Liar

6

“Who’s here?” I asked, still thinking of Travis.

I heard a car driving off just as Esther, hurrying down the stairs, hollered, “Damnation, Ruby! You scared him off. Didn’t even get a chance to look at the plates!”

“Who are you talking about?” I asked, stepping out of the apartment to look up and down the street. Rachel joined me, but neither one of us saw any moving vehicles.

“The one who tried to break into the apartment!” Ruby said. “I noticed him first,” she added, glancing back at Esther with a look of reproach. “Maybe if I hadn’t taken the time to call Esther, we would have been able to surprise him.”

“Did you get a better look at the car?” Rachel asked.

She blushed, then shook her head.

“The color?” I asked.

“Green!” she answered quickly.

“Brown!” Esther countered.

I asked them to wait, then went inside the apartment to get my purse, pulled out a couple of business cards and a pen. I wrote my home phone number on the backs of the cards, then handed them to Briana’s neighbors. “If you see him again, call me-doesn’t matter what time of day.”

“You’re a reporter?” Ruby asked. When I said yes, Esther began to give me some ideas for improving the Express-although she admitted that she had stopped taking it about ten years ago-continuing until Ruby said, “For crying out loud, Esther! She works there, she doesn’t own it. They ever ask you how the wing on a plane ought to be built when you were answering phones at Douglas? If the answer is yes, I’m never going to fly anywhere again!”

Rachel started laughing, which made Esther put her chin up in the air. I did my best to smooth her ruffled feathers, thanked them both, and Rachel and I went back into the apartment.

“Think he’ll be back?” Rachel asked as she shut the door.

“No,” I said. “Not unless he thinks we failed to find whatever he’s looking for.”

She looked around the room thoughtfully, eyeing the ceiling, walls and floor as if looking for a secret compartment.

“You said your aunt Mary arranged for movers to pick up the furniture?” she asked.

“Yes, they’re coming Monday. And she’s hired a cleaning crew to come by on Tuesday. So we’re just taking the personal items-clothing, papers, dishes, pictures-things like that.”

“Yeah, all right,” she said absently.

I wasn’t surprised when she started pulling the built-in drawers all the way out, inspecting the bottoms, looking for hiding places. I started doing the same to the furniture in the bedroom as I packed Briana’s things away.

Even with this check for secret compartments, packing up the meager contents of the apartment took little time. I didn’t search through the items we were taking-the actual contents of the drawers and cabinets-figuring I could do that later. Like Rachel, I wanted to have a look at anything we weren’t taking with us.

Only once was I tempted to linger over the contents of a drawer- when I found one that was filled with photographs, including some black-and-white photos of my mother and grandmother. But I heard Rachel working steadily in the other rooms, and rather than reminisce while she worked, I boxed the photos gently but quickly.

The desk had an assortment of loose papers in it, no more organized than the photographs in the drawer. I took a quick look at the papers, but none seemed to have blackmail potential, nor did they immediately identify Travis’s whereabouts.

None of my searching revealed any secret hiding places, but when I was ready to start loading the car, I couldn’t find Rachel. I went from room to room, and didn’t see her. I glanced out at the car, thinking perhaps she had already started loading it, but she wasn’t there. I walked into the apartment again, this time loudly calling her name. Her voice came back muffled, as if through a wall. I found myself wondering if she was in a secret passageway, perhaps having pressed some button on a built-in bookcase. But her voice had seemed to come from the kitchen, not the bookcases.

In the kitchen, though, I still couldn’t see her. I called out again and when I turned toward her voice, she startled me by briefly popping her face up in the window over the sink. “Out here!” she shouted. I looked out. She was standing beneath the window, in the backyard. As I started to unlatch the sash, she shouted, “Don’t! Don’t move it! Come back here-I want to show you something.”

I went outside, down the porch steps and through a side gate to a small backyard shared by the four tenants. It was basically a patch of grass with a couple of rusted metal lawn chairs on it, but Rachel wasn’t touring the gardens. She was staring at the window.

At first I didn’t see what was holding her attention, but as I drew closer, I saw that she was studying some sort of strange symbol, drawn in pencil on the windowsill, near the bars. It was small, not more than a few inches wide, and looked like a rectangle with the bottom side missing; a small, single straight line rose perpendicular from the top side:

“A gang symbol?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s not really in that style, and it’s way too small. But maybe it had some meaning to the burglar.”

“Why do you say that?”

She pointed to tool marks left on the bars of the window. “I think it marked this window as the one to break into. Or maybe it marked your aunt’s apartment. Or maybe it was left here as a kind of warning to your aunt.”

“Awfully small warning in an obscure place. She might not have ever come out here, or seen it if she did. And it could have been drawn a long time ago. Some kid could have drawn it.”

“Not too long ago,” she said, pointing at, but not touching, other areas of the sill. “See? Someone wiped at the dust on the sill before they drew it. It’s less dirty than these other places. And rain or more time would have left it looking like the rest of the sill.”

“Hmm. And now that I think about it, I guess no little kid drew it. Not up this high.”

“No. Older kid, maybe, but you’d expect more than one little mark if some teenager wanted to doodle.” She studied it for another minute and said, “I’ve got a camera in the car. Mind if I take a photo of this?”

I shrugged. “Be my guest.”

After she had photographed the drawing (at one point making me hold a ruler near it), we began loading boxes into the car.

When we had finished, Rachel peered into her trunk. “Been a long time since I could fit all my worldly possessions into the trunk and backseat of a Plymouth.”

“Look, if you’re hinting that I ought to feel ashamed of myself-”

“Hey, relax! I’m sorry about what I said earlier. Nobody’s trying to blame you for anything. All right?”

“Sorry. Guess I’m on edge. Maybe it’s because your friend McCain is trying to blame me.”

She closed the lid of the trunk a little more forcefully than necessary. “Let’s see if we can find this little grocery store,” she said, opening the driver’s side door.

“It’s probably within walking distance.”

“I don’t want to leave the car sitting here-not with all her belongings in it.

No sooner had she said this than a now-familiar car pulled up. McCain. He double-parked, blocking us. Even though Rachel was the one standing between the two cars, I took a couple of steps back on the sidewalk, a brief, wild urge to run passing through me. Run? From what? Maybe it was just that McCain was starting to make me feel hemmed in.

There was a humming sound as he lowered the passenger window.

“You live in this neighborhood, Mac?” Rachel asked.

“Just wondered how you were doing,” he said. “And I brought you a little present.”

“We’re fine,” she said coolly. “We just finished up, in fact. You caught us just as we were leaving.”

“Find anything?”

“Nothing we could walk off with,” she answered. “But you ought to turn on the famous Mac charm with the old ladies in the neighboring apartments. Ask them about break-ins.” She laughed. “Or ask the knuckleheads who took the breaking-and-entering complaint calls before Briana Maguire was killed.”