by Sharon Pape
“If someone sees Raffles, they’ll probably just think she’s a cat. If they see us prowling around, the jig is up.”
Jaye couldn’t argue with that logic, but she also knew that if Raffles became annoyed, she might bid the house a fond farewell and set out to explore the neighborhood. And with every passing second the risk of their being caught increased. If they had to start searching for the not-a-cat, they might as well pack it in and go home. “I have to be close enough for her to see me and hear me,” Jaye said, pulling away. “I have to keep her focused.”
Sierra let go of her arm, and the two of them ran to the side gate, which was now wide open, with Raffles nowhere in sight. Jaye pulled it shut. Then, crouching behind it to shield herself from view, she opened it several inches and peered left toward the front door. The angle was too oblique for her to see anything, and she was forced to open it more. Okay, now she could see the door and Raffles. Fortunately, she hadn’t taken off to see the world. Unfortunately, she was standing on her hind legs trying to turn the knob. After a few unsuccessful attempts, she started kicking the door, first with one hind leg, then with the other. Apparently giving up on the door, she turned away from the house in what appeared like a huff and looked across the street at a small dog who’d started yapping from behind a chain-link fence. With every passing second the risk increased.
“Raffles,” Jaye called out as loudly as she dared. She knew from experience that the not-a-cat’s hearing was impressive. She was ignoring Jaye on purpose. “Raffles,” she rasped again. The not-a-cat was now sitting upright on her hind legs in a very un-catlike posture. The woman who lived with the yapping dog started calling for him to come inside. From what Jaye could tell, the dog obeyed about as well as Raffles did.
Hunkered down in the corner of the adobe wall, where a mulberry tree provided some additional cover, Sierra was keeping watch down the street in the opposite direction. “Jaye,” she whispered urgently, “someone’s coming with another dog. They’re only a couple of blocks away.” She didn’t need to point out the danger. To the best of their knowledge, the not-a-cat had managed to stay below the town’s radar until now, but that could change in a heartbeat.
“Candy,” Jaye called to Raffles, wishing she had taken the tuna along after all. For that matter, she wasn’t even sure she had a hard candy in the small, cross-body bag slung over her shoulder. Not that it mattered. At this point a lie was preferable to an arrest. She’d make it up to the animal later.
“They’re still coming,” Sierra said, anxiety raising the pitch of her voice as if her vocal cords were straining from the tension. “They’ll be on this street in thirty seconds, tops.”
“Candy, Raffles, candy,” Jaye shouted, no longer concerned if anyone heard her. Even if the cops were called, the most she and Sierra could be charged with at this point was trespassing in Peggy’s yard. They’d apologize and say the stress of being under investigation had pushed them over the edge.
Sierra was counting it down like a pro from NASA. “Ten, nine, eight—”
Raffles finally noticed the man and dog half a block away. She turned and raced for the gate. As soon as she cleared it, Jaye pulled it closed. Before she could exhale with relief, Raffles had her hand out for the promised treat.
“That was close,” Sierra said. “So what now? Do we forge ahead or tuck our tails and go home?”
“You know I don’t like giving up,” Jaye replied, rummaging in her handbag for a candy. She snagged one and handed it to the not-a-cat, glad that she didn’t have to go back on her word.
“Okay, then it’s full steam ahead,” Sierra said. “But in the interest of saving time, what if we try the back– and side-facing windows ourselves? With all the police activity that was going on here, maybe they left one unlocked.”
“Could we be that lucky?” Jaye asked as they split up to give it a try. She and Raffles headed for the far side of the house while Sierra started with the windows on the gate side. Less than two minutes later, they met up in the backyard.
Jaye’s face was bright with a smile. “Raffles is inside.”
“Through a window?”
“No, they were all locked. But she went nosing behind some bushes that were up against the house, and she found a vent maybe a foot off the ground. I think it might be attached to the clothes dryer. Now we just have to hope she understood the words ‘open back door.’”
Before they had a chance to worry about it, the back door swung open and Raffles stood framed in the doorway looking mighty pleased with herself.
“Okay, our luck is definitely changing,” Jaye said as they hurried inside and closed the door behind them. They made a big but brief fuss over Raffles’s accomplishment before even taking a look around. The back door had led them directly into the kitchen, but from there they could see into the L-shaped dining and living rooms. It seemed as if the house was still fully furnished, presumably just as Peggy had left it on her last day as a resident of planet Earth. The decor was a hodgepodge of mismatched items with little thought to color or pattern, size or proportion.
“I guess she didn’t care,” Jaye said when Sierra remarked that she didn’t know how anyone could live in a house so lacking in beauty or serenity. “As secretive as she was, I doubt she ever invited anyone over for a meal or a cup of coffee.”
“No one’s even started getting rid of all this stuff so they can put the house up for sale,” Sierra added as they began searching the kitchen for places a paranoid woman might hide evidence that would lead to her killer.
“They might be having trouble finding her heirs,” Jaye pointed out as she poured dry cereal into a garbage bag to see if Peggy had hidden a very different kind of prize in the box. “Talk about irony—it turns out she had good reason to be paranoid after all.” Jaye reached the bottom of the box without finding anything but stale cereal.
After they’d finished inspecting every nook and cranny in the kitchen, they moved on to the dining room, proceeding through the house as quickly as they could without jeopardizing the outcome of the search. It was a tightrope walk. Every passing second the risk of being caught increased, and now that they were inside, burglary, criminal trespass and breaking and entering could be added to the charges against them. On the other hand, rushing through the search could result in missing the evidence they were after.
While they worked, Raffles was scouting for treasure of her own. She took a red rubber band from the kitchen counter and dug into her handy pouch for a lipstick to leave in its place. In the dining room, the not-a-cat took a daisy from a silk flower arrangement, replacing it with a pacifier. If Brock and Anastos came through the house again, Jaye wanted to be a fly on the wall when they tried to make sense of these new items.
The morning was well under way by the time they reached the bathroom off the hallway. It wasn’t large by current standards and was so ridiculously overcrowded with all three of them in there that Sierra decided to start hunting in the master bedroom. Raffles quickly discovered the new game of spin the toilet paper holder. Luckily, there wasn’t much left on the roll, so Jaye let her have fun. At least one of them was enjoying this adventure.
It didn’t take long to see that there was nothing remotely capable of storing information in the medicine chest above the sink or in the drawers of the vanity. Jaye even checked the undersides of the shelves and drawers. She’d had such high hopes, in spite of Daniel’s certainty that the police had already harvested every scrap of useful evidence. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time hope had let her down.
After the toilet paper ran out, Raffles had relocated to the floor in front of the vanity, where she was busy pulling everything out of the cabinet section. Jaye squeezed down beside her to get a good look at the products that were strewn everywhere. There was shampoo, a package of razors for delicate skin, a couple of unopened toothbrushes, a box of tampons, sunblock promising f
ull-spectrum protection, a dozen partly used bottles of nail polish, a box of Band-Aids. Jaye had a sudden epiphany. “Sierra, come here,” she shouted, forgetting to keep her voice down in case someone happened to be walking by outside.
Sierra appeared in a flash. “What is it? What did you find?”
“How old was Peggy?”
“Really? That’s why you called me in here? This isn’t exactly the best time for trivia.”
“Fiftyish?” Jaye pursued, ignoring the baffled expression on her friend’s face.
“The obit said she was fifty-five. Why does it matter?”
“What’s a fifty-five-year-old woman doing with a box of tampons?” Jaye asked, grabbing the box away from the not-a-cat, who’d apparently also decided it was worth further exploration.
Sierra’s expression changed to wide-eyed interest. “Do you think—?”
“It’s worth a shot.”
Jaye dumped all the tampons out of the box. She gave one to Raffles as a peace offering for having stolen her loot and a handful to Sierra, who’d plopped down in the bathroom doorway.
“If Peggy hid something in one of these, she would have had to reseal the paper around it carefully so it still looked like all the others,” Jaye said, examining one.
Raffles had already torn the paper off the one she’d been given and was busy pulling the tampon out of its little tube. Jaye kept an eye on her progress in case there was something else inside, but nothing additional came out. She double-checked that the tube was empty before going back to the unopened ones. She was so focused on the task that she jumped when Sierra yelled, “I think I’ve got something.” Apparently they could both use a course in Stealth 101.
Jaye was on her feet in an instant. She did a neat leap over Raffles, who was in the process of appropriating another tampon from the pile, and hunkered down next to her friend. Sierra pulled off the suspicious wrapping with trembling fingers and eased the tampon out of its tube. A tightly furled paper popped out with it. Jaye’s mouth went dry as she watched Sierra unroll it.
It was a photograph, but the quality had been badly compromised by the dry air and the way it had been tightly coiled in the tube. They could see that it was a picture of Adam Grayson sitting at a desk, surrounded by framed and unframed works of art. The deep creases and cracks in the faded photo made it impossible to see much of the detail.
Jaye shook her head. “It looks like a candid shot of Grayson at work, but why did Peggy feel the need to hide it?”
“There’s got to be something in the picture we’re not seeing,” Sierra said, squinting at the photo as if with enough concentration the image would become clearer. “We’ll have to bring it to a photo shop and see if it can be enlarged and enhanced,” she said, finally giving up. “The important thing is that we found it—how amazing is that?”
“Off the charts,” Jaye said, exhilaration making her feel a bit giddy.
“We’ve got to check the rest of the box to make sure we didn’t miss anything.”
“Fast though. We really need to get out of here.”
With Raffles’s help it took less than two minutes to determine that the remaining tubes held nothing else of value They decided not to bother putting things back the way they’d found them. It would take too much time; besides, they hadn’t touched anything without their gloves on. High on their success, they quickly completed the search of the master bedroom and backtracked to the kitchen. Before walking out, they pulled off their telltale latex gloves and shoved them into their pockets. Jaye would use her cloth to wipe down the doorknobs and gate on their way out.
“See, I told you our luck was changing,” she said brightly as she led the way out the back door and directly into the business end of a rifle.
Chapter 17
“Hold it right there,” the man with the rifle said. He was tall and clean-shaven, with a receding blond hairline and light blue eyes framed by blond lashes, all of which gave him a generally washed-out appearance. The ring on his left hand announced that he was married, most likely to the petite woman half hidden behind him. She was five feet, tops, her hair and eyes as dark as his were light, the gold band on her finger further proof of their vows.
Jaye noticed that his hands had started shaking. Either he was as scared as they were or his arm wasn’t accustomed to the weight of the gun. Chances were his daily routine didn’t include handling firearms. That realization gave her the bravado to respond as if she too held a weapon. “Put that thing away before you hurt someone,” she said with an authority borrowed from the old Westerns she used to watch with her dad. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Sierra staring at her as if she’d grown a second head, but she didn’t have the leisure to reassure her right then. Besides, she herself wasn’t all that sure about what she was doing or how it would pan out.
“Don’t listen to her, Jeremy,” the wife hissed. “She’s just trying to psych you out.”
Jeremy swallowed so hard that his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down a few times like a knobby yoyo. “I know, Kelly, I know.”
“Ask them who they are and why they’re here,” she prompted in a stage whisper. “And for Pete’s sake, hold the rifle still.”
Jeremy repositioned his hands for a steadier grip on the gun as if he were a marionette and his wife were pulling the strings. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he repeated—a parrot as well as a marionette.
“Our real estate agent brought us to see the house,” Sierra piped up while Jaye was still trying to come up with something clever. “My friend here recently opened a crystal shop near Tlaquepaque, but the apartment she’s renting is too small.”
“There’s no sign out front that the house is on the market,” Kelly muttered to her husband.
“They’re bringing it tomorrow,” Sierra replied without waiting for Jeremy to relay his wife’s comment.
“Where’s this agent who supposedly brought you here?” Kelly asked, bypassing her husband too. She was standing on tiptoe, straining to see if there was anyone else behind them still in the house.
“She got a call that her son fell in the playground and might have a broken wrist.”
“Well, it wasn’t very responsible of her to let two strangers wander through the house alone.”
“Oh, we’re not strangers,” Sierra said with a laugh that sounded genuine even to Jaye. “We know each other really well. I own Cravings!—the bakeshop in town.”
“I can’t eat gluten,” Kelly snapped, as if her malady were somehow Sierra’s fault.
“We actually have a lot of gluten-free products. Come in one day, and I’ll give you samples to try.”
Jaye was marveling at her friend’s smooth improv. She seemed to be assuming the role of peacemaker to offset Jaye’s “don’t mess with me” attitude.
“Who’s your agent?” Kelly asked, but with considerably less acrimony.
Sierra didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Betsy Dugan.”
“At Desert Harbor Realty?”
“The one and only,” Sierra chirped, as lighthearted as only an innocent person could sound.
At that moment a flash of golden fur erupted from inside the house and sprinted to the back wall, clearing it in one graceful leap. Jaye had been wondering where the not-a-cat was. She’d been right behind them when they were about to exit the house, but had managed to stay out of sight when they’d stumbled into their Waterloo. Judging by their faces, the gun-toting couple wasn’t particularly curious about the animal’s departure. They probably assumed it was just a neighborhood cat. That was the good news. The bad news was that without a key the top lock could only be engaged from inside the house. Raffles was supposed to have taken care of that and then exited the way she’d come in. But she’d obviously lost patience waiting for them to shut the door. At least she had escaped detection. She’d no do
ubt be sound asleep back at the apartment if and when Jaye returned. She couldn’t discount the possibility that Jeremy might accidentally shoot them or that they’d wind up in jail.
“Then you won’t mind if I give Betsy a call to check out your story,” Kelly was saying as she whipped her phone out of her jeans pocket. Jaye’s already tense muscles clenched more tightly.
“Try her cell in case she took her son to the doctor,” Sierra suggested.
Jaye’s eyes felt like they were popping out of her head. Had she just heard her best friend offer to light the fuse that would blow them to smithereens? What could she be thinking? Somewhere in that head of hers, a critical screw had clearly jostled loose. In the name of efficiency, maybe they should just march over to police headquarters and turn themselves in.
It took less than a minute for Kelly to get the realtor on the line. From her end of the conversation, Jaye couldn’t tell how it was going, but when Kelly clicked off the call, the sheepish smile on her face spoke volumes. “Well, your story checks out,” she told them. “I guess we owe you an apology.”
“No problem,” Sierra said. “In fact, it’s nice to know that people around here keep a close eye on things.”
Yes, Jaye was thinking, it was just dandy. And it would have been even finer if Sierra had given her a heads-up about having a plan with Betsy to cover their butts. Her friend had some serious groveling to do.
Jeremy had lowered the rifle with a sigh of relief. “So, you’re interested in maybe buying the place, huh?”
Jaye was a little surprised to hear him finally speak for himself. “It’s definitely a contender,” she said, trying to sound as upbeat and confident as Sierra, even though her knees had been close to buckling from anxiety two minutes ago.