Broken by Matthew Storm Page B

on
one side that would have accommodated exactly one pair of shoes. If she had
planned to go away with her daughter, even for just a few days, I was sure
she’d have taken some of this stuff. Even I took more than one pair of shoes on
a short trip, and I was the least girly girl anyone had ever met.
    My hand
clutched the air where the handle of my gun would have been again, only to drop
back to my side. Something was very wrong here.
    I went
back to the living room to look around. This time I noticed that the carpet
near the door had been vacuumed recently, but only the carpet near the
door. That was odd. Looking closer, I could see that there were a number of
track marks still in the carpet. I knelt down to get a better look. Some of the
tracks had definitely been left by a vacuum, but there were other marks that
were too wide and deep to have been made by someone cleaning. Something with
wheels had been here recently, and it would have been something large and heavy.
I traced one of the marks with my finger. Luggage? No, the marks were too deep,
and they were in the wrong pattern. Two large objects had been here, each
having four wheels on a wide rectangular frame. They’d been wheeled in,
stopped, and then wheeled back out.
    I
couldn’t think of anything that made marks like the ones I was seeing, unless
someone had wheeled two upright pianos in here and then decided to get rid of
them.
    The
kitchen was on the other end of the living room, to the right of the entry door.
An enormous refrigerator was full of diet soda and other things to drink. I
opened one and drank half of it. Looking for clues was thirsty work.
    The
refrigerator had two crisper drawers. I opened one and took out a head of
lettuce. The leaves were black around the edges. There was a bag of carrots
that hadn’t been opened yet. I tore a hole in it and pulled out a carrot,
unsurprised to find it limp. All of the fresh vegetables were in different
stages of decomposition, all well beyond edible. They’d been in here untouched
for quite a while.
    A line
of cabinets was set in the walls above the kitchen counters. I opened them one
by one, revealing plates, bowls, glasses, and finally the liquor I’d been hoping
to find. There was no vodka but Heather had a bottle of good tequila that was
well outside my normal price range. I took it down and twisted it open. The
smell hit my nostrils with the effect that steak might have had on a starving
man. I took a long sniff, then treated myself to a small sip directly from the
bottle.
    It was
amazing stuff. The tequila went down my throat with a warmth that felt like
visiting distant relatives on Christmas. I took a deep breath, then chased the
liquor with a swallow of diet soda. That was better.
    I took
the bottle back into the living room and looked around again. There had to be
more to this story. What was I missing? And what was that ? I could see
what looked like a dark green scratch on the wall a few feet away from the
door, but it was just above my head. That hadn’t been anybody’s shoe, unless it
had a green sole and had been thrown with considerable force. I reached up and
ran my fingers across the mark. Something had definitely hit the wall here, but
what could it have been?
    A set of
shelves near the television caught my eye. It held an assortment of ceramic
animals painted in different colors. I saw an elephant, a camel, a family of
little dogs, and another family of cats. The figures didn’t appear to be part
of a single set; Heather must have been collecting these for years. But there
was a large space empty between a rainbow-painted gecko and a long-necked
giraffe. Something else had been on this shelf.
    I didn’t
see a trash can in the living room, but there had been one in the kitchen. I
went back there and looked inside the trash can, unsurprised to find several
green ceramic shards at the bottom of the bag. I picked them out one by one and
laid them out on the counter. It didn’t take long