Drip Dead

by Christy Evans

  I would know I’d been there. I’d invaded her privacy. Whatever I saw couldn’t be unseen. It would be in my brain forever.

  What was I, nine? It’s just a bedroom. Get over yourself, Neverall.

  I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  The room looked like something in a magazine layout. Every detail was perfect. Unlike my house, there were no dirty socks on the floor, or books left splayed open across the night table. No jumble of pocket debris on the dresser, or empty water bottles next to the bed.

  This was what I was obsessing about? I’d driven myself crazy avoiding this—a room that looked like no one lived there?

  I laughed at myself, and the sound echoed through the empty house. It was a sudden reminder that I was alone in a strange house that belonged to a dead man.

  A shiver ran down my spine, and it felt as though someone was watching me.

  It was silly—all the doors and windows were locked— but I still found myself looking over my shoulder, wondering if I could have somehow left something open.

  I knew I hadn’t, but the feeling persisted until I gave in to my growing paranoia. I backtracked to the entry and double-checked the front door. It was securely bolted.

  I hadn’t opened any windows or any other door. It was nothing more than an overactive imagination and maybe a guilty conscience.

  I went back to work.

  When I got to Mom’s closet I gasped aloud. I’d swear it was as big as my bedroom, maybe bigger. Big enough to hold a dressing table and a jewelry armoire as well as custom-fitted rods and shelves, and an array of sweater boxes and shoe racks.

  Especially shoe racks. There must have been at least thirty pairs of stiletto heels in a rainbow of colors and styles. The one thing they had in common was the high, thin heel that had become Mom’s trademark.

  I didn’t see a single pair of flat shoes in the entire closet.

  Gregory’s closet, in contrast, was fairly modest. It held several racks of suits and sport coats, and stacks of carefully starched and pressed dress shirts.

  But it looked tiny next to the luxurious indulgence of what could more properly be called my mother’s dressing room.

  I was sketching in the bedroom wing when my cell phone rang. The sudden noise in the empty house set my heart racing.

  I dropped the pencil and fumbled for the phone with one hand. The number wasn’t one I recognized.

  “Hello?” I answered in a voice just above a whisper. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to speak out loud.

  “Georgiana? Dave Young here.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief and replied in a slightly more normal tone. “Hi, Dave. Have you seen Mom?”

  “I just left her,” Dave replied. “She’s doing okay.

  “The reason I called,” he continued, “is that I asked her about the wine cellar. She thought it was a pretty random question, but she did say he had a large storage cellar.”

  “Did she say where the cellar was, Dave?”

  “Just that he’d had it specially built into the new house.”

  There was a minute of silence on the other end of the line. I could imagine Dave trying to figure out why I had asked. But he still didn’t question me.

  There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. I thanked Dave for calling and hung up.

  I had confirmation there was a storage cellar, but not where it was.

  I went back to my sketches.

  chapter 30

  Something was wrong with the proportions in my drawing. I twisted the page around, looking at it from different angles, trying to figure out where I messed up.

  It wasn’t something wrong, it was something missing.

  Just like the files on Mom’s laptop, there was a space with nothing in it.

  It had to be the wine cellar.

  I paced off the bedroom. The closet doors were on one long, windowless wall. But when I compared the inside of the closets they didn’t add up to the length of the wall.

  I paced the wall again. Mom’s closet. Gregory’s closet. And a wide expanse of wall with no door.

  What was on the other side of that wall?

  I went back into Gregory’s closet, and flipped on the light to look at the wall next to the missing space. A rod spanned about half the wall, suits and sport coats carefully spaced along it to prevent wrinkling. Gregory was always impeccably dressed.

  Below the rod was a chest with partitions sized to hold shoes. Several of the spaces were empty, as though Gregory didn’t have enough shoes to fill the chest.

  But when I bent over to look more closely, I realized the empty spaces had recessed handles inside them. They were meant as handholds to move the chest.

  I held my breath and reached for the right side handle. As soon as I gripped it, I felt a latch release, but the chest wouldn’t budge.

  I tried releasing each side, but the minute I let go of a latch it snapped closed again. In order to move the chest I had to trip both latches at the same time.

  I tried to use my left hand to hold the latch, but the pain in my wrist was too great and I lost my grip.

  I bit down on my bottom lip and forced myself to try again. I ignored the pain, refusing to surrender to it. The fact that there were hidden latches meant there was something important to hide, and I had to find it.

  I drew in a deep breath and braced for another wave of pain as I curled my fingers around the latches and pulled.

  I nearly toppled over backward when the latches released and the chest slid easily away from the wall, revealing the bottom of a door.

  The upper portion of the door was still covered by the wall behind the clothes rod. It took me a few more minutes to find the release, but then the entire section of the closet swung away, exposing a simple door with a deadbolt.

  I took Mom’s keys out of my pocket and tried the front door key. To my surprise, it worked. All the locks in the house were keyed alike, even the hidden one.

  Chalk one up for the efficiency of master keys.

  I’d found Gregory’s wine cellar.

  The room was a couple steps down from the rest of the house. I suspected it sat on a slab to take advantage of the natural cooling, rather than on a foundation like the rest of the house.

  It was a big room, chilly but not cold. Wooden racks lined the walls on three sides. The fourth wall, where the door was, held a counter with several notebooks, each spine labeled with a variety of wine.

  I picked up a book at random and flipped quickly through the pages. They were inventory books, listing the wine, its purchase date, cost, and cellar location.

  Looking from the book to the racks, I was able to figure out the location key. Each rack had an alphabetical designation and the rows were numbered from top to bottom and left to right.

  If I wanted the bottle listed at the top of the third page, it was in rack C, row five, bottle two.

  To test my theory I carried the book over to rack C and compared the label with the entry. It was a match.

  I could have spent several hours checking the contents of the cellar against the listing, but I didn’t want to leave the van parked in the driveway. I’d already been there longer than I wanted to be.

  I did a quick count of the racks and bottles before I closed the door and returned the clothes rod and chest to their places.

  I scribbled the estimate on the corner of my sketches and headed for the door. Time to get out.

  I drove away from Gregory’s with a growing sense of excitement. I’d found the wine and I had the names of Gregory’s partners.

  Now all I had to do was figure out how to use that information to get my mother out of jail.

  Minor detail.

  Back home after switching vehicles at Mom’s, I let the dogs out and considered my next move. The day’s activities had left my wrist throbbing and my stomach in knots.

  I sat down with the computer to compare my notes with the information I already had, and found a discrepancy. T
he rough count I’d done in the wine cellar was several cases short of the totals shown on the spreadsheet.

  Were those the cases that had been found with Gregory’s body? And were they the same cases that were listed in the Authentication Report?

  And if they were, how did four cases of counterfeit wine end up under my mother’s house? With the dead body of her fiancé?

  The situation was getting stranger by the minute.

  I needed options, and I wasn’t seeing very many. I’d already decided against going to the sheriff. He would have to turn everything over to Vernon, a man I did not trust. I wasn’t sure how Dave Young would react to my search of Gregory’s house.

  He might even have to tell the Deputy Prosecutor, and given Vernon’s pursuit of my mother I didn’t doubt he’d be happy to put me in an adjoining cell, even if he had to settle for a trespassing charge until he could think of something worse.

  My brain was stuck in a rut, and I couldn’t seem to find my way out. I needed to make something happen, and I had a way to do just that.

  I opened my e-mail program and copied the names and addresses from Gregory’s Veritas list. I had Phil Wilson, Taylor Parkson, and the mysterious wineconsultantsoregon.net.

  If I e-mailed the three partners, maybe I could stir up some action. And maybe I could find the face hidden behind the anonymous address.

  I wrote and rewrote the e-mail, trying to get the proper tone. I debated about a salutation, but couldn’t come up with anything I liked so I simply started with the message, told them I had the wine, and asked what they wanted to do with the hundreds of bottles that would soon be homeless.

  It was an exaggeration, of course.

  Gregory had changed his will several months earlier, when he started building his new house. Mom was his sole heir and when she got out of jail she would decide whether to continue storing the wine in Gregory’s cellar. In the meantime it was safe in the house as long as the climate-control system was active.

  But it was the easiest way to get their attention.

  I wasn’t sure what I would do when I heard from them, but it was a first step. And I still had the Authentication Report, which I hadn’t mentioned. I was saving that for later.

  I had learned the hard way about facing off with suspects on my own. If I was going to meet with the Veritas partners, I didn’t want to go alone.

  I knew I was pushing the limits of my own “go slow” edict. I weighed the potential risks involved. And then I called Wade.

  I told him I had found Gregory’s wine cellar, and that there were a couple thousand bottles in the hidden room behind Gregory’s closet. I even described the location of the room.

  Wade gave a low whistle. “Pretty fancy detective work, Georgie. Ever thought of joining the sheriff’s office?”

  I wasn’t sure he was entirely joking. We’d had several discussions about the all-male force in Pine Ridge. From Wade’s seat on the City Council he’d had an inside look at the difficulties of recruiting a female deputy into a rookie position on a small-town force with few opportunities for advancement.

  “I’d end up riding a desk and running a computer all day,” I answered. “No thanks.”

  I went back to my original question. “Wade, I may have to go talk to these guys and I don’t want to go alone.” I swallowed hard. Asking for help was always difficult for me, and this time there were some relationship implications I didn’t want to think about too hard. “Will you go with me?”

  There was silence at the other end of the phone connection, and I babbled on. “I know this is asking a lot. Even if I have the keys to the house, and even if it technically is my mother’s now because she’s Gregory’s heir, I know you don’t approve.

  “But proving I know where the wine is might be the only way I can convince these guys to talk to me, and that’s the only way I can find out who killed Gregory—”

  “Yes.” Wade’s single word answer stopped my dithering.

  “Yes, you don’t approve? Or, yes, you’ll go with me?”

  I held my breath and waited for his answer.

  “Yes, I’ll go with you.” There was a deep sigh on Wade’s end of the conversation. “I have learned that there’s no way to stop you once you’ve decided to do something, and it’s clear you have, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, with or without me, you’re going, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “I guess I am.”

  “Then I can’t very well say no. It would just mean you’d go alone, and I think you could use some backup.

  “So call me if you have to go out there, okay?”

  I agreed, and Wade changed the subject. “How is your wrist? Is it healing at all?”

  “Still hurts, but I think it’s getting better. I have an appointment in a couple days to have Dr. Cox check it.”

  “How about the car? Have you heard anything?”

  “Not yet. The insurance company is supposed to be sending an adjustor to assess the damage, but I don’t know if they’ve been out yet or not.

  “You’re the one who knows everybody in town, Wade. What have you heard?”

  “Nothing much,” he admitted. “But Louie Marks was making a lot of noise at Tiny’s about how he kept that car in perfect condition, and there’s no way it should have lost control like that, unless you were driving crazy.”

  “I wasn’t!” I protested. “I was driving the way I usually do. Which, I admit, is a little fast. But nothing crazy.”

  I remembered the sickening feeling as the brake pedal dropped to the floorboard. “I’m sure the brakes failed, Wade. One minute everything was fine and seconds later I was out of control and the brakes didn’t work.”

  “Maybe the sheriff will find some explanation, or the insurance adjustor will.” He paused. “I probably shouldn’t have told you what Louie said. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. He’s right. I had the car in there regularly, and he kept everything running right. We both took good care of the ’Vette, and he’s probably feeling almost as bad about it as I am.”

  I shook off the melancholy that threatened to descend. I wasn’t ready to think about the ’Vette. As long as the sheriff and the insurance adjustor were continuing their investigations, I could delay making any decision.

  I was good with that.

  I reminded Wade he’d offered to drive me over to see Mom after work. He promised to pick me up, and offered to swing by Garibaldi’s while I talked to my mother.

  Wade was definitely working his way into keeper territory.

  Flush your drain-waste and vent systems regularly. Each time you get up on the roof to clean your downspouts and gutters, run a garden hose into each vent. A couple minutes of water at full flow should do the trick. If you’re not fond of going on the roof yourself, ask the people you hire to clean your downspouts and gutters (and you should do that at the end of every autumn) to do it for you.

  —A Plumber’s Tip from Georgiana Neverall

  chapter 31

  My visit with Mom was as awkward as it had been the night before. She asked how I was, I told her I was getting better. She said she was innocent, and railed against the sheriff and the prosecutor.

  When Carruthers knocked on the door and told us our time was up, I was relieved. Mom might need to see me, to be reminded she wasn’t alone, but seeing her in such distress took a toll.

  As I walked through the door into the lobby I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Even as a visitor, being behind the locked security doors and under the watchful eyes of the ever-present deputies felt oppressive.

  Wade waited in the lobby, as he had the previous night, and we hurried out the door to his car. I slid into the passenger’s seat and Wade handed me the pizza box from the backseat. The aroma of tomato sauce and pepperoni filled the small car and made my mouth water.

  “Extra onion?” I asked hopefully.

  Wade grinned. “As long as we’re both ea
ting them it’s okay, isn’t it?” He closed the car door and moved to the driver’s side.

  As he slid in, I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “In case the onions prove too much,” I teased.

  He turned and gave me a real kiss, then started the car. “If it’s just in case, better make it worthwhile,” he said.

  The dogs were waiting when we got home, but they had to settle for a romp in the yard and a green treat instead of the pepperoni and cheese they felt they deserved.

  Daisy’s reproachful look said more clearly than words that I was a mean and neglectful Airedale mom.

  While we ate I filled Wade in on all the information I had been able to glean from Gregory’s e-mail archive. He raised his eyebrows when I told him about the report indicating some of the wine was counterfeit.

  “You mean it’s worth about ten cents on the dollar? That’s going to be a pretty big hit for his partners.”

  “Big enough to get him killed?” I asked. “I mean, sure it’s a lot of money, but do you think somebody would actually kill him over it?”

  Wade shook his head. “Who knows? But if you think somebody killed Gregory because they lost money on this wine deal, shouldn’t you be talking to the sheriff about it? He’s the one who should be chasing these guys, not you.”

  “Can you just hear that conversation? Sheriff Mitchell I have some information that might bear on your investigation. How did I get this information? Oh, I just happened to hack into my mother’s laptop and find some of Gregory’s hidden files. Why, no, I didn’t think I should tell you about them. Withholding evidence? Hindering an investigation? But I’m here now.” I shook my head. “I don’t think I want to go there.”

  “And how is what you’re doing any better?”

  This was like talking to Sue. I didn’t have a good answer for Wade, either. “Because,” I said lamely, “maybe if I can solve this for him, he won’t think about arresting me.”

  We talked as we finished the pizza. Wade couldn’t change my mind about going to the sheriff. I think he knew he wouldn’t but he had to try.