“She sure seems to be getting a kick out of it,” Markie said, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, through which they could hear Lola’s continued screeches.
He spun the spider again, then reached out to spin the others, and all the ghosts, before stepping to the fridge. Bending down, he studied each of his old creations carefully, laughing quietly at the witch with her eleven googly eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “She really appreciates it.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
When Bruce knocked at eight o’clock the morning after Halloween to tell Markie that Mrs. Saint’s house had been broken into the night before, Markie wondered if perhaps she was asleep on her feet and dreaming. Patty hadn’t come for Lola until after two, and because the noise woke Angel, who then insisted on going out, Markie hadn’t gotten back to bed until close to three.
“Oh my God!” she said, after making Bruce repeat himself twice to make sure she had heard him correctly. “Did they take anything?”
“They sure did,” he said.
He nodded, as though he had now given her all the information she needed, and turned his attention to Angel, who was whining in her crate. “You want me to walk her so you can get your work done? I got some things to do now, but I could come for her later.”
“No,” she said. “Thanks, but you do too much for me as it is, and you won’t let me pay you.”
He had insisted on changing all the lightbulbs for her after Jesse mentioned the one in the upstairs hallway had gone out and she had almost tripped in the dark. While he was there, he replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms, and since he “just happened” to have brought extras in various sizes, he changed the ones in the TV remotes, too.
“So what did they take?” she asked. He looked at her blankly, and she said, “From the house.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “Money, for one. Don’t ask me how they knew where to find that. She keeps it in . . . a place that’s not so usual, let’s just say. They also stole some things from her medicine cabinet. Frédéric says that means it was kids. Because of, you know, drugs. ‘Who looks in the bathroom and leaves all the silver in the dining room?’ That’s what he said. But worst is, they took a little case that was sitting inside the front door. Frédéric was supposed to take it to the hospital for her, but he forgot it.”
“What was in it?”
“Family pictures and a few pieces of jewelry from her grandmother. Nothing fancy, no gold or nothing like that. Only worth something to her, which is probably why I found the case beside the garage, lying on its side. There was a couple of her papers inside it still, and I found a photo in the grass a few feet away, but everything else was gone. I don’t know if they took it all or tossed it behind the garage once they realized it wasn’t worth nothing, or what. Anyway, that’s how I knew something was up in the first place—I saw that case. Just happened to be looking in the right direction when I walked up the driveway today.
“And then I went searching around the house, and I found a broken window, and I called Frédéric, and he told me where else to look, and we pieced it together. I’ll look again in a minute, and maybe more things will turn up missing. Sure hope not. She’s upset enough about the case. I don’t want her getting more worked up. Especially with her, you know . . .” He tapped two fingers to his chest, the same way Mrs. Saint had done.
“Is something wrong with her heart?” Markie asked. “She told me it was only old age, and Ronda and Patty both said—”
“Frédéric’s not convinced. That’s why he made her go in for the tests.”
“Frédéric made her go?” Markie asked.
But Bruce only looked at her vacantly, so she gave up that line of inquiry and asked, “Why would she have wanted to take that little case to the hospital? I’d be worried something like that would get lost there.”
“Oh, she takes it anytime she goes anywhere overnight,” he said. “Always has. Not that she goes away much. But when she does, she always has that case.”
Markie thought about her ancient neighbor, who was gruff so much of the time yet had also shown quite a bit of sentimentality. Her voice always got softer when she talked about “my Edouard” or watched her Defectives at work, and Markie had seen her eyes glisten more than once in connection with Jesse, a child she had known only since August. She might be cold, even caustic, about a lot of things, but when it came to relationships, Mrs. Saint was quite mushy.
“She must be very upset about losing those family things,” Markie said.
“Crushed,” Bruce said. “I’m hoping to have time to search for them out behind the garage later. Right now, there’s too much else to do.”
He looked down, and they stood quietly for a few minutes. It was as though they were having a moment of silence for Mrs. Saint’s lost family heirlooms, Markie thought. It seemed crazy and right at the same time.
“I’d better get back,” Bruce said finally. “See if Ronda needs any help. Frédéric’s going to get refills on all the prescriptions that are missing, but he asked me to move some things around in the cabinet so those shelves aren’t standing empty when she gets home. He said she won’t want the reminder.”
Ten minutes later, Patty was at Markie’s door. “I wanted to thank you for taking Lola last night,” she said. “She couldn’t stop talking about it this morning. About Jesse and you and the costumes and the decorations, and on and on. It was her ‘best night ever’—I must’ve heard that phrase fifty times.”
“No problem,” Markie said. “She was no trouble at all. She actually got me and Jesse excited about Halloween, which is something I didn’t think would be possible. He was thinking he was too cool for it this year, and I . . . wasn’t in the mood.”
Patty looked past Markie, at the spiders and ghosts still suspended from the kitchen ceiling, the Halloween artwork on the fridge. “Looks like you were more in the mood for it than I’ve ever been.”
“I only put those things up because of Lola,” Markie said.
If it were Mrs. Saint at her door, she would never have admitted to any of this for fear the woman would consider it an opening to suggest she take Lola in again. She didn’t feel she had to be as careful around Patty. Maybe it was because Patty didn’t seem manipulative or pushy, or maybe it was because she didn’t seem all that interested in making arrangements for her daughter.
“Still,” Patty said, “I told everyone Lola’d be fine with Carol. Mrs. S didn’t have to go to the fuss of finding her a different plan, and she sure didn’t need to drag you into it.”
“It’s totally fine,” Markie said.
“How’s Angel doing?” Patty asked, nodding toward the crate and the animal inside it, who was trying to squeeze herself out between the bars. “You want me to take her out for a bit so you can get some work done?”
Markie narrowed her eyes. “Did Bruce send you over?”