“How am I supposed to count that?” Ariel said, then she looked at the wallpaper and smiled.
Sara smiled back. “Roses,” she whispered. “Count the roses.”
Ariel took a deep breath, then started down the steps. At the third step, she held onto the rail and stepped past it. No creak. Smiling, she looked up at Sara, who smiled in return, then Ariel looked at the roses on the wallpaper. One of the roses above the creaky step had been painted blue. It was something you wouldn’t notice unless you were studying the wallpaper, but it was there.
Ariel pointed at the blue rose and motioned to Sara, but she didn’t understand. Ariel slowly went down the stairs, noting the blue rose each time there was a stair she was to skip. When she was outside Phyllis’s room, she looked up at Sara, still standing in the doorway, smiling encouragement.
Slowly, carefully, silently, Ariel opened the bedroom door and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the tiny night-light in the wall. When her eyes adjusted, she saw Phyllis Vancurren sprawled across the bed, snoring softly. Ariel thought she might be able to fire a shot and not wake her, but she didn’t want to chance it. She tiptoed over the carpet—antique Persian, she thought, and at least ten grand—and went to the woman’s chest of drawers. As she’d hoped, there was a hairbrush. Ariel took a tissue from the box, removed some hair from the brush, and put it in her pocket. Glancing in the mirror above the dresser, she looked at Phyllis, then Ariel silently opened a top drawer. Junk. Old hair clips, business cards, broken combs, a small box of cheap jewelry. She closed the drawer.
The next drawer held underwear. Ariel couldn’t have been more pleased if she’d found gold. Clean underwear! She jammed the front of her shirt with half a dozen pairs of lacy underpants. The bras were, of course, useless to her and Sara, so she left them.
The next drawer held a stack of nightgowns, all French-made, all nearly transparent. Ariel was tempted to take a couple of those, but she didn’t.
In the bottom drawer, she hit pay dirt. There were monogrammed handkerchiefs and a handwritten card. I will love you forever. Phyllis, it read. She slipped a handkerchief and the card into the waistband of her trousers.
As she shut the drawer, she noticed a tiny red beam in the mirror, like a light on something electronic. Turning, she scanned the room but saw nothing. She looked back in the mirror and there it was again, a red spot, but now she realized she was seeing it through a gap in the curtains. It
was outside.
With her back against the wall, not daring to touch the curtains, Ariel looked through the tiny gap and waited. In a few moments the red showed again. It was the tip of a burning cigarette. Just as R.J. said, someone was hiding in the shadows, smoking and watching.
Ariel tiptoed across the carpet, left the room, and went back up the stairs.
“What took you so long?” Sara said. “I was beginning to worry!”
“Look what I got.” Ariel pulled the underpants out of her shirt, the two monogrammed handkerchiefs, and finally the card.
“Clean underwear,” Sara said in awe. “The greatest luxury in life.”
“Where are they—and him? It?”
“They left just after you and took it downstairs to try to find the freezer. I was left here to make these.” She stepped aside to show Ariel two long lumps of sheets and pillows, both of them tied together with burlap twine, into roughly the shape and size of Fenny Nezbit.
“That’s very good. It’s—” Ariel broke off as the men came into the room. They hadn’t made a sound as they came up the stairs.
“Did you find it?” Sara asked.
“Yes,” David said, his face even paler than before. “This goes against everything I’ve ever believed in. We just hid a dead body—”
“Yeah, and we had to take the frozen food out. It’ll thaw, then stink,” R.J. said. He was looking at Ariel. “Did you do okay?”
“Brilliant,” Sara said. “She stole us some clean underwear.”
When the men just blinked at that, Sara shrugged. “It’s a girl thing. But Ariel also got some evidence you can use to incriminate that woman.”
“We’ll drop it off when we go out,” R.J. said, then looked at Sara. “How’d you do?”
She stepped back to show the stuffed figures she’d made.
“Excellent,” R.J. said, his eyes sparkling. “You always could put together anything.”
“I saw a lit cigarette,” Ariel said. “Someone is standing at the back of the house and smoking.”
“No police cars?” R.J. asked.
“I had half an inch between the curtain and the wall so I couldn’t see much,” Ariel said. “Would you mind telling me the plan?”
Sara spoke first. “If the police are involved in this and are watching, we figure they’ll stop us as soon as we leave the house with a big roll across our shoulders. But if it’s an individual who’s watching—”