“Two - you’re a medium and you’ve been channeling one of the legendary packrats of history.”
I reached the doorway to the kitchen and looked around. The calendar beside the phone was still turned to April, with its overly cute picture of a quartet of fuzzy yellow kittens spilling out of an Easter basket. On the windowsills, the earthly remains of dozens of houseplants rustled gently in the faint draft created by my arrival. And on the counter, among the trivets, trinkets, and tea cozies, I found a nest of pill bottles, all in the name of a Mrs. Edwina Sprocket. Who had apparently suffered from an impressive variety of ailments, including heart problems, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, indigestion, and constipation. The most recent refill dated from the end of March.
“Three - you convinced the landlord, or the heirs, to let you move in before they held the estate sale.”
The more I looked around, the likelier that explanation seemed. The kitchen cabinets held dusty canned goods. Mostly cream soups and other bland prepared foods. The refrigerator contents were definitely Ted - several six-packs of Coors, leftover pepperoni pizza, kung pao chicken trimmed with feathery gray mold, and frozen enchiladas. The only kitchen items that seemed recently used were a few utilitarian pans, utensils, and plastic dishes - stored in the dish drainer, probably because it would have taken a magician to fit another saucer into Mrs. Sprocket’s tightly packed kitchen cabinets.
Other than the kitchen, the other rooms on the ground floor seemed undisturbed for weeks, except where someone - probably the Caerphilly police - had recently walked through, as I was now doing, leaving a trail through the dust. Most of the bedrooms on the second and third floor appeared to have been shut up for years. I sneezed a lot.
I had poked head and shoulders through the trapdoor to the attic and was peering around, trying to decide if it was worth searching, when the doorbell rang. I started, hitting my head on a low beam. And then I went downstairs to investigate.
The doorbell rang again as I tiptoed through the living room to peek out the lace curtains covering the glass panes in the door.
It was Frankie, looking as eager as ever, though minus the phony police uniform. But still, what was Frankie doing here?
I opened the door to find out.
“Oh, Meg - hi,” he said, looking rather surprised to see me.
“Hi, Frankie,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“Urn… I saw your car,” he said, teetering a little as he nervously wound one leg farther than usual around the other. “So I thought I’d see if I could help you out.”
I looked pointedly from my car to the giant hedges surrounding the driveway. Unless Frankie had X-ray vision, there was no way he could have seen my car from the road.
He squirmed. “So have you found any of Ted’s files? We could really use some of his files.”
“The police took all his computer equipment,” I said. “I’m just locking up.”
Maybe that was a sneaky thing to say - implying, as it did, that I was here as part of the police search.
“Oh, okay,” he said. “Well… I’ll be going now.”
I watched him drive away and waited until I was sure he was gone. Ted’s files were urgent - but were they urgent enough to bring Frankie this far out of town? After work?
Strange.
I went back to explore the one part of the house I hadn’t yet seen - the basement.
Of course, I thought, if this were one of those women-in-jeopardy movies, the basement would be where the escaped lunatic was hiding, or where the secret treasure was buried, and the soundtrack would swell with ominous music when I reached for the door handle.
And, I confess, I did start when I looked down the steps and saw a figure in the gloom. Santa Claus, to be precise. He was propped up in the corner where the stairs made a ninety-degree turn, his head slumped on his chest and his hat askew. I deduced from the improbable way his left leg was twisted that he was a life-size Christmas decoration, but I still checked him for a pulse before turning my back on him. The moth-eaten, life-size reindeer - irritatingly, only seven of them - were hanging by their antlers from hooks in the ceiling beams.
I noticed, with a sigh of relief, that the basement seemed ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house. And there I found more proof of Ted’s brief occupation. A space at the foot of the stairs had been cleared of clutter, and here Ted had set up housekeeping. A futon. A makeshift desk, still bearing the outline, in dust, of a CPU.