“No.Yourhouse.”
“My house?”Myhouse. Oh—“The Little house?” I squeak. “What’s wrong with the Little house?”
“Well, it’s been vandalized.”
“Vandalized?” That could mean a number of things. “I don’t understand.”
Finn looks over at my dad. “You ready, Kip?”
“Yep.” I turn and watch my father stand. He throws back the rest of his coffee and moves to stand next to me. “Come on, Velma Lou. Let’s ride over to see what’s up.”
Oh. My. God. Finn already told my dad. And my dad doesn’t want to tell me. I look back at Finn. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he nods once.
And that’s when the tears threaten to break loose. Doing my best to keep those inside, I nod in response and follow him out the door. Dad takes the rear, shutting and locking up the house as he goes.
It takes us fifteen minutes to get there, thanks to Finn’s lights on the top of his cruiser. When we pull up the driveway, there’s another sheriff’s car with their lights flashing too. Which means, everyone and their dogs will be awake and watching. Sliding out of Dad’s car, I look across the street, and sure enough, people are outside their homes, in pajamas and robes, watching the events unfold.
But I can’t worry about that. Instead, I start to jog up to the door when Finn stops me. “Please don’t touch anything. We’re going to dust for prints.”
“Right.”
I start walking at a fast clip again, but Finn reaches out and touches my arm. “Here.” He hands me rubber gloves. “And here.” I see things that look like paper socks. “Put those over your feet.”
The thing is, my fingerprints and feet are already all over the place, but I do what he asks anyway. At least he’s approaching this seriously.
There are five steps that lead up to the beautiful wraparound porch. It’s one of my favorite features about the place. The door is ajar, and I can see from the damaged lock that whoever did this, they must have come in this way using a pry bar or something else to pop it open. Reaching for the door, I feel a hand on my shoulder. Dad. Looking over my shoulder, I see he’s wearing gloves too. I glance down at his feet. Paper socks. My stomach does a complete 360-degree flip. Nausea hits me next. With my palm over my mouth, I nod when my dad asks in the most serious tone I’ve ever heard from him, “You ready?”
I’ve only heard his voice like that one other time. The time he woke me up to tell me Mom was gone.
“Yes.” I’m not, actually.
Pushing on the wooden part of the door, I gasp immediately. There’s broken glass everywhere. And I mean everywhere. There’s so much, I can’t even imagine where it came from. I look over at Dad, who’s looking up. I let my eyes move up to the chandelier that once hung there. It’s now just loose wires, dangling bits of metal hanging down. I glance down at the glass again, and that’s when I see, among shards from a window or cabinet, the crystals that once hung above me.
I hold in the emotion that has overtaken me because I have a feeling that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
We spend an hour in the house going through each room, even upstairs. Finn walks along with us, writing down every bit of damage that I see. From the smashed chandelier to the busted backsplash in the kitchen. Almost every surface and piece of furniture is either damaged or completely destroyed. The new cabinets in the butler’s pantry, the ones I just brought in from Omaha are a splintered mess. It appears as though the perpetrators were trying to tear them off the walls but either gave up or ran out of time. No matter, they’re too damaged to save. I’ll have to take them out. They didn’t stop there, though. The hand-blown rounded glass windows in the rotunda, gone. Smashed to smithereens.
Hell, even the walls have been damaged. There are huge holes in almost every single vertical surface in the house—upstairs and down. It’s unbelievable. It’s in worse shape than when I bought the place. Much worse.
“How long do you think this would have taken?” Finn asks me, hesitantly.
I stare at him for a minute. “It depends on how many people were involved.” I look at the kitchen, or what used to be the kitchen. “This would have taken more than one person.” A gang of people.
“What time did you leave last night?” Finn’s still got his notebook out.
“Ten?” I look over at dad. He nods.
“Your neighbor heard noises over here around three thirty and called it in.”
“How long did it take you to get here?”
He frowns. “Too long. Mona calls about this place so much, I think the guys figured it was you working late.”
I nod. So, because of Mona… and that’s when it hits me. “Mona had something to do with this.”
“Velma…” My dad places a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s not start pointing fingers.”
