The Boy from the Woods(27)
“No.”
“Where are you then?”
“Casing Naomi’s house.”
“You have a plan?”
“I do.”
“Tell me.”
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
Wilde hung up and moved closer to the house. Loads of homes now had motion detector lights that snap on when you approach. If that were to be the case, Wilde would simply sprint back into the woods. No harm, no foul. But no lights came on. Good. He kept close to the house. The closer to the wall, the less chance of being seen.
He checked the kitchen window. Bernard Pine, Naomi’s father, sat at the table and played with his phone. He looked nervous. Wilde circled the perimeter and peered in through the first-floor windows. No one else present, no other movement.
Wilde bent down and checked the basement windows. The shades were drawn all the way—blackout shades—but Wilde still spotted the small sliver of light.
Someone down there maybe?
He had little trouble climbing onto the second-floor overhang. He worried about the structure, if it could hold his weight, but he decided to risk it. There was a light in a corridor that shone through what appeared to be the father’s bedroom. He climbed toward the corner back window, cupped his hands against the glass, and looked into the room.
A computer monitor displaying a dancing-lines screen saver provided the only illumination. The walls were blank. There were no posters of teen heartthrobs or favorite rock groups or any of the expected teenage girl clichés, except, perhaps, the bed, which was low to the floor and blanketed with stuffed animals—dozens of them, maybe hundreds, in various sizes and colors, mostly bears but there were giraffes and monkeys and penguins and elephants. It was hard to see how Naomi could fit in the bed with all of them. She must have just jumped in, like she was living inside one of those claw-crane arcade games.
Naomi was an only child, so Wilde was pretty sure that this was her bedroom.
The window was locked with a vinyl lever sash lock with keeper. Routine security for a second-floor room. Most burglars don’t scale walls to reach second floors. Wilde was, of course, different. He reached into his wallet and plucked out a loid—short for “celluloid”—card. Better than a credit card. More flexible. He slid the loid between the two sash frames and moved the lever into the unlocked position. It was that simple. Five seconds later, he was inside the room.
So now what?
Quick check of the closet revealed the following: a pink Fj?llr?ven K?nken backpack on the top shelf, clothes neatly hung, no bare hangers. Meaning? He wasn’t sure. The backpack was empty. If she’d run away, wouldn’t she have packed it? Wouldn’t there be some signs of missing clothes?
Nothing conclusive, but interesting.
There was a time, Wilde imagined, where it would pay to check the desk drawers or perhaps look under the pillow or mattress for a diary, but nowadays most teens keep their secrets in their tech devices. The phone would be better to search, of course, the place we store our lives, and no, that wasn’t a comment on today’s youth. Adults too. Mankind has surrendered any pretense of privacy to those devices for the sake of…hard to say what. Convenience, he guessed. Artificial connections maybe, which might be better than no connection at all.
But it was not for him. Then again, real connections didn’t seem to be his bag either.
Had the police tried to ping Naomi’s location via her phone?
Maybe. Probably. Either way, he texted Hester to give it a try.
Naomi’s desktop computer had been left running. He moved the mouse, afraid that there might be a password blocking access. There wasn’t. He brought up her web browser. Naomi’s email information—name and password—had been saved for easy access. She was NaomiFlavuh, which seemed sweet and a little sad. He clicked and got in right away. He almost rubbed his hands together, hoping that he had hit the mother lode. He hadn’t. The emails couldn’t have been more innocuous—class assignments, college recruitment spams, coupons and offers from the Gap and Target and retailers unknown to Wilde with names like Forever 21 and PacSun. Kids today, he knew from his interactions with Matthew, text or use some sort of parent-proof app. They don’t email.
He stopped for a moment and listened. Nothing. No one coming up the stairs. He moved the mouse’s cursor up to the top and hit the history button. He hoped that Naomi hadn’t cleared her cache recently.
She hadn’t.
There were searches on eBay for stuffed animals. There were links to forums and Reddits that talked about collecting stuffed animals. Wilde glanced behind him at the bed. The stuffed animals had been laid out with some care. Several animals stared back at him. He thought about that for a second, about this girl who had been bullied all her life, how she must have rushed home after school, fleeing the taunts and abuse, maybe leaping high onto her bed, escaping into this lonely, self-created menagerie.
The thought flooded him with a surprising rage.
People had bullied this girl her whole life. If someone did more to her, if someone went the extra mile or forced her to do something desperate…
He bottled it and turned back to the task at hand. He still had the mask on his face. If by some chance Bernard Pine were to come upstairs or spot him—unlikely, really—Wilde would blow past him and run away. There would be nothing to identify him. His height and build—six feet, one eighty-five—would give them nothing.