Nothing but Trouble (15 page)

And Boone didn’t look at her.

She tried to find defense
 
—wasn’t prom night the perfect night? And it wasn’t like it was a first for the country club or even, probably, this green. Still as she climbed on beside Ernie and they raced back to the clubhouse, she felt like a tramp.

And then she got it.

Smoke spiraled off one end of the country club. Near the restaurant. Where she’d taken the cigarette from Boone.

Thick and black, the smoke chewed up the night sky, devouring their prom.

She glanced at Boone. He’d gone pale.

When Buckam stopped the cart and got out, PJ expected him to address Boone. Instead he grabbed PJ by the arm and
hauled her over to the chief of police, who gave her a look that cleared the final passion fog from her brain.

“Here’s our little arsonist,” Buckam said as smoke teared her eyes.

She looked over her shoulder and caught Boone’s eyes.
What?
But Boone was the one with the cigarette
 
—

He turned away, his hands in his pockets.

The memory of the smoke could still make her tear up, fill her lungs with acrid pitch. She coughed. Coughed again, her chest closing upon itself. Coughed again, so violently it woke her.

She sat up in bed, still feeling the bruise of her cough.

Smoke.

A thin veneer crept into the room in the early morning light, but because of her vast experience she recognized it in a second. As if in confirmation, the fire alarm went off, numbing nearly all thoughts save one.

“Davy!”

PJ launched from her bed and raced down the hall to Davy’s room in zero point two seconds. Here, at the top of the stairs, the smoke thickened, a haze that stung her eyes. A quick sweep of his room revealed it empty. She hacked again, putting her hand to her mouth, and raced down the stairs. “Fire!”

She dove into the fog toward the kitchen and barely made out Vera, dressed in a rust-colored robe, her hair tied back in a scarf, fanning a towel below the alarm. Davy, seated at the counter with a stack of what looked like pancakes, clamped his hands over his ears.

“Turn off the stove!” PJ grabbed a wooden spoon and took
a swipe at the alarm, knocking it from its mount. It dangled, silenced, from a thin wire.

She turned her attention to the stove, where pancakes bubbled in a sea of sizzling oil from a smoking cast-iron pot probably hauled over from the motherland and formerly used to serve father Lenin.

“Blini,”
Vera said, as if explaining the food group.

PJ turned off the stove and squished past Vera, grabbing an oven mitt and then the pan. She expected it to combust at any moment. Muscling open the back door, she ran out onto the porch and tossed the smoking contents into the backyard, pancakes and all.

Dora looked up at her and stopped chewing a mouthful of hostas.

“Breakfast,” PJ said.

“Shto tee dyelish?”

What was she doing? What did Vera think PJ was doing
 
—watering the lawn? She rounded on the babushka standing on the porch. Vera seethed
 
—PJ deduced that from the wild hand gestures, the rough-edged Russian that sounded like a curse upon their entire family. Which, PJ wanted to remind her, she was a part of now.

“Sorry,” PJ said calmly, holding up a mittened hand in surrender. “I have this thing about fire.”

“That oil’s not good for the grass.”

PJ whirled. Super, more criticism. Connie’s lawn boy . . . er, man . . . in a green jumpsuit and brown cap knelt in her garden fertilizing the recently replanted, badly wounded bleeding heart. “When did you get here?”

“Maybe an hour ago. Sorry. Mrs. Morton expects me, so
I just come in and get started. I’m Anders, with the lawn service.”

PJ looked at him, and while she had the vague understanding that she stood there in her jammies, what was providentially clear was that she’d found the answer to her problem.

She knew exactly how she’d get into Ernie Hoffman’s house.

Marching inside past the angry Russian, she dropped the pan into the sink, opened a few windows, and sprinted upstairs. A glance in the mirror told her that she should be wincing. But she was too fueled by her plan to care. Sweeping her hair back into a ponytail, she whipped on a pair of jogging shorts and a T-shirt and pulled on her tennis shoes.

This wouldn’t take long.

She took the stairs two at a time, swinging her keys.

Davy perched at the bottom, wearing a goatee of syrup.

PJ skidded to a stop. Oh yeah,
Davy
. She sank down hard onto the bottom step. Foiled again.

Vera materialized through the fog, wiping her hands. Her gaze ranged from PJ to Davy to PJ’s keys.
“Ya smatroo za rebyonka.”

Hmm . . . PJ deciphered that as an offer to watch the fish. Which she dearly hoped meant Davy. Still, fish or not, he was a little guy who’d felt abandoned lately.

PJ crouched in front of him. “Little man, I gotta run out for a bit. Will you stay with uh . . . uh . . .”

“Baba Vera?”

PJ glanced at Vera; she was smiling at Davy. She focused on the smile and the way Baba Vera took Davy by the hand, leading him back to the kitchen, then perching him on a chair
and patting his cheeks. It looked like the “fish” would be fine for a few minutes.

She tried to unstick herself from the syrup that had puddled under her tennis shoes.

Casting a final look toward Davy and his baba, PJ lit out for the front door.

She
did
have a plan, one that didn’t include breaking too many laws. “Hey, Anders! I gotta move your truck, okay?” PJ peeked around the side of the house where he was watering the hostas. The spray rainbowed under the morning sun. He looked up, nodding.

She checked the back of the truck and yes, there hung an extra jumpsuit, a hat, and a plethora of gardening tools. She debated leaving a note, but judging by the amount of yard Connie had maintained, Anders would be busy for at least an hour.

She fully planned to be back before he noticed that she’d relocated his truck . . . to Hoffman’s neighborhood.

Nobody noticed the lawn guy. Or the mailman or milkman.

She slid into the jumpsuit, zipped it up, and added the hat, pulling her hair through the back. As a former locksmith’s apprentice, she was counting on her rudimentary knowledge of legal B and E to get her inside Hoffman’s house. People often secreted a key outside their house. Seventy percent of their emergency calls had come from kids or the elderly who forgot where they hid their extra key. Maybe she wouldn’t have to technically
break in
.

Regardless, she wasn’t going to take anything. Just look around. Like a fly. And again, she was with the good guys.

Hoffman’s house, which PJ had found from the address
listed in the paper and confirmed with the name on the mailbox, was a 1970s rambler with a long, low front porch overgrown with lilac bushes, purple viburnum, and two beautiful pink hydrangea plants. She put a hand inside the dying impatiens hanging near the front door and nearly tripped over the two huge frog planters guarding the stoop.

She was a lawn girl. So she filled the watering can from the outside spigot (no key box magnetized to the faucet) and watered some of the bushes and the impatiens. At the country club, they had always left the key to the pool house on top of the door.

PJ sidled up to the front door, ran her hand over the frame.

Nothing.

She lifted the welcome mat.

Nope.

She watered the geraniums in the frogs, picked out a couple weedy shoots, lifted and looked under one of the planters. Nothing but an outline of froggy.

A zippy red compact drove by. The driver waved, and PJ waved back with her watering can. Even criminals were friendly in Minnesota.

She moved to the next planter. When she lifted it, she heard something rattle inside, down deep in the froggy’s throat.

Oh, she was so good at this. Or maybe that wasn’t something she should be proud of?

PJ checked over her shoulder. Yes, she knew it made her look slightly guilty, but it could also come in handy if someone, say Boone or one of his henchmen, happened to be driving down the street.

Street was clear.

She entered Ernie’s home.

A dead guy’s house. Inside, stale air and the odor of rotting milk made her pause, and she tasted her heartbeat in her mouth. Closing the door behind her, she allowed her eyes to adjust and, for a moment, froze.

The place had been destroyed. Just from her vantage point looking into the family room, she could recognize Angry Search in the overturned cushions on the sofa, the pictures torn from the wall, the books strewn on the floor, a crushed trout ripped from its mount.

The mail had been scattered on the entry floor
 
—newspapers, magazines, letters. She crouched and sifted through it:
AARP
, offers for credit cards, a history magazine. She accidentally stepped on a bubble envelope and heard it crunch. She winced and picked it up. Priority mail, with a green certified mail sticker.

PJ stared at the signature, the date.

Ernie had died sometime after getting his mail. After signing for it.

Strange that he hadn’t opened it.

She put the mailer on the buffet table. Turning right, down the hall, she saw that the first bedroom had been dismantled
 
—overturned mattress, a shattered mirror. Yeah, that made sense.

The next room down made her pause. A boy’s bedroom, also destroyed. Even the wooden airplane that she guessed hung over the bed had been trampled into little balsa wood splinters. Hardy Boys books littered the floor, along with a torn
Men in Black
movie poster.

The room looked like it hadn’t been updated since the mid
nineties. Her gaze lingered on a thick oil portrait of Ernie, Tucker, and Mrs. Hoffman. Tucker looked about ten, his grin betraying buck teeth PJ knew were later accessorized into submission. Ernie beamed, his hand on his only son’s shoulder. PJ recalled Denise’s words:
“You’d think a widower in his twilight years would want to spend time with his son and grandchildren
.
”

The next door led to the office. Curls of dust rimmed the tracings where the computer had sat, conspicuously absent next to the lonely monitor on Ernie’s desk. She ran her finger along the bookshelf, taking in the volumes and volumes of books on ancient coins. She picked one up and was momentarily caught by a picture of a coin struck during the time of Constantine the Great, from the fourth century AD. She didn’t even know there’d been a Great Constantine (although maybe Boris did). More importantly, what might such a coin be worth today?

A dusty guitar leaned on a stand in the corner, and through her mind swept the vague recollection of Mr. Hoffman playing “Elvira” during a talent night at the school. She plucked a string as she crouched next to it, paging through a photo album on the floor. In it she recognized a picture of Ernie jauntily dressed in shorts and hiking boots, posed in front of the ancient Parthenon in Athens. Another showed him at an archaeological dig in what looked like Italy.

She stood for a long time, looking at the blank monitor. She’d had a computer once, had spent long hours surfing the Net late into the night with a laptop on a pillow in her bed. Leaving the office, she found Hoffman’s bedroom across the hall. She stood at the threshold, an invisible hand pressing against her chest. The covers had been torn from the bed, a
puddle of brown cotton on the floor. Only the fitted sheet and the dust ruffle remained. A pile of books lay upended, tossed to the floor from his bedside stand. On the other side of the bed, a high school picture of his wife sat untarnished.

PJ tiptoed over the debris and sat down on the side of the bed. Dusty sunlight striped the green carpet through the venetian blinds, and a plant in the corner begged for water with its brown and curling leaves.

She should go.

But first . . . she fell to her knees and lifted the edge of the dust ruffle. And discovered that Ernie Hoffman and she had had one thing in common
 
—they both kept their late-night surfing laptops under their beds.

More proof that it wasn’t the cops who’d ransacked the house
 
—since they’d taken Ernie’s desktop, they would have also confiscated his laptop if they’d found it. But clearly whoever had tossed the place wasn’t interested in Ernie’s laptop. Which begged the question
 
—what were they looking for?

She pulled the computer out and sat on the bed, booting it up.

For two months right after she started going to New Life Church and dating Matthew, the surfer-turned-pastor, she’d taken a job retrieving files from damaged computers. Yes, she used a software program provided by the owner and mostly just pushed Okay or Cancel. Still, she learned a few things, like how to search for files on a computer and access recently visited Web sites.

Ernie had file upon file of pictures, data, descriptions, and articles about coins, mostly centered around the time of Nero. PJ remembered Nero. Like Buckam, he accused some perfectly
innocent people of setting fire to something. In Nero’s case, it had been Rome. She didn’t particularly like Nero.

Thankfully Ernie still had his settings stored and she easily hooked up to his wireless connection. Going to his history file, she accessed his last few Web sites, starting at his account on Auction.com. The cookies still had him signed in under the name Antionias. Interesting. According to the site, his last auction had been of a Nero coin cast in AD 60.

She was googling that coin when a car door slammed outside.

PJ closed the laptop and hit her knees, peering over the sash just in time to see Boone standing in front of the lawn truck. He turned and stared at the house as if it might have come alive.

She tucked the computer under her arm, then keeping low, scampered through the house.

Surely there was a back door. Or a basement?

Or . . . the garage! From the kitchen, PJ spotted Boone striding by the picture window. She ducked under the counter and crawled, keeping her head down, toward what she prayed was the garage door and eased it open. Darkness and the pungency of oil, grass clippings, and cement sucked her into the muggy shadows.