The attic was a tiny crawl space off the upstairs bathroom. Nothing in it.
Room by room he searched, pulling out every drawer, checking for false bottoms, for loose moldings on walls. Halfway through the upstairs—thank goodness the house wasn’t that big—he texted Alicia again: Did she rent a safe-deposit box? He waited.
No response. It was after 2:00 a.m. in Belgrade. She must’ve been asleep.
Nothing in Nicole’s closet, apart from what should be. He shook out each shoe in every shoebox, opened every piece of luggage, checked behind every picture, lifted up the mattress, re-made the bed. He’d finished the upstairs—the master bedroom and the spare room she used as a practice room—when Alicia texted back, clearly not asleep: No. That was the 1st place we looked. Also no storage unit. I’ll see u tomorrow. WAIT FOR ME!
Ray: Did you check her mom and sister? How about Tina Reed?
Nicole was close to her mother and sister, who lived outside Harrisburg, and Tina was her best friend at the orchestra.
Alicia: We asked for all this information from her right after the theft. We’ve checked them all. I’ve already contacted Bill Soames to ask him to run a check on everyone again. More tomorrow!!!
Down the stairs, checking each stair tread. The house was newish—built during the 1980s steel boom—with cheap hollow-core doors and wall-to-wall Berber carpet. There didn’t seem to be any structural hiding places. He often stayed over, so she would of course know that he’d be in the house. Wherever she hid it, it had to be somewhere he wouldn’t normally go. The basement? The unheated garage out back?
It was nearly 8:00 p.m. when he made a peanut butter sandwich, ate it standing at the sink, staring down at an unwashed coffee mug. She’d be back in a couple hours. “I missed you, so just flew in to see you,” he imagined telling her, trying out the words. Could he sound sincere?
On the main level sprawled the kitchen, dining room, living room, half bath/laundry room, foyer. The living room was immaculate. The gray couch sat quietly, yellow pillows staring back at him. The rubber tree plant was shiny and tall. Not a speck of dust on her dark hardwood floors. On the console in the foyer, a pile of mail was neatly stacked. He thumbed through it, as if expecting a postcard from the violin: Hi, hope you’re well, really enjoying my time here in the front closet, wish you were here!
This was stupid. What had he been thinking? Nicole loved him. She listened to all his family drama—she was there with him when only Aunt Rochelle would speak to him. “You can do this,” she would tell him, grabbing his face with both her hands. “You’re better than they let you know.” She’d pull him close, their foreheads almost touching. “And everyone you meet is better because of you.”
But why had she driven back from New York? The hall closet was packed with winter coats. He went through every pocket.
Besides the basement, all that was left were the half bath/laundry room, the dining room, and the kitchen. He dreaded the kitchen—fishing around in the flour, emptying the open boxes of pasta, pouring out the bag of rice—so figured he’d start with the bathroom.
Nothing in the powdered laundry soap. Nothing in the cabinets. Nothing taped to the back of the toilet, or suspended in the toilet tank, the way he heard drug dealers hid their stash. He sat on the toilet and thumbed through the pile of magazines on the shelf next to him. He’d seen them all before, but he was being thorough, right?
There were those old Men’s Health magazines, which were still arriving addressed to Marcus Terry, the previous tenant, whose subscription had still not run out.
“Who’s Marcus Terry?” he’d once asked Nicole when they’d started dating.
“I think that’s the guy who used to live here.”
He remembered her telling him that the house had sat empty for several months as the heirs tried to decide what to do with it. The patron’s estate was complicated, and probate was going to take years, which is why they finally agreed to rent it to a symphony musician.
That conversation with Nicole had been six months ago, and she’d moved into the house more than a year ago. This Men’s Health issue was from July of this year. The subscription should have run out by now, shouldn’t it?
What was the name of the orchestra patron who’d died? He googled the address.
Elizabeth Sutton, beloved wife of Benjamin and mother of James and William, passed away on…
No Marcus Terry. Nicole had been the first tenant in the house, he remembered that very clearly. Perhaps Elizabeth Sutton had had a caregiver, though? No mention of his name in the obituary.