That door was also locked.
Kai reached up and ran his hand over the top of the door’s casing. “We might get lucky and find the key.”
“Again?” I doubted Hattie was as careless as her granddaughter when it came to spare-key hiding, but started looking anyway.
Then I thought of something.
“If you witnessed a murder and knew people might be after you, would you put your key outside like Ronnie did?”
“No, but the landlord might. I had one once who required you keep a spare key outside.”
“Really?”
“He also charged you a hundred bucks if he had to come unlock your apartment.”
“Sounds like a nice guy.” I returned to the search for a key. After ten minutes of turning over every clay pot, loose brick, and anything else that might hide a key, we gave up.
“There might be a side door that’s unlocked.”
We traipsed around the enormous house and found not only a side door, but an attached greenhouse.
The windows of the glass structure were coated with grime. Ivy climbed up and over the roof, engulfing it in a nebulous mountain of green.
Brushing the vine out of the way, I tried the glass-paneled door and shook my head. Locked.
“There,” Kai said, pointing to the lower outside corner of the greenhouse.
The glass pane at the very bottom was missing.
We looked at each other for a long moment.
It was one thing to find a door open and walk inside, but crawling through a missing window took things to another level.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this,” I said. “I’m sure the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office frowns on its investigators breaking and entering.”
“Whoever Cornelius saw on that table was being tortured, right?”
“Right,” I said, understanding his point. “I’ll go through and see if I can unlock the door.” I squatted down and, careful to avoid any stray shards of glass, ducked under the metal frame and crawled into the greenhouse.
It took some doing, but I managed to turn the rusty lock and force the door open.
“Let’s hope those are unlocked,” Kai said.
I looked at the set of French doors leading into the house.
“Cross your fingers,” I said, and grasped the handle. It turned easily and swung open with a gentle creak.
From the outside the house looked abandoned. On the inside it just looked . . . preserved.
The doors from the greenhouse led to a large room that looked as if it had been used as an extended pantry–garden shed combo. A large farmhouse sink sat to one side, flanked by rows of shelves stocked with every size of canning jar imaginable. On one wall there was a long wooden table stacked with a variety of clay pots.
“Hello?” I said as we moved through the room and stepped into the main house. I doubted anyone was there, but didn’t want to frighten Hattie if she was.
“Miss Hallowell?” Kai called out. His voice carried a lot more than mine and I felt sure that even if Hattie was hard of hearing, she’d know we were there. We listened, but there was no answer. No sound at all.
“Maybe she got Max’s warning and took off,” I said as we walked through the dim interior.
“Maybe,” Kai said. “But I get the feeling Hattie’s not the taking-off type. Look at this place.”
I did. Everything was tidy, with only a light layer of dust, but somehow it felt like nothing in the room had been used for years.
We moved through a formal parlor and library and finally, into the kitchen.
“If Hattie isn’t here, where is she?” I wondered aloud.
The most obvious answer was that we were too late.
“Someone’s been here,” Kai said after opening the refrigerator. “The produce is still fresh.”
“So either Hattie very recently left or was very recently taken.”
Kai used the sleeve of his jacket to lift the lid on the garbage can. “Look at this.”
“It’s a broken plate,” I said.
“That used to hang on that wall.” He pointed to the far end of the kitchen.
“And?”
“These old platters are heavy. People usually use heavy-duty hangers to put them up.” He walked to the wall and studied it.
I followed his lead but didn’t see much more than a vague outline of a large platter, no nail or hook of any kind.
“How was it on the wall? I don’t even see a hole where a nail would have been.”
“These walls are plaster. A lot of people use a picture rail to hang things,” Kai explained, pointing to a piece of trim running along the wall about a foot below the crown molding.
I remembered seeing it done before in older homes. “Right—they use a cord and a special hook.”
“It would take a good bit of force to send a platter swinging far enough to dislodge the hook.”
“Maybe Hattie was moving the platter and dropped it,” I suggested.
“It’s possible but I don’t think so.” Kai leaned close to the wall and angled his head to look at it at a more acute angle. “See this?” He pointed at a smudge in the paint. “It looks like the platter impacted the wall and then was scraped sideways.”
I nodded, understanding the scenario he was seeing. “If you’re Hattie, and you’re running away from someone coming in the back door, and you stumble . . .” I mimed the movement as I spoke. “You could have crashed into the platter.”
“Exactly.”
I didn’t like the idea of someone chasing a grandmother in her own home, but it made sense.
“Let me record this, in case we need it later.” Kai took out his phone and began taking a video. Every once in a while he’d say something technical out loud—clearly for posterity and not for my benefit, because I had no idea what he was talking about. It looked pretty official so I stayed out of the way and kept quiet.
When he finished he turned to me and said, “Let’s check upstairs.”
We went through the house room by room. Only one bedroom looked like it had been used in the last decade. Finally, we made it up the stairs to the third floor, but were stymied by yet another locked door. Kai used the flashlight on his phone to inspect the doorjamb.
“The dust is pretty thick here. So are the cobwebs,” he said. “No one’s been up here in a while.”
I thought about the feeling I’d had the night before—that strange instinct that I was being watched from somewhere on this level of the house—but decided it was probably just nerves.
“Now what?” I asked as we headed back downstairs. I’d really been hoping our expedition would give us something to work with.
“We head back to Belinda’s and try to get a lead on Cornelius.”
“You think my sister’s map idea will work?”
“I think it can narrow down the area to search. Most of the city is a grid. It will take time, but if we can section off a few pockets where Cornelius might be, we can drive the grid and might get lucky and find him.”
“I keep wondering what I’ve missed. Cornelius has obviously found a warm place to sleep at night. I keep thinking that’s how he stumbled on Barry and Anya’s House of Horrors. But he never showed me anything that will help us figure out where. I just wish his memories weren’t so difficult to make out.”
As we reached the bottom floor Kai stopped and faced me.
“Grace, listen. I know you believe Belinda’s reading is true, and I’m not disputing it, but you can’t put too much pressure on yourself. You’re doing everything you can to help Ronnie and Hattie.”
I pulled in a slow breath and nodded. I hadn’t realized until then how much stress I’d been putting on myself.
“Okay, let’s find the Mystery Monkey.”
•••
Kai dr
opped me off in front of Belinda’s and went to park Bluebell in the lot. I stepped through the courtyard door into the kitchen, expecting Moss or, at the very least, one of the Pomeranians to greet me. But I found Emma sitting at the kitchen table alone. She looked up from the monkey map. “Hey, any luck?”
I shook my head, shrugged out of my borrowed jacket, and hung it on the back of one of the chairs.
“You?” I walked to check the coffeepot, hoping for some steaming brew. There was some left—yay!
“I’m making progress,” Emma said.
I poured the remaining coffee into a mug and went to look at the map.
“Heck yeah, you are,” I said. There were a number of red and black dots all over the paper.
“I decided to number the sightings starting with the earliest and color-code them. Red is a confirmed sighting. Black is a maybe.”
“Em, this is great.” I could see three areas on the map with a distinctly higher number of dots clustered together.
“What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a black triangle to the far right of the map.
“That is possibly the very first sighting.”
“It’s nowhere close to the others.”
She nodded. “I looked it up on Google Earth—there’s not much in the area aside from some swamps and the interstate.”
“Then who reported seeing Cornelius?”
“It was a 911 call from a motorist. Here—the cop working the case sent me a copy of the audio.” She hit a few keys on her laptop to bring up the file and pressed play.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
“Hi . . . Um . . . This is gonna sound weird, but I’m on the I-10 and I swear I just saw a monkey run across the road in front of me.”
“A what?”
“A monkey.”
“Okay, sir, you’re saying you saw a monkey in the road?”
“Yes, ma’am. Around mile marker . . . I’m just passing two forty-seven and it’s been a couple miles back east.”
“Okay, sir, we will send someone to check it out.”
When the call ended, my sister said, “On the plus side, the guy doesn’t sound drunk or crazy but . . .”
“It could have been anything running across the road. What time did the call come in?”
“Just before nine p.m. Which is why I’m not able to put this as a confirmed sighting.”
“It was dark.”
“It did make me wonder, though,” Emma said.
I thought I knew what she was going to say and my heart sank. “Someone could have dumped him by the side of the road.”
“Poor thing, can you imagine?”
I could. Sadly, people could be pretty heartless when it came to animals. I thought about Anya and how she’d been ready to shoot Coco just to slake her frustration.
“Did you ever hear back from Layla?”
“Yep. She’s got Coco at her place and is steering clear of Ronnie’s apartment.”
I blew out a breath and felt a little less tense. One animal safe. Now I just had to find a monkey and save a woman, and probably her grandmother.
I straightened, took a sip of coffee, and focused on the map.
“Looks like the hot spots are in Uptown,” I said.
“Yep,” my sister said. “Here and here”—she pointed—“and possibly here, in the Garden District. I say ‘possibly’ because there are a lot more ‘maybes’ than confirmed sightings so far in that area.”
“I thought Hugh was helping you go through the reports.”
“He was. He took the dogs for a walk. Though now that it’s past noon, I’m guessing he’s using them as an excuse to go to Fay’s Fried Chicken.”
“Again?”
“The man has a problem.”
“Maybe Fay adds crack to the breading.”
Emma shook her head. “It’s cooked in bacon fat, which is pretty much the same thing.”
I wouldn’t know, as I didn’t eat chicken or bacon. My elementary school class visited a petting zoo when I was seven. Since then, I’ve been reluctant to eat things I can have conversations with.
I opened the fridge and froze when I saw the container of baby kale and carafe of homemade dressing. Eyes wide, I turned to my sister. She was grinning. “You’re making the kale salad?”
“That’s what Belinda had to go get. I forgot to grab organic sunflower seeds when I went to the store earlier.”
My sister, who tended to use as many organic ingredients as possible, was trying to get me to nix processed foods—like doughnuts.
I can tell you this—if anything could get me to eat healthy it would be this salad. It was that good.
The chimes on the shop’s front door sounded. I knew it wasn’t Hugh and the dogs, since I would have sensed the canines, or at least heard Moss’s tags jingle.
When Belinda didn’t appear in the entry to the kitchen, Emma said, “Better go see if it’s a customer.”
She stood and hurried into the shop. A moment later I heard my sister say, “I’m sure Belinda will be back any minute. If you want to have a seat or look around, I’ll bring you some coffee.”
A man’s voice replied, “That would be great. Thank you.”
I winced inwardly, because I’d just swallowed the last of the coffee.
My sister walked into the kitchen as I was lowering the cup from my lips.
“Sorry,” I said, setting the mug on the counter. “I can make more.”
Emma nodded. “I’m going to take him some scones. Just bring the coffee out when it’s ready.”
I did as she asked. Thankfully, Belinda’s coffeemaker was pretty quick and let you remove the carafe without spillage. As soon as I could, I poured a cup, grabbed the cream and sugar containers, then tried not to drop anything as I hurried into the shop. The man was standing near the bookshelf. Emma stood to his left and was saying, “Belinda is very good. I promise you’ll be glad you waited.”
“Fresh coffee,” I said.
The man turned, saw I was juggling three ceramic containers, and took a few steps toward me to take the mug.
I froze.
He was limping.
I shot a wide-eyed glance at my sister. Emma frowned at my expression, her eyes narrowing as she watched him move. She raised her gaze to meet mine and mouthed the words, “Is this the guy?”
I started to nod but something under his jacket caught my attention.
I shouted, “Gun!” and tried to fling the coffee in his face, but he managed to sidestep, and everything, including the cream and sugar, went flying past his head.
The guy was too fast for me, but he wasn’t so lucky with Emma.
Before he managed to do much more than look surprised, my sister had taken him to the ground—hard.
He let out a grunt but recovered quickly. Shifting his weight, he tried to roll onto his back, but Emma was ready.
Moving like an octopus she wrapped her legs around his waist and snaked her arm around his neck.
“Say good night, sweetheart,” she said quietly in his ear.
He couldn’t, of course. The pressure on his carotid artery and vocal cords prevented anything more than a strangled gasp.
There’s a reason it’s called a sleeper hold. In seconds, he was out. Emma released him slowly and he slumped, motionless, to the floor.
That was when the shop’s door chime sounded.
I turned, ready to spin an elaborate lie for whatever customer was unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon the aftermath of our skirmish and heard, “Sweet Holy Mary Mother of Jesus, what is this?”
“Belinda, it’s you!” I said. The wave of relief hit me so hard I was almost giddy. I realized I was smiling like a deranged lunatic and tried to calm down. “This is the guy.”
She turned, and for a moment I th
ought she was going to bolt, but instead she engaged the lock on the shop’s door and flipped the sign to read CLOSED.
“We’ll explain in the kitchen,” Emma said. “Grab his legs.”
I’ll give her this, even though she looked scared out of her wits, Belinda hesitated for only a moment before hurrying to do as asked.
“I didn’t see this coming,” she muttered as we carried our burden down the hallway. “Why didn’t I see this coming?”
“Put him on the chair,” Emma directed once we’d made it into the kitchen. “We need something to tie him up with. I don’t want to have to hold him while we talk.”
“Got it.” Belinda rummaged through her ginormous purse and pulled out two silk scarves and pair of fur-lined handcuffs.
“What?” she asked, seeing my arched brows.
“Nothing.”
Emma took the cuffs with a shrug, and I worked on tying his ankles to the legs of the chair.
“Somebody tell me what’s going on before I have a heart attack,” Belinda said.
I went through what happened as quickly as I could.
“A gun?” Belinda looked horrified. “I do not like guns. Where is it?”
She looked like the idea of seeing a gun might make her faint.
“It was under his jacket,” I said.
Emma checked and shook her head.
“It must’ve fallen out.” I hurried into the shop and stopped when I saw what was on the floor. “Crap!”
“What is it?” Emma called from the other room.
I walked back into the kitchen and said, “Um . . . I may have jumped the gun a little. No pun intended.”
“A cell phone?” Belinda’s eyes widened as she stared at what I was holding in my hand.
“Grace . . .” Emma blew out a slow breath and closed her eyes.
“Sorry. But look at it. He’s got to be a bad guy with a phone case like that.” I handed her the phone. It was encased in a bulky, brushed aluminum frame with black rubber trim.
“It looks like the grip on a Smith and Wesson, right?” I said. “If you turn it, kind of to the side.”
“Really?” Emma held up the phone to illustrate how much it didn’t look like a gun.
“Hey, he’s in cahoots with Anya. My assumption was justified.”
Take the Monkey and Run Page 20