Suddenly (23 page)

With a look that said, “Enough,” Angie opened the door and left the office.

Paige and Angie saw all of the scheduled patients and then some between that midmorning point and the lunch break that was built into the appointment book. As happened often, Paige lingered with her last patient, leaving herself ten minutes to eat a tuna sandwich and call home to check on Sami, before starting on the afternoon cases. She had until three, when she would pick up Sami and head for Mount Court. Jill had asked for the afternoon and evening off to help the mother of one of her friends prepare a surprise birthday party for the girl, and Paige wasn’t about to refuse. Jill needed to be with her friends. And Paige liked taking Sami along.

Shortly after two, though, Jill called, out of breath and upset. “I took Sami for a long walk, like I told you I would, and when we got home, the back door was open. Someone’s been in there, Dr. Pfeiffer. Someone’s gone through your things.”

Paige’s stomach lurched. “Someone
broke
in?”

“Well, I didn’t lock the door. But I’m sure I shut it. I wouldn’t leave it open. Not with kitty running around. I called to her, but she didn’t come.”

“Is Sami all right?”

“She’s fine.”

“Where are you now?”

“Next door at the Corkells’. I don’t know what to do.”

Paige put her fingertips to her forehead and tried to think. Her heart was pounding. “Don’t do anything, Jill. Just stay where you are. Whatever you do, don’t go near the house until I get there. I’ll call Norman Fitch. He’ll meet me there.”

Fortunately Peter had returned and could see the last of her patients. She paused only to call Mount Court and cancel the afternoon’s practice, and within minutes was driving across town, trying not to let her imagination run wild. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before, not during her growing-up years in the kind of wealthy suburb thieves loved, nor during her school years in the city. The last place she would have thought it could happen was in Tucker—small, friendly, law-abiding Tucker.

But it had. Someone had entered her house uninvited. Drawers had been rifled, books removed from bookshelves and set aside, papers and magazines fanned. Pieces of clothing lay on the closet floor, seeming less thrown there than inadvertently dropped, but that made the violation no easier to swallow. A neat intruder was an intruder nonetheless. Only the medicine chests showed no sign of trespass, suggesting that the search hadn’t been for drugs.

Nothing appeared to have been taken except kitty, who was nowhere in sight. While Norman and his deputy dusted for fingerprints, Paige ran to the Corkells’. She took Sami in her arms and held her tightly, then carried her back to the house and went from room to room.

“Kitty? Kitty? Where are you, kitty?”

She made a second round of the rooms, this time shaking a box of kitty treats, usually a surefire way of drawing kitty from hiding. But there was no small furball scampering out, and Paige grew frightened.

She returned to the front hall to find Norman talking with none other than Noah Perrine.

“I heard you’d canceled practice,” Noah said by way of explaining his presence, but Paige’s mind was on a single track.

“I can’t find my kitten. She must have run out of the house while the door was open.” She slipped past, out the door to the front porch, calling, “Kitty? Come here, kitty!” She ran down the steps and began a search of the perimeter of the house, looking behind bushes, into trees, down the window wells of the basement. “Where
are
you, kitty? Here, kittykittykitty!”

Noah met her at the garage. “I don’t see her.”

Paige was close to tears. “She’s just a baby. She isn’t used to being outdoors. She can’t possibly protect herself against other animals, and if she wanders too far, she’ll never find her way back.” Still holding Sami, she set off for the neighbor’s yard and searched it the way she had her own. Jill was searching, too, and Betty Corkell, and before long the search had spread down the street. Paige’s shoulders were aching by the time she returned home. She sank down on the front stairs, propped Sami on the lower step between her legs, and buried her face in her hands.

She didn’t have to see to know that it was Noah who settled beside her. The solidness of him was a tangible thing, and that was before he began to rub her shoulders. His hands were masterful. They knew just where she ached.

“She’ll show up, Paige. She can’t have gone far.”

“But she doesn’t have a collar. I was just keeping her for a little while, only until I found a permanent home for her, and since she was staying inside all the time, I didn’t bother with a tag, but now no one will know where she belongs.”

“Maybe someone will find her and keep her. Isn’t that what you want?”

“No!” She shot him a glance. “I want to find a home for her myself. A good home. Not just some place she wanders into. Do you know what people do to cats they take on the spur of the moment and then tire of?”

“Don’t assume the worst.”

“She was abandoned once. Now she’s probably wandering around, thinking it’s happened again. She was so
sad
then. She may be bigger now, but she’s just as helpless.”

“Cats aren’t helpless. They can fend for themselves.”

“This one doesn’t know how.”

“It’s instinct.”

“But she’s just a baby,” Paige said, and put her chin in her palm. On one level she knew she was being foolish. On another she was feeling devastated. “I’ll put signs up. Someone must have seen her.” Assuming whoever had broken into the house hadn’t taken kitty in a car and dumped her far away.

Noah’s fingers continued their work. After several minutes, leaving one hand on her arm, he slid to the step below. “Hey,” he said softly, studying Sami. To Paige he said, “She’s getting bigger. Looks none the worse for the excitement around here.”

Paige shifted Sami to her lap. The little girl didn’t belong to her any more than kitty did, but the worry was there. “Thank God she and Jill weren’t home.” Her throat grew tight with emotion. She forced words past it. “If anything had happened to either of them, I don’t know what I’d have done.”

“Do you have any idea who might have broken in or why?” Noah asked.

She shook her head.

“Nothing’s missing?”

“Nothing obvious. Television, stereo, CD player—they’re all there. Same with my parents’ silver, which would have brought in a bundle on the black market.”

“Do you keep any patient records, confidential reports here, that someone might have wanted?”

“None.”

“Then robbery wasn’t the motive, at least not robbery in the traditional sense. Stealing your peace of mind is something else. Do you have any enemies who may be out to give you a scare?”

“Enemies? In Tucker?”

“A difficult case that may have upset a parent? Maybe an
unstable
parent?”

“I have several, but I can’t imagine they’d do this. Small-town doctors have a kind of protection. You might disagree with something they say, but you can’t tell them to go to hell, or next time you get sick, you’re out in the cold.” She stood suddenly and went down the stairs. “Kitty?” She looked back up at Noah. “I thought I heard something.” She moved aside a rhododendron branch. “Kitty?” But there was neither movement nor noise.

Discouraged, she returned to the stairs. She leaned heavily against the wood railing and looked up at the house. Inside, Norman was making notes on a pad. She had a sudden sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Are you okay?” Noah asked.

“I guess. It’s just the thought of a stranger going through my things. The intrusion. The violation.” Her imagination took her further, to an image of kitty mutilated and left to die, meowing piteously but with fading strength.

Noah left the stairs and started thrashing through the rhododrendron.

“She’s not there,” Paige said. “I’ll have to go through the neighborhood putting up signs.”

But he moved to the next bush and worked his way toward its base. He straightened with a wide smile on his face and kitty in his hand. “You heard something all right.”

Instantly relieved and grinning, Paige took kitty in her free hand and hugged her against Sami. She buried her face against the animal’s neck, which was soft, warm, and blessedly intact. “I was so worried.” At that moment she couldn’t imagine sleeping without kitty on her bed.

“Paige?” Norman called from the door. “Can’t find any sign of forcible entry, but since the doors weren’t locked, that’s understandable. Mickey’s staying here to dust more while I go asking around the neighborhood. It’s possible that whoever it was went in and out the back way through the trees so no one would see, but it’s worth a try. Do me a favor and don’t move anything until Mickey’s done?”

Paige nodded. She looked toward the house and swallowed hard. Her skin crawled when she thought of touching her own private things after a stranger had touched them.

“I’m calling the girls on your team,” Noah said. “They’ll help neaten up when it’s time.”

“No, no,” Paige said, though she was touched by the offer, “don’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll upset them. They’re too young.”

“Not too young to help someone who has helped them out many a time. It’s a good lesson. Besides, they like you, and they’ll like being off campus.”

But Paige hated the idea of the girls giving up their evening to clean up her house.

“I’ll let them out of study hall for it,” Noah coaxed.

At that, she couldn’t resist a crooked smile.

Pushing off from the step, he said, “I’ll be back.” A handful of long strides took him across the lawn to his car.

The van was packed with Paige’s team and pizza. By the time it pulled into her driveway, Mickey had left and the local locksmith was at work installing the dead bolts that Paige would never have bought if she were the only one involved. But there was Sami now, and Jill; Paige wouldn’t be able to go to work with a free mind, knowing that they might be prey to a thief on the loose.

Then again, this thief may have deliberately waited until they left the house, may have sat in the bushes and watched. While it was reassuring to think that they hadn’t been in danger, the thought that someone had been so calculatingly determined was terrifying.

She tried to think of who it might be and what he might have been after. She still couldn’t find anything missing. While the girls neatened the living room and kitchen, she tackled the bedroom.

“This is the worst,” Noah observed from the doorway.

Nearly every drawer had been opened and searched, leaving mounds of femininity stuffed haphazardly back in. The closet shelves had been re-arranged none too neatly. Mara’s knitting basket had been overturned, scattering skeins of yard hither and yon.

Paige tossed underthings into a laundry basket. She didn’t care how many washes she had to run, she would run them
all night
if that was what it would take to restore a sense of purity to her life. “I can’t imagine why anyone would do this.”

“The world is full of perverts.”

Angrily, disgustedly, she tossed a nightgown into the pile. “I always thought Tucker was different.”

“No place is different. Not that this had to be the work of a dangerous criminal. It could have been someone with a weird sense of humor. Are you sure nothing’s missing?”

She had checked her jewelry box, but nothing was gone. She had checked the closet file that held the official paper on her mortgage, her insurance, her IRA. Nothing was even out of place, as it might have been if the papers had been photographed.

With a sudden pang, she thought of Mara’s letters. Pushing aside dresses, blouses, and slacks, she pulled from the closet the apron that Mara had made for her several birthdays before. It had been a joke; Paige had never been much of a cook, despite Mara’s attempts to humiliate her into it. The last of those attempts had been this apron. It had no less than a dozen pockets on the front. Mara had claimed that they were deep enough to hold every ingredient Paige would need to bake a chocolate cake in an organized fashion.

Paige didn’t know about that, since she still hadn’t tried to make a chocolate cake, but the pockets were more than deep enough to hold packets of letters. They were intact, all four, each with its own bow neatly tied.

“Nothing’s missing,” she said, and wondered why she had thought of the letters with such a pang. Probably because they held great personal meaning. But for that same reason, a thief would be disinterested. Which apparently he had been, since the letters hadn’t been touched. Unless he hadn’t realized they were there.

But why would anyone want Mara’s letters?

“What is it?” Noah asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing special.”

“You sure went pale looking for those.”

“They’re personal.”

“Letters from a lover?”

She shot him a droll look. “No, not letters from a lover. I’ve never had a lover who was that sentimental.”

“Would you want one?” he asked, leaning against the bureau, “or would you consider sentimentality a sign of weakness?”

She began tossing T-shirts into a second laundry basket. “Sentimentality isn’t a sign of weakness. Nor, though, is it enough to make a lover top-rate.”

“What else does it take?”

“Strength, individuality, conviction—traditional values in a man, but macho when they stand alone. Mixed in with a little sensitivity”—she sucked in her breath—“potent.”

“You’ve never found a man like that?”

“No.”

“Is that why you’ve never married?”

“I never married,” she said, attacking the drawer with slips and stockings, “because marriage as an institution never held much of a lure. I didn’t need it.”

“Didn’t need the commitment?”

“Didn’t need the burden.”

“What burden?”

“The
burden
. Obligations. Expectations that can’t be met.”

“You mean, you don’t want to be tied down to one man?”

She made a face to show the absurdity of that.

“Then what expectations can’t you meet?” he asked.