A Likely Story

by Jenn McKinlay

  “So, you don’t want to go with me?” he asked.

  “Go with you?” she repeated. “You’re okay with that?”

  “You left your box of books out there, didn’t you?” he asked. “I was thinking that would be our excuse to go, as I could help you retrieve them.”

  “That’s genius,” she said.

  Heathcliff reappeared with his toys, and this time Lindsey scooped up a couple of them and threw them inside.

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  “Are you kidding? If you hadn’t already kissed me senseless, I’d kiss you again,” she said.

  “I really don’t see what’s stopping you,” he said.

  He picked up the rest of Heathcliff’s toys and tossed them into the apartment. Lindsey laughed as she grabbed Sully by the jacket and pulled him close so she could show him exactly what she meant.

  * * *

  It was a miserably cold day. Lindsey huddled into her coat, pulling her scarf up over her nose. She glanced at the pewter sky, the barren trees along the coast and the fathomless water surrounding their small boat. Today was definitely the sort of day that signaled winter was not letting New England out of its icy grip anytime soon.

  Sully maneuvered the boat through the islands at a slow pace, keeping the boat’s wake to a minimum. Lindsey was in the seat beside his while Officer Kirkland sat on the bench at the back of the boat.

  Getting Chief Plewicki to agree to let them go back out to the island had required some fast-talking on Lindsey’s part along with the latest Deborah Crombie novel. Emma was a crime fiction junkie, and Lindsey had her short-listed for any bestselling police procedurals that came in. Lindsey considered it maintaining healthy interdepartmental relations to keep the chief happy, especially since her broken leg was making her a bit cranky.

  Emma had finally agreed to let her retrieve her books on Monday morning, but only after insisting that Officer Kirkland go with them. The newest officer on the force, Kirkland looked almost giddy to be going back out to the scene of the crime.

  “You all right, Kirkland?” Sully called as he made his approach to Star Island.

  “Yes, sir,” Kirkland said.

  “Great, then get up on the bow and prepare to jump,” Sully said.

  Kirkland’s eyes bugged, and Sully laughed.

  “On the dock,” he clarified.

  “Oh, right, on it!” Kirkland bounded from his seat and slid past Lindsey to climb around onto the bow.

  As Sully gently slid into the dock, Kirkland hopped down, taking the boat’s bow line with him and tying it off while Sully cut the engine. Lindsey hopped out next and tied the boat’s stern line, securing the boat for their visit.

  Lindsey glanced down the dock and noticed that Stewart’s boat wasn’t there. She felt a pang of disappointment but shook it off. It was better that it wasn’t here, as maybe it meant he was still alive. Then again, if it was here it might mean he was in the house, and she would really like to see him to reassure herself that he was okay.

  Officer Kirkland led the way up the stairs to the landing above. It was still crowded with junk. Lindsey exchanged a look with Sully. She was feeling overwhelmed by what they were trying to accomplish, and she wondered if he felt the same.

  Officer Kirkland went to step down into the yard, and Sully stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  “I think I should take point,” he said. “I’ve been here before and know where to look for the traps.”

  Kirkland shook his head. “With all due respect, my job is to protect and serve. You’re a civilian now, and although I respect your military background, I can’t put you in harm’s way.”

  Lindsey shivered as a cold draft shot up the back of her coat and made her shake. She wondered how long this would go on before one of them gave in.

  “I appreciate that, but I have actual frontline training that will be more useful than a few weeks at the police academy,” Sully said. He sounded irritated.

  “I graduated top of my class,” Kirkland argued. “I can handle myself here, and more importantly, my job is to ensure the safety of both you and Ms. Norris—Ms. Norris?”

  He whipped his head around the landing, looking at all the junk as if Lindsey might suddenly peek out at him.

  Sully glanced over his shoulder, but when Lindsey wasn’t there, he did a three-sixty, spinning around looking for her not unlike Heathcliff when he chased his tail.

  “I’m over here, boys,” Lindsey called from the porch at the house.

  As one, their heads snapped in her direction, and she waved. Kirkland looked relieved. Sully looked annoyed. Lindsey didn’t care. The house broke the wind, and she was much warmer over here than she’d been over there while they argued.

  “Don’t move,” Sully said. He led the way across the yard, leaving Kirkland to follow. Obviously, the debate was over.

  The third step had been boarded over, so that it couldn’t collapse on anyone. Still, both Sully and Kirkland stepped over it just as Lindsey had done.

  “Just because the police have been here and have thoroughly investigated the house doesn’t mean it’s safe,” Sully said. He gave Lindsey a hard glance. “Stewart could have come back and reset a lot of his traps.”

  “I was very careful,” she said. But she couldn’t deny his point. “But I won’t take that risk again.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Kirkland glanced between them and said nothing. Lindsey could tell by the look on his face that he thought this was a relationship thing. She had to fight not to roll her eyes.

  She gestured to the spot on the porch where her crate of books had been. It was bare.

  “The books aren’t here,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that’s where we left them, although I’m not completely certain.”

  “What do you think happened to them?” Kirkland asked.

  Lindsey shook her head. “Emma confirmed that no one from your department picked them up, so I guess . . .”

  “Someone took them, or perhaps they brought them inside,” Sully said. “The question is, who?”

  Lindsey didn’t want to say it out loud.

  “Stewart Rosen,” Officer Kirkland said. He stepped forward as if he would charge the house, but Sully put his hand on his arm, stopping him.

  “Or the person who killed Peter Rosen,” he said.

  “Which could be Stewart,” Kirkland argued.

  “Either of whom could be in there waiting right now,” Sully said.

  Kirkland’s shoulders sagged. “Right.”

  Sully took charge. He examined the door and noted that the trap hasn’t been reset and there didn’t appear to be a new one in its place.

  “Stay close and step where I step,” he said.

  “Ms. Norris, you’ll wait out here,” Kirkland said.

  Before Lindsey could say anything, Sully barked out a laugh. She raised her eyebrows at him, and he looked duly chastised.

  “Sorry,” he said to her. He turned to Kirkland. “You don’t have much experience with librarians, do you?”

  “Sure I do,” he said. “Mrs. Capshaw was our school librarian, and she was very clear that libraries are places of higher learning. She liked quiet and order, and she read a lot.”

  Lindsey glanced around him at Sully and said, “It’s like he’s talking about libraries from the Stone Age.”

  “What, did I get it wrong?” Kirkland asked.

  “Libraries aren’t really known for being that quiet anymore,” Lindsey said. “Too much going on. And while higher learning is awesome, we’re also the place where you can learn how to actually do stuff like knit, fix a car, build an ultralight airplane, you know—whatever you can think of, we can find the directions.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I need to visit the library more often.”

  Lindsey nodded in approval.

  “And although librarians like order, they’re also curious like cats,” Sully said. “Lindsey, here, might expire from inquisitiveness if we don’t
let her inside with us.”

  “Really?” Kirkland asked.

  “It’s a serious condition.” Lindsey nodded.

  “Practically a disorder,” Sully said. Lindsey frowned at him.

  “Well, okay, then,” Kirkland said. “But we stay together. This place has all the makings of a B movie horror film.”

  “Remember, step where I step, and if I say get down, jump up, or put your left foot in and shake it all about, do it without question,” Sully said. “Agreed?”

  “Yes,” Kirkland and Lindsey said together.

  Sully gingerly pushed the door open. Nothing jumped out or swung down at them. Still, Lindsey found herself crouching low, half expecting the board with the nails to be coming at her eyes.

  The three of them huddled in the foyer. It was cold and dark and so full of boxes and junk that Lindsey had a hard time getting her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

  “I’m not sure where to begin looking,” she said.

  She knew that Sully knew she was talking about a source for Peter’s emails, while Kirkland would be thinking she was talking about her box of books.

  “We’ll just have to take it room by room,” Kirkland said.

  Lindsey wasn’t positive, but she suspected he was chomping at the bit to investigate this house without Detective Trimble or Chief Plewicki breathing down his neck.

  She glanced at Sully and saw him looking at Kirkland with the same speculation she was feeling. He glanced at her and nodded. This could definitely work in their favor.

  They turned into the first room, and Lindsey felt a surge of claustrophobia kick in. The towering piles of old clothes, yellowed newspapers, stacks of dishes and flattened cereal boxes made her eyeball the piles as if they would topple down at any moment and crush her under their weight.

  She had to force herself to keep following Sully, who moved meticulously through the room, scanning the piles from top to bottom. They were halfway through the room when Lindsey realized that somewhere under all of these piles there must be furniture. She wondered how it was holding up under the weight of so much stuff. When she got home she was going to sort her linen closet just to make herself feel better.

  “The Rosens have their own power source as well as an electrical line, don’t they?” she asked.

  Sully glanced back at her over his shoulder. “Yes, the house runs on a combination of sources.”

  Lindsey nodded. If Peter was using a tablet, laptop, desktop or smartphone, he would need to plug it in at some point, which would mean access to an outlet, which was generally found in the wall. She glanced around the aisle of space they stood in. She couldn’t even see the wall, never mind find an outlet.

  “I don’t see it in here,” she said. She was hoping to get their little train moving to the next room, where maybe it wasn’t so crowded with stuff.

  Sully glanced at her face and reached back and squeezed her hand. She wondered if he could tell just by looking at her that she was having a hard time breathing in here.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s see what’s in the next room.”

  They moved forward, but it was slow going, and Lindsey knew Sully was still looking for any traps that had been set. Doorways seemed especially worrisome to him, and he paused in front of the entrance to the next room.

  He knelt down to examine the doorframe. “Kirkland, do you have a light?”

  “Always,” he answered, and he unstrapped a small flashlight from his belt.

  “Shine it down here, would you?”

  “Here, take my spot,” Lindsey said, and she and Kirkland maneuvered around each other so that he was behind Sully.

  “All right,” Kirkland said as he leaned down and aimed his flashlight where Sully directed. He was quiet for a moment and then he asked, “Is that a trip wire?”

  “’Fraid so,” Sully said.

  “Why do I get the feeling that wire will do more than trip you?” Kirkland asked.

  “Because it’s set up so that if you do trip you land right on the gnome statue holding the spear and impale yourself,” Sully said.

  “The what?” Lindsey moved so she could glance between the two men’s heads. Sure enough, a few feet into the next room stood a three-foot statue of a gleeful-looking gnome, which was doing sentry duty while holding a very sharp, very lethal-looking spear.

  “Well, that’s not very friendly,” Kirkland said.

  Lindsey shuddered. She couldn’t imagine having the last sight she ever saw be a red-capped, white-bearded gnome grinning at her just before being gutted by him.

  “No, it isn’t,” Sully agreed. “Especially since this wasn’t here before.”

  “What do you mean?” Kirkland asked.

  “Emma said that when the investigation team went through the house, they disabled everything,” he said. “There is no way they would have missed this.”

  “So Stewart came back,” Lindsey said. She glanced around, hoping to see her wily friend.

  “Maybe, or whoever murdered Peter, assuming it wasn’t Stewart, came back and set this up, possibly to kill Stewart,” Sully said.

  All three of them were silent as they thought over this information.

  “Can we just step over the wire?” Kirkland asked.

  “I’m checking,” Sully said. “I’d rather cut it to be on the safe side, but I want to be sure there aren’t any other nasty surprises attached to it.”

  Lindsey held her breath as he checked out the invisible fishing line that was strung just a few inches above the floor from one side of the door to the other. When he rose to stand and took a step over the wire, she felt her whole body tense up.

  She pressed her fingers against her mouth to keep herself from shouting for him to stop and instead held her breath, knowing full well that it did nothing to help him, and yet she couldn’t seem to force herself to breathe. Not yet.

  Once he was on the other side, Sully crouched low and examined the line. He took a pocket knife out of his jacket pocket and opened up the scissors feature.

  “I want you two to back up and take cover just in case,” he said.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kirkland said. “Can’t we just step over it like you did?”

  “We can’t risk forgetting about it and getting caught by it later,” Sully said.

  “Good point,” Kirkland said.

  He and Lindsey moved back the way they had come until Sully nodded. Lindsey noted that Kirkland blocked her with his body, which she thought was unnecessarily gallant of him and a little annoying since she was trying to see what Sully was doing.

  She heard Kirkland heave out a pent-up breath, and she figured Sully had just cut the wire. Nothing happened. No knives were launched at their heads, no fireballs flew at them. Instead it was eerily quiet.

  Kirkland rose, and Lindsey moved around him to see Sully. He met her gaze and pursed his lips as if to say phew. Lindsey felt her heart start beating again, and she sagged a little in relief.

  Creak.

  The noise came from directly above them and sounded just like a person stepping on a loose floorboard. Lindsey felt the back of her neck prickle with unease.

  “I’m thinking we have company,” Kirkland said, and he put his hand on his department-issued Glock.

  Lindsey glanced up at the ceiling. There was another creak, and this time it was followed by the sound of something being dragged across the floor. Uh-oh.

  Lindsey felt her heart leap up into her throat. At first, she was giddy, hoping it was Stewart, but then she remembered his boat hadn’t been at the dock. Either he was keeping the boat elsewhere or this wasn’t Stewart.

  She glanced at Sully. His head was cocked to the side as he listened. Kirkland looked about to say something, and Sully put up his index finger, indicating quiet for the moment.

  Kirkland nodded, and they all stood still, listening. There was another creak and then the heavy tread of what was most definitely a person stepping across the floor above them.

  “There’
s definitely someone up there,” Kirkland said. He looked as if he was about to pull his piece out of its holster, but Sully put his hand on his arm, stopping him.

  “Wait,” he said. “We don’t want any accidents until we know for certain what we’re dealing with.”

  “But—” Kirkland began to protest, but Sully shook him off.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  Kirkland nodded and left his weapon on his hip.

  “We have to play this very smart,” Sully whispered. “We can’t go up the stairs because the path is so narrow with all of the stuff on the steps that if it is the person who murdered Peter, they’ll be able to pick us off from above as easy as one, two, three.”

  Lindsey did not love this description.

  “We need to draw them down here, then,” Kirkland said.

  “No.” Sully shook his head. “This is not someone who is going to join the party if he hears us down here. This is someone who is going to jump through a window to get away from us if need be.”

  “So, we’re just going to wait down here?” Kirkland sounded horrified by the idea.

  “Consider it a stakeout,” Sully said.

  Kirkland’s frown cleared up at that.

  “We’re going to need to spread out to cover the downstairs so that he doesn’t slip past us.”

  “What about Lindsey?” Kirkland asked. “She’s a civilian. I don’t feel right about putting her in harm’s way.”

  “She won’t be,” Sully said. He turned to look at Lindsey, who had opened her mouth to protest. “No. No arguing. You’re going to wait outside and act as a lookout.”

  “But—” Lindsey argued, but Sully shook her off.

  “Remember what happened to Emma,” he said.

  Lindsey blew out a breath. She would never forget finding Emma under that table or the pain the chief had been in when they had moved her downstairs. Bad pun or not, she knew she didn’t have a leg to stand on to argue her case with Sully.

  The sound of footsteps moving across the floor above caused the three of them to glance up as one. The sound of something heavy being dragged right over their heads made Lindsey freeze, and she noticed the others did, too.

  She wondered what could make such a noise, and then she felt her insides grow cold with the realization that it could be anything in this house, even a body.