Peter shook his head.
Ellie was on the landing, her face pale. “What happened?”
“Someone was here. Looking through your mom’s office, I think.”
“Did he take anything?”
“I don’t know. I lost him. Are you okay?”
She gave him a pointed look. “I’m not the one who lost him.”
Peter snorted. “Next time, you chase him.”
“That’s the bodyguard’s job.” She clattered down the stairs. “We should go check my mom’s office. See if we can figure out what he was looking for.”
It was a good idea, Peter had to admit. “Manny, you’re on security.”
“Roger that.”
She led him through the kitchen to the office door, where she stopped and scanned the room. “What’s that?”
19
Peter stepped past Ellie and into the ransacked office. She was pointing to a cassette-tape case on the floor by the wall. Peter knelt and took a closer look. The clear plastic case was empty. It was also cracked. Above it, at shoulder height, was a small triangular divot in the plaster.
Peter licked his fingertip and pressed it to the divot. When he pulled it away, loose grains of plaster were stuck to his skin. He put his nose to the wall and sniffed. Renovating houses, Peter had torn out a great deal of old plaster. It had a distinctive smell when you first broke it open, like wet concrete and dust bunnies. The smell didn’t last long. He was pretty sure the divot was fresh.
The person he’d chased had been wearing gloves, so Peter didn’t think he’d left any prints, but he took a tissue from the box, then carefully picked up the case, checking the corners. A little paint still clungto one. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Someone had thrown the case against the wall, cracking it.
Ellie stepped closer and peered at it. “What is that thing?”
If the searcher had found what he was looking for, would he have thrown the case against the wall? Peter didn’t think so. He’d have kept the tape in the case and taken it with him. Which meant the case had been empty already. Which meant the tape might be somewhere in the house.
“You haven’t seen this before?”
“Never,” she said. “I don’t even know what it is.”
“It was designed to hold a cassette tape. An antique form of media storage. It made music truly portable for the first time. You could make copies of albums you liked, even make mixtapes for your friends.”
As a teenager, Peter had run a lot of miles on the gravel roads outside of Bayfield, listening to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson on his dad’s ancient Walkman. That was almost twenty-five years ago, and it was old technology even then.
“Like an iPod, but, like, primitive?”
“Exactly. Except the tape needed a player, something you’d put the cassette in. It might be big, it might be almost as small as the tape itself.” He glanced around the office, checked drawers and shelves, finding nothing. He turned to Ellie. “Can you think of anything in the house that might be able to play this thing?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “Why would she even have something like this?”
“Good question.” He thought a moment. “Does your mom have a box of old electronics somewhere?”
She blinked. “In the basement? The graveyard of technology. That’s what my mom calls it.”
He noticed she was still referring to her mother in the presenttense, as if she were still alive. Which made him realize he was doing the same thing.
He tucked the plastic case in his jacket pocket and resettled the revolver in his waistband. “Lead the way, kiddo.”
—
The basement stairs were steep enough that Peter had to duck to make it down without banging his head. When Ellie flipped on the lights at the bottom, he saw a cramped space with a cracked concrete floor and exposed floor joists above. An oversized dehumidifier hummed softly in the center, keeping the space dry. The walls were lined with mismatched metal shelving units.
