Finally.
As I stepped out of the elevator and realized it led directly into Susie’s apartment, I hit enter to take me to one of the several pages listed for a Kelly Leigh before I looked around.
That was also the exact moment I wondered if Susie had taken her cold medicine. It didn’t seem like a good idea, being pregnant, and maybe I should ask if she’d called a doctor for advice.
“Susie,” I called out distractedly, thinking to warn her as I tried the third page listed for a Kelly Leigh, due to the fact that it listed the page owner’s home state as Mississippi. I clicked on the link and waited.
And then Kelly’s page opened.
And I stopped all movement.
Oh, boy.
Chapter 17
“There you are,” Susie sniffed, wrapped in a warm pink throw, tissues in hand.
As the elevator door closed behind me, I swallowed hard, trying to manage my phone and my coffee with what felt like two left feet attached to my wrists.
Alas, I was all of a sudden clumsy. My phone fell to the gorgeous white marble floor of Susie’s apartment, sliding across the slick tile and almost landing at her feet.
She stooped to retrieve it for me, but I stopped her by yelling, “No!” Then I realized how my voice had echoed with panic and I softened it. “No, don’t bend. It’ll only make your stuffy head feel worse.”
Sure, my words sounded a little shaky and unsure, but I thought I’d pulled it off.
I raced to grab my phone from the floor, but Susie was quicker than me. She scooped it up—and then she stopped all motion, too, her brown eyes narrowing.
Holding it up between her thumb and forefinger, she sighed forlornly, as though I’d deeply disappointed her, before she stomped toward me, stopping on her way to type some numbers into a panel on a whitewashed wood buffet with gleaming silver handles.
Stuffing my phone in her back pocket, Susie stood in front of the enormous wall of windows in her gorgeously white and soft pink living room, overlooking the river and the Hawthorne Bridge with a maniacal gleam to her eyes.
My heart raced because I’d been caught. As sure as the day was long, I’d been caught. My hands instantly went clammy—so clammy, I wasn’t even really feeling the hot coffee.
I didn’t need any explanation. I knew why Susie was looking at me the way she did.
Good gracious, how does this always happen to me? I mean, this time I wasn’t even really doing anything but paying a visit to someone I thought I was beginning to forge a friendship with, who was having a tough time. I wasn’t snooping or poking anything—well, not actively anyhow. I was just trying to be a good person.
And now this.
I mean, c’mon, universe! Give an ex-nun a break!
Susie eyed me forever as my mind raced, and I considered what had to happen next.
I had to get the heck away from Susie Masters, that’s what had to happen. I began to back away, inching toward the elevator, but she nipped that effort in the bud.
She shrugged as she closed in on me. “Don’t bother. I told you, it has a code to lock and unlock, one I can easily change and no one else but the doorman downstairs has it. And now, it’s locked. I pay a hefty price to live here, but sometimes, like this time, it pays off. Besides, there’s really nowhere for you to go. I’m on the top floor. That kinda kills all escape routes.”
My eyes flew to the panel of buttons on the buffet, and it was then I saw her blue square of a passport next to her big pink Coach bag.
I didn’t have to ask her anything; she provided it as easily as she’d told me everything about her life that night in the bathroom.
Susie shrugged with an easy nonchalance. “Morocco. Maybe Switzerland. I’m not sure yet. I was thinking whatever strikes my fancy in the moment. Neither country has—”
“Extradition treaties with the US,” I muttered. I don’t know why that bit of trivia popped into my head, but it did. Again, Universe, what the heck?
Where are you when I need to figure out a crime? Dead. That’s where you are. I get nothing but silence from you until the last second when my life is in imminent danger.
“Bingo!” she shouted into the suddenly very quiet apartment. “No extradition. Money’s not a problem, I have plenty of that. It affords me the opportunity to do whatever I want to do…and if you hadn’t figured it out, I would have left tonight without a single word. No muss, no fuss.” She sauntered over to a drawer and pulled it open, lifting a false bottom out of it.
Then she dragged something shiny out and, of course, I knew what it was.
A gun.
Okay, that’s just it, Universe. I want to lodge a formal complaint. You suck big, ugly, oozing pustule boils.
Indeed, it was a gun. A small, shiny revolver pointed at my face. I’m not sure what kind of gun it is. I’m still learning gun models. I do know, it doesn’t really need a label. It’s the kind that can kill me. ’Nuff said.
How did this keep happening to me?
“Aren’t you going to say something, Trixie?” she asked, using her other hand to steady her wrist.
I licked my dry lips. “I’m not sure what you want me to say. The gun says it all. You’re going to kill me because I know too much.”
Her sigh was long and deep and rattled with her congestion. “And I hate it. I hate that you were the one who found me out. I like you, Trixie. I was sure we were on the road to a blossoming friendship. But you gotta know I can’t let you live, right? I mean, you know…”
I wasn’t entirely sure what I knew. I was experiencing
