Page 23 of No Pucks Given
I pulled a face since maybe I wasn’t in dad mode after all. I didn’t even think about the fact that someone had to stay here with Stephanie. But she was right. The kid should be protected, which meant one of us needed to stay here.
“Right.” Looking straight into my broken girl’s eyes, I said, “Do you want me to investigate things? If needed, can you be ready to go on a video call to determine if things are missing?”
She nodded, and I gave her a kiss.
Okay, that was it. My mission was to be her white knight. I didn’t care if they were still there. I would take them on if I had to, consequences be damned.
I grabbed my keys and drove my truck over to her place. It was dark, and at first glance, things seemed normal, which was a relief. It took so much work to get the messages cleaned off the last time, and it had hurt Siobhan so badly to be called a slut and a whore.
As I walked toward the front door, there was the distinct sound of cracking glass under my foot. Pulling out my phone, I turned on the flashlight to see what was broken. It was the glass panel on her door. It was broken just enough to get a hand through the door to unlock it.
I seriously wanted to go through the door, but I knew that would compromise the evidence. So, instead, I called the police and paced, which only caused the glass shards to break apart even more.
After what felt like a lifetime, the police finally showed up. There were two cop cars. The officers came up to me. “Mr. Carmichael. What seems to be the trouble?"
I pointed to the door with my phone flashlight. “Someone broke into the house.”
“Did you enter?”
I shook my head. “As much as I wanted to, I waited for you.”
The officers didn’t seem to care about that. Instead, they just put on some gloves and opened the door. The alarm went off. I wanted to silence it, but the police officers shook their heads, effectively stopping me in my tracks. Then I realized why. They needed to dust the panel for fingerprints.
The police officer whose arm blocked my path to the panel asked, “Can you silence the alarm from your phone?”
“Let me call my girlfriend. This is actually her house. She’s at home with her daughter.”
With that, I called Siobhan, and she was able to silence the alarm. Before she hung up, something dawned on me. The security alarm system should have called the police, but when I called emergency services, they said my report was the first report of the break-in.
“Hey, babe, shouldn’t your security system call the police when it’s going off like that?”
Siobhan replied, “It’s supposed to automatically report it when the alarm goes off for longer than ten seconds.”
Weird. But I wasn’t going to worry her about that just yet. We could easily reach out to the alarm company to make sure there was nothing wrong with the system. But that was a problem to deal with later.
In the background, I heard Stephanie’s voice call out for help, so I said, “Go. If I have more questions, I’ll call you.”
I thumbed off the phone call and pocketed the device. That was when one of the police officers called over to me. “Sir. We need your assistance over here.”
The police officer seemed to be almost a little starstruck. He was looking at me a little too hard. But just wanting to get this done and over with, I walked over to the area the officers were looking at. It was near the mantle where Siobhan had pictures of her and Stephanie taken over the years. Every single frame was smashed.
A guy was dusting the frames with fingerprint dust. I was a bit surprised to see that some were appearing. Hopefully, there would be some from someone besides Siobhan or Stephanie. Hell, even the cleaner would be a relief.
One of the officers said, “First thing first, we need to take your DNA to help with the exclusion process. Plus, we will need to do the same thing with your girlfriend.”
That all made sense, so I nodded. Before I could comprehend, a cotton swab was stuck into the side of my mouth and rubbed up and down. It just went so fast.
The officer led me around. “Do you know if anything is missing?”
I looked over everything with my flashlight. The temptation to rifle through everything was so strong, but I was good and didn’t touch a thing. There was one frame that I remembered held a photo of a baby Stephanie. It was empty.
“Um, I think a photo of the baby," I said.
Which struck me because it felt so personal.
They guided me through the house, and I tried to determine if anything was missing. As we walked upstairs, I noticed that the beautiful canvas of Siobhan and Stephanie standing at the water’s edge in Hawai’i was slashed to pieces. It wasn’t a photothat you could tell it was them, since they were completely in silhouette with their backsides showing. It was more akin to one of the artistic images. Stephanie loved to tell people about it.
When we got to the bedrooms, more things had been destroyed. But it was clear that nothing was really taken from the house. Maybe a photo or a toy here and there, but it was mostly just destruction and a way to cause fear. It all just felt so personal.
