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“I’ll give ’em to her. She’s asleep. Your boyfriend’s visit tired her out. If I find out there’s any funny business going on between them I’ll sue that college for sex harassment.”
“Liam would never take advantage of a student,” I sputtered. “He cares about them too much…”
“‘Too much’ is right. He was holed up in Nicky’s room for half an hour. Nicky said they were talking about her poetry, but I saw his eyes. Bedroom eyes, if you know what I mean.”
To my horror, I blushed.
“I guess you do know what I mean.” JayCee snickered. “My advice to you, honey, is keep your man satisfied so he don’t go prowling around here looking for younger meat.”
With that sage advice delivered, JayCee slammed the door in my face. I almost knocked again but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I retreated down the steps and along the unshoveled front path which, I noticed now, did have large footprints that matched Liam’s size 13 L.L.Bean snow boots. So JayCee hadn’t been lying about him visiting. Which was no big deal. It was just the kind of considerate thing Liam would do—even the baking part. So why did I feel funny about it? Surely I wasn’t taking JayCee’s obscene hints seriously. Liam would never take advantage of a student that way. But still there was something about Liam visiting Nicky that bothered me…
“Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo!”
The call, which might have belonged to a migratory waterfowl, pierced my consciousness as I was stomping up Elm Street. I turned and found a petite middle-aged woman in abright red sweater and jeans waving at me from the front porch of a Craftsman bungalow. I recognized the house as the one I’d gone into on Thanksgiving Day with Dory to check the pipes for its owners who wintered in Florida. A glance at the RV in the driveway suggested they were back.
“Hello?” I answered back, holding my hand over my eyes to shade the glare. “Are you talking to me?”
The woman came down her steps and then looked at the snow on her unshoveled path and the red slippers on her feet with dismay. “Oh dear,” she said as she began to pick her way gingerly through the snow. “We came back early and forgot to tell Brock to shovel our paths. Or to turn up our heat. And now we’ve found that we’ve been broken into! Harald’s on the phone with the sheriff. Can you believe it? Here in Fairwick? I’m Cheryl Lindisfarne, by the way, but everyone calls me Cherry.” She held out her hand when we reached each other on the middle of the path.
“Callie McFay. I’m at the college. And actually I came by your house with Dory Browne after the Thanksgiving ice storm to check on your pipes. Everything looked fine then.”
“Oh my, I hate to tell you this, but from the dates on the fraudulent credit card charges the home invader was already in the house on Thanksgiving Day! We noticed some unusual charges on the AmEx in December and we canceled all our cards. But who knows what other information he might have taken! He might have stolen our identities!”
She glanced nervously up and down the street as if clones of Cheryl and Harald Lindisfarne might be strolling brazenly in broad daylight along Elm Street.
“Well, thatisupsetting,” I agreed, unsure what the woman wanted me to do about her problem. “But if you haven’t seen any more fraudulent charges maybe it was just a vagrant trying to get warm…”
“Do you think?” she asked, laying her hand on my arm. “He ate an entire Hormel ham and all the peaches I’d put uplast summer, but he was very neat. He washed out the peach jars and put back all the DVDs from Harald’s collection. Harald is a bit of a movie buff…”
“He put back the DVDs?” I asked. “Then how do you know he took them out?”
“Oh, because they’re out of alphabetical order…Oh dear, maybe he was anilliteratevagrant! Maybe he turned to a life of crime because he never had a proper education. I’m a literacy volunteer, you know,” she added. “I work with newly arrived immigrants in Florida and migrant workers up here in the summer. Gosh, do you think it could have been one of the men I tutor?”
Thankfully the new conjecture was cut short by the appearance on the porch of a short, bald, rotund man in khaki shorts, a T-shirt that proclaimed the owner was aRETIRED SNOWBIRD AND PROUD OF IT! and red suspenders. “The sheriff’s on his way, Cherrybaby,” the man called as he picked his way across the snow toward us. “He says we need to make a list of everything that’s missing. You’ll have to do the pantry.”
“Oh,” Cherry said, squeezing my arm, “I’d best go in. Thank you for being such a good listener. I just had to tellsomeone!And I’m glad to meet you. Dory told me we had a nice new woman professor at the college. You’ll have to join our book club and Harald’s Friday night movie club. We watch classics and new movies. My favorites are the romantic comedies…”
I’d been trying to come up with a polite way to get away from Cherry Lindisfarne when the wordsromantic comediesbrought me up short.
“Which movies did the thief watch?” I asked, interrupting Cherry’s personal review of the new Nancy Meyers film.
Cherry Lindisfarne blinked at my rudeness, but recovered herself quickly and turned to her husband. “Do you remember, Harald?”
“I made a list for the police,” he said taking a folded pieceof paper out of his shorts pocket. “Let’s see…” While he adjusted a pair of bifocals on his sunburned nose I suppressed an urge to throttle him. “Beauty and the Beast—the French one, not Disney—It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, You’ve Got Mail, andWhen Harry Met Sally.”
“He was apparently quite the fan of romantic comedy!” Cherry exclaimed. “I bet he’d been disappointed in love and was trying to figure out how to get back with his girlfriend. Those movies are practically primers on the art of love!”
“Yes, a person could learn a lot from those movies.” Like how to lie to your girlfriend, I reflected bitterly. “And those credit card charges. Do you recall what companies they were from?”
“Oh yes,” Cherry said. “L.L.Bean, Lands’ End, and J. Peterman. All Harald’s favorites so we didn’t notice at first. But then we looked closer at the orders and saw that the pants were a narrower waist size and longer inseam and the shoes were way bigger…”
“What size shoes?” I asked.
“Thirteen!”
“Oh,” I said, feeling my heart grow heavy in my chest. “That’s…big. I guess there aren’t too many men with that size shoe.”
“No! It will be a good clue for the police. But you poor thing, you look pale! I imagine realizing he was in the house when you came by is upsetting. I don’t blame you for feeling shocked. It makes you feelviolatedsomehow.”
“Yes,” I told Cherry in perfect honesty. “It does. I think…I think I’d better go home now.”
“You do that, dear. Make yourself a cup of tea with plenty of sugar in it for the shock. And make sure you lock your doors. Who knows? Our home invader might still be lurking around.”
I walked back to the house going over what I’d learned from the Lindisfarnes. The day after I’d banished the incubus someonehad broken into the Lindisfarnes’ house and used their credit card to buy clothes from the same catalog companies that Liam favored, and then less than two weeks later Liam Doyle showed up in Fairwick.
When I turned the corner onto my street I saw three women sitting on my porch. Two of the women were the same as the ones who had arrived on the night of the ice storm: Diana Hart and Soheila Lilly. The third was Fiona Eldritch.
As I walked up my porch steps my legs felt heavy. Ihadbeen feeling tired lately, hadn’t I?
“You don’t have to do an intervention,” I said. “I know what you’re here to tell me. Liam Doyle is the incubus.”
