The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason Page B

untouched. The dust has hardly been disturbed. Someone rifled through my papers, but only a framed reproduction of the
Hypnerotomachia
’s title page, a gift from my father, has been taken off the wall and opened. One corner is bent, but otherwise it’s undamaged. I hold it in my hands. Looking around, I spot a single book of mine out of place: the galley proof of
The Belladonna Letter,
before my father decided
The Belladonna Document
had a nicer ring to it.
    Gil steps into the foyer between the bedrooms and calls to us. “They didn’t touch anything of Charlie’s or mine. What about you guys?”
    There’s a spot of guilt in his voice, a hopefulness that despite the mess, nothing is gone.
    When I look in his direction, I notice what he means. The other bedroom is pristine.
    “My stuff’s fine,” I tell him.
    “They didn’t find anything,” Paul says to me.
    Before I can ask what he means, a voice interrupts from the foyer.
    “Could I ask you two a few questions?”
    The proctor, a woman with leathery skin and curled hair, takes a slow look at us as we appear, snow-soaked, from the corners of the room. The sight of Katie’s sweatpants on Paul, and of Katie’s synchronized swimming shirt on me, catches her attention. The woman, identified as Lieutenant Williams by the tag on her breast pocket, pulls a steno pad from her coat.
    “You two are . . . ?”
    “Tom Sullivan,” I say. “He’s Paul Harris.”
    “Was anything of yours taken?”
    Paul’s eyes are still searching his room, ignoring the proctor.
    “We don’t know,” I say.
    She glances up. “Have you looked around?”
    “We haven’t noticed anything missing yet.”
    “Who was the last person to leave the room tonight?”
    “Why?”
    Williams clears her throat. “Because we know who left the door unlocked, but not who left the window open.”
    She lingers over the words
door
and
window,
reminding us of how we brought this on ourselves.
    Paul notices the window for the first time. His color fades. “It must’ve been me. It was so hot in the bedroom, and Tom didn’t want the window open. I came out here to work and I must’ve forgotten to shut it.”
    “Look,” Gil says to the proctor, seeing she’s not trying to help, “can we finish this up? I don’t think there’s anything else to see.”
    Without waiting for an answer, he forces the window shut and leads Paul to the couch, sitting beside him.
    The proctor makes a final scribble in her pad. “Window open, door unlocked. Nothing taken. Anything else?”
    We’re all silent.
    Williams shakes her head. “Burglaries are hard to resolve,” she says, as if she’s wrestling with our high expectations. “We’ll report it to the borough police. Next time, lock up before you leave. You might save yourself some trouble. We’ll be in touch if we have any more information.”
    She trudges toward the exit, boots squeaking at each step. The door swings shut on its own.
    I walk over to the window for another look. The melted snow on the floor is perfectly clear.
    “They’re not going to do a thing,” Charlie says, shaking his head.
    “It’s okay,” Gil says. “Nothing was stolen.”
    Paul is silent, but his eyes are still scanning the room.
    I raise the sash, letting the wind rush into the room again. Gil turns to me, annoyed, but I’m staring at the cuts in the screen. They follow the border of the frame on three sides, leaving the material to flap in the wind like a dog door. I look down at the floor again. The only mud is from my shoes.
    “Tom,” Gil calls back to me, “shut the damned window.” Now Paul turns to look as well.
    The flap is pushed out, as if someone left through the window. But something’s wrong. The proctor never bothered to notice it.
    “Come look at this,” I say, running my fingers over the fibers of the screen at the edge of each cut. Like the flap, all of the incisions point outward. If someone had cut the screen to get in, the sliced edges would point