by Geonn Cannon
“Therefore,” Timothy continued, “I have decided to donate Crossing-Over Place to the Burke Museum.”
Preston got to his feet. “That is bullshit!”
Timothy didn’t even look up. “Ariadne Willow, acting as my proxy, is to give the key to Mr. Timothy Dodd, who will take possession of the tapestry until the museum can be contacted--”
“Bullshit,” Preston said again, this time grabbing the key off the table and storming out of the room. Evelyn stepped in front of him, but he pushed her out of the way and kept going.
Ari didn’t hesitate. She stepped around Evelyn and grabbed the back of Preston’s jacket. She bent her arm and twisted, throwing him off-balance and sending him reeling toward the wall. She stepped in closer, grabbed his arm, and shoved him against the wall hard enough that the sliding door shook. She held him in place with one hand and plucked the key from his grip with the other.
“I don’t think the man was finished speaking,” she said.
Elizabeth, who had remained against the wall, had taken a step forward during the scuffle. “Well, hello, Miss Willow,” she said under her breath. Some of the judgement faded from her face, the haughty sneer replaced by true interest.
Ari ignored that and let Preston go. She took the key back to the table and held it out. “Mr. Dodd, maybe you want to take this.”
“Actually, Miss Willow, since you were the one entrusted with it... and you’ve just proven how strong that loyalty is... I believe Miss Burroughs would prefer if you held onto it. The rest of the note simply says that I should prepare the tapestry for transport to the museum. If you wouldn’t mind following me upstairs to unlock the door...”
Preston said, “Oh hell no. No, that thing really is priceless, and there’s no way I’m letting these two strangers walk in there and walk away with it.”
“It’s what Mom wanted,” Eleanor said softly.
“Screw that!”
Elizabeth said, “I’m afraid I have to agree with the brat.” She took out her phone and held it out in front of her. “I’ll go with them and document everything they do.”
Preston scoffed. “So you can sneak it away from them?”
Evelyn said, “Did you miss the part where she’s going to be literally recording everything?”
“Like I trust her.”
The twins gave up the fight. Ari noticed that Eleanor seemed uncomfortable, but already assumed she wouldn’t speak up and take sides against her siblings.
“Look, why don’t we all just go upstairs together?” Ari suggested. “That way no one has to trust anyone, and you’ll all get a chance to say goodbye to the tapestry before it goes to its new home. Does that work for everyone?”
“It’s fine by me,” Eleanor said quickly.
Timothy nodded. “Seems like a reasonable tactic, Miss Willow.”
Ari said, “Okay then. Let’s go, campers.”
She led the way upstairs. She didn’t look back to see who followed her first, but she knew the room emptied out behind her. The chair lift had already been taken out. She was surprised by how sad that made her. Hopefully Vivian had done it herself before she passed, because otherwise its loss was a crass move by a family she had quickly grown to dislike.
She led the witnesses to the door and slipped the key into the lock. She turned it, both felt and heard the latch click, and twisted the knob. It was strange to think that she was the last person to enter the room, given how long ago it seemed, and she instinctively turned her head to the left as she stepped inside. Preston pushed past her, and Eleanor stopped next to Ari and gaped with her.
The tapestry was gone.
Chapter Five
There was no denying its absence. The wall was completely bare without it, a patch of light brown between two stuffed bookshelves. The rest of the Burroughs family had entered the room, along with Timothy Dodd, and they all stared at the empty space as if that was the work of art.
Preston was the first to recover. He aimed a finger at Ari. “You! You broke in here and stole it.”
“And then came back so I could escort you all to the scene of the crime?” Ari said.
That tripped him up, but only briefly. “As an excuse if we find your fingerprints anywhere in here!”
Ari held her hands up. “I haven’t touched anything.”
Evelyn said, “Don’t be an idiot, Preston. It’s far more likely one of us broke in here and stole the damn thing.”
Ari agreed. Unfortunately the fact that they’d all entered the room together meant that they had contaminated any scent they might have left behind while stealing the tapestry. She took a deep breath anyway, just to see what she picked up, but there were far too many people around for her to sort through all of them. It was an interior room. No windows, but every wall was shared with another room in the house. Walls were good barricades, but they were far from impenetrable.
“The air ducts!” Eleanor said. “Maybe someone used the vents.”
“It’s not Die Hard,” Ari said. But that only mattered to someone human-sized. She’d seen werecats, mermaids, all kinds of shifters. Maybe someone who could turn into a snake or a rat could fit into the vents. But once they were inside... She looked at the door. “Is there a way to unlock the room from the inside?”
“All you would have to do is flip the latch,” Eleanor said. “But that would mean someone was in here when you and Mom locked it up.”
Ari said, “Yeah. That doesn’t seem likely.”
Elizabeth and Evelyn were standing near each other, heads bowed close, arms crossed. It was disconcerting to see two women who looked so much alike and seemed identical in every way except fashion sense. Evelyn saw Ari watching them and returned her gaze without blinking. After a moment, she stepped away from her sister and nodded at Ari.
“How much do you charge?”
Preston spun on her. “What?”
Evelyn ignored him. “Is it like a retainer or, or a daily rate?”
Ari said, “Your mother paid me very well to watch the key. Actually, she paid me for eight weeks and it was only six, so technically I’m still on the clock.”
Preston said, “If she’s not the thief, then someone who works with her or her boyfriend or... or...”
“Mr. Burroughs, I’ve been working in this city for over a decade. I have a reputation. That’s why your mother hired me, in fact. I promise you, I haven’t built a life here just waiting for a payday to fall into my lap. I actually ran away from a life of easy money. I lived on the streets and built my agency from the ground up. I wouldn’t throw that all away.”
Eleanor said, “Not to mention the fact she’s the obvious suspect. The key was in your possession the entire time? You’re positive?”
Ari took a moment to think about it. “If it wasn’t in my pocket, it was nearby. It was on the same keychain as my house and office keys.”
“Someone could have broken into your house while you were asleep,” Preston said, with less of the fire than he’d started with.
Evelyn and Ari both glared at him. Evelyn said, “Someone broke into the house of a private detective without her noticing? I find that hard to believe.” She looked at Ari again. “We’ll hire you. Or keep you on retainer, or whatever you want to call it. Find out what happened here, find the tapestry, and bring it back. And if you go over the time you had left, we can...”
“No, however long it takes, you’re paid in full. Your mother didn’t hire me to just watch a key, she hired me to ensure the tapestry was safe.” She gestured at the empty space on the wall. “I obviously failed. The case is open until I get it back where it belongs.”
###
Timothy suggested the family go downstairs so Ari could look around without distraction. Preston gave a halfhearted protest, but Eleanor stopped him by pointing out Ari couldn’t exactly slip the tapestry under her shirt and sneak out with it. Ari said they could use the time looking around downstairs to see if anything else had been taken.
Once they
were gone, Ari stood in the center of the room. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She would get a better result if she transformed into the wolf, but she wasn’t about to risk that with everyone downstairs. The perfume, cologne, and body odor of everyone who had just left swirled around in the otherwise stale air of the room.
She checked the rooms which shared walls with the study and didn’t find any evidence of tunneling. She counted steps in the corridor and determined there was no missing space that could indicate a secret passageway. The ceiling of the study was unbroken save for the light fixture, so there was no need to check the attic since no one could have accessed the room from there anyway. She looked at the hinges on the door, even though they were on the inside, and confirmed there was no evidence they’d been knocked out so the door could be removed without being unlocked.
“What the hell?” she muttered under her breath. It seemed impossible to access the room without the key, and she knew it had been in her possession from the moment the door was locked. She tried to remember any instances where she and her keys were separated. Other than running as the wolf, there was nothing. Whenever she had pockets, the key was in one of them. Even when they went to Bellingham, Dale had used her key so it would be with them.
There was no way into the room without the key, and either she or Dale had always been in possession of the key.
She went downstairs, where everyone had again gathered in the parlor. The twins were on one divan with Eleanor, and Preston sat on the other with a fresh glass of something amber. Elizabeth also had a drink now. Timothy was pacing, but he stopped and looked at her hopefully.
“Ah, the great detective returns,” Preston said.
“Did you find anything?” Eleanor asked, ignoring him.
Ari said, “Nothing to indicate who took the tapestry or where it might be now. Is anything else missing down here?”
“We didn’t find anything amiss,” Timothy said.
“Of course, none of them have been in the house for months,” Preston said, “so how would they know?”
Elizabeth raised a glass to her brother. “To the grand martyr!”
“Stop it!” Eleanor snapped, and the two went back to sulking.
Ari cleared her throat. “Earlier you said that your mother paid for you to stay hotels. Was there a reason you didn’t just stay here? There are plenty of rooms upstairs.”
Evelyn smirked. “We’re not even staying at the same hotels. Mom wanted her last days to be peaceful. Having the four of us under the same roof would be, um, counterproductive.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Ari muttered. “Okay. Was anyone else staying in the house, or was there anyone who might have come by after your mother passed away? Did she have any romantic partners or--”
Elizabeth and Preston both laughed. Preston said, “Mom didn’t have ‘romantic partners,’ not since Dad. He died in the same accident that put her in the wheelchair. She was... angry and grieving and depressed. A few years later, Ellie suggested she should start dating again, and Mom told her she would never again put her heart through that.”
Eleanor said, “She was also aware that some men might see her differently because of the chair, and other men might try to take advantage of her ‘weakness’ to get access to her wealth.”
“Seems like a reasonable enough concern,” Elizabeth said.
Eleanor shrugged.
Ari said, “Okay. I’m going to need access to footage from the security camera out front. If there’s a camera in the backyard, I’ll need that footage, too. Mr. Dodd, if I need to get back into the house...”
“Absolutely, Miss Willow, I’ll see that it’s arranged.”
She looked at the siblings. “The will reading isn’t for another few days. I don’t know how long all of you planned to stay in Seattle, but it would be great if you could stick around a bit longer, just until we have all the answers. I’ll also need a way to get in touch with all of you so we can talk.”
Evelyn rolled her eyes.
Eleanor took out her phone and began tapping at the screen. “I think that can be arranged. I’m here until Saturday, so I can push that back to a later flight.”
Elizabeth shrugged and said, “I’ll be around.”
Preston said, “I live here, so whatever.”
“Fantastic.”
She took out her wallet to give everyone a card, taking their cards in return. Preston had to put his information on the back of one of Ari’s cards. She had no idea where she would even begin to look if someone in this room wasn’t revealed as the thief, but her mood was lightened by the knowledge of one person who would be over the moon about this news.
###
Dale listened calmly to the recap when Ari got back to the office but, once she was finished, she leaned forward with a manic grin. “It’s a locked room mystery!”
Ari glared across the desk, but she was clearly amused. “Try not to act so excited, Dale. If I don’t solve this, the best case scenario is that we have to return thirty thousand dollars. Worst case scenario is that we get sued for the loss of something that has been described two different ways as ‘priceless.’ I don’t think the agency can take a hit like that.”
Dale’s shoulders slumped and she fell back against her chair. “True. But on the bright side, I have all the confidence in the world in you and your abilities.” Her smile slowly returned, as if it was too strong for her to hold back. “But come on, puppy! A real-life locked room mystery!”
Ari couldn’t help but smile at Dale’s excitement. “Okay, yeah, that is kind of cool.”
“So do you have any leads yet?”
“The whole family,” Ari said. “Any of them could have done it. Elizabeth is quiet and grumpy, Evelyn is flaky, Preston seems like an alcoholic, and Eleanor... well, Eleanor seems calm and reasonable, but you can never trust the quiet ones. They’re always hiding something.”
“Okay.” Dale stood and went to their bulletin board. She skimmed to make sure everything she was about to erase was outdated before she swept an eraser across it all. “We have the suspects. Are we going to add you to the list?”
Ari said, “Hey!”
“Come on, Ari, you had the only key and you recently got out of prison. If it was anybody else, they would look at you first.”
Ari grunted. “Okay, fine, I’m a suspect, too.”
Dale wrote the names on the board. “The PI’s secretary is sleeping with the prime suspect in the case. Boy, this is turning into quite a noir.”
“I’m not going to call you a dame.”
“Even if I ask you nicely?”
Ari grinned and stared at the names Dale had written. Eleanor. Evelyn. Elizabeth. Preston. Timothy. And, of course, her own name at the end of the list. She obviously didn’t consider herself a suspect in the theft, but there was always the possibility someone had gotten access to the key without her knowing. She’d been the wolf fourteen times in the past six weeks. Assuming two hours for every transformation, that was twenty-eight hours she couldn’t swear to knowing where the key was. That was enough for reasonable doubt.
Dale hooked a thumb toward the door. “I’ll let you ponder this while I go through three days of security camera footage to see who went in the Burroughs house after Vivian’s death.”
“Have fun,” Ari said.
“I always have fun with security camera footage,” Dale said on her way out of Ari’s office. “Better than Netflix.”
Ari got up and went to the board. She’d gotten some more information from each family member before she left the house, and she transferred the notes from her phone to the board.
Eleanor. The eldest, lived in Philadelphia. She had explained what her job was, but all Ari was able to understand was that she did public relations for a company that did something with an app that was somehow tied to sports. She’d arrived in Seattle exactly one week ago.
Evelyn lived in Portland, where she worked as a bartender who was also a driver for food-deli
very and rideshare apps. She drove up last Wednesday, the same day Eleanor arrived. They had both taken their mother to dinner at SkyCity, the restaurant at the top of the Space Needle.
Elizabeth, Evelyn’s twin, hadn’t shown up until Friday. She lived in Spokane, where she was the sales manager for a winery. They went to the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum, then met their sisters for dinner at Canlis.
And Preston, the baby of the family, lived in Seattle. He dropped by the house every few weeks to check up on their mother and see if there was anything that needed to be done around the house. Evelyn had interjected that this was just an excuse to “pick up his allowance,” which Preston hadn’t exactly denied. He worked in construction and fixed up cars for his neighbors, and “sometimes things get slow.” He claimed his mother was always happy to help him out. They hadn’t done anything special in her last week, but they had gone out to dinner at No Anchor two nights before Vivian died.
Vivian ended her life on Sunday night. She’d asked for privacy on the last day of her life, and her children had agreed. According to Timothy Dodd, Vivian left the house at six o’clock and went to a clinic where her physician helped her carry out her plans. Ari couldn’t help but feel sad thinking about that. She knew it was Vivian’s choice, and it was done to prevent months or years of pain and hardship, but it still hit her hard.
There had been times when her transformations were still causing her unbearable pain when she’d thought about it. She had known they were getting worse, that one day she might be stuck in one form or the other, and a part of her brain kept suicide as an option when that dark day arrived. She liked to think she would never have gone through with it, especially after she and Dale officially became a couple, but there were days when she remembered how much it had hurt...
Dale knocked on the door, bringing Ari out of her reverie. “Sorry to disturb your thinking.”
“It’s fine. What I was thinking was worth disturbing. Did you find something on the video?”
“Maybe. I wanted your opinion.”
Ari followed her out to her desk. Dale sat down and angled the computer so Ari could see the screen. The security camera was angled to show the front walk and the space where someone who rang the doorbell would be standing. They could see the majority of the lawn and the street in front of the house. Streetlights glowed on the opposite sidewalk, but the Burroughs property was shrouded in darkness.
