"Are you job hunting?" she asks me closely.
"Slow down. It's that white house with the blue trim."
"Jack, tell me!"
She wheels into Janet Thrush's driveway, stomps on the brake and whips off her sunglasses. There's nothing for me to do but kiss her, very briefly, on the lips. No retaliatory punch is thrown.
"Come on," I say, stepping out of the car, "let's go commit some journalism."
Janet's banged-up Miata is parked out front but she's not answering my knock. Emma says we ought to bag it and come back later, but I've got a bad feelingthere's a fresh pry mark on the doorjamb. Cautiously I twist the knob, which falls off in my hand.
"What're you doing?" Emma says.
"What does it look like?"
Stepping inside, I break into a sickly sweat. The place has been looted. Half a dozen times I call Janet's name.
"Let's go, Jack." Emma tugs anxiously at my shirt. This isn't as safe as boarding Jimmy Stoma's boat. This time the cops haven't been here ahead of us; only the bad guys.
Janet's makeshift TV studio has been demolished. The tripod racks are down, lightbulbs shattered on the floor. A couch is overturned, the ticking slit open with a knife. Her computer operationkeyboard, monitor, CPU, video camerais gone.
I expect the rest of the house to be in shambles, but it's not. Emma stays on my heels as we move wordlessly down the hall; at each doorway I pause to gather a breath, in case Janet is lying lifeless on the other side. Oddly, nothing in the kitchen, the bedrooms or the closets appears disturbed. A light is on in a bathroom and cold water runs from a faucet in the sink. I turn it off.
"Maybe she wasn't here when they did this. Maybe she's okay," Emma whispers.
"Let's hope." But I fear that even if Janet Thrush is alive, she's not all right. Her Miata shouldn't be parked in the driveway, and the intruders should have gotten farther than the living room. Something worse than a burglary happened here.
"Jack, we'd better go."
"Wait a second. Let's think this through."
We're sitting side by side on the end of Janet's queen-sized bed. Somewhere in another room a phone is ringing and ringingRonnie from Riverside, maybe, or Larry from Fairbanks. Doesn't matter because the computer line is disconnected, and Janet's gone. Emma says, "You know why I think she's okay? Because we haven't found a purse. She must have taken it with her, which means she's probably just fine."
I'm not persuaded. Why would a woman returning to a ransacked house flee with her handbag but leave the car?
Emma follows me out the front door. When we arrived I didn't look closely in Janet's convertible, but now I see why she didn't drive it away. The glove box is ajar, the carpeting over the floorboard is ripped back and both bucket seats have been wrested off their mounts. Whoever broke into the house started first with the Miata.
Which means Janet most likely was at home, inside, when they came through the front door.
"Shit." I kick another dent in the car.
"You think it's the hard drive they were after?" Emma's voice is shaky.
"That'd be my guess."
"You ever had this happen beforea source disappearing like ... ?"
"No, ma'am." The wise move is to call the cops anonymously from Janet's phone, pretending to be a concerned neighbor, then depart swiftly. There's no point trying to explain our presence here to detectives Hill and Goldman. Emma agrees, not eager to involve herself, or the Union-Register,in a possible kidnapping investigation. We're hurrying up the steps toward the house when she suddenly stops, pointing into a flower bed. Carefully I reach through thorny bougainvilleas and pick it upJanet's toy Mi6, the prop for her SWAT-Cam costume. I hold it up for Emma's inspection, saying "Don't worry, it's not real."
"Is this hers?"
"Yup."
"What in the world does she use it for?"
"She performs on television," I say, "sort of."
Before we re-enter the house I take out a handkerchief and wipe my prints off the doorknob; likewise the faucet in the bathroom. In the kitchen I Saran-Wrap my right hand before using the wall phone to dial the sheriff's office, Emma pacing in the living room. No sooner have I hung up than I hear her twice cry out my name.
She's rigid when I reach her side. "What is that?" she says hoarsely.
A dark stain on the carpet, recognizable to anybody who has covered a homicide. I hear myself saying, "Oh no."
"Jack?"
I grab Emma's arm and lead her outside and place her in the passenger seat of the Camry. She assents numbly when I tell her I'll do the driving. I take it real easy down the interstate, checking the rearview every nine seconds like some kind of paranoid coke mule. Emma's clenched left hand, as pink as a baby's, is on my knee.
"Who was she?" she asks finally, in a broken voice.
"Jimmy Stoma's sister."
Standing on the pier watching the horizon bleed away with the last of the sunlight, I'm thinking about the only time I got engaged. Her name was Alicia and she was, I later discovered, mad as a hatter. I met her on a newspaper assignment, a feature story about a beer promotion disguised as a balloon race from St. Augustine to Daytona. Some guy left his boogie board on the beach and I accidentally demolished it with a rental car, distracted at that moment by Alicia in an electric-blue bikini. The guy who owned the boogie board turned out to be her boyfriend, whom she dumped five days later to move in with me. We were both twenty-four. The decision to become engaged was strictly hormonal, which isn't always foolish, but in this case the lust began to ebb long before the diamond ring was paid off. Among Alicia's multiple symptoms were aversions to sleep, employment, punctuality, sobriety and monogamy. On the positive side, she volunteered weekends at an animal shelter.
Soon my apartment filled with ailing mutts that Alicia had saved from euthanasia while secretly consorting with one of the staff veterinarians, who (she later complained) took unfair advantage of her weakness for ketamine and nitrous oxide. Our breakup was a spiteful and messy business, mostly because of the loose dogs, yet I'm amused to recall that I presented myself as heartbroken at the time. Within weeks I was again pursuing waitresses, emergency-room nurses and secretaries, an agreeable social orbit that accepted newspaper reporters without disdain. This carried me along until I met Anne, who worked in a bookstore. During our first conversation she managed to eviscerate Jane Austen with such aplomb that I was smitten on the spot. What she saw in me, I couldn't say.
Anne and I didn't fade out or implode like most of my other relationships. Back and forth we wenttogether, then apart, then together againas if caught on a wild spring tide. What finally ended our romance was my crushing demotion to the obituary beat and the morbid preoccupations that came with it. Anne didn't want to hear about people our age dyingwhether it was F. Scott Fitzgerald or the friend of mine in Colorado who keeled over while reeling in a ten-inch brook trout. Nor did she care to listen to morose, middle-of-the-night speculations about the demise of my long-gone father, though she was too gentle to interrupt. One morning she simply said goodbye and moved out. That time I knew she wasn't coming back because she took her favorite Nabokov novel, which she'd always "forgotten" before, and a leather-bound volume of sonnets by John Donne (composed at the ripe old age of twenty-five).
Such details make it all the more excruciating to know she has pledged herself to a hack writer of espionage novels. From The Falconer's Mistress:
The woman slipped her hands inside Duquesne's fur-lined overcoat but drew away when she felt the ominous bulge of the holster.
"Now you know who I am," he said, pulling her face close to his. She gazed into his gray eyes with a mixture of dread and excitement. "I'll leave, if you wish," he said.