by Hillary Avis
With a glance over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching, she extracted the pair of bolt cutters from her trunk and slid the handles down one leg of her yoga pants. They bulged through the stretchy fabric and made her walk funny, but at least the tool wasn’t dangling suspiciously from her hand. She pulled up her hood as she approached the gate, entered the gate code that she already knew by heart, and tried to make her posture as nonchalant as possible as she scanned the buildings for unit 197.
She eventually located it near the end of the second row and checked the area for any late-night visitors. She’d heard that sometimes people even lived out of these units when they were really down on their luck, bedding in sleeping bags on the hard concrete floors at night and storing all their worldly possessions here during the day. But if there was anyone in residence at Hughes Mini Storage, they were minding their own business.
She tugged her hood a little lower and stood close to the sliding door so if the cameras caught her, they wouldn’t be able to tell what she was doing as she pulled the bolt cutters from where they were snugged against her right thigh. One quick snip, and the padlock holding the clasp shut fell away. She rolled up the door just far enough to duck inside, then rolled it back down before clicking on her phone’s flashlight.
The harsh glare illuminated a carefully organized space. Furniture was stacked to the left and labeled boxes to the right. Allison spied the three boxes she was looking for right away. Unlike the others, which were plain brown cardboard moving boxes, they were decorated with red-and-cream paisleys and shaped differently—long and flat, made to slide underneath the bed. One held the blank paper, one held Paul’s memories, and one held the memories of the Claypools’ crimes, the ones they’d stolen so long ago. And a couple of snakeskins, Allison remembered, giving an inadvertent shudder.
Unfortunately, the shape made the boxes awkward to carry, especially stacked, but she couldn’t afford to make multiple trips. She struggled to balance them and aim her phone’s flashlight, while raising the rolling door with the bolt cutters stuck down the leg of her pants. Eventually she gave up, stowed her phone in her hoodie pocket, and operated the door in the pitch dark, using the toe of one sneaker to launch it upward. As soon as the door was open and light from the bright industrial streetlamps streamed in, she felt horribly exposed. Anyone could see her with these giant boxes—astronauts on the International Space Station were probably watching her clumsy attempts.
She briefly set the boxes down on the pavement outside while she closed up the unit, arranging the broken padlock so that, to a casual eye, it appeared clasped, and then booked it around the end of the row of units to the back gate. Her arms burned by the time she reached her car, but it wasn’t until her trunk closed over the boxes that she let out the painful breath she’d been holding.
She had them. Joy exploded in her chest and her ears rang with triumph. She had Paul’s memories back. Michelle would be pleased about the rest of it, too. As she drove home, her excitement wore off as she considered how long it would take to transcribe all of Paul’s memories back into the books. There must be hundreds of memories—it would take months to copy them all, if not longer. And Michelle would want to find a new guardian right away.
How long could she put her off? A week, maybe two.
Allison turned from the highway onto Rosemary Street and lights flashed behind her, red and blue, swooping into her car like belligerent swallows. Her mouth went instantly dry as she pulled the car to the curb in front of her house and rolled down the window, watching in her side mirror as Leroy swaggered toward her, her heart racing.
Busted.
Chapter 19
Leroy leaned over to better see inside the car. “My, my, it’s Allison Rye.”
“What is it, Sheriff? Did I forget my turn signal?”
“Oh, I’m afraid it’s a bit more serious than that.” Judging by his smug expression, he was enjoying every second of this harassment. He must still be angry about his hayfield.
Conscious of the contraband in her trunk, Allison chose her words carefully. “Are you going to fill me in here?”
“Why don’t you pop that trunk latch for me? I just want a peek at what you got in there.”
Her skin prickled, every hair on her body standing on end. How could he possibly know what was in there? “Do you have a search warrant?”
Leroy paused, slowly wetting his lower lip with his tongue as he considered how to respond. “Well, no. Not just now. But if you don’t have anything to hide, I don’t see why you won’t open her right up. If you prefer, I can impound your vehicle and come back tomorrow to search your car and your home.”
“For what?” Allison blinked innocently—or she hoped it looked that way.
“Shoot, I don’t know. Got a call from a resident at the Dream-a-Lot that someone was scrounging around the mini storage, so I thought I’d come check it out. And who do I find fleeing the scene but you, dressed like a fricking ninja. Now I’m wondering—why is she out and about when all the businesses in town are closed? I bet the answer is right there in that trunk.”
“For your information, I rent a unit there. You can call Nan and ask. I was just picking up some personal things, that’s all.” The rush of her heartbeat was so loud in her ears, she feared Leroy might be able to hear it, too.
Leroy set his hands on his hips, grinning. “Then you won’t mind if I see what you got. Pop it.”
“It’s my stuff,” she said, wishing she sounded more confident as, resigned, she pulled the handle to release the trunk latch. Leroy ambled around behind the car where he was blocked from view. “I’m getting out!” she warned out the window, as she pushed the door open so she could join him.
Leroy stared down at the stack of boxes in the trunk and the orange-handled bolt cutter beside them. He pointed at the tool. “What’s this?”
“I lost my key,” Allison fibbed.
“And these?” He rested his hand on top of the boxes.
She shrugged. “Stuff.”
He wasn’t smiling anymore as he tapped the lid of the top box. “Open it.”
Dread vining under her skin, she used her house key to slit the tape and cracked open the lid. It was the blank paper, much to her relief. She waited a beat while he looked in the box and then closed the lid again. “Just stuff,” she repeated.
Leroy narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “Thing is, I thought you might get up to something like this, so I’ve had my eye on you. My guess is, you didn’t use these”—he picked up the bolt cutters, hefting them in his hand—“on your own unit. You wanted payback, so you went and took some things from the person who wronged you.”
“What?!”
“Revenge, Mrs. Rye. You couldn’t press charges because your daughter is engaged to Ms. Kirkpatrick’s son, and you wanted to make yourself feel better. So you took a few things from her storage unit. Maybe figured nobody would miss this stuff.” Leroy picked up the top box and carried it back toward his car. Over his shoulder, he added, “Unfortunately for you, the law declares that even those who are incarcerated are entitled to own property. Now you’re the villain, not the victim.”
Allison’s fists clenched by her sides. Every molecule of her being wanted to run and grab the box from him, but ending up face down on the sidewalk in handcuffs wouldn’t put her any closer to her goal. “That’s not her property! That paper is Michelle Robinson’s; check the police report for the burglary.”
Leroy returned for the second box. He winked at her as he lifted it up. “If anything in these boxes are stolen, then the claimant can apply for a return of goods at the sheriff’s office. You can go ahead and notify Ms. Robinson of that fact.”
“But—”
He was already loading the second box into the back of his SUV. She only had a few seconds to act. She broke the seal on the third box and stuck her hand inside for whatever she could grab. If she was lucky, she’d get a handful of Paul’s memories before they disappeared into Leroy’s evidenc
e files, maybe forever. But instead of pages, dry snakeskin brushed her skin. She jerked her hand away from it, her fingers closing on something else as Leroy’s voice blared too close.
“You’re lucky it was me who got the call and not someone else,” he said, reaching for the box in the trunk as she quickly pulled her hand out, hiding the object—it felt like a book—behind her back. “Might have hauled you off to lockup.”
“Mhm,” she said absentmindedly, edging back toward her door and flinging the book—it was a book—through the open window of the car while Leroy was too busy being smug to notice what she was up to. He returned once more for the bolt cutters, then slammed her trunk with a lot of fanfare, like he was being chivalrous. She rolled her eyes. “Thanks so much.”
Oblivious to her sarcasm, he nodded and pointed the bolt cutters at her. “We’ll get this sorted out, don’t worry. Figure out who’s the villain and who’s the victim and all that and get it out in the open.”
“While we’re at it—I mean, while we’re sorting out villains—we should probably sort out who killed Jenny, don’t you think?” The words popped out before she could stop them.
He turned toward her, his face a blank mask. “What did you say?”
“Jenny. Myra Mitchell’s dog,” Allison said, emboldened. “You hit her on the highway and left her to die. People should probably know about that, don’t you think? When they’re evaluating who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. Your mom would probably be pretty interested, I’m guessing.”
He licked his lips nervously. “I didn’t—” he began, but then broke off.
“Didn’t what?” Allison raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t kill her? I know you did. I saw the blood on your hubcap.”
“That could be any—” he broke off again, seeming to realize that blood on his hubcap was a bad thing, no matter the source. He narrowed his eyes at her. “Be careful, Mrs. Rye. Wouldn’t want you to get yourself stuck in the basement again.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I don’t know. Are you threatening me?” He took a step toward her and his sheriff’s badge glinted in the glow of the streetlight. Leroy knew he had the upper hand, and what did she have? Suspicions. Regrets. And now, fear. Heart hammering, she shrank back from him. He smiled crookedly. “I didn’t think so.”
He tipped his hat and sauntered back to his SUV with the unhurried steps of someone confident in their power. She stood there stiffly as he pulled out, unable to relax until she could no longer see his taillights in the distance.
The screen door of the yellow house banged open, jarring her senses. When Allison looked up at the noise, she saw Michelle, ghostly in a nightgown on the porch, waving her into the yard. Allison grudgingly walked up the path and stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up at her as the breeze swirled her nightgown around her ankles.
“Did you get caught?” The words were accusing.
“No—well, sort of.” Allison sighed. “Someone at the Dream-a-Lot called the cops on me and set off Leroy’s spidey senses. He pulled me over and took the boxes into evidence. I don’t know if I’ll be charged with anything, though.”
Michelle pressed her lips together, her nostrils flaring. “We should have torched it.”
“I still would have been caught,” Allison said defensively. “Plus gone to jail for arson. How about a ‘thank you’?”
Michelle’s face twisted as she stared down from the porch. “Thanks for what? As far as I can tell, you didn’t accomplish anything. At least if you burned it, the paper wouldn’t be floating around out there for anyone to get their hands on.”
“For taking the risk,” Allison snapped. “Anyway, it’s not floating around. It’s in evidence at the sheriff’s office. Leroy says you can apply for the return of your property any time. You’ll get what you want.”
Michelle snorted. “Leroy says. That’s what worries me.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“You’ve never asked yourself who the guardian of the library was before Elaine got her hands on it?” Michelle waited a beat as a dread crept up Allison’s spine. It couldn’t be Leroy...could it? Her horror must have shown on her face, because Michelle gave a satisfied nod. “You got it.”
Allison frowned. She’d always known Leroy as a spoiled mama’s boy, and Mrs. Gauss was loaded. She owned half the property in the county, it seemed like. And she and Leroy were so close, they might as well be one person. “I don’t understand—why would he want to be the guardian in the first place? He doesn’t need free rent.”
“Few years back, his mama kicked him out of the house because he was a drunk. Wrote him out of the will and everything. The library was a soft place to land while he worked himself back into her good graces.” Michelle shrugged. “When he finally got his act together, he passed it on to Elaine.”
“Let me guess. They met while she was volunteering down at City Hall. Same way she met Myra.”
Michelle shrugged. “Who knows. He’s a weasel, she’s a weasel. No surprise that they get along.”
“Do you think he remembers the library like Elaine does? Does he know what he has in those boxes?”
Michelle shrugged, her shoulders small and sloped inside her voluminous nightgown. “Maybe, maybe not. But if he doesn’t, she’ll fill him in now that he’s got all the goods. It’s over. It’s all over.” Tears traced the lines of Michelle’s face as she sagged against the porch post. She turned her face away when she noticed Allison’s concerned expression. “I guess the only consolation is that neither of us will remember anything. We’ll probably end up vegetables like Paul—if we’re lucky.”
“You’re giving up?” Allison’s voice came out an octave higher than she meant it to and echoed hollowly in her ears.
“This isn’t a surrender. This is a defeat. They won.” Michelle’s face hardened, her thoughts somewhere in the distance. “They have everything.”
“Not everything,” Allison corrected, remembering the book she’d rescued from the last box. She didn’t know what was in it, but if Elaine had stored it with the rest of the memory papers and the snakeskins, it had to be something important.
Chapter 20
Allison left Michelle bewildered on the porch and ran to her car, returning with the small brown book in her hands. She held it up so Michelle could see. “I grabbed this out of the last box while Leroy was loading up the others.”
Michelle reached for it, but Allison shook her head, holding the book out of her reach. “First, promise me you’ll give me more time in the library. Please.”
“What good is more time?” Michelle said heavily.
“Elaine still thinks they need the pen to make new books out of the paper, right? That means we have time to get the boxes back from Leroy.” Desperation burned across her scalp as she clutched the book to her chest. “We can’t stop now—we’re so close. You have to at least try and get all the stuff back from the sheriff’s department, Michelle.”
“It’s a waste of time. What you should be worrying about it what they’re going to do to your mind. All our minds. Yours, mine, Taylor’s. Emily’s.”
Her daughter’s name hit her like a ton of bricks, knocking the air out of her. Michelle nodded. “That’s right. Your clever little manipulations to get Zack’s memories into the books? All you did was make Emily vulnerable. I told you not to mess with the library, but you couldn’t keep your selfishness in check.”
“Selfishness? I did it for your son! To find out who killed him!”
“Shhh,” Michelle cautioned, looking up and down the empty street. Something in her expression changed, and she gave a deep sigh and dragged open the screen door. “Come on in. Let’s see if that book is anything to write home about. If it is, we’ll keep trying. If it’s not—well, we’ll do as much damage control as we can.”
Allison entered the house warily and followed her to the living room, where Michelle clicked on a lamp next to the sofa. Light filtered through the stained-glass shade,
casting long, colorful shadows across the room. She motioned for Allison to join her, but Allison hesitated.
“If you put it on the coffee table, we can both see.”
It was an uneasy truce, but Allison took the seat next to her and opened the book. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find inside, but it wasn’t this. Rather than printed text, the book was crowded with elegant handwriting. The first page had a date printed at the top—almost exactly five years ago.
“It’s a diary!” Michelle gasped. She snatched the book from the table and held it close, squinting to read it. She looked up at Allison, her eyes wide. “This is Elaine’s. It has to be. This must be how she remembered what happened while she was a guardian, even after Myra ripped out her pages. She kept a record. Look! ‘Sweet Leroy’?” Michelle made a face.
Allison leaned closer so she could see over Michelle’s shoulder, and Michelle spread the book wide so they could be both see the first entry better.
Sweet Leroy gave me the key and strict instructions: no guests, no telling anyone, no taking books out of the library. I can’t stay longer than three years, and I have to find a guardian to replace me before I go. He told me to tear his pages out of the guardian book and burn them so he won’t remember anything about his time in the library. I followed his instructions to the letter—I can always fill him in later, if he remains useful.
Allison looked up when she reached the end of the first page. “So maybe Leroy doesn’t know.”
“Like she said, she can fill him in any time,” Michelle said darkly. She gnawed her lower lip and then flipped to the back of the diary and located another date Allison recognized: the day Paul’s memories disappeared. The day Tim and Dara were murdered.
Allison put her hand out to cover the page. “Don’t do this to yourself. You don’t want the image in your head forever. Let me.”
Michelle made a harsh noise of impatience as she tried to pry Allison’s fingers from the book, but a moment later, she relented and handed the book over, motioning for her to read. “Quickly.”