Smoke in Mirrors (15 page)

“A man his age ought to think twice about running. Hard on the knees.”

“His knees don’t seem to be giving him any trouble.”

“Knees are tricky. You never know when they’ll go out on you.” Thomas dropped the small binoculars into the pocket of his jacket. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

She glanced at him with a startled frown. “Where are you going?”

“Long as I’m in the neighborhood and the neighbor in question isn’t around, I thought I’d seize the moment.”

“To do what?”

“Check out his house.”

“What? You’re going to break in?” Her voice rose on the last two words. “Are you crazy? What if Alex returns unexpectedly? He could have you arrested.”

“He just left for a run. He’ll probably be gone at least half an hour. Maybe longer. I’ll only be inside for a few minutes.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Don’t watch, if it bothers you.” He started off through the trees.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” She hurried after him. “If you insist on doing this, I’m going in with you.”

He heard her muffled footsteps on the damp ground and came to a halt, turning to confront her.

“No,” he said.

“You can’t stop me, Thomas.” She halted. “We’re partners, remember?”

The fierce stubbornness in her voice warned him that he wasn’t going to be able to keep her from following him. He could always come back later when she wasn’t around.

“All right, forget it. It’s a bad idea, like you said.” He reached for her arm. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“I know what you’re thinking.” She stepped hastily out of reach, spun around on her heel and started toward the cabin. “You plan to come back some other time and do your little breaking-and-entering routine without me, don’t you?”

“Damn it, Leonora, wait.” He caught up with her. “I agree with you. This is too risky.”

“But that won’t stop you, will it?”

He thought about picking her up and putting her over his shoulder. Somehow he didn’t think she’d go along with that plan.

What the hell was a man supposed to do with a woman like this? He looked around. The oncoming night and the fog provided excellent cover. Chances were they were safe enough for the moment. If they went in and got out fast they should be okay.

“All right,” he said. “We’re here. Might as well do it.”

She surveyed the windows. “How do we get inside?”

He reached inside his jacket, removed the small tool
kit he carried on his belt and opened it. He selected two of the gleaming picks.

“With these,” he said. “Now you watch out for Rhodes.”

“Good grief. You planned this, didn’t you?”

“I never do anything without a plan. I’m sort of obsessive-compulsive that way.”

He mounted the three steps to the back door and went to work.

It took less than thirty seconds to pop the lock.

“Wow,” Leonora whispered. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“I’m into remodeling, remember? You install and repair enough locks over the years, you learn how they work.”

He pulled on his gloves and opened the door cautiously. He found himself gazing into a small room. A trash can loomed in the shadows. A pair of dirty boots sat on the floor. The shelves that climbed one wall held the usual assortment of odds and ends you expected to see in a storage room: A flashlight. Some batteries. A garden hose. Kitchen supplies.

A bag of golf clubs stood propped in the corner.

Behind him Leonora came to stand in the doorway. She glanced back over her shoulder and then followed him into the storage room.

“Don’t touch anything,” he ordered.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got gloves on, too, see?” She held up one sheathed hand.

“We don’t want to disturb anything. No sense making him suspicious.”

He eased the door closed with a gloved hand and went past her into a narrow hall that connected the bath and bedroom to the front room and kitchen. He halted to give his eyes time to adjust to the gloom.

“Watch your step,” he said. “It really is dark in here with those shades down.”

“What are we looking for?”

“How should I know?” He went down the hall toward the bedroom. “I’ve never done this before.”

“But it was your idea. I thought you had a clear objective.”

He ignored that to open a closet. An array of small vials and bottles were displayed on the shelves.

“Take a look at this,” he said.

She came to stand beside him. “The ingredients of his nutritional supplement, probably.”

He picked up one of the bottles. “Think he’d miss any?”

“Are you serious?” she asked sharply.

“I’ll just take a little pinch from a couple of the bottles. Rhodes will never notice. Think of it as a random sample. Consumer quality-control testing.”

“What are you going to put your samples into?”

He went back into the small storage room and helped himself to some plastic bags. “These should do the trick.”

He opened three of the little vials and dumped a tiny amount of the contents of each into three bags. He sealed the bags and closed the cupboard.

“Let’s see what else we can find.” He led the way into the bedroom.

The small room looked surprisingly normal. A wooden dresser, bed and chair constituted the extent of the furnishings.

He opened the closet door and confronted a sea of black. An array of black shirts and black trousers and jeans hung on the rod. Several pairs of black boots and black loafers were neatly lined up on the floor. A cluster of black-on-black ties were draped over a tie rack.

“You notice there’s a real touch of the theatrical about
this guy?” he said. “The phony yellow eyes, the black clothes. It’s like Rhodes is acting a part. Kind of surprised to see he doesn’t have any mirrors over the bed.”

“Please.” She gave him an enigmatic glance. “Are you so biased against Alex because he dated Meredith for a while after you split with her?”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

It was the truth, as far as it went. But not the full story.

He had to admit that Alex Rhodes hadn’t even been on his radar screen until this afternoon when he had stood on the sidewalk outside of Pitney’s Hardware & Plumbing Supply watching the guy escort Leonora into the coffeehouse. At that point a deep and abiding distrust of the man had flashed through him.

But he didn’t think Leonora would understand. Hell, he wasn’t sure he understood his reaction himself, although he had a sneaking suspicion that he was way too old and much too jaded for this kind of elemental, hormone-driven stuff.

He closed the closet and opened the nightstand. “Well, now, what do you know?”

She looked at him across the width of the bed. “What’s in there?”

“A large, industrial-size box of condoms. Which suggests that Rhodes may indeed be sleeping with some of his clients.”

Judging from the fact that the box was half empty it was also a good bet that Rhodes’s sex life was a lot more interesting than his own had been of late. But that was probably not a very professional thought for an amateur detective to be thinking.

Leonora came to stand beside him. “My goodness. He seems to have gone through quite a few of them. Maybe it’s all that running.”

He slammed the drawer shut. “I told you, running is bad for the knees.”

“I know, but he probably doesn’t use his knees for this sort of thing.”

“If that’s true, the man lacks imagination.”

He opened a dresser and saw stacks of black T-shirts and black briefs. He closed the drawer and opened the next one.

Black socks.

“You know, it would be nice to turn up some banking or financial records but that’s probably not real likely.” He closed the last drawer and stood looking around the room. “Rhodes strikes me as the cautious type. Doubt if he’d leave anything useful lying around.”

“Now what?”

“You take the bathroom. Check for prescriptions or anything that looks interesting.” He went out into the hall. “I’ll do the front room.”

“Right.” She disappeared around the corner.

He wandered into the shadowed living room. It appeared unremarkable at first glance. The sofa was covered in a subdued print. There was a circular braided rug on the floor. A laptop sat, closed, on a desk.

He looked longingly at the computer, but he didn’t dare swipe it and, unlike Deke, he didn’t have the skills to get past whatever personal security Rhodes used.

He turned his attention to the long, low table positioned on the rug instead.

There was something odd about it.

He went closer and saw that it was draped in black velvet. He could see that there was an object under the velvet.

The whisper of unease that drifted through him was as inexplicable and primordial as the feeling of sexual possessiveness he had experienced when he walked into the coffeehouse and found Rhodes trying to charm Leonora. Not quite civilized.

“Nothing unusual in the bathroom,” Leonora said behind him. “Find anything out here?”

“Maybe.”

“Black velvet?” She came quickly forward to join him. “
Without
a picture of Elvis painted on it. This doesn’t look good, does it?”

“Looks damn weird, is how it looks.”

He reached down, grasped a fistful of black velvet and lifted it away from the table.

A circular mirror, its reflective surface darkened with age and surrounded by an elaborately worked and heavily tarnished metal frame, glittered in the shadows.

The mirror was not a single, flat plate. It was composed, instead, of what appeared at first glance to be several concentric circles of glass bubbles. Each bubble produced a tiny, slightly distorted, independent reflection. The result was a myriad of miniature fun-house images that had a disturbing effect on the eye.

“Uh oh,” Leonora said. “This is definitely strange.”

“Couldn’t have put it more pithily, myself. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I have—in one of the books in the library at Mirror House.”

She leaned down to take a closer look. There was just enough light left in the room to reveal a small image of her face reflected in each of the bubbles. Some of the reflections made her look larger. Others made her look minuscule. An eerie feeling swept through him. It was as if there were a hundred little Leonoras trapped inside the bubbles.

Without thinking, he reached out and pulled her upright and away from the mirror so that the distorted reflections disappeared.

She was startled by his sudden movement but she did not resist.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, lying through his teeth. “I just want to check something out.” He reached down to grasp the edge of the mirror and lifted it partway off the table. It was surprisingly heavy.

He looked at the faded number written on the back.

“It’s from the Mirror House collection. There’s an old inventory number on the reverse.” He lowered the looking glass back down onto the table. “Rhodes must have stolen it.”

Leonora watched him arrange the black velvet cloth over the mirror and table.

“Each one of those little bubbles is a tiny convex or concave mirror,” she said. “I’m no expert, but I’ve been doing a lot of heavy research lately. My guess is that it dates from the early nineteenth century. According to what I’ve read, the technology required to produce that kind of unusual mirror plate wasn’t widely available until the end of the eighteenth century. I suspect it’s very valuable.”

“Probably.” He contemplated the black velvet that covered the mirror. “The question is, why did Rhodes take it and what the hell is he doing with it?”

Leonora gave a small shudder. “Playing games with his clients?”

He could feel the hair stirring on the nape of his neck. Adrenaline pumped through him. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

“Come on.” He grasped Leonora’s arm and hauled her toward the back door. “We’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here.”

She offered no protest. In fact, judging by her willingness to move quickly, he got the impression that she was as eager to leave as he was.

He heard the footsteps on the front porch just as he opened the back door.

Rhodes was back from his run.

He sensed rather than saw the flutter of fear that went through Leonora. He bundled her through the open door and motioned her to head for the fog-bound trees. She whirled and disappeared quickly, almost instantly, into the fog.

Now you see her, now you don’t.

He suddenly understood why Rhodes had returned unexpectedly early from his run. The fog had grown much heavier while he and Leonora had been inside the cabin. When the last of the light vanished it would be impossible to see your hand in front of your face out here.

Rhodes’s keys jangled in the lock.

Thomas heard the front door open just as he carefully shut the back door.

Bending low he made for the cover of fog and trees.

“Over here,” Leonora whispered.

He saw movement in the shadows off to his left, reached out, groped and caught her hand. Together they plunged deeper into the damp mist. Darkness closed in around them, offering safety and a new kind of danger.

A short distance into the woods it became almost impossible to see where they were going. Getting lost or brained by a long hanging branch was not on his agenda. There were other risks inherent in this activity. In the damp, chilly muck they could wander around for hours and fall prey to hypothermia.

He drew Leonora to a halt. “Hold on. I need to get my bearings. We don’t want to get too far from the cabin. It’s our only solid reference point in this pea soup.”

At that moment a dim glow appeared in the mist behind them.

“Thank you for turning on the porch light, Rhodes,” he said softly. “Just what we needed.”

He tightened his grip on Leonora’s hand and moved toward the right. He kept the dim glow of the porch light at his shoulder as they made their way through the trees. The result was a path that described an arc with the cottage at its center.

A few minutes later they emerged onto the graveled drive that led to the road.

“Okay,” he said. “Gravel has a nice crunch to it. Sort of like breakfast cereal. As long as we’re crunching we’re headed in the right direction.”