“So you’re playing turtle,” she said. “You think you can pull your head under your shell and close up tight.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“Last week, when I wanted to hide from the whole world, when you wanted me to go out with you instead, you said it wasn’t healthy for a person to withdraw into himself after an upsetting experience. You said it was best to share your feelings with other people.”
“I was wrong,” he said.
“You were right.”
He closed his eyes, said nothing.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asked.
“No.”
“I will if you want me to. No hard feelings.”
“Please stay,” he said.
“All right. What shall we talk about?”
“Beethoven and bourbon.”
“I can take a hint,” she said.
They sat silently side by side on the sofa, eyes closed, heads back, listening to the music, sipping the bourbon, as the sunlight turned amber and then muddy orange beyond the large windows. Slowly, the room filled up with shadows.
***
Early Monday evening, Avril Tannerton discovered someone had broken into Forever View. He made that discovery when he went down to the cellar, where he had a lavishly equipped woodworking shop; he saw that one of the panes in a basement window had been carefully covered with masking tape and then broken to allow the intruder to reach the latch. It was a much smaller-than-average window, hinged at the top, but even a fairly large man could wriggle through it if he was determined.
Avril was certain there was no stranger in the house at the moment. Furthermore, he knew the window hadn’t been broken Friday night, for he would have noticed it when he spent an hour in his workshop, doing fine sanding on his latest project–a cabinet for his three hunting rifles and two shotguns. He didn’t believe anyone would have the nerve to smash the window in broad daylight or when he, Tannerton, was at home, as he had been the previous night, Sunday; therefore, he concluded that the break-in must have occurred Saturday night, while he was at Helen Virtillion’s place in Santa Rosa. Except for the body of Bruno Frye, Forever View had been deserted on Saturday. Evidently, the burglar had known the house was unguarded and had taken advantage of the opportunity.
Burglar.
Did that make sense?
A burglar?
He didn’t think anything had been stolen from the public rooms on the first floor or from his private quarters on the second level. He was positive he would have noticed evidence of a theft almost immediately upon his return Sunday morning.
Besides, his guns were still in the den, and so was his extensive coin collection; certainly, those things would be prime targets for a thief.
In his woodworking shop, to the right of the broken cellar window, there were a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of high-quality hand and power tools. Some of them were hanging neatly from a pegboard wall, and others were nestled in custom racks he had designed and built for them. He could tell at a glance that nothing was missing.
Nothing stolen.
Nothing vandalized.
What sort of burglar broke into a house just to have a look at things?
Avril stared at the pieces of glass and masking tape on the floor, then up at the violated window, then around the cellar, pondering the situation, until suddenly he realized that, indeed, something had been taken. Three fifty-pound bags of dry mortar mix were gone. Last spring, he and Gary Olmstead had torn out the old wooden porch in front of the funeral home; they’d built up the ground with a couple truckloads of topsoil, had terraced it quite professionally, and had put down a new brick veranda. They had also torn up the cracked and canted concrete sidewalks and had replaced them with brick. At the end of the five-week-long chore, they found themselves with three extra bags of mortar mix, but they didn’t return them for a refund because Avril intended to construct a large patio behind the house next summer. Now those three bags of mix were gone.
That discovery, far from answering his questions, only contributed to the mystery. Amazed and perplexed, he stared at the spot where the bags had been stacked.