Framed

Framed

By Nancy Springer

Copyright 2012 by Nancy Springer

Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass
and Untreed Reads Publishing

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
, April 1999.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Also by Nancy Springer and Untreed Reads Publishing

The Mystery World of Nancy Springer: #20

The Mystery World of Nancy Springer: American Curls

http://www.untreedreads.com

Expecting nothing but the creative pleasure of a reframe job, Veronica ripped the brown paper off the back, wadded it and lobbed it into the trash. Reaching for the pliers to pull the brads, she asked, “So you think this guy’s had a sex change or something, Lois?”

“Who knows?” Putting on her coat to leave, the boss rolled her eyes. “His phone’s a wrong number, they returned the postcard I sent him, maybe he’s deep-sixed with Jimmy Hoffa. Who knows what goes on with customers? Look at the art they bring in. Look at the mats they put on it.”

“I’ll say.” Puce and fuchsia on a lithograph; what was somebody smoking?

“Another cowsy-wowsy print. Mat it up nice and some schmo will buy it.”

“I’ll do my best.” Veronica pulled the last brad and lifted out the backing.

“Well, I’m outa here. See ya, Ronnie.”

“See ya,” Veronica echoed automatically, staring at the strange little parcel she had just uncovered. Or not strange, exactly, but quite out of place, taped to the back of the fuchsia mat. Why would somebody sandwich a key inside a frame job?

A key in a clear plastic bag. Ronnie pulled it loose and looked at it more closely. Looked like some sort of locker key. And a business card. With one stubby, callused finger Ronnie coaxed the card out of the bag and read it: GROAT’S MINI STORAGE. And scrawled in Bic pen the number 129.

“Huh!” she said.

“What’s that?” Tim, the other framer on the evening shift, had just come in. She showed him her find. It was good for a lot of joking and speculation over the next four hours, during which she reframed the lithograph in a really classy cream black-core mat with V-groove.

“Groat’s Mini Storage. Isn’t that where they had an Elvis sighting or something?”

“I doubt it,” Ronnie said. “It’s down near where I live.”

“Well, something happened there. I can’t remember. Clinton did it with some woman there? Princess Di’s ghost?”

When it got near time to close, Ronnie said, “I’m just going to drop the key off.”

“Sure.”

That night? Why not; it wasn’t like there was anybody waiting for her at home. Since the divorce, the less time she spent at home, the better. It felt good to walk into Groat’s 24-Hour Convenience Store. Lights. People. She asked the man behind the counter, “You’re under the same management as the mini-storage out back, right?”

“Right. You want to rent a unit?”

“No. I found a key.” She laid it on the counter in front of him. Leaning on his plump forearms, he stared at it but did not touch it. He had eyes like a dead fish, expressionless.

“Where’d you find it?” he asked.

“Inside a framed picture, of all places.”

“How’d you do that?”

She explained briefly. She had no clue why he wanted to know, and for sure he wasn’t her type, but talking with him was better than going home.

“One twenty-nine,” he said meditatively after a short silence. “That’s a claimer unit.”

“Huh?”

“Nobody’s been paying the rent. You got the key. Whatever’s in there, take it. It’s yours.” He shoved the key at her, still in its bag.

“You serious?”

“Yep. Yours.” He looked at her with those fish-flat eyes. “Go take a look.”

She gawked a moment, then took the key and headed out to see for herself. Veronica Phillips could use a windfall as much as most people. More than some. Bluejean jobs like framing don’t pay much. But she’d reached a point in her life where, even if it meant working for minimum wage, she was not willing to walk the walk and talk the talk any longer. No more lipstick. No more pantyhose.

And if somebody wanted to give her the contents of a mini-storage free, why not?

It was lighted well enough down there that she did not feel frightened. One twenty-nine was only halfway down the hill anyway. She spotted the number about the same time as she heard the sirens approaching.

The key fit the lock okay.

Guinea pig siren noises,
woot
woot
woot
, and something with flashing lights pulled into the convenience store parking lot. Ronnie glanced up. Cop car.

What the hell? Was somebody trying to rob the place? She’d stay until she was sure it was safe to go up there. With a click she pushed open the door of 129.

Empty.

She stood there a moment to be sure the shadows in the corners weren’t fooling her. But it was…empty. Ronnie clenched her teeth, mentally framing a thing or two to say to that fish-eyed man.

“Police officer,” said a male voice behind her. “Turn around slowly and keep your hands where I can see them.”

About that time Veronica remembered why Groat’s Mini Storage had been in the news months back. It was the place where they’d found the body.

* * *

“Tell it to me one more time,” said the police detective, looking bored.

“Why? It’s way past my bedtime.” Ronnie tried to speak pleasantly even though her head ached with stress and fatigue. It had to be 3 a.m.

It had been a woman’s body,
she remembered.
The cops wouldn’t tell her a thing, but it seemed to her that it had been a woman’s body jammed into a footlocker in the mini storage. Sawed in pieces.

“Because I’m asking you nicely,” said the detective not very nicely. Llewellyn, his name tag said. He
was
her type, damn it, lean and dark, but he was too young; he wouldn’t be interested in her. Anyway, she didn’t like his attitude. “Start at the top.”

“No.” Ronnie found that she had had enough. “You want to stay here all night, fine, we’ll stay here all night, but I’m calling a lawyer.”

It was the smell that had given it away. The fish-eyed man probably wouldn’t have bothered with the contents of #129 for a few more months if it hadn’t been for the stench. Just like the frame shop hadn’t bothered with the deadbeat order until months past the six-week deadline.

“You’ll have to wait till morning for that,” said Detective Llewellyn. With a name like that it was no wonder he had to act tough. “I can put you in a cell if you like.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ronnie cried, her voice breaking, “if you won’t let me go, tell me what it is I’m supposed to have done. Just tell me what you think I did!”

He wouldn’t, of course. What was driving Veronica toward the edge was the way none of them would tell her anything. But he did leave her alone for a while. When he came back, he carried papers. “Okay,” he said, still bored, “just read over this transcript of your statement, sign it, and you can go. For now.”

The transcript was accurate enough. While she read it, Detective Llewellyn diddled with papers on his desk, his hands irritated, jumpy. But as she signed, she saw his hands freeze like rabbits. She looked up; he was staring at her hand holding the pen, definitely not bored any longer.

“How’d you get that callus on your little finger?” he asked.

“Huh?” She put down the pen and looked at the rough patch on the outside of her little finger, right at the first joint. “Pulling the wire taut.”

“Wire? What wire?”

“Picture framing.”

“And you get a lot of little cuts doing that?”

“Oh, yeah.” She had bandages on two fingers right now and half-healed glass cuts on her knuckles.

“And you keep your fingernails short.”

“Yeah. Have to.” She’d never liked those acrylic claws anyway. “Why?”

“Nothing. No reason. Just curious.” Llewellyn stood up, dismissing her. “I’ll be calling on you again. Don’t leave the area or you really will need a lawyer.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Ma’am, that’s a promise.”

Damn him. Ronnie hated it when anyone called her ma’am, it made her feel so old. And what was all that rigamarole about her callus and her cuts and her fingernails?

It came to her intuitively when she was in bed, finally, trying to go to sleep but too wired to relax, thinking about what she should have done…what she should’ve said…oh, damn it all, what should she do now? Her mind was going like a hamster in a wheel, and dreams were trying to break in; the result was almost like hallucination. That woman’s body. Still unidentified. In pieces. Head, dead. Decomposed. Hands. With a callus just in that place. Little cuts. Short nails.

She sat straight up in bed. Of course, her mind tried to tell her, the cop could have been thinking about something else entirely. Some other case. Some show he saw on TV. But instinctively she knew better. She felt sure to her core.

“A framer,” she whispered. “The dead woman was a framer.”

It was no use even trying to sleep after that.

* * *

The next day when Ronnie walked into the shop Lois dropped all her paperwork and hugged her.

“Ron,” she wailed, “for God’s sake, why didn’t you just put the damn key in the lost and found?”

“The cop was here?”

“Yes. That dead woman in the mini-storage—”

“I know.”

“She was a framer.”

“Yeah. So now I know how it feels to be framed,” Ronnie said. She’d never thought much about that expression, but now she understood to her bones what it meant: to be put in a false context that looked true, a picture complete with spotlight. “Everything’s pointing at me, and I don’t know why.”

“That detective is cute!” called a blonde framer named Tiffany.

“Too much attitude,” Ronnie told her.

“I like ’em with ’tude!”

“Did he beat you with a rubber hose?” Tim asked helpfully.

“Ooooh!” Tiffany cooed. “Did he? Please say he did!”

“Stop it, guys,” Lois ordered, still hugging Ronnie. “We’ve got to find out who originally framed that litho.”

It should have been simple. The order was still in the computer. The paperwork was still in the bin. But nobody had signed off on it, and nobody had entered it in the log.

“Ronnie, do you remember, did anybody sign the back?”

“Crud. I didn’t notice.” And the brown paper had gone with the trash. Ronnie was feeling increasingly annoyed. No, face it: increasingly scared. “Lois. Did whatshisname, the detective—did he seem to think that I, you know, that I’m mixed up in—you know, the dead woman?”

“Honey, like he’d tell me?”

“Well, dammit, isn’t he going to look for the deadbeat? What’s his name, Tedder?”

“Horace Tedder. Yeah, I guess. He was asking about him.”

With angst that echoed Ronnie’s Tim said, “You’d think I’d remember a guy who ordered puce and fuchsia mats.” According to the initials on the order, he had taken it.

Ronnie knew how hard it was to remember yesterday’s orders, let alone one taken six months ago. Nevertheless, she bleated, “You don’t remember a thing?”

“No. I don’t even remember the litho.”

“Who else was working then? Lois, do you still have the old work schedules?” It felt like time to grasp at straws.

Lois grumbled, “It’s a good thing I save everything.” She rooted in the back of a file drawer and eventually pulled the schedule for the day the Tedder order was taken. “You.” Oh, goody. Detective Llewellyn was going to eat that up when he got around to asking, which he would. “Tim. Tiffany. And Melinda.” Melinda was the only one Ronnie didn’t know very well. Melinda hadn’t lasted very long.

“Do you ever hear from Melinda?”

“No. But why would I?” Some people were like that, and Melinda was one of them. One day she just hadn’t showed up for work, and nobody was surprised. Ronnie remembered Melinda saying that she had held jobs as a road construction flagger, a masseuse, a telemarketer, a nail tech, a cookie factory line feeder, a horse groomer, and an exotic dancer. Not the stay-with-it sort.