A Night at the Operation (15 page)

Game, set, and match to Mom, who grinned broadly while paying, and then got in a good couple of lecture points on maintaining a healthy credit score. And I’d thought this was going to be a difficult trip.

Back in the car, Mom read from the MapQuest directions, and after a few eternities, we finally reached Tunkhannock.

I knew my way around from years before. Sharon had taken me up to this spot a number of times early on in our marriage, even when she didn’t need to get over a bad day or an especially difficult diagnosis.

Lake Carey is just that: a lake, with houses ringing it. Most of them are strictly for summer vacations, but some, like the one belonging to Sharon’s mother’s family, were winterized and usable year-round. I approached the house slowly, and not just because I suddenly wasn’t in a hurry to see what I had driven all this way to see.

There is no garage behind the house, but there is a driveway, and sort of a carport area that opens to the kitchen door in the back. I parked Mom’s car in front of the house next door, so that I wouldn’t be detected if someone were watching from inside the house.

“This is it?” my mother asked, ever the arbiter of what is and is not acceptable. She seemed to think that a hundred-year-old lake house should look like I. M. Pei had just gotten finished with it.

“Yeah. This is it. Now, let’s not talk for a while. You stay here, and . . .”

She was already opening the car door. “I didn’t ride all the way up here to sit in the car,” my mother said.

No vehicles were in the driveway, but the frozen ground showed tire tracks. I’m no expert, but they weren’t especially large, and didn’t have a very wide tread. I was guessing they weren’t from an SUV, at least not one of your more absurdly macho ones. They could have been from Sharon’s Volvo.

I felt foolish keeping my head down as I walked toward the rear of the house. It was so
Man from U.N.C.L.E.,
but it couldn’t be helped. I didn’t want to be seen through the windows before I was ready.

Luckily, Mom is small enough that she wouldn’t be seen from the windows if she were walking on stilts.

“Why aren’t you going to the front door?” she asked, much more loudly than I would have liked (in fact, having asked her not to talk,
any
volume was much more loudly than I would have liked).

“Mom!”
I hissed.
“Keep your voice down! I’m not ringing the doorbell because if Sharon’s being held here, I don’t want to alert anyone that we’re here!”

“Oh, that’s just silly,” my mother said. But she followed me up the driveway.

The ground floor of the cottage is essentially two rooms: a front room with a fireplace and some old, beat-up furniture (no television, and therefore no movies: I always felt that spending time here was a way of showing Sharon how much I loved her); and the kitchen, with its picnic-style table and benches, a stove that Julia Child had probably watched her grandmother cook on, a refrigerator that could keep things slightly cool, and about one-tenth the necessary amount of countertop and cabinet space. Anorexics couldn’t get by on the amount of food you could store here.

We crept (only one of us intentionally) up onto the carport to look through the kitchen window, which was closed (of course) and locked. There wasn’t anyone in the room, and no food or cleaning products out on the counters. From this viewpoint, there was no sign anyone was here now, or had been for some time.

“Isn’t spying on people illegal?” Mom asked, once again in a voice that could be heard in the third balcony. Ethel Merman herself would have been envious.

I ignored her.

I walked around to the far side of the house (thinking as I did of the Monty Python bit where an older woman shows a younger woman photos and narrates “this is your uncle behind the house; this is your uncle on the side of the house,” only to have her younger relative tear up each snapshot as it is handed to her) and found two tires in the driveway next door.

Mom was content to wait on the back porch, as she said it was “ridiculous” to do anything but go through the front door. It took five minutes of tense whispering (on my part) and passive-aggressive braying (need I say?) to convince her not to go back around and knock. I told her I’d be right back.

The owner of the house next door had clearly boarded up for the winter and gone home, so I was relatively sure he wouldn’t mind if I used his spare tires (on rims) to boost myself into a position where I could see through the window. And if he did, I could point out that using such old tires on any moving vehicle would probably result in a horrible crash, so I was probably saving the poor man’s life.

This is how my mind works, and yes, it is sad.

With the added height from the tires, I could see through the downstairs window into the front room.

But I didn’t see Sharon. Or anyone else, for that matter. From this angle, the fireplace didn’t appear to have any ashes in it, and there would surely have been some temptation to light a fire for anyone staying there recently. The house was winterized, but it wasn’t exactly cozy. A nice fire would help neutralize the chill.

I could tell there was no one in the room, but I couldn’t see into every corner from here, and dragging the tires from window to window seemed a less-than-efficient plan. It was time to do something that would make Meg happy she hadn’t come along.

In the driveway, near the tires’ original resting place, was a cinder block, undoubtedly used as a jack-substitute for whatever rent-a-wreck the owner of the house had taken the tires from. I hefted it; too heavy and bulky to be of real use. There had to be something else . . . There!

It was a cliché, but an effective one. A nice handy rock, just the right size and weight. I don’t know why, but I wrapped it in my pocket handkerchief.

Normally (as if there were a “normally” in this situation), I’d have gone in through the kitchen, but I knew there was an alarm system attached to that door, so entering that way would have made a racket.

Instead, I stood about ten feet from the side of the house, wound up like Sandy Koufax, and hurled the rock through the window. When no alarm sounded (apparently there had been no security upgrades since I’d last been here), I climbed up carefully on the tires and knocked in the remaining pieces of glass with my elbow. Then, gingerly, I unlocked the latch, raised the frame, and climbed through the window.

I was careful not to kill myself on the broken glass inside, but there really wasn’t very much. Getting back to my feet, I scraped myself slightly on the left forefinger, but it barely bled.

The room was empty, as I’d thought it would be. For one thing, any people who had been inside would surely have come to investigate what the breaking glass was all about. I took a look around the room—mystery books; fireplace (indeed without ashes); pile of firewood, about half full; overstuffed chairs from the Johnson Administration (not sure if it was Lyndon or Andrew); and a throw rug that, if there had been sense, would have been thrown—away—long ago. No people, nor signs of people.

Except my mother.

“Didn’t I say you should wait back there?” I asked.

“I got tired of waiting. My leg hurts.”

“How did you get in here?” I whispered.

Mom pointed. “Through the back door, in the kitchen.”

My voice caught a time or two. “There’s . . . there’s an
alarm
on that door.”

She shrugged. “It didn’t go off.” Then she looked at my hand, and at the broken glass on the floor. “Elliot! Did you break the window?”

I ignored that. I was working on my ignoring skills. Perhaps I could be the captain of the Ignoring Team at the next Olympics.

There was no one downstairs, clearly, or they would have sent a welcoming committee because of all that had been going on. I knew the house, and all that I’d find upstairs would be three bedrooms.

“This time, I’m going to insist,” I told my mother. “You stay down here.”

She thought about it, but after a moment said, “With my knees? Naturally. I’ll be the—what do you call it?—the lookout.”

Having left the Jewish Squanto in the living room, where she took a book off the shelf and leaned on the easy chair (far too dusty for her to sit on), I crept up the stairs as slowly as I could, because the stairs creaked like my grandmother’s knees on a rainy day, except they didn’t yell “oy.” (To be fair, Grand-ma’s knees didn’t yell “oy,” either, but they caused the yelling, and that was close enough.) I winced with each stair, and it felt like an hour before I made it to the landing. I’d given serious thought to giving up somewhere around stair number seven, but plodded on, trying very hard not to break into a sweat, breathe audibly, or throw up before I achieved the summit.

There were three bedroom doors, and they were all closed. I heard no moaning coming from behind any of them, of either the excited or tortured variety.

I searched all three bedrooms, and to spare you the gory details, each one was empty, although one was somewhat less dusty than the other two. It was a relief to have found no one holding my ex-wife hostage, and I had to admit, not to find her Evelyn Wood speed-reading through the
Kama Sutra
with some guy she might have just met. But I was back to square one: Sharon was still missing.

The trip downstairs took considerably less time than the one upstairs had taken. I didn’t have to worry about finding anyone in the house this time.

So it was really a surprise to discover the two police officers in the front room when I hit the landing. That was bad enough, but the guns they were pointing at me were even more disturbing.

“Nice looking out, Mom,” I said.

“Didn’t I say you shouldn’t have broken the window?” my mother answered.

 

 

 

 

PROBABLY
the best tactic here was to treat them to a smile. They can smell fear. “Hello, officers,” I said.

“Please put your hands behind your head and don’t take another step, sir,” the officer closer to me barked. Apparently, he was trying to take a bite out of crime.

“I just came in through the back door,” my mother said.

“Can you tell me why you’re pointing your weapons at me?” I asked, putting my hands exactly where he suggested.

The lead cop holstered his weapon while the other kept his trained on my head, which was an improvement, but not much of one. He found a pair of zip strips—the white plastic handcuffs that are all the rage in the cop biz these days—on his belt, and took first my right hand, and then my left, and tied them up like a Christmas present.

“Sir, what is your name?”

I told him. “Why are you arresting me?” I asked. He hadn’t started to read me my rights yet, but the handcuffs were a dead giveaway. I had an urge to ask why he wasn’t arresting my mother, but that seemed to be in poor taste.

“We’re taking you in for questioning, sir,” the cop said. He was maybe twenty-four on a good day, and still practiced in what they’d taught him at the academy.

“Questioning? About what?”

“We’ll tell you at the station, sir,” the cop said.

His partner, seeing my hands bound by plastic, put his gun away.

“I don’t understand,” I tried. “Should I be calling my attorney?”

“I think your cousin Herbie is in Acapulco on vacation,” said Mom, pulling out her cell phone, “but I can call.”

“Why are you here, sir?” The second cop had decided he could speak now.

“I’m looking for my ex-wife,” I said. “I thought she might be up here. Her family owns the house.”

They opened the front door with the apparent intention of leading me out and putting me in the police car. I was determined not to let that happen unless I had no choice, but it was starting to look that way.

“Just a second,” I said. “Why are you here? Did someone call? Did you hear from Dr. Simon-Freed?”

“My Sharon,” Mom moaned. Perhaps the cops would appreciate her suffering.

No luck; the cops were trying out for the Ignoring Team, too. “All I know is, we got a call from a resident across the lake that someone was breaking into this house,” the second cop, slightly older and less vehement, said. “And sure enough, there’s broken glass right by that open window.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, I forgot my keys, can you believe it? And I was concerned about my ex, so I decided to . . . Across the lake? Somebody saw me from all the way
across the lake
?”

“The guy has a telescope, apparently.”

“That’s rude,” Mom said.

Great. Now I was self-conscious about the times Sharon and I had spent up here alone. “I just needed to get into the house, and I didn’t have a key,” I reiterated.

Neither cop was buying it. “Come along now, sir, and we’ll get this all straightened out down at the station,” the older one said. They started to move me toward the door again.

Not that I minded the odd trip to jail now and then, but I really didn’t have time for this today. “Look, fellas, this is all very innocent,” I said. “Do we really have to spend all this time and make you fill out all that paperwork? Can’t we just straighten it out here?”

“Are you trying to bribe us?” the younger cop asked. He looked like he’d been waiting to say that all his life.

“
No
, I’m not trying to bribe you. I’m just saying, you’ll have to fill out lots of reports. Just let me tell you what happened.” I know cops hate filling out forms.

The older cop rolled his eyes a bit at his partner’s behavior, but he shook his head slightly. “We have to do the paperwork whether we arrest you or not,” he said. “Nice try, though.”

“Look,” I said to him, ignoring the younger cop entirely, “you can see I haven’t stolen anything. I haven’t damaged anything, except the window. And that was just because . . . Officer, please. My ex-wife is missing. I’m seriously worried about her, and I . . . I guess I wasn’t using my best judgment. I had to see if she was okay.” I don’t like to admit it, but I think my eyes were starting to moisten.