Collectors: The mystery of the missing visitor
ALICIA BLAISDELL-BANNON
If there had been cartoon thought bubbles over their heads, all three would have said the same thing: "Awkward."
Jeremy had been walking to the last cottage — the unrented one — to see why the door was open, at the same moment Harry and Sylvia pulled up to their place and got out of their car. Looking, Jeremy could not help but notice, like a couple in love.
A couple from the L.L. Bean catalog, in love.
Was everyone patching things up except him, he wondered as he stood there, trying to think of something to say besides, "How nice: matching barn coats." Sylvia broke the ice.
"Heading to the beach?" she asked, wincing as soon as she said it, realizing, too late, that of course Harry knew now that's where she and Jeremy met to carry on their September dalliance.
"I'm going to see why the door to the last cottage is open," Jeremy said, as Harry stared at him. "I wonder if kids got in there last night."
"Why not?" Harry asked. "It wouldn't even make the top-10 list of strange things going on here this week." But he joined Jeremy on the steps to the cottage, Sylvia trailing behind. When all three were inside, they looked around in astonishment. Dirty dishes, soda cans, discarded napkins, an abandoned game of solitaire, a plastic chess set.
Someone clearly had been staying there.
"Did you see anyone here during the week?" Harry asked Sylvia, who shook her head while searching in the bottom cabinet for dish detergent. He looked at Jeremy, whose forehead was creased in a frown.
If he were a painting, it would be titled "An Idiot Tries to Think," Harry mused. It would be a miracle if they got out of the cottage before he set his brain on fire from the effort. What in the world did Sylvia see in him?
Thinking about a painting made him look to Miss Sampson's artwork, hanging above the fireplace. Cows and sheep. Cute, Harry thought, but not quite up to the standards of the harvest scene in Mandy and Fred's place. This must have been one of her earlier efforts.
Sylvia cursed as she cut her thumb on a pop-top. Turning to look at her, Harry noticed something on the kitchen table. It was a white, business-sized envelope, so he thought at first that the mysterious occupant had left a rent check. Or a list of complaints to the landlord ("1. Didn't like the fact someone got shot," for example). But, when he picked it up, Harry saw he was wrong. In a scrawling hand, someone had written "Please Deliver to Fred and Mandy." Harry was surprised.
But not nearly as surprised as he was when he saw what the envelope had been lying on top of.
Tomorrow: Cool, calm and collected.