“Good. Tell him I’ll touch base with him in a little bit.”
“You want to show me where you’d like your alarm panel?”
“Just inside the front door is fine. Henry has a key to my place.”
“Thanks. Have a good one.”
“You, too.”
Once at the office, I let myself in with my usual OCD routine: unlocking the door, using my code to disarm the system, arming the periphery, and relocking the door. If I’d had dead bolts and burglar chains, I’d have mobilized those as well. I didn’t want to live like this, concealed carry included, but I had to be sensible, even if my caution bordered on the paranoid. In the meantime, I scooped up the mail that had been shoved through the slot Saturday afternoon and proceeded into my office proper, where I sat down at my desk.
This is how the subconscious works, mine at any rate. I’d been fretting about Phyllis and Ned off and on in the upper regions of my brain. While I was chewing on the issue of how Ned had picked up her address, the speculation had sifted down into my Dark Side like lightly falling rain. Answers—those little kernels of truth—had stirred to life much in the way seeds germinate when conditions are right. By this point, my conscious mind was bored with the subject, since I’d been running the same questions relentlessly with no tangible relief. I was restless, ready to move on to a problem more easily solved, so I really wasn’t thinking about anything at all. And that’s when the following notion popped into my head: I’d been assuming that the puzzle of Ned’s whereabouts and the mystery of how Phyllis’s address had been leaked were two separate issues.
But what if they were one and the same?
I rejected the idea at first because it seemed so unlikely. There was only one set of circumstances I could think of that would net one answer for those two questions. Then again, if I was right, it would make sense of Ned’s disappearance and what passed for his clairvoyance. I reached for my shoulder bag and searched the depths until I found the Leatherman tool set Henry had given me for my birthday. I slipped the minitools in my windbreaker pocket, opened my bottom drawer, and took out the heavy-duty flashlight that was a mate to the one I had at home. As I rose from my swivel chair, I touched the holstered gun under my left arm like a talisman.
I left my inner office and walked down the hall to the back door, where six months earlier Cullen had placed a second alarm panel, identical to the one he’d installed at my front door. I disarmed the periphery, unlocked the back door, and went out. I took a left and moved along the walkway that runs between my bungalow and the look-alike bungalow next door. My telephone junction box is mounted to the side of the office and when I reached it, I stopped.
The box is a bland gray, some kind of heavy-duty plastic, maybe three inches thick, six inches wide, and seven inches high. The General Telephone logo was embossed on the front. There was a bracket that read CUSTOMER ACCESS, with an arrow pointing to a metal snap, labeled SNAP, and an arrow pointing to a screw, labeled SCREW. Those guys really had it down. Running from the bottom of the box there was a fat round black wire, a bright blue wire, and a gray conduit an inch in diameter that contained the cable connecting my box to the wires mounted on the telephone pole at the street. The black wire and the bright blue wire trailed down from the box and disappeared into the crawl space through one of the vents that allows fresh air to circulate under my office.
Now a third wire had been added, this one white. I opened my Leatherman and removed the minitools. I had a choice of nineteen, all neatly folded together like a pocketknife with assorted blades. I selected a pair of needle-nose pliers that I used to loosen the snap. Then I used the Phillips-head screwdriver to remove the screw. The telephone company probably had special tools that performed the same job in half the time, but I had to make do.
I stuck the Leatherman back in my windbreaker pocket and then opened the junction box. I have two lines into my office, one for the telephone and a second for my combination printer and fax machine. My phone number was neatly written in black marker pen beside one set of wires and my fax number was inked beside the second set. Alligator clips had been clamped to the two contacts that served my phone line. Attached to the alligator clips was the white wire, which extended from the bottom of the box and disappeared into the crawl space along with the other two wires.
All three bungalows are built over a three-foot concrete footer. A sizeable vent opening had been cut into the stucco just above the footer to provide air flow to the area under each bungalow. The vent cover is a flimsy wooden trellis, easily removed to allow access to the crawl space. I squatted, lifted off the vent cover, turned on my flashlight, and peered into the space. The dirt floor was approximately five feet below the subfloor and flooring joists, running flat for a distance of fifteen feet and then slanting down and away toward the far corner of the bungalow. The soil was dry, but I suspected a good rain (if we ever had one) would result in puddles that would feed the mold spores that had been proliferating there for years. Construction debris was still in evidence: broken bricks and wood scraps dating back the seventy years since my landlord and his father had built the cottages.
There were 3-foot-by-3-foot cinder block piers at intervals. One section of the dirt had been covered with widths of plastic sheeting and there were rolls of pink fiberglass insulation like hay bales left out in a farmer’s field. I couldn’t believe my landlord had been too cheap to have the insulation properly tacked into place. I’d have to have a little chat with him. I didn’t like to think about the shoddy workmanship for which I paid rent. Okay, it wasn’t much rent, but cheap is cheap.
The beam of my flashlight picked out the three phone wires, which meandered from the vent opening across the dirt to one of those telephone company handsets used to determine if there’s a dial tone. I was curious about that myself. I inched my way across the hard-packed soil, using my elbows for leverage. Just as I extended a hand to pick up the phone company handset, there was the shrilling of a telephone above me. I jumped, banging the back of my head on a joist. Without even thinking about it, I pressed Talk and said, “Hello?”
“Kinsey, this is Ruthie. Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“It’s not the best. Is it all right if I call you back?”
“Sure. It’s nothing urgent. I just wanted to know how you were feeling.”
“About what?”
“The bun you have in your oven.”
“I don’t have a bun in my . . . oh, the bun in my oven. You mean the bun Camilla mentioned Friday night at Rosie’s?”
“What other bun is there?” she asked.