Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

“Jackson is just a worrier,” said Iris.

“Yeah, well, worry about this,” said Mimi, and handed him her fishing rod, which was all snarled. They had been sitting in the middle of the lake with fishing rods as an excuse for doing nothing. So he had picked away at the knots and tangles and kept his worrying to himself for the rest of the weekend.

They’d left Iris at the lawyer’s office in Ladybank where she had a summer job. Jay was driving the Camry. He was going to drop Mimi off and make sure everything was okay before heading back into town. And everything did look okay. Pretty as a picture, with the tall grass and wildflowers nodding in a light breeze. But Jay watched the house carefully, waiting for the whole thing to blow up.

Mimi babbled on about a scene she was going to rewrite, but he hardly heard her. They had arrived at the shed by then, and he stopped in his tracks.

“What?” she said.

He pointed.

The back door was ajar.

Jay ran for the stairs, Mimi to her desk. “Oh, thank you, God, thank you, thank you,” he heard her say as he charged upstairs, two steps at a time. Presumably her computer was still there. His computer was still there, too, and he breathed a long sigh of relief, leaning on his knees to catch his breath. Mimi joined him and gasped.

He looked up, and his gaze, so narrowly fixed when he first got there, now saw what he had missed. Two of his guitar stands were empty.

The cops took almost an hour. By then Jay and Mimi had discovered that the back door had not been forced but opened from inside; the window in Mimi’s bedroom had been smashed. Glass lay everywhere on her bed, in her open suitcase-everywhere!

But that wasn’t the last of the surprises. Jay had gone down to the snye to lay a two-by-ten plank across the broken bridge for the cops, figuring they wouldn’t want to wade over, when suddenly Mimi came running down to him. “The camcorder’s gone,” she said.

“Oh, crap,” said Jay.

“And that’s not all. My computer beeped at me.”

Jay stared at her. “Huh?”

“It’s never done that before,” she said. He laid the planks down and then followed her back up to the house. She had left the laptop partially open. Jay crouched and peered inside, then slowly raised the lid. The screen was black. He pushed the power button. Nothing.

“It beeped when I opened it,” she said.

So Jay closed the lid. Then pressed the button to open it.

Beep, beep, beep.

He jumped back. They both did. “Like that,” said Mimi. “Three beeps.”

“And it never happened before?” She gave him an exasperated look.

Constable Roach came alone. They were short-staffed, and Jay got the unmistakable impression that a breaking and entering was no big deal. Like maybe people got burgled every day. Roach took down the story.

“So that’s a wine-red thirty-gigabyte JVC HDD?”

“Right. And it’s worth?”

“About six hundred, American.”

Then he turned to Jay. “And two guitars plus cases?” he said, reading his notes. “A Gibson ES-175 with a sunburst finish and a powder-blue Fender Stratocaster?”

“Baby blue,” said Jay.

Roach made the change. “And their value, roughly?”

Jay shoved his hands in his pockets, shrugged. “Somewhere around three or four grand,” he said.

While Roach wrote this in his notes, Jay swallowed hard and risked the question he had been afraid to ask. “Any chance I’m going to see the guitars again?”

Roach grimaced. “Depends on whether you got robbed by crooks or musicians,” he said. “I’m guessing these are pretty high-end instruments?”

Jay nodded again, a sick feeling coming over him. The loss was beginning to sink in.

“If your thief was some budding rock star, you probably won’t see either of them again unless it’s in a club somewhere. And if you think you do, do not attempt to do anything. Come to us. But from what you tell me-the troubles you’ve been having-I suspect your visitor finally decided to step up his game, make a move.”

Jay swallowed hard. Mimi took his arm.

“We’ll alert the music stores in Ottawa and Kingston, the pawnshops,” said Roach. “You don’t by any chance have serial numbers or anything like that?”

Jay nodded, though he had forgotten until then. “They’re back at the house-my mom’s house. I’ll phone them in.”

“You do that.” Roach looked impressed. “You’d be surprised how few people bother.” He glanced at Mimi.

“Don’t even ask,” she said. “I’m one of those people you’re talking about.”

“How long will it take?” said Jay, turning back to the policeman. “Getting in touch with the music stores and all that?”

“Oh, I’ll do it right away. Soon as I get out to the cruiser.”

Jay must have looked hopeful, because Roach sighed. “But you’re not optimistic?”

Roach rubbed the side of his nose with the end of his pencil. “Depends,” he said. “If they broke in Sunday, they might not have been able to dump them yet.”

And Jay could guess the rest. They’d been gone since early Saturday afternoon.

It was only as Roach was about to leave that Mimi mentioned about her computer.

“It beeped at you?” said Roach.

“Yeah, I know. It sounds pretty lame,” she said. “But it is a pretty weird coincidence that my computer goes down when this perp comes around.”

Roach smiled in a patronizing way, which made Mimi furious, from the look on her face. And Jay jumped in to defend her. “It’s not as crazy as you think, sir,” he said. “The guy who’s been breaking in did some weird stuff to my computer, too. Left little messages, whatever.”

Roach nodded. But then he shrugged and turned to Mimi. “I didn’t mean to take what you said lightly. It’s just that I don’t know what to tell you. The item is still here.”

“Yeah, and beeping at me!” said Mimi. “God, I’d like to…”

“Like I said, miss, you come to us if you find anything. Anything at all.”

“Like if we find any clues?” said Jay. Roach nodded.

“The fucked-up computer is a clue,” said Mimi, glaring at the officer. He smiled at her again, and Jay wanted to warn him that he was walking on thin ice. But Mimi wasn’t finished. “Think about it,” she said. “This guy has been sneaking in here for months, and he’s never done anything like break windows or steal things-well, not big things. There’s something screwy about this.”

Roach flipped back through his notes. “You said you locked the storm door out back, which you figured was how he had been getting in?” Jay nodded. Roach shrugged. “So, he comes back, sees you’ve taken precautions, and it bugs him. Bugs the heck out of him. So he decides to make you pay.”

Jay nodded again. But when he looked at Mimi, she was still fuming.

“Miss,” said Roach. “I understand you’re angry. You have every right to be. And we’ll do what we can. But I gotta tell you, this was a pretty hit-and-miss burglary. They left two computers, an iPod-I don’t think we’re dealing with professionals here. It’s not the modus operandi of a typical rural B and E. See, out here, your specialists back a van up to the door, knock, and if anyone answers, pretend they’re lost. If no one answers, they take as much as they can and split. Now, you’ve got that broken bridge, which would likely be enough of a deterrence to any kind of ring-not worth the bother to cart stuff back and forth across the stream.” He paused, looked around. “What I see is someone on foot, who took just as much as he could carry. And what’s easier to carry than a couple of guitar cases and a camera. I’d guess it might be local kids.”

“Which doesn’t explain leaving the iPod,” said Mimi, and all Roach could do was shrug. But then Mimi’s eyes lit up. “Somebody nearby, you think?”