It took only a minute, Joe clinging to Clyde’s jacket, his whiskers tickling Clyde’s ear as Clyde made the call. They listened to Mabel pass his message on as, out in front, McFarland answered her call. At once, the two officers stopped loading the van and moved away to vanish among the wooded yards. Listening to their soft, fast footfalls as they ran, then a dry scraping and sliding as if their quarry was climbing a fence, Joe leaped from Clyde’s shoulder to the roof, to see better. Yes, there went Dulcie racing across the roofs, looking down, watching them. He sped to join her, but soon she lost the runner between the houses.
Together they watched Crowley circle through the trees to the left while McFarland disappeared to the right. Ahead, a branch snapped. McFarland shouted, dove in among the trees behind the brown cottage; they heard a scuffle, then McFarland’s sharp command.
The young officer came out marching the erstwhile gardener ahead of him, hands cuffed behind him. Crowley joined him, moving close to the man, carrying the tool belt. Behind them in the cottage the curtain twitched aside and a figure appeared, watching them, watching the prisoner. McFarland had his back to the window, he didn’t see Emmylou—until some inexplicable cop instinct made him turn, and look back.
They halted their prisoner, and moved him away from the window. Crowley took a frowning look at her, and moved up the three cement steps. Standing to the side of the door, he knocked.
There was a long pause. When he knocked again, Emmylou eased the door open, stood looking at the officers, looking at the handcuffed prisoner, at his pale, angry face; and she took a step back. Crowley towered over her, made tall Emmylou Warren look as petite as a doll by comparison.
“Do you live here?”
She nodded, then shook her head.
“Could you tell us your name?” By the look on his face, he knew who she was. When she didn’t reply, he said, “You’re Emmylou Warren?”
She stood with her veined hands loose at her sides, her wrinkled face impassive but her jaw set tight, a little muscle twitching. “It isn’t my house, it belongs to a friend. She’s . . . I don’t know where she is. You can see the mail’s piled up.” She nodded toward the mailbox at the curb, its door open, the mail so jammed inside that half of it stuck out. She glanced toward the soggy newspapers littering the porch. “I’ve been up here several times. When I saw she was gone, I started coming to feed her cats, but now they’ve disappeared, too. I’m worried about her, and I’m worried for them. She always leaves the key, tells me if she’s going away. But it isn’t there, and at last, today, I broke in.” She looked at Crowley pleadingly. “I’m afraid something’s happened to her. Someone’s been in here, they’ve made a terrible mess.”
“Does she have any family near? Have you tried calling them?”
Emmylou shook her head. “No one. No one I can call, no one who’d come. Only her brother, and he never comes up here, he’s . . . He calls himself a vagabond.”
“Homeless?” Crowley said.
She nodded.
“Where does he hang out?”
“Up and down the coast.
“With bad weather on the way,” Crowley said, “might he have come here, wanted a place to crash? Found her gone, and broke in?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like that, Birely wouldn’t make that mess, he wouldn’t trash the place. He shows up in the village a couple times a year. When she worked bagging groceries, he’d meet her out in front of the market, she’d give him money, buy him some food. When he’s in town, he camps down by the river with the other homeless, or, in cold weather like this, under the Valley Road bridge. Bridge is just behind the market where we both worked, they’d meet there, she’d see him a few times then he’d be gone again.”
“Do you think she’d have gone off with him?”
“She’d never do that, she hated the way he lived. Sammie’s a homebody, she loves her home. I don’t understand where she’s gone.”
“Would he have harmed her?”
She looked intently at Crowley. “No, not Birely. He’s stable enough, he’s not a nutcase, he just likes that life, no responsibility. I’ve met him a couple of times, and the way she talks about him . . . He calls himself a vagabond, a hobo, a wanderer. He’s a happy man, and gentle. No,” she said, “he would never hurt her, he loves his sister.” She frowned. “It isn’t like her to leave the village without telling me, so I could feed the cats. She didn’t know I’d been evicted but she knows my old car; if she’d wanted me, she’d have found me.”
“You want to file a missing persons report? You can do that when you come in for fingerprinting.” At her uncertain look, he said, “You’ll have to come in, Ms. Warren. We need your prints in the investigation of the fire and of Hesmerra Young’s death. When you delay, you’re holding up a murder investigation.”
She looked at him blankly.
“Hesmerra was your friend?”
“Yes, she was.”
“There’s a possibility she didn’t die naturally.” Emmylou was silent, looking at him, gripping the door frame. He said, “You could help her by giving us your prints. You want to ride down to the station with us? I can bring you back to your car.”
From the roof, the cats watched the exchange, Dulcie’s ears sharply forward, the tip of her tail twitching as Emmylou backed away from the two officers. The cats looked at each other, puzzled. Surely Emmylou hadn’t poisoned Hesmerra, they didn’t like to think that, though they had no real cause to believe otherwise. “I’ll come to the station on my own,” she said stiffly. She seemed not to know the prisoner, he might have been a tree standing there in handcuffs for all the attention she paid him. The officers didn’t question her about him, nor question him about Emmylou. Maybe they were leaving that up to one of the detectives, who would want to do the questioning in their own way.
Emmylou said, “I’m parked down the block, around the corner.” She stepped on out, carefully pulled the door closed, latched it as best she could despite the way she’d pried the lock loose. It looked, Joe thought, much like the jimmied lock on Hanni’s garage door. Coming down the three steps, she walked past the officers and their prisoner with her head high, and moved on down the street. She was just approaching Hanni’s cottage when Billy looked up from the garden, saw her, and the two officers just behind her with their cuffed prisoner. The boy went still, looking, then he raced to Emmylou and threw his arms around her.
19
“They can’t put you in jail,” Billy said indignantly, clinging to Emmylou, watching the officers and their prisoner. “What did you do? You didn’t do anything.”
“They only want my fingerprints,” she said, “they say it’s routine. Didn’t they take yours?” Billy nodded. She said, “Sammie’s house is trashed inside, I don’t know what happened. While I’m at the station I’ll report her missing, maybe they can find out where she’s gone. First the fire, and Hesmerra, and now . . . seems like everything’s gone wrong.” She saw the hurt in his eyes at mention of his gran, and hugged him hard. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to upset you. I’m just a foolish old woman.”
“Have you been staying at Sammie’s?” he said so softly the cats could barely hear.
Emmylou shook her head. “She didn’t leave the key, I can’t find the key. But I did break in, just now, to look inside for the cats. She always comes to tell me if she’s going away, she always leaves the key.” She looked at Billy, frowning. “She said more than once that someone was watching her, maybe following her. She’s been gone since before the fire, and not a word. She could have found me, found my car. And now, where are the poor cats? Muddy raccoon prints all over the back porch, too, and in the house, so maybe it wasn’t a person at all, but those beasts . . . Oh, the poor cats.”