by Kylie Logan
“But why here?” Sarah wanted to know. “Why would anybody willingly come up here? How did he … or she…” She echoed Jazz’s words. “What do you say to someone, ‘Come on up to the never-used attic because I’m planning to kill you and nobody’s going to find the body up there’? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“It really doesn’t,” Jazz agreed. “Unless there was something they had to get. Could something have been hidden up here? Stored up here? The girls, they’re always talking about how the fourth floor is haunted, how they sometimes hear footsteps. Maybe somebody—”
The theory would have to wait.
From the bottom of the stairs they heard a key slide into the lock.
“Come on!” Jazz whispered, and when all Sarah did was stand there, her gaze fixed on the stairway, her eyes wide and her cheeks as pale as the bits of dust that floated in the humid air, Jazz darted forward and grabbed her hand. “Sarah, come on! Over here.”
They stooped to fit through the doorway, slipped into the little room where only weeks before Bernadette had lain forgotten, and closed the door behind them.
It was stifling, cramped, and, except for the sliver of light that flowed from the attic beneath the door, pitch-dark in the tiny place, and Jazz didn’t dare use her flashlight app. She stood motionless, and when she saw Sarah twitch she put a finger to her lips, grabbed Sarah’s hand, and held on tight. Was she trying to calm Sarah? Or herself?
They listened to the clunk of footsteps coming up the stairs. They heard the shuffle of shoes on the wooden floor of the old dormitory.
Walking to her right.
Jazz made a mental note of it.
That meant the person was headed to the left of the stairway.
Now closer to that never-used roof access door.
The creek of rusted hinges made both Sarah and Jazz flinch.
Roof door. Jazz mouthed the words and pointed, but she doubted Sarah even noticed. Her body trembling, it took every ounce of courage she had for Sarah to keep still. To keep quiet.
Jazz couldn’t blame her. It was hard enough to keep calm when the person who might be the murderer was walking just a few feet way.
It was even harder if Sarah, whose imagination was way more lively than Jazz’s, was thinking what Jazz was thinking—they were in the dark. In the place where Bernadette had been entombed.
As quickly as the thought occurred, it raced out of Jazz’s head when the footsteps came back the other way and a shadow blocked the light. The handle on the utility room door jiggled.
And a phone buzzed a text message alert.
Thank goodness it wasn’t from Jazz’s or Sarah’s phone. Jazz slapped a hand over her own mouth to keep from gasping just as the person outside the door turned and went back down the steps.
If it was up to Sarah, they would have escaped the tiny room in a heartbeat. But Jazz stopped her, a hand on her arm. They waited a minute before Jazz let go the breath she was holding and signaled Sarah that they could leave.
“Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” Outside in the dormitory, Sarah shook off the fright and the dust that coated her newly washed skirt. “Jazz, that could have been—”
“Yeah, I know,” Jazz conceded. She didn’t wait. She went over to the roof access door.
“Word is this door has been nailed shut since forever,” she told Sarah, and at the same time she grabbed the handle and pulled the door open.
As it turned out, the door didn’t lead directly to the roof but to a small boxlike structure that had been built to provide extra insulation between the actual roof door and the inside attic door, extra protection against cold Cleveland winters.
Jazz stepped back so Sarah could see into the little room. “Something was in here. Look, you can see the way the dust is disturbed on the floor. Whoever that was, he just came and got something and took it downstairs. And if we’re quick enough—”
Jazz rushed down the stairs and into the third-floor hallway, but whoever had been up in the attic with them was not around now.
“But Jazz…” Behind her, Sarah whimpered. “What if—”
“Shhh!” Jazz heard a door bang closed and tried to gauge where the noise came from, but in the stillness, with the sound bouncing and echoing against the walls, it was impossible. “We’re good,” she assured Sarah. “We’re fine.” She looked at the cobwebs trailing from Sarah’s hair and laughed. “But whoever it was, we can’t let them see us like this.” She locked the door, and together they ducked into the nearest ladies’ room. “Let’s get cleaned up before we go back downstairs.”
* * *
It didn’t take Jazz long to brush her fingers through her hair, splash some water on her face, and dust off her shorts and T-shirt. Sarah’s pink skirt needed a little more tending to, as did Sarah herself. After the initial cleanup, Jazz left her in the art studio, still shaking, but with a box of vegan-approved chocolates open in front of her and the electric teapot she kept near her desk nearly at the boil.
They made a lunch date, and Jazz went downstairs. She stopped short at the door to her office.
But then, she didn’t expect to see Sam Tillner.
“How did you get in?” It was the wrong way to greet a guest to the school, but after the experience in the attic, Jazz couldn’t help herself. Suspicion hung in the air like the dust motes that floated around the attic.
“Sorry.” Tillner had been waiting in her guest chair and he stood. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t startle me; you confused me. We have a security system. How did you get in the school?”
“Oh, that!” Unlike at the funeral where he should have been in his Sunday best, he was dressed formally, in dark pants, a crisp white shirt, and a blue silk tie that was understated and all the more impressive because of it. He grabbed a plastic grocery bag that had been on the floor next to the chair.
“I tried to come in the front door, but it’s locked tight, and I knocked and a guy named Eddie came by and let me in.”
“Eddie should know better.”
“I told him…” Tillner closed in on Jazz. “I told him I just wanted to stop by and give you this.” He handed her the bag and Jazz peeked inside.
From what she could see, it was filled with bits and pieces of paper—a rubber-banded-together stack of cream-colored note cards with a border of blue flowers, a legal pad, a book of daily devotionals.
“It’s Bernadette’s,” he told her. “I found it all in a drawer, a piece of furniture I’m having refinished. It doesn’t look like much, but since you have the rest of her things, I thought you might want it.”
“Thank you,” she told him at the same time she looked him up and down. If he’d been up in the attic, his dark pants showed no traces of dust. But then, she and Sarah had taken the time to clean up. “How long have you been waiting?”
“Not long.” He checked his watch. “Which is a good thing, because I’ve got to get to work. There’s an auction today and a lot of work that needs to be done before it starts.” He stepped around Jazz and out into the hallway, and a minute later she heard the front door of the school close behind him just as Eileen stepped into the office.
“Bernadette’s cousin?” The principal glanced in the direction where Tillner had gone. “What did he want?”
Her mind spinning, Jazz went to her desk and deposited the grocery bag on it. “That’s a very good question.”
CHAPTER 18
“You know what this means, don’t you?”
Jazz and Sarah had picked up lunch and they sat on a bench side by side beneath the shade of a tree in Lincoln Park.
“It means I never want to do anything like that again.” At the same time Sarah shivered, she popped open the to-go top on her curried broccoli and chickpea salad and made a decidedly disapproving face at Jazz’s corned beef on rye.
“I’m still shaking,” she insisted, though she was not shaking so much that she couldn’t scoop up a forkful of salad and chomp it do
wn. “How can you do this investigating thing, Jazz?”
Jazz bit into her pickle and the vinegar hit her at the back of the throat. At the same time she shook off the sharp tang, she told herself that the only place she’d get by dwelling on what had happened earlier up in the school attic was into a state of panic.
“Not what I’m talking about. Sure, it was scary at the time, but we’re fine. It’s over,” she said, and she sounded confident enough to convince Sarah and, very nearly, herself. “I’m talking about the fact that someone was up there in the attic.”
“Yeah.” Sarah shivered. “Someone who wasn’t us. That’s exactly why I have the willies.”
“So how did that someone get up there?” Jazz wanted to know.
Sarah looked at her like she was crazy. “Up the stairs, of course.”
“Uh-huh.” Jazz stared at her, waiting for the lightbulb to click on. “And…”
Sarah set down her fork long enough to think, her eyes squinched, her nose wrinkled, and when all thinking did was make her muscles cramp she groaned. “And what?”
“And we had the key.”
The light dawned, and Sarah’s mouth fell open. “You mean—”
“Eileen’s key isn’t the only key.”
“And the other one might belong to—”
“I’m going to guess it’s the murderer.”
Sarah gulped. “That means we were up there with a soulless killer.”
Jazz didn’t put a lot of stock in melodrama. She re-wrapped her sandwich and handed it to Sarah. “Take that back to school for me and tell Eileen I’m going to be a little late coming back from lunch.” She slid off the bench.
“And you’re going where?” Sarah wanted to know.
“Wherever a killer would go to have a key copied.”
* * *
It took three tries, and Jazz wasn’t really surprised. Any killer worth his (or her) weight in salt would know better than to have a stolen key copied in the one and only hardware store close to the school. She tried a different lock and key shop downtown, and when no one there remembered copying an antique key she made one last stop. It was already midafternoon, and she needed to get back to St. Catherine’s.
The store, just on the outskirts of downtown, had been an anchor in the area of small businesses, dive bars, and strip clubs since forever. It was dark, musty, and cramped with coils of rope and bins of nails, and tools hanging from pegboards on the walls the likes of which Jazz couldn’t identify. The man behind the counter looked like he’d been there since the place opened. He was thin, bald, and as wrinkled as an old blanket, and he had the wheeze and the smell of a habitual smoker.
“This key.” Jazz had hung on to the one from St. Catherine’s, and like she had at the other shops she’d visited, she showed it to the man. “Have you copied one like it?”
He had Coke-bottle glasses and he took the key out of her hand and held it an inch from his nose. “Not lately.”
Something she didn’t dare admit felt like hope fizzed inside Jazz. “What do you mean, not lately?”
The man handed the key back to her. “Been a while.”
It lined up with Jazz’s theory. The killer could have taken the key off Eileen’s key ring, had a copy made. That would explain why the key wasn’t on the ring where it was supposed to be when Eileen went to look for it on Assembly Day. It also explained why someone else was able to get upstairs earlier that day when the attic door was locked from the inside.
And a few years? Yes, the key would have been copied more than three years earlier if it was copied by the murderer, before Bernadette was killed.
“Do you keep records?” Jazz wanted to know.
“For key duplicates? Supposed to, but if you ask me, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.” He waved a dismissive hand and the smell of stale cigarettes oozed from him and washed over Jazz, a noxious cloud. “Not worth it for a sale so small.”
“Then do you remember—”
“Who asked me to duplicate a key three or four years ago?” He laughed, then coughed and kept on coughing, and he hung on to the front counter with one hand and rocked back and forth.
It was only polite to wait until he was done hacking to thank him and back away, and Jazz did just that.
“No sir, I wouldn’t remember nothing at all. If not for that woman.”
Almost to the door, she stopped in her tracks and turned around. “What woman?”
“The one who was murdered. You know, it was all over the news. That skeleton they found at that hotsy-totsy school over on the west side. They showed her picture on the TV. Not the skeleton, mind you. A real picture. From when the woman was alive.”
She zipped back to the front counter. “What does the key have to do with the woman who was killed?”
“That’s what made me remember the whole thing,” he explained. “Because keys like that…” Jazz had already tucked the key back in her pocket and he looked that way. “Not a dime a dozen, if you know what I mean. And thinking about that key, that made me think about that there woman. And about the other key.”
By this time, Jazz’s head was spinning, and she shook it in the hopes of clearing it. “There were two keys? Or two people?”
“One key, I guess. That key. The one you have. I can tell just by looking at it ’cause I know a thing or two about keys. What you have there, that’s the original. And that young man, he came in here with that same original key and he asked me to make a copy.”
Jazz didn’t want to look too eager, so she thought this over, took her time. “Can you describe him?”
He scratched one bony hand across the back of his neck. “Tall kid. Dark hair, the way I remember it. Wearing gray clothes. Like he was a janitor or something. Oh, and bad skin. Yeah, I remember that. Bad skin.”
Eddie Simpson.
Still, it didn’t explain …
“What does that dark-haired kid who came in here have to do with the woman who died?” she asked.
“That’s easy.” The phone rang and the man stepped toward it, one hand out to answer. “When I made a copy of that key for the kid, that’s what made me remember that a few years ago … like I said, maybe three or four, a woman came in. That woman who was murdered. And she gave me the same key and asked me to make a duplicate for her.”
* * *
Jazz was tempted to call Nick, but she knew better than to rock the procedural boat. She didn’t give a damn what Detective Gary Lindsey thought of her, but there was no use making things at the office hard for Nick. She waited until she got back to St. Catherine’s and phoned Detective Lindsey to tell him what she’d learned.
He arrived at the school about a half hour later, and from the looks of the shirt half-tucked into his pants and the fact that he was wearing white sports socks with his black loafers, she guessed it was his day off. He’d been busy with something else, and he dropped what he was doing and changed in a hurry.
Like it or not, she had to give him kudos for that.
He was followed into the school by two uniformed officers, and they asked where they could find Eddie and went out back where he was supposed to be weeding the flower beds that surrounded the garden shed where, once upon what felt like a very long time ago, Jazz had uncovered the cat switcheroo and the dead body of poor little Titus. When they brought Eddie inside so they could talk to him and get the story straight about the key, Eileen offered her office and stepped into Jazz’s. Eddie wasn’t handcuffed, but he was plenty pissed. His cheeks were red and spittle pooled at the corners of his mouth.
“I don’t care what she says.” He spit out the words at the same time he sent a glare at Jazz. “I never touched the bitch. She’s making it up about how I jumped her over near the park.”
Jazz sucked in a breath. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be outraged by Eddie’s confession or just plain stunned. Eddie was the man who’d jumped her and nearly caused her to lose Wally?
Outrage won out over stunned and Jazz had alrea
dy taken a step toward Eddie, her fists clenched and her Irish temper stoked
Sure, a bigger person would just have ignored Eddie’s sputters and moans when he realized he’d just made a huge mistake. But then, that person probably wouldn’t love Wally the way Jazz loved him. Watching Eddie step in it was at least a little revenge. Jazz gave Eddie a great big smile. “Since I haven’t talked to Eddie since last week,” she told Detective Lindsey, “it’s strange, don’t you think, that he knows I got jumped on Friday night?”
“Strange, indeed.” Lindsey’s pursed lips told her he’d heard suspects say dumber things, but not lately.
“He told me to mind my own business,” Jazz said.
Eddie sputtered. “It wasn’t me. It was—”
“Shut up!” With a tip of his head, Lindsey instructed the cops to take Eddie into Eileen’s office and he stepped closer to Jazz. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“There’s no way he could know what happened to me Friday. Except if he was the one who did it. I filed a police report on Saturday morning. All the details are in it.”
Lindsey nodded and she went right on.
“And this morning, someone came up to the fourth floor when I was already up there and had the door locked behind me.”
“Someone with a key.”
She gave him credit for being quick on the uptake, nodded, and wrote down the name of the hardware store where she’d talked to the coughing man. “He had a copy of the key made there. And he’s not the only one.” She hadn’t had a chance to fill Eileen in on the details, so Jazz looked her way. “Bernadette got her hands on the key, too. She had a copy of the key made in the same place.”
