Page 50 of Luck of the Devil

“She sent the video?”

“About ten of them.”

He shot me another glance. “Ten? Didn’t the neighbor say the woman only came over once?”

“Yeah. Maybe she went through the video files and found some other visits.”

She didn’t send any messages with the videos, but if she’d sent something helpful, I’d be happy to ignore the lack of niceties.

I opened the first video. My mother’s house was centered in the frame, which meant she’d been flat out spying on her. But I immediately forgave her once a black sedan pulled up in front of the house. The back passenger side door opened, and a woman got out. She shut the door and started heading up the front walk, as the car drove off. I kept my eyes glued to the screen, disappointed, but not surprised when I didn’t see a license plate. The woman reeked of confidence, from her perfect posture to her lifted chin and brisk stride. The front door opened and my mother appeared in the opening. Once the woman reached the porch, my mother stepped to the side and let her in. The video stopped seconds after that.

“Shit.”

“What?”

“I can’t see her face.”

“Can you see the driveway?”

“A little.” Hopefully one of the videos would show my mom and the mystery woman walking out to her car.

I pulled up the next video. After a couple of seconds, I could see the lower half of my mother’s body and her suitcase as she rolled it down the driveway alongside her car and then brought it to the back. She stood behind it for several seconds while she lifted her suitcase, presumably to put the bag in the trunk, then she walked along the side of the car again, opened the door, and got in. Seconds later the car backed up, out of the frame, and the video ended.

I told Malcolm what I’d seen. “The woman wasn’t in this one.”

He nodded to the side of the road. “There’s a rest stop up ahead. I’m gonna pull over so we can watch the rest of them together.”

I set my phone in my lap, trying to temper my disappointment. While the two videos I’d watched corroborated Becky Comstock’s version of events, there wasn’t a good enough image the mystery woman for me to show to my mother’s friends. There were plenty of other videos, but I had no idea what they showed. Mrs. Comstock claimed she’d only seen the woman that one time.

Malcolm pulled into the parking lot and pulled into a space in the back. “Show me.”

I started with the first video, then moved on to the second when he didn’t make a comment. After it played, I said, “At least we know Mrs. Comstock was telling the truth, but the woman’s not even in the second video. The first video is helpful, but not enough.”

“Play the next one,” he said, his gaze still on the phone.

I closed the second video, then returned to the text string and clicked on the third. The video began to play, and I immediately recognized that this one was from different a camera, aimed at my mother’s driveway and the neighbor to her left. It showed my mother walking down the driveway, pulling her suitcase behind her. The woman was walking in front of her, moving around to the passenger side of the car, only a tree branch from the across-the-street-neighbor’s tree blocked the view of the top of her body. My mother walked to the back of the car and put her case in the trunk, then got in and backed it up into the street. But when she pulled into the street, I could see the mystery woman’s face in the passenger seat. She’d rolled down the window, making the view as perfect as it could be from such a distance. She looked to be in her fifties or early sixties. The car pulled out of the frame as my mother drove down the street.

“Recognize her?” Malcolm asked.

“No,” I said as I pushed out a heavy breath. I looked over at him. “Do you?”

He looked slightly surprised, then said, “No.”

His reaction caught me off guard, not because he was surprised but because he’d let that surprise show. He was the master at covering his reactions, so if he’d wanted to hide his reaction, he would have. Did this mean he was letting me see the real him?

“Let’s look at the other videos and see if there’s anything else there,” he said.

I didn’t respond, simply loaded the fourth video. I cringed when it showed two dark figures slinking through the shadows as they crept down my mother’s driveway and to the back of her house.

“Is that Pinky and his dimwit Brain?” Malcolm asked. I knew he was talking about the men who’d broken into my mother’s house the previous week.

“No,” I said as the video kept playing, even though nothing was happening. “They came to the front door.”

Seconds later, a light flashed on in the living room window. It was covered in sheer curtains, so we could only make out vague shapes. Then the light turned off, and a bedroom light flipped on.

“There’re looking for something,” Malcolm said. “When was this recorded?”

I stopped the video and looked at the name, which included the date and time stamp. “Two Wednesday nights ago, at 9:11 p.m.”