“My stuff.” She moves toward the bed, lifting her comforter. At once, I understand. The comforter is a shade darker than before and obviously heavier.
It’s soaking wet.
She grabs a pile of clothes from the floor, tossing them onto the bed. Droplets of water splash up from the impact. She picks up her laptop next, the silver machine absolutely dripping with water. “Someone destroyed all my stuff.”
I move forward, gathering her things in my hands, trying to understand what might’ve happened. A glance at the ceiling tells me nothing there appears wet. If there was a leak in the roof, there would be signs.
With a look back at the door, I realize Conrad is gone, though I didn’t hear him leave. Greta disappears from the room and returns a few seconds later with her arms full of hand towels. “This was all I could find.”
Of course. Because our larger towels are packed away somewhere in some box that might take hours to find.
“Thanks. Here.” I take half of the towels and toss a few to Taylor. Together, the three of us begin working to dry up what we can. There’s very little use, though. Her blankets and clothes will have to be washed, and her mattress will take hours to dry out. There’s no hope for her computer. She looks hopeless and angry, so utterly defeated it breaks me. “Honey, we’ll get you another computer, I promise.”
I have no idea how I’m going to swing it. I don’t exactly have MacBook money lying around, and I refuse to ask Lewis for help. I can’t.
But I’ll manage. Somehow.
Carefully, I lift one of her shirts to my nose, wincing. I need to make sure it’s only water, not something worse. It smells of nothing but our detergent.
“How did the water get in here?” Greta asks, looking at the ceiling too.
“Someone did this,” Taylor tells us, waving her hand toward the bed as if it should be obvious. “Whoever has been squattinghere—leaving trash. They clearly did this. Come on, Mom. Are we seriously going to just pretend like everything is fine?”
I press my lips together, looking around. “That doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone was here before, no one has been in the house since we got here. There’s only the front door, and you guys would’ve seen them come in or out. And if you didn’t, I would have. I was just outside.” Technically, I was distracted there for a minute or two talking to Conrad—being scared by him—but still, between the three or four of us, surely one of us would’ve noticed someone breaking in. And who would do that in broad daylight, anyway? And why? “You slept in here fine last night. No one bothered us. There has to be another explanation.”
“Like what?” she demands, staring at me. “What explanation could there possibly be, Mom? This is insane. I’mnotstaying here. They ruined my stuff.” Splotches of scarlet stain her cheeks, so bright with fury and frustration I can practically taste it in the air. I step forward, and the floorboard groans underfoot.
“Honey, I—” I try to think, to offer some reasonable explanation for what could’ve caused this. Slowly, my eyes trail the walls, looking for evidence of a leaking pipe or something else, but there’s nothing. Nothing in this room is wet except for the clothes, her bed, and her laptop. It’s as if someone poured water directly on her things. But that’s…impossible.
How would it have happened? Even if I want to believe her, how would it be possible for someone to sneak in here unseen, manage to somehow get—what, several glasses? A pitcher?—of water without being heard, and then leave without being noticed?
I cross the room to her window and run my fingers along the seam, pulling up gently, then with more force. It gives with a loud groan in protest, and after another tug, the window lifts.
My breathing catches as the breeze hits my skin, the scent of the lavender. It wasn’t locked.
“Okay, so call me Sherlock, but maybe someone came in through the unlocked window,” Greta offers, wincing.
It’s a stretch. As we just heard, opening the window isn’t exactly a stealthy task, and I still don’t know how they would’ve gotten water into the room without drawing attention to themselves. But when I look back at Taylor, I know my arguments and excuses are pointless. If I want her to stay here, I have to find the answer. I need to know what happened.
“I’ll call the police,” I say finally. “We can let them check this out, just in case.”
It feels extreme, but I also don’t really know what else to do. Adding a security system to my mental to-do list, I pull my phone from my pocket and dial the local number.
It takes around an hour for the police to arrive, and when they do, it’s clearly the most exciting call this town’s gotten in quite a while. There are four officers who arrive on scene, which I suspect might be the entire police force. Three women, one man. The Black woman who introduces herself as the sheriff is shorter than I am, her dark hair pulled back in tight braids.
She meets me at the door and asks us to replay everything that happened again. I tell her about the trash left in the room and the water this morning.
“And the neighbor who keeps an eye on the place? Where is he?”
“Conrad. I don’t know a lot about him, other than that he’s a neighbor, and he watches over Foxglove for Mom. I met him this morning, but he sort of…disappeared after we found the water.”
“Disappeared?” She eyes me.
“Well, not disappeared, but he left. It was kind of chaotic there for a minute, and I’m sure he felt like he was in the way.”
“Right.” Her gaze travels the room slowly as she thinks. “Can you describe Conrad for me?”
“He is in his late fifties or sixties, I’d say. Blondish-gray hair. Not too tall, definitely under six foot, but not too short, either. Average build. Tan.”
