had a reason to go into the basement.
Except, of course, when Ella had a hold of my arm and was leading the way.
We got to the door outside what used to be the volunteer locker room and she drew in a calming breath. “You ready?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. If there’s a body, or—”
“Oh, it’s nothing like that,” she said. She pushed open the door and flicked on the overhead fluorescent lights.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dull light. In the recent past, the locker room had been used for storage, and against the wall to my right, there were boxes piled on the tan linoleum floor. At the far, shadowy end of the room was a door that I knew opened up to stone steps that led right into the cemetery. Directly across from the door were two rows of gray metal lockers with a wooden bench between them.
“That’s Marjorie’s,” Ella said, pointing to the left, all the way down at the end of the row and farthest from the door. “It was just like that when I came down here.”
“Just like . . .” I closed the distance between the door and locker, taking a closer look. “It was open? It was —?”
Ella nodded.
I stood in front of the locker. Not only was it opened, the lock had been forced, and it didn’t take a genius detective to figure that out. The door near the lock was smashed and dented.
The contents of the locker itself looked as if they’d been put through a blender. “Ransacked,” I mumbled. “Just like Marjorie’s house.”
“What do you suppose they took?”
I’d been so busy examining the locker, I hadn’t realized Ella had crossed the room and was standing right in back of me. When she spoke, I jumped.
“Sorry.” She patted my arm and leaned forward. “What do you suppose they took?”
I shrugged. “If something’s missing, we can’t possibly know what it is.” I was tall enough to see up on the top shelf of the locker. “Head scarves,” I said, making a face as I plucked a pile of the nasty, filmy things out of the locker and handed them to Ella. “Our thief didn’t take them, so whoever it was, he had better taste than Marjorie.”
“That’s mean, Pepper,” Ella scolded, but I didn’t have to turn around to know she was smiling when she said it.
I poked through the rest of the locker. There was a ratty sweater hanging from the hook on the door, and in the main body of the locker, one of a pair of battered black loafers, an extra bottle of that gag-in-the-mouth gardenia perfume Marjorie always wore, and a pair of black polyester pants. The seam at the crotch was ripped. “There’s nothing but junk in here,” I said, stepping back to get an overall look and maybe a feel for what somebody could have been after. “There sure isn’t anything worth taking. Or is there?”
From where I was standing, the light reflected against something on the top shelf, all the way in the back that had been hidden by the scarves. I reached a hand in, and slid out a pile of credit cards.
“Holy—!” I counted them below my breath. “Six more,” I said, and I spread them out like a hand of cards to show Ella. “And all with different names on them. So Marjorie really did have a get-rich-quick scheme. I bet she was planning on using these babies little by little, and thinking that if she did, no one would ever trace them. Whatever our thief was looking for, it wasn’t these.”
“Which means . . .”
Ella had been in on all the same meetings with the FBI and the local cops that I’d taken part in, but I couldn’t blame her for thinking like a civilian. She’d never had to deal with the criminal mind before. “It means that whoever broke into Marjorie’s locker, it probably wasn’t Jack.” I didn’t need to fill her in on the details. Because of those meetings, she knew (almost) all about Jack. “If he broke into the locker, he would have taken any cards he found. He’d have to be thorough. Any loose ends might lead right back to him.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
This, I had to think about. I was relieved to think that maybe Jack wasn’t the killer after all. I mean, the thought of kissing a guy who’d just recently tossed a woman over a balcony railing was enough to make anybody shudder.
But I still didn’t have all the answers I was looking for, and not having them didn’t sit well with me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“But you’re going to find out, right? We need to get things back to normal around here, Pepper. A murder in the cemetery is bad for business. People are afraid to even come visit their loved ones. We need closure.” The look in Ella’s eyes was so hopeful, how could I possibly let her down?
In keeping with my promise to Ella, I did something I never, ever do except in the direst emergencies: I went into work on the weekend.
For one thing, there was that whole deal about how the detecting part of my brain worked better when I was in my own office.
For another, I wasn’t kidding when I said that the murder and the stakeout had kept us all on our toes. It’s not like I’m a cemetery whirlwind, but I do have work to do. And I was way, way behind on it all. Ella was nearly done with that fall schedule of hers, and she’d been bugging me about how many tours I had planned. It was early September. I had to get hopping.
My final reason for going into the office on Saturday should come as no surprise. Now that Scott was knee- deep in his case, we were talking on the phone, but he’d been busy, and we hadn’t been able to hang out together. Staying at home—alone—and risking the chance of Mr. Doughboy showing up at my apartment was not my idea of a good time. Even on the weekends, Garden View is fairly busy. After all, it’s never a good day to die, and most Saturdays, families come in to buy plots for their recently departed loved ones. Unlike a certain president, I was grateful for the commotion. With people coming and going, I felt safe. Since I didn’t have to worry about stalker boy, I could concentrate on my case.
That was what I was doing. Or at least it was what I was trying to do. Too bad my brain was stuck in a loop that went something like this:
Jack, Nick, Ted, Gloria, Ray, Doris.
Then it started all over again.
I was getting nowhere, and it was making me crazy. I’d brought my lunch and I’d just decided to step outside so I could sit at the picnic table behind the administration building. Maybe a little fresh air and sunshine would work wonders on my fact-clogged brain. I was headed out there, just passing the steps that led down to the basement, when I heard a noise.
I knew better than to go down there alone. But I’m not a detective for nothing. (I mean, I am since the whole Gift thing that got me into it in the first place wasn’t my choice. But even on my own and if I didn’t have this dumb Gift, I’d still be plenty curious. And have I mentioned plenty anxious to solve the case before Quinn did?)
With that in mind, I looked around for a likely weapon and grabbed the one and only thing I could find, a laser pointer Jim had recently used for a presentation to the Board of Trustees and had left out on the credenza in the reception area. If there was an assailant down there, I was ready. Maybe I couldn’t bean him with the pointer, but I could at least blind him long enough to run away.
Since it was Saturday and I wasn’t officially on the clock, I hadn’t been too worried about what to wear that day. Of course I still looked like a million bucks, but I was a million bucks in skinny jeans, an emerald green T-shirt, and sneakers. Good thing, too. Sneakers don’t make noise on steps.
I was at the bottom of those steps, holding my breath and wondering what to do next, when I saw that the door into the old locker room was opened a crack. I knew that wasn’t the way Ella and I had left it the night before. I crept closer.
And heard another noise.
It sounded like a muffled gasp, and I wondered if our burglar had caught some other employee by surprise and was holding that person hostage. Or worse. Just in case I needed it, I flicked on the laser and charged into the locker room.
If I had been a little less enthusiastic and a little more careful, I wouldn’t have interrupted Ray and Doris doing . . . well, what it was they were doing.
