Sarah chided herself for accusing Harlan of measuring things in terms of money. After all, he certainly hadn’t made a penny for the work he’d done for the twins during the past few days. Moreover, he’d taken a hit in his pocket when he created a job for her when no one else was willing to hire her. Harlan might be small of stature, but he was a big man.
The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was Harlan probably met with Jacob during Jacob’s few off hours because he was doing a good deed. Considering all the terrible things that had happened to the Southwind gang since Bill’s murder, it was time something nice happened to a member of the staff.
Remembering how Jacob had been her biggest booster during the exhibition, even though Grace or he could have handled the presentation, it dawned on Sarah exactly what Jacob had said that was bothering her. He’d told her he needed to get back “in case Jane or Emily want some help prepping.” Surely, if Emily knew the rules prohibited a contestant from having any help at any stage of today’s competition, Jacob was familiar with them, too. Was he covering up something from his visit or did he plan to help someone so that it ultimately resulted in that person’s disqualification?
Could that be what he wanted? He’d seemed okay with Emily being named Southwind’s sous chef and had been Sarah’s rock during her demonstration. It was obvious Chef Marcus depended upon him. No, Jacob had a bright future if Southwind survived. What more could he gain by having Jane or Emily knocked out of the competition?
Maybe he wanted to mess with Jane. Sarah could certainly understand that inclination, considering how mean and selfish she was. Or was he after a non-Southwind competitor? Maybe the fried green tomato maker? Wait a minute. Jacob said he talked to Harlan about investment advice. What money could Jacob possibly have to invest? That had to have been a lie. But why?
Sarah toyed with the different possibilities as she randomly filed the notes Harlan had made in various cases, but nothing came to mind. She squinted at the sheet in her hand, trying to read Harlan’s miniature handwriting to determine which case the memo went with. He might not have the best handwriting, she decided, but no one would ever be able to accuse him of not keeping meticulous notes.
That was how she could find out why Jacob had been here. Look at Harlan’s notes. She dropped the sheet of paper back on her to-be-filed stack. There was no way Harlan wouldn’t have made a detailed note of his conversation with Jacob. Where was it?
Everything from his “out” basket had been on the top of her pile and she’d already handled and filed those sheets. If the notes were in his “out” basket, she should have seen them. The thought that curiosity killed the cat went through her mind, but she banished it quickly as her eyes rested on the closed door to his office. It was a no-brainer that unless Harlan took his notes about Jacob home with him, they were still some place in his office.
Chapter Forty
Normally, Sarah respected Harlan’s privacy, especially when his office door was closed. Not today. With Bill and Richard dead, the refrigerator sabotaged, someone tampering with the brownies that Grace and Emily ate, and the fire damaging Southwind, she felt Harlan’s out-of-character appointment with Jacob made him fair game. Sarah made a beeline for Harlan’s office. The door was locked.
She hesitated, surprised and confused Harlan felt the need to do more than close his office door. Was he deliberately keeping her out or had he locked it out of the same skittishness that made her hurry to lock the front door? No matter, she was on a mission now.
Returning to her desk, she found the small jewelry box she kept in the back of her center drawer. She removed the extra passkey to Harlan’s office he’d given her on her first day of work. “Sarah,” he’d said, “you’ll need this only if I want to avoid someone and escape out the back door or if I hit the lock button by accident.”
Up to now she’d never needed to use it, but then again, Harlan had never locked her out before. Sarah slipped the key into the lock. It turned easily.
Inside his office, she closed the door, flipped the overhead light on, and looked around to see where the file or memo might be. She checked his “out” basket first, but it was empty. A quick glance revealed the coffee table and the small, round, marble inlaid conference table in the corner of his office had nothing on them. If he hadn’t taken it home, that left Harlan’s desk as the logical place for the memo.
Rather than trying to read the few things lying on his desk upside down, she walked around the well-polished mahogany piece. She moved his leather chair back a few inches to allow her to slip her legs under the lip of the drawer. She’d never realized how high Harlan’s chair was set.
There were no papers stuck in or on the desk blotter. A marble-based gold pen-and-pencil set was centered on the desk above the blotter. An etched United States Supreme Court building and the slogan JUSTICE FOR ALL adorned a glass mug filled with sharpened pencils and a few pens that sat to the far side of the blotter. Two manila folders were stacked next to the blotter.
She pulled the handle of the middle desk drawer, but it didn’t give. A quick check revealed all the drawers were locked, so she turned her attention to the file folders. Sarah opened the first one and skimmed the pages in it. One was Bill’s codicil to the animal trust naming Jane RahRah’s trustee, and the other documents were the ones relating to Bill’s estate that Harlan previously showed her—only these were stamped “draft.” She flipped through the other pages in the file quickly but slowed when she came to a group of deeds she hadn’t seen before.
All of them conveyed property to B&E, Inc., a corporation Sarah wasn’t familiar with, but none were signed. Several of the sellers’ names sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place them until she examined the fourth deed. It purported to sell the property of George Rogers to B&E, Inc.
Sarah went back to the first deed and looked more closely at the address of the property being sold. It was on Bill’s street. She went through the other deeds quickly. Each of the unexecuted deeds was for the sale of one of the properties belonging to one of Bill’s neighbors.
Behind the deeds was a paper headed “Buyouts,” but buyouts of what? She glanced at the list of five names. Next to four were recent dates. The fifth name, which didn’t have a date beside it, was Jane’s. There were no other papers in the file, so she opened the second folder.
It contained title descriptions and maps of some of the properties included in the stack of deeds in the other folder. There also was an artist’s schematic rendering of “Main Street.” The diagram showed multifamily housing, restaurants, and shops. Notations on the drawing caught her eye. She held it closer to the light to read the words “Southwind Restaurant” with a question mark written on Bill’s house.
Sarah studied the labeling on the rest of the diagram. The two houses to the right of Bill’s weren’t marked. Mr. Rogers’s house and the one next to his were designated as a restaurant and store, respectively. Two smaller homes, farther down the street, read “gallery” and “craft center.” There was nothing written on the homes she knew already were subdivided into apartments.
She thought about the house that had been torn down. Sarah checked to see if anything had been written in its space. It had. It read “park.”
Unsure of what she was looking at, but wanting to be able to study it in more detail, she started to take the pages to the copy machine. As she approached the door, a creaking sound made her jump. She stopped and listened. Nothing. She inched to the door and pressed her ear to it. Could someone be out there? But how could they have gotten in? She looked around for a weapon to defend herself. She heard another creak, this time behind her. She jumped around, her heart in her throat. No one was there. She felt foolish reacting so dramatically to the sounds of a settling house.
Still, in case Harlan came back, she didn’t want to explain why she was at the copy machine with folders from his locked office. She whipped out her smartphone and quickly shot copies of the schematic, a sampling of the deeds, and
the buyout list. She started to put the files and Harlan’s chair back in their original positions but decided she’d also like copies of the documents supposedly giving Jane custody of RahRah.
The unmistakable crunch of tires in the alley behind the office made Sarah jump. Abandoning her task, she shoved the pages back into the files, straightened them to look like she had found them, and switched off the light. As Sarah pushed the lock button of the door while she pulled it closed behind her, she realized she no longer heard a car’s motor.
She plopped into her own desk chair, grabbing the top document from her to-be-filed pile in her trembling right hand, while throwing the key to Harlan’s office into her desk with her left.
The door from Harlan’s office opened. “I didn’t expect to still find you here.”
“Just finishing up. I thought you were gone for the day.”
“I forgot a few things, so I swung by to get them before I went to the contest.” He looked at his watch. “You better hurry if you don’t want to miss the beginning. The Civic Center parking lot was almost full when I passed it.”
Sarah nodded. She didn’t know if he was merely being helpful or wanted to get rid of her. It didn’t matter. She grabbed her purse and fled, without enlightening him that she had walked to work.
Outside, Sarah let out a sigh of relief as she distanced herself from Harlan’s building. One part of her wanted to go straight home and review what she’d just recorded with her phone, but the desire to bounce everything off Emily before the contest began made her quicken her steps toward the Civic Center. She was sure anyone she passed could see her knees shaking. She wished she’d never gone to the office today, but there was no turning back the clock.
Nothing made sense to her. It was apparent from the artist’s rendering and the unsigned deeds that someone had major designs to develop Bill’s street but that was all it was—drafts and plans. The renderings appeared to be final schematics, but none of the deeds were signed. Plus, Jane and RahRah setting up a permanent residence in the carriage house and Sarah’s recent run-in with Mr. Rogers underscored that whoever was behind this project lacked the most important thing—ownership of the properties.
Was Harlan the one trying to buy up the properties or was he representing someone else? Could sweet, kind Harlan be part of something shady? She didn’t want to jump to the conclusion he was a backstabber, but she had found the papers on his desk. The deeds obviously were drafted by someone with legal knowledge.
Then again, perhaps things were more innocent than they appeared. Maybe Jane’s call and the papers on his desk were because he was drawing up a new deed or will for her.
Sarah knew she’d never typed the deeds or seen them before today. That was strange because, with Harlan being a terrible typist, her job required her to type everything, including his personal correspondence. Of course, nothing could have stopped him from asking someone who didn’t work for him to type the documents or having another lawyer prepare them for his review.
Sarah wondered whether he or a developer really thought they could convince the various owners to sell their properties. What would it take to have no holdouts? She couldn’t imagine Mr. Rogers letting anyone push him from the house he loved. No, he wasn’t going to move off the street until he was carried out of his home in a pine box.
At the idea of Mr. Rogers protecting his property to the end, another thought crossed her mind. Maybe Bill was dead because of his unwillingness to sell his property to the mysterious developer.
Up to now, Sarah and Emily had linked Bill’s and Richard’s murders to food or Southwind. The idea of economic development introduced completely different possibilities. From reading mysteries and what she’d learned living with Bill, Sarah knew a good detective always followed the money. There might be money in food, but there certainly were bigger profits to be made from being on the ground floor of a project of this magnitude.
Chapter Forty-One
Sarah entered the Civic Center’s main room and glanced at the big clock on the wall. Because it was just after one, she debated whether corralling Emily for a brainstorming session before the contest would be productive.
The sizable crowd ringing the stage made the decision for her. Much as she wanted to get to the bottom of what was going on, she needed to find Emily to give her support rather than distract her. She spotted a cluster of Southwind jackets near the stage and made her way toward them. As she got closer, she saw her sister in the middle of the group. Sarah squeezed through the people milling around her sister. “Emily!”
Emily looked up and waved. “I was afraid you weren’t going to be here.”
“You know I wouldn’t miss cheering you on for anything. Besides,” she blurted out, despite her previous intentions, “you won’t believe what I’ve got to tell you!” She reached out to give Emily a good luck pat on her shoulder, but Emily moved, resulting in her hand landing between Emily’s shoulder and neck.
“Wow, you’re tight. Relax.” Sarah kneaded her sister’s neck but couldn’t feel any of the tension dissipating. “Something wrong?”
“I’m set up and ready to go, but, and I know you’re not going to believe this, I’m worried about Jane.”
Sarah made a face.
“Stop that! It’s just that most of the contestants are here, but no one has seen Jane.” Emily darted a glance around the room, as if trying to manufacture a glimpse of Jane. Considering what had happened to the last person not to show up on time, Sarah understood Emily’s fear. “Marcus said he’d look for her, but one of the other contestants waylaid him because he didn’t think his oven was heating right.”
“Marcus is back?”
“Straight from the hospital.” Emily pointed at the stage.
Sarah looked in that direction and saw Marcus deep in conversation in front of one of the four stoves onstage. She tried not to laugh at how Marcus dwarfed the man he was speaking to. His sling was almost longer than the other man’s upper torso. Like Emily, his face had a sunburnt flush to it. They appeared to be discussing something attached to a tube in the smaller man’s hand. Sarah couldn’t tell what was on the other end of the tube because it was stuck in the oven, but neither man seemed particularly happy.
“That looks like it could be a bigger problem than Jane being late. I wouldn’t worry about her. She’d be the first to tell you she’s a big girl.”
Emily’s lips tightened in a grimace as she played with her scrunchie, redoing her ponytail. “Normally, I’d agree and wouldn’t think anything else about her not being here early, but the way things have been going lately, her not being here creeps me out. Someone needs to check on her. Will you?”
“You’re kidding me, aren’t you?”
Emily shook her head.
Sarah scoured the crowd, hoping Jane’s face would jump out at her. Although she picked out Jacob and Grace standing with some of the other young people she’d noticed working at different booths during the past few days at the Expo, she didn’t see Jane. One look back at Emily and she knew she had no choice. “Don’t worry. I’ll find her. She’s probably fixing her makeup or thinking of a way to sabotage all of her competitors.”
“I actually hope that’s the case.” Emily straightened her collar. “How do I look?”
“Like a champion chef.” Sarah gave her sister a hug. “Good luck and don’t worry, I’ll find Jane. And after the competition, have I got things to share with you!” She knew from the smile Emily shot her as she walked away that Emily was going into the contest feeling a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The only problem was, Sarah wasn’t quite sure how she was going to honor her promise.
Mentally whispering a prayer, Sarah climbed on the first riser near the stage to get a better view of the room. She didn’t see Jane anywhere and Jane wasn’t among the people still coming in, but she spotted Peter by the doorway. What better person to turn a missing person search over to?
Peter’s head jerked up at the sound of his name, b
ut from the way he kept turning his head, he couldn’t pinpoint who had called to him. Sarah shouted his name again. She knew he’d seen her when his face relaxed and he moved in her direction.
He sidestepped when a big woman barged between them. Watching the woman bodily force her way closer to the stage, Peter laughed. “I guess I’m going to need to do some crowd control. What’s up?”
Her words tumbled out. “Jane’s missing. The contest starts in a few minutes and the judges are all here, but no one’s heard from Jane. Emily is worried.”
“Jane’s not here?”
Sarah swallowed. “No one has seen her and the contest is getting ready to start. I ran late, but Emily looked for Jane. Em has a lot of complaints about her, but she said Jane’s not one to be late for something like this. She’s afraid something may have happened to her.”
“I agree. Jane wouldn’t be late for this competition. Did Emily check both exhibition rooms and the restrooms?”
“I only did a cursory check of this room. I can’t speak for Emily.”
“Okay. Do you have your cell phone?”
Sarah bobbed her head.
“Did you keep my cell number?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Let’s split up. You take the ladies’ lounges, while I get a few of the Civic Center security guards to help me check the main rooms, backstage, and the loading dock. If you find her, call me. I’ll do the same. Otherwise, I’ll meet you at the main entrance in ten minutes.”
Without pausing for a reply, he strode toward the far room, already talking on his cell phone.
Sarah didn’t wait to watch his back fully disappear. Instead, she began her assigned task with the nearest ladies’ room. It didn’t take her long to cover the restrooms and, for good measure, the nurse’s station. There was no sign of Jane.
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