Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [70]
It was in the midst of this train of thought that the alarm on Martin’s watch began to vibrate, signaling the prescribed end to his visit. Only once before had Martin been inside a client’s home for longer than he allowed, and that was during his recent Clayton visitation. Though the vibration of the alarm initially sent a shot of panic through his system, Martin focused on his success in the Claytons’ home and forced himself to return to the task at hand.
Option #2 was to alert Justine Ashley to the phone message and gift and have her intercept both before her husband could. Again, this would have to be done without exposing his identity to the client and without telling her how he knew about Laura’s error. While this option also seemed impossible, Martin developed a plan in which he would call Justine Ashley at work, claiming to be a UPS driver who was attempting to drop off a gift at the home. He would explain that the screen door to the porch was locked and would ask where he should leave the brightly colored gift. Alerted to the presence of a gift at the home a week before the party, Justine Ashley might then find a reason to go home ahead of her husband, in order to determine why a gift had arrived so early. She would then hear the message on the answering machine and be able to eliminate the evidence before her husband arrived home.
He eventually dismissed this plan as well because of the unlikelihood that a UPS driver would know the work number of a homeowner on his route. This too would appear suspicious. There was also no guarantee that Justine Ashley would come home upon receiving the phone call. She might just assume that the gift was from an out-of-state relative who had no plans to attend the party but routinely sent a gift every year. There was also no guarantee that Justine Ashley would check the messages on her machine upon arriving home, and the fact that Laura had not sent the gift by UPS might eventually come up as well.
This train of thought led Martin to consider creating a situation that would force Justine Ashley home. A broken water main, a rock thrown through the front picture window, or an electrical problem were all possibilities that Martin considered but eventually dismissed, finding no way to guarantee that Justine Ashley and not her husband would respond to the problem.
It was at about this time that Martin developed his contingency plan. More than an hour had passed at the table, and without a planned course of action, he had begun to grow despondent. Though he still felt as though he had heard Laura’s message for a reason and had been meant to help his client, he was beginning to wonder if he was clever enough to arrive at a solution to the problem with which he had been presented. Perhaps he simply wasn’t up to the task, or maybe there was no viable solution. The self-confidence that his success with the Claytons had bred began to wane, and it was amid this growing sense of dread that the pieces of the contingency plan suddenly fell into place.
If no other plan was formulated, Martin decided, he would move the gift underneath a table beside the porch swing, out of sight from anyone who wasn’t looking for it. He would erase the message from the answering machine and then trip the circuit breakers in the house, temporarily knocking out the electricity in order to provide the appearance of a local power outage. When he reset the breakers, electricity would be restored, but the digital clocks in the house would begin blinking their preset