Circle of Evil (9 page)

Nancy automatically turned toward the club. She didn't know what she was going to do there, but maybe she'd be able to get inside and explore—look in the lockers as Ned had suggested.

As Nancy was driving down the tree-lined entry drive toward the clubhouse, she thought of something that startled her. Her house
hadn't been broken into. The door was just ajar, but it hadn't been jimmied, and neither had any of the windows. She was positive now that she
had
locked the door, so the only way anyone could have gotten in was with a key.

Nancy took her foot off the gas and let the car coast to a stop. She needed a minute to think it through. If the thief had used a key to get into her house, then maybe he had had keys for the other houses. But how?

Sitting in the car, Nancy went over her day—what she'd done and where she'd been. She had had her keys in her canvas bag, and the bag was with her the whole time.

Except, she remembered, when she had been in the weight room and when she had been having her massage. The bag had been in a locker then. Could someone have taken the key, made a copy, and put it back? Easy! After all, someone
had
put the note in her bag. Could it have been Cindy? Cindy certainly knew her way around the club.

Nancy thought of Rita, too. Could she have done it? Rita had never left the room. But Nancy remembered suddenly that she
had
made a short phone call.

What had she said? Something about being too busy to make it that night. Nancy thought she must have been canceling a date or something,
and maybe she was. But maybe it was some kind of signal to let a partner know that Nancy's key was in a locker, there for the taking. Who could the partner be?

Nancy slowly backed her car up and out onto the main road. She drove about half a block until she came to a place where she could park so it would be half-hidden by trees. Then she walked through the grounds to the clubhouse. She decided it had been foolish to alert anyone that she was there by going up the driveway.

The clubhouse was dark and appeared to be locked up tight. But Nancy got lucky and found one open door. There were two choices: someone had forgotten to lock it, or someone was inside. Cautiously, she pushed the door open and stepped into the cool, dark silence.

Once inside, Nancy slipped off her sandals. She wished she weren't wearing a white top—it stood out like a neon light—but there was nothing she could do about it then. Taking a deep breath, she moved deeper into the building. Except for the occasional spill of moonlight slanting in from the windows, the club was night-dark. The silence was broken only by the faint ticking of a distant clock.

Bypassing the lounge, Nancy headed for the stairs that led to the locker rooms. She wanted to check out the locker she'd left her bag in to
see how someone could have gotten in, left her that message, and taken her key.

There were a couple of yellow light bulbs burning downstairs, and they washed the hall in a sickly mustard glow. Walking soundlessly on the cool tiles, Nancy passed the locked women's massage room, the boiler room, and then turned into the locker room.

Using the weak glow from another yellow bulb, Nancy managed to find the locker she had used earlier. The key was in it, the same key she'd locked it with and kept in the pocket of her shorts. Most of the other lockers had keys in them, too.

That had to be it—the keys were interchangeable. Nancy took one out and tried it on another locker. No—it didn't work. Somebody must have used a key to get into the locker, though. Women went in and out of the room all day, and she couldn't imagine anyone taking the time to actually break into a locker. It was just too risky. Duplicate keys—

A faint sound. A bare foot on the tiles? Nancy froze and strained to hear it again. Holding her breath, she waited. She heard a car horn in the distance and the buzz of an airplane, and finally she distinguished the thudding of her heart. Then the noise came again, and Nancy whirled around—her hands were up, ready.

But the locker room remained empty. No one was looming in the doorway; no one was lurking in the shadows by the sinks.

Then Nancy almost laughed. The light was dim, but she saw it—a shining drop of water hanging from one of the faucets, ready to fall. When it did, she heard the gentle
plop
and realized she had been frightened by a slow drip from a faucet.

Her breathing returned to normal again. Nancy turned back to the lockers, thinking through her theory. The robber or robbers learn when a wealthy person will be away. Then they steal the person's house key from a locker room and have a duplicate made. But where do they copy the key? she wondered. They'd have to do it in the clubhouse; they wouldn't have time to take it away. And what about alarms at the houses? How could they break in without setting them off?

The faucet dripped again, an incredibly loud sound for such a small drop of water, and Nancy jumped again. Deciding she had had enough of the locker room, she stepped out into the still hallway. As she started toward the stairs, she noticed that the weight room door was open. As long as she was there, she decided, she might as well check it out, too.

Except for the spill of light from the hall bulbs, the weight room was all in shadow. The
equipment, especially the big new weight-training machine, looked like monsters designed by a science-fiction writer.

Nancy walked into the middle of the room and realized that without a flashlight she wouldn't be able to detect much. Deciding to check out the room the next day, she turned to leave but paused by the new machine when she heard a noise that made her heart miss a beat. It wasn't water this time. It was a creaking sound with a faint jingling for accompaniment. The second sound was like the rattling of keys.

You've got keys on your mind, she told herself. As she took another step, the creaking-jingling sounded again. Nancy stopped and caught sight of the weight-training machine's shadow thrown high against the wall. The heavy piece of equipment was rocking slowly back and forth. But not by itself. Another shadow was next to it—the shadow of a person, both hands gripping the equipment, making the machine rock faster and faster. And as Nancy stood there, she realized that the machine was about to topple—straight onto her.

T
HERE WAS NO
time to wonder who was pushing the machine. There was almost no time to move. But Nancy did, leaping sideways, trying to throw herself out of the path of that lethal piece of equipment. She had no idea how much it weighed, but she did know that if it hit her, she could be killed.

With a thud, Nancy hit the hard floor, her shoulder and head skidding on the rough, scratchy carpet. At the same moment, the state-of-the-art workout equipment crashed. It bounced once, crashed again, and then rocked
back and forth more and more slowly. Finally, with a creak and a clank, it stopped.

Slowly, Nancy opened her eyes and looked. Less than five inches lay between the tip of her nose and the top of the heavy equipment. If she hadn't seen the shadows on the wall, she'd have been pinned to the floor right then, beneath hundreds of pounds of bone-crushing equipment.

Nancy was just sitting up when she heard the door to the weight room slam and the echo of feet padding quickly down the hall. The contents of the room became obscure without the light from the hall. Knowing she couldn't possibly follow in time, Nancy closed her eyes and fell back on the dusty carpet.

No one could have known I was coming here tonight, she told herself. But somebody saw me, and the minute he did, I almost got caught.

Disgusted with herself for not being quieter and more careful, Nancy rolled quickly away from the workout equipment and started to get to her knees. That was when she noticed a narrow door in the wall next to her. Probably some kind of storage place, she thought. But then she remembered that the storage closet was on the opposite wall.

Nancy tested the metal handle. Locked, naturally.
She knew she should get out of there and go home, but she couldn't stop wondering about what was behind that door. A set of duplicate keys for all the lockers, maybe? Or, better yet, a diamond and ruby necklace, a Picasso painting, a rare book, and all the other things that had been stolen?

After she opened the door to the hallway, she could see better. She rummaged in her large straw handbag for her lock-picking kit. She wished she could turn on a light, but she didn't dare risk it. Moving the small picks in the lock, she turned the tumblers by feel and sound.

A few minutes later, Nancy was staring at two packages of light bulbs, a small pile of rags, and, behind these, a void. Not much of a storage closet, she thought. She pushed the bulbs and rags aside and stepped in, stretching her hands out in front of her. She expected to be stopped by a back wall, but instead she continued to feel only air. She kept going, sure that she'd hit a wall any second—but nothing. She was in a long, narrow passageway.

As Nancy walked farther into the corridor, her hands felt nothing but the two walls on either side of her—no boxes, no spare equipment, nothing. It wouldn't be a very good storage room, anyway, she thought. It was so
long and narrow that it would take hours to get anything from the back.

Nancy took a few more steps, then stumbled as her foot hit what felt like a loose tile. Instinctively, she threw her arms out to the sides to steady herself in the pitch darkness. But instead of hitting solid wall, her right hand pushed against a flimsy piece of metal that swung in silently and smoothly.

After Nancy regained her balance, she felt around with her hands, trying to figure out what kind of cabinet she had opened. She touched something soft and slightly damp. Pulling it out, she discovered that it was a terry-cloth towel. As she put her hand back into the cabinet—or whatever it was—she saw thin yellow lines of light spilling faintly into the cabinet. Her fingers reached out and closed around a plastic bottle; she removed it, opened it, and sniffed. It was suntan lotion.

A towel, a bottle of lotion, and yellow light. This isn't just any cabinet, Nancy thought excitedly. She was looking into the rear of a locker.

Wanting to make certain, she stepped back, ran her hands along the wall for a few inches, and then pushed again. Another metal panel swung in, and more lines of yellow light from the locker room fell into the locker. The same thing happened on the left wall.

It was perfect, Nancy thought with a smile. A perfectly beautiful setup. The door in the weight room, the little stash of light bulbs to make people think it was for storage, and the long line of locker backs, cleverly fixed so they could be opened and the robbers could help themselves to anyone's house keys. People in the locker rooms would not even be aware that one of the lockers was being rifled.

Nancy pushed open a few more locker backs. Even if she didn't know who was committing the burglaries, she at least knew how. And that meant she was one step closer to putting all the pieces together.

Nancy closed the metal panels and headed down the passageway and back into the weight room. As she passed the workout machine, lying still like some large wounded animal, she almost laughed. Whoever had pushed it at her had actually ended up helping her to crack the case! She was on to their secret now, and it was only a matter of time before she had them trapped!

Nancy gave the machine a pat, then gathered up her bag and the sandals she had dropped when she made her flying leap. She'd just left the weight room and was walking down the hall toward the stairs
when a clattering noise made her spin around.

The noise went on for a few seconds. It sounded like rocks tumbling in a washing machine. Nancy saw that she was standing right next to the boiler room door. She pushed it open, and the noise got louder before settling down to a steady hum.

The pipes must be rattling, Nancy thought, or maybe the air conditioner had come on. Boiler rooms always had equipment that made loud noises. In the daytime, she wouldn't even have noticed it. And neither would anyone else, she thought suddenly.

On a hunch, Nancy stepped into the room and began looking around. In just five minutes, her hunch paid off. Stuck in a far corner, behind a pile of old pipes and covered with a dusty canvas sheet, was another piece of equipment. When Nancy pulled the sheet off, she found herself looking at a key-duplicating machine.

Perfect, she thought again. Anyone hearing the key duplicator would think it was just the furnace or the pipes and wouldn't check to see what the noise was.

Nancy had just left the boiler room when another sound made her freeze. Voices were coming from somewhere above her in the
clubhouse. She couldn't tell exactly how many, but one was a man's, and at least one belonged to a woman. The robbers, she decided, coming back to check if the weight machine had done its work.

Quietly but quickly, Nancy padded barefoot the rest of the way down the hall, then ran lightly up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, she stopped, held her breath, and listened. The voices were coming from the lounge. She could hear them perfectly now, and what she heard made her burst out laughing. Fooled again, Detective, she told herself.