Kandell quieted the au pair with a slight, polite movement of his right hand. “I’d like to ask Ms. Dance some questions, in private. Could we sit on the porch?”
Jill said, “Thanks a lot,” to the au pair. She led the officer up the stairs. Manfred followed. Jill asked, “Do you mind coming in? I need something to drink.”
“That’s fine.” Detective Kandell’s voice was professional and even, and had a calming effect on Jill. His eyes held a hint of humor, which she supposed he was trying to hide, since she could see nothing funny about this. As she got out her keys, she asked, “How did he get in?”
“The front door’s open.”
It was, just slightly, as if it had been closed in a hurry behind someone and the latch had not caught. “I’m sure I locked it this morning.”
“He came in through the front door. He left, quite rapidly, out the back, through a window that he broke. A shredded bit of his suit indicates that your dog bit him when he dropped into the yard.”
“Good girl!” Manfred wagged her tail.
“Would it be possible for your dog to stay on the porch while we go inside? I don’t want her to disturb anything.”
Jill told Manfred to sit, lie down, and to stay with quick hand signals. Kandell raised his eyebrows. “I’m impressed.” He pushed the door gently with his foot. It swung open, creaking, and revealed the wide foyer, the long staircase to the right, and the hallway to the kitchen straight ahead.
“Please just stand here for a moment. Can I take your briefcase?” His fingers brushed hers as he lifted it from her hand. “Take your time. Do you see anything different?”
“No,” she said slowly, drawing out the word. “Not yet … Wait a minute.” She pushed the door back to full open with her foot, so that it doubled back against the wall, affording her a full view of the library. She took a few quick steps and stopped. “The ladder.”
The room smelled of beeswax and the peculiar smell that old books, when they reach a certain density, exude—a mixture of dust, cracked bindings, and inexorably mildewing paper. “The rolling ladder has been moved since this morning.”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
The large partner’s desk, which had come from her grandparents’ house, looked as it had when she had left this morning—strewn with papers. It sat catercorner, facing the glassed double doors and the front window at an angle with its back to the bookshelves and a window. The old wooden venetian blinds that covered the side window were tilted upward, throwing stripes of light onto the ceiling. She saw that she had left the blinds to the front windows, behind the couch, open to the porch and the street.
“Did he rifle the desk?” asked Kandell.
She laughed. “No.”
The gently sagging, once-elegant couch, upholstered with soft but indestructible moss-green fabric, was surrounded by stacks of books she had been reading. A coffee cup sat on top of one pile. Untidy towers of books hid the top of the coffee table. After the party, she’d wasted no time in creating a comfortable mess.
“Did the intruder do that?” he asked, nodding toward the couch, covered with crumpled papers discarded from a report she’d been working on.
“No,” she said, almost certain that he was making fun of her housekeeping rather than detecting. “But he did remove three books from the shelves.”
Hands on his hips, he raised his eyebrows slightly and gave her a look that she interpreted as skeptical.
“There.” She walked over to the shelf-lined wall and pointed to a tiny gap just above her head, left of the desk. “And up there—he used the ladder. He did move the ladder. I left it on the right side of the fireplace.”
“Can you think of any particular reason he would want those books?”
“No. They were some of my dad’s old engineering books from college. I’ve never actually read them. My brother and sister might have at some point.”
“Are your parents still alive?”
She hesitated for the slightest bit of time. “Yes.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, without a trace of sarcasm.
She blinked, and sighed. “Not really. Officially, they are both missing.”
“Are they in the military?”
She looked at him. “Does it matter?”
“I need to make a list of everyone that has access to the house. For instance, do your brother, sister, and parents, if still alive, have keys?”
“Yes.”
“Might one of them have just dropped in to borrow a book?”
“It’s possible, but unlikely. You can put the briefcase down. Right there is fine. Can we move into the kitchen? I’m dying of thirst.”
“Sure.” He followed her down the hallway. She kept an eye out for further signs the intruder might have left but saw none. Over her shoulder she said, “I’m not positive that someone took those books after they removed them from the shelves. They could still be in the room somewhere.”
“You mean you couldn’t tell?” This time she was sure she heard a note that her mother would have called smart-alecky, but when she glanced at his face it was impassive.
“It’s been a long day.” She slipped out of her suit jacket, a cream-colored, cool silk from Hong Kong, and hung it on the back of a chair.
“Tailor-made.” It wasn’t a question.
She turned to her left, saw the broken window the thief had left behind, and sighed. “Damn. Another repair. Just when I thought I was getting ahead. Have a seat. Iced tea?”
“Sounds good.” He moved past her, opened a glass-fronted cupboard to the right of the sink, and took down two large glasses. Just before setting them on the countertop his hands stopped abruptly. “Spacies.”
He set the glasses down, and continued to stare, an odd, yearning look on his face. He glanced at Jill. “Do you mind?”
“Knock yourself out.”
With gentle reverence he picked up a black astronaut holding a little radio receiver in one fluffy-gloved hand. “Estrella.” He removed her helmet and revealed a wild Afro.
“You know their names?”
“Oh, yeah. This is a real one.”
“Real?”
“You know what I mean, right?” He gave Jill a keen glance.
She was ever so afraid that she did. “No.”
His deep, pleasant voice had a reasonable timbre that she suspected infused everything he said. She wondered if he ever got angry. “The original Spacies are much more refined. No little plastic tags sticking out of the seams; actually, no visible seams at all. The colors inside are realistically human”—he grinned—“although I don’t suppose you ever sliced one up in order to find out, like I did.”
“Why did you?”
“I had to find out if they were black all the way through. You know what I found?”
“I have no idea.”
“They regenerate.” Now his voice sounded a wee bit strained. A tiny, V-shaped frown appeared between his eyebrows.
“What do you mean?”
“If you cut one in half, two perfect Estrellas will grow back.”
“How? I mean, they seem pretty tough. How in the world did you even cut it?”
“With a vise and a circular saw.”
“Oh. A real professional. Kind of like Snidely Whiplash tying Little Nell to the train tracks?”
“I thought of it more in the vein of scientific inquiry. And they grow back by nanotechnology, of course.”
“Really? Self-replication like that is incredibly controlled. I mean, it’s possible, of course, but it’s so highly regulated that…” She thought of the Game Board. She thought of a lot of other things, like the fact that self-reproducing, self-regulating nanotech was actually a deep national security issue, the very discussion of which the government had repressed completely ten years earlier when the issue first burst into national awareness. Now, the term “nano” mainly referred to harmless commercial products that actually had nothing to do with nanotechnology, or was invoked in kids’ cartoons. Her Q-Schools couldn’t self-replicate; at least, that’s what her designer had told her. But they did, of course, repair themselves. At any rate, they would probably never exist.
Detective Kandell was not, perhaps, exactly what he seemed, yet he didn’t seem to care if she knew that. Wanted her to know it, in fact.
Or maybe he was just being a friendly neighbor.
“Will it grow into anything else?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And was she black all the way through?”
“No, she was strangely real, kind of a whitish-beige, like you or me, under the skin. So actually, I was satisfied.”
“These Spacies all belong to my younger brother and sister. I guess I was a little too old for them.”
“The original ones are hard to find. It’s as if someone collected as many as they could and sequestered them somewhere.”
“So I guess we could make a fortune by putting these in the blender and keep making more.”
“That’s a thought. Ever wonder why, when you really like something, it disappears? Like brands, for instance?”
“I just always thought I had such esoteric tastes that no one else liked what I did.”
He startled her by joining her laugh, then set Estrella back on the windowsill, picked up the glasses, and turned to what they’d always called the icebox. “I know that you’re probably trying to do a historically accurate renovation, but don’t you think it might be time to invest in a new refrigerator?”
“This one works fine.”
He pulled down the lever of the old Crosley, small by present standards, with rounded, somewhat slouching corners, and the freezer door opened. “Nice big ice bin. Good idea.” He shoveled ice into the glasses with the metal scoop that Sam had always kept in his ice bin.
“I get bag ice at the store. I hate ice cube trays. The tea is in that jug.”
“Some people are shocked when their house is broken into,” he observed, after he filled both glasses with tea and took a seat across from her. The newspapers were rather low today, so they could see each other tolerably well. She was surprised that he didn’t ask if the intruder had stacked them there.
“I probably am. Mainly, I’m just tired. It’s been a long week. So you think he got in using a key?”
“The doors have deadbolts.”
“I might have forgotten to lock it when I left,” she admitted.
“Then he could have picked the lock. These old houses are easy. He was in a hurry to leave, though.”
He scribbled in his notebook. “Can you call your brother and sister and ask them if they were here today?”
She called Brian. When he picked up, she said, “Quick question. Were you at the house today?”
“No.”
“Megan, do you think?”
“No. Why?”
“There was a break-in. I’m talking to a detective right now.”
“I’ll be right over.”
Jill hung up and told Kandell that Brian hadn’t been there.
“Okay, here’s what we know. He arrived on foot, but someone probably dropped him off around the corner so he could walk down the street and make sure he was safe. He wore a gray suit and tie, and he was white. He also wore a homburg. He was of medium weight, wore glasses, and was about five foot ten. This is all from your neighbor’s description. She was watching from her living room. He appeared to knock and ring the bell and then hunched over the doorknob for a few minutes. He then opened the door and closed it behind him. She said that she knew that you weren’t home from work yet because—”
“Because she’s nosy as hell.”
“Because you always take the dog in. She went out on her porch with the phone and called 911.”
“Why did she go out on the porch?”
“To keep a better eye on things, she said. A minute or two later she heard barking and yelling. He shot out of the side yard with your dog biting at his legs. She saw him get into a car that was waiting at the end of the street. A light-colored late-model car, she didn’t know what kind. It was too far to see the license plate. I pulled up about two minutes later. We’re looking for that car.”
“You got here fast.”
“I live two blocks away. I was just pulling out of the driveway for work when I heard the call, so I took it. Normally they’d send an officer rather than a detective.” He looked quite official, sitting there at the table, yet she felt at ease with him. “I have a little boy, and I want the neighborhood to be safe.”
“How old is he?”
“Seven.”
“Mine is five.”
“A nice age.”
“Sometimes.”
Kandell said, “I wonder if he got what he came for. He seems to have known what books he wanted, and exactly where they were. Who else, besides your family, have you had over here?”
“I just moved back in two months ago. Before that no one had lived here for quite some time. I had a party here a week ago.”
“I’ll need a list of names.”
“They were from the World Bank, where I work, and Georgetown—some professors and students—and neighbors. Sort of a moving-in-housewarming-change-of-life-circumstances party.”
“I see. Did you go to Georgetown?”
“I finished my poli-sci doctorate at Georgetown a couple months ago.”
“Was the house empty before you moved in?”
“Empty of people. Otherwise, all the same stuff was here.”
“So he could have come in at any time before you moved in.”
“Yes. And he could have taken whatever he wanted then. All of us—my brother and sister and I—used to come by at least once a month or so just to check on the place, make sure that the boy down the street was really cutting the grass, things like that. But no one lived here.”
“Okay.” He stood up. “Let’s just check around and see if anything else is missing. Or if he left anything.”
“Such as?”
“Anything. Evidence, or something placed here deliberately.”
She kicked her shoes off under the table and stood up. It seemed to her that Detective Kandell was taking this quite seriously. Which was good, but it seemed odd, somehow. Except, perhaps, that he lived nearby.
“What would they leave except maybe a bug or a bomb?”
“Exactly. Is there anything sensitive about your job?”
“No.”
He followed her as they walked through the dining room, which was also at the back of the house, with a bank of double-hung windows opening onto the overgrown backyard. This was the one room where everything was always pretty much the same, and after the party, it had reverted to form. Knickknacks on the buffet had a new coat of dust, just a few days later, which wasn’t quite fair.