Invisible Prey

cauliflower and eggplant and pine-scent spray, and old wood and insulation. There were creaking wooden floors with imitation oriental carpets, and vinyl in the kitchen; brown walls; doilies; three now-dried-out oatmeal cookies sitting on a plate on the kitchen table.
    An old electric organ was covered with gilt-framed photographs of people staring at the camera, wearing clothes from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. The earliest were small, and black-and-white. Then a decade or so later, color arrived, and now was fading. The organ looked as though it probably hadn’t been played since 1956, and sat under a framed painting of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child across the river.
    There was a blood spot, about the size of a saucer, on the floor next to the bottom of the stairway.
    “They took the ball,” Coombs said, pointing to the bottom post on the stairway. The post had a hole in it, where a mounting pin would fit. “They supposedly found hair and blood on it.”
    “Huh.”
    He looked up the stairs, and could see it. Had seen it, once or twice, an older woman either killing or hurting herself in a fall down the stairs. The stairs were wooden, with a runner. The runner had become worn at the edges of the treads, and Coombs might have been hurrying down to the phone and had caught her foot on a worn spot…
    “Could have been a fall,” Lucas said.
    “Except for the missing music box,” Coombs said. “And her relationships with the other mysteriously murdered women.”
    “Let’s look for the box.”
     
    T HEY LOOKED and didn’t find it. The box, Coombs said, was a distinctive black-lacquered rectangle about the size of a ream of paper, and about three reams thick. On top of the box, a mother-of-pearl inlaid decoration showed a peasant girl, a peasant boy, and some sheep. “Like the boy was making a choice between them,” Coombs said, still with the guileless voice.
    When you opened the box, she said, four painted wooden figures, a boy, a girl, and two sheep, popped up, and then shuttled around in a circle, one after the other, as music played from beneath them.
    “Is the boy following the girl, or the sheep?” Lucas asked.
    “The girl,” Coombs said, showing the faintest of smiles.
    “I think we’re okay, then,” Lucas said.
    Although they didn’t find the box, they did find what Coombs said, and Lucas conceded might possibly be, a faint rectangle in the light dust on the surface of the bookshelf where the box should have been.
    “Right there,” Coombs said. “We need a light…” She dragged a floor lamp over, pulled off the shade, replugged it, turned it on. “See?”
    The light raked the shelf, which had perhaps a week’s accumulation of dust. There may have been a rectangle. “Maybe,” Lucas said.
    “For sure,” she said.
    “Maybe.”
    “Only two possibilities,” Coombs said. “Grandma was killed for the music box, or the cops stole it. Pick one.”
     
    T HE HOUSE DIDN’T have anything else that looked to Lucas like expensive antiques or pottery, although it did have a jumble of cracked and reglued Hummel figurines; and it had quilts. Coombs had decorated all the rooms except the living room with a variety of quilts—crib quilts and single-bed crazy quilts, carefully attached to racks made of one-by-two pine, the racks hung from nails in the real-plaster walls.
    “No quilts are missing?” Lucas asked.
    “Not that I know of. My mom might. She’s started quilting a bit. Grandma was a fanatic.”
    “It doesn’t seem like there’d be much more space for them,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah…I wish one of the Armstrongs were left. I’d like to go to India for a while.”
    “The Armstrongs?”
    “Grandma…this was ten years ago…Grandma bought a bunch of quilts at an estate sale and they became famous,” Coombs said. “Biggest find of her life. She sold them for enough to buy this house. I mean, I don’t know exactly how much, but with what she got for her old house, and the quilts, she bought this one.”
    They were at the top of the stairs, about to come down, and Coombs said, “Look over here.”
    She stepped down the hall to a built-in cabinet with dark oak doors and trim, and pulled a door open. The shelves were packed with transparent plastic cases the size of shoe boxes, and the cases were stuffed with pieces of fabric, with quilting gear, with spools of thread, with needles and pins and scissors and tapes and stuff that Lucas