Mom Zone Mysteries 02 Staying Home Is a Killer (27 page)

She didn’t have to. The night I was there, the cash register didn’t stop ringing after the meeting.

“News reporters were there! I can’t believe it. Ballard only wants to help. Who could be against world peace?”

I pulled up Livvy’s hood and snapped it under her chin. The lights in the parking lot surged on, highlighting Rory as he dropped the carpet beside several boxes and his suitcase. Another flyer, it looked like Zeke, strode through the snow with his suitcase bumping along behind him. He must have been on the same crew with Rory.

“I don’t know,” I said and hooked the diaper bag over my shoulder. I leaned on the bar to push the door open, but Irene caught my arm again.

“Ballard is wonderful. She’d never hurt anyone. She only wants to help, you know?”

Irene released her grip and I opened the door. She trotted along beside me. Rory opened the tailgate of his pickup and shouted something to Zeke. He stopped and helped Rory maneuver the carpet into the pickup bed.

“Irene, you don’t have to convince me.”

“Oh! You’re right.” She turned toward me suddenly. “You already know Ballard. It’s all those people who’ll see the story on the news I’m worried about. After they hear the protesters, you know, they won’t even give Ballard a chance? And her products were doing so well, she was talking about expanding. You think I should call the news stations?”

“Couldn’t hurt. Give them your side of the story.”

“Okay. Great idea, isn’t it?” She scurried off to her SUV.

I got Livvy in the Cherokee and turned onto the sanded roads of the interstate. As the Cherokee swooped around the curve in the freeway a plastic grocery bag slid out from under the front seat on the passenger side and skimmed across the floor. I leaned over and shoved it back under the seat. I wasn’t sure what to do with the journal I’d found at Penny’s. I should probably hand it over to Thistlewait, but I dreaded the questions he’d have when I showed up with it. If I could get back in their house, I could leave it there and then call in a tip, but there was no way I was going to repeat my unauthorized entry stunt.

Maybe I could mail it to the police anonymously? I swept down the freeway exit ramp and pulled into the parking lot of the Stop ’n Shop, a convenience store. Great. All the parking places in front of the store were taken. That meant I’d have to walk through the slush and ice while carrying Livvy and then haul her and the gallon of milk back to the car. I stopped and surveyed the parking lot before I got out. I didn’t like being on the end of the row in the shadow of the building next to a boarded-up grocery store where the Dumpster made a conveniently dark corner for someone to lurk in. I gripped the diaper bag and glanced around as I prepared to step out of the car. I stopped and squinted.

A pickup rolled into one of the deserted parking slots on the other side of the Dumpster. Rory stepped out of the pickup.

Chapter Twenty-five

I
f I hadn’t seen him just a few minutes before I probably wouldn’t have noticed him, but it was definitely Rory. The Dumpster blocked my view of him for a moment, but then I could see him again as he rounded the end of the pickup and let down the tailgate. His round glasses caught and reflected the glow from the dim streetlight. I gripped the door handle and stayed in the Cherokee. A second pickup pulled in beside Rory and the driver stepped out. I sank down lower in my seat, even though the second driver only took a cursory look around. A clump of hair stuck out from under his baseball cap.

Rory and the other man heaved boxes and the rolled carpet from Rory’s truck into the bed of the second man’s pickup. Then the men jumped in their trucks and swept in large circles before roaring out of the parking lot.

I put the Cherokee in reverse, but a compact car pulled in behind me, blocking my exit. The woman at the wheel motioned for the driver a few slots down from me to back out. That driver had to check both directions, twice, before he took his foot off the brake, and then he moved at approximately two miles an hour. By the time the way was clear, both pickups were long gone.

I slammed out of the Cherokee, frustrated. Why hadn’t I gotten the license number from the pickup that the baseball-capped man was driving?

I replayed the strange interaction between Rory and the baseball-capped man. Could Rory have been bringing a rug back for a friend? But why park behind the Dumpster? There were plenty of open slots in the empty grocery store lot just a few feet away. The interaction with the rug seemed too furtive and rushed. It was secretive and quick.

I remembered Rory checking his Rolex in line at the BX. He did drive a nice new truck and Will said he owned a boat. Quite a few expensive items for a staff sergeant. Ballard said he was always going to Turkey. What better way to make a few bucks than to bring something back and smuggle it through customs when they landed? A large rug would conceal a lot of—what? Drugs? There had been an investigative report on a news magazine show a while back about Turkey. It was a distribution point for drugs from Asia.

I decided running low on milk was the least of my worries right then, so I drove home, trying to talk myself out of calling Thistlewait. I didn’t want to speak to him, but if Rory was smuggling something I
had
to call Thistlewait, and the information Will had mentioned about Rory and Clarissa was too important to keep to myself. After I got home, I parked in our driveway and used my cell phone to leave a voice mail for Thistlewait, describing Will’s information and what I’d seen at the Stop ’n Shop. I closed the phone, then stepped carefully down our sloping driveway to open the doors to our basement garage. Automatic garage door openers were a luxury that were swiftly moving up on my list of things to buy for the house. I heaved and the garage door rose with a groan. I glanced inside and then did a double take. I walked inside the garage and turned on the light. The double-car garage took up half the basement, like a sunken add-on to our house. The other half of the basement, the portion directly below the house, was a traditional basement with storage shelves, a huge furnace oil tank, and washer and dryer hookups.

Tonight the light from the naked bulb on the house side of the basement reflected up from a shallow pool of water in front of the washing machine. I hadn’t been doing laundry when we left, so I doubted the machine, only a year old, had suddenly sprung a leak. I crossed the basement and peered into the water. From the edge, I could make out a drain in the middle. The one I always tripped on when I carried baskets of dry clothes back to the stairs. Did we know any plumbers? No, but the Yellow Pages had plumbers. I’d just call one. And pay their per-hour rate. Yuck. I wished Mitch was home. I tromped back to the Cherokee and pulled into the garage.

The doorbell rang and I frowned. I’d found a plumber and he’d already arrived, so I didn’t know who could be at my door. I tossed the last of the silverware into the draining board and wiped my hands on the back of my jeans. Hopefully, it wasn’t the Jehovah’s Witnesses or kids from the elementary school selling chocolate bars for a fund-raiser. I couldn’t resist the latter and I’d had too many visits from the former. But when I opened the door it wasn’t the neighborhood kids or men in white shirts and ties. It was the skinny woman from the Cedars.

“Here.” She thrust a black VHS videotape at me. I opened the screen and took it.

“I thought about what you said. I don’t want the person who killed Clarissa to get away with it, but there ain’t no way I’m going to the police,” she said over her shoulder as she trotted down the steps.

“Wait. Please! You’re Karen?”

She paused on the last step. “Yeah. Never been an apartment manager in my life.” She smiled quickly. “But don’t look for me at the Cedars. I won’t be there. I won’t be anywhere in this town.” She turned away.

“Wait. Please don’t go. You knew Clarissa. Please tell me why you think someone killed her.”

She must have heard the desperation in my voice. Karen glanced at a black Accord idling in the street, then leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “She was mixed up with a bunch of friggin’ thieves.”

“Was Rory a part of it?”

The car horn tooted and Karen stepped down into the snow. “All I know is that one of the big shots accused Rory of stealing from them, but he said he didn’t do that.” The fleeting smile crossed her face again as she said, “Like you can believe a thief. I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not, but Rory called in some thug to scare the English dude.” Karen shook her head and said, “I can’t believe Clarissa was stupid enough to get tight with them. She was so smart about everything else. Watch the tape.”

This time she didn’t stop. Her spike-heeled boots left deep pockmarks in the snow as she hurried to the car. She slipped into the passenger side, slammed the door, and the car pulled away. Only the pale exhaust fumes lingered in the street.

The phone rang and I hurried to lock the dead bolt and pick up the phone.

Abby said, “Hey, Ellie. I wanted to warn you that Jeff came down with the flu. I hope Livvy doesn’t get it.”

“We should be fine. Livvy’s already had it.”

“Oh, I’d forgotten.”

“That’s okay.” I turned the tape over in my hands. On a yellow sticky note,
32:47
was written in black ink. “I’ve got to go,” I said to Abby.

I pulled off the note, pushed the tape in the VCR, and hit
PLAY
. A dark blob resolved itself into a small room crammed with people. The date imprinted on the corner noted the video was taken February 7. A loud voice cut across the mumble of the crowd as the camera zoomed in on Clarissa. “There’s the birthday girl!” said someone holding the camera. The female voice came across the tape louder than anyone else.

“Karen!” Clarissa’s sparkly sleeveless top glittered as she turned her back on the camera.

“No way.” The picture bobbed as Karen hurried around to keep Clarissa’s face in the monitor. “Come on, Risa. It’s your thirtieth birthday. We gotta get it on film!”

“It is not! I’m twenty-eight,” Clarissa snapped back, then stuck her tongue out at the camera. A thick arm draped over her shoulder and she turned to smile at Rory.

“Hey,” a voice shouted from my basement. “I found your clog.”

I hit the
PAUSE
button and went to the top of the basement stairs where I secured the baby gate across the top step and said to Livvy, “Back in a minute.” She crouched in front of the refrigerator, sliding the ABC letters back and forth.

“Here’s your clog. Tree root,” said the lanky man in a dirty coverall from Righto-Roto. He held up a chunk of root about the thickness of my wrist. Water dripped off the fine, fringelike roots emerging from the larger root.

“Oh. Thanks.” I squinted at his stitched name tag and added, “Jerry.” It was darker in the basement than I expected and I glanced around. I’d expected one of the garage doors to be open so he could run his tube from the truck inside, but they were closed. Instead he’d run the large tube through a hole in our wall, one that I didn’t remember.

“Sure. No problem. That’ll take care of it.” He held the root out. “Want to keep it?”

“Ah. No.”

Jerry shrugged and tossed it over by his toolbox. “I’ll throw it away when I leave. You never know. Some people want to keep them. Show them to their friends, I guess. I’ll write you an invoice in a minute.” He picked up the tube as he spoke.

“Okay. I’ll get my checkbook.”

I gripped the handrail to head up the stairs as he said, “Found that in the coal shoot.”

I picked up a dirt-smudged zip-top plastic bag. Jerry explained, “It was folded up and stuck inside the frame.”

I stepped back across the basement and examined the opening he’d indicated. The dull white glow of the snow filled the opening and let in a chilly gust of wind. “I’d never noticed we had a coal shoot.”

“Lots of the old houses in this neighborhood have them. Most of them are sealed up, but yours wasn’t.” He flipped his toolbox shut, then picked it up along with the tree root. “It keeps it a lot warmer in here, if I can keep that garage door shut while I’m working.”

I hardly noticed him open the garage door. I examined the dirty bag. Inside was a tiny, dark blue square. I opened the bag and pulled out the square. It looked like a miniature computer disk. It looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure what it was. My heart started pounding. Had Penny left it? Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a shadowy movement on the floor. With a whoosh, the tube slithered across the floor and disappeared up the wall and out the coal shoot. I took a deep breath to calm my heartbeat.

I ran up the stairs and placed the disk at the back of the kitchen counter. Jerry returned with my bill and a salesman’s spiel about how I should buy the company’s Roto-Crystals to dissolve tree roots in my pipes. I brushed off his sales pitch, scribbled a check, and pushed him out the door because I’d remembered where I’d seen one of the minidisks before.

I pulled out Mitch’s new handheld computer and turned it over. With a little maneuvering, I slid out the disk and compared the two. Exactly the same. I took a deep breath and plugged Penny’s disk into the computer. As I went back into the kitchen to check on Livvy, I explored the documents. I heard Livvy laugh before I rounded the corner into the kitchen and saw her swatting the ABC letters into a pile on the floor.

I looked back at the screen and stopped. Black letters in another language, one I didn’t recognize, filled the small screen. I scrolled up and down the document, looking for some text in English that I could read, but there wasn’t anything. The document was called
Doc1.

Livvy’s voice penetrated my concentration. I realized she’d been patting my leg and saying, “Mom? Mom?” for the last few moments. As usual, she was waiting until she had my complete attention before she spoke. If I did that with her, I’d probably have better luck getting her to follow my directions.

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Snack. Snack.”

“What else do you say?” I asked automatically as I set the computer down.

Her eyebrows scrunched in concentration, and then her face cleared. “Peeze.”