sees cut glass decanters and massed house plants and art that looks like something picked out by last-century maiden aunts. Somebody has lined up a six-pack’s worth of Heineken empties like soldiers on a side table by the recliner. Tropical fish hang in place in their lighted tank, fixing to float to the top, belly up. Except for the flat screen TV, the new century hasn’t made its way into the living room. These are not lives he wants to walk into.
He is here to steal. Given a choice, Dan would lurk in the bushes forever, but he doesn’t know how long he has. It’s time.
Even though there’s nobody around to see and nothing coming, Dan enters from the back. He pries the rusting screen off a back window overwhelmed by a thicket of Bougainvillea and forces it with the screwdriver. Planting his hands on the sill, he hoists himself up and inside, swift and neat as a swimmer clearing the pool.
Unlike the rest of the house, the original kitchen was redone, probably back when dinosaurs walked. Bleak under the fluorescent strip light, it’s bare and stark as a biology lab. The vinyl flooring has been mopped to death; the pattern on the green Formica counters has been scrubbed white. The room is so antiseptic that it’s hard to believe people eat here. It glistens like a place where food has been banned.
Sobered, Dan ducks into the shotgun hallway. In the windowless hall he can’t be seen from the street, probably because the architects were under orders to keep Herman Chaplin’s maids busy, but out of sight. Maids! It’s a straight shot from the kitchen to the heavy front door, with hall doors opening on pantry and dining room to his right, living room to the left. Golden oak bookcases line the hall, with dusty books shelved like prisoners behind dusty glass; this house hasn’t seen maids in years. The pattern in the Persian runner was worn to nothing before the present generation of Chaplins learned to walk and the place smells of mildew. Old, all these things are old.
He whirls, wondering. What is he looking for? It’s not like he’ll find his Lucy’s initials carved into the woodwork, or a hastily lettered sign pointing the way. There must be something left of his mother in this dismal house: letters, a snapshot of the two of them together. If he has to, he’ll hack into Chaplin’s hard drive and find her there. Entering the dining room, he drops to a crouch so he won’t be seen from the street. Not, he thinks, that there’s anybody out there, but still.
It’s been a long time since Chaplins sat down to family dinners here. He opens cabinets, looks in drawers, uncovering yellowed linens, mildewed table mats, tarnished silverware. The living room looks just the way he thought it would. Cluttered. Inhabited. Sad. Gnarled, hairy African violets crouch like spiders on ancient shelves in the round turret off the living room. The Naugahyde recliner dates from the Sixties, but like the art, all the other furniture looks as if it was nailed to the floor back in the day. Only the electronics are new.
Everything is in stasis.
Troubled, he stands quietly, listening. Trying to imagine his mother back when she was happy; why she was here. What she might have left behind. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, it takes you a while to figure out what you’re looking for and even longer to find it. If you ever do.
Upstairs, he stalls outside the third bedroom door. The two others are easy to identify: the brother’s is strewn with fat-guy clothes; hers is papered in violet, scented, with floral touches on everything that doesn’t move. It has to be this one. Matched leather boxes on the dresser, monogrammed. Everything neat. New laptop sitting open on the table, like an invitation. He should start with Chaplin’s dresser, then go in the closet and check out his jacket pockets, ransack the shelves, his desk drawers. His hard drive. Piece of cake, right?
Not so much.
Practiced reporters are trained to steal bits of people’s lives when they think the conversation is about something else, but they aren’t necessarily prepared to break into their subjects’ empty houses and ransack their things. A normal thief would do that, no problem. To his surprise, Dan is not that guy. It takes him too long to unlock his body, joint by joint, and move on.
He has to satisfy himself with a