I’d just switched on my computer the next morning, braced for intimate messages from the usual alternative energy suppliers, orthopedic shoe peddlers and western wear clothiers – all of whom thought I had interest, and money – when the little computer dinger signaled a new bit of incoming email.
It was from Jenny, and it was short. ‘This clip from third camera. Up all night squinting. No attackers, no day workers. Attached are two minutes Rick enhanced. Upper right window. Nothing, or something?’
I emailed back. ‘Who’s Rick?’
She answered instantly. ‘Guy who picked up camera from you.’
‘His name is Ralph,’ I sent back.
‘Goes by Rick, too. Paranoid about secrecy.’
I opened the attachment. It showed a close-up of the rightmost, second-floor bedroom window. I recognized the window and the curtains. It was the same window through which Theresa Wade had been purportedly photographed some months or years earlier, probably seated in her wheelchair, by a photographer using a long lens. Other than her big hair, none of her features had been recognizable.
There was movement behind the window. Someone with the same big hair, no doubt a woman, was moving behind those lace curtains now.
The person’s head was too high for someone seated.
I emailed Jenny. ‘Any new evidence that the Wades have live-in help?’
‘No.’
I watched the clip again. The movement lasted only five seconds.
It wasn’t Timothy Wade behind that window. The hair was wrong. It was too full. It seemed to be a woman’s hair, a woman’s head.
Yet I was sure the hair was too high for a woman in a wheelchair. A woman was walking behind those curtains.
A wheelchair-bound woman might well need live-in help – a nurse, a maid, a cook.
But my mind wanted to see only that dirt-dusted Cadillac hidden in the sunken garage at the back of the Wade estate. And to recall the wheelchair left upright in the back seat, just as dirty as the car. A wheelchair never retrieved, never needed. A wheelchair that had nagged at me since I’d first seen it.
A car horn tapped twice outside.