street from theirs, like Columbella House, had the ocean tumbling away from their backyards. They just had mountains of sand.
Her backyard was accessible from the front with not even a fence between them. “Anyone off the street can get into your backyard.”
“Yeah, well, I never had to worry about that before.”
They turned the corner of her small beach cottage where two windows faced the sand dunes. She pointed to first one and then the other. “Those are both bedrooms. The first one is mine.”
Colin eyed the bottoms of the windows, which reached about waist-high. Anyone could climb through those windows. Before he clumped through the sand to the window, he asked, “I suppose you wouldn’t notice any footprints out of the ordinary back here, would you?”
Michelle looked down at the bumps and indentations in the sand and shook her head. “You can’t really make out footprints in dry sand, can you?”
“Not really.” He shuffled through the sand and crouched beside her window. “If you saw a disembodied hand, it’s because the hand’s owner was down here. You couldn’t see the rest of his body or his face because he was hiding below the window and reaching up with his hand.”
“Why would he do that if he were trying to break in or even peer through the window like a Peeping Tom?” She hugged herself and hunched her shoulders.
“Maybe he thought he could cut the glass first before reaching in to unlock the slider.”
She shook her head and her light brown hair slipped over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure he wasn’t holding a glass-cutting tool. He was scratching or almost clawing at the window.”
Colin mumbled more to himself than Michelle. “Why would you scratch at a window?”
“Huh?”
He ignored her question and brushed his fingers on the front of his sweatshirt, the muscle in his jaw jumping. He smoothed the tips of his fingers across the glass in a grid pattern—up and down and left to right. Then he moved on to the next quarter of the window. He sucked in a breath.
“What is it?”
Lightly, he traced the pads of his fingers over the rough spot on the windowpane. With his nose almost touching the glass, he scraped at the patch with his fingernail.
He held up his finger, dug the residue from beneath his fingernail with his other nail and rubbed the sticky substance between his thumb and forefinger.
“Colin, what did you find? Looks like a grain of sand to me, which wouldn’t be all that unusual.”
She’d crouched down beside him, and he extended his finger beneath her nose. “It’s adhesive.”
“Adhesive? You mean like tape?”
“Yeah, or more likely one of those two-sided adhesive strips.”
Her eyes widened and he could see flecks of gold in her irises. “What does that mean? I’ve never taped anything to the outside of this window.”
“I didn’t figure you had, which means someone else did.”
“How old is that stuff? It could’ve been my dad.”
He rolled the adhesive between his fingers. “It’s still sticky. Old stuff wouldn’t be sticky anymore, or it would be covered with sand. This isn’t.”
“I don’t get it, Colin.” A note of panic had crept into her voice and he cursed himself for being the one to keep bringing bad news into her life.
“Help me search the ground.” He tapped the window to replace the adhesive and dropped to his hands and knees. Michelle liked to keep active, to be involved.
“Wh-what are we looking for?”
“Anything out of the ordinary. A button. A cigarette butt. A chewing gum wrapper.”
She skimmed her hands across the sand, sifting her fingers through the silvery grains. “A button?”
“A button?” Colin sat back on his heels.
Michelle held out her cupped hand to him. “Not a button like from someone’s shirt, but a black button that looks like it could’ve broken off some machinery or something.”
Colin’s heart jumped in his chest as he held out a surprisingly steady hand to receive Michelle’s discovery.
She turned her hand over, dumping the object into his waiting palm.
He wedged the black disc between two fingers and brought it close to his face. He ran the pad of his finger along the smooth side of the disc, but it wasn’t so smooth.
The same sticky substance he’d collected from the window was present on the disc. He closed his fist around the button and cursed, a black fury beating wings in his chest.
Michelle dug her fingers into the sand. “What is it?”
Colin drew in a steadying breath to keep from smashing his fist into the wall of Michelle’s house.
“It’s a camera.”
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