Harley Rushes In (Book 2 of the Blue Suede Mysteries) (15 page)

Drumming her fingers atop the gleaming surface of the desk, only slightly marred with remnants of fingerprint dusting powder, she considered her next move. A search of Harry’s house would probably be impossible. Despite her recent dip in the detective pool, she was notoriously cowardly. It was the closest she came to a religion since her days as a student in Catholic school. Going from the complete freedom of her early life in communes to the restricted discipline of well-meaning nuns could have been more traumatic if she hadn’t actually yearned for some kind of structure in those days. She’d even briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a nun, until a fling with Bobby Baroni in the back seat of a Ford had proven her lack of real commitment to the vocation.

“What now?” Cami asked as she plopped her purse on the desk, and Harley shrugged.

“I don’t know. I guess I thought something would jump out at me, or the police would have left behind something important.” She’d dropped the little metal pick, and bent to retrieve it from the carpet. A faint gleam under the desk’s kneehole caught her attention, and still bending down, she reached up under the desk to find the source. Her fingers grazed something metal and sharp. She pressed it, and a soft click sounded. What the—? Going to her hands and knees, she wiggled her way under the desk to investigate. A small door had popped open. Her heart raced with excitement. The missing manifests, perhaps?

No. It was a tiny compartment hardly big enough for a button. But it did hold a key. She pried it loose from the tape holding it to the opening, and scooted out from under the desk. With a grin, she held it up so Cami could see. “
Voila
!”

Cami didn’t look impressed. “Walla what?”

“That’s French for
Looky what I found
. Never mind. It’s a key. Now we just have to find what it fits, and I bet we find the missing evidence we need to prove Harry’s a smuggler.”

“How is that going to help? He’s dead. The police are looking for his killer, not illegal imports. Besides, didn’t you just say that’d give your aunt a motive?”

“Cami, Cami, you can be so shortsighted. If we find the evidence, we find the motive. If we find the motive, we find the killer. See how simple that is?”

“So what if it really is your aunt? I’ve always thought she had the personality of a serial killer.”

“The only thing Aunt Darcy is capable of killing is a bottle of gin,” Harley said, though she wasn’t completely sure that was true. She slid the key into the pocket of her cutoffs, then retrieved her metal pick and looked around the storage area. Evidence that the police had done a thorough investigation showed. Furniture was pulled from the wall, rugs unrolled and clumsily rolled back, graphite residue was everywhere, and file cabinets had been left partially open. Aunt Darcy would have a fit when she saw the disarray. They had that much in common. Both liked things tidy.

“So now what?” Cami said, looking around with her hands on her hips. “I think we’ve done all we can do here.”

“First, I’m going to see if this key fits anything here, which I doubt since that’d be far too easy, then we’ll go. No point in pushing our luck.”

Cami looked agreeable, and wandered over toward a stack of rolled carpets against the far wall. Harley tried the key in the desk locks. It didn’t fit, not that she’d thought it would since it looked more like an old fashioned door key, then tried it on all the shop’s closet and Exit doors. It didn’t fit any of them. Of course not. There would have been no reason to hide it. Maybe to Harry’s house? A lock box in a bank?

“You missed this door,” Cami said when they went back to the storage area and Harley pocketed the key again.

“What door?”

Pulling back a roll of carpet, Cami pointed to a small door built into the wall. It was barely visible, looking like part of the wall unless you looked really close. Then the outline could be discerned in the wainscoting. The wallpaper design hid it very well, but there was a definite keyhole right beside the white painted molding.

Harley inserted the key. It turned with a metallic click of tumblers and the door swung open. A musty smell wafted out from a narrow flight of stairs that led down into pitch darkness. She left the key in the lock and stood there indecisively.

“What is it?” Cami wanted to know. “Another storage room?”

“I don’t know. Storm shelter, maybe. But isn’t it odd that it’s hidden like this? Why is it disguised?”

“Let’s look inside, Harley. I’ll wait here.”

Harley shot her a wry glance. “Right. You’re really brave as long as it’s not you.”

“There might be bats in there. I don’t like bats.”

“What if there are spiders? I don’t like spiders.”

They stood there for a moment, staring into the void that beckoned. The hair on the back of Harley’s neck stood up without the benefit of gel. She had no idea why. All of a sudden it just seemed risky to be doing this. Despite the stuffy air and possibility of finding smuggled goods, she shivered.

“Harley? Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“Yeah. Still . . . it seems a shame to have found this door and not at least see where it goes. Doesn’t it?”

“Uhhh . . . ”

“This is silly. It’s a door. It’s probably the basement, though I didn’t know there was one. And I can’t imagine why the entrance would be hidden. Or why the key was hidden under Harry Gordon’s desk. Or why I’m talking out loud instead of just going on and getting this over with.”

Dredging up her flagging courage, Harley stepped into the stairwell. To her relief, there were no cobwebs, just cool concrete walls as she gingerly made her way down the steps, feeling for a light switch along the way.
You’d think they’d have had the good sense to put a light switch in here close to the top,
she was thinking when something bumped into her. She screamed. Cami screamed. Then Harley realized Cami was right behind her on the steps.

“Damn, Cami! You scared the crap out of me!”

Cami’s teeth were chattering. “I didn’t want to stay up there by myself. Sorry.”

“Tell that to my stomach. It dropped to my toes. Let go of my shirt, please. You’ve got skin.”

Cami released her shirt, but she stayed so close to Harley that they could have been wearing the same shoes.

Finally Harley reached the bottom of the stairs, and stood indecisively. Except for the thin light coming through the open door, it was dark as a grave. That thought made her shiver again.

“Isn’t there a light down here?” Cami asked plaintively.

“
I
should know? You’re the one who found the door.”

“Maybe the light’s upstairs. That’d make sense. To have the switch up there, I mean.”

“Right. It would. Go check.”

“No! I mean, maybe both of us should go.”

Cami sounded shaky. Somehow, that made Harley feel better. Being scared alone was never a good thing. Having company in terror made it bearable.

“Okay. We’ll both go. If you’ll, uh, just give me room to turn around here . . . ”

They’d made it three steps back up when the light from the opening flickered, and both of them looked up. A shadow blotted out the light, then grew bigger as the door began to close.

“No,” Harley yelled, “stop!”

She charged up two more steps with Cami clinging to her back like a baby possum, and got almost to the top just as the door slammed shut with a solid thunk. Everything went black as pitch.

“Oh, help,” said Cami.

“Oh, shit,” said Harley.

Harley felt her way up the last step and tried the door. It didn’t budge. There was no knob, no release catch. Just smooth wood.

“Dammit all,” she said irritably, “another self-locking door. Why do they make these things? Hey! Is anyone out there? Hey!” She pounded on the door until her hand hurt.

Cami’s voice came from close by, sounding really faint. “Harley?”

“Yeah?”

“I have to pee.”

Harley leaned against the locked door and sighed. “Of course. Well, give me a minute to find the key—uh oh. Never mind. I’ll pick it. I still have my pick. Thank God for a father with a slightly criminal turn of mind. He likes being prepared for all emergencies.”

“Good.” Cami’s teeth chattered, a weird sound in the velvety blackness that swallowed them. After a moment, she said, “Think this is how Jonah felt?”

“Jonah who?”

“You know. The guy swallowed by a whale.”

“Good God, Cami.” Harley felt along the wood, fingers tracing the lintel and frame, down one side, then the other, feeling for the lock. There had to be one. If there was one on the outside, there was one on the inside. That’s the way it went.

“Of course, there would have been the ocean,” Cami said in a reflective tone, “and ribs. A tongue. A heartbeat. Whales are mammals. It would have been warm in there.”

“Not to mention halitosis from all the dead fish. Cami, you’re scaring me. Get a grip. You’re regressing back to junior high.”

“Junior high?”

“Sister Mary Margaret. All those Bible stories she used to tell us. Third period. Right before lunch, remember?”

“How do you remember things like that? I have trouble remembering what I ate yesterday and you remember what period we had lunch in junior high school.”

“I can’t remember what I ate yesterday. I only remember Sister Mary Margaret because she made the stories interesting. And she didn’t tell on me when I snuck out early on the days they had chocolate cake in the cafeteria.”

Cami laughed. It was a nice sound. Harley smiled in the darkness. At least one of them felt a little better. She didn’t want to scare Cami, but she couldn’t find the lock. There had to be one. How could there
not
be one? Locks on doors generally went all the way through. Anyone who built a storm shelter or basement and didn’t put a lock on the inside was just asking for a lot of trouble. Unless . . . no, that was ridiculous. Why would Aunt Darcy be involved? Yet she’d never mentioned the basement as a possible place to look for stolen goods.

Damn, she hated what she was thinking. And even more, she hated what the police would think when they found out about the smuggling, which they would if they hadn’t already.

“Harley, did you find it yet?”

“Not yet.”

“If you don’t hurry, there’s going to be a wet spot on these stairs.”

“Yeah, well if I don’t get it open soon, there’ll be two wet spots.”

Damn. Where
was
it? She scraped her knuckle against something hard and her heart leaped. A quick investigation with her fingertips discovered no lock, only some kind of metal plate over where it should be. By now her fingertips were bleeding and she regretted, not for the first time, her lack of fingernails. One more reason to stop biting them.

“Cami, you’ve got nails, don’t you?”

“Nails? Like what you hammer?”

“No, fingernails. Something to pry off this metal plate. It’s covering the lock.”

“Oh God . . . ”

“Now don’t panic. It’s not like we’re in the wilderness. We’re in the basement of a design shop that usually has at least a half dozen employees and plenty of customers. We’ll be fine.”

Cami was fumbling in the dark, her hands making slapping sounds as she searched for the plate cover. After a few moments, she said, “I’d have to have a screwdriver to pry off this thing. It’s fastened pretty firm.”

She sounded remarkably calm. Harley nodded, then realized Cami couldn’t see her. “It’s okay. We’ll just have to think of something else.”

“Yeah? How fast? I really gotta pee, Harley.”

“Me too. Maybe there’s a toilet down here somewhere. Or we could just go scratch in the dirt like one of your cats, I guess.”