Follow the Dotted Line (22 page)

“What?” Lorna asked.

“A key. There’s a key. Under the bear-cub carving on the deck. I’ll bet it’s still there.”

“Well,” Lorna began, weighing the possible jail time, “I guess that wouldn’t be ‘breaking,’ per se, but wouldn’t it still be ‘entering?’”

“Not if we’re not caught,” Andy said,

“And if we are?” Lorna wanted to know.

Andy waved the possibility off and busied herself with a very slow sip of latte, hoping for another brainstorm. When it wasn’t forthcoming, Harley jumped in.

“Early onset Alzheimer’s,” he volunteered.

The two women looked at each other and simultaneously decided not to go there. As was his practice, Harley took their silence as a signal to elaborate.

“Some old guy who used to live next to us in Omaha had it,” he explained. “They moved him to a nursing home, but he used to wander off and make his way back to our neighborhood. Even though his house had been sold, he walked right in anyway because he still thought he lived there. The owners called the cops a couple of times, but nobody ever arrested him. Not once.”

Personally, Lorna agreed the idea had merit but wanted clarification. “And you’re thinking exactly what?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you exactly what he’s thinking,” Andy sneered. “If we get caught, he wants me to feign dementia.”

“Okay,” Lorna said, noncommittally. “And how do you feel about feigning dementia, if push comes to shove?”

Andy considered the plotline for a long moment. “It might work,” she grudgingly admitted. “I guess I’d be willing to take the mental fall.”

“Well, this is your call, Andy. You know that. But I’m game if you are,” Lorna announced, with surprising enthusiasm.

“Okay,” Andy ventured. “If that’s what it takes, I’ll do it.” She raised her latte. “All for one!”

Lorna raised hers, as well. “And one for all!”

Harley looked perplexed.

“It’s something the Three Musketeers always say,” Lorna told him.

“No kidding!” Harley grinned. “So do the Three Stooges! You were right, Aunt Andy. That
is
a good name for us!”

“So much irony,” Andy sighed, “so little time.”

But Lorna decided the boy’s heart was in the right place, even if his brain was still struggling to get into position. She clinked her cup to his.

Harley beamed, then turned uncertainly to his aunt. Andy shook her head, knowing it was time to cave to the demand for solidarity. She tepidly lifted her cup to him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get the information you wanted,” he said.

“It’s okay. I always expect too much. Just ask my children.”

“Maybe next time,” he said, weakly.

“Maybe next time.”

They touched glasses, and Harley flushed with relief.

Lorna moved quickly to brighten the mood. “Now all we have to do is find a way to get Tilda out of the house this weekend,” she announced.

“Do we have to get her out?” Harley asked, not quite following.

“If we want to get in, we have to get her out,” Lorna said.

“I know. What I mean is, couldn’t we just wait until she leaves for the Saturday Night Séance she’s holding at the Book Nook tonight?”

In unison, the two women set their cups on the table and balled their hands into white-knuckle fists. Lorna spoke because they both knew Andy shouldn’t.

“Really? Tilda is holding a séance tonight? That sounds interesting, Harley. Important even. Tell us more.”

He lit up brighter than a neon sign. For once he was saying something that was useful. “Well, Tilda asked me herself. Gave me a personal invitation. Maybe

because . . . well, I think she kinda liked me.” He looked down at his feet, humbled by his unexpected powers over women. “She offered me half off the regular price.”

Andy unleashed her fuming fingers and slapped her palms down on the picnic table, putting a full stop on his last sentence and signaling she’d heard enough.

“Are we going?” he asked.

She stood up, taking a final and fortifying gulp of what was left at the bottom of her drink. “Yes, we’re going.”

“Why?”

“Because you annoy the hell out of me, Harley.”

Picking up her purse, the international female sign for ‘the end,’ Andy signaled Lorna to do the same.

“Why?” he asked. “Did I do something wrong?”

He hadn’t, of course. Not really. He’d just been, well, unbearably
Harley
: bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. And she was tired of it.

“No, Harley, you did nothing wrong,” said Andy, her agitated molars suddenly crushing the mouthful of residual ice to smithereens.

“So we’re going into Tilda’s house tonight?”

“That’s the plan,” she said, continuing to grind.

“And was I, you know, very helpful?”

Her jaw sought vainly for something more to pulverize, but the ice was gone. “You were,” she said, smiling through very, very clenched teeth. “Despite the odds and due to no fault of your own, you’ve been very helpful.”

He glowed.

She couldn’t stand it. “Don’t do that!” she snapped.

“Do what?”

“Look so self-satisfied. It drives me crazy.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her, utterly clueless about what he’d done. Then he inadvertently glowed again.

Sensing another eruption, Lorna suddenly grabbed Mount Andy by the elbow and led her away to psychological safety.

Three tension-filled hours later, which included trips to a hardware store, a Goodwill, and a place that sold medical supplies, the trio sat parked in Lorna’s car under a juniper tree on Feldstrasse, one block from the Kornacky cabin on Hauptstrasse. There had been several heated exchanges about who would actually enter the house, how they would search it, and what time they needed to make their exit. In the end, they had agreed that they would all go inside: Harley would stand watch at the window, Lorna would look for any interesting papers lying around, and Andy would search for what she referred to as ‘proof-of-life,’ specifically her ex-husband’s.

Lorna called the bookstore and learned that the Saturday Night Séance was scheduled for 9:00 p.m. So they arrived at their lookout spot early—6:30 p.m.—calculating that Tilda would leave for the bookstore sometime between then and 8:45 p.m., depending on whether or not she stopped for dinner on the way. The burglars-in-waiting themselves chose Subway sandwiches for their last meal before becoming first-time offenders. At 8:36 p.m., they could just make out the palm reader, as she exited the house and stepped into the dwindling daylight.

“You see what a beautiful spirit she is,” Harley whispered.

“Not at this distance,” Andy fired back. “And I don’t care what she smells like, either. Now hush up.”

Tilda locked the door and walked away, leaving the house in total darkness.

“Nobody else home,” Andy noted.

They watched, as the psychic got into her car, backed out of the driveway, and rolled silently down the secluded street, brushing past them like an apparition.

“Broom-Tilda has left the building,” Lorna announced.

“Very funny,” quipped Andy.

Harley leaned forward from the rear seat and nestled in between them. “I don’t get it.”

“Old lady code,” Andy said, pushing him away. “Finish your barbecue chips. We’re going in.”

Lorna started the car and, without turning on her lights, maneuvered the vehicle onto Hauptstrasse and drove past the cabin about 30 yards. She parked where the block-long street dead-ended into the craggy hillside. The plan was for Andy to mosey down the road under cover of darkness, walk up the driveway, and stroll onto the deck, where she would check under the butt of the bear cub for the key. If all went well, she would open the door, close the curtains, and signal the other two with her flashlight.

Without the urban curse of streetlights, the neighborhood was now covered in a pitch blanket, obscuring almost everything but the faintest outlines of trees and the yellow haze from interior lamps. Andy was nearly invisible in her black sweatshirt and pants, as she moved toward her destination. Less than a minute after she hit the deck, the blinking of her flashlight cut through the crisp mountain air like a gleaming knife.

“We’re on,” Lorna murmured, as she reached for the door handle. By the time she stepped out of the car, Harley was on the pavement, panting with anticipation.

“Okay. Are you set to go?”

He nodded.

“Then let’s skulk.”

“What’s skulking?’ he rasped.

“Hell if I know,” Lorna said. “I think we keep our heads down and our hoodies up.”

Noiselessly, they moved toward the house, arriving at the front door just as Andy cracked it open to let them in. “Put your surgical gloves on,” she instructed, as they stepped inside. “And take your positions.”

Harley moved quickly to the front window and held the drape open with his neoprene-clad fingertips, while Lorna tried to orient herself to the layout.

“Geez,” Andy shuttered, waving her flashlight around the room. “I don’t think Mark’s moved a thing in this place since the divorce. I wonder how much he came up here.” She pointed the beam toward the staircase leading to the second-story loft. “There’s a desk over there, Lorna. Under the steps. We kept all our papers in there.”

“On it,” said the accountant.

While Lorna searched the desk, Andy made her way toward the first of the two downstairs bedrooms, the one that had belonged to the girls. Judging from the luxuriating layers of dust on the dresser and headboards, no one had touched anything here in a very long time. As a grade schooler, Samantha had insisted on painting the room purple and stenciling yellow flowers across the back wall. Andy felt a warm surge of distant happiness, as she scanned the imaginary garden with her flashlight. The kids had never had a chance to say a proper good-bye to the place because it had abruptly disappeared—along with her marriage and their dad—from their lives one day in the divorce settlement. Andy’s eye caught something shiny on one of the twin beds. She zeroed in. It was the plastic green nose of Lil’s well-loved Good Luck Bear poking out from under the comforter. Sweet and immutable, it was like seeing her daughter’s childhood in repose.

The boys’ room was equally untended. Andy’s eyes toured the little museum. Ian had loved John Lennon’s music from the time his three-year-old vocal cords could carry a tune. The Yellow Submarine poster she’d given him for his fifth birthday still clung to the closet door on three pieces of browning tape. Mitch, on the other hand, had loved The A-Team and spent most of his childhood destroying anything in his path, particularly anything built from Legos. Dozens of them still lay scattered across the matted shag carpet, a defeated army no one had bothered to pick up. The warm surge of memory dissolved into a dull sadness—another era over and never coming back.

Andy turned back into the hallway and braced for the master bedroom upstairs. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find there, but she felt sure
that
room, at least, had gotten some use. As she mounted the steps, she could hear the quiet shuffle of papers where Lorna worked below. She turned to look at the front living room window. Harley was on the job. So far, so good, she thought.

She reached the upstairs landing and stopped short. The master bedroom was awash in yellow moonlight from a skylight near the peak of the cabin roof. She remembered this particular glow and the contentment it evoked whenever they came to Big Bear in the summer. She often sat in the wooden rocker near the window after the kids had gone to bed and watched the nightlife in the pine trees. Squirrels and birds and surprisingly agile raccoons rustled the branches and jostled for territory. The rocker, she saw, was still in its place, as was the large captain’s bed and matching bed tables. Everything as she remembered it, except for the two suitcases perched on the bench at the foot of the bed.

Girding herself for the task at hand, she stepped across the threshold and peered into first one piece of luggage and then the other. All women’s clothing. No doubt about that. She moved quickly into the bathroom and surveyed the vanity: liquid soap, a tube of toothpaste and one toothbrush. She opened the medicine cabinet. No shaving cream or razor. Tilda was definitely flying solo.

Pivoting both mentally and physically, she retraced her steps to the suitcases, wondering what she could learn from the contents. She stooped down beside the larger of the two bags and prepared to exhume the articles of clothing one by one, vowing to keep them folded and in order. Downstairs the phone rang. Her gloved fingers froze, hovering tenuously above a pile of Tilda’s thongs, as she remained in place, balanced on the balls of her feet. She considered standing up but stopped when the phone rang a second time. The ring was familiar. Not a cell but the old house phone.

Not surprisingly, no one spoke. Andy looked at her trembling hands and wondered if Lorna and Harley were shaking as badly as she was. A third ring pierced the silence. It was followed by an unheralded, but familiar click, as the dated answering machine on the kitchen counter did what answering machines used to do: turned on a recording tape and prepared to broadcast the message of the caller. Poor Harley, Andy thought, he’s probably going to wet himself.

“Ah, hello? Tilda? You there, honey?” a musty voice began.

A smoker, Andy surmised, who definitely has low self-esteem. And he’s not all that bright, either, she told herself. Because even in the midst of a misdemeanor, she couldn’t help passing judgment on Tilda Trivette’s gentlemen callers.

When no one picked up, the voice stumbled onward. “Anywho, Tilda, it’s me leaving this message,” he said, straining to project his version of boyish charm. “I, ah, told you I’d call. Remember?” He paused awkwardly, as if expecting an answer. “Anyway, I really enjoyed meeting you. At the Elks Lodge. Prettiest girl in the bar. That’s what I said. Remember?” Another pause. Followed by more awkward charm. “I warned you I’d call and ask you out. So how about dinner? Tomorrow? At the Lodge?” By now he seemed to understand the answer he wanted wasn’t coming and, without another word, he hung up.

Still eye level with the suitcase, Andy quickly leaned forward on the balls of her feet in order to stand up. Something she could have done easily ten years ago. Tonight it was too much too fast for at least one out of the four quad muscles in her left thigh. Without warning, she lost the battle with gravity and fell face-first into Tilda’s lingerie.