Chapter 3
Three
As penance for the pizza, I did an extra twenty minutes on the elliptical the next morning.
It was nice and convenient, although it took away any excuse I might have had when I didn’t feel like working out.
Since Zachary was covering Steven Morton, there was no point in my going over to the university.
Besides, Diana had told me he usually had lectures and appointments in the mornings.
And there was nothing at the office I needed to tend to.
I decided to drive over to Crieve Hall instead, and scope out the house next door to Mrs. Grimshaw’s in daylight.
If the young woman Zachary had met last night was a student, maybe she wouldn’t be home this morning.
Maybe the house would be empty, so I could take a look around.
It isn’t a long drive, so it was less than fifteen minutes later that I swung down the street where I’d spent so much time yesterday.
Things looked as quiet now as they had then. This was a solid middle class neighborhood, and most people had probably gone to work and school already. A woman was jogging down the street with a dog, and in a driveway, another was strapping a toddler into a car seat.
As soon as I slowed down in front of the house, I realized why the place had looked dark last night. There were heavy curtains covering every window, even the one in the door. Either these people were vampires, or they really liked their privacy.
There were no cars in the driveway. I thought about getting out and walking around the house, but if the windows were covered, what would be the point? And since Steven wasn’t here anyway, pressing my nose to perfect strangers’ windows seemed a little out of line.
Tampering with the mail is a federal offense, but I figured no one would really mind if I just took a look. Sure, my heart was knocking a little extra hard against my ribs as I slid out of the car and opened the mailbox... but I did it. And all for nothing. The box was empty.
According to Private Investigating for Dummies, you can learn a lot about someone from their trash.
Diana surely had Steven’s trash covered, since she lived with him.
And I wasn’t about to break into the university’s recyclers to try to get at his office trash.
But would it be worth my while to peek into the trash can?
If nothing else, I might learn the name of the lady of the house.
Or the sister or daughter or whoever Steven had been seeing.
My nose wrinkled involuntarily at the thought of digging through garbage. Toilet paper rolls and used tissues and empty cans and leftover food.
Maybe I could just take the trash bags back to the office and make Zachary dig through them? Wasn’t that the kind of thing I was paying him for?
I decided it was.
The trash cans must be behind the house.
It wasn’t trash day, since nobody’s cans had been rolled down to the street.
That would have made things much easier.
But with the curtains closed anyway, I might be safe in driving up to the parking pad, emptying the trash bags into the trunk of the Lexus, and driving off with them. It would only take a minute.
I did it. My heart was knocking against my ribs, but I scooted the car up the driveway and behind the house, into an open parking area. It was empty. Unless they had cars parked in the garage, the house appeared to be empty, too.
The garage doors were solid, with no windows, so there was no way to look in. And like in the front, all the windows were covered with curtains back here, too.
One tan trash can and one green recycling can were parked by the wall next to the garage door. I opened the recycling can first. It was empty. Most people try to recycle something—cardboard, if nothing else; maybe plastic—but maybe the tenants weren’t that environmentally conscious.
I took a step sideways and lifted the lid of the trash can instead, wrinkling my nose against the expected odor. It was October, not July, so it wasn’t like the garbage had been cooking in the midsummer heat, but I still expected it to smell.
And it did, but not as badly as I had expected. The reason was obvious once I peered inside. The odor was residual. There was nothing inside the can. No trash, and nothing else, either.
I blinked.
Not recycling is one thing. Not throwing anything away is quite another.
What kind of people don’t generate trash?
There was nothing I could do about it, though, so I just drove the Lexus back down the driveway again.
I was passing Mrs. Grimshaw’s house when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and stepped on the brake the way you do when a squirrel is about to jump in front of the car.
There was no squirrel, but the small, spotted dog was moving through the grass close to the road. I glanced at the house, expecting to see Mrs. Grimshaw on the stoop, watching it, but the front door was closed. I squinted, but didn’t see a figure behind the glass in the picture window, either.
Of course, that was Mrs. Grimshaw’s business. The dog was on her property, and might even be safe behind an invisible electronic fence.
Nonetheless, I didn’t like it being loose so close to the street. The last thing I wanted was for it to dart out suddenly, in pursuit of a squirrel, in front of a car, and get turned into roadkill. Those short legs probably couldn’t move very fast.
I pulled into the bottom of Mrs. Grimshaw’s driveway, parked the car, and got out. “Hi, sweetheart.”
The dog stopped rooting through the grass to look up at me. It had round black eyes set wide apart in a broad face with a flattish snout, two big, black bat ears, and a white blaze down the middle of its nose. Some sort of small bulldog or boxer mix, maybe. Not a pug, but similar.
“What are you doing out here by yourself?” I asked.
It didn’t answer, of course. But after a second, it abandoned the ditch and trotted up the grassy yard toward the house. I watched it go. After a few seconds, it stopped to look at me over its shoulder.
Do dogs have shoulders?
I’ve never had a dog. David didn’t want anything that might ruin his expensively decorated house, and before that, it was just my mother and me, before I went off to college. We had enough trouble feeding ourselves. We couldn’t afford a dog.
Anyway, they don’t have arms, so it doesn’t make sense that they’d have shoulders. But they probably don’t have two sets of hips, either.
At any rate, the dog looked back at me, clearly expecting me to follow.
“Fine,” I said, and headed up the driveway.
Instead of going to the front door, the dog headed for the rear. I turned the back corner in time to see its hind quarters, with a tiny stub of a tail, disappear through a pet flap into the house.
So that explained how the dog had gotten out, and why Mrs. Grimshaw wasn’t watching it. For all I knew, it might be doing this every morning.
For all I knew, Mrs. Grimshaw was ninety-five, and much too decrepit to walk her dog. This trip into the front yard might be the animal’s daily constitutional.
At any rate, there was clearly no point in knocking on the door and telling her that her dog was loose. Not only was it not loose anymore, but it was obvious that she must know about the dog’s coming and going, since presumably she knew about the pet flap that was attached to her house.
I was about to turn around and go back to my car when something struck me.
There were tiny doggie footprints coming out of and going into the house. But it hadn’t rained for days. So why were the dog’s paws wet?
I moved closer, squinting in the darkness under the carport.
Only to stop short when I realized that the paw prints weren’t black, like water. They were red.
“Shit.”
I fumbled for my phone with hands that shook. And stopped with it in my hand. Talk about jumping to conclusions.
Maybe Mrs. Grimshaw was an artist and the dog had stepped in red paint.
Or maybe there was a broken can of marinara sauce on the kitchen floor and the dog had walked through it before Mrs. G could shoo it away.
Or hell, maybe it really was blood, but all that had happened was that the dog had stepped on the glass from the broken jar and cut itself.
Even if it was blood, that didn’t mean that Mrs. Grimshaw was lying inside in a pool of it, with her throat cut.
Before I caused an alarm, I should probably endeavor to find out whether there was cause for alarm.
I walked to the back door and knocked. “Mrs. Grimshaw? Can you hear me?”
There was no answer. I cupped my hands over my eyes and peered through the glass in the door.
All I could see was a washer and dryer, and an ironing board. No Mrs. Grimshaw. No blood. The door was locked. The knob rattled in my hand, but it didn’t turn and the door didn’t budge.
I made my way around the house, peering into the windows I could reach. The first room I came to was a den, paneled in mid-century knotty pine. It was empty, of people and of blood.
Beyond that were a couple of bedrooms, the beds made and pristine. Guest rooms, I assumed. A small window between them, too high for me to reach, was probably a Jack-and-Jill bathroom.
The master bedroom was on the far end of the house, and pristine, also.
The bed was sort of halfway made: the pillows stacked on the floor, the comforter smooth, but folded down.
Mrs. G had either started to turn it down last night, and stopped before getting into bed, or she had started to make the bed this morning, but had stopped before finishing the job.
There was no sign of her in the bedroom. The light was on in the adjacent master bath, which struck me as a little peculiar when it was bright and sunny outside, but it wasn’t necessarily sinister. She might not have been into the bedroom since earlier, and might not realize the light was still on.
In the front of the house was a dining room, with what looked like a carved mahogany dining room set, and then the front door and picture window.