Something Missing (20 page)

As the answering machine beeped, indicating the end of the recording, Martin wasted no time in moving to the front of the house. Standing beside the living room window, he peeked through drawn curtains onto the enclosed porch. Sure enough, a long tubular package was resting against the swing, wrapped in colorful paper.

Standing there, staring at this unexpected surprise, Martin felt the same urge that he had first sensed inside the Claytons’ coat closet return. It was the feeling of opportunity, of obligation.

The Ashleys owned a gourmet catering service in their hometown of Southington and kept some of the longest hours of any of Martin’s clients, rising before five each morning (Martin always checked the setting on a client’s alarm clock in order to determine the time that they awoke) and arriving home well after seven each evening. This rigorous schedule, combined with the success of their business, had made the Ashleys excellent clients.

Three months ago, Daniel Ashley had attended a conference
for the American Bakery Association in Houston, Texas, leaving his wife at home for almost a week. During that time, Justine Ashley, a petite, no-nonsense spitfire of a woman, had transformed their home into Surprise Party Central (actually sticking a Post-it to the dining room doors with this very title). Taking advantage of his absence, Justine Ashley began planning for her husband’s fortieth birthday party in late October. During the week a guest list was created, invitations ordered, favors purchased and assembled, and bands interviewed.

Evidence of her plans littered the dining room, kitchen, and office. Copious notes on the various bands that she had interviewed were kept on a clipboard that migrated throughout the house during the week, with a large red circle eventually drawn around a band named “The Degenerates.” Clay pots containing miniature putting greens, complete with turf grass and tiny flags and cups (presumably the party favors) were scattered about a makeshift assembly line on the dining room table, eventually disappearing at the end of the week, presumably to the home of a friend or relative for safekeeping. The guest list, tacked to a corkboard above the kitchen sink, expanded and shrank until it finally numbered 156 invitees. Most important, Martin had seen the invitation proofs indicating the date, time, and location of the party, five days from today, on Saturday, October 27, at the Water’s Edge Resort in Westbrook, Connecticut. Martin had marked the day on his calendar as well, knowing that Justine Ashley had also planned a surprise golfing and fishing trip to Marco Island in Florida immediately following the party, allowing him unrestricted access to his clients’ home for just under a week.

But somehow a woman named Laura, presumably a friend of the couple, had marked the date incorrectly in her calendar and thought that the party had already taken place. If Daniel Ashley were to come home and find the gift on his front porch
or listen to the message on the answering machine, all of his wife’s work would be ruined.

Martin found himself with an unexpected choice: attempt to help Justine Ashley while risking his anonymity, or ignore the situation and allow the surprise to potentially be ruined.

Had Martin not seen the single red rose standing in a thin crystal vase (one that he had inventoried long ago) on the Claytons’ dining room table earlier that morning, during his scheduled visit to their home, he might not have felt compelled to act on Justine Ashley’s behalf. But the flower had been there, along with a card that read:

No large-scale acquisition had ever brought Martin more joy than the image of that flower and the words on the card, scrawled in the hand of a man who loved his wife but had too often forgotten to tell her. His apparent success with the Claytons had brought Martin a remarkable feeling of attachment and goodwill for the couple, and he now felt compelled to come to the aid of Justine Ashley and her cause for the same reason.

In fact, as Martin considered helping his client, he also began to wonder if he hadn’t been placed in the Ashley home at that particular moment by fate, in order to hear the answering machine message and take action. Even before Laura’s message, Martin had begun to speculate as to whether his career choice had actually been meant to be a vehicle to a higher calling. During visits to the Archambauts and Owens earlier that morning, he had begun envisioning himself as an agent for good, entering his clients’ homes in order to make a living, but perhaps to improve their lives as well.

Perhaps Martin had been meant to help his clients all along.

The logical and calculated side of Martin dismissed this notion immediately, and not surprisingly. In the more than sixteen years that he had been in this business, Martin had never entertained any such thoughts. His methodical approach to business had earned him his success, and he was well aware of that fact. Involving himself unnecessarily in the lives of his clients would have been the last thing he might consider. But that rose, and those two simple sentences written on a card from husband to wife, had begun to make him wonder.

And now he wondered if he was somehow meant to help the Ashleys as well.

Without much fanfare, Martin decided that he would try. The only question was how much action he dare risk.

The first decision that Martin made, while still standing in the living room and staring at the gift through the window, was not to allow anything he might do to jeopardize the Ashleys as clients. Helping the couple made sense to him only if it did not place his relationship with them at risk. Whatever he might choose to do, it had to be done without uncovering his identity or his reason for being inside their home.

Next he looked at his watch. 12:35. The Ashleys wouldn’t be home until at least 7:00, so he had more than enough time to act. It would mean eliminating scheduled visits to the Sullivans and the Pearls, but those visits could be made up later. This emergency took precedence.

Martin moved to the Ashleys’ kitchen and sat down at the butcher-block table, concealed by drawn shades and a dirty window, and began running through his options. The simplest solution would be to erase the message from the machine and confiscate the gift. This would eliminate the immediate danger to Justine Ashley’s surprise, but doing so would also leave evidence of his presence in the Ashley home. When Laura and the Ashleys spoke (later that night in all likelihood), the gift and
phone call would certainly come up in conversation, and it would quickly become apparent that someone had been in the home.

Even if Martin chose to forsake the Ashleys as clients in favor of protecting Justine Ashley’s hard work, erasing the message and confiscating the gift failed to eliminate the danger to the surprise entirely. According to her message, Laura was planning to call later that evening, and if Daniel Ashley answered the phone, the surprise would surely be ruined, even if the message and gift had been eliminated.

Martin saw his options as very limited.

Option #1 was to eliminate the evidence (the message on the machine and the gift) but also to alert Laura to her error, so that she would not call about the party later that evening. He would have to do this without endangering his anonymity, which meant that even if he managed to find and contact the woman, he would have to inform her of the error in a way that would keep his identity a secret and explain how he knew of her error in the first place.

Not an easy task in Martin’s immediate estimation.

After some thought, he briefly considered calling Laura (provided that he could find her phone number), posing as the Water’s Edge banquet manager. He would tell her that he was calling to confirm her meal choice for Saturday night, claiming that their computer had crashed and the meal choices for the Ashleys’ guests had been lost. Martin had seen the invitations (and had even photographed one), and he knew that Justine Ashley had offered her guests three different meal choices. He could even go back to the digital record to determine which three options were available, if necessary. Upon receiving the call, Laura would be alerted to the actual date of the party and would undoubtedly call Justine Ashley and admit to her error, giving Justine enough time to get home and eliminate the message and gift before Daniel found either.

This idea initially appealed to Martin, but in the end he decided that it would not work. A phone call from a banquet manager to a guest would be highly unorthodox and suspicious (and questions as to how the banquet manager acquired Laura’s phone number would inevitably arise), but more important, Justine Ashley was likely to see or speak to the banquet manager again before or at the party. Grateful to him for averting disaster, she would likely thank him for the phone call to Laura, explaining how his call had unwittingly preserved the surprise. The banquet manager would deny making the phone call, and Martin would be forced to cancel the Ashleys as clients, since questions as to who made the phone call would necessarily follow.

It was in the midst of this train of thought that the alarm on Martin’s watch began to vibrate, signaling the prescribed end to his visit. Only once before had Martin been inside a client’s home for longer than he allowed, and that was during his recent Clayton visitation. Though the vibration of the alarm initially sent a shot of panic through his system, Martin focused on his success in the Claytons’ home and forced himself to return to the task at hand.

Option #2 was to alert Justine Ashley to the phone message and gift and have her intercept both before her husband could. Again, this would have to be done without exposing his identity to the client and without telling her how he knew about Laura’s error. While this option also seemed impossible, Martin developed a plan in which he would call Justine Ashley at work, claiming to be a UPS driver who was attempting to drop off a gift at the home. He would explain that the screen door to the porch was locked and would ask where he should leave the brightly colored gift. Alerted to the presence of a gift at the home a week before the party, Justine Ashley might then find a reason to go home ahead of her husband, in order to determine why a gift had arrived so early. She would then hear the message
on the answering machine and be able to eliminate the evidence before her husband arrived home.

He eventually dismissed this plan as well because of the unlikelihood that a UPS driver would know the work number of a homeowner on his route. This too would appear suspicious. There was also no guarantee that Justine Ashley would come home upon receiving the phone call. She might just assume that the gift was from an out-of-state relative who had no plans to attend the party but routinely sent a gift every year. There was also no guarantee that Justine Ashley would check the messages on her machine upon arriving home, and the fact that Laura had not sent the gift by UPS might eventually come up as well.

This train of thought led Martin to consider creating a situation that would force Justine Ashley home. A broken water main, a rock thrown through the front picture window, or an electrical problem were all possibilities that Martin considered but eventually dismissed, finding no way to guarantee that Justine Ashley and not her husband would respond to the problem.

It was at about this time that Martin developed his contingency plan. More than an hour had passed at the table, and without a planned course of action, he had begun to grow despondent. Though he still felt as though he had heard Laura’s message for a reason and had been meant to help his client, he was beginning to wonder if he was clever enough to arrive at a solution to the problem with which he had been presented. Perhaps he simply wasn’t up to the task, or maybe there was no viable solution. The self-confidence that his success with the Claytons had bred began to wane, and it was amid this growing sense of dread that the pieces of the contingency plan suddenly fell into place.

If no other plan was formulated, Martin decided, he would move the gift underneath a table beside the porch swing, out of sight from anyone who wasn’t looking for it. He would erase the
message from the answering machine and then trip the circuit breakers in the house, temporarily knocking out the electricity in order to provide the appearance of a local power outage. When he reset the breakers, electricity would be restored, but the digital clocks in the house would begin blinking their preset 12:00 starting point, providing visual evidence of the outage. Martin realized that digital answering machines such as the one the Ashleys owned would not typically lose a recording in the event of a power loss, but he reasoned that the discovery of a missing message combined with the appearance of a temporary power outage would probably lead a homeowner to assume that the two were somehow related, thus dispelling any question or fear that an intruder had erased the message.

Martin liked the plan. He thought it might work. He estimated its probability of success at somewhere near 60 percent. With the incriminating evidence eliminated to a degree, it would all come down to Laura’s phone call. If Justine Ashley answered the phone when she called that evening, disaster would likely be averted. But if Daniel Ashley decided to pick up the phone first, or if the couple went out to dinner after work (a not uncommon event), allowing Laura enough time to leave another message on the machine, the surprise would surely be ruined. Martin set the probability for success at 60 percent based upon his belief that women were more likely than men to pick up the phone, and that Laura was more likely to be a friend to Justine Ashley than to her husband. Thanks to the advent of caller ID, Martin found that ringing telephones were often passed to the intended recipient before anyone answered them. Based upon these assumptions, he gave the plan a good chance for success, perhaps as high as 70 percent if the Ashleys came straight home after work.

Not bad for a contingency plan.

Half an hour after he had finalized the details, Martin was ready to make this his primary plan as well. It was almost two o’clock and he was no closer to finding a better solution than when he first sat down at the kitchen table. He had already spent more time in the Ashleys’ home than at any other client’s in history and though he was certain that the Ashleys would not be home for another four hours or more, he was becoming nervous just the same.