Chapter 4
Rising late on Saturday, Elizabeth pulled on her robe and wandered downstairs for a leisurely breakfast. She knew that Alice had to work and Dirk was teaching an aerobics class in the morning, so she expected to have the house to herself, except for Penrose, but she found Bob messing with the back door.
He was kneeling on the floor with a screwdriver in one hand and the guts of a lock in the other. Beside him was a hardware store bag filled with more locks. A pile of new keys sat upon the table.
She greeted him and started a fresh pot of coffee. "What are you doing?"
"Since we've had that food going missing, I thought it would be a good idea to replace the locks. Maybe one of the former residents still has a key and he's been coming in to help himself to our food. I also got some latches to go on the downstairs windows that don't have latches. I wish we could get an alarm system, but I don't think it would work with the wiring in this house." He fit the lock through the hole in the door.
While she waited for her coffee to brew, she poked around the butler's pantry, which was a tiny office with more built-in shelves. She envisioned it filled with books and a computer and wondered if she might not be able to scare up some freelance editing work so she'd have an excuse to use it for a home office.
A large window faced east over the back yard. The garden included some broad herbaceous borders, mostly dormant by now. Silvery lamb's ears poked up among the leggy remnants of nasturtiums and petunias along a serpentine brick path that cut through the grass to a carriage house, nearly invisible behind a glorious red oak, several maples, and a ginkgo tree. Red and yellow leaves were scattered over the grass.
"Does anybody live in the carriage house?" she asked Bob when she went back into the kitchen.
"No, it's used for more storage. There's actually a carriage out there. It's not in very good shape. And some rakes," he said. "Do you want to rake the yard today? We should get some of those leaves off the grass."
She poured herself a cup of coffee. "Okay. I was just going to lie around today anyway."
Bob screwed in the last screw and tried the lock. The bolt snicked smoothly in and out. "One down and three to go." He gathered up his tools and the other locks, and headed for the front door.
Elizabeth sipped her coffee and munched down some toast before taking her coffee upstairs. She figured Bob would be busy with the latches and locks for a while longer, so she would have time to snuggle up on her chaise lounge and dip into a book before she had to dress for the yard work.
Penrose was sitting in the hallway outside her door and reading a book. Beside him the boxes of books that she had been going to hide were opened, their flaps sticking off to either side and their contents thoroughly churned. He rose when he saw her. She recognized the cover of the book he was reading and braced herself.
After they exchanged a few pleasantries, he said, "I have to ask. What is the fascination with telepathic animals?"
She blushed and said defensively, "I was twelve. All twelve-year-old girls want telepathic animals."
"But why?"
"I don't know. When we're little we all want ponies, but by the time we're twelve, we have figured out that we're not going to get a pony and we transfer our desires to even more unattainable objects."
"And after one outgrows telepathic dragons?"
"One develops a literary lust for Ramses Emerson or Septimus Hodge."
"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with them," he said drolly.
"The bookcase on the left side of my fireplace, fourth shelf down. When you're finished with the dragons." She smiled sweetly and left him in the hallway.
After she lingered over the cooling coffee and attempted to make some headway with The Decameron (Penrose probably had the hand-illuminated medieval Italian manuscript downstairs), she scrounged up one of her rattier sweatshirts and a pair of disintegrating jeans to wear for the raking. By the time she joined Bob at the carriage house, he was inside sorting through an extensive collection of rakes, including everything from antique bamboo rakes missing most of their teeth to a fancy modern steel rake that expanded like an umbrella. They both selected ordinary plastic rakes and Bob spread out a large piece of tarp onto which they could pile the leaves for easy transfer to a super-can.
As they combed the long green grass free of leaves, they talked amiably about other leaf-raking experiences. Elizabeth and Alice had grown up in a suburban house with a huge yard filled with oaks, pear trees, and brilliant sugar maples whose beauty was offset by the amount of work they created.
"At least the squirrels ate the pears, so we didn't have to pick those up as well," said Elizabeth. After Bob started talking about where he had grown up, she felt like a big wimp for complaining about her own childhood leaf-raking angst. His parents had an orchard.
A sudden shrieking from the alley made them drop their rakes and run to the back gate in the high brick wall that surrounded the yard. The gate was solid oak, unpainted and eight feet high, with a small iron grill at face height. A shiny new padlock dangled from the latch.
"Did you put this on?" she asked him.
"First thing this morning."
The alley behind the house was a narrow, level strip of gravel and on the opposite side from the house, dropped steeply into a wooded ravine. At first they saw nothing out back, but another shriek led their eyes to a frayed rope swing that carried two daring children over the abyss. The rope creaked alarmingly against the bark of the tree limb from which it hung.
"Just kids," said Bob.
The children saw they were being watched and made faces and comic poses.
"It sounded like somebody was getting mugged back here," she said.
"We don't usually have muggings in the alley. The muggings happen out in the street when people are going from their cars to their houses. Back in the alley, anything that isn't tied down vanishes, but other than that it seems to be pretty safe," Bob explained.
They went back to the raking and before long the grass was clear and they had a modest pile of leaves on the tarp. It was still early in the season and most of the leaves remained on the trees. Bob started to gather up the corners of the tarp to drag it back to the alley where the super-can waited to be filled.
Elizabeth eyed the pile wistfully. "That's really pitiful. Not hardly enough to jump in."
Grinning, Bob dropped the corners of the tarp. "Go ahead and jump. You know you want to."
The pile was not large enough to provide sufficient cushioning for a big running jump, so Elizabeth flopped backwards into it and waved her arms and legs to make an angel in the leaves. When the leaves crackled into dust and tickled her nose, she stopped and looked up into the sky, admiring the way the sunlight shone through the gold leaves of the ginkgo.
With his hands on his knees, Bob leaned over and his face hove into view. "Having fun?"
"You should try it." She reached up and pulled him into the pile.
"Why, you!" He came up with a handful of leaves which he tried to stuff down her back.
She shrieked and got her own handful of leaves. Being significantly meaner than he, she tried to stuff them in his mouth.
"Well, well. What have we here?"
Dirk was standing at the mouth of the narrow walk that ran from the front of the house to the back garden. His gym bag was slung over his shoulder and he jingled his keys in his hand.
"We're just doing some yard work," said Bob, letting go of Elizabeth's neck.
"Yes, I saw." He dangled his keys in the air. "Is there some reason why my key doesn't work in the front door anymore?"
Bob said, "I changed the locks today. I thought that the person who's been taking our food might be somebody who had a key."
"If you say so. I hope the back door's unlocked. I wouldn't want to interrupt you all. Carry on." Dirk turned up his nose at their leaf-covered selves. Elizabeth expected they made quite a sight with leaves sticking out of their hair every which way. Bob's old sweater prickled with leaf fragments and her own could look no better. Dirk naturally looked sleek as a seal, despite having led thirty people through an hour-long workout. His warm-up suit wasn't even wrinkled.
Bob's eyes met hers and the same idea flashed between them. "Get him!" They scooped up armloads of leaves and ran towards Dirk.