Emotions, take a seat. She’d need to deal with it eventually, and getting it over with seemed like a good idea. She’d go to Sarah’s, see what had happened to what she thought of as “the party of five” (and boy, could they party!) and either ask to borrow her bullhorn or just borrow it, depending on whether there was someone to ask. Simple. Straightforward. Go.
She went, back up the street, away from the store. Past the Molinaros’ …
Once again she found herself heading up their walk toward the front door. You know, she really should check on them. They were in town at last check, and she did work for them, and she considered them friends, just like she considered her coworkers friends. Before anything else, she should look in on them – even if it was probable that she wouldn’t like what she found. She felt obligated.
She hesitated, though. It would not be pleasant if she found what she expected to find. But nothing about this was going to be pleasant – people were dead. No yippee skippee about that. Nothing had been pleasant since she first left the house that morning. But she could still do it. It was A Thing She Could Do, and one she thought she ought to.
Standing there, she pulled out the notes she’d scribbled before, then a pen, and started listing all the people in town she’d want to know the fate of above all others. The Molinaros, obvs. Sarah and LaSheba and Vivi and their roommates. Ravinder – he shared an apartment with Bilbo on Ensign Drive. Pablo Amendola, the volunteer firefighter she’d dated for a few months before they discovered they bored each other silly, but they were still friendly. Chandra, who worked at the Spinnaker Inn – didn’t she live in the same complex as Rav and Bilbo?
That was about the list. She’d look in on each of them, at their homes and workplaces, just to be sure. She’d get Sarah’s bullhorn and go around town, calling out to anyone who might be listening. And she should probably go up the trails too.
Like Julius Caesar’s account of Gaul, all Sayler Beach was divided into three parts. There was the beach itself and the points north and east – the beach parking area, the lagoon, the fire department, the Holy Green Zen Farm (a location whose existence let you know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that you were in Marin County, California). There was the residential section, roughly a thousand feet in diameter with winding streets, the houses of the rich and successful and the peons who worked for them terraced and cascading downhill toward the ocean.
And then there was the undeveloped part, wilderness and the occasional copse of windswept evergreens, cut through with a few trails. This was by far the largest part, extending for about a mile up the coast to a local horse ranch and a quarter-mile inland. No one was supposed to be living on that land – it was for camping and outdoorsy activities – but you usually had a few homeless folks parked out there. California and its weather were a lot nicer to the displaced than most states, granted that was a low bar to clear.
So she had a plan – check on friends, get bullhorn, go everyplace she could drive her Accent and talk loudly until she ran out of streets to cover. Simple in concept, gut-wrenching in execution. And it started with the Molinaros.
Where she encountered her first unforeseen problem. The house was locked.
Ordinarily that would not have been an issue – she knew where they kept the spare key, since she had to go in every other day to check things when the family wasn’t around. But since they were present, they hadn’t bothered to leave the key out, since why would they need to? Which put her in the position of not being sure how she’d get in.
First, she tried knocking on the door. If one of them was alive, it would be rude to just barge in. But there was no response, so she tried calling Pete Molinaro’s cell. Voice mail, still. Toni Molinaro’s cell? Voice mail. She walked around the house, hoping for an open window or an unlocked back door. No dice. She double-checked where the spare key would be, and a few other likely hiding spots. Nothing.
Kelly sighed. Nothing for it but to break in if she wanted to look in on them. She figured the odds were that they were inside and deceased, so she didn’t feel guilty about trespassing or damages. She just wasn’t sure how to go about it – she’d never done anything like this before. “Okay, Kel, you’re a burglar. You know you won’t get caught. You’re too small to break the door down, you don’t want to cut your hand on a shard of broken window, and you don’t know how to pick locks. How do you do this?”
The answer was obvious: go back to the Matchicks’ – which she did have a key to – and see what you find.
Ten minutes later, she was in her car with three items she hoped would do the trick. The crowbar was obvious. The little jack that came with her car also had a small prybar. And wonder of wonders, Sandy Matchick – who’d gone on a Marie Kondo kick last year and gotten rid of half the items in the place – still had a glass cutter from her days of dabbling in stained glass art. Between the three, she figured she could get into almost any place in town.
She’d also
