would have called me if she’d known that someone had broken in. She had not. So this must have happened very recently.
And secondly that the front door had been locked.
Thumb hovering over Amy’s speed-dial number, I went out into the living room. Stood and listened, letting my mouth drop open. The house was as quiet as when I’d first arrived. I walked quickly and silently to glance into the other rooms on the main level, then up the stairs. My study looked as it had, laptop lonely in the middle of the table.
I searched the rest of the house. Within five minutes I was confident there was no one there.
And by no one, I now meant Gary Fisher. I couldn’t imagine who else might have come here. He not only knew where I lived but had tied Amy in to the story he was building around Cranfield’s estate. If he’d walked straight out of the hospital to his car and gotten on the road, he could have beaten me here.
Though not by much—and there was still the issue of the front door. Only way he could have managed that was with a set of keys. I still had mine, and there’d been no opportunity for him to copy them. Unless when he’d come to visit, he swiped the spare set from the bowl in the kitchen…
The keys were still there. Across from the breakfast island was access to the garage, but a quick twist of the doorknob confirmed that this door was locked, too. That left one remaining option. I headed back down the stairs and over to the windows. Grabbed the handle of the sliding door and yanked it to the right, hard, expecting it to slide open. But it did not.
I unlocked it and stepped out onto the deck, finally pressing the speed-dial number on my phone. It took Amy a while to pick up, and when she did, she sounded distracted.
“Yes?” she said.
“It’s me. Look…”
“Who?”
“Who does it say on the screen, honey?”
There was beat. “Answered without looking. Sorry, miles away.”
Again, I added silently. “Look, where are you?”
“Home,” she said. “Where are you?”
I turned back to the window, prey to the bizarre idea that I’d somehow missed her, that she was inside the house doing something mundane, working, making coffee, or tea, that she’d just happened to move from room to room in such a way that I’d not seen her since I got back.
“At home?”
“What time are you getting back?”
“Amy, you’re not at home. I’m in the house now. You’re not here.”
There was a pause. “Not in the house.”
“In Birch Crossing?”
“No. I’m in L.A.”
“You’re in Los Angeles?”
“Yes. The city where I was born? Grew up? Did that back-in-the-day stuff?”
“What are you talking about? Why are you in L.A.?”
“I left a message on your phone,” she said. She sounded confident now, as if she’d worked out the precise way in which I was being obtuse. “Like, about an hour after we spoke last night? I flew into LAX last night.”
“Why?”
“KC and H called a big powwow. God and his angels are flying in, business class.”
I held the phone away from my ear, looked at the screen. There was an icon there to show I had voice mail.
“I didn’t notice it come in,” I said. “Amy…” I didn’t know what to say and instead got mired in the trivial. “And you couldn’t conference-call instead?”
“My point entirely, honey. I fought tooth and nail. But apparently not. This is face-to-face action.”
“So how long are you down for?”
“Meeting’s tomorrow A.M., stupid early. Been at the office all morning. I’m on my way to Natalie’s for the afternoon now—thought I’d catch up with the brat, be big-sisterly at her. She’s probably feeling under nagged.”
“Right.” I was distracted by a tiny spot of unexpected color, pale and sandy, deep in the undergrowth twenty feet below the deck.
“You still there?”
“Yes,” I said. I was leaning over the rail now. “Was everything okay at the house when you left?”
“Well, sure,” she said. “Why—is there a problem?”
“No. Just feels…kind of cold, that’s all.”
“So check the furnace, caveman. That where big fire spirit lives. Want you nice and toasty while you work.”
She said she would keep me updated and was gone.
I’d barely heard the last few sentences. I went to the end of the deck and ran down the flight of stairs to the path. It wasn’t designed to enable access to the area directly underneath the balcony, which was heavily sloped, but to deliver you to the more landscaped area below. I had to come off it and push my way through bushes to get to where I’d been looking.
It took me a couple of minutes to find the first one. Soon afterward I’d found three more.
I made my way back out to the path and stood with them in the palm of my hand. Four cigarette butts. Each had been stubbed out on something firm, then dropped over the side. The color and condition of the filters said they hadn’t been there long. Yesterday at most, this morning more likely; overnight mist would have made them soggy and dull.
I walked back up to the deck. Found the point above where I’d found the butts and discovered a discolored patch on the upper surface of the rail. I always stubbed mine underneath, precisely to avoid causing this. I didn’t just drop the remains into the bushes either but carried them indoors to put in the trash.
Somebody had been standing right here, smoking.
There were two things I didn’t understand about this. The first was, whoever was out there should have been visible from the house if anyone was inside.
The second was, I knew that Gary Fisher didn’t smoke.
Another question occurred to me. The SUV had been with me in Seattle. So how had Amy gotten to the airport? Birch Crossing didn’t exactly rate a cab ser vice. The only solution I could think of was one I’d taken advantage of myself, a few days before. The Zimmermans. This made me remember something else.
The Zimmermans had keys to our house.
They were, in fact, the only people in the world who did. I couldn’t for a moment see either of them letting themselves in. But they were helpful folks. If someone came to them with a convincing story, I was far from sure they wouldn’t have tried to help. Ben, at least—Bobbi would have been a harder sell. But wouldn’t even Ben have come into the house with them, hovered in the background?
Five minutes’ search failed to turn up their phone number in the house. I decided to walk over there instead. The first question was settled as I walked up their drive. Both Zimmerman vehicles were present.
I went to the front door and rang the bell. The door opened immediately. Bobbi stood there holding a glass of wine. The broad smile on her face faltered but then reattached in a slightly different shape.
“Jack,” she said. “How are you?”
The Zimmermans’ house was arranged all on one level, ranch style. Over Bobbi’s shoulder I could see that some kind of get-together was taking place in their living room, a wide, open space with a view of the creek. There were people standing there, at least fifteen, perhaps twenty. Ben didn’t appear to be among them.
I stepped inside, trying not to be overly aware of the people in the living room or the way some of them seemed to be looking at me.
“Wanted to check something with you,” I said quietly. “You’ve got a set of our keys. Has anyone asked for them? Or asked you to let them into our house?”
Bobbi stared at me. “Of course not,” she said. “And I wouldn’t have let them in if they did.”
“Right,” I said quickly. “I didn’t think so. It just looked a little like someone might have been hanging around
