“Really, when you think about it, it’s only been two and a half days.”
“That’s fast.” Denise raised an eyebrow. “It took you, what? Three, four months before Chad was this involved in your life? Although, given how that’s turned out, maybe it’s a sign Jase is involved so fast.”
“It’s—” Bree shook her head. “I don’t know what it is. It’s a lot.”
“How’s the sex?”
A flush crept up Bree’s neck and she opened the cabinet under the sink to get the garbage bags. Why was she embarrassed to talk about how good Jase was in bed? Denise knew way more personal details about her.
“That good, huh?”
Bree stood and blew a strand of hair out of her face. “In a word, yes.” She tore out two bags and tossed the box back under the sink. “He kept Charlie while I went to Gran’s yesterday.”
“Wow, really?”
“Yeah. He was playing fetch with him when I got back to his place. And he changed the locks for me.”
“That’s why he had the keys.”
“Yup.” She twisted the bags in her hand. “Is it too much?”
“That depends, sweetie. How much do you want?”
Bree’s answer was delayed by the sound of the side door opening. Charlie, Polly, and Denise’s large English Mastiff mix, Sprocket, trotted in ahead of Jase.
“You know, you’re supposed to be zoned for a farm to keep horses,” he said. Sprocket let out a groan as she sprawled in the middle of the kitchen floor and yawned.
Denise reached down and rubbed Sprocket’s head. “She’s not a horse. The laziest dog in the world, maybe.”
“I want to get the comforter off before we take the mattress out. I think just folding up the sheets around it will prevent most of the feathers from flying everywhere,” Bree said.
Denise paused just inside the door and took in the carnage. “That’s a lot of feathers.”
“No kidding. I’m going to be finding them for days.”
They carefully bundled up the sheets and comforter and got them into the garbage bags without too many more feathers escaping. Jase grabbed one end of the mattress, and Denise and Bree grabbed the other. Between them they hauled it out of the house and onto Jase’s truck. Bree grabbed the vacuum out of the hall closet on her way back to the bedroom.
“You rearranged your dresser,” Denise said, when Bree turned off the vacuum.
“What? No, I didn’t.” She walked over and stood next to Denise. There wasn’t a lot on her dresser – a metal dish for loose change, a small crystal vase with a single porcelain rose she bought while in Italy, a small wooden jewelry box her grandfather had made her, and a few pictures of her and her grandparents. They had all been rearranged. Before the pictures had been on one corner of the dresser. Now they were spaced evenly along the length of the dresser, the other items placed between the photos.
“That’s creepy,” Denise said.
“I told you.”
“Do you think the cops should dust for prints or something?”
“Maybe? I’ll get Jase to call Tim and ask.”
The phone call to Jase, already on his way to the dump, was brief. In less than five minutes, Tim called Bree to let her know a crime scene technician was on the way and Tim would be joining them after he finished at the station.
Denise went to answer the door when the doorbell rang, leaving Bree to examine the rest of her bedroom and office. She was in the closet when Denise led the tech in.
The tech set his kit on the floor and knelt next to it. “Is the dresser the only thing you noticed was out of place?”
“And my closet. A few of my clothes are out of place.”
He paused with a canister in one hand and a large brush in the other. “How can you tell?”
