The Nosy Neighbor (16 page)

Wylie shrugged. “Have it your way, Lucy. To me, it means nothing. There’s not one piece of personal mail, not one bill of any kind. That says a lot in my book.”

Her eyes hard, her voice grim, Lucy said, “Try telling that to the feds the next time they show up. Hell, they’re probably watching and spying on us right now.”

“Now what?” Jake asked.

Mitch fixed his gaze on Jake. “Drew and I are going to investigate the upstairs and the attic while you guys pour us that coffee. It should be ready by now.”

Five minutes later, just as Lucy was starting to pour coffee into the cups, Mitch called them upstairs. They ran, jostling one another in their haste to see what Mitch had found.

“What?” they said in unison at the doorway to a small room, no more than eight-by-ten in size.

Drew looked at them with a strange expression on his face. “I saw a room like this in Somalia that belonged to some badassed dudes.”

“Yeah, and what’s that supposed to mean?” Wylie asked, his voice on the shaky side.

His eyes hard as flints, Drew looked from one to the other.

“It’s called a dead room.”

“And a dead room would be…what?” Wylie growled. “We’re just ordinary people here in case you haven’t noticed. There doesn’t appear to be anyone dead in this room, so I have to assume it means something else entirely.”

Lucy’s jaw dropped as she gazed around the small room. Something lumpy with the look of Styrofoam had been sprayed onto the walls and ceiling. The door was padded with strange-looking quilted material that resembled shiny plastic. The floor was intertwined wire-and-rubber matting. A scary-looking room in her opinion. As she tried to absorb what she was seeing, she could hear Mitch and Drew explaining to Jake and Wylie what they were analyzing on the computer table. Since she didn’t understand the high-tech talk, she only heard snatches that left her even more clueless than before. Underwater parabolic eavesdroppers, fish-eye camera, microphones, a video console for the fish-eye camera, hard laser microphones. What she finally deduced from their conversation was that the room enabled whoever was in it to have conversations that were truly secure.

“What’s that?” Lucy asked, pointing to the center of the table.

“I’m glad you asked,” Mitch grimaced. “They’re the latest in technology. The mikes and headphones enable people to talk on the phones face-to-face, have conference calls secure in the knowledge that whatever they say stays safe in this room. That’s why it’s called a dead room.”

“Why would someone need something like that?” Jake asked.

“I don’t have any answers, Jake. You could try asking the feds or the guy himself. There isn’t anything more we can do here. So, let’s check out the basement, drink our coffee, and head for home. The big question is, do you want all this stuff we dismantled activated or what?”

“No!”

“Okay, Miss Lucy, you’re the boss. We will lock the door and reset the house alarm, though. You don’t want strange people crawling around in here. You have the card to the gate so if you want to come back, you can just swipe it. I’ll write down the code to the alarm system. You can come and go as you please. A word of warning, Miss Lucy. Somewhere, someplace, the person who installed all this hardware is going to know it’s been compromised. They probably knew the minute we started dismantling the system. And before you can ask, the people who did this are experts. Your guy probably brought them in from other countries. It’s not the kind of security you want your neighbors or your local security people to know about.”

Drew fixed his gaze on Lucy and Wylie. “You might want to give some serious thought to relocating or else have the feds give you some kind of protection. From the looks of things, there’s been some serious stuff happening here. It’s anyone’s guess if it is still going on. The federal agents were right when they told you it was dangerous, and you could get killed. Think about it.”

Like I can think about anything else.
Lucy nodded.

Mitch shrugged, his eyes worried. “Let’s have that coffee before we head back to your house.”

“I’ll take mine to go. I’ve got some pretty steep roads to travel. I’ll be lucky to make it home by midnight,” Drew said.

In the kitchen, Lucy poured a mug of coffee for Drew. “Thanks.”

“Be careful,” Drew said, as he shook hands all around before heading out the door with his coffee. He called over his shoulder. “Call me if you need me.”

Mitch gulped at his black coffee. “Drew is right, Miss Lucy. You stumbled onto something that could get you killed. My suggestion to you is get in touch with the
feebs,
lay it out, bring them back here if necessary, and clean your skirts. Do that as soon as you can. Then relocate.”

As Lucy sipped at the scalding coffee, she strained to
hear
the men’s thoughts. Under the circumstances, she expected to hear a jumble, but nothing was coming through. Her shoulders slumped.

Wylie turned the thermostat to sixty-five before he placed his empty coffee cup in the sink.

Mitch set the alarm in the garage, and then they exited. The garage door closed with a loud bang. The little group, their heads down, ran as fast as they could through the deep snow and stinging sleet to the car outside the gates. Breathless, they piled into the vehicle. Wiley turned the key in the ignition and pushed the heater as high as it would go. Then he hopped out and scraped the ice from the front and back windshields. From his pocket he withdrew an aerosol can of deicer and sprayed both windshields. The wipers slid smoothly across the windshield as he slipped the SUV into reverse. They literally slid down the driveway and out to the main road.

What would normally have been a thirty-five-minute ride took them almost three hours before they pulled into Wylie’s driveway. Wylie’s head slumped down on the steering wheel the moment he turned off the ignition. “I need a drink!” he mumbled. “Hell, I need two drinks! I don’t ever remember driving in road conditions like this in my whole life.”

“Relax, you got us home safe and sound,” Jake said cheerfully. “I’ll personally make your drink.”

“Good, because I have to make a meat loaf for Coop. Lucy, are you coming in or are you going home?” Wylie asked.

Meat loaf. The dogs. A drink.
She was back in the world of normalcy. Safe and sane. There were no dead rooms in Wylie’s house or in hers either. There were no security gates or things that would blow up if you stepped on them, no trip wires, no mail chutes here in this quiet neighborhood. “I’ll go home and bring the dogs over. My larder is bare, so we’ll have to raid yours. Have my drink ready when I get there,” Lucy said, as she hopped out of the SUV.

The dogs knew she was home. She could hear them barking all the way in Wylie’s yard. When she reached her own driveway she was surprised to see footprints in the snow. Someone must have been by earlier. Who? One of the kids from one of the side streets wanting to shovel her driveway? She shrugged as she fitted the key into the three locks on her front door, glad that she’d added the mega lock at the top of the door that went into the molding. As she swung the door open, she was greeted by three clamoring dogs.

Inside, she raced through the house, her gaze going every which way as she looked for accidents or a sign that someone was or had been in the house. She didn’t see anything, so that meant the dogs were just barking because they really needed to go out. She turned on the floodlights on the deck as her hand went to the lock on the sliding glass door. There were footprints in the snow all over the deck. She started to shake as she bent down to take the dowel out of the sliding track. Even if someone had a key to the slider, the dowel wouldn’t allow them to open the door. Whoever had been in her yard must have climbed over the fence or else was tall enough to reach up, over, then down to the latch on the other side of the fence. Who?

The door swished open. The dogs barreled outside, even Lulu, who immediately piddled on the deck. The moment she was finished, the Yorkie started to sniff at the indentations just the way the others were doing. Who? Who had been in the backyard? Not some youngster wanting to shovel the driveway. Who?

Coop looked up and threw back his head and howled. Lucy jumped at the sound. Sadie moved across the deck to the fence gate. Her nose in the snow, she walked back and forth, but she didn’t bark. Did that mean she’d picked up the scent of someone she knew?
Who?

“Who? Who? Who?” She sounded like an owl. She called to the dogs. They all bounded into the house. Lucy waited to see if they’d sniff out anything unusual. They didn’t. That meant no one was in the house. Who in their right mind would enter a house where a dog like Coop barked?
Who?

Jonathan, that’s who.

Lucy felt an adrenaline rush at the thought. She looked down at her watch. It was quarter to eight. Time enough for Jonathan to have gotten there from wherever he’d been when he had called last night. Lucy could feel her insides start to clench up at the implications of what she was thinking.

Quicker than lightning, she ran around the downstairs rooms, turning off all the lights. In the kitchen she snapped off the night-light over the stove. Total darkness washed over her. Sadie growled at the strange goings-on. Lulu yelped to be picked up, and Lucy obliged. Coop started to prowl, sniffing at the track of the sliding glass doors.

Lucy crept over to the little alcove off the kitchen where the pantry was located. No windows, no doors where a person could be seen. She started to shake. Hot tears of anger and frustration burned her eyes.
Weaklings and sissies cower in fear,
she told herself.
Top-notch lawyers with brains are trained to stand up to just about anything. Yeah, well, today was over the top. He’s playing with my head, that’s what he’s doing. I know it because I know Jonathan. I should call the FBI right now and tell them what we found.

“Maybe I should call the feds,” Lucy muttered. “But if I don’t know if I should trust them, what’s the point?” She thought about how nasty they’d been to her, how cold and uncaring. “The hell with it,” she muttered again. She backtracked in her thoughts. If she told them she thought the footprints belonged to Jonathan, they’d probably laugh their heads off. They’d say she was just trying to wiggle out from under their scrutiny. She smacked her hands together. That thought alone convinced her it was not in her best interests to call the agents. Lucy dropped to her knees, Lulu clutched tight against her chest. “Listen up, you two,” she said to Coop and Sadie. “We’re going to Wylie’s house. Straight across the yard.” Her voice was so jittery and shaky that the dogs actually paid attention to what she was saying. Lulu licked at her chin.

She was still wearing her jacket. She slipped into her rubber boots, scuffling along as she herded the dogs to the front door. Key in hand, she took one last look around before opening the door to let Coop and Sadie out, then locked it. There were wings on her feet as she crossed the yard to Wylie’s house. She didn’t bother to knock, just let herself in. Wylie was watching her from the foyer when she turned around and snapped the dead bolt.

Lucy was breathless from the run in the deep snow across the yard. “Someone was in my backyard. They must have been by the front door, too. Coop pitched a fit, but not Sadie, so that means the scent she picked up was someone she knew. Lulu picked up on it, too. I’d appreciate it if you’d close your blinds, Wylie,” Lucy said. She could have saved her breath because Wylie was already closing the vertical blinds. Mitch meandered into the foyer, Jake behind him. Both had beer bottles in their hands.

Wylie explained Lucy’s nervousness as she kicked off her boots and shed her jacket.

Mitch was the first to speak. “When it snows like this, people have a tendency to look out their windows from time to time to see if it’s still snowing, how deep it’s getting. Call some of your neighbors and see if they saw anyone at your house, Miss Lucy.”

Lucy hung up her ski jacket. “After being in that house, I think I’m spooking myself. I suppose it could have been a youngster wanting to shovel the driveway.”

Mitch swigged from his near-empty bottle. “If that’s the case, then the kid would have knocked on other doors in the neighborhood. It won’t hurt to call around, Miss Lucy.”

“While you’re doing that, Lucy, I’ve got to finish the meat loaf for Coop. By the way, that’s what we’re having for dinner, with baked potatoes and canned corn. I have some cabbage if anyone wants to make coleslaw or fried cabbage. Then I have to go across the street to feed Rachel Muller’s cat and change the litter box. I almost forgot I was supposed to do that. She’s liable to call me tonight to ask how the cat is. It won’t take me long.”

Curiosity ringing in her voice, Lucy asked, “Where’s Rachel? I thought I saw her this morning.”

“She went to Delaware to spend Thanksgiving with her sister. Her brother was picking her up just as we were leaving. I’ve had a key to her house forever. She used to take the cat, but he’s old now and doesn’t travel well. On nice days she used to walk Coop while I was at work.”

“Lulu is going to be mighty upset if you come home smelling of cat,” Jake warned. “We might as well have something besides corn. I’ll do the coleslaw.”

They were chatting about mundane matters, hoping to wipe away the look of anxiety on Lucy’s face.

“I think I’ll have a beer. Jonathan could have been on a plane when he called me last night. If he was, he could very well be here. Maybe I should call one of the agents. I think I figured it out. Jonathan is trying to play with my head so I’ll go off the deep end,” Lucy said as she marched into the kitchen. “Jonathan knows I haven’t made any real friends since I moved here. Aside from Nellie, that is. He also knows Nellie goes south for the winter, and so he figures I’m here alone. I’m sure that’s what he’s doing. When I walked away from my law practice, he said a
stable
person wouldn’t do something like that. When I said I didn’t want to be a judge and was going to turn down the offer, he made a really big deal about it, saying I was losing it, that I wasn’t
stable,
that I was teetering on the edge. Believe it or not, I laughed in his face.” Lucy gulped at the beer she was holding.

“And, Miss Lucy, he would do this…why?”

Lucy watched as Wylie pulled on his jacket and boots and made his way to the front door, Rachel Muller’s key in his hand. An ordinary, kind thing to do for a neighbor. Jake was chopping cabbage, and Mitch was pacing the kitchen. The dogs were tussling in the family room with a long, coiled, braided rope. Everything just then seemed normal.