“Turn it over,” she said. “You never know. Something might be on the back.”
He lifted a corner of the note and nodded. “There is something.” He removed the pushpin and flipped it over, then whistled.
“What’s it say?”
“Must tell Doreen about the murders. She’s the only one who will understand.”
There was silence at first, and then everybody looked at each other before staring at Doreen. Her eyebrows shot up as she asked Darren, “Is there anything else?”
He shook his head slowly. “What do you know about any murders?” he asked, looking at Doreen suspiciously.
“Nothing,” she said. “I know that she wanted to talk to me about something, so I was trying to see if she had left any notes about it herself here.”
“No,” he said. “Not at least at this point, at this place.”
“Somebody needs to go in there and take another look,” Nan said. “Why won’t you let Doreen?”
Darren looked a bit haggard, as everybody pounded him with questions. Finally he put his hand up and said, “Stop. I’ll ask Mack. Then it’s on his head whether he lets Doreen in here or not.” And he pulled out his phone and called Mack turning slightly away so no one was listening in. Not that anyone could hear Mack’s side of the conversation.
Finally he put away his phone and said, “Doreen and only Doreen can come in. It’s only because we’ve already had officers through here once.” He crooked a finger and turned to Doreen. “You can come in.”
She nodded and walked to the first light switch, then flipped it on. “Now let’s take a look,” she said with a big smile. And she headed straight to the night table.
“Why are you looking in there?” Darren asked.
“Because everybody knows that, when you have a small room, you put the important stuff—that you really want—closest to you at all times. Rosie spent most of her time in bed,” she said, “so anything she wanted to keep close would be here in her night table.” Doreen pulled out the drawer, dumped it on the bed, and then flipped it over. And, sure enough, taped underneath was an envelope with Doreen’s name on it. Without touching the envelope, she held out the drawer and said, “See?”
Chapter 16
Sunday Evening …
Darren quickly put on gloves and took the envelope from the drawer in Doreen’s hands and laid the envelope on the bed. He then took photographs of both sides of the envelope. Even as he did that, his phone rang. “Yeah, Mack, you need to come back here,” he said into the phone. She could hear the garbled voice on the other end. “Yeah, she found something. The guys missed it. … No, I don’t know how,” Darren said. “An envelope was underneath the night table drawer with Doreen’s name on it. I followed standard protocol and snapped photos of the envelope itself, which I’ll forward to you. I’m hoping there might be fingerprints or something on it. Yes, I know it’ll likely be Rosie’s only.”
He gave a sideways look at Doreen, who stood here staring at him. “Yes, she’s still here, and, of course, she wants to open it. I thought maybe you should come back and deal with this.” At that, Doreen fisted her hands on her hips and glared at him. He smirked at her. “Yeah, okay. Talk to you in a few.” He hung up and said, “Mack is on his way back.”
“The only fingerprints on that,” she said, “are Rosie’s. You know that, right?”
“Maybe,” he said, “but you know that we’ll also check it.”
“It’ll be another copy of the note she wanted to give to me,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “May I continue to look?”
He nodded slowly, but he handed her a pair of gloves this time. She snapped them on with a big grin. “And now it feels official.” She could hear the others at the doorway. She looked over to see Nan giving her a thumbs-up. Even Richie’s grin was broad, and the two of them were crowding out the rest of the seniors from the home. Doreen immediately headed toward the pile on the bed that she’d taken from the night table. She noticed a wealth of chewing gum here. A couple old letters, some medication that looked like pain pills that anybody could get from any drugstore, a couple greeting cards which Doreen opened and studied, then carefully laid to one side. “Did forensics go through here or just the cops who were looking for whatever?”
“Cops looking,” he said.
She nodded. “It makes sense.”
“It wasn’t a crime scene.”
“I know that,” she said. She kept rifling through the paperwork and found a little address book. She pulled it out, smiling. “I haven’t seen one of these in years,” she said.
He peered over at her. “I believe they said it was empty.”
She flipped through it and nodded. “It is,” she said. Except for the very last page, which was a little thick. She studied it carefully and said, “Except these last two pages have stuck together.”
“Let me see it,” he said.
She handed it to him and headed back to the rest of the pile. One long letter had been written to someone named Posie. “Nan, does Rosie have a sister named Posie?”
“Yes,” Nan said. “What did you find?”
“Rosie wrote out a long letter to her sister, but it was dated a few weeks ago. She never sent it.”
Nan just shrugged.
Doreen set it off to the side, wondering why Rosie hadn’t mailed it. As Doreen continued to sort through the night table contents, she heard a commotion at the doorway. She could hear Mack’s rumble coming toward her. “Now here comes trouble,” she muttered.
Darren chuckled. “No help for it,” he said. “This is definitely Mack’s department.”
“Why? Because he’s the detective?”
“Well, one of the reasons,” he said. “He’s also, as we would call it,
