the envelopes so that there wouldn’t be any more fingerprints.”
“Any more? So his are on there? Emma”—he looked at me doubtfully—“look, you are going to give this stuff to the cops, right?”
“I want to, but I suddenly wondered…who? I mean, what jurisdiction?”
“Maybe you should leave that up to them. I bet Bader would be willing to hold on to it, until we sort this out.”
“Probably.”
“You’re embarrassed to show this to them, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you?” I answered. I could feel my face going red.
Brian shrugged. “I don’t like it. But I know it isn’t you, and I’m not going to keep evidence from them just because I’m embarrassed.”
“Maybe.” I was still mad at him for trying to blame Michael. It just wasn’t Michael’s style, any more than that letter was mine. And yet, I could hardly fault him for trying to find a ready solution to this.
Brian picked up the letter and read it. I watched interest and curiosity cross his face, and finally he frowned and put it down. “It doesn’t sound like you.”
“I didn’t think so.” That was something, at least. I needed to feel close to someone, I needed to know that Brian still was there, that he still knew me, no matter what was going on. What ever problems there might be between us, our relationship was only strained, not broken.
“I don’t know. If you really felt this way about someone, you’d send them something…Shakespeare. And you’d only do it if whoever was going to get it knew just exactly how much passion that meant for you. It wouldn’t matter if they got the poem or the reference, or whatever, it would matter that they knew you knew.” He looked at the letter, then straight at me. “You’d save the hot stuff for the bedroom.”
I leaned over and kissed him hard. “Yes. Exactly.”
I spent the next afternoon dropping off the materials at the Stone Harbor police department. Bader’s face didn’t change much when I told him what was in the envelope, but it was the fixedness of his expression that told me he was disturbed. After, I returned home and went up to my office. Tried to get into my office, anyway: I realized that the end-of-season clutter had merged disastrously with the new semester’s piles of papers and files. If I did nothing else today, I would have to clean a path to my computer, maybe put some of the summer’s work back in the barn.
After putting the drying screens aside, I rearranged the books and papers into what could arguably be called more-organized piles. At least I could move freely through the room after a few hours of sorting, and had a good idea where everything was. I brought the screens, now empty of the artifacts I’d cleaned, down to the barn for storage.
I opened the padlock, and pulled the door open. When we’d first bought the place, I was nearly certain that the barn would have to come down, but had soon learned that it wasn’t in as bad shape as its appearance suggested. Most of the older barns in New England seem to be standing up through memory only. The smell of old dirt and rotting wood and oil—it had been made into a garage after it had housed animals—hit me, and I thought about how nice and cool it would have been here, before it was closed up as a garage. Not so now. It was stifling.
I flipped the light switch on and set the screens off to the side. As I was turning around to get the next load, I realized that the tool bench was also due for a sorting out, cluttered with the safety stuff Brian had for using power tools, a pile of boxes of fasteners—ah, the hand vac I needed. As I went over to get it, I noticed an extension cord was plugged into the outlet behind the bench.
I frowned. It was black; we only used orange. Easier to see.
The cord ran up to the loft. Since every odd occurrence was now suspect, I climbed the stairs to the loft—and then went back downstairs to get a flashlight. The lights were only on the first level.
On my way back up the stairs, I noticed that there was a fresh crack in the wood of the stairs. I hadn’t heard a crack going up the first time. This was fresh, not filled in with dirt or dust. Someone had been up here, someone heavier than me. I