It was eleven by the time I reached over to turn off the light and drifted off to sleep.
I was in the middle of a dream involving Agatha Satterthwaite chasing me into the ocean with an enormous flatiron in her hand when there was a tinkle of glass from somewhere in the cottage.
I sat up straight. Beside me, Winston had also woken up, and he was vibrating with a low growl.
I shushed him and listened. There was silence for several minutes, and then I heard the creak of a floorboard from somewhere below me.
The hairs stood up on my arms; unless I was imagining things, my intruder was back.
17
I closed Winston into the bedroom, tossing him a dental chew to keep him busy, and tiptoed into the kitchen, pulling a knife from the block next to the sink. It glinted in the faint light from the moon outside the window as I crept to the door, opened it slowly, and peered down the stairwell into the darkness.
A flicker of light, as if from a flashlight, danced across the floor at the base of the stairs, and I heard heavy breathing. I grabbed my cell phone to call the police, but then I stopped. What if the intruder would be gone by the time they got to the shop? I really wanted to know who was breaking in—and what they were looking for.
I tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs, the knife tight in my hand. I turned the corner to encounter a shadowy figure bent over my desk, rifling through the drawers.
I took a step closer, hoping to see who it was. I was about to edge to the side, where I might get a chance to see the intruder's face, when Winston burst out in a volley of barks from above me. The intruder turned the flashlight toward the base of the stairs, the light flashing over me as he or she turned, then jerked it back to focus on me.
I squinted into the light, shielding my eyes. "Who are you and what do you want?" I croaked over the cacophony of Winston’s barking from upstairs.
No answer. We remained frozen in a stand-off. Then the figure the figure moved. In a split second I saw the glint of the glass paperweight they snatched up from the desk to hurl at me and I ducked, but the heavy globe glanced off my temple, and a burst of pain shot through my head. As I raised my hand instinctively to my head, the intruder rushed past me, pushed through the back door, and fled into the night.
I took a moment to clear my vision, then ran to the back door, knife still in hand, and stared out at the path to the ocean. The flashlight was bouncing—my intruder was running—and as whoever it was turned right and disappeared into the night, I flipped on the lights and looked down at the door. The doorframe was intact, but one of the windows was broken; it looked like someone had smashed the pane and reached in to unlock the door. I relocked the back door, not that it was going to make any difference, and walked to the front of the shop; the door was still locked.
I turned to the desk. The intruder hadn't had much time, but he or she had made the most of it; papers were strewn all over the floor, including the letter regarding the Satterthwaite will, and the bottom drawer was out and upside-down on top of the desk, as if someone was looking at the drawer itself. I thought of the bookshelf that had been slightly pulled out the other day; it was as if someone was looking for some kind of secret compartment or something.
But why?
I grabbed the phone and called the police to let them know of the break-in, telling them that I was unharmed (except for a small goose egg on my right temple). Once they assured me they were on their way, I headed upstairs to toss on jeans and a T-shirt, threw a few ice cubes in a baggie and wrapped it in a dish towel to make a cold compress and went back downstairs, holding the ice to my forehead and contemplating the drawer lying askew on top of the desk.
Someone was looking for something they thought was hidden in the shop. And it was important enough to break in and pull things apart to look at.
But why?
And why the sudden urgency? I'd been in and out of town for months, with plenty of opportunities to break into the store while no one was in residence. Was Loretta the keeper of some secret treasure, or first-edition book that hadn't been unearthed yet? Had someone just realized it was here? There was a small section of signed first editions on a shelf near the front of the store. I hadn't researched all of them yet, but I hadn't noticed anything that seemed to be of particular value. There were certainly no Gutenberg Bibles among the collection, which largely consisted of first editions by crime writers (one genre preference Loretta and I had had in common).
I headed back to the desk, stymied, and noticed a scrap of paper on the floor. I bent down to look at it; it was a crumpled receipt from the IGA, from 4:37 that afternoon, for a box of mothballs.
I hadn't bought mothballs. And I hadn't seen the receipt when I went up to bed, either. I made a note to point it out to the
