As I waited for the foil, I turned my thoughts to finding a place to crash for the night. I didn't have a car. Stuart wasn't a big city, so there weren't any taxis roaming the streets. My cell phone was dead. Even if I wanted to call Poppy, I couldn't. I could ask Skye to call a cab. And then what? Pay for another cab in the morning?
I needed a place to rest my weary head, and I needed it fast. I longed for the apartment above The Treasure Chest.
The apartment I had the key to.
Why not stay there? Supposedly the utilities were still on. If I was lucky, that old refrigerator in the back was still working, so I could eat my leftovers for breakfast. I could spread out Tommy's sleeping bag, the one in my trunk, and sleep on the floor in one of the new apartments.
The more I thought about it, the more I warmed to the idea. Why not spend the night in The Treasure Chest? I'd signed a contract and paid my earnest money. What was the worst that could happen? I'd get arrested for squatting? Not likely given my signed intent to buy the place. Digging around in my purse, I found my spare car key and the key to the building.
Skye handed me a brown paper bag. "I wrapped your sandwich. I put an extra dill pickle in a second piece of foil. Also, I wrapped up chips in wax paper for you. Anything else?"
"You've been wonderful," I said. I paid the bill in cash and left a generous tip inside the leather folio. "I like your earrings and your bracelet."
"I love making jewelry. Especially using unexpected materials. My dream is to make a living selling stuff I make. Maybe next time you come in, I'll show you pictures of my pieces."
"I'd like that," I said and took my leave of Pumpernickel's.
Twilight had crept up softly and deepened into darkness. As I walked away from the well-lit intersection and along the side of Essie's store, my path grew harder to see. Not surprisingly, the security light behind Poppy's gas station wasn't working. I added that to my mental "to do" list. Using the remote open button, I popped my trunk. There wasn't much illumination thrown by the inside lamp, but it served my purposes.
Rummaging around, I found the flashlight I kept next to the spare tire. When switched on, it flickered intermediately. Pounding it against my palm gave me a watery beam. That would do to get me inside The Treasure Chest. I also snapped up Tommy's sleeping bag. He'd asked me to bring it in case any pals from St. Louis wanted to spend the night in his dorm room.
Next up, clean clothes. After slamming the trunk, I unlocked my car. From the back seat, I retrieved a small travel bag with my toilet articles and a change of clothes. I also slid my cell phone into my pants pocket.
After locking the car, I hightailed it across the alley by the faint light from my flashlight. The security light behind The Treasure Chest was out. No surprise there. Juggling my purse, the food, the sleeping bag, my travel bag, and the flashlight, I accidentally gave the door a hip-bump.
It flew open. My things clattered to the ground. I was so tired I could barely stand up. I figured I'd retrieve my belongings later. First I needed to get inside the building.
What was it with people in Stuart that they didn't lock their doors? First Poppy and now Hal Humberger. I shook my head in dismay. Geez.
Reaching into the black void, I flipped the light switch. Nothing happened.
"Oh, come on!"
Training the wan beam of my flashlight on the threshold, I stepped inside Essie's back room. There used to be another set of switches, as you entered the sales floor. I had no choice but to keep going toward them, using one hand on the wall as my guide, and hoping my flashlight kept working. As I moved along, I felt more confident. I walked out onto the sales floor, moving the light this way and that—and tripped over Hal Humberger's body.
10
As I threw out my hands for balance, my flashlight hit the floor and rolled away. Although I stumbled forward, I somehow managed to stay on my feet. Once I caught my balance, I turned and ran. I was almost at the back door when I heard footsteps echoing on the wooden floor.
I was not alone.
I froze. As slowly as I could, I sank to my knees, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.
The footsteps continued. They were more muffled now.
Was the other person coming or going? I couldn't tell. I tried to stay quiet but I panted with fear. My senses were alert, and I strained to listen. Was anyone else in the building with me?
A squeak, a protest of metal on metal suggested that the front door was being opened. Thunk! With a rattled of glass, the wooden door was slammed shut.
The intruder had left the building.
Listening carefully, I could hear a car motor crank and turn over. Headlights sent a horizontal stream of brightness bouncing across the display window, suggesting the driver was backing out of his or her parking space. The car shifted into gear and pulled away.
For good measure, I remained in my awkward kneeling position for what seemed like a long, long time. My legs ached. My heart was banging around in my chest as my eyes adjusted to the dark.
My ears also made an adjustment. I could hear an appliance humming, probably a refrigerator. But I couldn't hear anyone else breathing or moving. Just the sound of my heart pounding.
Was Hal Humberger really dead? It sure seemed that way to me. He had been sprawled face down. I'd actually tripped over his leg, but he hadn't made a sound. Was it possible he was unconscious? Alive and needing help?
Should I go to him? Try to rouse him?
Another car drove by. It slowed as it passed in front of the building.
What if the killer had come back?
I needed to leave—and I needed to go now!
I shoved my way out of the back door, stumbling off the stoop, and into the alley. I went flailing into the night, tripping, stubbing my toe on a rock, running, fumbling my way toward Pumpernickel's, the only business I knew was open. I could hear cars rumbling through the intersection, around the corner. I could see the street light up ahead. Picking up speed, I raced toward it. Spurred by fear that the killer might be looking for me, I ran faster than I've ever run in my life.
The crosswalk signaled flashed in my favor, so I sprinted across the street.
My heart thumped in my chest. My breath came in ragged gasps.
What had I walked into?
Had I panicked and left behind a man who needed help?
Or was a killer on my heels?
My legs felt like rubber bands. I reached the front door of the deli, threw open the door and hurled myself at Skye, who was standing over a table of diners.
"Skye!" I grabbed her. "He's dead! Dead! You have to help me!"
"What?" Her blue eyes grew huge in her face.
Her customers were two old farts with hearing aids. They cupped their hands over their ears and shouted, "Huh?"
I realized how ridiculous I looked. I let go of her and added, "Help me. Please?"
Smiling at the diners, she excused herself and steered me through the swinging Dutch doors and into the kitchen.
"Who's dead? Are you okay?" She looked me up and down.
"No! Yes! I mean, I think I found a body. My phone is dead. Out of juice."
"Just a sec." She finished writing on her order pad, and then passed her order to the chef and gave him special instructions to "hold the mayo." That chore dispensed with, she unclipped her phone from her waistband and handed it to me. I dialed 911, identified myself, and stuttered the nature of my call.
"I found a man and I think he's dead. But I don't know for sure."
The dispatcher requested the address.
"Essie's place.” I couldn't come up with a street name or number.
"Tell them it's the old Trash to Treasures building across the street from Pumpernickel's. Everyone knows where it is," suggested Skye.
That worked. The dispatcher told me that officers and an ambulance were on their way. I promised to meet them at the site.
"Cindy?" Skye crooked a finger at another waitress, who was loading a tray
with bowls of soup. "Could you finish up Table Six for me? Got an emergency here."
While she untied her apron, I asked, "Got a flashlight?"
"Everybody in Florida owns at least a dozen flashlights. Going without power is a way of life for us." Skye dug around in a low cabinet. "See?"
She held up a honking big flashlight with a bulb the size of a large onion.
11
"A dead man? Are you sure?" Skye asked, as we trotted out the front door of the deli.
"I think so. I'm pretty sure it’s Hal Humberger there on the floor at The Treasure Chest. He didn't move. I suppose he could just be unconscious."
"Hal Humberger, the real estate agent?" She jogged along beside me.
"Yes," I answered.
"What on earth were you doing in Essie's store this late at night?"
We moved away from the streetlamp and into the dark. Her flashlight lit the ground like the sun at high noon. I made a mental note to buy myself a couple of those big dudes.
"I planned to spend the night at The Treasure Chest. I bought it today."
"You what?" Skye stopped in her tracks.
"I bought it."
"Oh. Is that why Dick was so mad?"
"Yep. When he stomped out, I didn't have a place to spend the night, so I figured I'd stay in The Treasure Chest."
"By yourself?"
"Yes."
"That was brave."
"I didn't expect to find a corpse there!"
We rounded the corner of Essie's building and approached the back door. Now that I realized whoever had been in the building had left, Skye was with me, and the police were on their way, I felt a lot more confident. I also felt stupid. My things were scattered there on the ground. The door was still open, as I'd left it. Skye shone her light into the doorway, but we still couldn't see much.
"Where is he?" asked Skye.
"About a third of the way in the building," I replied.
"And you're pretty sure he's dead?" said Skye.
"I think he is. My flashlight wasn't working well and then I dropped it. So I didn't get a really, really good look."
"So maybe he isn't dead," she said. "Maybe he just fell down. Maybe he just fainted or something. We should go in and check on him."
"Uh…" I stalled. I did not want to go back in the building. Not yet. "I heard a door slam right after I tripped. And someone drove away. What if there's a murderer on the loose? What if he's waiting inside?"
"Come again?" Her expression was one of puzzlement. "If they drove away, the person is gone, right?"
"Maybe. I don't know." My shoulders drooped in defeat. “It could have been a trick.”
"Well, if I was a killer, I wouldn't stick around, would you? Was there any blood?" Skye asked. "I mean, on the body? Or on the floor?"
"Not that I could see."
"What if Hal is hurt?" she asked. "What if he needs us? Maybe he's just unconscious. We need to check."
My head said, "Yes, maybe," but my feet refused to move.
She repeated. "Come on. We have to do something! Are those your things? All over the ground?"
"Yes," I said. "I dropped them while I was trying to open the door. But it wasn't locked."
"We better go in and see what's what."
"Right. Okay. All right. Let's go." I pushed the door open and stepped inside the store.
I took two steps and stopped. Skye was so close that she nearly climbed up my back. She pointed the beam of the flashlight forward, and then it drifted upwards.
"Can you aim the light lower so we can see where we're going?"
She lowered the flashlight slowly, taking in our surroundings. "Wow. Look at all this neat stuff!"
"Could you point that over there? At the ten o’clock position. That’s where I saw Mr. Humberger."
She trained the beam on the prone figure, sprawled face-down with his feet near us and his head toward the front door. Because one arm was beneath him, and his torso was sideways, his shoulders blocked a good view of his head. He seemed to be staring off into space, but the way his face was turned, but I couldn't quite tell.
"That's Mr. Humberger all right," she said. "He sure looks dead to me, but you never know. In the old days, they used to bury people alive all the time. Couldn't tell if they were dead or comatose. Undertakers attached a string that ran from inside the coffins to a bell above ground. That way if you woke up, and you weren't really dead, you could call for help by ringing the bell. That's where the term 'dead ringer' came from."
She was just a font of useful information.
Not.
I shook my head. "This is seriously creepy."
She nodded. "I know. Too bad he doesn't have a bell."
I took a moment to take that comment in.
"So you think he's alive?" I ventured a guess at her meaning.
"Could be. You'd better take his pulse. I'll just wait over here," she said, as she backed away. "Just holler if you need help."
Right. Thanks a lot.
"Here goes." Moving closer to Mr. Humberger's head, I sank into a slow squat about two feet from him. His face was turned away from me.
"Yoohoo! Hello! Hal?" I called.
"You're going to need to get closer," said Skye, from a safe distance.
Great.
"Mr. Humberger?" I said loudly, aiming my voice at the back of his head. "Hello?"
He didn't move.
Very, very slowly, I inched my hand toward his neck, steeling myself for the moment of contact. My fingers hovered over his collar. The hairs along his neckline bristled against my fingertips, an oddly intimate sensation. His skin felt cold and clammy. Taking a deep breath, I put pressure where I figured his vein should be, but I didn't feel anything. I moved my fingertips around, thinking I'd somehow missed the jugular. Nothing.
"Can you tell if he's, like, breathing?" Skye asked.
"No. His skin seems cold. Feels weird.”
"Could be the air conditioning blowing on him. That happens to me a lot," Skye said.
"What air conditioning? Do you feel any air conditioning? Do you hear it kicking on?"
"No. Should we be doing CPR?" she asked. In the glow of the flashlight, her features took on an eerie distortion.
"Do you know CPR?" I asked.
"No. Do you?"
"Sort of."
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
"Do you hear something?" My voice climbed an octave. Skye and I turned toward the back door.
"Oh no. The killer has come back," she whispered. We both froze in place.
The air buzzed with a funny crackling sound. A red light blinked over our heads and turned one wall after the other the color of blood.
"Ten ninety-seven," said a male voice.
The back door flew open so hard that its handle smacked the wall. Lights flooded the scene. I couldn't see a thing. Skye dropped her flashlight with a loud thunk.
"Police! Stay where you are! Hands in the air!"
12
Three years earlier
Griffith, Indiana
At his retirement party, Detective Lou Murray raised a can of Bud and said, "Goodbye, boys. With any luck, I'll never see another corpse in my life, unless it's a dead fish."
His fellow members of the Griffith Police Force had a good laugh over that. They knew Lou was making a mistake. But who could blame him? The buy-out had come at a good time. Even though he was only forty-two, he was burned out. He'd lost his mentor and partner, Harvey Showalter.
Showalter had pulled over a speeder, who shot him point-blank in the head. The cop had been off-duty at the time, on his way to the cemetery to visit his wife's grave. It rankled Lou that such a good guy could die doing something so routine. Lou decided he'd had enough of police work.
For those first six months after he moved to Stuart, Lou took his new boat out on the water every day.
Nine months and one surgery for melanoma later, fishing had gotten old.
"The lure has worn off," Lou told Sh
owalter. "See? It's a pun. Aw, forget it!"
Talking to Showalter had become a habit over their twenty years of service together. Even though the other man had been gone for a year and a half, Lou still deferred to his old colleague. The department shrink had assured him he wasn't crazy. "It's a coping mechanism. We all have them. Yours is a little more persistent than most."
After the cancer scare, Lou found himself spending more and more time inside his trailer. If the tin box seemed a bit cramped, at least the A/C worked. Life in the retirement community was quiet, for the most part. Everyone but Lou was fifty-five or older. Management had jumped at the chance to have a retired law enforcement officer on the premises, so they'd waived the mandatory age requirement. The ratio of ladies to gents was about five to one, even if the "girls" were old enough to be grandmothers. Lou never lacked for female companionship or a home-cooked meal. But deep inside, he felt restless. He had no purpose. No reason to get up in the morning.
Lou would have been the last to admit he was going stir-crazy. However, the officers back in Griffith had put down bets on how long their old comrade could stay away from police work. A dispatcher won the pool and $167 one hot afternoon in August.
Lou was watching a DVD of The Godfather for the umpteenth zillion time when Marlon Brando's monologue was interrupted by the sound of a fight in the Winnebago next door. Ignoring the racket proved difficult. Should Lou knock politely on his neighbor's door and suggest Bucky dial it back a bit?
Seemed reasonable enough. He and Bucky had shared a couple of cold ones, taken in a Cardinals game at Roger Dean Stadium, and even borrowed charcoal lighter fluid from each other. In Lou's mind, they weren't exactly friends, but they were more than nodding acquaintances.
Of course, Bucky shouldn't even have been living in that trailer, because he was only thirty-five. The trailer's owner had sworn to the park manager that Bucky was only house-sitting for him.
"I'm just here temporarily. Taking a break from my old lady," Bucky had told Lou with a smirk. "She caught me misbehaving and kicked me out. She's bound to come crawling back, though. You wait and see."
Kiki Lowenstein Books 1-3 & Cara Mia Delgatto Books 1-3: The Perfect Series for Crafters, Pet Lovers, and Readers Who Like Upbeat Books! Page 69