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He brightened. “You know what? I can at least dust those chrome bars and take some pictures with my phone if I find anything. No point trying the handgrips, they’re rubber, and those little arms beside the seats are fabric. But those metal push-bars are, yeah, ideal for prints. Did Zane or Canavan touch it?”
“I’m not sure, but I think just me. And Allie Bell, of course.”
He nodded. At this point we were still at the foot of the stairs. We hadn’t gone out into the garage yet.
“So I could find two sets of prints—yours and Mrs. Bell’s. Although unlikely. Most people would just use the rubber handgrips.”
“I think I reached down and tilted the stroller up to get it over the doorjamb and into her garage. If I did, I could have wrapped my hands on those rods just below the grips. You might not find fingerprints, but there would be palmprints.”
He nodded, and we went into Greg’s garage. He headed outside to get his fingerprint kit, but I took his elbow to stop him. “Look,” I said, and pointed at the stroller.
“What about it?”
“It’s been moved. When I brought it in from the courtyard, I put it next to the driver’s side of my car. Now it’s on the passenger side.”
So I had heard the squeaking.
“Can’t remember for sure.”
His frown—the vertical line between his brows so deep I couldn’t see the bottom—told me he did remember but didn’t want to believe it.
“Come on, Andy.” I used his given name deliberately, an old ad conference trick I employed when arguments got heated. I wanted us to be in this together, if possible. “You’ve been a police officer long enough for observation to be a habit. That stroller was in the shade. Now it’s on the other side of my car and in the sun.”
He thought about it and shook his head. “Couldn’t say for sure.”
I wanted to make him admit it, wanted to tell him I’d heard that squeaky wheel when the pram had been moved even if he hadn’t, wanted to shake the arm I was holding. Instead I let it go. It was hard, but I did it. Because I didn’t want him to think I was crazy… and if he thought I was the one moving the stroller at night between the Bell house and Greg’s, he was already halfway to drawing that conclusion. And there was Allie Bell’s weird holograph will for him to think about, too. Did he really believe Allie and I were bare acquaintances who had only met twice? Would I have believed it?
I had an idea the questions were just beginning for me.
“I’ll get my little kit,” Pelley said. “Although I’m not hopeful.”
He drove off in his pickup ten or fifteen minutes later, after reminding me again not to leave the county, saying it would be a real bad idea. He told me that he or one of the full-time county detectives would be in touch after the autopsy.
That was a long day. I tried to nap and couldn’t. On several occasions I thought I heard the squeaky wheel and went down to the garage. The stroller hadn’t moved. I wasn’t surprised. I had heard it when Pelley was sitting at my kitchen table; that was real. Later on it was something else. Imagination, you would say, but it wasn’t. Not exactly. I thought it was a form of teasing. You can believe that or not, but I felt sure of it.
No; I knew.
Once when I heard that squeaking (not real, but real in my head) and I went down to the garage, I thought I saw the shadows of snakes on the wall. I closed my eyes tight, then opened them. The shadows were gone. They hadn’t been there, but they had been. Now there was only the stroller, sitting in the sunlight on the cement garage floor and casting its sane shadow.
Around noon, as I was eating a chicken salad sandwich, I thought of oiling that squeaky wheel after all—there was 3-In-One on the worktable in the second garage bay—and decided against it. I didn’t like the idea of touching the stroller, but I could have; I wasn’t hysterical or phobic about it. Only I remembered the old Aesop’s fable about the mice that belled the cat. Why did they do that? Because they wanted to be able to hear it coming.
I felt the same about the stroller. Especially after Pelley dusted the chrome rods and found nothing—not even the random smudges and bits of dust he would have expected. “I think it’s been wiped. By your prankster.”
Looking right at me when he said it.
That evening I walked the length of Rattlesnake Key to the swing bridge. A long walk for an old man, but I had a lot to think about. I started by asking myself again if I was crazy. The answer was an emphatic no. The snakes in the tub and the waving hand could have been a stress-induced hallucination (I didn’t believe it, but granted the possibility). The stroller in the bathroom, on the other hand, had been there. I’d only seen its shadow, but the sound of the squeaky wheel had been unmistakable. And when it was in the garage, it had moved. I’d heard it. I didn’t think Pelley had, but he knew it was in a different place, although he didn’t want to admit it to me (or probably to himself).
The swing bridge was a 24/7 deal. That night it was being manned by Jim Morrison (“Not of the Doors,” he always liked to say), a guy who was probably older than either Pelley or me. We talked for awhile when I got there—the weather, the upcoming election, how Covid had emptied the baseball stadiums except for cardboard cutouts of make-believe people. Then I asked him about Mrs. Bell.
“You found her, right?” Jim said. We were outside his little booth, where he had a television, a beat-up easy chair, and a toilet cubicle. He was wearing his yellow high-visibility vest and his red cap with RATTLESNAKE KEY on the visor. A toothpick jutted from one corner of his seamed mouth.
“Yes.”
“Poor lady. Poor old soul. She never got over losing those boys of hers. Pushed that stroller everywhere.”
Which was a perfect lead-in for what I really wanted to ask. “Do you think she really believed the boys were in it?”
He scratched his stubbly chin as he thought it over. “Can’t say for sure, but I think she did, at least some of the time. Maybe even most of the time. I think she made herself believe it. Which is a dangerous thing, in my opinion.”
