by Fran Stewart
“Maybe he lost it and Mason picked it up.” I thought back to the number of times Mason had made fun of me for picking up stray bits of litter in the street. “Nah, forget that. Mason wouldn’t have cared.”
“So this is getting us nowhere.” Karaline hunched over the paper. With her height, she had to hunch quite a bit. “Blank blank stars. Hmm.” She looked around the room. “It wouldn’t be back here.”
“What wouldna?”
“The clue. This is a nothing room. There’s no character to it. Let’s look out front.”
“For what? What are you talking about?”
She spoke as if I were a three-year-old. “The clue has to be something that somebody could figure out easily, right? So let’s see what’s in the room out front that is part of the structure. Something that wouldn’t have been changed from year to year.”
“Oh! I see. You’re saying it wouldn’t be in, say, the wallpaper, because that could be changed, but it might be in the stone walls or overhead.” I thought about it. “Overhead would make more sense, because that’s where stars are.”
“I’ll grab the big ladder.”
I stuffed the papers into my pocket for safekeeping. “I’ll get a flashlight.”
“I will go look at the ceiling, if one of ye would please to open the door.”
* * *
We moved that ladder from one end of the shop to the other. We felt the surface up there to see if stars might somehow be embedded in the ceiling material. We shone the flashlight across every square foot, looking for something stuck on or in the ceiling. We tried it from different angles. Even the boarded-up hole, where the chimney pipe from an old potbellied stove used to go through the ceiling, yielded nothing.
Karaline stepped down from her turn on the ladder and rolled her shoulders back. I heard something creak. “We need to give up on this,” she said. “Those stars, however many of them, are sure not here.”
“Maybe we should call Drew. He might have an idea.”
“What I would like to ken,” Dirk said, “is why the person who made the holes didna find the safe if the directions in that first line were so clear.”
“Maybe he couldn’t remember the number. If he’d lost the piece of paper.”
“Good grief,” Karaline said. “If he’d read it even once, he’d know that first line said eighteen. That’s a pretty easy number to remember.”
“Why don’t we check?” I suggested. “Let’s see if he was measuring eighteen feet.” I stepped behind the checkout counter and rummaged for the measuring tape.
Karaline reached for the end of it. “I’ll hold this against the wall, and you can measure to where the holes start.”
“Did ye no want to move the bookcase first, so we can see just where the wee holes were?”
K and I looked at each other. Men. Logical. We laughed, and Dirk squinted at us. “What would be so funny?”
“Never mind, D,” Karaline said and made as if to punch him in the arm, but he stepped quickly back out of range.
“I don’t think you want to do that,” I told her. Between us, Dirk and I explained some of the things that happened when ghosts and people made contact. He and I studiously avoided mentioning those few seconds I had cried in his arms.
We slid the bookcase away from the wall, far enough that we could crouch behind it. Karaline handed me the tape measure, but stopped short when a knock sounded on the front door.
Harper? I squelched the thought. I wasn’t talking to him. I hadn’t forgiven him. It had better not be him. Maybe it was.
“You’d think they could read the sign,” Karaline said and headed toward the door.
I jumped in front of her. “I’ll get it.” She looked at me with one of those what got into you? looks. “It might be a customer. I’ll let them know how happy I’ll be to have them come back tomorrow.” And if it’s Harper, I’ll tell him where to get off. The knock repeated, three light taps.
I pulled back the side of the little curtain and peeked, but I didn’t see anyone. I opened the door a tiny bit and poked my head out.
No wonder I hadn’t seen him. Harper stood well back from the door and off to one side, his neck craned skyward.
“Checking out aircraft in the vicinity?”
He kept looking up. “Nope.”
“Then what are you looking at?”
“Come here and I’ll show you.”
Karaline reached a hand over my head and pulled the door back, almost knocking me off balance, but she grabbed me as I tottered. “You’re really going to have to work on your stability, Peg.” Before I could think of a good retort, she and Dirk joined Harper on the sidewalk. “What’s up?”
He pointed overhead, to something above the door of the ScotShop. “I think I found our stars,” he said.
I walked to his left side and peered upward. “What are you talking about?”
“Och, aye! The wee flags, like the ones in the history book.”
I stared at Dirk. “Have you been studying American history?”
“Aye,” he said rather smugly.
Harper, once again, looked at me funny. “Why would I need to do that?”
Karaline guffawed. “I see what you mean.”
Dirk looked offended. Harper raised a hand, like a traffic cop. “Would someone like to clue me in?”
“I was, uh, just thinking about the flags up there on the sign, like you said.”
“I didn’t say anything about flags. All I did was point.”
“Aye. I would be the one who mentioned the wee flags.”
“I know that,” I said to both of them at the same time. “We were just looking for stars inside, and here they were all the time out here, right in plain view.”
“I wonder how many stars the American flag had in 1915,” Karaline said.
“Forty-eight,” Harper and I answered at the same time.
“But the number might be twenty-four,” I added. “That’s how many stars are on each flag up there.”
Harper studied me. “How could you possibly know that?”
“My dad counted them when he installed the ScotShop sign.”
Harper opened the door for us all, and I had to pause right beside him to give Dirk the room and the time to get inside. Harper must have misinterpreted. “Am I forgiven, then?” His breath made a faint stirring just above my left ear.
“I haven’t decided yet.” I stalked after Karaline, leaving him to lock the door.
“We figured out the first line, Harper.” Karaline stood in front of the bookcase facing us, like a teacher before a whiteboard and raised her voice, although that wasn’t really necessary. “It’s eighteen feet from that wall”—she gestured to her right across the cash register—“to the edge of the safe.”
“No,” I said. “It’s eighteen feet from that wall.” I pointed the other way, indicating the opposite wall, the one closer to the street. I pulled the paper out of my pocket. “See?”
Karaline came up to my right side. Harper was on my left. Dirk stood in front of me and peered upside down at the code. “Look,” Karaline said, pointing to the original list. “Left side eighteen to wall. That means you measure from the left side of the safe to the wall.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what it says.”
“So, where’s the problem?”
“Why dinna ye use the metal marker to show what ye mean?” Dirk pointed at the measuring tape in Karaline’s hand.
She pulled out the end of the tape and thrust it at Harper. “Hold this up against that wall, will you?”
He shrugged and headed to his left, holding his end of the tape high so it would clear the various displays in the way. “Ready.”
Karaline shoved the bookcase farther away from the wall—I didn’t know she was that strong—and extended the tape to the eighteen-fo
ot mark. It fell about two inches short of the leftmost drill hole. “See? The paper was wrong. No wonder he couldn’t find the safe.” She pressed her index finger to the wall and motioned Harper to come see. The tape reeled in as he walked closer.
“You’re right, Karaline.” He frowned. “The code must be wrong. I wonder why?”
She nodded. “Does this mean we can’t trust the combination numbers, either?”
I thought back to the scene in the hospital room, when Harper had held up my kerchief and told me there was blood on the right side of it. Thank goodness I’d worn this thing. I slipped it off my head, still tied, the way it had been at the hospital. I lined Harper and Karaline up side by side in front of the bookcase with their backs to the wall. “Show and tell time,” I said, and stood in front of them, facing them. I held the kerchief in front of me as if it were still on my head. “Please point to the left side of this kerchief.”
Their hands shot out in unison, pointing to the side of the kerchief I held in my right hand. “Bingo,” I said. “Neither one of you has good spatial orientation.”
Needless to say, they looked at me as if I’d gone bonkers. I took the tape measure from Karaline and gave the end to Harper. “Would you please walk to that wall?”
Once he held it steady, I pulled it to the eighteen-foot mark, which lined up exactly one inch inside the doorway that had been cut out to allow access to the safe, a good three feet away from the drilled holes. I held my finger there until Harper joined us. “I rest my case.”
“The murderer, then, would have been thinking like the two of them”—Dirk pointed to Harper and Karaline—“while the person who drew up the clues must have had good . . . what did ye call it?”
“Spatial orientation,” Karaline and I said at the same time.
I was afraid Harper might object, but he just stood there, staring at the measuring tape. He held out his hand and I gave it to him. “Have you measured anything else with this in the last week or so?”
I thought back. “No, I don’t think so. Just when we measured the bathroom, and what we did tonight. And I measured the distance between the sheetrock nails.”
“Did you open the tape any longer than eighteen feet tonight?”
I looked at Karaline. She looked at me. “Maybe an inch or so,” she said. “Just enough so we could see the eighteen-foot mark clearly. Why?”
Harper turned and headed for the door. “Say a little prayer to the gods of forensic science,” he called over his shoulder before he scooted out, closing the door behind him. I locked it and walked back to the bookcase, thinking.
“He didna even bide long enow to open the wee safe.”
Karaline put a hand on my shoulder. “Did we miss something here?”
27
Open Sesame
“Looks like it’s up to us,” I said. “Are you ready for this?”
She grinned. “Like a cow at milking time.”
“What does that mean?”
She put a hand dramatically to her forehead like a silent film actress. “I can tell you didn’t grow up on a farm.”
I just looked at her.
“It means let’s go.”
I led the way to the bookcase. It took only a moment to shift the bookcase and pull out the wall panel.
I pulled the combination paper out of my pocket.
“Here.” She grabbed it out of my hand. “I’ll read it and you do the turning.”
I twirled the dial four or five times. “Ready.”
Dirk leaned forward over my shoulder. “Aye.”
“Don’t bump into me,” I said. “I don’t want to pass out.”
“I wouldna do that.”
“Hush, you two.” Karaline pointed a finger at us. “Now listen. Turn right to seventeen.”
They watched me. I could have sworn they were holding their breath. Come to think of it, so was I. “Okay—seventeen.”
“Now go four times around the dial to the left and stop on number five.”
We counted together, each time the seventeen reached the top. I paused and moved the dial to five. “Now what?”
“Right three turns and stop on either twenty-four or forty-eight.”
I rotated the dial three times. “Which do you think we should use?”
She studied the paper. “Don’t see it makes much difference. We’ll either be right or we’ll be wrong.”
What a brilliant observation.
“Twenty-four,” Dirk said.
“Why?”
He tilted his head to one side. He looked like Dorothy’s Scarecrow at the crossroads. “Why not?”
I stopped at twenty-four. “Okay. Now two turns to . . .”
“To forty-four.”
“Done.”
“One turn to sixty-five.”
I dialed even more slowly until sixty-five stood at the top. “Now I open it?”
“I sure hope so.”
Crud.
The second time we tried it with a forty-eight. I pushed the handle down, down, down. Click. I looked at Karaline, kneeling near my left shoulder, and at Dirk on my right. “I’m afraid to open it. What if there’s nothing in there?”
Karaline snorted, one of her less-endearing sounds. “There was something in there that somebody thought was worth killing over.”
On that sobering thought, I swung open the door and Karaline caught her breath. The scuffed metal floor of the safe held a stack of papers, bound together with a string, like bargain-basement Christmas wrapping.
We all let out whoops—half exaltation, half relief, half fear. I clapped my hands to the side of my head. “Ouch!”
“What’s wrong?”
“I shouldn’t have done that. I hit my boo-boo.”
She giggled. Dirk rolled his eyes.
“It doesn’t belong to us,” Karaline whispered.
Propriety warred with curiosity.
Curiosity won.
I picked up the stack and pulled on the string. It knotted. “Crudbuckets. Why does that always happen? Would you go get me the scissors, Karaline? They’re under the counter.”
We unfolded the pieces of paper one by one, stacking them tidily. There were maybe fifty of them, certificates for thousands of stock market shares. “Somebody’s really going to wish they had these.” Karaline leaned against my arm. “Don’t you wish it was you?”
I thumbed through the stack. “I’m not so sure. I’ve never heard of any of these companies. Do you know anything about Amalgamated Aluminum Excavation?”
She shook her head.
“American Standard Express, Buffalo Surety, Prince William Foods, the Pro-phy-lac-tic Tooth Brush Company. That one rings a bell.” I told her about the ad that said seventeen thousand dentists couldn’t be wrong.
“I guess they were wrong,” she said. “You mean these are worthless?”
“Looks like it. There may be something in here, but so far, none of these companies seems to have survived.”
“Think they went down in the 1929 stock market crash?”
“Economics is not my strong point, K.”
“Why would ye—”
She interrupted Dirk’s question and rubbed her knees. “Squatting is not my strong point.” She slid to one side, leaned against a two-by-six, and stretched her legs out in front of her. “What are you going to do with them?”
“I don’t know.” I fiddled with the door. It swung gently on perfectly quiet hinges, even though it hadn’t been opened in a hundred years. Amazing. “I don’t even know who owns the building, and I guess that would be who owns the safe.” I tied two pieces of the string together, rolled the useless stock certificates into a tube, and tied it tight. “I’ll take them to the property management office. They certainly will know who the owner is.”
“Don’t yo
u think we ought to turn these things over to Harper?”
She had a point. I thought for a moment. “I’ll tell him about them next time I see him.” I stood, brushing off my rear end, “It’s just down the street. Wanna come along?”
“I will go with ye.”
“I guessed as much.” I smiled at him. It was nice to have a ghostie by my side.
Karaline stretched her long arms and said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
She hooked her left thumb over her shoulder, almost as if she were hitching a ride. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice that.”
“Oh. That.”
That was a compartment in the upper left section of the safe. The lower left corner was discolored, the finish worn down to bare metal by the oils of a thousand fingerprints. “It’s locked,” I said. “What am I supposed to do about it?”
She pulled out her key chain and selected a small key. “Let’s just give it a shot. There’s always a million-to-one chance.”
“Karaline, that’s the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard. There’s no way that padlock key of yours is going to open a hundred-year-old safe. What’s it’s for anyway, your bicycle?”
“You don’t need to get huffy. It won’t hurt to try.” She slid over until she was right in front of the safe. “Wish me luck.”
I hate to admit it, but I did hold my breath again, silly as that seems. Of course, it didn’t work, and I exhaled with more disappointment than I’d expected. “Crud,” I said, the only word that seemed to fit. Dirk cleared his throat.
“You go on and take those certificates,” she said. “I’m gonna sit here and cry.”
I laughed and gave her shoulder a playful slap. “Come lock the door after me.”
“Why? There’s nothing left to steal.”
There’s still a murderer around. “Humor me.” I picked up the certificates and headed down the street.
* * *
There was yet another new clerk behind the counter. She stilled her thumbs as I walked in and stuffed something into her back pocket. “What can I do for you?”
“You’re Bethany, aren’t you? I recognize you from the grocery store.”