by Edie Claire
“Don’t bother,” Leigh said absently. “I’ll be there tonight, and I haven’t worn them since the nineties.”
“Women used to wear garters, you know,” Earl informed.
“I really do have to go,” Leigh said, moving toward the steps. “But thanks for catching me up on everything.”
“You think Lori Ann ever wore garters?” Earl asked.
“Not the kind you mean,” Merle answered.
“Bye! See you tonight!” Leigh said quickly, hastening down the steps and across the street. Assuming Bess was in the sanctuary, she headed for the front door and banged on it. There was no response. With frustration, she turned around to try the door in the parking lot. But she had only moved a few steps before she heard the door creaking open behind her.
“Hey, kiddo,” Bess said curiously. “I thought you left already.”
Leigh swung around again and moved through the open door and into the vestibule. “I leave several times daily,” she answered, planting her hands on her hips. “Why didn’t you tell me that Merle and Earl saw lights over here last night? Did you tell Detective Stroth that when he was here?”
A look of vague discomfort flitted across Bess’s face, but she dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand. “Oh, bosh. Why would I bother the detective with that nonsense? Or you either, for that matter? Merle and Earl are lovely people, but their imaginations are a little too vivid. I’m sure they were just confusing the times — the rehearsal went quite late, you know.”
Bess walked past Leigh and on into the sanctuary.
Leigh followed. “They seemed quite specific about the times, and they both saw the same thing,” she countered. “You can’t just dismiss this, Aunt Bess.”
“Can’t I?”
“No,” Leigh insisted. “You told me that you and Gordon have the only keys. Are you sure he couldn’t have loaned his out to someone without telling you? Or did you loan one out? To Camille, maybe?”
“Heavens, no,” Bess retorted. “She’d be the last person I’d allow in this building unsupervised. No one has had access to my key. As for Gordon,” she looked suddenly contemplative. “Well, it’s possible. I really don’t know what that man is up to.”
Leigh gave a summary of her conversation with Gerardo, minus his potentially inflammatory comments about his employer. The omission gave Leigh no qualms, as her aunt was obviously well aware of the state of Gordon’s libido.
“Yes, yes,” Bess replied rather impatiently. “Gerardo is a spy for Gordon and he’s reporting back everything I’m doing, yada yada yada. That’s all yesterday’s news. The man is conniving and manipulative, yes, but that’s just Gordon. It’s part of his charm, if you consider such things charming. But if you’re insinuating that he had anything to do with the assault on Sonia, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I know Gordon. He may be a high-handed little tyrant, but underneath all that bluster, he’s a lamb in wolf’s clothing. And you’ll just have to trust me on that one.
“Now, what was I doing?” Bess asked herself. “Oh, right. The water.” She began walking toward the stairs to the basement.
Leigh followed. “So you’re not just the teeniest bit curious why Gordon — or Gerardo — might be wandering around this building with a flashlight in the wee hours of the morning?”
“Of course I am,” Bess replied as she hurried down the stairs. “But can we theorize about it later? I have a thousand things to do before the show, and I just found out there’s no hot water in the ladies’ room, never mind that it was perfectly fine yesterday! And God forbid, if it’s anything Lydie can’t handle, I’ll have to call—”
She broke off as she opened the door into the basement. She held it open for Leigh, then shut it behind them.
“Do you smell that?” she asked, sniffing.
Leigh sniffed, too. “Gas.”
Bess’s lips pursed with annoyance. “Well, I suppose that’s good news,” she said without enthusiasm. “Probably just means the pilot light on the hot water heater went out, right?”
Leigh nodded. The odor, although distinct, was still faint. “Where is the hot water heater?”
“The boiler room,” Bess answered, moving toward a door along the front wall of the basement. “Well now, how did this get here?” she said irritably, running the toe of her shoe through a streak of dust on the floor. “You could have licked these tiles after Francie finished with them yesterday. Even the inspector was impressed…”
Bess’s voice trailed off as she opened the door and disappeared inside the gloomy looking space. Leigh hung back, further examining the dirty floor. The streak of dust was an odd whitish color, and it started at the boiler room door and angled away toward the stairs to the annex. Smaller patches of dust lay ahead along the same trajectory. She frowned.
She walked to the open door and peered into the boiler room. It was every bit as charming as she had imagined, complete with dimness, a low ceiling, variously sized pipes and ducts running everywhere, and multiple outdated-looking metal appliances. The one surprise was that despite its inherent dinginess, the space was amazingly free of dust and cobwebs. Which could only mean that it had recently been visited by one Frances Koslow.
Bess emerged from the back side of a particularly mysterious looking appliance with a sigh of exasperation. “Well, the pilot’s out all right,” she informed. “The tank’s cold. But darned if I can figure out how to light it. Doesn’t look like any hot water heater I’ve ever seen.”
Bess moved toward the door, but almost tripped over something on the floor. “What the—” She leaned down to take a closer look. “Oh for heaven’s sake, when did this happen? Francie cleaned in here! It looked perfectly fine for the inspector!”
She made her way back to the doorway and let out a gruff exhale. “I’ll go fetch Ned. I bet he’s dealt with this dinosaur before. I’ll have him clean up the mess, too. Honestly, it’s like a truck ran into the outside of the building or something! Be right back, kiddo. Of all the…”
Still muttering to herself, Bess crossed the basement and headed towards the annex and the exit to the parking lot.
Leigh remained in the doorway of the boiler room. Her body tensed. Someone had been snooping around down here last night, and whatever they had been doing, they had managed to leave a trail of dust across the floor as a result of it. What was it that Bess had nearly tripped over?
She pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight app. The one bulb in the room’s ceiling was beyond pathetic, and the ductwork blocked most of its light from shining where Bess had stumbled. As Leigh moved forward, she could see a rectangular opening in the original brick wall facing Perry Highway. Black soot stained the bricks all around the hole, which looked at first glance like a fireplace, but which was several feet off the floor. Leigh noticed the wooden frame bordering it and realized that it must be an old coal chute. With the original sanctuary being built in the early 1900s, the outside wall would have had an opening to the street with a wooden or metal hatch, through which the coal truck would have made its delivery. Inside, the chute would open to a coal bin.
Leigh looked at the area more closely. All the surrounding bricks were still black with coal ash, but the bin itself was long gone. The only thing beneath the opening now was a pile of broken bricks and chunks of mortar. It was this debris that Bess had tripped over. A mess that couldn’t possibly have been present when Frances cleaned yesterday.
Leigh’s brow furrowed. When coal furnaces went the way of horse-drawn buggies, the chute openings on both ends must have been bricked in. The rough remnants of a line of mortar were still obvious along the inside frame, where the debris on the floor must have come from. She picked up a broken chunk of brick left just inside the chute, and noted that unlike those in the wall around it, it bore no stains of coal ash. Yet even the newer bricks must have been placed a very long time ago. Why would they fall out now? She leaned over the pile and shone her flashlight up the chute. The bricks at the other end were still i
ntact.
That was weird.
She turned her light back toward the door to the basement. Enough of the boiler room for her. It bore entirely too much resemblance to the attic.
“Hey, Ms. Leigh,” Ned said politely, filling the doorway in front of her. “Don’t you worry about that hot water heater. I’ve lit that pilot before. I worked for the banquet hall, did you know? It was always going out.”
Leigh stepped back out of his way, but remained close to the exit. “I thought you worked for the dance studio,” she said absently, remembering the Pack’s warning about not being alone with him. She still believed they were judging the man too much on his appearance, but still — no way was she getting stuck in a boiler room with anyone whose tee shirt read “Magic Man.”
Ned smiled sheepishly and moved away from her and on into the room. “Oh, I did them, too. I expect I’ve cleaned half of West View at one time or other. I’ve done the water treatment plant and the chocolate factory — I used to work summers at West View Park, too. Cleaning up trash. Your mum likes to clean, just like me. She’s a good, moral lady and she says being a cleaner is important work.”
“Here, Ned,” Bess said, entering behind him with a giant flashlight. “You want me to hold the light for you?”
“That’d be fine, Ms. Bess.” Ned dropped to his hands and knees beside the hot water heater, and Bess aimed the light in his direction. “Yep, it’s out,” he announced. “I’ll have it lit in a jiffy.”
Leigh had been primed for escape, but now she couldn’t step out without both dislodging her aunt and disrupting Ned’s light. “What do you think happened to these bricks, Aunt Bess?” she asked instead.
“Oh, Lord only knows,” Bess answered. “I’m just glad they waited to fall out until after the inspector left.”
“Would anyone in the cast have come down here last night during the rehearsal?”
“A few of them do have to walk through the basement for entrances and exits,” Bess explained. “But I can’t imagine why they would come in here, no.”
Leigh considered the implications of the timing, and a growing chill began to gnaw at her insides. If the bricks had fallen out by themselves, how had a trail of mortar dust come to cross the basement on the other side of the door? Someone must have been snooping around down here, both inside and outside the boiler room, after both the inspector and Frances had left for the day.
But who? And why?
She shone her flashlight beam back onto the floor under the coal chute. Had someone busted out the bricks intentionally? There were enough on the ground to fill up the hole; if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the false front of the chute, they obviously hadn’t done it to steal the bricks. She stepped forward and pushed a few of the pieces around with a toe. Her gaze fell on what looked like a thick cigarette, and she reached down and picked it up.
The object was roughly a cylinder, about an inch and a half long. But its ends were wider than its middle. And as the significance of their curved smoothness hit her already confused brain, she felt suddenly weak in the knees.
She held the object between her thumb and index finger, and her hand began to shake. Slowly, she moved her opposite hand holding the phone light up beside it.
It couldn’t be. It really, really couldn’t be.
Her own hands had enough finger bones, thank you very much.
By no stretch of the imagination did she need a spare.
Chapter 16
“Aunt Bess?” Leigh said with a squeak. “What does this look like to you?”
Bess craned her neck, but couldn’t move without depriving Ned of his work light. “Can’t see that far, kiddo. Bring it over here.”
Leigh stepped over on shaky knees. Pretty much all of her was shaky.
Bess lowered her spectacles and squinted a moment. “Chicken bone,” she pronounced.
“Chicken?” Leigh asked weakly. “In a coal chute?”
Bess waved a dismissive hand — a hand which, it occurred to Leigh, had been doing a lot of dismissive waving lately. “A pigeon, then,” Bess conceded. “What of it? Lord knows how many bat bones are in the attic!”
“Bird bones are hollow,” Leigh stated. “This one isn’t.”
“So, a rat then,” Bess persisted. “Or a squirrel. What does it matter?”
Leigh could hear her own pulse pounding in her ears. Maybe she was thinking crazy. Maybe it was just an animal bone. If she’d swept it out from behind the furnace, she wouldn’t give it a second thought. But the facts were this. Somebody had been in the basement last night. That somebody had gone into the boiler room, broken apart the bricks blocking the lower end of the coal chute, left the bricks, and trailed mortar dust back out. Why leave a trail of dust… unless you were carrying something dusty?
Why bother at all, unless the object you were after was very, very important?
“Aunt Bess,” Leigh said more firmly. “Somebody was in here last night, and you know it. I don’t believe those bricks just fell out of the wall, and I don’t believe whoever did this was looking for squirrel bones. I think…” She swallowed hard. “I think this bone might be human.”
A loud thump made both women jump. At the word “human,” Ned had scrambled up from the floor and bonked his head on an air duct. Unfazed, at least by the air duct, he stood stock still for a good five seconds, staring at the object in Leigh’s hands with his eyes bugged and his mouth agape.
Then he pushed past Aunt Bess and ran out the door.
“Oh, now look at what you’ve done!” Bess said irritably. “Why did you have to say it like that? You’ll have the poor man hiding under the desk in the office again! And I need him to stay on here. We’ll never find anyone else willing to clean this place so cheaply!”
Leigh blinked in disbelief. Bess thought her behavior inappropriate? With Ned running and hiding under a desk… again?
“Aunt Bess!” she said even more firmly. “I’m no expert on bones, but you can’t just ignore the possibilities, here!”
Bess let out a harrumph. “I most certainly can.”
“You can’t deny that it could be human,” Leigh argued.
“But what are the odds?” Bess countered. “People find little bones here and there every day!”
Leigh raised one eyebrow. “Well, people didn’t find this one, did they? I did!”
Bess’s left eyelid twitched. Her determined facade began to falter. “Well, hell.” She plopped herself down on the edge of the furnace.
“We have to tell Stroth,” Leigh pushed.
“Oh, no, we don’t!” Bess argued, jumping back up. She glanced about with desperation. “Why don’t we just put it back where you found it? Nobody knows about it except us and Ned, and he won’t say anything if I tell him not to. We’ll just close the door behind us and go our merry way, and then first thing Monday morning—”
“No,” Leigh declared.
“But it’s obviously an old bone! Surely—”
“No!”
Bess crossed her arms over her chest and pouted. “Oh, I suppose you’re right. But I just know they’ll throw us out of the building again! And what if we can’t get back in by tonight? The box office opens at six!”
Leigh sighed. Realizing she was still holding what could very well be something she didn’t want to touch, she crossed to the chute and laid the object down just inside the remaining rim of mortar. Then she took her aunt by the hand, pulled her out of the room, and closed the door behind them. “Look, the sooner we call him, the sooner this will get resolved,” she reasoned.
Bess nibbled on a fingernail. “But if the neighbors see anything… if the press gets wind of it before tonight…”
Leigh considered. “We’ll call Stroth directly and tell him we want to show him something. Maybe he’ll just put it in a bag and that will be that. There won’t be any need for sirens and a coroner’s van… not for one bone, and not when we don’t even know whether it’s human or not. Right?”
Bess lo
oked faintly hopeful. “They’ll have to do testing or some such thing. Surely that will take some time!”
“Almost certainly,” Leigh agreed. “It could be days before anything at all gets reported by the media.” She wasn’t terribly confident about the last part, but as determined as her aunt was to open the show tonight — come hell, high water, or an apparently unlimited number of corpses — she felt justified in telling one white lie. They had not yet set up the bail fund, after all.
“All right,” Bess said evenly, “I’ll go call Stroth right now. My phone is… in the office.”
Leigh’s eyes narrowed with skepticism. “No, that’s okay,” she insisted. “I’ve got my cell phone right here. I’ll call him.”
Bess’s lips puckered with annoyance. “Well, in that case, I’ll go tend to Ned.” And with a flounce, she headed toward the stairs.
Leigh pulled out her phone, quickly talked her way through the county police’s switchboard — a process she was unfortunately familiar with — and left an urgent voicemail on Stroth’s private line. Bess did not return immediately, and after standing around alone in the empty basement for several minutes, Leigh began to get antsy. A part of her felt she should stay and guard the boiler room door until the detective’s arrival. But a stronger part of her couldn’t stand the thought of it — not when she had no idea when he might arrive. It could be hours.
She thought a moment, then was inspired. She sprinted up the stairs into the annex and opened a closet where she knew Bess had stashed some basic office supplies. Then she pulled out a clear tape dispenser and returned to the basement. After sticking about forty different pieces of tape from the door across to the frame at a variety of angles, as well as from the knob to the door, she declared herself satisfied. No one could possibly turn the knob and open the door and get all the tape back in the same configuration afterwards, including her Aunt Bess, whom she had no doubt was the most likely person to try it.
Leigh pocketed the dispenser, took a series of photographs of the tape on the door with her phone, then texted one of them to Bess with the caption, “Don’t even think about it.” Then she turned her attention to the dust trail.