“Lord, you’re a pessimistic man,” she said, standing on her toes for a better view. Strange that she should be just as certain that his suitcase would materialize any moment as he was that it was gone for good.
He’d been right, though. His suitcase was lost, and so was he.
—
BECKA, he thought, his eyes filling at the memory of that all-too-brief period when they were still in love. Since none of the other mourners were paying him any attention, he decided to risk glancing toward her grave. He knew roughly where it was, but with the stones lying flat here in Dale, he couldn’t tell precisely. Someone had placed a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses on one of the graves in her section, causing Raymer, who’d let the first anniversary of her death go unmarked, to feel a deep pang of belated guilt. Becka was an only child, her parents having died in a car wreck when she was in high school, and her theater friends were mostly too self-absorbed to miss or even remember her. Which left only Raymer to do so, unless you counted Alice Moynihan.
Or unless you counted the man Becka’d been about to leave him for.
When Gus nudged him again, a perplexed expression on his face, Raymer realized he’d pulled the garage-door remote out of his trouser pocket and was unconsciously fondling it. Not long after her death, he’d sold Becka’s RAV back to the Toyota dealership where they’d bought it two years earlier. He thought he’d cleaned the vehicle out pretty carefully, but the service department, preparing it for resale, discovered the remote when they pushed the driver’s seat all the way back on its runners. “Bet you went crazy looking for this,” the guy said when he returned it to him at the station. “How it got wedged up under the seat like that’s beyond me.”
At the time Raymer had naturally assumed the remote was for their own garage. He’d put the town house on the market the day after her funeral, making a mental note to give the remote to the new owners. Then he’d put it in his desk drawer for safekeeping and promptly forgot all about it until a couple weeks ago. The house had sold pretty quickly, and he distinctly remembered handing over two garage-door remotes, along with the door keys, at the closing. So what was this remote?
“You okay?” Gus whispered.
“I’m fine,” Raymer whispered back, returning the device to his pocket, though in truth he was feeling light-headed.
“Quit weaving.”
Having not realized he was weaving, he quit.
It was possible, of course, that this weird little mystery had nothing to do with Becka. The RAV had been a demo model with several hundred miles on it when they bought it, so the remote might’ve belonged to a salesman at the dealership. Probably not, though. It hadn’t been dropped. No, it had been hidden deliberately. One of the more serious obstacles to small-town adultery was the problem of what to do with your car. If you left it out at the curb, it would be noticed and maybe recognized. You could leave it a couple blocks away, but people would still conclude you were having an affair; they’d just be wrong about who you were having it with. Better to arrive under the cover of darkness, drive directly into your lover’s garage and lower the door before either you or your car could be identified.
“What’s that?” Charice had wanted to know when she entered the office unexpectedly and caught him examining the thing as if it were a fossil.
“A garage-door remote.”
“I can see that,” she told him, irritation her default mode, at least with him. “I mean, like, what’s the story with this one?”
He explained where it had been found, in Becka’s RAV, up under the driver’s seat.
“Throw it away,” she said, without the slightest hesitation.
“Why?” he asked. Because you could tell at a glance that she’d leaped to the same conclusion he had.
“I’ll tell you why. Because it doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does.”
What we think it does, she meant.
“Could be she let somebody borrow her car,” Charice continued, “and this other person dropped that remote in there.”
“But if somebody borrowed her car, why would that person have his garage-door opener on him? Wouldn’t that be in his car? Do you carry your remote around in your purse?”
“I don’t have one. I don’t even have a garage. Also, it’s none of your business what’s in my purse.”
“Okay,” Raymer said, ignoring her. With Charice you did well to ignore a good portion of what she said. “Then how’d it get wedged up under the driver’s seat?”
She shrugged. “Could be an innocent explanation, is all I’m saying.”
He raised an eyebrow at this.
“Admit it. You been thinkin’ sideways since Becka passed.” Selling the condo, she meant. Moving into the Morrison Arms. Selling the RAV instead of his piece-of-shit Jetta. All three decisions motivated by spite and self-loathing.
“And anyhow,” Charice went on, standing over him now with her hands on her hips, “suppose you’re right, which you aren’t. You plan to do what, exactly? Go around to every house in Bath and point that thing at all the garages and see which door it opens?”
That was, in a nutshell, the very plan taking shape in Raymer’s brain, though he was reluctant to admit it to someone so clearly determined to deride it. But was it such a bad idea? After all, Bath was a small place, and he could cover it neighborhood by neighborhood in his spare time. Wouldn’t that just be good, methodical police work, eliminating the innocent from your inquiries?
“Thing about garage-door openers, Chief? They send out, like, a radio signal, except that one there — the one you’re holding? — that’s not the only remote with the same signal. It’s like the key to your car. Say you own a Volkswagen Jetta.”
“I do own a Volkswagen Jetta.”
“There you go. And you got a key that starts your car.”
“Charice—”
“Here’s what you don’t know ’cause you’re not a criminal. Your key? The one to your car? Probably starts half-a-dozen other VWs, maybe even an Audi or two. Anything German. And that’s just here in Schuyler County. Never mind Albany. Or the rest of New York State.”
As was often the case, Raymer was puzzled by Charice’s logic. “So you are a criminal, since you do know this?”
“I know because I know lots of criminals. ’Cept for me and Jerome”—this was her brother—“our family’s mostly crooks. I got a cousin in Georgia did time for auto theft? He broke into this car and set off the alarm and got himself collared. Tragic part? Turned out he had a key that fit the ignition. Wasn’t any need to break in, even.”
“He was a car thief. He got caught and went to jail. This is tragic how?”
“Plus,” Charice added, undeterred, “how’s it gonna look, the chief of police standing outside citizens’ houses, trying to open their garages? God’s own fool is what you’re gonna look like.”
In this she’d been proven correct. Early the following morning Raymer had begun his investigation in his and Becka’s old neighborhood, sort of as a control. After all, it was unlikely that she’d been having an affair with someone on their block, in which case she’d have walked, not driven. But he was curious to see if Charice was right and the device might open some innocent doors. He’d gone up one side of the street and back down the other without setting a single door aflutter. He’d even tried his and Becka’s old condo on the off chance the remote was a spare he’d forgotten about. Returning to the Jetta, he found a man in a bathrobe waiting for him. “So what’s this about, then?” he said, pointing at the remote, his brow knit with dark suspicion.