Bob's battered car appeared at the corner and eased its way carefully past the police cruiser to squeeze into the cramped spot that was almost always available because it was located beneath a dead tree whose spongy branches threatened to drop at the slightest breeze.
The guys were upset but, oddly enough, unsurprised to learn that the police were in attendance at their own residence.
"Well, with everything that's been happening lately, why should we be surprised?" Bob muttered to Elizabeth when she explained what was going on.
The police were trooping out of the house, giving Alice further instructions on documenting the damage and the case number for their police report.
"If you do find anything missing, make sure that you call and let us know so we can add it to the report," the officer told them after he dictated the number to Alice.
Elizabeth accompanied the boys back to the dining room to show them the damage as Alice ushered the police out and sagged against the door, which she'd not quite let hit them on the way out. The house telephone rang again and she picked it up.
"Oh, it's you! What? No, I don't think so. Describe it to me. No, that's not the battery, it's the alternator. Well, just call for a tow. I'll be right there to get you. Okay, bye." She hung up the phone and called down the hall to her sister. "That's Joe. He's got car trouble and I've got to pick him up. See if you can get the guys started on cleaning things up around here." She grabbed a coat from the coat tree and hurried out of the house.
The guys were in the dining room expressing great dismay over the mess.
"Why don't you look around and see if they took anything," Elizabeth said. "I don't think they did. It looks like the damage is all in here and the kitchen, but you might notice something I didn't."
The guys made a quick but uneventful tour through the downstairs and then ran upstairs to look at their rooms.
Bob came back downstairs, shaking his head. "This is so strange. You would think that if someone is going to risk breaking in, they would take something, but it looks like all they did was make a mess."
Carrying a digital camera, Dirk appeared a moment later. "I thought we should take pictures of everything before we start cleaning up," he explained.
They followed him into the dining room and watched him snap pictures. Elizabeth turned the lights all the way up. The short autumn dusk had passed into full night by now and the darkness framed by the smashed windows sucked light from the room. Undaunted by the flash, shadows lay in every corner.
Dirk paused and squinted at his velvet Elvis. "That's not my Velvis! They took it and replaced it with another one." He stamped his foot passionately. "It had to be Carl who broke in. He's the only one who would do something like that and the rest of the mess is just for spite."
"I don't know, it looks the same to me," said Bob.
"No way. My velvet Elvis was the earlier Elvis and look at this one, he's a lot fatter, and look at the fringe on that jumpsuit. This is definitely a much later Elvis."
Through hooded eyes, the velvet Elvis looked insolently down on them. The silver-painted sequins on the white jumpsuit glinted in the fragmented light from the chandelier. The black velvet shadows behind Elvis were as dark as ever, but no longer formless. Anthropomorphizing the shape crushed into the velvet behind him, Elizabeth imagined a black-hooded, bunraku puppeteer reaching out for Elvis's arms.
"Looks the same to me," said Bob.
"Only because you don't pay attention," Dirk retorted. He fiddled with the buttons on his camera. "Look, here's a picture from the barbecue we had last August. You can see what he used to look like and compare it with this one."
Elizabeth and Bob leaned over the tiny screen on the back of the camera. The velvet Elvis hung in the background behind a conversational grouping of smiling people holding hot dogs and plastic cups of beer. Sure enough, the Elvis in the photograph looked trimmer and moody, but not as sinister as he did now.
"You can't tell from this," Bob protested. "That little screen is going to make everything look darker."
"So, don't believe me," Dirk snapped. "I know what I see, and that is not the same painting."
"Why would anyone break in and switch your stupid picture? In this neighborhood the burglars pretty much just want to grab cash or jewelry, or anything else small, that they can exchange for drugs."
"Stranger things have happened," said Dirk. He turned to Elizabeth. "Didn't your ghost friend see anything? He must've been here."
"I haven't seen him since we got home," Elizabeth told him. "But he doesn't like your Velvis either. That's the one thing he wouldn't stop anyone from stealing."
"Is everyone against me?" Dirk huffed into the kitchen and started taking pictures in there. Once the damage was fully documented, the housemates got down to cleaning. Disturbed at the thought of working right over the sand room, Elizabeth refused to clean in the dining room no matter how foolish the others thought her, and she wouldn't go downstairs to see if the vandals had messed around in the basement. Sighing at her timidity, Bob made a quick tour through the basement and reported that all was normal.
The fact that all of the glass from the dining room windows was lying on the inside of the house was not comforting either. It clearly emphasized that something had broken in, not out, and she could not let go of the thought that the vandal(s) might still be hiding in the house somewhere.
With no choice but to bury her worries in action, Elizabeth ran upstairs and changed into jeans and an old sweatshirt, and slid her feet into machine washable sneakers which would not be ruined by the mess on the kitchen floor. Back down in the kitchen, she got a dustpan and a sponge and began scooping the mess and wrecked dishes into an old grocery bag.
Dirk stuck his head in the kitchen and announced that he was heading out to the home repair store to get some plywood to nail over the windows until the glass could be replaced. "If Kevin turns up, tell him I'll be back soon."
Out in the dining room, Bob dropped the bricks out the windows and cleaned up the smashed glass. After he slashed one finger when a long, knife-like shard slipped from his grasp, he came into the kitchen for a Band-Aid.
"Can't you sweep it up?" she asked him. They stood over the sink, washing out his cut.
"No, not the big pieces." He spied the heavy leather work gloves she had used that morning. "I guess I'll try those."
The cowhide gloves provided more than enough protection to his hands, but made his fingers so thick and stumpy that he struggled to pick up even the largest pieces. Elizabeth watched for a while, before he found the trick of it, and giggled as he groped with complete futility to slip even one finger beneath the edge of a shard.
He glared at her. She disappeared back into the kitchen and the easier, but smelly, cleanup tasks there before he could suggest that she switch rooms with him.
Rififi wandered down the back stairs and into the kitchen. He minced his way among the smears on the floor, pausing to delicately lick one paw free of an offending smudge of ketchup and olive oil, and wound around her ankles.
"Meow," he said. He looked intently at the cabinet that held the cat food and at his dish which sat in its corner and had miraculously escaped damage.
"There's tuna all over the place," Elizabeth told him. The vandals had opened up a few cans of tuna and spread those around the kitchen too. She pointed out a small pile of meat on the table.
Rififi ignored her pointed suggestions to help with the cleanup and then stepped carefully across the floor to sit beside his dish. He meowed again. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and hissed. Fur bristling in all directions, he ran from the room like a bit of dandelion fluff before a hurricane blast.
Penrose materialized beside the kitchen table.
"There you are!" Elizabeth withheld expressions of relief at his appearance when she saw how faded he looked. She gestured towards the damage to the kitchen. "I don't suppose you saw who did this."
"Trip," he said, his eyes distant.
She dropped her mop. "That's impossible! He was just here, asking what happened."
"Who are you talking to?" Bob appeared in the doorway carrying a bag of shattered glass.
"Penrose," she said.
"Did he see anything?" Bob asked with interest.
"He says it was Trip that broke in and trashed the place."
"That bastard!" Bob heaved the bag into the trash can. "That figures. He's the type who gets away with everything. And he'll get away with this too, because our only witness is invisible!"
"Maybe there's some other evidence," Elizabeth said. "Fibers or something."
"That's absurd. The police are hardly going to send over a forensics team to investigate vandalism. Besides, he's been in to see the crime scene, so that would explain away any fibers," Penrose said. He attempted to pull out one of the kitchen chairs and gave up when his hand passed through the back. Elizabeth pulled the chair out for him. He thanked her tiredly and sank into it. He leaned his elbows on the table and put his face in his hands. A greenish tinge suffused his entire form and dulled his aspect.
Bob said the same thing Penrose did, so Elizabeth didn't bother to relay his words. He added, "Couldn't your ghost friend have scared him off in the first place?"
Penrose said, "It's all I can do to manifest this much. I can't muster anything scarier than a cold draft. Something is sucking off all the energy on which I can normally draw."
"But why would Trip break in and mess up our house?" asked Elizabeth.
"Ask him what happened," said Bob.
"I heard the breaking glass in the dining room and went to see what was happening. I looked out through one of the broken windows and saw Trip opening up the window to the boiler room and climbing in. His familiarity with that means of ingress points towards him being the one who broke in before and messed with the coal. And if the sugar skull I found in the coal is any indication, he was probably the one who broke into Miss Price's bookstore. Anyway, he came up through the basement and started trashing the kitchen. I'm afraid I have to say in his defense that he did not appear to be acting on his own volition. He had all the signs of being under the aegis of some outside force, and probably has no memory of his actions."
Elizabeth relayed this to Bob, who didn't buy into the idea that Trip wasn't simply being an asshole. Elizabeth ignored his tirade about spoiled, silver-spoon-sucking FFV brats who get everything handed to them, and think they can take whatever they want, and need a good pop in the face. She returned her attention to Penrose. "Then why would someone make him break in? That makes no sense."
"All he did, besides make a mess, was to break through the protective spell that the coven laid over the house. It's completely gone now. Did he take anything? I didn't see--I wasn't able to manifest for the entire time he was in the house," Penrose said.
Bob finished his litany of complaints about Trip, which seemed to Elizabeth to be awfully extensive for a set of grievances about a neighbor, and asked what Penrose said.
When she told him, he said, "So the spell couldn't do what any ordinary alarm system could, and it was totally eliminated by a guy coming in and throwing ketchup around. Great—what a waste of time that was." He went into the broom closet and rummaged among the cleaning equipment.
"The spell didn't protect the house at all?" she asked Penrose.
He shook his head. "It was never intended to keep out people, and the counter-spell rode in on Trip."
Bob snorted as he emerged from the broom closet carrying a bucket and a sponge mop. "Maybe you should have called Miss Price instead of the police."
In answer to Penrose's question, Elizabeth said, "Nothing is missing, except that Dirk insists that someone switched out his Velvis. He has a picture of it from last year, and the one hanging in the dining room really does look different."
"Damn it." Penrose pounded his fist on the table and it passed right through. "It's the same one, all right. I knew that thing was cursed. I should have found a way to get rid of it before."
Bob filled his bucket at the sink and massaged the head of his mop under the stream of water from the tap.
"Maybe we should call Miss Price now," she said.
"No!" Both males agreed firmly on that point.
"Why not? She might be able to figure all this out."
The doorbell rang before Bob and Penrose could marshal their separate arguments.
"That must be the police again." Elizabeth went to answer the door. After she left the kitchen, Rififi appeared beneath her feet and wrapped himself around her legs. He hampered her progress all the way down the hallway and meowed with agitation.
Elizabeth tripped and caught herself on the table in the front hall. "I will feed you in one minute," she exclaimed. With an iron will, she kept herself from kicking the cat. Fuming, she yanked open the outer doors and gasped at the crowd before her.