They had gone to Iris’s cottage on Saturday. Mimi had tried to beg off initially, but Iris had insisted.
“Are you sure?” Mimi looked from one to the other, but her gaze ended up on Jay. He could tell she wanted his blessing-he could see it in her eyes. He nodded and was quick about it. She was sharp and any delay would give him away. She would think he didn’t want her along and she’d be wrong.
“Hey, if I want you to buzz off, I’ll give you a quarter,” he said.
“It’ll cost more than that, bud.”
The bantering didn’t quite fool him, and soon enough she changed her mind. “You know, on second thought, I’m really on a roll with this new scene I’m writing. I think I’ll pass.”
So Jay got down on his knees and wrapped his long arms around her legs and pleaded until she just about fell over and agreed to come. Everyone was laughing. The happy trio. But she looked at him funny, all the same, as if she knew there was something up. She was right, but he wasn’t sure himself what was up. He and Iris didn’t desperately need to be alone. They wouldn’t be, anyway, at her parents’ cottage. It was Mimi alone that he was worried about. The house at the snye was secure; he had to believe that. It was Mimi he was worried about. She had been alone a lot lately. Maybe too much.
Jay had seen a movie about the composer Gustav Mahler. The opening shot was of a lake in the mountains somewhere: a dock, a boathouse, and early morning mist swirling on the water. Quiet. The camera dollied in on the boathouse, and suddenly the whole place exploded. He found himself thinking about that as he and Mimi waded back across the snye bright and early Monday morning. They’d had a good time, but halfway through the weekend, he had started worrying about the house. The girls had called him on it.
“First you want me to come along because you’re worried about leaving me alone,” said Mimi. “Then you wish you’d left me there because you’re worried about the house.”
“Jackson is just a worrier,” said Iris.
“Yeah, well, worry about this,” said Mimi, and handed him her fishing rod, which was all snarled. They had been sitting in the middle of the lake with fishing rods as an excuse for doing nothing. So he had picked away at the knots and tangles and kept his worrying to himself for the rest of the weekend.
They’d left Iris at the lawyer’s office in Ladybank where she had a summer job. Jay was driving the Camry. He was going to drop Mimi off and make sure everything was okay before heading back into town. And everything did look okay. Pretty as a picture, with the tall grass and wildflowers nodding in a light breeze. But Jay watched the house carefully, waiting for the whole thing to blow up.
Mimi babbled on about a scene she was going to rewrite, but he hardly heard her. They had arrived at the shed by then, and he stopped in his tracks.
“What?” she said.
He pointed.
The back door was ajar.
Jay ran for the stairs, Mimi to her desk. “Oh, thank you, God, thank you, thank you,” he heard her say as he charged upstairs, two steps at a time. Presumably her computer was still there. His computer was still there, too, and he breathed a long sigh of relief, leaning on his knees to catch his breath. Mimi joined him and gasped.
He looked up, and his gaze, so narrowly fixed when he first got there, now saw what he had missed. Two of his guitar stands were empty.
The cops took almost an hour. By then Jay and Mimi had discovered that the back door had not been forced but opened from inside; the window in Mimi’s bedroom had been smashed. Glass lay everywhere on her bed, in her open suitcase-everywhere!
But that wasn’t the last of the surprises. Jay had gone down to the snye to lay a two-by-ten plank across the broken bridge for the cops, figuring they wouldn’t want to wade over, when suddenly Mimi came running down to him. “The camcorder’s gone,” she said.
“Oh, crap,” said Jay.
“And that’s not all. My computer beeped at me.”
Jay stared at her. “Huh?”
“It’s never done that before,” she said. He laid the planks down and then followed her back up to the house. She had left the laptop partially open. Jay crouched and peered inside, then slowly raised the lid. The screen was black. He pushed the power button. Nothing.
“It beeped when I opened it,” she said.
So Jay closed the lid. Then pressed the button to open it.
Beep, beep, beep.
He jumped back. They both did. “Like that,” said Mimi. “Three beeps.”
“And it never happened before?” She gave him an exasperated look.
Constable Roach came alone. They were short-staffed, and Jay got the unmistakable impression that a breaking and entering was no big deal. Like maybe people got burgled every day. Roach took down the story.
“So that’s a wine-red thirty-gigabyte JVC HDD?”
“Right. And it’s worth?”
“About six hundred, American.”
Then he turned to Jay. “And two guitars plus cases?” he said, reading his notes. “A Gibson ES-175 with a sunburst finish and a powder-blue Fender Stratocaster?”
“Baby blue,” said Jay.
Roach made the change. “And their value, roughly?”
Jay shoved his hands in his pockets, shrugged. “Somewhere around three or four grand,” he said.
While Roach wrote this in his notes, Jay swallowed hard and risked the question he had been afraid to ask. “Any chance I’m going to see the guitars again?”
Roach grimaced. “Depends on whether you got robbed by crooks or musicians,” he said. “I’m guessing these are pretty high-end instruments?”
Jay nodded again, a sick feeling coming over him. The loss was beginning to sink in.
“If your thief was some budding rock star, you probably won’t see either of them again unless it’s in a club somewhere. And if you think you do, do not attempt to do anything. Come to us. But from what you tell me-the troubles you’ve been having-I suspect your visitor finally decided to step up his game, make a move.”
Jay swallowed hard. Mimi took his arm.
“We’ll alert the music stores in Ottawa and Kingston, the pawnshops,” said Roach. “You don’t by any chance have serial numbers or anything like that?”
Jay nodded, though he had forgotten until then. “They’re back at the house-my mom’s house. I’ll phone them in.”
“You do that.” Roach looked impressed. “You’d be surprised how few people bother.” He glanced at Mimi.
“Don’t even ask,” she said. “I’m one of those people you’re talking about.”
“How long will it take?” said Jay, turning back to the policeman. “Getting in touch with the music stores and all that?”
“Oh, I’ll do it right away. Soon as I get out to the cruiser.”
Jay must have looked hopeful, because Roach sighed. “But you’re not optimistic?”
Roach rubbed the side of his nose with the end of his pencil. “Depends,” he said. “If they broke in Sunday, they might not have been able to dump them yet.”
And Jay could guess the rest. They’d been gone since early Saturday afternoon.
It was only as Roach was about to leave that Mimi mentioned about her computer.
“It beeped at you?” said Roach.
“Yeah, I know. It sounds pretty lame,” she said. “But it is a pretty weird coincidence that my computer goes down when this perp comes around.”
Roach smiled in a patronizing way, which made Mimi furious, from the look on her face. And Jay jumped in to defend her. “It’s not as crazy as you think, sir,” he said. “The guy who’s been breaking in did some weird stuff to my computer, too. Left little messages, whatever.”
Roach nodded. But then he shrugged and turned to Mimi. “I didn’t mean to take what you said lightly. It’s just that I don’t know what to tell you. The item is still here.”
“Yeah, and beeping at me!” said Mimi. “God, I’d like to…”
“Like I said, miss, you come to us if you find anything. Anything at all.”
“Like if we find any clues?” said Jay. Roach nodded.
“The fucked-up computer is a clue,” said Mimi, glaring at the officer. He smiled at her again, and Jay wanted to warn him that he was walking on thin ice. But Mimi wasn’t finished. “Think about it,” she said. “This guy has been sneaking in here for months, and he’s never done anything like break windows or steal things-well, not big things. There’s something screwy about this.”
Roach flipped back through his notes. “You said you locked the storm door out back, which you figured was how he had been getting in?” Jay nodded. Roach shrugged. “So, he comes back, sees you’ve taken precautions, and it bugs him. Bugs the heck out of him. So he decides to make you pay.”
Jay nodded again. But when he looked at Mimi, she was still fuming.
“Miss,” said Roach. “I understand you’re angry. You have every right to be. And we’ll do what we can. But I gotta tell you, this was a pretty hit-and-miss burglary. They left two computers, an iPod-I don’t think we’re dealing with professionals here. It’s not the modus operandi of a typical rural B and E. See, out here, your specialists back a van up to the door, knock, and if anyone answers, pretend they’re lost. If no one answers, they take as much as they can and split. Now, you’ve got that broken bridge, which would likely be enough of a deterrence to any kind of ring-not worth the bother to cart stuff back and forth across the stream.” He paused, looked around. “What I see is someone on foot, who took just as much as he could carry. And what’s easier to carry than a couple of guitar cases and a camera. I’d guess it might be local kids.”
“Which doesn’t explain leaving the iPod,” said Mimi, and all Roach could do was shrug. But then Mimi’s eyes lit up. “Somebody nearby, you think?”
The officer considered the idea. “Could be,” he said.
“Because it’s weird,” said Mimi, “but somebody nearby said the same thing you just said a few days ago.”
“What do you mean?”
Mimi turned to Jay. “Remember when I told you about my run-in with Stooley Peters?” He nodded. “I told him we were having problems, and he said it could be kids. Which really bugs me because kids always get blamed.” Then she turned back to the officer, her eyes big. “And that might explain leaving the iPod. I mean, a kid wouldn’t leave it, but an old geezer might.”
It was a good point. Roach pursed his lips.
“Who’s this Peters fellow?”
Mimi told him where Peters lived. The policeman said he would look into it.
“Good,” said Mimi. “Thanks.”
“I’m not promising anything.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’ll piss him off, anyway, which is fine by me.”
“Do you think Peters screwed around with your computer?” said Jay.
Mimi shrugged. “Maybe he was going to steal it and then he dropped it, which is why it’s beeping. I don’t know.”
“We’ll be sure to get in touch with Mr. Peters,” said Roach, closing his notebook. “But, like I said, you get any ideas-you come to us. You hear me?” The warning was clear.
Mimi nodded but she didn’t look any too happy.
They headed down the lawn with Roach. “Can you answer me one more question?” Mimi asked.
“What’s that?” the cop asked.
“Do they have the death penalty up here?”
Roach chuckled and, shaking his head, went on his way.
“Bet he doesn’t talk to Peters.”
“He said he was going to.”
Mimi snorted. “Yeah, right, he was one step away from patting me on the head and saying, ‘There, there, little lady.’ What an asshole.”
Jay went to give her a hug, but she sloughed it off.
“Hey,” he said. “In case you forgot, I also got ripped off.” He had no idea if the stuff was covered by his mother’s home insurance. She’d said something about it once, but he hadn’t paid much attention.
Back at the house, Mimi went straight to her desk. She sat down, leaning on her elbows, staring at her laptop. “I’m sorry, Jay,” she said. “I just feel violated. And why is it that cops make you feel like you’re to blame?”
Jay rested his hand on her shoulder but sensed somehow that she didn’t want to be mollified, so he pulled away. But he didn’t go away. And after a bit, he leaned his backside on her desk so that they would be facing each other if and when she decided to look up.
“Maybe we should get out of here,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Pack up and leave.”
She looked furious. “Hell no,” she said. “That’s what this guy wanted all along.”
“And we ignored him so he gets tough, and now I’m out two very expensive instruments and you’re out a camcorder. We stay and what’s he going to do for encores?”
Mimi’s eyes flashed. “Get his balls shot off,” she said.
Jay smiled. “Guns aren’t easy to score up here.”
“We’ll see about that,” she said.
He looked at her hard. She was kidding-had to be.
“You’ve sure got a lot of moxie,” he said.
“I don’t know about that. Hey, I don’t even know what moxie is, come to think of it. But this whole thing sucks, Jay. Whoever was leaving you bluebirds and snake skins, and figured out how to get in here without ever leaving a trace is not the same person who smashed in my window. Think about it.”
Jay nodded. But he was thinking that the guy who filmed Mimi at the window with her own camera might just want it back to see his handiwork. It was all pretty ugly.
He couldn’t tell if Mimi had thought about what purpose the thief might have for the camera. She seemed angrier than anything. She didn’t just want her stuff back-she wanted to get even. There was bravery in her he didn’t feel himself. If she wanted to stay, then he’d tough it out. But he could feel his strength slipping away. He could feel a darkness seeping into him. It wasn’t just the guitars; it was bigger than that. He doubted Mimi would understand. Rage kept such feelings at bay. Rage burned up sorrow.
She stood up and put her arms around him. He held her tightly, trembling. Finally they pulled apart. She pushed the hair back from his forehead. “You looked as if you were floating away on me,” she said.
He nodded.
“I’m sorry about your guitars,” she said. “That is totally shit.”
“And I’m sorry about your pretty red camcorder and the beeping computer,” he said. “But there’s this place in town. PDQ Electronics. The owner knows Macs.”