Dead Body Language (11 page)

C
atching movement from the corner of my eye, I spun around and screamed. Poor Casper. Nearly scared her to death.

I patted my leg—the sign for “Come here, girl”—calling her back from the hallway. She returned timidly, wagging her tail between her legs. “It’s all right. I think,” I said, while I signed “Good dog.”

Casper responds to about fifty signs. Although she’s not an officially trained hearing dog, I taught her myself, from the first day I got her as a puppy. A fluffy white-and-cream-colored Siberian husky with transparent blue eyes, Casper learned her first sign—“stay”—in two hours. Now she responds to basic signs like “wait,” “stop,” “come,” “lie down,” “door,” “food,” as well as concepts such as “where?” “listen,” “quiet,” bring me,” and “what’s that?”

Right now she was using body language to let me know I had frightened her with my scream. That made two of us. I still wasn’t sure we didn’t have a reason to be scared. But at that point I figured if there was an intruder
in the house, he or she would have made his presence known by now.

Armed with a two-foot wooden pepper mill I made a timid search of closets, corners, and cupboards, but found nothing. With two bandaged knees, several decorative bruises, a splitting headache, and a doubled heart rate, I was in no mood for this latest intrusion into my life.

But someone had been eating my porridge and it was not only scaring me, it was pissing me off.

“Sheriff …” I typed, after I’d given my living quarters a second, more intensive search. “Someone broke into my place while I was out this morning. Can you come over and dust for prints or do whatever it is you guys do to catch burglars? GA.”

“COnnoor? WHat are you talkig about? GA.”

There he went again with his creative keystrokes.

“Sheriff,” I typed more slowly, thinking that might help. My fingers trembled over the keyboard. “Someone broke into my diner. My things have been …” I paused. The cursor pressured me into a word choice: “… disturbed. Can you come take a look? GA.”

“SOmeone broke in? How? ANYthing missing? ARe you sure the perps gone? GA.”

I took a deep breath and resumed keying. “Yes, someone broke in. I don’t know how they got in. I keep the place locked all the time. Nothing is actually missing—so far. At least, I don’t think …”

Another pause while the cursor blinked like a demanding instructor tapping a foot, waiting for an appropriate answer to an inscrutable question. I had no idea what the creep had come for—or if anything truly was missing. And I wasn’t absolutely certain he was gone.

“COonnor? You there?” he broke in.

“Yeah, I’m here. I’m pretty sure whoever it was is gone. I don’t think anything was taken, but some of my things are … messed up. GA.”

There was a long pause on his end. The pulsar winked rapidly at me in time to my pounding heart.

“MEssed up? what do you mean exactly? RAnsacked? DAmaged? DEStroyed? Overturned? what? GA.”

I realized I was beginning to sound a little odd. “No, actually, everything’s very neat. Nothing’s been broken or destroyed. But—it’s not the way I left it. GA.”

There was another long pause before the sheriff came back on line. His hesitation was beginning to irritate me.

“ok. YOur things are messed up. DId you leave the dooor open? A window? MAybe your dog got into your stufff. GA.”

“Sheriff, I NEVER leave my door unlocked! And I don’t think Casper has much interest in my mail or my underwear drawer. Everything’s … just … well, different! GA.”

“Different. ok. WHat did the 415 do exactly? GA.”

I typed a little more forcefully and hoped he felt my irritation on the other end. “THE 415 WENT THROUGH MY MAIL! MY LETTERS ARE BACKWARDS FROM THE WAY I STACKED THEM. AND HE WENT THROUGH MY … MY UNDERWEAR! GA.”

There was yet another long pause. Sheriff Mercer was probably having a good chuckle over this one. No doubt sharing it with Mickey and the dispatcher and anyone else who happened to be in the office.

“HOld tight. I’ll come take a loook at your underwear drawer when I get done here. I may be a couple of hours tho if its not an emergency. GOt another urgent call and stack of forms for the M.E. I have to process before I can deal withh suspected mail disarray and felony underwear dishevalment. YOu’re SURE someone was in your place? I mean, its possible in your hurry to gett to your newspaper this mornig, you might have left the diner open or messed up things yuorself? GA.”

He wasn’t taking this very seriously. Maybe more exclamation points would help. “NO, SHERIFF!!! I KNOW WHEN SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT! SOMEONE’S BEEN HERE! CAN’T YOU COME OVER NOW? GA.”

“Ill get over as soon as I can. Maybe I can get Mickey to cruis by when he comes in.”

“I can’t wait long for him. I have to go up to Whiskey Slide this afternoon on business. I don’t want to leave
the place open.” I hated the thought of the deputy or the sheriff rummaging through my Calvins without a chaperone.

“10-4. We’ll do the best we can. GA. SK.”

I signed off, feeling more exasperated at the sheriff than frightened by the intruder. I headed to the closet for a change of clothes, peeking and scanning before taking too many steps, just in case. I pulled my favorite denim skirt and white cotton top out of the clean laundry pile next to my couch-bed, then I thought about something the sheriff had said. The front door hadn’t been damaged, but maybe a window had been pried opened somewhere.

I checked the diner’s front windows, then the living area windows in the back. All secured. Barefoot, I stepped into the tub in the tiny adjacent bathroom and checked the small smoked porthole window. Locked.

I stepped back out and felt something gritty beneath my bare toes. I raised one foot and brushed it off. Fine red clay drifted down like snowflakes.

Dirt in my bathtub. I wasn’t usually
that
dirty when I took a bath.

I stepped back into the tub and examined the powdery dust, then stood up and looked out the window again. The window was definitely locked, just as it had been this morning when I left. But the thin layer of dust along the sill had been wiped clean.

I wasn’t that clean, either. I never dusted this early in the week. Frankly, I never dusted.

I went out the back door, examined Casper’s doggy door, then moved around to the bathroom window. There weren’t any telltale footprints in the red clay beneath the window, but one of my white poppies and yellow monkey flowers looked a little squished. And the dirt around the area seemed unusually smooth.

I examined the window for signs of tampering. The glass looked untouched, as did the wood sash and sill.

Nothing.

No signs of breaking and entering. The diner was locked up tight. I finished dressing and opened the medicine cabinet to renew my bandage accessories. A nearly
empty box of Road Runner Band-Aids hid behind a bottle of piña colada-scented suntan lotion. I pulled out the box, helped myself to half a dozen, then replaced the box next to the lotion. I started to close the cabinet door, then stopped.

They say you can tell a lot about people from their medicine cabinets. Not surprisingly, I keep things all lined up in neat little rows, tall at the back, short at the front. Kind of like my mail.

Something was missing. There was a gap between the hearing-aid earpiece cleanser and the hydrogen peroxide. Whoever had invaded my cabinet had moved back a short bottle to disguise the space. But I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was gone. And it sent a chill up the back of my neck.

Once I was certain my diner was a fortress again, I finished getting dressed, stuffed a pair of blue jeans, a red rugby shirt, and a pair of sneakers into a backpack for a comfortable change, and grabbed my reporter’s notebook, along with a handful of personalized business cards.

I thought about calling my old boyfriend before I left to let him know about the intruder, make him worry about me a little. But I knew it was just an excuse, and I was feeling vulnerable. With a last look around the diner and a curse for the unknown invader, I headed for my Chevy and Whiskey Slide.

Whiskey Slide is a thirty minute drive if you take Highway 49, even longer if you opt for the back roads and hit every podunk mining town along the route. I took the long way. I liked the ride and I didn’t get many opportunities to drive my classic car.

Aside from getting a giggle or two out of the town names, I’d found most of the old camps were nothing but dry creeks or large pits in the landscape. Early settlements like Lousy Ravine, Humbug, Poverty Hill, Bogus Thunder, Poker Flat, and You Bet weren’t much more than dusty markers on the side of the road now.

My personal favorite, Git-Up-And-Git, still sported an
old weathered waterwheel, but the land was mostly a series of dug-up mounds that look like oversized burial plots. The entire town gave the impression of being one big cemetery.

Whiskey Slide, however, had managed to survive the influx and desertion of the argonauts. Like Flat Skunk, it had become a tourist mecca full of boutique overkill and gold-panning lures for weekend wanderers, only on a much larger scale.

Larger in acreage and population than Flat Skunk, Whiskey offered additional amenities: a decent discount clothing mart, a computer store, and one good Mexican restaurant. It was worth the trip from time to time.

I pulled into a gas station/bait shop and filled up the car before locating a telephone booth that still housed an intact directory. Searching the L’s for Longo, I found nothing between Samuel Longnecker and Zachary Longueville. Rats. On to Plan B.

Whiskey Slide is one of a handful of towns in the Mother Lode that doesn’t offer mail delivery. With such a small population, folks just keep a post office box and make the daily trek to town to pick up their mail.

I entered the post office building, found the postcard machine, and dropped two quarters into the slot. Voilà! Instant stationery. The one I chose featured an old prospector holding a nugget the size of a tooth. Appropriate, since he was missing a few canines himself.

I wrote a vacation cliché in the blank space—“Having a wonderful time! Wish you were here!”—then signed it and addressed the front to Risa Longo, filling in a post office box number that matched my age.

“I’m not sure I have her right box number,” I told the clerk as I handed him my bogus correspondence. “Could you check it for me, just in case?”

He mumbled something, looking down at a large envelope he was taping closed for a previous customer.

“What?” I said, as I leaned in.

He repeated his question but I still couldn’t understand him. I stared at him blankly, shaking my head and tapping my ear.

He glanced up, looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “You’re deaf?”

I smiled as he pushed a notepad over to me.

“I can lip-read, if you speak clearly and look at me.”

He began to speak again, exaggerating his mouth and talking slowly as if I were a child just learning the language.

“Longo? Let me see,” the clean-cut middle-aged man said, scratching his left eyebrow with his pinkie ring. He looked at a well-worn plastic-covered list and shook his head, causing a handful of loose neck skin to ripple. “I think it’s fifty-four. Fifty-four. Fifty-four. Yep, here it is. You’re way off. There, that’ll do it,” he said, drawing a line through the thirty-seven and replacing it with the correct number.

After thanking the man for his invaluable assistance, I went outside to find a comfortable spot under a tree, hoping I hadn’t already missed Risa Longo’s mail pickup. I pulled out a dog-eared Dick Francis mystery and read with one eye on the page and one eye on the post office. A number of people went in and out, but none seemed to fit the bill of Lacy Penzance’s sister.

I was all the way to the part where the horse trainer gets killed when a woman in a silk jumpsuit brushed past me and entered the post office. She was approximately Lacy’s age, but that was the only similarity to Lacy, as far as I could see from a distance. This woman was plumper and shorter, with close-cropped dark hair and ringless hands. As I had done with all the other post office visitors, I watched her as surreptitiously as I could from my vantage point, then moved in closer so I could see the rows of boxes more clearly.

Fifty-four. Bingo. It was Longo.

I turned around and pulled out my compact for the old pretend-to-check-my-face trick while the woman retrieved her mail. Peering over the top of the case, I watched as she paused at a nearby counter and sorted through the stack, discarding nearly half into a trash bin with a blank expression. When she reached my postcard, she stopped, read it, flipped it over twice, glanced around
the room, and frowned. I pretended to struggle in my backpack for some change to use in the stamp machine. Did the name I had signed at the bottom—Lacy Penzance—ring a bell? Or was Lacy a stranger to this woman? I couldn’t read Risa Longo’s puzzled expression.

With a second glance outside the door, she tucked the card into a copy of
TV Guide
, stuffed the mail she’d saved into her oversized carry bag, and left the post office. I was right behind her.

As I ducked behind my Chevy, I watched her walk to her BMW parked across the street. When she arrived at her car, she pulled the postcard from the small magazine, frowned again, then replaced it and got into her car.

I knew one thing for certain. She was soon going to need major collagen treatments for those deepening frown lines.