by K. J. Emrick
Jerry parked his car out front. He didn’t have one of the patrol cars today, which Cookie was happy about. She didn’t want to draw a lot of attention down on her. She wanted to get in, find what she was looking for, and leave again. The quicker, the better. It was hard enough holding in her emotions over Sheila’s death. Being here was making it harder.
When she and Jerry walked in with Cream on his leash, the secretary at the front desk smiled and greeted her by name. Cookie explained she was here to pay her respects to Sheila, and that she was just going to pop up to her apartment for a moment. The woman stared uncertainly at her, but then her gaze drifted to Jerry, and she nodded that it would be fine as long as she didn’t stay there for very long. Apparently, the uniform of the Widow’s Rest police department made up for any suspicions about what a longtime friend like Cookie might want in Sheila’s rooms.
The tiled floor had lines painted on it leading off in different directions, guiding guests and residents to different areas. Blue for the back courtyard, red for the cafeteria, and others. Yellow led them to the elevators for the second level.
As they waited for the elevator doors to open, Cookie found herself thinking back again to all the times that she had come here to see Sheila. Those had been happy times, catching up on life and sharing secrets and hopes and dreams. Sheila would talk about her daughter, and that good-for-nothing boyfriend of hers, as she put it. Cookie would talk about her bakery, and how proud she was of Clarissa, and about her love for Jerry. There had been talks about wedding plans for a while, too, but those had ended once it became obvious that their wedding was on a sort of permanent hold. All in all, the times she had spent with Sheila had been happy ones.
This time, her feet felt like she was wearing shoes made out of cement. It was hard to make herself go up to Sheila’s apartment. She dreaded going in there and having the reality of her friend’s death brought home to her. If she wanted to find the information she had remembered, however, this was the only way.
“The services are tomorrow,” Jerry told her quietly as the elevator brought them up. “I figured we could go together.”
“Yes, I would like that,” she told him. “Thank you.”
They passed a few of the other residents in the second-floor hall, and they nodded a greeting but didn’t have anything to say. No one seemed to, in fact. They all seemed to be lost in their own world. They all seemed sad. This was a place where people came to spend the remainder of their days. Yesterday, death had come for one of them far too soon.
At the door to Sheila’s apartment, Jerry reached out and wiped a tear away from Cookie’s cheek. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
Cream whuffed up at her, apparently agreeing with Jerry.
“Both of you can just hush,” she told them. “This is important. Amanda is missing and we have to find her. I think I might have an idea where she is but I need to find something in Sheila’s apartment.”
“We could look for you…” Jerry started to offer.
“It’s not like I can tell you where to look, Jerry. I know what I’m looking for but Sheila isn’t exactly the neatest person. She has her own organizational system and it usually involves putting one thing on top of another until there’s no more room.” She chuckled at a memory. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to help her find her glasses.”
From the pocket of her slacks she took out her ring of keys. Her apartment, her car, her bakery, and a few others. The one she was looking for was right here. A spare key to Sheila’s apartment. A few months back Sheila had gone on a little vacation and asked Cookie to watch over her place. The key had never found its way back.
The apartments were private. There were no roommates allowed here unless the people were a couple. Sheila hadn’t been with a man since… oh, several years now. Cookie had known her last boyfriend. He was… an interesting man, to say the least. That relationship had broken off rather suddenly, as Cookie recalled, and Sheila hadn’t dated anyone seriously since him. He was in Canada now, she thought. Or maybe it was England. He was some big world traveler. A business owner, or something. She never really got to know him before he was gone.
When the door swung open she stood there for a moment, feeling odd about going in. Her friend was gone and all that remained of her were memories like the one Cookie had just been lost in. Yet, it was like her spirit remained to fill this space.
Jerry held her hand, urging her to take as much time as she needed.
It was actually Cream who went in first. He padded in as far as his leash would allow him, and then looked back over his shoulder at them. His tail wagged. He was obviously wondering what they were waiting for.
Cookie smiled down at him. Such a smart dog.
“He’s right,” she said to Jerry. “There’s no time to waste on… oh my…”
Sheila’s apartment was even more of a mess than Cookie remembered it being. Instead of the neat piles of important papers on shelves and instead of the orderly stack of magazines that had covered one end of the coffee table between the couch and the rocking chair, everything was spread out, or pushed over onto the carpeted floor. The cushions on the couch were out of place. The curtains on the window were half closed on one side. Past the living space, in the kitchen, they could see that cupboards had been left open and the contents pushed through. Someone had gone through the apartment looking for something, and they had been in a hurry while they were doing it.
“People from your department?” she asked, thinking perhaps the police had done a look through Sheila’s apartment in connection with the investigation.
But Jerry shook his head. “No. This wasn’t us. We didn’t bother checking on her apartment yesterday because we all thought we had our suspect already. I think Detective Kent was scheduled to do it this afternoon.” He sighed. “Now I’ll have to call someone in to do a forensic check of the whole place. Dust for prints, interview the neighbors, all of that. I can just picture Chief Rosen flipping his lid now. He’ll want to know why I’m here mucking around a crime scene.”
“That man,” Cookie growled. “I’d like to give him a piece of my mind!”
“I think you already did that,” Jerry said with a little smile. “I’m sure he won’t forget it anytime soon.”
“Yes. Well. Someone needs to put him in his place.”
“Maybe I’ll do that myself,” Jerry said. “Once I’m retired.”
There he went again, teasing her with the idea of retiring. She didn’t go into it with him. Another discussion of where their future was headed wouldn’t help anyone. For now, she just wanted to concentrate on finding what she was looking for, so they could find Amanda, and find Sheila’s killer.
“I’m going to call this in,” Jerry said after another moment. “Don’t mess anything up… well, don’t mess it up worse, I guess. There’s a pair of gloves over there. Put those on before you touch anything, okay?”
He walked out into the hallway before Cookie could say anything to that. The gloves were what Sheila used for gardening, and as she looked at them now she saw they still had fresh dirt on them. Empty plastic planters were stacked next to them. The sticker on the side showed a picture of yellow lilies. Sheila must have transplanted these. The retirement home encouraged its residents to plant flowers outside if they wished, so long as it wasn’t anything invasive or ugly or poisonous. There were some pink roses around one of the trees in the backyard that Sheila had put there with Cookie’s help. That had been… oh my, was that last year? Cookie shook her head at how fast time could fly.
Well. She couldn’t use those gloves, at any rate. She’d be getting dirt all over everything. She went for one of Sheila’s silk handkerchiefs instead, laying over the back of a kitchen chair. That would save her from leaving fingerprints.
She started with the pages and forms that had been unceremoniously dumped on the coffee table in the living area. Just junk mail, as it turned out. From there she expanded her search to the kitchen. C
ream tagged along behind her as she went through cellphone bills and other similar expenditures, until finally she found part of what she was looking for.
Most of the bills were for this apartment. The rent for Cedar View included electricity up to a certain amount, and heating in the winter. However, in her hand she had a power bill in Sheila’s name with an address that was for another location in Widow’s Rest. That was the address she needed.
She doubted the police would have found this on their own. They wouldn’t recognize what it meant. Certainly not that blowhard Chief Rosen. It helped that she and Sheila had known each other so well. She knew Sheila’s entire life story. Well… except for the part about Sheila being wealthy that is. The house on this bill had belonged to Sheila’s husband’s brother. He’d fallen on hard times and they had helped him purchase the home, ten years ago or so. She saw now that they’d done much more than help him buy it. Sheila was paying the electric bill, and there was another bill for recent repair work, as well. She was beginning to suspect that Sheila and her husband may very well have bought the house outright for the brother.
Sheila’s husband had died not long after the house was purchased, and the brother a few years after that. Sheila had kept it as a rental property. Before today, Cookie had always assumed that was for the extra income it would bring Sheila. Now, after Benjamin Roth telling her that Sheila was a rich woman, Cookie was beginning to suspect she kept the house as an emotional attachment to a husband who was dead and gone.
No one had rented the house in months according to what Sheila had told Cookie. It would have taken the police a long time to find this address through normal methods since it was in Sheila’s dead husband’s brother’s name. My, but that was a mouthful.
A nearly anonymous house right here in Widow’s Rest. It would be the perfect place for someone to hide. Like Amanda. If she really was just laying low to grieve, this might be right where she was.
If something worse had happened to her… well. Best not to think that way. Not yet.
Besides. She’d come here to find something else as well.
Going through every piece of paper she could find was tedious. Whoever had gone through the apartment had made a real mess of things. Most of what she saw was just the usual things that a person collects in their lives and tosses aside and forgets they even have. Notices about community events. Take-out menus. Estimates for car repairs. Receipts for flowers and potting soil and… a shovel? She didn’t remember seeing a shovel anywhere in the apartment.
This was her friend’s life on paper. While she looked further, Cookie wondered what her own life would look like when she was done and gone. All those old invoices for flour. Ha!
She found more pages, and looked through them one by one. She was just about to set the last sheet aside when she realized it was exactly what she had been looking for.
Sheila’s bank statement. Cookie got hers online now through her e-mails, but Sheila hadn’t been as comfortable with computers. She preferred to be able to hold everything in her hands and look at it “in real life,” as she put it. She was old-fashioned that way.
What the statement showed her was astonishing. She felt her eyes try to bug out of her head. Benjamin Roth had been right, but that was an understatement.
The column of figures added up to a total that was in the hundreds of thousands. Her friend had been halfway to being a millionaire. “Why, you penny-pinching sneak, you,” she griped as if Sheila could still hear her. “And half the time it was me who bought our lunch!”
Tracing her finger down the column of dates and figures, she found herself looking at an entry for just last week. That was when the account went from six figures, to zero. Sheila had taken all of the money out. All of it. So that begged an obvious question.
Where was the money?
Looking through the papers in her hand again, she didn’t find any answers. From the bills she found, it was obvious that Sheila was current on all of her debts. There was no way she could have owed that much money to anyone.
Not for anything legal.
That was a sobering thought, but she couldn’t help but entertain it. She hadn’t known about this bank account. How could she know for sure what else Sheila might have been hiding?
Collecting the important pages she’d found, Cookie went looking for Jerry. A thought occurred to her on the way back to the front door of the apartment. Whoever had made such a mess of the apartment had to have been looking for something. Other than copies of bank statements and bills, that is. What could they have been after in Sheila’s apartment? They must have done this right after they killed her, and that certainly wouldn’t have given them much time.
Did that mean that Grayson was the killer after all, or was this definite proof that he couldn’t have done it? She wasn’t sure. Maybe another discussion with him in the police interview room would be in order.
Not that Chief Ed Rosen was likely to authorize that. He seemed happy just to make the arrest and move on, whether they could prove anything or not.
Ignorant man.
Cream barked at her feet. He was right, of course. She had an idea where to find Amanda. That was what mattered for now.
Chapter 4
After waiting for other officers to take control of the scene at Sheila’s apartment Jerry drove them to the address that Cookie had found on the power bill.
It was a place on Academy Street, one of the little streets at the far end of town, away from the business district and only just still inside the speed limit zone. Small and unassuming, the brown house pretty much blended into the backdrop of the rest of the neighborhood. If you didn’t have a reason to notice it, chances were good you wouldn’t even remember seeing it.
Which rather made it the perfect place for someone to disappear for a little while, Cookie had to admit.
There was no car in the driveway, and the grass looked as though it hadn’t been mowed in a month or more. The curtains were drawn. The mailbox had been removed from its post at the edge of the road. There was absolutely nothing to indicate anyone had been here in a while.
“Well,” Jerry said, “looks like we came out here for nothing. I don’t suppose you have any bright ideas about how to find out if Amanda was ever here?”
“Certainly I do,” Cookie told him. “We knock.”
She gave Cream’s leash a quick and gentle tug to let him know that he should follow her. Then she marched right up to the front door and gave it three solid knocks. Then she waited.
Behind her, Jerry crossed his arms and leaned against his car where he’d parked it half on the lawn and half on the pavement. The house sat close to the road so he didn’t have to raise his voice for her to hear him. “You know this is crazy, right?”
“No, I most certainly do not know that.” She knocked again, trying to peek into the little square window in the door but it was beveled glass and she was pretty sure there was a blanket hung up to cover it on the inside. “Polite people knock.”
“Police officers don’t have time to be that kind of polite.” He pushed away from the car and walked past the front steps, around the corner of the house. “We try to work smarter, not harder.”
“Oh, is that a fact, Mister Police Officer? So just what would be the smarter way to do this?”
He looked back over his shoulder and winked, but didn’t answer her.
She walked with Cream and they followed him around to the back side of the house. The grass rustled around their feet as they went. The backyard was small. It was no bigger than the size of Cookie’s bedroom, really, and when Jerry stopped suddenly she very nearly walked right into him.
When she gave him a puzzled look, he made a grand motion at the back door. “We find another way in. That’s what police officers do.”
He turned the handle, and the door opened.
“Smart aleck,” she scolded him, but she smiled when she said it. “You can’t just go in there, can you?”
“Exigent circum
stances,” he said in his professional police officer voice. “We have a missing woman to find, and we think she might be inside. Besides. The woman who owns this place was just murdered. She can’t file a complaint. I actually think your friend Sheila would want us to go in if it meant potentially saving her daughter.”
“Saving her?” Cookie repeated. “You think she might be in some danger?”
“I usually like to expect the worst,” he said, brushing aside strands of his hair that the wind had blown across his forehead. “Let’s hope we find her inside nursing a bottle of wine to drown her sorrows.”
Those were Cookie’s thoughts exactly.
The back door opened to a long hallway of dark wood paneling and ugly orange carpeting. There was a bathroom to the right where the white porcelain sink had rust stains inside the basin. The red plastic shower curtain was pulled back to show the built-in shelves were empty of shampoos or soaps.
Two other doors opened off the hallway to the right, opposite the windows of the outside wall to their left. Cookie had never been here before but the layout of the house seemed simple enough. This hallway led to an open living room and kitchen area. She thought there might be a crawlspace up above, but other than that there was nothing but these rooms here. She certainly wasn’t looking forward to searching that crawlspace.
“Amanda?” she called out. “Are you here? It’s Karen Williams. It’s Cookie, dear. Are you around?”
There was silence in the house. Until the floorboards creaked out in the kitchen, out of view around the corner at the end of the hall.
Jerry looked back at her. His hand settled on the handle of his pistol, there in its holster on his duty belt.
The floorboards creaked again, closer this time.
Then a face peeked out around the edge of the wall. Amanda Tucker.