Chapter Five

After Ricky left, I introduced Gil to the location of his food dishes (kitchen turret) and litter box (mud room), and left him to poke around the house while I sluiced myself off in the very roomy tiled shower in the primary bedroom's ensuite bathroom. Afterward, I was too exhausted—both physically and emotionally—to do anything but sleep.

Despite the truly pristine state of the house—I made a mental note to thank Taryn for the cleaning service because, hey, no rats , much to Gil's disapprobation—I didn't feel right yet sleeping in the king-sized oak sleigh bed that had belonged to two men who'd never had a real chance to enjoy their home.

Instead, I inflated the air mattress that had been my constant companion for the last couple of months and slept in my sleeping bag in the suite's turret sitting room. I'd fallen asleep gazing at the stars, with Gil curled, purring, at my side.

I was woken by a sharp pain in my hipbone. "Ow."

I blinked blearily, disoriented for a moment, not remembering where I was. Windows just lightening with dawn surrounded me, and maple leaves fluttered against the panes with a gentle shush ing.

My house. I was in my house .

But overnight, my air mattress had finally given up the ghost— heh —and deflated. My bony hips didn't approve of the oak floor, nor, when I crawled out of my sleeping bag and stood up, did my back or my knees. Clearly I'd have to get over my squeamishness about the bed. Or should I say beds, because every bedroom on the second floor had one. I just needed to pick one and sleep in it tonight.

After I brushed my teeth and washed my face—I'd save showering until after at least one cup of coffee—I pulled a couple of sets of sheets from the neat stacks in the linen closet. After all, I wasn't going to refuse to use them. I was broke, not boneheaded, and these had a higher thread count than I'd ever seen in my life. Besides, thrift stores had been my main shopping venues even before the Greg debacle. I was used to used .

Blessing Uncle Oren for locating the laundry facilities on the second floor rather than downstairs or in the basement, and Avi for keeping the detergent well-stocked, I tossed the sheets in the washer. Yeah, they seemed clean and smelled fine, but they'd been sitting in that closet for ten years.

And they'd belonged to somebody else.

So washing them was a sort of ritual of new ownership, I guess.

I headed down the stairs, Gil scampering in front of me rather than winding himself around my ankles in his usual morning attempt to murder me for not feeding him early enough. But when I got to the last step, he was standing in the middle of the vestibule in a double arch—back and tail—looking at least twice as big as normal with all his fur standing out.

I hurried over to him. "What's—"

My jaw dropped, because beyond him, the library looked as though it had been hit by a tornado. Most of the shelves were empty now because books littered the floor, completely obscuring the rug.

My heart caught in my throat because in addition to the books—whether spine up, opened face down, or closed—the place was papered with, well, paper . I picked up one sheet, my hand shaking. Page 287/288 from Jake Fields' latest thriller. I spotted the cover—hardcover edition—upside down in the corner, only a couple of pages still remaining. In a way, I could commiserate—the book hadn't lived up to the earlier books by a long shot—but that wasn't the point.

Someone had been in my house.

While I was asleep upstairs.

They'd been in here and they'd destroyed things, things that, while I was still getting used to them belonging to me , definitely didn't belong to some vandal.

How the hell had they gotten in? I froze. Could they still be here? And had they done any other damage? I hadn't heard anything overnight, but I sleep pretty soundly once I finally drop off.

I backed out of the library and crept into the family room. The throw pillows were scattered over the area rug and one of the paintings—a landscape featuring Mount Hood—hung crooked on the wall, but nothing had been broken that I could see. I wouldn't be able to tell if anything was missing. I'd barely looked at the place, let alone taken an inventory.

I grabbed the poker from the fireplace set and scuttled back to the front door. The deadbolt was thrown, just as I'd left it last night. I flipped its brass thumb-turn and stepped onto the porch. Realizing I was still clutching page 287/288, I folded it about six times and wedged it between the door and the frame so I didn't do anything stupid like lock myself out.

The many double-hung windows that opened onto the porch all seemed secure and undamaged, so I went inside again and checked the back door and all the other first-floor windows.

All locked tight.

I peeked in the garage where my Civic sat in dusty solitude. It appeared undisturbed, although if somebody had gotten in with the opener or the code, I wouldn't be able to tell.

I eyed the basement stairs. The basement was one place Ricky hadn't taken me yesterday. He'd offered, but I'd declined because by that time I was in total sensory overload and who knew what was down there?

I glanced at Gil, who was plastered against my leg, nose twitching as though testing the air with his olfactory rodent radar. His fur had mostly flattened by now, although his tail was still in bottlebrush mode.

"We've got to check, Gil. If you see a rat"— ugh, no —"you are not to engage. You don't know where they've been."

I scooped him up in one arm, gripping the poker with the other, and crept downstairs.

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. The basement, while not what any real estate agent would call finished, wasn't a serial killer's murder dungeon or dank hoarder's den. It was well lit from one concrete wall to the other, nothing obscuring the sight lines except supporting posts.

The neatest, most immaculate workshop I'd ever seen was laid out along two of its walls, power tools like a table saw and a drill press bolted to the concrete floor. Empty metal shelving lined the other two walls. In other words, zero places for anyone to hide.

When I checked the bulkhead doors, they were still bolted from the inside, just as Carson had said they'd be.

I set Gil on his feet and he sniffed around the room in a desultory way, but not with the focus he reserved for hunting furred or feathered victims, and not with anything like his response when we first came downstairs. From my own observations and his reaction, I assumed there was nothing to see down here unless I wanted to take up woodworking sometime in the future. I patted my leg and Gil trotted over. I picked him up and went upstairs, turning off the basement lights and shutting the door behind me.

The kitchen hadn't been touched. I hesitated to go upstairs. I mean, was there a point? It was the second story, and I'd been there, albeit sacked out in one turreted corner. But I'd ghostwritten a retired detective's memoir, and I'd learned never to assume: If somebody wanted to get into a house badly enough, they'd get in. There were such things as ladders, after all.

So I went back upstairs and checked every freaking window, including the ones in the turret that had surrounded me all night. I'd opened a couple of them to enjoy the breeze, but their screens hadn't been touched, at least not as far as I could tell. Nothing in any of the bedrooms had been disturbed, nor was anybody hiding in the closets.

I paused at the stairs leading to the attic.

If somebody was lurking up there, they could take me out before I knew what—literally—hit me. But they could have done the same thing while I was asleep, too. I took a deep breath, along with a tighter grip on my trusty poker, and stomped upstairs.

"I'm coming up now," I called. "If anyone's there, I just want to talk. Assuming you don't want to kill me. Because if that's the case, I'm not hanging around for the convo."

Nothing. No sound except the cheep of birdsong filtering in from the open windows in the main suite. Gil scampered up ahead of me, tail up, apparently perfectly content to check out the accommodations. I stopped when my head topped the floor and peered around. The attic was dimmer than downstairs because the only windows were in the dormers and they were smaller than the ones on the first two floors. I didn't see anything moving, and Gil was mrrp ing happily, pawing at a stray sunbeam that shone through the window that overlooked the backyard.

I sighed and trudged up the last few steps to check inside the only door—full bathroom, containing nothing but gleaming tile and porcelain—before joining Gil. He'd parked his furry butt in his sunbeam and was staring fixedly at the secretary.

"Not that I doubt your feline superpowers, Gil, but not even you could bat that typewriter off the table. Those things were made to…"

Spiders—the phantom kind—staged a kick line up my spine.

Yesterday, the Smith-Corona's platen had been empty, but now? A piece of onionskin paper was rolled onto it, as though awaiting a missing typist. I crept forward. The machine held no ribbon, but since the keys on this model struck with some force, that didn't mean the totally blank paper held no message.

With other tips from my retired detective client skittering around in my brain, I covered my hand with my T-shirt and rolled the page free. Then I high-tailed it downstairs again, Gil bounding at my heels.

"Pencil, pencil, pencil," I muttered as I yanked open drawers in the kitchen. "Oh, come on. Who doesn't keep a pencil or two in their kitchen?"

There was probably one in the library desk, but I didn't want to go back in there until the police had been here—and, yes, I was definitely calling the police, even though my client had told me that cold burglaries had a very low clearance rate. In hindsight, I should probably have called them before I went slinking around the house with a freaking fireplace poker like some TSTL teenager in a slasher movie.

"Aha!" In the corner drawer by a telephone niche, I found one of those big, rectangular carpenter's pencils, apparently sharpened with a knife. I set the paper on the counter and, holding it down with one hand, carefully ran the pencil over its surface.

The phantom spiders staged an encore, because sure enough, the impression of the keys was there, embedded in the paper:

no no no no no no no no no