Chapter Six
That afternoon I waited in the cheese factory parking lot for Emily to leave work. I had the top up on the Mustang to keep the sun off the back of my neck, and for once there was enough of a breeze from the coast that the smell of the dairy was blown towards the coast mountain range. I’d parked three rows away from Emily’s car and was watching the front door of the building in my rear-view mirror.
Emily came out of the building a few minutes after I parked. She had on a white blouse over jeans and black low-heel pumps. Her hair was pulled back by a hair band, and she wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses with round lenses like the ones she’d had on in the picture Eric gave me. She carried a brown leather purse and walked like someone having a pleasant afternoon. I watched her to see if she looked over her shoulder as she walked, or checked for someone hiding between cars, or fumbled with her car keys when she got to her Buick. She seemed unafraid of the world. She did a little hair toss as she unlocked the car, then she got behind the wheel, ran the windows down, and I heard the sound of country and western music coming from her car radio. She rocked her head slightly from side to side, keeping time with the beat of the music. Then she put the car in drive, pulled onto the access road that led to Highway 101, and headed south towards her house.
I followed Emily as I had before. She didn’t seem distracted when she drove. She obeyed the traffic lights, did the speed limit, and used her turn signals. I turned the corner onto Stillwater Avenue as she pulled into her driveway. She exited her car as I approached, and she went into her front door at about the same time that I parked at the curb across the street from her house.
I got out of my car and walked up the driveway to her house. I was unarmed and wearing a faded red shirt over a pair of jeans and running shoes. I rang the doorbell and heard all hell break loose inside the house as the Doberman responded to the sound of the doorbell. Eventually Emily came to the door and opened it as far as the door chain would allow. The dog barked furiously as it tried to force its head through the narrow opening.
“What do you want?” she said loudly.
“I’m Delorean,” I said. “Eric Fullmeyer told you about me. I’d like to talk to you.”
“How do I know you’re who you say you are?” she asked.
“If it would be easier for you, I can come back with Eric tomorrow. I don’t blame you for being nervous.”
She thought about it for a second. “You can come in, but if you try anything I’ll turn the dog loose on you.”
“Okay.”
She reached up with one hand, popped the chain off the door, then wrapped both hands around the dog’s collar and wrestled the dog towards the sofa. The animal’s coat shone black and gold as it writhed against the force she applied to its collar. Once she and the dog were on the far side of the room, I followed her inside, stood by the door, and closed the front door behind me.
The front room of the house had hardwood floors and an arched entryway leading to a hallway that showed a single bedroom off to the left, a bathroom to the right, and a kitchen at the rear. Green pastel paint on the walls. Flat screen television on a simple teak stand in the corner. The furniture was inexpensive but looked comfortable. The sofa was covered in brown leatherette. An Adirondack chair with a bright orange seat cushion faced the sofa. I thought about sitting down but wanted to be standing in case the dog got loose. If I moved fast enough I might be able to get at least part way out the door before I felt the dog’s teeth sink into my leg.
“So you’re the guy that Eric said was going to check on me?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“You don’t look like a cop. You look like Casey Affleck. Bigger muscles, though.”
“I’m not a cop. I’ve dealt with bad people before, and Eric asked me to take a look. He wanted me to keep an eye on you for a while to see if anything seems wrong.”
“You got an ice cream cone from me the other day, right? You said you live in Oceanside. Was that a lie?”
“No. I really do live in Oceanside.”
“Why didn’t you introduce yourself to me?”
“I didn’t want to interfere until I’d seen what was going on around you, whether anyone was watching you or following you.”
“And what do you think?” she asked.
“I haven’t searched your house, but I haven’t seen anything obviously wrong so far.”
The dog continued to bark. It was pulling hard against Emily’s grip as it tried to get at me. I was concerned that the collar was choking off the dog’s windpipe.
“Do you know much about dogs?” I asked.
“I know this one is loud when strangers are around and would kill anyone who bothers me.”
“I agree. Why don’t I come by the creamery tomorrow and talk to you at lunchtime? There’ll be plenty of witnesses around if I make you nervous. I can bring Eric with me.”
She looked at me hard for a few seconds, then stood and dragged the dog by its collar across the hardwood floor into the kitchen. She closed the kitchen door quickly, and then came back into the front room. I could hear the dog pawing at the door as it tried to find a way through the wood.
“Why don’t we sit on the porch?” she said. “It’ll be quieter out there.”
“Sure.”
I followed her out the front door onto the small concrete porch. She sat down and stretched her legs out in front of her on the steps. I sat down beside her, cross-legged. At the far end of the block, a man wearing cutoff jeans and an unbuttoned grey dress shirt pulled the cord on a lawnmower. The engine sputtered to life and he began cutting his grass.
“My legs get sore standing in the ice cream line all day,” she said.
“I believe it.”
“How do you know Eric? Are you in the witness protection program, too?”
“No, I’m not in the program. If you asked Eric, he’d probably tell you that my personality makes me a bad fit for all the structure you have to live with.”
“Like what?”
“I have problems with being told what to do. Sometimes I’m impulsive. When I’m threatened I don’t take it well. Things like that.”
“Then why did he choose you to give a second opinion about my situation?”
“I’m an intelligent person, Emily. I just don’t like following rules. Eric also knows that I’ll do literally anything to protect someone I say I’ll protect, including you.”
“That’s pretty strong language, considering that we just met.”
“When I say I’ll do something, I’ll do it.”
“You really mean it, don’t you?”
I stared at her.
She looked down. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. You have a right to ask. So now I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay.”
“When did you feel like you were being watched or followed?”
“It started about a month ago. I’d be at work, or in the grocery store, or even here at home and I’d feel like someone was watching me.”
“And you told Eric about it?”
“I did. He had someone watch my house for a few days. Then he had one of his people go through the house looking for hidden cameras, had someone come to work with me several times to see if they could see anything, followed me when I was driving in my car, but they didn’t find anything.”
“Do you still feel like there’s someone watching you?”
“The last few days I haven’t felt anything at all. I have the dog now, and that helps. But I just feel like whoever was watching me has stopped. Maybe they’re taking a break or they moved on. I kind of feel like a weight has been lifted off of me. It’s weird.”
“Eric told me that he offered to move you to a new location but you refused. You don’t have a glamorous job. Why didn’t you just move if you were afraid?”
“I gave up everything I had to get what little I ha
ve here. I’ll be damned if I’ll give that up, too. They’ll have to drag me out of here.”
“Good to know. Eric said that you were considering leaving the witness protection program because you felt like he wasn’t taking you seriously.”
“He told me several times that his people said that there was no problem, and he was starting to treat me like a mental patient. He’s a nice man, but I’m damned if I’ll be patronized by him.”
The lawnmower down the street sputtered to a stop. The man in the cutoffs and dress shirt took the bag off the mower and carried it over to a plastic trash can in the driveway.
“Could you be more specific about where you were when you did feel like you were being watched?”
“Sometimes when crowds of people would be at the visitor center. I’d feel like I was being stared at, but I could never figure out who was doing the staring. Or when I was in my car. I’d feel like I was being followed when I was out running errands.”
“Do you think it could be a co-worker?”
“I don’t think so. I felt that creepy feeling occasionally at work, and then sometimes days would pass with nothing. Then it would happen again. But nobody at work ever bothered me. People here are friendly enough, but they leave you alone.”
“Any boyfriends in the picture?”
“No. I’ve kept to myself since I’ve been here.”
“Nobody’s asked you out in six months? That’s hard to believe.”
“I went on a few dates with guys I met through a dating site, but they just weren’t the right type for me, so I canceled my membership. I get chatted up occasionally at work by customers, at the grocery store, you know how it is. I’ve already got a cheap wedding ring that I wear when I remember to, but the ring only stops the nice ones. It doesn’t even slow the losers down.”
“Have any of them taken it badly when you told them you weren’t interested?”
“Not enough that I was scared by it. Usually when I tell someone that I’m married to a patrolman and I have three kids, they can’t get away fast enough.”
I laughed.
“Would that scare you, too?” she asked.
“The kids or the husband?”
“Either.”
“Are the kids still in diapers? I hate the smell of diapers.”
Then it was her turn to laugh.
“Eric said you could be funny sometimes,” she said. “Usually when you should be scared.”
“Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone.”
She nodded.
“So you said that you felt like you were being watched while you were inside your house?” I asked.
“Sometimes. It felt like someone was looking over my shoulder, but whenever I’d turn around there was no one there.”
“Any particular room more than others?”
“I guess I felt it the most in the bedroom. I’d gotten to the point that I didn’t want to undress in there any more. I keep the blinds closed, but I started taking my clothes with me into the bathroom to change anyway.”
“But you didn’t feel like you were being watched in the bathroom?”
“If you saw my bathroom, you’d understand. It’s about the size of a phone booth. I guess I could tell myself that there was no way anyone else could be hiding in there or watching me.”
“Have you had that uncomfortable feeling since Eric had someone check inside for cameras?”
“No. Like I said, it’s gotten better. Especially with having the dog. She has such a quick temper that I just sleep better at night knowing she’s there.”
“Justifiably,” I said. “Let’s do this. Why don’t you take your dog down to the vacant lot and throw the ball for her? I’ll look around your house for a few minutes. Maybe I won’t find anything either, but at least I can check your closets, look under the bed, see if anything seems odd. Right?”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”
The lawnmower down the block sputtered back to life. I went out to the Mustang and waited in the car while Emily went inside to get her dog. Once they’d walked down the sidewalk to the empty lot, I crossed the street and went inside.
I knew that I didn’t have a lot of time, so I started in her bedroom. Fortunately, the room was so small that there wasn’t much to search. There was a yellow four-drawer bureau against the south wall with a hairbrush and an assortment of earrings, bracelets, a simple wedding ring, and a Rolex women’s watch on top. Padded dog bed on the floor beside the queen-sized bed. Nightstand with a small digital clock and a brass lamp with a canvas lampshade. The bed didn’t have a headboard or footboard, just a plaid black and red bedspread over a mattress and box spring. Two big pillows at the head of the bed. I looked under the bed and saw a thin layer of undisturbed dust. I checked the ceiling vent by standing on the mattress in my stocking feet and using a dime as a screwdriver to unscrew the vent cover. Nothing. I slid the drawers out of the dresser and looked for anything unusual built into the frame of the dresser. Nothing. I knew that Fullmeyer’s people had already checked everything, but I looked for pinhole cameras in the coat hooks on the wall, the pull handles on the dresser, the clock on the night stand. I pulled out all the drawers, looked for anything unusual, and put the drawers back. After twenty minutes I gave up. There was a window on the east wall that faced onto the driveway, but she’d covered the window with louvered wooden blinds facing out and down. The louvered blinds were in closed and locked position. Hard to imagine how anyone could see inside past those. Then I moved on to the bathroom. Emily was right. The bathroom was ridiculously small, with yellow and black tile on the walls and white and black checked tile on the floor. I unscrewed the ceiling vent using a dime and checked for a camera inside, and then checked everything else in the bathroom: the shower drapes, the shampoo rack, the toilet. Nothing.
I left the house through the back door in the kitchen. The dog food bowl and water bowl were on the back porch, which served as a useful reminder to unwanted visitors that there was a dog inside. I didn’t see any evidence of the back door or the kitchen window being jimmied from the outside. I walked around the perimeter of the house looking for flattened grass or evidence of the house being tampered with. There were places outside her bedroom window where the grass might or might not have been stepped on recently. I tried to peek in around the blinds in her bedroom window, but it wasn’t possible to see inside from either a low or high angle. I went through the gate that separated the back yard from the driveway, closed it behind me, went around to the front of the house, and stepped up onto the front porch. The front door lock didn’t have any fresh scratches on the lock or on the strike plate attached to the door frame, but it was a very old lock and there was no deadbolt on the door. I’d have to talk to Emily about installing deadbolt locks on the front and back doors.
I didn’t have the benefit of the equipment that Fullmeyer’s team did, but I came to the same conclusion that they did: there wasn’t any evidence of the house being tampered with. It seemed likely to me that if there had been surveillance gear in the house, it had been removed before anyone from Eric’s crew checked the house. Maybe what Emily was sensing was someone peering in through the kitchen or living room window at night.
I walked down the stairs and onto the short gravel driveway. I waved at Emily as I crossed the street. She put her dog back on leash and started my way. I got back into the Mustang and waited while she came down the sidewalk with the dog. Once she had the Doberman back in the house, she came over to my car and leaned against the driver’s side door, bending at the waist and resting her elbows against the top of the door. The top buttons of her blouse were unbuttoned, making it impossible for me not to notice the abundance of her cleavage and the lace fabric on her overtaxed white brassiere.
“Did you find anything?” she asked.
“I don’t have the kind of sophisticated equipment that Eric’s people have, but no, I didn’t.”
She thought about what I’d said, and then
she nodded to herself as if a suspicion had been confirmed.
“Do you usually leave your Rolex on top of your dresser?” I asked.
“Yes. I can’t wear it since Eric said it telegraphs my wealth. At least the wealth I used to have.” She sighed, stood straight up, and raked her fingers through her hair to comb it away from her face.
I said “It just seems like if someone had come into the house, it would have been irresistible to take the watch. Someone could pawn it in ten minutes for a few thousand dollars. If it went missing you might not notice for days, or you might think you’d misplaced it.”
“So you’re saying it’s all in my head.”
“Not at all. I’m saying that if someone did follow you, or did come into your house, they were disciplined about it and careful about not being caught. That could explain why it’s hard to find evidence.”
She put her hands on her hips and looked down the street towards the vacant lot where she’d thrown the ball for her dog.
“Okay. So maybe I’m not crazy.”
“Right. It’s also possible that someone was watching you for a while but they moved on. Possibly they found someone they liked better in some way.”
“Christ.”
“Or maybe Fullmeyer’s people spooked them, or the dog did.”
“I’m feeling very creeped out,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said. “I’m just trying to connect your feelings with what we’ve been able to find. If you really felt certain that you were being watched and followed, I think you probably were. If you felt like it stopped, I think that it probably did.”
“Marshal Fullmeyer doesn’t see it that way. He thinks I’m losing my mind.”
“Your feelings are real, and I encourage you to listen to them. I can tell when I’m being watched, too. It’s an instinct some people have.”
She had her arms crossed, and she was tapping her foot up and down against the pavement like she was counting off beats for music in her head.
“At a minimum, I think that you should get deadbolt locks installed on the front and back door,” I said. “That’s a simple thing to do, and makes it much harder for someone to get into the house without a key.”
“I’ll call a locksmith. I promise.”
“Good.”
Two boys who looked high school age came out of one of the houses a few doors down. One of them was carrying a football. They gave Emily and me a good look as they spread out across two front yards to play catch.
“Do you have plans for the rest of the evening?” she asked.
“I was going to watch your house for a few more hours, then go home and make a late dinner.”
“Could we just go to dinner together somewhere? I don’t feel like being in my house right now. Dog or no dog.”
“Of course.”
“Just friends, right?”
“Just friends,” I said.
“I have a rule about telling guys up front what to expect.”
“I’m all ears,” I said. “What should I expect?” I gave her my gentlest smile.
She looked concerned. “No. I just mean that I don’t want you to think I’m coming on to you by asking you to dinner,” she said.
“I didn’t think that,” I said. “I thought you felt spooked because we talked about the possibility of someone being in your house, and you wanted to be somewhere else for a little while.”
“Right. I just … don’t know you and don’t … know … you.” She tightened her arms across her chest, and her right leg was twisted around the left to the maximum extent possible. It looked like she was trying to hug herself, protect herself, and possibly to turn herself into a pretzel.
“Well, my taste in cars runs to antiques that are fun to drive. I like old music and dark beer. Does that help?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know it isn’t,” I said. “You asked me to go somewhere with you, and now you wonder if I’ve misunderstood your intent and that I’ll complicate things between us by making a pass at you. I won’t do that.”
“Now things are going to be awkward,” she said.
“Far from it. I appreciate it that you say what’s on your mind. You’re just being authentic with me. It’s not a problem.”
“You seem like a very unusual man,” Emily said.
“More than you know,” I said.