The Good, the Bad, and the Emus(45)

But if not Annabel, who? Was it only my imagination? Had I spooked myself with the image of the now-slumbering dragon? Or was it the thought of someone sneaking around with more potentially lethal purple-and-green packages that was making me nervous?

Then I spotted him. Him or her, I couldn’t tell which, only that someone was watching from the bushes behind Theo Weaver’s house, right on the border with Annabel’s lot, at the foot of the eight-foot iron fence. Was it Weaver himself?

I stood there for a while, pretending to be watching Annabel’s house, but keeping my eye on Weaver or whoever was lurking in Weaver’s yard. Was he watching me or the camp?

Standing here by the emu pen wasn’t going to get me any answers. I took one long, last, obvious look at Miss Annabel’s house, heaved my shoulders in a sigh, and ambled off in the general direction of the tents. But I took care to veer a little to my right, so I could pass as close as possible to Weaver’s yard. I stared up at the sky while I walked, as if fascinated by the stars—or, more likely, assessing whether the predicted thunderstorm was about to break—and let myself drift even farther to the right.

Suddenly I saw a flurry of motion in the distance. I heard a faint rustling of leaves as a shadowy figure extracted itself from the shrubbery along Weaver’s fence. Then I saw the figure, half running, half tiptoeing, across the lawn to the back door of Weaver’s house. The door opened and closed slowly, as if someone was trying to minimize the noise it made.

I drifted over to the fence and loitered there for several long minutes. No lights came on in the house.

Then I heard a slight rustling farther down the fence. Had I only imagined him going inside?

I set out again, paralleling the fence, pretending to be merely strolling along, enjoying the evening. And meanwhile I fished in my pocket with my healthy hand until I found the tiny flashlight I was keeping there for midnight bathroom trips. When I got level with the place where I’d heard the latest rustling, I whipped out the flashlight and turned it on.

“Shut that thing off!” Stanley Denton snapped.

I obeyed. Probably not as quickly as Stanley would have liked, but the bandages prevented me from helping with my other hand.

“Sorry,” I said, while fumbling over it. “I thought you were Weaver.”

“He went inside.”

Stanley extracted himself from the shrubbery in which he’d been hiding and came over to join me.

“So I saw,” I said. “But what’s to keep him from sneaking back out again? He could have gone in the back door, out the front, and snuck around the back of the house again.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Stanley said. “But I’m not going to spend another hour and a half watching him crouch furtively in the shrubbery staring at the camp.”

“Sorry I scared him off,” I said.

“Don’t be.” He stretched and then rolled his shoulders, and I gathered he’d been crouching there motionless for an uncomfortable length of time. “I was looking for an excuse to stop watching him.”

“Happy to oblige, then.”

“Look,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you and I and Theo Weaver are the only ones skulking about here tonight, but just in case I’m wrong, let’s go someplace where we can talk in peace.”

“I think Riverton rolled up the sidewalks hours ago,” I said. “And Camp Emu isn’t exactly awash with privacy.”

“My trailer’s over there,” he said, pointing to a shape a little apart from the main encampment.

“Then let’s—what’s that?”

Stanley whirled to see where I was pointing, but the slight shadow I’d seen was already gone.

“What was it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone in the bushes? Someone else, I mean.”

We spent a few minutes searching up and down the edge of the field, peering into all the bushes in both Miss Annabel’s backyard and Weaver’s, but found nothing. Unless you counted the place where the shrubbery had been slightly broken or trampled, but it could easily have been done by one of the three deer we’d startled during our search.

We hopped the fence into Miss Annabel’s yard and circled the house, making sure nothing looked amiss. No signs that anyone was awake.

“No sinister packages outside any of the doors,” I muttered.

“Were you expecting any?”

“Someone left a box of chocolates for Annabel,” I said. “Wrapped in the same paper and ribbon as Grandfather’s decanter. In case it comes up, pretend I told you earlier today, before Chief Heedles asked me to keep it quiet. But I thought you should know.”