The fondue was reduced to a crust around the edge of the pan, and the salad was gone. I unplugged the skillet and put it on the counter to cool.
“Now then,” Wade said, “you two owe me a story. And it better be a good one.”
I hesitated, feeling the knot in my stomach twist and tighten. I had to tell him.
“I, that is, we . . . we were worried about Miss Tepper. Nobody knows where she is, and I can’t get a straight answer out of anybody. Rick Gladstone promised me a forwarding address, but he hasn’t called. I had a key to the house, and so we went out to see if we could find some clue as to where she went. An address or a flyer or something from the place she’s moving to. Something like that. We figured there had to be something in the house.”
Wade snorted. “Dressed all in black, in the middle of the night? With all the lights off? You were just innocently looking for an address? Oh, please!”
“It’s the truth,” Sue said. “We are worried. You can turn us in to whoever it is that you think cares, but we were just trying to find out where she went.”
Wade bristled, and glowered at both of us. “Did it look like I was going to ‘turn you in’ to anyone?” he asked. “Or did I wait, and give you a chance to explain?”
His gaze moved to me, looking deep into my eyes. “I don’t want to see you get in trouble. Either of you,” he said, glancing over to Sue, then returning to me. “If anyone caught you in that house, with or without a key—which, you will notice I have specifically not asked how you got—you could be in serious trouble.”
I colored at the mention of the key. He knew I didn’t have any right to have the key, and he didn’t want me to try and lie about it.
“Wade,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. “I know this looks kinda bad, but there really is a good reason.”
He leaned back and crossed his arms, looking at me expectantly. “I’d like to hear it.”
“I think something happened to Miss Tepper. I don’t think it was her idea to leave, and I don’t think she’s coming back.
“Ever.”
Wade threw his arms in the air and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “All because of some sad story Paula Ciccone told you? I warned you about her stories! She dramatizes everything.”
“It isn’t just that.” By now I was practically begging. I wanted Wade to believe me; I needed someone besides Sue to share my fears.
“There’s the housekeeper,” Sue said. “She lived in the house, and when Miss Tepper moved, she lost her job and her home at the same time.”
I cut in, explaining about all the un-Miss-Tepper-like behavior, and our suspicions. Wade let me talk, though I could see it wasn’t changing his mind.
Finally, as I ran down, he shook his head. “I don’t buy it, Georgie. Martha Tepper was a nice old lady, sure. But she was tired of the cold and the wet, and she had more than earned the right to live where she pleased. She didn’t owe anyone in this town a thing.
“In fact, this town owed her. Not that she would think that way, but we all knew she did a lot for the community, even if she kept it quiet. Did you know she funded the first Homes for Help project?”
I shook my head. “That’s my point exactly. She had the money to do what she wanted. There are people who would benefit a lot if she went away and never came back,” I argued, not ready to give up.
“Like who?” he shot back.
“Like Gregory Whitlock. He’s going to make a bundle off that house, and even more off of developing the warehouse site, and you know it.”
“And there’s the housekeeper, Janis,” Sue added. “If Miss Tepper was deserting her, she might have felt she had nothing to lose. Desperation and anger are a bad combination.”
“I can’t believe you two.” Wade shook his head, and shrugged. “Look, I know I’m not going to stop you. You two are determined to keep up your so-called investigation, no matter what I say. So go to it. Have fun.”
He reached for my hand, and looked in my eyes. “But I need a favor from you, Georgie. Please.”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t about to promise anything until I heard what it was he wanted.
“Could you confine your snooping to daylight hours? To times that you might actually have a legitimate reason to be in that house?”
Wade grinned at me, lightening the tension in the room. At least he wasn’t threatening to tell anyone about our adventure.
“I suppose,” I said. I looked at Sue, and she nodded.
“Thanks.” Wade squeezed my hand and winked at me. “It would be darned difficult for me to explain to the rest of the Council if my girlfriend was arrested for breaking and entering. Especially if they found out I knew about it.”
At the word girlfriend, Sue’s eyebrows shot up, and her expression said, “I told you so.”
I ignored Sue’s gloating, and grinned at Wade. “Girlfriend? Isn’t that a bit presumptuous?”
“Maybe,” he teased back. “But it could happen. And a cat burglar just doesn’t fit with the rising young politician image, now does it?”
I frowned. “You mean this all has to do with your political image?” I pulled my hand away. “Is that it?”
“N-n-no, not at all,” Wade stuttered. “I mean, it was just a joke. I was teasing. I didn’t mean—”
Sue couldn’t keep a straight face any longer, despite my warning glance. She laughed out loud at Wade’s predicament.
“Forgot she was the star of the senior play, didn’t you?” she said between giggles. “She had you going!”
Wade looked at me. I smiled and spread my arms in a “caught me” gesture.
“Next time we have dinner,” Wade muttered, “we are not including your partner in crime.”
chapter 15
The problem with “borrowing” something, I realized, was that you had to return it without getting caught. I’d been lucky once, when Angie was distracted.
This time was proving a bit more difficult.
I stood near the schedule board, my left hand shoved in the pocket of my jeans where I clutched the key. Angie had decided she wanted to be more than just a receptionist, and she had been asking questions about my job for nearly ten minutes.
I answered in sound bites, designed more for brevity than clarity, and silently prayed for the phone to ring. I was back working the McComb site with Sean—Barry was still gone—and I had to leave soon.
Sean and I had reached a wary truce over the last couple days. I did my job and more, showed up on time, and kept my mouth shut. More than he could say for most of the men on the site, and he knew it.
“Are the classes really hard?” Angie asked. That was her biggest concern, was it “too hard” for her.
“No, as long as you’re committed to doing your best,” I answered.
“But you’re still going to school! Even though you already went to college, and you have a job, and everything!”
“It takes four years, Angie. You take the classes, then you get an apprenticeship while you take more classes, and you take tests to be sure you know what you’re doing. That’s what all the guys did, and that’s what I have to do.”
I moved a step closer to the key hooks, waiting for my chance. If nothing happened in another couple minutes, I would have to give up and try tomorrow.
If Barry didn’t show up in the meantime, and miss the key.
The phone rang, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I pulled the key out the instant her back was turned, and reached for the hook. Behind me, I heard Angie bang the phone down, with a curse.
“Salesmen!” she said. “They just—you found it!” Her voice rose at least an octave, the shriek threatening my eardrums.
“You have totally saved my life, I swear.” She was practically babbling, relief clear in her expression.
“That key has been missing since Barry left, and I was so afraid it was lost! I mean, at first I thought maybe he took it with him, but he would never do that, and then I was pretty sure
I had seen it after he left, anyway. But the hook was empty, and I just knew Barry was gonna be so pissed when he found out I lost it, and—”
Angie stopped to draw a long shuddering breath, and I took advantage of the interruption. “It was right there on the floor.” I waved vaguely at the gray, industrial-grade carpet. “Maybe a little under the edge of that bookcase, I think.”
I hooked the Tepper key in place, and fished the Beetle key from my other pocket. “Glad to help, but I gotta go. Don’t want to be late getting to the site.”
I was halfway to the McComb site when the shakes hit me. I seriously was not cut out for a life of crime. Just getting that key back on its hook was too much stress.
Not to mention the guilt. Not over taking the key, but the upset and worry I caused Angie. There was fallout from my actions that I hadn’t even considered, and I wasn’t liking it.
Not that I was going to give up my search for clues. But I would change my tactics a little. I would have to be patient until Barry came back, and I had a reason to be in the house.
In the meantime, I hadn’t promised not to look around the warehouse. Besides, it wasn’t in a residential area, where I was going to be noticed.
At least, that’s what I thought.
But when I just happened to drive past the warehouse after work, there were tape and stakes dotting the unpaved parking area. Spray-painted markings showed where various utility lines ran in and out of the building.
Gregory and Sandra were moving ahead with their development plans at the warehouse site. That answered the question about whether Gregory would benefit from Martha Tepper’s leaving.
Of course he would. And quickly, if the work at the site was any indication.
I was leery of visiting the warehouse in the dark, and there was too much activity during the day.
Fortunately for my impatience, Barry and Paula returned that evening. Barry called to tell me we were back to work on the Tepper house the next day.
I asked about his trip, and he answered, “Crisis averted,” in a relieved tone.
“I imagine you’ll be glad to give up digging that moat,” he continued with a chuckle.
“It’s not so bad,” I answered. “I think Sean has decided I’m not completely useless. But I’ll be glad to get back to work on the house so Sandra will stop calling three times a day, asking when we’ll be through.”
Barry’s tone grew serious. “Tell her to call me, Georgie. She needs to remember the chain of command around here. Your job assignments, and all the other schedule issues, are my problem, not yours.
“She may be your mother, but I’m still the boss.
“Just don’t repeat that to Paula.”
I laughed. “I won’t, but now that you mention it, I do need to talk to her. Is she there?”
Barry turned the phone over to Paula, and we arranged to meet after work the next day.
“Come on, guys,” I called to the dogs after I hung up. “We all need some exercise.”
And I needed to think. I locked the door behind us, tugging at the knob to make sure it was secure, and headed out.
Spring was giving way to summer, daylight lingering later each day. The weather still held a cool dampness, but there was a promise of warmer weather to come.
Pine Ridge often had a few dry weeks in the height of summer, but for most of the year it still held a hint of the rain and snow that gave the Great North-wet its nickname.
We walked along the shoulder, Daisy and Buddha exploring the damp grass and salal thickets along the side of the road as I considered what I knew about Martha Tepper’s disappearance.
We were just a block from Main Street. On impulse, I tugged the dogs toward the closed shops that made up the commercial center of Pine Ridge.
I found myself standing in front of the empty storefront, peering through the gaps in the brown paper taped over the windows.
I wondered if Pine Ridge could support a dojo. Not that I had any money to spend, or any idea what to do, but I knew I couldn’t be the only one in town who could use a little stress relief.
When I reached the Tepper house the next morning, I was surprised to see Sean’s battered pickup truck parked behind Barry’s behemoth.
Barry greeted me at the door. “Good to see you again, Georgie.” I suppressed a grin. Even on the work site, he couldn’t break the habit of holding doors.
“Sean’s here for a couple days,” he continued, leading me through the house to the kitchen. “The McComb site is shut down again; more permit issues. They’re going to end up spending as much on lawyers and permits as they pay us to build the blasted thing.”
I followed him into the kitchen. Sean stood waiting, three steaming cups of coffee on the counter next to him. He didn’t actually smile—but at least he didn’t growl—as he handed me a cup. “Morning, Neverall,” he said.
I nodded back at him, took the cup, and said, “Thanks.”
Barry motioned to the stained and chipped kitchen sink. “This is going,” he said between sips of the scalding coffee. “We need to replace the feed lines and the valves, and get it ready for the new sink and faucets.
“The moving crew is supposed to clear this place day after tomorrow, and then we’ll be able to work in the basement. There are a couple places where they replaced galvanized pipe with copper, and there’s some serious problems at the joints.”
I nodded my understanding. Galvanized pipe and copper pipe did not play well together. If they were directly connected, galvanic corrosion would eat away at the steel pipe. I allowed myself a moment of self-congratulation for remembering the classroom lesson, then turned my attention to the problem at hand: how to look for clues with both Sean and Barry around.
And Barry had just said the movers would be taking everything away in two days, so I had to work fast, if I was going to find anything before it all disappeared.
Barry assigned Sean to the bathroom, since he could work alone. Barry and I would tackle the kitchen.
I wrestled with the shut-off valves under the kitchen sink for several minutes, without success. They were in worse shape than the bathroom valves, and I finally admitted defeat, sliding out from the cramped undersink cabinet.
“Sorry, Barry. I can’t get those suckers to budge. Maybe we should just shut off the water at the street.”
Barry, however, had a large dose of stubborn, and was not about to give up. He grabbed a long-handled wrench for more leverage, and wiggled into the tight space under the sink.
He grunted and groaned as he tried to close the valves, finally asking for a shorter wrench. There wasn’t room to use the long wrench he had initially chosen.
As he struggled with the wrench, I glanced around the kitchen. Sue and I had searched it before, but we could have missed something. I slipped off my heavy work gloves and opened cupboard doors and pulled out drawers, confirming our fruitless search of a few days earlier.
“What are you doing up there?” Barry’s muffled voice came from under the sink, followed by a grunt of effort.
“Nothing,” I answered, trying to close the drawer I had opened without making any more noise.
“Well, how about going out to the street and finding the shutoff?” Barry said.
I smiled as I went out the door. He hadn’t actually said to turn the water off—that would be admitting defeat, after all—but I knew that was what he expected me to do.
Easier said than done. The front yard had benefited from the soft spring rain, and I guessed it hadn’t been cut since Miss Tepper left. I tromped through the thick, ankle-high grass, and dug beneath the fresh foliage of the bushes that defined the property line, looking for the shutoff.
I finally found the concrete cover a few feet west of the mailbox, obscured by the grass and a stand of calla lilies that had spread around the concrete vault that held the valve.
I passed Barry coming out of the house as I was going back in. “Need to check the truck for replacement parts,” he said. “Back in a
minute.”
I took advantage of the time, hurrying to the dining room. I wanted a chance to look in the drawers of the built-in china hutch, where Sue and I had been interrupted on our previous visit.
I opened the bottom drawer, which I hadn’t had time to search before, and peered inside. It looked empty, but there was a scrap of paper, caught in the back of the drawer, as though a corner had ripped off something larger.
I grabbed the piece, but it was stuck between the back of the drawer and the bottom of the drawer above. At least I understood how it had ripped off. I tugged, but it didn’t move.
I heard Barry open the front door. I had only a few seconds. Taking the drawer pull in my other hand, I wiggled the drawer while pulling gently on the scrap. It slid free, and I stuffed it in my pocket.
I pushed the drawer shut, praying it wouldn’t make noise, and walked back into the kitchen a couple seconds before Barry returned.
He looked disgusted. “I was afraid of this. It’s an old house, and I don’t have the right size replacement on the truck.”
He pulled out his cell phone and hit the speed dial. His suppliers were all on speed dial. He talked for a minute with Frank at All-Ways, then flipped the phone closed.
“Frank has the valves, but no one to deliver them today. I’m going to go pick them up, and you can help Sean with the bathroom while I’m gone.”
Not what I wanted to hear, but at least I got to stay in the house. Maybe I could look around a little more.
“I’ll tell Sean,” he said, heading down the hall.
I looked longingly at the china hutch, tempted to look in one more drawer before following him down the hall. But he was already curious, and I didn’t want to arouse any suspicion.
Barry roared off in his truck and I was left with Sean, and a bathroom that needed the fixtures removed.
“Let’s do this, Neverall.” Sean nodded at the toilet. “This has got to go before the floor guys can come in.”
Sean already had the supply lines disconnected. He motioned to the tank. “You want to get the tank bolts?”
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