a homicide."
Once again, I used the pitchfork to push the door open. This time I let out a scream, dropped the pitchfork, and stumbled back into O'Malley's arms when I saw a figure inside the house, poking through the rubble with a stick.
"Jeez, you could have told me someone was still here," I snapped, pulling away from him.
"I wouldn't have let you skewer him."
I stepped into the entrance of my once cute, now violated, little bungalow. I maneuvered around the cop, and surveyed the damage.
The rug had been pulled up and tossed in a corner on top of a plant called Spanish Dagger. The path to my office was strewn with papers, books, and the contents of drawers. My desktop computer was missing, as was a box of old CDs I normally used as a bookend. All of my clients' files had been rifled, some spilling out of folders, others tossed in a heap in the middle of the floor. My eyes filled with tears; I used my anger to keep them from trickling down my face.
"Who would do this? Why?" My feet shuffled through the papers on the floor as if they were leaves.
I walked through the office to a small room behind it, where I worked out. I couldn't afford a gym membership anymore and had resorted to buying every piece of castoff equipment—including the unused treadmill—that Springfield's secondhand market had to offer. I had a setup that most small-town phys-ed departments would envy.
"Sweet," the young cop said, eyeing my gear.
"And she uses it, too," O'Malley said. "I can attest to that."
"Howl at the moon once." So I had punched him once. It was an accident and there was no permanent damage—his jaw and our relationship, such as it was, had both survived.
"Is the upstairs just as bad?" I asked, hoping for some good news.
"Not nearly," the cop I'd almost pitchforked answered.
I followed O'Malley up the tight spiral staircase in the middle of the house to my tiny bedroom. It was a shambles. The dresser drawers had been pulled out and my clothing obviously handled. The bed had been stripped.
"I'd hate to see your apartment," I told the cop.
"You've still got your sense of humor," O'Malley said. "That's good."
"I just meant that nothing seemed damaged," the younger cop mumbled, embarrassed.
They walked me into the kitchen, where it was more of the same, except the dishwasher and the fridge had been left open. I skidded on a puddle of water near the fridge, O'Malley slipped an arm around me to keep me vertical, then retreated to a more appropriate back pat.
"This was not your garden-variety break-in," O'Malley said. "Our man seems to have been looking for something in particular."
"In my fridge? Like what? Did they think I had money stashed in there like that guy in Washington?" I asked.
"Does anything other than your computer seem to be missing?" he asked.
"You mean like my jewels and collection of three-thousand-dollar handbags?" I did a quick mental inventory of my possessions—I didn't have much worth stealing. "Is my telescope still here?" The cops followed as I ran out to my deck. There it was. Other than my car, the most expensive thing I owned was parked on the deck facing true north. I collapsed onto an old deck chair.
"So why would anyone break in, trash my house, and take a five-year-old desktop? You can probably find newer models at the Salvation Army."
"It's not the computer," O'Malley said. "It's probably what they think is on it."
Fourteen
"Believe me, there's nothing on that computer except old contracts and my iTunes library. If someone broke in here for that, they'd better like Bruce Springsteen."
That was the mantra I'd repeated five or six times in slightly differing versions until Mike O'Malley shepherded his two young fledglings out of my house and down to Springfield's police headquarters to file their reports.
The task of putting my house back together was daunting, but like most unpleasant jobs, you just had to start and with any luck the process would take over. The entrance was easy—replace the rug and pad, pick up the overturned pots, sweep up the Spanish moss and pebble soil covers that had spilled onto the rough slate tiles. The young cop was right; it was a mess, but there was no permanent damage. It was just an illustration of something O'Malley had told me over a year ago: Springfield has everything the big city has. Including thieves.
Two hours into my cleanup Mike O'Malley returned bearing gifts—a two-liter bottle of Fresca and a pepperoni pizza.