“Do you know if he came home last night?”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I heard his truck drive up around eleven-thirty. I was watching the Late Show.” She took a few steps closer, and the cats followed her like a tidal wave of fur. “Is something wrong?”
“I’m not sure.” I looked back at Nick’s door, then at his truck. If he was home, why wasn’t he answering? “You haven’t heard anything unusual this morning? Any arguments or loud noises?”
She shook her head again. “It’s been very quiet.”
“Does he usually go off in someone else’s car? Or does he have another vehicle? A motorcycle or even a bicycle or something?”
“He has a girlfriend,” the old lady said. “They take her car sometimes.”
Jacquie? Or Megan? “Brunette?” I asked. “Or blonde?”
“Oh, a dark-haired thing.” She flapped her hand. “Same coloring as his.”
Not Megan, then. Probably Jacquie, unless Nick had another Greek or Italian girl on his string.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t mention it, dear. Are you sure nothing’s going on?”
I wasn’t sure of that at all. Nick’s truck was here. Zachary had said he’d seen Nick go inside last night. So where was he?
I thought about calling Jacquie and checking with her, but then I thought about Megan and her silver Accord, the one that wasn’t parked outside the house in Charlotte Park this morning.
If the kid was playing soccer, and the kid was Nick’s, what were the chances that Megan had stopped by and picked him up so they could go watch the kid together?
When I put it like that, the chances were pretty good, I thought.
But since I was here— “Does this place have a back door?”
The old lady nodded. “Goes into the kitchen. Around the corner, halfway down the side. Living room in the front, kitchen in the middle, bedroom in the back.”
And a bathroom somewhere along the way, no doubt. I thanked her again. “I’m going to take a look. Maybe bang on his bedroom window, in case he’s just asleep.”
He’d had rather a lot to drink last night, at least according to Zachary. Then again, he hadn’t had any qualms, or indeed any problems, driving home, so maybe he and Sal had sat at… what was it, the Tin Roof?—long enough for most of the alcohol to evaporate. The food they’d eaten would have soaked some of it up, too, surely.
But if he was in bed with a hangover, maybe that would explain why he wasn’t answering the door.
I gave the old lady a nod before I walked around the side of the duplex, past the truck and the trash can and the recycling bins stacked there.
The back door was more of a side door: wooden, painted white, and set about halfway down the side of the duplex, on top of a tiny stoop made of rough-hewn lumber.
I eyed it for a moment, before I bypassed it. If Nick’s bedroom was in the back, I’d check there first. Breaking and entering is rarely a good idea, at least not when you have other options.
As it turned out, though, those other options didn’t materialize. There was window in the back wall—in fact, there were two, but one of them was high up and small. If I squinted, I could see a square of white ceiling with the corner of a vent through it, and on the roof, the tip of a pipe sticking up. The sewer vent, or as my contractor at the house in Hillwood had called it, the stink pipe.
That was definitely the bathroom, then. The room beside it must be the bedroom.
It had a double window, one I could almost reach by standing on my tiptoes. The curtains were drawn tight across the opening, however, so there was nothing to see even if I could get up there.
I huffed and sank back down, my heels digging into the soft soil under the window. After a moment, I reached up and rapped sharply on the glass.
Nothing happened, so after doing it again, I backtracked to the kitchen door and climbed the two wooden steps to the stoop. There, I knocked again. It was mostly for show, since I didn’t think it was likely that Nick would answer now when he hadn’t before.
When there was no answer—of course not—I wrapped my scarf around my hand and grabbed the doorknob.
To my… not surprise, not at all; perhaps relief, or perhaps consternation—whatever, the door opened. I let go of the knob and let it swing in until it fetched up against the wall in the kitchen, and then I stood there and looked in and thought about what I should do now.
