Keeper of the Black Stones (8 page)

“Mrs. Grey,” I said, glancing at my grandfather. Mrs. Grey was the neighborhood's busybody, and everyone here knew it. Nothing went on without her noticing, and she usually followed up with an opinion or advice. Sometimes both. Though the way Doc was acting, her attention was less than welcome this time. He looked like he wanted to pin someone to the wall and take shots at them with his new dart set.

He shot the officer another angry look and moved toward the house, evidently intent on getting in. I grabbed his arm and held him in place, then turned to the officer.

“May we go inside?” I asked quickly. I was freaking out; someone had broken into our house and gone through our stuff, and now the place was crawling with cops and who knew what else. I couldn't figure out why there was so much police action over a break-in. But Doc had already been inexplicably rude to this guy and the last thing I needed was for him to walk in when no one was expecting him and get arrested. Or shot.

Instead of accepting the white flag, though, the officer decided that he was going to play hardball.

“Actually, son, we're still working on our investigation.” He spoke slowly and clearly, like he was afraid that I wouldn't understand him. My fists clenched in response, and I bit my tongue. This wasn't the time for brash actions.

Doc took a more vocal route and growled deep in his throat, leaning toward the cop as though he wanted to shake him. The cop backed up a step, startled, and looked toward the house for help. Another police officer appeared at the front door at that point, looked in our direction, and waved us forward.

The cop next to us coughed, embarrassed. “Okay, well it looks like you're free to go inside. Please take your time and look very closely to see if anything's missing.” He paused and allowed a moment to pass. “I'll be back in the morning to take a police report, which you'll need for your insurance claim. Make sure that you're careful with that report or you'll have trouble.”

Doc jerked angrily past the officer, and Paul and I ran past him to enter the house. As I darted through the front door, I looked back to see if Doc was following us, and couldn't find him. I shrugged, sorry for whoever had delayed him now, and turned to survey our house.

We passed quickly through the mudroom, where the bench, chairs, and coat rack sat undisturbed. My Wellies were still lying under the bench, where I'd left them the day before. For some reason, this made me even more nervous, as if this room's innocence predicted even worse for the rest of the house. I gulped and shoved past the cop standing in the mudroom doorway to rush into the kitchen. Doc had redone our kitchen two years ago, and it still had that sparkly, freshly painted feel. The cabinets were a sharp, clean white, and the countertops were sedate slate-gray granite. The oven and refrigerator were brand new, and white to match the cabinets. The colors lacked a certain creativity, and were definitely those of a confirmed bachelor, but the room always seemed orderly and clean.

Now everything in the kitchen was wrong. Pots and pans lay scattered on the countertop, and canned goods rolled across the floor. A broken bag of rice littered the stove. Stacks of dishes were spread across the kitchen table like decks of cards. All of the cabinet doors were left open to reveal empty shelves.

I turned around wordlessly, too shocked to respond. These were our things. Granted, they weren't overly valuable–food, glasses, dishes that Doc had owned since the ‘70s. But they were ours, and someone else had gone through them, tossed them around, and disposed of them. The sense of violation was overwhelming. It started to dawn on me that this might not be the safest situation. What if these guys were still here, waiting? If they could do this to our kitchen…

Paul had stepped ahead of me and gone into the den. “Holy crap!” I heard him say. I snapped out of my thoughts and followed slowly,
unwilling to see what they'd done to the den, which had been my favorite room in the house.

It was in worse shape than the kitchen. This was our haven; the place where we kept our treasures. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, complete with a sliding ladder (my idea). Doc's desk dominated the center of the room with its deep mahogany presence, and the worn leather chair he kept was older than me. Leather-bound history books sat next to physics tomes, biology texts, and the classics of literature, along with my personal collection of comic books and graphic novels. One shelf was dedicated to knick-knacks and figurines from our travels. The room had always been warm, cultured, and welcoming.

Its current state made me want to turn and run away. Every book, every figure, even our old globe had been ripped off the shelves and thrown into the center of the room. It looked like someone had been trying to build a campfire.

My heart lodged in my throat as I bent down to pick up my copy of
Robinson Crusoe
. I gulped and set it back on the shelf, as if one book in its place could cancel out the chaos on the floor. Then we continued on into the living room. The shelves next to the TV had been emptied, their contents spread out in the middle of the floor. The three large oil paintings of our home in the winter lay on the floor. But the flat plasma television still hung on the wall next to the fireplace, and the stereo and DVD equipment were untouched.

“So they left the expensive stuff, and made one hell of a mess with the rest of it,” Paul observed. “Why bother?”

I shook my head and looked down just in time to keep from stepping on the picture frame on the floor. Lifting my foot, I saw that the frame held a wedding photo of my mom and dad. I bent and lifted the photo, careful not to cut myself on the broken glass. Suddenly the break-in was even closer and more personal. Painfully real. I must have made some sort of sound, because Paul stopped in the doorway and looked back.

“Hey, are you okay?” he asked.

I shrugged, unwilling to admit how close I was to crying. “Let's just go upstairs,” I said. I put the photo carefully on the coffee table and walked toward the staircase. This was no time to get emotional.

My grandfather's bedroom was the first room on the second floor. His door was open and the scene was more of the same–bedcovers stripped, mattress turned, and all of the contents of Doc's desk on the hardwood floor.

Paul glanced at Doc's room but didn't stop. Instead, he continued down the hallway toward my bedroom. His shout pulled me out of Doc's room and toward my own.

It hadn't been spared; everything I owned was on the floor.

“Someone was looking for something,” Paul said quietly. “What could you guys possibly have that someone would want?”

I gasped. Paul was right, and I had completely missed it. Everything was on the ground, and in complete disarray. But I was willing to bet that everything was still here. They'd been looking for something specific, but hadn't had any idea where it would be. I wondered what it was, and whether they'd found what they were looking for. Then, for reasons I couldn't fathom, I wondered if it had anything to do with Doc's strange behavior.

“Maybe someone thought you guys were loaded,” Paul said, interrupting my train of thought.

“Oh yeah, I can see why. Doc installed new gutters over the garage this summer,” I replied sarcastically.

Paul laughed, but without any humor. “What a friggin' mess. I'll call my mom and tell her I'll be late.”

I stopped going through my stuff and stared at him. “Why?”

“Someone's got to help you clean up,” Paul replied matter-of-factly. He reached into his backpack and pulled out his cell phone.

I smiled in response, thanking whoever was in charge of these things for a friend like Paul. I wouldn't have considered asking him to stay, so the fact that he was volunteering meant more than he probably realized.
I turned from him to gaze around my room again, overwhelmed. Books were everywhere, and my desk drawers were emptied out on the floor. The mattress and box spring from my bed were upside down, and it looked like every scrap of clothing from my closet had been pulled out. I closed my eyes in disbelief, and turned to my bedroom window. I half expected it to be covered in graffiti or broken, but it was intact, and I moved toward it instinctively, wondering what had happened to the yard.

Everything seemed to be in order out in the yard, though, and I almost turned my eyes back to the room. Then a movement caught my eye. Doc was slowly walking around our garden shed, going over the walls with his hands. I did a double take. Was he looking for damage? On the garden shed? Before I could say anything to Paul, Doc grabbed the padlock on the door and unlocked it. He looked secretively over his shoulder, then disappeared into the garden shed. My jaw dropped. What on earth was he doing? And in the garden shed, of all places?

I turned back to the room, where I found Paul on his phone.

“Mom, I'm good… I'll be home in a few hours… Everyone is okay, I just want to help clean up… Yeah… Okay… Bye!” He hung up the phone and made a face. “She never cares where I am or what I'm doing, and suddenly she wants to know when I'm coming home. As if Derrick and I are going to sit down for dinner, say grace, and talk about our day.” He shook his head in disgust. “My mother, ladies and gentlemen.”

He finished his tirade and glanced at me again, registering the look on my face. “Hey, are you losing it on me? You haven't moved from that position in at least five minutes. You aren't catatonic with fear or something, are you?”

I didn't answer, but turned back to the window and waved Paul over. He got there just as Doc was leaving the shed. We watched as he closed the door and quickly replaced the padlock. He looked around again, presumably to make sure that he was alone and unobserved. In any other situation it would have looked staged. And corny.

I turned to face Paul. “Why in the world would Doc spend five minutes examining the contents of our garden shed before coming inside to check out what happened?”

“What?” Paul asked, looking more closely at Doc.

“Why would Doc care about four shovels, a bag of mulch, and some rakes? He went in there instead of coming into the house with us. The house, where we keep the valuable stuff. Don't you think that's a little … odd?” I asked.

Paul shrugged his shoulders. “I guess the man loves to work outside.” He shoved me with his shoulder. “Maybe we should go help him out.”

I nodded and watched my grandfather walk around the corner of the house. I didn't know what he'd been doing, but he'd lost the tension in his shoulders, and didn't look as grim as he had before. I guessed that meant that he was relieved, or at least satisfied. But satisfied about what? What was so damn important in the garden shed? From his actions, I was willing to bet that whatever was in there was also what certain people had been looking for. Or at least Doc thought it was. And judging from his obvious relief, they hadn't found it. Did this have anything to do with his journal, or was I letting my imagination take over again? This was all more than a little odd, but based on the already-odd day I'd just had…

I sighed. Too many questions and not enough answers, and that never sat well with me. I wanted to get to the bottom of this, and there was only one way to start doing that. I had to read the rest of that damn journal. Get a better idea of what Doc was up to, and how deep he was. Then maybe I could figure out what to do about it. That meant that I'd have to get my hands on it one more time, and tonight was as good a time as any.

By 10PM, the pots, pans, and dishes were mostly back in their proper places. The books, DVD's, and CD's were on their shelves, and the picture of my parents had a new frame. It had taken us six hours to put the house back in order, throw away the broken stuff, clean the floors, and make the beds. My sense of self was a bit scattered, and our house still felt a bit off, but at least things were back in place. We'd been too busy for me to put my plan into action, though I'd spent several hours planning how I would
do it. When we were done cleaning, Doc ordered a pizza for delivery and Paul chose a movie:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. It was one of his favorites–born of a lifetime obsession with movies–and he was thrilled to find it on TNT. It also gave us some much-needed distraction. Communicating with aliens via flashing lights was, if nothing else, a break from the complexities of the real world.

Two hours later, and well past midnight, the three of us stumbled upstairs to turn in for the night. Paul pulled out the mattress that lay beneath my bed, retrieved an extra pillow and comforter from my closest, and collapsed. He was asleep before I could say goodnight, and well before I got to my own bed.

Paul was like that–he could fall asleep anywhere, at the drop of a hat. He wasn't a pretty sight when he slept, though, by any stretch of the imagination. His mouth was always open, and he never closed his eyes all the way. He also snored. Not loud enough to wake me, but loud enough to keep me up if I wasn't really tired. Tonight, his snoring and my racing thoughts had me wide awake. I looked at the clock for the hundredth time at 2:15AM and sighed. Time to get moving.