The Uninvited (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

T
HEY HAD GONE
to Iris’s cottage on Saturday. Mimi had tried to beg off initially, but Iris had insisted.

“Are you sure?” Mimi looked from one to the other, but her gaze ended up on Jay. He could tell she wanted his blessing—he could see it in her eyes. He nodded and was quick about it. She was sharp and any delay would give him away. She would think he didn’t want her along and she’d be wrong.

“Hey, if I want you to buzz off, I’ll give you a quarter,” he said.

“It’ll cost more than that, bud.”

The bantering didn’t quite fool him, and soon enough she changed her mind. “You know, on second thought, I’m really on a roll with this new scene I’m writing. I think I’ll pass.”

So Jay got down on his knees and wrapped his long arms around her legs and pleaded until she just about fell over and agreed to come. Everyone was laughing. The happy trio. But she looked at him funny, all the same, as if she knew there was something up. She was right, but he wasn’t sure himself what was up. He and Iris didn’t desperately need to be alone. They wouldn’t be, anyway, at her parents’ cottage. It was Mimi alone that he was worried about. The house at the snye was secure; he had to believe that. It was Mimi he was worried about. She had been alone a lot lately. Maybe too much.

Jay had seen a movie about the composer Gustav Mahler. The opening shot was of a lake in the mountains somewhere: a dock, a boathouse, and early morning mist swirling on the water. Quiet. The camera dollied in on the boathouse, and suddenly the whole place exploded. He found himself thinking about that as he and Mimi waded back across the snye bright and early Monday morning. They’d had a good time, but halfway through the weekend, he had started worrying about the house. The girls had called him on it.

“First you want me to come along because you’re worried about leaving me alone,” said Mimi. “Then you wish you’d left me there because you’re worried about the house.”

“Jackson is just a worrier,” said Iris.

“Yeah, well, worry about this,” said Mimi, and handed him her fishing rod, which was all snarled. They had been sitting in the middle of the lake with fishing rods as an excuse for doing nothing. So he had picked away at the knots and tangles and kept his worrying to himself for the rest of the weekend.

They’d left Iris at the lawyer’s office in Ladybank where she had a summer job. Jay was driving the Camry. He was going to drop Mimi off and make sure everything was okay before heading back into town. And everything did look okay. Pretty as a picture, with the tall grass and wildflowers nodding in a light breeze. But Jay watched the house carefully, waiting for the whole thing to blow up.

Mimi babbled on about a scene she was going to rewrite, but he hardly heard her. They had arrived at the shed by then, and he stopped in his tracks.

“What?” she said.

He pointed.

The back door was ajar.

Jay ran for the stairs, Mimi to her desk. “Oh, thank you, God, thank you, thank you,” he heard her say as he charged upstairs, two steps at a time. Presumably her computer was still there. His computer was still there, too, and he breathed a long sigh of relief, leaning on his knees to catch his breath. Mimi joined him and gasped.

He looked up, and his gaze, so narrowly fixed when he first got there, now saw what he had missed. Two of his guitar stands were empty.

The cops took almost an hour. By then Jay and Mimi had discovered that the back door had not been forced but opened from inside; the window in Mimi’s bedroom had been smashed. Glass lay everywhere on her bed, in her open suitcase—everywhere!

But that wasn’t the last of the surprises. Jay had gone down to the snye to lay a two-by-ten plank across the broken bridge for the cops, figuring they wouldn’t want to wade over, when suddenly Mimi came running down to him. “The camcorder’s gone,” she said.

“Oh, crap,” said Jay.

“And that’s not all. My computer beeped at me.”

Jay stared at her. “Huh?”

“It’s never done that before,” she said. He laid the planks down and then followed her back up to the house. She had left the laptop partially open. Jay crouched and peered inside, then slowly raised the lid. The screen was black. He pushed the power button. Nothing.

“It beeped when I opened it,” she said.

So Jay closed the lid. Then pressed the button to open it.

Beep, beep, beep.

He jumped back. They both did. “Like that,” said Mimi. “Three beeps.”

“And it never happened before?” She gave him an exasperated look.

Constable Roach came alone. They were short-staffed, and Jay got the unmistakable impression that a breaking and entering was no big deal. Like maybe people got burgled every day. Roach took down the story.

“So that’s a wine-red thirty-gigabyte JVC HDD?”

“Right. And it’s worth?”

“About six hundred, American.”

Then he turned to Jay. “And two guitars plus cases?” he said, reading his notes. “A Gibson ES-175 with a sunburst finish and a powder-blue Fender Stratocaster?”

“Baby blue,” said Jay.

Roach made the change. “And their value, roughly?”

Jay shoved his hands in his pockets, shrugged. “Somewhere around three or four grand,” he said.

While Roach wrote this in his notes, Jay swallowed hard and risked the question he had been afraid to ask. “Any chance I’m going to see the guitars again?”

Roach grimaced. “Depends on whether you got robbed by crooks or musicians,” he said. “I’m guessing these are pretty high-end instruments?”

Jay nodded again, a sick feeling coming over him. The loss was beginning to sink in.

“If your thief was some budding rock star, you probably won’t see either of them again unless it’s in a club somewhere. And if you think you do, do
not
attempt to do anything. Come to us. But from what you tell me—the troubles you’ve been having—I suspect your visitor finally decided to step up his game, make a move.”

Jay swallowed hard. Mimi took his arm.

“We’ll alert the music stores in Ottawa and Kingston, the pawnshops,” said Roach. “You don’t by any chance have serial numbers or anything like that?”

Jay nodded, though he had forgotten until then. “They’re back at the house—my mom’s house. I’ll phone them in.”

“You do that.” Roach looked impressed. “You’d be surprised how few people bother.” He glanced at Mimi.