sixteen
thursday, april 24

My week of forced furlough so far included two tasks: I watched Katrina not give birth and I assisted her in the kitchen. In her last few weeks of freedom, Katrina had decided to cook, freeze, and can anything within arm’s reach, and I had become her gofer. My KP duties, although mind-numbing, freed me at the same time. With every jar I boiled and bowl I washed, I sensed a breakthrough building until it fizzled like soap down the drain. I genuinely could not conjure up a single detail related to the mystery woman’s face, despite the fact that I’d had a full-on, unobstructed view of the stranger. In one particularly low moment, I tried to tempt Frank with a few poorly executed sketches of the unidentified woman, but he immediately saw through my ruse.

“Isn’t that the baker from the gourmet shop where you get the day-old bread?”

Boy, he had some memory. It wasn’t easy dating a detective.

My plan B involved using Cheski’s stomach and Katrina’s pre-natal cooking frenzy to win back my spot on the team.

“Homemade pie,” I yelled upstairs where Frank, Cheski, Lamendola, and Charlie had been holed up for the last two hours. “Katrina and I are setting the table on the front porch.” And then I added, “Fresh whipped cream.”

“Only two days past the expiration date,” Katrina added with a laugh.

As I expected, the steaming pie lured the group to the front porch of Harbor House.

“Nothing wrong with a break,” I said as I passed out plates of peach pie. Cheski was in heaven and close to a food coma. Frank took a few polite bites, careful to never fill up on anything we offered lest its origin come into question.

I didn’t have much of an appetite, as Bob’s death had begun to weigh on me. Frank’s connection to Bob was through me, and that one phone conversation seemed to have triggered the events that led to Bob’s murder. I wanted nothing more than to undo the events of the past week. Worse, my visual block had rendered my talents useless, which made me as purposeful as a computer stripped by scavengers.

We had learned one thing since the sighting of the unidentified woman at Bob’s house: Barbara had left Cold Spring Harbor. Frank found a note tacked to a box of dry cat food on the porch. Please feed cat. Be back in a few months.

“Do we even know she wrote it?” I asked as I plopped an extra spoonful of cream on my pie.

“It seems to check out,” Frank offered, although I sensed he wasn’t sold. “The refrigerator had been emptied, and her bedroom drawers appeared half full. I also checked with the utility companies, and she paid a handful of bills forward the day after Bob died. Her actions seem consistent with the note.”

“What about the front door?” I asked. Barbara and Bob might have been a bit bohemian, but their lifestyle didn’t justify leaving a door wide open. “If you’re not planning on locking your front door, why leave the cat food on the porch?”

“I think we have to assume that the door was closed, and your unidentified woman had been in the house as we approached. It’s possible she heard us coming.”

As I hoped, my simple observation about the cat food started the ball rolling, and I used the opening to insert myself back into the investigation. Charlie, it turned out, had been busy cataloging the remaining equipment in the warehouse as well as going through the containers of e-waste at the recycling center. Despite the fact that
I was under thirty years old, my technical literacy skills were a bit underdeveloped. While my peers had been riding the Internet boom,
I had been renovating a 150-year-old house and nurturing a self-sustaining farm. My goal had been to plug into life by unplugging. As a result, I had no idea what Charlie had been looking for in a pile of used computers, but if a lead or a connection existed, Charlie was Frank’s man.

“I need two more days with the equipment,” Charlie said, and Frank nodded.

“Whatever you can give would be great.”

Cheski and Lamendola had been tasked with dissecting HG Space Savers’s business. This included analyzing the accounts in the hopes a renter’s name would provide an elusive clue. They were also in the process of interviewing the day trippers on the outside chance a renter had seen something. Cheski and Lamendola were also eager to uncover the bad blood between Harry Goldberg and his cousin David. Were the Goldberg cousins involved in a green-washing scam gone bad, or was it simple family rivalry, as Harry Goldberg had suggested? Moreover, was there any evidence, no matter how thin, that either Goldberg cousin knew Bob? It seemed a bit of a stretch since the Goldbergs made money storing junk, and the recycling center made money getting rid of junk. In my opinion, the purpose of these two organizations were diametrically opposed, thus reducing the chance for an overlap. I reminded everyone of their divergent goals.

“It’s a fair point,” Cheski said. “We got a keeper and a tosser. I can’t think of any reason for Bob to connect with the Goldbergs.”

“I had a storage unit once,” Lamendola said thoughtfully as he scraped his plate. “After the police academy, I was living in a huge house in Queens with two other guys. When I got my own place, a 400-square-foot studio, I stored my stuff.”

“I guess that’s the routine,” I said.

“Not exactly,” Lamendola corrected. “I stopped paying rent after about a year. I couldn’t even remember what I had in the unit. The storage place hit my credit card with a removal penalty. I have no idea what happened to my stuff after that.”

Frank’s ears perked up. “You’re right. The Goldbergs must get stuck with defaulted units all the time,” he said, and then asked, “Don’t these storage places auction off the contents?”

“That sounds familiar,” Cheski said. “Maybe there’s a link there. I’ll go back to Harry and ask him about default procedures.”

“No,” Frank said. “Find another storage facility and figure out the industry standard on defaulted units first. I don’t trust Harry. If units are auctioned, find a local auctioneer and see if he’s done business with the Goldbergs. If Harry is lying, we shouldn’t use him as our go-to source on all things storage related.”

Cheski and Lamendola agreed.

I was encouraged by this revelation, but the pile of unanswered questions grew faster than the answered. Frank had secured an account list from the largest manufacturer of laminated badges. He was in the process of visiting the local companies with badges under the pretense that there had been some break-ins in the area. There was also Bob’s receipt book, which included at least twenty pages of recent tech drop-offs by local residents. The team planned on reviewing all the names in Bob’s pad and cross-checking them with the renters at HG storage. Then there was the issue of Barbara. Frank had planned to contact her friends and family in hopes Barbara had sought refuge with someone close to her.

The painfully obvious hole in the investigation remained my visual recall. If I could get a sketch on paper, we’d have a tangible piece of evidence. As it stood, we had a jumble of loosely connected threads.

The one thing we agreed upon was that Bob had most likely been pushed to his death. Although there was no eyewitness to his fall, he had been observed in a heated conversation with a man at the recycling center after the center had closed. A few days before Bob’s death, he had had a benign conversation with the police about e-waste. At that point, Frank and Bob had never met and only spoken over the phone. At the time, Bob’s knowledge of e-waste appeared unrelated to the two storage warehouses packed with toxic waste. Bob’s death, so soon after the conversation with Frank, now appeared to be connected. The fact that Bob and Barbara’s house had been broken into fed the theory that Bob knew something about the warehouses.

The marks on Bob’s arm were harder to understand as were the now-emptied warehouses. Possibly, the marks had nothing to do with his death. Possibly, the warehouse e-waste was simply en route to a legal recycling buyer. And, although three women had been spotted either right before or after Bob’s death—one at the recycling center, one at the storage unit office, and one at Bob’s house—there was no evidence they were the same person or that they were involved in Bob’s murder.

The last tidbit, the unidentified women, bothered me to no end. My sketching talents had failed both me and Bob. I let a triangle of gooey peach rest on my tongue until the fruit’s acidity overpowered the sugar. I swallowed the pie and laid my fork to rest.

“I need to unclog my head,” I announced.

Charlie raised an eyebrow seductively, and I swatted his arm.

“Bowling works for me,” Cheski said. “And Frank likes to pace.”

“And grind his teeth,” I added.

Frank’s jaw dropped. Did he think we hadn’t noticed the tread marks he had left in the floorboards and the gnawing sounds emanating from his mouth?

“Sorry,” I said, “but you pace and grind. I have something else in mind to clear my head.” In fact, I had started to think that my brain bank had been overloaded with images of children. The children’s faces that filled my sketchbook. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds. To make room for the unidentified woman, I’d have to clean house. There was another woman I needed to see who I thought could help.

My mother.