"Hey, Gordon.
Who reported us?" I tipped back, pivoted to face him, and balanced on my
back wheels for a few seconds.
"Mr.
Poldruhy." He stepped over to the railing at the bottom of the ramp and
leaned on it. The two-inch pipe groaned in protest.
"He's three
blocks over. Man, those dogs have lungs."
"Joyce says she
saw somebody creeping around the fence just before the dogs woke up. All this
snow reflection, even with the lights out, it's hard to find a dark spot."
He hooked his thumb over his shoulder at my neighbor across the street and one
door down.
I would have to wheel
over to Joyce's place tomorrow with a plate of cookies and thank her. Problem
was, I hadn't even started my holiday baking. The combination of my folks being
in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle and missing their last two check-in
phone calls took a lot of the steam out of me.
Harry came outside
and retrieved the big spotlight from under the passenger seat of the Jeep. Pop
had insisted that I needed to have one, just in case I had car trouble in the
middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. What was I going to do? Turn it
into a klieg light and wave it at the sky until the Mounties showed up? Well,
Pop would have been laughing now, as Harry helped Gordon look around the
perimeter of the fence for footprints.
Problem was, between
the melting and freezing of old snow and the blowing of new snow for the last
three hours, it was hard to tell what footprints all over the yard were new and
what were old, what belonged there and what didn't, and what had been covered
up already. Gordon loved to play with his CSI toys, but he didn't even make a
half-hearted offer to take footprint casts and try to match the soles with
famous brands in the national registry. I knew that had to depress him, so I
made sure he took two pieces of pizza when he left. From the boys' meat-lovers
box, of course.
"So, who was
poking around, do you think?" Pete said, when we finally settled down in
the kitchen. He flipped the lid open on the top pizza box and didn't go through
his routine of inhaling loudly and smacking his lips. The boy was distracted, for
sure.
"If the security
cameras Kurt installed in the fence posts were working…" I shook my head.
Felicity felt bad enough about breaking Kurt's newest toys. I didn't want to
rub it in, even though she wasn't even in the house.
"Whoever it is
will come back, eventually." Harry opened his mouth and turned the pizza
around so he could devour it crust first. The glitter in his big, dark eyes
challenged me.
"Pete, say the
blessing this time?"
He hadn't even gotten
his pizza onto his plate, let alone lifted it to his mouth. He groaned, let his
two slices drop, and licked sauce off his fingers before folding his hands
together to pray.
I barely listened to
him recite the standard lines he had been using since he was seven. My mind
switched back and forth between the rotten turn my day had taken, and the
mystery that greeted us when we got home. Sure, we had some weird characters in
Neighborlee, but on the whole even the weirdos were friendly, and mostly
harmless. Other than the Grandstones, and some of the wackos who ignored the
subliminal “go away, we don’t like you” vibe the town gave off.
