Page 29 of Butterflies and Hazel Eyes
“I’m not bothered by your legs, Gulliver, unless they hurt; then I’m bothered. I don’t want you to be in pain when we’re spending time together.” I sat on the couch and tucked my legs under me. “Now, tell me what happened this morning. You took off, and I haven’t seen you in hours. Laverne called me several hours ago to tell me the marina guys had a chance to look at the motor. It turns out someone tampered with it. The wires were cut halfway through and the motor was drained of most of its oil. The people behind the vandalism knew either the lack of oil or the wires were going to strand us out there. I asked her if she told anyone where we were going and she said no. It seems strange that someone would mess with it there.”
“Taking into consideration what happened here while we were gone, it might not be as strange as you think,” he said grimly. “Last night the silent alarm was tripped. Mathias ran over to see what was going on since he was staying with Honey to keep an eye on her. When he got here, someone had broken in and was trying to get into the research lab. They escaped, and he never caught a glimpse of them, but he also doesn’t know if they found any information before he interrupted them. He turned the information and the tapes over to the cops when they arrived, but there wasn’t much to go on.”
“They broke in because they knew we were stranded out on the island.”
“Most likely,” he agreed.
“Did you find anything missing this morning?”
“No. An iPad was out, but it was locked from too many attempts at the password. And there were no fingerprints, which means they wore gloves.”
“The iPads concern me. I didn’t know there were iPads in the mix. How many and are there any other phones or tablets tied to the account?”
“We have four iPads, and we use them to document our research with pictures and video. Once the work is complete, we upload them to our computer server and wipe them. We don’t use a cloud.”
I shook my head in exasperation and sighed. “You think that means they’re safe, but they aren’t. I can promise you, the information is on a cloud somewhere, Gulliver. I need to check the iPads. I’m going to have to change passwords and encrypt the email. Unless you’re using the same email as the one for your website; then it’s already encrypted.”
He grimaced and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter because there is no cloud. I know you think there is, but there isn’t. I’m telling you, we erase the data once we upload it to the safe server, or what we thought was the safe server.”
“Nothing is safe. Even when we encrypt and protect, nothing is completely safe. The fewer places you have the data, the fewer issues you’ll have with it going rogue.”
“The good news is,” he said, winking, “there are only the four iPads. There are no other devices connected to it. I have one here in case you wanted to go over it. It’s on my bed. Would you grab it?”
“Sure.” I wandered behind his chair to the bedroom door, and I had to take a steeling breath before I stepped into the room.
Faced with his most personal space, I wanted to get in and out as quickly as possible, but the second I stood in the room, I realized that was never going to happen. In a daze, I stared at the mural before me. It encompassed the wall to the left of the bed, and I couldn’t draw my gaze away from the wonderment of it. The mural enveloped my senses with a field of clover and monarch butterflies that flitted from clover to clover. The room was small, but the mural put you in the middle of an endless garden of butterflies. I stared at it in fascination and wonder, waiting for one of the butterflies to fly over and land on my nose. I picked up the iPad, but I still couldn’t take my gaze off the mural.
That wall told me more about him than anything had thus far. I turned and left the room, stopping next to his chair with the iPad under my arm. “The mural is breathtaking,” I whispered. “Absolutely riveting, Gulliver.”
A slow smile lifted his lips. “Thank you. It took me a year to finish, but I’m happy with it. I discovered you could paint by number on your walls, too.”
“You painted that mural?” I asked in shock and surprise.
“I don’t have a lot of spare time, but I have nothing to do with what spare time I do have,” he explained with a shrug. “Someone had done something similar at a convention once, and I wanted to recreate it. It’s funny because I spent a year working on it, but no one gets to see it. I probably should have painted it on the wall in the front office.”
I sat on the couch and made myself comfortable again. “No, it’s perfect where it is. No one else would appreciate the scene the way you do, I’m sure.”
I scratched my temple to try and shift my head back into the cat-and-mouse game we were unwilling participants in. “Do you think the break-in is the reason we were stranded? That doesn’t make sense, though. They could have just done it when we were on the island.”
“The flaw in your logic is, we might appear remote out here, but we’re not. There are enough people around during the day that they’d report someone sneaking around the building. If the people behind this wanted in, they had to do it at night, and they planned it that way. They also know I live here, which means they had to be certain I was gone for the night.”
I sighed in irritation. “By stranding us in the middle of the lake, they had enough time to get the job done.”
He nodded once. “I suspect the person did just enough damage to get us off the island and halfway across the lake. They had to hope we couldn’t find a ride back, or it would be after dark before we did.”
“Man,” I said, my voice holding a tinge of fear, “someone is devoted to the cause to go to all the trouble of stranding us. They had to travel eight miles across the lake in a boat and mess with the motor without getting caught.”
“No one would think twice about it, honestly. The island docks are always full of boats in the summer, so they’d get lost in the fray easily. As long as we didn’t catch them in the act, they could do whatever they wanted to the boat, and no one would ask questions. If anyone noticed them by the motor, they would just think they were fixing it. Not a soul would know it wasn’t their motor.”
“They post a lookout to make sure we stay on the other side of the island, snip a few wires, drain out some oil, and they’re gone,” I finished.
“What I don’t know is how they figured out we’d be on the island. We didn’t talk about it in public, and I didn’t tell anyone I was going,” he pondered.
“We only told Laverne and she didn’t tell anyone,” I pointed out. “That means someone is constantly aware of what you’re doing, and they saw us leave on the boat and followed.” I groaned in a low, unhappy tone.
His face was pinched now. “It appears so. I’ll have to make things right with Laverne for the cost of the motor and tow. I had no idea someone would go to these extremes to get this information.”
“People will do anything if they think it will somehow improve their bottom line. Never underestimate the power of money, Gulliver.”
