She tried the kitchen door, but it was locked. She hadn’t seen a sign warning that the house was protected by an alarm company. But she was loath to break a pane of glass. For the novel that she had been writing, she had researched burglary, speaking with detectives in the robbery detail and with a convicted criminal serving time for a score of offenses. She had learned that in some jurisdictions, you needed to force entry and steal something to be guilty of burglary. If you did neither, merely trespassed, you were at most guilty of the lesser charge of housebreaking.
That she should be calculating the legal consequences of her criminal activity, committing a crime rather than contemplating it, was disturbing. Well, screw it. She had no choice. The cops didn’t help you with complaints of supernatural harassment, and it was likely that some Wrong People were on the police force, too. The thing to keep in mind was that, two days earlier, Death had not just been on her doorstep but had been ringing her bell and knocking and calling for her to come out and play. Whatever trouble she got into now would be, by comparison, as sweet and smooth as pudding.
Among the many interesting things she learned when researching burglary was that a surprising number of people were diligent about locking potential points of entrance on the ground floor but were careless regarding second-story windows and sometimes even balcony doors.
At each end of the wisteria-entwined arbor that shaded the back patio, the vertical members were made of two-by-twos and appeared strong enough to serve as ladder rungs. She chose the end where the wisteria grew thinner. Assuring herself that this was less dangerous than surfing, since there were no sharks in the arbor, she climbed to the top with an agility that gratified her. She might have spent the last few years being more of a desk-bound writer than she would have preferred, but she hadn’t gone soft yet.
Four double-hung windows overlooked the arbor and the backyard. The third proved to be unlocked. Bibi slid up the lower sash. When no alarm sounded, she climbed over the sill, leaving the window open in case she needed to make a hasty exit.
Sneak thief, even minus the theft, still wasn’t a title that made her feel dashingly romantic, certainly not proud. She almost drew the pistol from her shoulder rig, to search the house at the ready, but that seemed stupid. She had no experience of a job like this. Her nerves were tripwire tight. If she turned a corner and encountered Calida—or, worse yet, a total innocent—she might squeeze the trigger in startled reaction. Instead, she went naked, or so it seemed, wondering why she had never thought it essential to earn a black belt in one martial art or another.
She had entered what seemed to be the master bedroom, which looked more ordinary than she might have expected. Neatly made bed with dust ruffle. Reproductions of California plein-air paintings. No zodiac carpet, no black candles in polished-bone holders, no weird totem hanging on the wall behind the bed. No snakes. The door to the walk-in closet stood open, and the clothes were hung in an orderly fashion.
Although she had risked a housebreaking conviction to come here, Bibi had no intention of pawing through Calida’s dresser drawers in search of secrets, which would probably turn out to be about things that had nothing to do with her and that were in one way or another pathetic, as most bedroom-kept secrets were. She suspected that if anything important waited to be found in this house, it would be grotesque or at least singular. She would recognize it the instant she opened a door or crossed a threshold.
The maple floor of the upstairs hallway talked back underfoot. She could do nothing to silence it. Staying close to a wall didn’t lessen the noise. Proceeding quickly caused no greater disturbance than stepping slowly and cautiously.
Beyond the hall bath were two rooms, the first peculiar but not helpful. No furniture whatsoever. Nothing hanging on the walls. The windows had been blacked out by fitting them with mirrors. She glimpsed her reflection and didn’t like the way she looked. Anxious, small, uncertain. In the center of the pale maple floor, in neat black letters an inch high, had been painted THALIA. The name of Calida’s mother. If you could believe anything the diviner said, Thalia had been cruelly tortured and dismembered by the Wrong People, twelve years earlier. Most likely not in this house. Somewhere else. This room, with the name on the floor, didn’t feel like either a marker of the crime or a shrine to the victim. For reasons that Bibi couldn’t specify, the chamber felt as if it had been established for the purpose of communication, although with whom or what, she could not say.
Across the hall from the empty room lay an office. A corner desk held a computer and two printers, the second for color work, all the equipment dark and silent. More plein-air paintings. A rosewood sideboard along one wall. In the center of the space stood a round worktable attended by a single chair.
She had found the grotesque, the singular, the something.