by Tasha Black
“Look,” Vi hissed nodding
They all watched as Myra got into her car and adjusted the seat and mirrors, checked her hair, and pulled out of her parking spot.
Vi waited for a moment after her sister pulled out and then pulled the ice cream truck out to follow at a reasonable distance.
“Why did we have to follow her?” Natalie asked. “We know where she’s going.”
“She’s got two different gym memberships,” Vi explained. “She mixes it up so that no one at either place realizes what a freak she is.”
Natalie nodded and they drove on in silence, at last rounding the corner and pulling into the lot of the Fitness Planet.
Now that the mission was before him, Spenser was suddenly more apprehensive.
Was it really wise to take something from Myra, then break into her office?
But Vi was already out of the van, waiting for them at the glass doors of the exercise studio.
Natalie looked at Spenser and shrugged, then they both headed to join their friend.
“I’ll stand outside the locker room so I can distract anyone trying to get in,” Vi said. “The class will start in about two minutes and forty seconds, so we should wait out here until then. After that, you should be home free.”
“Aren’t people sometimes a few minutes late?” Natalie asked. “She could still be in the changing room.”
“Not for Hot Pilates,” Vi said, as if it were obvious. “This is a waiting-room only class for serious exercise seekers.”
Natalie blinked at her.
“At least that’s what it says on the web page,” Vi confided. “No lateness will be tolerated. Doors lock at noon. Myra’s locker number will be 12.”
“How do you know?” Natalie asked.
“It’s her lucky number,” Vi said. “She’s super weird about it.”
Spenser knew that Vi had some superstitions of her own, but he thought it was probably best not to mention it.
“What do you think she would do if she caught us taking something from her?” Natalie asked.
It was the same question Spenser had.
“Let’s not find out,” Vi said, nodding at her watch and pushing open the door to the gym.
They headed in, and the woman at the desk waved.
Vi went straight over and began asking long, boring questions that would require very detailed answers.
Natalie pointed to the ladies’ room and the lady at the desk nodded.
As soon as she was focused on Vi again, Natalie grabbed Spenser’s hand and dragged him into a door marked Changing Room - Femmes.
They scanned the room.
He spotted locker #12 and ran for it.
“Shit,” Natalie said when she noticed the combination lock. “How did we not plan for this?”
But Spenser merely took the lock in his hand, and used his gift to ask all the little tumblers inside to line up neatly.
Natalie’s eyes opened wide as the lock popped open.
“Wow,” she said appreciatively, then hesitated for a second. “If you can do that, then why are we here to steal a key in the first place?”
“Keyed locks are different,” he explained. “Too many moving parts.”
He’d tried to practice on one of the doors back at the lab, but holding all those little pieces in the perfect position was just too much. Combination locks were easy compared to that. Just one thing to move at time, and all the pieces stayed exactly where you left them.
“I guess you could have a pretty promising career as a bicycle thief,” Natalie joked as she opened the locker and pawed through Myra’s belongings.
Spenser felt a wave of relief. He’d been so conditioned to keep his gift hidden, that he’d been nervous about finally using it in front of anyone. But Natalie didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to find it pretty impressive.
Natalie pulled a huge keychain from Myra’s purse. The sheer number of keys was overwhelming. He wondered how they would even have time to test them all.
But Natalie turned them in her hands, examining the heads, each of which had a tiny sticker label. Myra might be even more organized than Vi.
“Got it,” she whispered victoriously.
He closed his eyes and called on his power to separate the key from the ring.
“So if we don’t get it back in time all the keys aren’t all missing,” he explained. “Maybe she’ll just think it fell off somehow.”
“Great idea,” Natalie said, her beautiful face breaking into a big smile.
He resisted the impulse to kiss her and instead moved back toward the entry door.
She followed him and they listened before opening, but no sound penetrated the wooden frame.
Natalie opened the door to find Vi on the other side, studying a schedule.
“We’re good?” Vi asked.
“We’re good,” Natalie echoed.
Spenser couldn’t help but notice how well the two were getting along. It was hard not to picture what a great team they would all make if Natalie accepted him fully and became part of the group.
The ride back to Myra’s office was quiet and tense.
Spenser imagined they were all picturing the task ahead, envisioning what would happen if they succeeded and what could happen if they failed.
For a moment, he nearly regretted swiping the envelope in the first place.
But then he thought of his mate’s mourning over her lost friend and knew he would do what he had to do, over and over again, if it brought her some measure of relief.
Vi turned the truck into the alleyway behind Myra’s office, then pulled up behind a parking area that said PRIVATE PARKING on a small sign in neat lettering.
“You’ll have to scale the fence to get to the little deck,” Vi said. “That’s the back door to her office.”
Natalie was already climbing out of the van, so Spenser hurried to follow her.
He observed the large fence and wondered how he could get her over it.
But before he could come up with a plan, she was running, pulling herself up and over easily, as if it were just for fun.
He followed, impressed by his capable mate.
They climbed the two steps up to the wooden deck and Natalie used the key they had stolen to open the back door into Myra’s office.
Natalie placed a finger to her lips and pulled the door open slowly. They went in and she pulled it almost all the way shut behind them, but didn’t close the latch.
Spenser heard a voice and froze in place.
Then he realized it was Myra’s assistant on the phone in the lobby just outside. He must not take his lunch break at the same time that she did.
It was good that the man was on the phone, hopefully it meant he was distracted enough not to notice a stray noise or two from this room.
Natalie wasn’t wasting any time. She had already moved to the painting, and was in the process of lifting it off the wall. Sure enough, there was a wall safe behind it, just as they had suspected.
Spenser handed Natalie the key card and watched as she swiped it down the side of the safe.
The door made a loud click-pop sound and swung open.
The two of them froze, but the phone call in the lobby droned on, they hadn’t been heard.
Inside the safe was a single file.
Natalie grabbed it and spread the contents hastily along the floor behind Myra’s desk. Then she pulled out her phone and began photographing each image, starting with the one on the left.
After she took each photo, Spenser grabbed the sheet and laid it upside down on one side of the folder.
Out in the lobby, Myra’s assistant was laughing at something the caller had said.
Natalie seemed to redouble her efforts.
Spenser wondered if funny things happened at the end of phone calls.
Sure enough, as he placed the last page back inside the folder the sounds from the lobby ended.
Natalie took the file and put it back in the safe.<
br />
It closed with another loud click and pop.
Natalie moved quickly to hang the picture back over it.
“Myra?” the assistant’s voice called from the lobby.
Natalie grabbed Spenser’s hand and dragged him under the desk.
“Are you there?” the assistant asked.
The door opened and Spenser closed his eyes, hoping they wouldn’t be spotted.
“Weird,” the assistant said.
Spenser opened his eyes and listened to the footsteps heading toward the desk.
But they passed by, then went to the door that led to the deck.
“Must have blown open,” the assistant said to himself.
A moment later the door to the lobby closed and they were alone once more.
Spenser moved as if to run for the door to the deck, but Natalie stopped him with a touch.
They waited in silence and Spenser began to wonder how much time had passed. His heart pounded madly, and he began to think about what he could do if the man came back in.
If he jumped out and surrendered himself it might allow Natalie an opportunity to get away. This was probably best.
Natalie had gotten out her phone, she was typing in a number.
It was an odd time to make a telephone call. He might have expected her to text Vi for help, but a phone call seemed unnecessarily noisy.
The sound of a phone ringing carried to them from the lobby.
“Myra Croft’s office,” the assistant’s voice rang out from the next room and echoed in the phone in her hand.
Natalie tapped mute on the screen and dragged Spenser bodily out from under the desk.
“Hello?” the assistant said.
A moment later they were out the door, leaping off the deck, running for the fence.
When they landed on the other side, Natalie hung up the call.
“Natalie,” Spenser said, amazed at her ingenuity.
She grinned at him.
“What are you guys standing around smiling about?” Vi demanded. “Get in, get in, before someone sees us.”
They got into the van and it was the most natural thing in the world for Spenser to throw an arm around his incredible mate and kiss the top of her head.
She leaned in, warming his heart with the proof that she craved his touch as well.
14
Natalie
Natalie watched as Vi spread papers across the floor.
Jana had printed out the photos Natalie had taken of Myra’s file to make the pages easier to study.
Now the six of them huddled around the patterned wool rug in Vi and Jana’s living room, watching Vi drink in the contents of the documents like a movie vampire crouched over a corpse.
“My God,” she murmured, swiping one page out of the way and snatching another one.
From what Natalie could tell, there were basically two types of documents.
Some were plot maps, and others appeared to be sale documents and titles. None of it seemed like unusual stuff to find in an attorney’s office.
On her own, Natalie would certainly have studied them carefully, leaving no door unopened. But Vi was devouring them, as if each fresh page only made her more ravenous for the next.
Natalie stayed out of the line of fire, knowing she would have her chance to look over everything as soon as Vi was finished.
“Okay,” Vi said at last, sitting back on her heels. “Okay, wow.”
“So what are we looking at?” Jana asked.
“There’s a reason these were kept as hard copies in a safe, and not stored electronically on Myra’s hard drive,” Vi began. “I knew as soon as Natalie told us that what she and Spenser found was paperwork, that this had to be serious.”
Natalie sat back against the sofa, realizing this was going to take a moment.
Vi had a great point though. In this day and age, important documents were generally stored under password in the cloud so they couldn’t be lost.
“Myra didn’t want anyone seeing these or connecting these transactions to her,” Vi went on.
“What transactions?” Jana asked.
“Land purchases,” Vi said, confirming Natalie’s suspicion. “It looks like a corporation called Kendra Z. Bose, Inc. has been buying up land on the northwest side of town and Myra’s been handling the paperwork.”
“You mean out where we found the dogs?” Jana asked.
“Yes,” Vi replied. “It’s a rural area, and the land there is fairly cheap. The bulk of it honestly can’t even be built on, and there’s no farming on most of it because it’s all granite crags and floodplain.”
“What do they want with that land?” Natalie asked.
“That’s the thing,” Vi said. “Typically, with a land purchase like this you see contingencies for zoning. No one wants to buy a chunk of land and find out they can’t build what they had in mind on it.”
Natalie nodded, that made sense.
“But there is nothing like that here,” Vi continued. “And this isn’t just one land purchase. It’s multiple parcels, big and small.”
“So why do they want it?” Jana asked.
“I’m not sure,” Vi admitted. “But there’s a map here that looks like it might be for utilities or something going in. But that doesn’t make sense, since a utility company can take an easement for free, even if they don’t own the land. So they wouldn’t have to buy it all up. And this company name isn’t a utility anyway, at least not a local one.”
“I can’t find anything about Kendra Bose,” Jana said, looking at her phone. “Maybe it’s like a stage name.”
Spenser knew that humans sometimes used a name they were not given as a way to hide their identity. He and his brothers had all taken names from the human movies and shows they’d watched before coming to Earth. There was nothing wrong with choosing a new name, as far as he knew.
Unless you were using it to hide something.
“May I see the map?” Natalie asked.
Vi handed her a page.
The topography didn’t stand out to her right away, but the colors did.
On the page were three color-coded lines, a red, a blue and a green. The red and blue were fairly close, running parallel to each other. The green line was much further east.
“This looks like a roadway plan,” Natalie said, squinting some writing along the edge. “Look, it’s a little out of focus, but I think it says PennDot in the lower right corner here.”
“A roadway plan?” Jana echoed.
“I’ve seen plans like this before, when they were putting in the roundabout near town center,” Natalie explained. “They always give optional routes, in case one doesn’t work out. That’s why there are three lines in alternate colors. There’s a URL here, too. It must be the engineering firm that drew them up.”
Natalie slid her phone out of her pocket and typed in the web address. She could feel the others holding their breath.
In a few seconds, a stock photo image of a smiling man in a hardhat greeted her. She clicked on the menu for About Us and read the mission statement.
“It looks like they specialize in highway design and planning,” she said, looking up at her friends.
“Let me see that map again,” Vi said, grabbing it. “Yeah, that’s definitely Stargazer. There’s the orchard, there’s the pond. It even has the new roundabout.”
“So they’re bringing in a highway,” Natalie breathed.
“What does this mean?” Spenser asked.
Vi looked up from the map, her eyes blazing. “It means my sister is a very greedy woman.”
“The attention this town is getting because of aliens means we’re a destination now,” Jana said. “I guess a highway would help relieve congestion on the local roads leading here, and encourage more tourism too.”
“And if a highway is approved, the government will buy up the land for it,” Natalie said. “They’ll pay the local market price per square foot, even though this land is worth far less than typi
cal market value.”
“The agreements back that up,” Vi said, nodding.
“So whoever just bought the land can sell it at a profit to the government when they build the highway?” Jana asked.
“Bingo,” Vi said.
“But the mayor wanted that area for the MacroFoods executive housing campus,” Natalie said. “He had already negotiated a right-of-first refusal with a farmer out that way. He told me all about it. Several times.”
She remembered Saturday mornings, sitting in his office, drinking coffee together as he enthused about one plan or another while he worked on the weekly anagram puzzle in the local paper. She felt her throat hitch at the thought that she would never get to enjoy time with him like that again.
“Where’s the farm?” Vi asked, handing her the map and snapping her back to the present.
Natalie studied it, eager to keep her mind occupied on the task at hand. There would be time for grief when this was all over.
“Here,” she said, pointing at the farm in question.
It was at the exact center of the map. The red and blue lines both went through it.
“My God,” Natalie breathed.
“Natalie,” Spenser said worriedly. “Are you okay?’
“What is it?” Jana demanded.
“I’ll have to piece together the plot maps and deeds like a puzzle to be sure,” Vi said. “But I think it’s going to turn out that the people behind Kendra Z. Bose corp. hedged their bets by purchasing land along the red and blue routes, but not the green.”
“So if Mayor Smalls ruined their shot at getting the last parcel in the way of those routes, they would be out a ton of money, with nothing to show for it but a whole lot of worthless land,” Vi said. “The government wouldn’t pull eminent domain on a brand-new housing complex if they could just go with the green route instead.”
She stopped, looking like she didn’t want to say the next part.
“With that much money on the line, the corporation might have been willing to do anything to stop the mayor from completing his deal,” Natalie said quietly, since Vi wouldn’t say it. “Including murder him.”
A hush fell on their group.
Natalie looked over at Vi, who wore an expression of consternation.
