Why? What was in there?
My mind jumped again to dead bodies.
Pushing that thought away, I wished I’d brought my purse in. My credit card would have come in handy right about now. Kevin had once shown me how incredibly easy it was to bypass a simple lock.
And this one was simple.
I didn’t bother checking my hair for a bobby pin—I never used them. I thought fast.
The desk. It would have paper clips. Sure enough, they were in the top drawer. An economy-size box of them. I grabbed one, unbent it.
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A second later the lock released.
Slowly, I opened the door.
“Ewww.” I stepped back.
Not a dead body, but almost as bad.
Mushrooms.
I shuddered.
Two small barrels of them took up two-thirds of the closet floor. There was an empty space on the left side that looked just the right size for another barrel. Shelves started above the barrels, right about thigh high, and went all the way to the ceiling. They were filled with everything from humon-gous jars of fat-free mayonnaise (ewww) to cans of chick peas, black beans, barley, and lentils (double ewww).
It was a storage closet.
Not an accounting book to be found. And I looked. Behind cans of mandarin oranges, bags of rice, spice tins. Despite myself, I even poked around the mushroom barrels.
If Bill had taken the accounting books from Greta’s house, he hadn’t brought them here. Not that I could find them anyway. Maybe he’d kept them at home? Less suspicion that way.
The office doorknob jiggled. My stomach lurched.
“Why is this door locked?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked around for a place to hide. My gaze hit on the closet floor. I might be able to make it . . . if I squeezed.
Hard.
“How odd,” Bill said. Muffled, his voice sounded menacing.
I ran over to the light switch, flipped it as I heard a key sliding into the lock. I fairly dove into the closet, became a contortionist, and closed the door behind me.
It was dark. Very dark.
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And oddly chilly.
And smelly.
For a second I had a panic attack about my deodorant again, then realized the smell wasn’t coming from me. It was the mushrooms.
I shuddered again. Mushrooms and I just didn’t get along.
Not since my mother made beef Stroganoff when I was six and forced me to eat every revolting bite. It probably had more to do with my mother’s cooking than the mushrooms themselves, but it had scarred me, and my stomach, for life.
I didn’t know a lot about mushrooms—just that I didn’t like them—but weren’t they supposed to be stored in a refrigerator?
I told it to be quiet, because I should have realized that myself. I really hated being wrong.
The office door swung open, its hinges in need of WD-40.
I held my breath, afraid Bill and Noreen could somehow hear me breathing. Despite the coolness, sweat trickled down the side of my head, tickling my ear. I rubbed it on my shoulder.
I heard a click, and light suddenly filtered through the cracks in the closet door as the overhead fluorescents in the office clicked and popped, giving me just enough hazy illu-mination to make out shapes.
When I started to see spots, I finally took a deep breath, but was suddenly overcome by the same
