“But this is another possible egress, another way to access the house,” I reply. “There’s the front door. The back door off the sunporch. And this one, each with an alarm keypad.”
“Also, the garage. Except it would be trickier leaving that way,” Fruge says. “You can’t close the garage door from the outside. Not unless you have a remote.”
“Have you seen one anywhere?”
“Actually, now that you mention it, I haven’t.” Surprise glints in her eyes, followed by a spark of irritation. “That’s two strikes, Fruge,” she chastises herself, her voice dropping an octave. “First you forget to ask about the rent. Then you don’t notice there’s no garage opener. But Gwen doesn’t have a car.” Talking to me again, her voice back to normal. “Not even a bicycle that I’ve seen.”
Outside the kitchen is a granite countertop, and on it a small unopened FedEx package with the return address of an electronics company. The receipt shows the delivery was this past Friday morning.
“I find it interesting she didn’t get around to opening whatever she’d ordered,” I say to Fruge as I walk into the kitchen.
“Sometimes I leave mail and stuff lying around unopened for days,” she feels compelled to share.
On the windowsill over the empty sink is a terra-cotta bonsai pot of parched cacti, zebra plants, aloe variegata, and African violets. The dish garden is the very sort of thoughtful gift Dorothy would present to a stranger she’s descended upon with friendly suggestions in addition to helpful guidance and histories about the area.
The succulents are dried up, the violets a withered blackish-purple. They’ve not been watered in recent memory, maybe ever, and how disgraceful. Like the absence of so much as a single holiday candle. Like everything I’m seeing.
“Was the kitchen light on when you got here?” I ask. “In fact, were any lights on?”
“Yes, the ones that are now. Here, the living room, master bedroom, and entryway. And the garage, everything is exactly like it was when the manager let me in. I didn’t touch a thing except for going through the knapsack on the table.” She heads that way to show me.
“I’ll get there eventually. One thing at a time,” I let her know, because I won’t be hurried or directed.
I imagine Dorothy appearing at Gwen’s door, welcoming her to the neighborhood with a dish garden. Likely it was my sister who set it on the windowsill with its northern exposure, and it catches my attention that the faux wooden blinds are open. The kitchen lights shine through the glass, dimly illuminating the patio.
I can see the cover on the grill twitching in the wind, the empty bird feeders and suet basket hanging from wrought-iron shepherd hooks, the table and chairs. If a stalker, a killer had gotten into the patio area when she was fixing soup with the blinds open, she would have been visible through the window over the sink.
“Especially after dark.” I point this out to Fruge. “I’m curious why the blinds are open, and find it odd. The drapes are drawn everywhere else I’ve looked so far. Yet she was inside the kitchen late afternoon, early evening, and didn’t close the blinds?”
“Why are you making a big deal out of a dead plant?” She watches curiously as I use my phone to take pictures of the dish garden. “What’s so important about it?”
“I’m making sure we have a record of what it looked like before it was moved.” I pick it up. “And tampered with.” I dribble in tap water from the sink.
About a fourth of a cup should be enough, and I set the ceramic pot in the dish rack to drain, feeling increasingly uncharitable about the person to blame.
“How hard is it to take care of something that needs minimal sunlight and watering only once a week?” I can’t help but remark.
“By all appearances, Gwen Hainey didn’t seem to have much respect for anything,” Fruge agrees. “Probably selfish as heck, like a lot of these people who grew up on social media.”
“Except from what I’ve been told she has no presence on it,” I reply. “It would seem she was skilled at staying off the radar.”
My next stop is the kitchen table, what’s actually a butcher block that no doubt belongs to the house. On top of it is a green leather knapsack, a wallet. Gwen’s driver’s license is near a set of keys simply labeled #14, an abbreviation for the address of the rented townhome.
“When I first got here there was nothing else on the table except the knapsack I went through,” Fruge says. “I was looking for a picture ID and for her phone, which still hasn’t turned up. I don’t think it’s here anywhere, and I’m thinking the killer took it.”