Survival Clause, стр. 9
I turned to the car and hauled Carrie and the baby seat out of the back. And turned toward the house. “So far, so good.”
Charlotte nodded. “I just got here, so I haven’t gone inside. But the new roof and front door look all right.”
They did. You could hardly tell that the roof had been patched at all. If you didn’t know that a chunk of house had been missing until recently, you might not notice anything wrong.
“Wonder if there’s anyone in Columbia who doesn’t know what happened here?” I mused.
“What?” Charlotte had started walking toward the house, and now she turned around to look at me.
I shook my head. I already knew the answer: nobody. Everyone in town probably knew that our house had been blown up. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
She gave me a look, but didn’t pursue the subject. “Paul told me about the murder victim,” she said instead, as she headed across the grass toward the front door.
Paul? “When did you talk to Detective Jarvis between last night and this morning?”
Or had he spent the night?
I didn’t think they’d taken the relationship to that level—I hadn’t been sure there was a relationship there at all—but maybe I was wrong.
“He called,” Charlotte said, with a betraying blush in her cheeks. “He’s the one who told me about the video.”
“And the body?”
She nodded. “What’s going on?”
“Well…” Until Grimaldi’s personal connection to case was public knowledge, I should probably stick to the basics. “I don’t know that I know a whole lot more than Paul Jarvis. Someone found the body of a woman at the truck stop up by the interstate, and the sheriff’s office got called in. Because there’s some indication that she’s the victim of a serial killer who’s been operating up and down I-65 for fifteen or twenty years, Rafe got called in. Now they’re talking about maybe having to call in the FBI.”
Charlotte nodded, and looked sorry she’d asked. I put the baby carrier down on the concrete stoop (that not even a box full of Tannerite had been able to budge) and nudged her out of the way so I could insert the key in the lock of the brand new front door we’d had to install after the previous door had been blown to pieces.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her over my shoulder. “It has nothing to do with you. Or with us.”
She nodded, but didn’t look convinced. I twisted the knob and pushed the door open. And stuck my head through the opening. “Well, hell.”
Three
“What?” Charlotte wanted to know, pushing against my shoulder. Her voice hit somewhere between frantic and resigned.
She’s a few inches shorter than me, so I stepped aside to give her access to the doorway. She peered past me. “Oh, no.”
“It’s no big deal,” I said, even though my heart had dropped when I’d first seen it. “Just a broken window.” And some glass on the floor. “We can replace it.”
Charlotte gave me a look. I avoided her eyes. “Looks like a baseball.”
It was in a corner of the living room, up against the wall. I continued brightly, “It’s not a brick or a rock. Breaking the window was probably not deliberate. And whoever did it doesn’t seem to have entered the house.”
The broken window was still in place. No one seemed to have reached in, undone the lock, and pushed the sash up so they could crawl across the sill and inside.
“Probably just kids,” I said.
Charlotte looked unconvinced, and when she crossed the threshold, her shoulders hunched, like she was waiting for that proverbial other shoe to literally fall out of the ceiling onto her head.
It didn’t. We took Carrie inside and locked the door behind us, and then we made a reconnaissance of the rest of house to see whether anything else had gone wrong since we’d been here yesterday.
Nothing had. Everything else was in place, and looked the way it should. “See?” I told Charlotte. “Nothing to worry about. Just an accident.”
She looked reluctantly convinced. “So we’re ready to go on the market again?”
“Once we fix the window,” I said. “Shouldn’t take too long. I’ll start breaking out what’s left of the pane if you’ll go buy a new piece of glass.”
Charlotte nodded. We both remembered the dimensions, since this wasn’t the first broken window pane we’d had to replace.
By the time she came back, thirty or forty minutes later, I had the rest of the glass swept up and removed, and it was a matter of a few minutes to pop the new window into the old frame, push in the little points that held it in place, and then run a new bead of putty along the edges.
We both stepped back and contemplated it.
“Looks good,” Charlotte said.
I nodded. “I’ll call the photographer and have her come back out.”
Charlotte glanced at me. “Do we need new pictures?”
“I guess we could put up the old ones. The finishes are all the same.” Paint color and tile and all the rest. “But the place was staged the first time we put it on the market.” And Michelle the stager absolutely refused to rent us furniture a second time, since several of her pieces had been damaged in the vandalism. “It would probably be best if we got some pictures of the house the way it looks now.”
Charlotte sighed. “More money.”
“Yes. But we don’t want to market a house full of lovely furniture and then have people show up and be disappointed when they see empty rooms.”
We were headed out when Charlotte’s phone emitted a little chirp, different from the usual ringtone or message sound. She dug it out of her pocket and peered at it, brows arching. “There’s another video of Rafe.”
I leaned in. “How do you know?”
“I set an alert,” Charlotte said.
“On videos of my husband?”
She shrugged. “I figured you’d want to know. And you might not think to set one yourself.”
She was