House of the Rising Nun

by Dakota Cassidy

  “Any thoughts on what you think you might find that the police haven’t? I don’t need anyone to confirm they’ve probably already searched his place.”

  I took a sip of my second cup of coffee today and shrugged, peering into the light mist of rain. “I don’t know. And you’re right. The police have already been there, according to Nadia and Amber. So it’s not like I’ll disturb anything. Somehow, it just feels like the next thing to do. I only knew Dr. Mickey on the surface, maybe seeing some of his things will tell me something deeper about him. Like, maybe he was an animal lover and collected pictures of dogs playing poker, or a reader who loved old books. Any little thing would be better than what I have now—which is nothing but a gorilla costume.”

  Higgs gave me a thoughtful look. “Any plans on how you’re going to get into his apartment?”

  I winced and avoided his eyes. “None that are legal… I don’t know if I’ve mentioned my friend Stevie from Washington? But she sent me to this video on YouTube on how to pick a lock…”

  “What if there’s an alarm code or one of those coded keypads?”

  I didn’t think about that. “Then my mission’s doomed for disaster.”

  His one eyebrow rose in that way Higgs had when he was surprised you hadn’t asked for his help. “Well, if there’s no alarm, you could have just asked me. I know how to pick a lock.”

  “Okay, who the heck are you?” I asked with a laugh. “You can’t be my cautious, overly protective Higgs. He would never consider aiding and abetting. So you just go back to wherever you came from and send my by-the-book Higgs back right now.”

  “Am I your Higgs, Sister Trixie?” he teased, smiling down at me.

  I squirmed a little and blushed with a fury as the light rain pelted my face. “If you pick that lock for me, and we get caught, you’re going to be my cellmate.”

  He smirked at me and began walking. “I call dibs on the upper bunk. I’m a big guy and I need my space.”

  I held out my fist to him and grinned, happy to have skirted an intimate moment I didn’t know how to address. “Deal, but only if you give me your Jell-O at dinner. I love Jell-O.”

  He bumped my fist with his larger one. “Done, but not if it’s green. That’s my favorite.”

  I barked a laugh and almost skipped beside him, I was so happy to have him in on this with me, and even happier to have his expertise on my side.

  “Fair enough. Now let’s go pick a lock.”

  “First, I’d check with Nadia and Amber and see if maybe they have a key or if a code is needed. You never know.”

  “Good idea,” I muttered, stopping to pull my phone from my back pocket.

  Higgs rolled his forearm in a regal gesture. “Then after you, milady.”

  As we made our way down the sidewalk, I texted Nadia for Dr. Mickey’s address, and asked if she had a key or a code. Unfortunately, she didn’t, and neither of them had ever been to his apartment, so she couldn’t tell me if he had an alarm system. Though, I didn’t tell her we were going to attempt a break in; the less anyone knew what we were up to on that front, the better.

  Also, as a by the by, I was greatly comforted by more than just Higgs’s knowledge. I’m comforted by his presence. And I’m not sure what that means, or if it means anything at all.

  I’m just glad he’s my friend. I never wanted to think about my world without Higgs in it.

  Never.

  Chapter 11

  “Shhhh!” I hissed at Higgs as he clunked around with his big feet and fiddled with the lock on Dr. Mickey’s modest apartment door. “You sound like a herd of elephants practicing for Cirque du Soleil.”

  No one was as surprised as we were when we saw his building. I don’t want to call it rundown, but it certainly wasn’t what we’d expected to find a successful dentist with a booming practice living in. It was old-ish, and not in the charming way some of the buildings here in Portland were.

  The brick facade was cracking and fading, a few of the windows were crooked, and though someone had tried to spruce up the front entry with barrels of rust and yellow mums, it still looked pretty rundown.

  However, due to the age of the building, and after observing the people entering and exiting, it could mean the apartment door might not have an alarm or a coded lock. In fact, we’d observed two people on two different floors come and go from their apartments using only a key. We hoped Dr. Mickey’s apartment would be the same.

  Higgs gave me a narrowed gaze. “Hush, Trixie! I need to concentrate. It’s been a while since I’ve done this.”

  I tugged his arm as I gave a furtive glance around the relatively quiet hallway with some very worn burgundy carpeting. “I thought you said you knew how to do this?”

  “I do,” he groused at me. “If you stop breathing down my neck and give me some room, I will. Now go be my lookout.”

  “Do you want me to look up the YouTube video Stevie sent me?”

  He stood up straight and frowned down at me. “I do not. What self-respecting ex-cop watches a YouTube video to help him crack a lock?”

  I fought a giggle at his insulted tone and held my hands up, backing away. “Okay, fine, Cat Burglar. I’m only trying to help. Just hurry up before we get caught.”

  I went back to my post at the end of the hall and watched the elevator doors until I heard a hiss of satisfaction.

  “Hah! Got it,” he whisper-yelled.

  Taking one last cursory glance around the hallway, thankfully still quiet, I backed up and turned to follow Higgs into Dr. Mickey’s place.

  We both stopped short in astonishment as we entered. In fact, I crashed right into Higgs’s broad back, making me grab onto his arms to steady myself.

  He reached one hand up to scratch his head and used the other to balance me. “Wow. That’s a lotta pink, huh?”

  “Well, it’s more mauve, but yeah…” I murmured as I gazed at Dr. Mickey’s living room in mauve and blue with doilies on every surface and hand-stenciled ivy borders across the top of all four walls.

  “Is that a cow?” Higgs asked, pointing to the small dining room table by the window.

  Sure enough, it was one of those cute cow planters cut out of wood with big eyes and exaggerated spots painted on it. Huh. Dr. Mickey sure had unusual taste. Maybe that was as sexist as my comment about the killer being a man when Coop and I were chatting earlier, but there you have it. Dr. Mickey’s décor was a bit “little old lady.”

  As I stared at the cow, the arms of the wooden piece holding a dying plant, I nodded. “I believe it is.”

  In fact, Dr. Mickey had a bunch of cows—a herd, if you will—lining the tops of the dark brown kitchen cabinets, along with a cutout of a pig or two. Lacey curtains in matching mauve lined the windows in swag fashion, letting a decent amount of light in, and the couches were covered in a blue floral chintz material with more doilies splayed over the back.

  “Are you sure we broke into Dr. Mickey’s place and not a time machine to the ’80s? I think my mom had cows just like this in our kitchen when I was a little kid.”

  I snorted and gave him a light nudge. “Wipe your feet and let’s get crackin’. Where do you want to start?”

  He gave me a bewildered look, driving his hands into the pocket of his jeans. “Are we sure Dr. Mickey lived here? Really sure?”

  I crossed the room to the yellow refrigerator in the connecting kitchen and pointed to a picture hanging by a cow magnet. “That sure looks like younger Dr. Mickey, don’t you think?”

  He was standing with his arm around a woman by the very couch in the living room, his hair no longer gray with age, his eyes bright, his smile wide.

  The woman with Dr. Mickey was a petite, female miniature of him. She wore a frilly apron and a blue gingham checked dress.

  Higgs followed me into the kitchen and glanced at the picture. “It’s definitely Dr. Mickey. Bet that’s his mother.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned back against the fridge, the cool exterior against my spine
easing the ache I’d woken up with this morning. “I bet you’re right.”

  “So, why’s a successful guy like him living in an apartment straight out of The Golden Girls?”

  I shrugged, unclear myself. “Maybe he just really likes the color mauve? I told you it might help to see where he lived.” I paused and glanced around the kitchen, with its Formica countertops in white and more hand-painted wooden cows on the tiny island tiled in matching white ceramic. “I don’t know. I do know we need to get to poking around before we’re caught in here. I mean, what if the police come back? What if forensics forgot something? We need to get shakin’.”

  Higgs gave me the thumbs-up and grinned. “You take the bedroom. I’ll take the living room?”

  “Game on,” I muttered, anxious to get started. I don’t know what I’d hoped to find after seeing the decorating styles of Dr. Mickey, but I wasn’t wrong in thinking I’d learn something about him if I saw his place.

  I’d learned not to judge a book by its cover, and that was all I had to say about that.

  The master bedroom was as frilly as the living room, with a mauve and blue bedspread and lots of blue and mauve pillows embroidered with, you guessed it, cows.

  There were pictures in heavy, ornate frames on the long dresser made in a dark wood with lots of scrollwork on the legs and the mirror, and as I glanced at them, I began to wonder if this really was Dr. Mickey’s place.

  Though, a quick perusal of the mirrored closet, his clothes all neatly lined up inside, suggested he’d definitely spent some time here.

  “Hey, Trix?” Higgs called from the bright living room. “This isn’t Dr. Mickey’s place…or, it wasn’t. I think it was his mother’s.”

  From the dresser, I grabbed a silver-framed picture of the woman I’d seen in the picture on the fridge, and nodded. She’d be about the right age to be Dr. Mickey’s mother is he was in his late forties. The woman in the picture had a Mary Tyler Moore style bouffant hairdo, happy blue eyes, and a white, toothy smile just like Dr. Mickey’s.

  Distracted, I asked, “How do you know?”

  “Just found a five-year-old electric bill in her name.”

  I went to stand in the doorway, and asked, “That makes more sense than this being his, especially with all the mauve and blue furniture and the doilies everywhere. But why do you suppose he lists this as his address? Was he really living here? I distinctly remember Amber and Nadia telling me his mother died three years ago.”

  He stopped rifling through a buffet table with a long, tasseled mat on it and looked up. “I have no clue, but like you said, it makes more sense than this being Dr. Mickey’s place.”

  I wandered back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb the pile of pillows, and opened the nightstand drawer. There wasn’t much there but some old receipts from an Albertsons for peanuts and some loose costume jewelry, but one piece caught my eye—a necklace. I scooped it out and held it up to the light, letting the silver chain thread through my fingers.

  It was a glass teardrop in fading shades of light turquoise to a deep sapphire, but it was the chain-link chain and the design on the top of the glass that made me pause.

  At the top of the artificial stone, the artist had added a unique sort of squiggly metal that almost looked like snakes draping themselves down around the top of teardrop. The work was exceptionally detailed and quite pretty—maybe even something I’d wear myself.

  But why did it look so familiar?

  And then I remembered—didn’t Nissa Lawrence, Dr. Mickey’s receptionist, make jewelry?

  You bet she did—and she’d been wearing this exact piece in one of her yoga pictures.

  “Hey, Higgs? Come in here a sec, would you?” I asked, holding up the necklace.

  He poked his head around the doorway and eyeballed the necklace. “What’s that?”

  “I think it belongs to Nissa Lawrence. You know, Dr. Mickey’s receptionist.”

  Higgs frowned. “So?”

  I rolled my eyes as I handed him the necklace and opened Facebook on my phone to find Nissa’s page. “Why is her necklace in Dr. Mickey’s apartment? Don’t you find that suspicious?”

  “After seeing his love of cows, I don’t find anything suspicious. And on a serious note, she works for him. Maybe he had his employees over for a little cow-lebration?”

  I giggled and shook a warning finger at him to knock it off. “Nadia and Amber said he kept his personal life pretty personal, and I’d bet if I asked them, they’d tell me they’d never been here. So why would Nissa’s necklace be here if he didn’t mix work with home?”

  I held up my phone and showed him the picture of Nissa in her yoga class, smiling at whoever had taken the picture with the necklace around her neck.

  “Well, if this is his mother’s apartment, maybe he bought it for her. You know, support one of his employees’ endeavors and pick up something nice for Mom in the process?”

  “Then why is Nissa wearing it?”

  “Well, if she makes them, maybe she made one for herself, too?”

  All valid points, but still, it niggled. I clicked the link to her Etsy page and scrolled through some of her creations, all lovely, all leaving me wondering if there was something more to this than a gift for Dr. Mickey’s mother.

  I took a picture of the necklace and resumed my search while Higgs quietly went off and did the same. An hour, three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms later, we really had nothing to go on but the necklace, which could turn out to be nothing.

  I sighed and meandered out to the living room, where Higgs stared out the window, his profile sharp and handsome in the dull light coming in from the windows facing the street.

  “You ready? I don’t think we’re going to find anything here that’s going to help us get to know Dr. Mickey or lead us to his killer. Unless it was a cow who killed him.”

  “A cow dressed as a gorilla?” Higgs said, then laughed out loud before giving me a guilty look.

  “Shame on you. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy love of hand-painted cows. They don’t all have to end up cheeseburgers, you know?”

  Higgs nodded affably and ran his hand over the doily he’d mussed on the back of the couch. “You’re right. I’d be okay with a steak, too.”

  I pointed to the white door. “Out, Funny Man. I have to get back to the shop and then I have to talk to Nissa.”

  Higgs took the lead, heading out into the hallway, and I followed, closing the door behind me.

  “Hey! What are you doing there, you two?” I heard an elderly voice call out.

  Both Higgs and I stopped dead in our tracks. I bumped into his broad back again, my nose pressed to his sweatshirt—which smelled really nice, by the way.

  As I peered around him, I saw a woman probably in her seventies, with curlers in her hair, a striped housecoat and fuzzy, open-toed slippers.

  She peered at us with sharp, birdlike eyes, flitting back and forth over our faces. “Who are you? Nobody’s supposed to be in there!”

  Higgs was gearing up to speak, but I pinched his arm and pushed my way around his big frame. “Yoo-hoo!” I called, holding out my hand to the woman as she made her way down the hall, her stern face hesitant. “My name is Amy Ray Clementine, and this is my handsome husband Merle. You are?”

  “Merle?” Higgs whispered down at me.

  The woman eyed me with a critical scan of my person while Higgs stood by, clearly unsure what to say about my sudden southern accent. “Why do you want to know?”

  I smiled warm and wide at her and leaned back against Higgs, pulling his arm around my waist. “I’m just bein’ neighborly is all. We’re thinkin’ about movin’ into this apartment. Do you like it here?”

  I’d caught her (and Higgs) off guard, because her eyes grew hesitant. “Wasn’t aware they’d put it up for sale yet. Man’s not even cold in his grave and already those realtors are at it, huh? Anything to make a buck these days, I s’pose.”

  I sm
iled and winked, snuggling close to Higgs’s side. “Early bird gets the worm and all, right, honeybun?” I asked, looking up at Higgs, who didn’t miss a beat.

  He ran an indulgent finger down my nose and smiled adoringly back at me. “That’s right, sugar. Don’t want to miss a deal like this, do we?”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, Mrs…”

  “Upton. Lorraine Upton,” she said, her voice gruff with age.

  “Did you know the man who lived here? We heard he was…” I cast my eyes to my feet, as though saying the word was too upsetting, before lifting them to meet hers.

  She planted a hand on her hip, her wrinkled face scrunching up. “Murdered. Yep. I knew him, and yep, he was murdered just a coupla days ago. Nice kid, Mickey was. Good to his mother, too. Her name was Antoinette. That’s who used to live here before she died a few years back. Then Mickey took over the place—had big plans to renovate it eventually, just didn’t have the time, he said. He was a dentist, you know. Said he couldn’t give the place up—reminded him too much of where he’d grown up.”

  So Dr. Mickey had grown up here? That made more sense than the space being his—still, his mother had been gone three years, and he hadn’t done anything to renovate. He and his mother must have been really close.

  I smiled in sympathy. “Aw, isn’t that just precious, honeybunch?” I cooed at Higgs. “He loved his mama. Hearin’ that makes me happier n’ a clam at high tide. That means there’s good karma here.”

  “Sounds like a reeeal nice fella,” Higgs cooed back, tucking me against his side and patting my waist.

  Oh, he was horrible at this. His southern accent sounded like a cross between a drunk Jeff Foxworthy and a confused Steel Magnolia.

  There was an awkward silence before I filled it with a condolence. “Anyway, our sympathies to y’all, Mrs. Upton. So sorry for y’all’s loss. I hope you’ll forgive our intrusion. We were just hopin’ to take an early peek. Apartments are hard to come by these days—especially one as nice as this.”

  She eyeballed me for a moment longer, as though she were assessing our worth as neighbors. “Well, I guess I’d rather have you for a neighbor than that blonde woman. She was loud and always screechin’ about something. I can put up with your crazy accent over that carrying on any day.”