I don’t make a habit of carrying a gun—if you do, you get dependent on them and your wits slow down. But I’d been jumpy enough already between Nancy’s murder and the threat to send me into the swamp after her. Now this housebreaking. I supposed it could have been local punks casing the place and seeing that no one was home. But tearing the furniture apart. It could have been a druggie coked so far out of his mind that he’d torn the furniture apart looking for money. But it could also have been her killers looking for something she had that might incriminate them. So I stuck a second clip into my handbag and pushed the loaded gun into my jeans waistband; my wits were not fast enough to stop a speeding bullet.
The Cleghorn house looked remote and bedraggled in the gray mist. Even the turret that had been Nancy’s bedroom seemed to be drooping a little. Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting for me on the front walk, her normally pleasant, round face gaunt and strained. She gave a tremulous smile and climbed into my car.
“I’ll ride with you if you don’t mind. I’m shaking so badly I don’t even know how I got home.”
“You can just give me her house keys,” I said. “You don’t need to come along if you’d be happier staying here.”
She shook her head. “If you went by yourself, I’d only spend the time worrying that someone was waiting in ambush for you.”
While I followed her directions for the quickest way up, along South Chicago to Yates, I asked if she’d called the police.
“I thought I’d wait. Wait until you saw what happened. Then”—she gave a twisted little smile—“maybe you could do it for me. I think I’ve done all the talking to police that I can stand. Not just for now, but forever.”
I reached across the gearshift to pat her hand. “It’s okay. Happy to be of service.”
Nancy’s house was up on Crandon, near Seventy-third Street. I could see why Mrs. Cleghorn called it a white elephant—a big wooden monster, its three full stories filled an outsize lot. But I could also see why Nancy had bought it—the little cupolas at the comers, the stained-glass windows, the carved wooden banister on the stairwell inside, all evoked the comfort and order of Alcott or Thackeray.
It wasn’t immediately obvious that someone had been in the house. Nancy had apparently put everything she had into buying it, so the front hallway had no furniture. It wasn’t until I went up the oak stairs and found the main bedroom that I saw the damage. I sympathized fully with Mrs. Cleghorn’s decision to wait for me in the entryway.
Nancy had apparently made the main bedroom her first rehab project. The floor was finished, the walls plastered and painted, and a working fireplace, with a tiled mantel and gleaming brass fittings, was set in the wall opposite the bed. The effect would have been charming, except that the furniture and bedding had been thrown about the room.
I tiptoed gingerly through the rubble. I was violating all possible police rules—not calling to report the destruction, walking through it and disturbing the evidence, adding my detritus to that of the vandals. But it’s only in rule books that every crime gets detailed lab inspection. In real life I didn’t think they’d pay too close attention, even though the homeowner had been murdered.
Whatever the vandals had been looking for didn’t take up much space. Not only had they ripped the mattress cover away and slashed through the stuffing, but they had taken up the grate in the fireplace and removed several bricks. Either money, if I stayed with the coked-out-addict theory. Or papers. Some kind of evidence Nancy had of something so hideous, people were willing to kill to keep it a secret.
I went back downstairs, my own hands shaking a little. The destruction of a house is such a personal violation. If you can’t be safe within your home base, you feel you have no security anywhere.
Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting at the bottom. She put a motherly arm around my waist—seeing me upset helped her gain some composure.
“The dining room is the only other room Nancy really had fixed up. She was using the built-in cupboards as a little home office until she had the time and the money to fix up the study.”
I suggested that Mrs. Cleghorn continue to stay in the hall. If the marauders hadn’t found what they were looking for upstairs, I had an unwilling vision of what the cupboards might look like.
The reality was far worse than anything I had brought myself to imagine. Plates and tableware lay scattered on the floor. The seats had been ripped from the chairs. All the shelves in the walnut cupboards that formed the far wall of the room were splintered. And the papers that made up Nancy’s personal life were strewn about like ticker tape the day after a big parade.