That Lenovo was the only portable thing of value she had. Well, there was the TV that had come with the house, and that was also where she’d last seen it.
One by one, she opened all the cabinets. The drawers. The door into the little pantry.
Struck by a driving paranoia, she went to the living room and lifted the cushions off the sofa. Picked up the remotes and put them back down again. Measured the distance from the rug’s edge to the kick pleat on the old armchair. Checked the shade on the lamp.
Then she pivoted to the stairs.
Had someone come in the house while she’d been asleep? She didn’t have an alarm, security cameras, or motion detectors. And locks could be picked, even dead bolts.
As she went up the pine-planked steps, she avoided the one that creaked even though there was nobody else in the house. There couldn’t be anyone else—and there hadn’t been. Otherwise they’d have hurt her or stolen something, not that she had much of real value.
When she got to the top landing, she looked through the open door of the single full bathroom. The sunlight reassured her, but only because the magical-thinking part of her brain told her that nothing bad could happen on a sunny spring day.
Bad things happened at night.
When you were asleep alone in a house.
They did not happen in broad daylight. No matter what was in the dirt outside those windows.
The guest bedroom—not that she’d ever had guests—was across from her own and she went there first, not sure what she expected to find. An indentation on the pillow? A depression on the handmade quilt? Water glass on the bed stand?
Like she’d had a houseguest she’d somehow missed.
Nothing.
She checked the hall closet that was cedar lined and where she kept the extra sheets and her sweaters in the summer. Nothing out of place, but like anybody was going to take a Martha Stewart queen-sized anything?
Swallowing dread, she turned to her own bedroom doorway. There was no way someone had come into her room. NFW.
Over at her bed, she smoothed the comforter, which she’d put back to rights as soon as she’d gotten up. She checked under both her pillows. On her little side table, she checked that her old alarm clock, the radio one she’d had in college and still used, remained at a perfect right angle to the corner.
Nothing out of place.
She checked the drawers of her bureau and the shallow closet with her one-note wardrobe of practical, casual clothes. She even looked under the bed.
Just before she walked out, she glanced over her shoulder.
Across the way, there was a window seat full of throw pillows where, in theory, you could sit bathed in the morning light on a Sunday, and get cozy with the paper or a book, and sip chamomile tea in your robe and fuzzy socks. Maybe a fluffy gray cat with green eyes would curl up at your feet, and if you got a draft, you could pull a handmade quilt over your legs.
She had seen the vision clear as day the second she’d walked into the room. It was the reason she’d picked the house.
Of course, none of that Instagram-delusion had happened: She didn’t relax. She rarely read. She hated tea and didn’t have a cat. But the fantasy persisted anyway.
Out in the hall, she rubbed her face and did some mental math. Nothing breached and nothing stolen. So there had been another purpose to those obvious tracks—like a message to her that she was being watched. And she knew why it had been sent.
On Friday night, she’d spent two hours on the phone talking to the television producer at WNDK, and then she’d sent him photographs of the bait trap, the meat, and the printouts from when Rick had tested what poison had been used. She’d debated sharing a picture of the wolf—and in the end, she had forwarded the man one image and told him that they could use it, but under no circumstances take footage of the animal or disturb him in any way themselves.
A team was going to come and interview her in the office.
The hotel construction site was operational on weekends. She was willing to bet the producer went there. And the station had certainly called the corporate headquarters for a statement.
Lydia was aware that she had flimsy evidence to go on, nothing but the timeline of the work beginning on the site, and the traps being put out, and the three wolves getting poisoned. So there was a possibility that the hotel chain’s lawyers were going to get on the story and kill the whole thing under the libel laws.
They were good at killing things.
Did she call Eastwind? she wondered as she went downstairs.
Peering out through the panel of glass next to the front door, she looked over her driveway. She could just barely see the county road out in the distance.