Sand Dollars by Charles Knief Page B

he was standing next to the avocado tree.”
    â€œHow big was he?”
    She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell. It was just a glimpse. Then I ducked away from the window and called Juanita.”
    I went to the window. Nothing was visible in the dark beyond the blazing white pool of lights over the tennis court. “Do you have lights for the grounds?”
    â€œOnly the court lights. There’s the lights that shine up the trunks of the trees, but that’s just for landscaping. We rarely used the backyard after dark.”
    â€œIs there a gate from the alley?”
    â€œYes. Back near the garages. But it’s always locked.”
    â€œSo what happened?”
    â€œJuanita looked but said she saw no one. When she came back, I turned on the tennis-court lights and saw him again. Just for a split second, because when the lights came on, he ran.”
    â€œWhich way?”
    â€œBack toward the garages.”
    â€œDo you have a flashlight?”
    â€œJuanita does.”
    â€œYou staying up here?”
    â€œI’ll come down now. This is the best place to watch the whole backyard.”
    â€œJuanita is a good guard. She let me in. She was watching the front of the house, waiting for me. She was carrying a thirty-eight.”
    Claire’s eyes went wide. “She had a gun?”
    â€œAnd she was going to stand there and protect you with it until I arrived. Whatever you’re paying her, give that woman a raise.”
    She nodded. “I will.”
    Claire followed me down the stairs. Juanita was no longer in the entry and we found her in the kitchen, humming tunelessly, taking a tray of cookies from the oven. There was no sign of the gun. She smiled her wide, white-toothed smile when she saw us, a study in contrast to our previous encounter.

    â€œCould I borrow your flashlight?” I asked.
    She nodded. “Here,” she said, wiping a hand on her apron and reaching into a drawer, handing me one of those black-aluminum five-battery flashlights that cops carry, the kind that could be useful as a club.
    I stepped outside. The rain had stopped, but the trees dripped heavy drops of water and the gutter drains rumbled, a staccato drumming, covering any noise I might make. Or noise anyone else would make.
    I went directly across the broad, sloping lawn to the bushy avocado tree and shone the light on the ground near its trunk. It had rained so hard that any tracks might have disappeared, but the intruder was sloppy, or unlucky, and there must have already been mud from recent irrigation. Near the redwood fence were two impressions of a hard landing.
    I studied the footprints. People tend to land with their feet shoulder-width apart. It’s instinctive, not something we have to learn, although the paratroops spend a great deal of time teaching us to do things that way. Whether this guy had training or not, his feet landed about eighteen to twenty inches apart, center to center. That made him narrow shouldered. The ovoid craters were not too deep, either, telling me the intruder was not heavy. I had the impression of a slight, small person. A female, or a young slender male.
    Like the young gangster I saw with Stevenson.
    That was a path I didn’t want to travel down just yet, but I filed it away for future reference.
    The remainder of the footprints tracked across the lawn toward the tennis court. I followed them to the bright white lights and noted the clumps of earth littering an otherwise immaculate green surface.
    So Claire had seen someone out here. It was not her imagination.
    It would be handy for her husband if she made a report of a prowler, or several reports, and have the police find nothing. It would make her sound like a hysterical woman, seeing things in the dark. It could cloud the credibility of her claim of seeing her husband in Mexico.

    Was that the basis of this exercise? Or was there something else?
    Whatever it was, and whoever it was, it was