by Nene Adams
The front half of the space she rented from Pastor Collier acted as the public face of her company, Finders & Keepers, Inc. Although most of her business was conducted by phone or over the Internet, she’d still decorated the waiting area with colorful abstract prints on the walls, comfortable chairs, potted Swiss cheese plants, a receptionist’s desk and an impressive, custom- made, copper monstrosity of an espresso machine.
Never mind that she hadn’t needed to hire a receptionist, and only fired up the espresso machine once a year for the volunteer fire department’s charity spaghetti supper, bake sale and sock hop. In the business world, appearances counted for a lot.
Mac, my girl, don’t you ever forget to shine your shoes, put a ribbon in your hair and wear your best dress, no matter if you ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, her daddy had said when she was fourteen years old, returning home in tears after failing to sell any band candy. If you look successful, people will treat you like you’re about to hand out hundred-dollar bills. If you look like a bum, they’ll spit on you. That’s the way it goes.
She dismissed thoughts of her father to concentrate on her company.
The worst damage had occurred in the waiting area when the big front window shattered under the onslaught of wind and rain and took out a Swiss cheese plant. She hadn’t been here, staying holed up for the storm’s duration in her apartment with a six-pack of beer, a meatball sub and a new copy of the Shooter’s Bible.
The second room she used as a private office had also suffered a few minor problems like a ceiling leak and water- damaged drywall. Fortunately, her computer equipment and prized sixties Rock-Ola jukebox escaped unscathed.
She opened the door to her private office. Stale air rushed out at her like an exhaled breath, carrying a dry, musty smell that reminded her of a months-old dead mouse moldering behind the wainscoting. A glance at the wall showed she wasn’t far off.
A piece of drywall had been removed and discarded in pieces on the floor. As Maynard had told her, a desiccated human corpse was crammed upright between the wooden wall studs, looking like a prop in a Hollywood horror film.
Mackenzie took in the dry skin, gray with dust and warped to the bones so tightly it had split in places. The lower jawbone hung open in a parody of a yawn. Long hairs clinging to the top of the skull appeared to confirm the victim’s sex.
She had been renting the office for three years, ever since she started the business. The victim had to have died and been hidden here before she took possession. Who was this unknown woman? How had she died? Why had her killer stuffed her in this particular wall?
Taking her cell phone out of her pocket, Mackenzie began snapping pictures of the body from every angle. She zoomed in the camera to take more detailed shots. The sound of voices outside the door made her hurry.
When Maynard burst inside the room, she’d already returned the phone to her pocket and stood in front of the jukebox nonchalantly brushing drywall dust off the glass front.
A muscle twitched in his cheek. She could tell he wasn’t amused this time. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, the words rumbling deep in his chest. “Goddamn it, Kenzie, this is my crime scene.”
Mackenzie pointed out, “You won’t find any evidence here, Jimmy. I had the wallpaper stripped, the walls painted, and the floor redone before I moved in. If there is anything, it’s in the wall with your victim, which I didn’t lay a finger on.”
“Damn it to hell and gone,” Maynard said, but she saw him deflate slightly. He flapped a hand at her. “Go away, Kenzie. Go home. Go do whatever. Just go.”
Mackenzie hurried away, eager to study the pictures she’d taken. Veronica gave her a sad, hurt look as she walked past on her way to the front door. Shit.
She paused on the threshold. “Sorry, Ronnie. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”
Veronica nodded and smiled. “It’s okay, Mac. Detective Maynard doesn’t stay mad long and I really don’t mind when he yells.”
Feeling like the world’s worst asshole, Mackenzie left.
Chapter Three
Instead of returning to her car, Mackenzie walked around the block to her favorite coffee shop—independently owned and operated, not part of a national chain. Even with her fast metabolism and perpetual scrawniness, after two slices of pie at the diner, she wanted nothing to eat, but a cup of coffee that didn’t taste like scorched cow manure would suit her down to the ground.
Mighty Jo Young’s seemed busy all the time, filled with students from the high school, employees from the courthouse and government buildings, and shoppers taking a break from spending their money in the Straightaway shopping center a few blocks away.
As usual, the tables were full, though conversation was subdued. The loudest noises came from a commercial espresso machine, a stainless steel monster which let out long, steamy, angry-sounding hisses at regular intervals. The exclusive operator of the machine was Josephine Joanna Young herself, proprietor and if necessary, bouncer, currently decked out in a sweet rose-pink dress with a white collar, a white belt and a full, flouncy skirt.
Mackenzie tipped an imaginary hat to the feminine and frilly Jo-Jo, a friend since high school and the largest woman she’d ever known. Jo-Jo wasn’t just tall. She was built along Amazonian lines, big-boned and broad-hipped, busty enough for watermelon comparisons, and owning biceps the size of cannonballs. Nobody messed with Jo-Jo twice. She’d left Antioch after school to become a star on the women’s professional wrestling circuit. After her triumphant return, she could still tie a man’s arms in knots behind his head.
“Oh, Kenzie, honey, I heard the police are searching your office!” Jo-Jo cried from her station at the espresso machine without pausing in her scooping, frothing and pouring.
Going to the counter, Mackenzie leaned an elbow on the wooden surface. She avoided the gaze of a barista who appeared too bored to take her order and replied with deliberate casualness, “The construction boys found a body hidden in the wall.”
Jo-Jo shrieked and nearly dropped a cup on the floor. “Good Lord! You poor baby!” She flew out from behind the counter to squash her in a hug.
Mackenzie appreciated the gesture as much as she enjoyed having her face enveloped by huge, soft, pillowy mounds of breasts that smelled of talcum powder and Fair Trade Ethiopian coffee. In high school, she and Jo-Jo had tried the sex thing once after getting drunk under the bleachers, but in the harsh light of mutual hangovers, decided it wasn’t for them. Still, she felt almost nostalgic at the sensation of suffocation by the nicest breasts in town.
At a certain point, however, she had to breathe or risk passing out. A tap on Jo-Jo’s arm had the much larger woman taking a step backward to release her.
Mackenzie grinned. “Thanks for the mammaries,” she murmured, an old joke.
Jo-Jo responded by blowing a raspberry, but quickly became serious. “What do you need? A place to stay?” She glanced around and added in a whisper, “A lawyer?”
“I don’t think I’m in trouble,” Mackenzie said. At Jo-Jo’s frown, she added, “You know if I did kill somebody, you’d be the first person I’d call for help moving the body.”
After patting her helmet of flaming red curls—the color matched her fingernail polish—Jo-Jo smiled. “Well, as long as you’re okay.” She adjusted the apron spreading over her generous bosom. “Let me fetch you something to drink. Did you eat lunch yet?”
“Pecan pie at Sampson’s Diner. Two pieces, in fact, but I had a meeting with a client.”
“Honey, that is not a proper lunch. You’re going to waste away if you don’t get some meat and vegetables in there.” Jo-Jo prodded her in the stomach with a long finger. “I’ll send D’Ante over to the luncheonette for sandwiches.”
When Mackenzie began to protest, Jo-Jo gave her a quelling look. “Hush. You need to eat. That’s all there is to it. Mama Jo has spoken.”
Mackenzie subsided, knowing further objections were fruitless. Besides, her ski
nny physique brought out the nurturer in some women who apparently suffered an obsessive need to stuff food down her gullet. When it came to Jo-Jo, she didn’t mind.
“Fine,” she said. “But I don’t like pimento cheese.”
“I know,” Jo-Jo said mildly. She retreated behind the counter. A few moments later, a young man darted out of the shop.
Scouting around for a place to sit, Mackenzie spotted a table miraculously free of customers. About thirty seconds later, a perfectly made cup of cappuccino was deposited in front of her by a barista. She picked up the thick, white china cup and lifted it to take a sip. Just as the foam touched her upper lip, it felt like something bumped the bottom of the cup, sending hot coffee surging over the rim and spilling down her front.
She didn’t quite yell, but the startled curse that shot out of her mouth must have been louder than she thought. Jo-Jo seemed to materialize out of thin air, looming over her with a concerned expression while applying a kitchen towel to her ruined blouse.
“Was the cup too full, honey?” Jo-Jo asked.
“No, I don’t…I don’t know what happened,” Mackenzie answered, trying to recall if she’d imagined the bump. “Got the dropsies today, I guess.”
“There’s a T-shirt of mine in the back if you want to change.”
Mackenzie plucked at her coffee-soaked blouse, lifting the fabric away from her skin. “Yeah, okay, that’s a good idea. I want to drop this off at the dry cleaner in a bit.”
Five minutes later, she emerged from the ladies’ room wearing Jo-Jo’s oversized T-shirt. Not only was the garment a lurid pink and printed with daisies, the hem ended well below her knees. She felt like a little kid playing dress up in her mother’s clothing.
She reminded herself to be grateful, mouthed “thanks” to Jo-Jo, and resumed her seat. A second cup of cappuccino arrived at the same time as D’Ante delivered her sandwich.
Peeling apart the waxed paper wrapping, Mackenzie was delighted to discover a Miss Laverne’s Luncheonette’s famous fried chicken sandwich: a crispy breast of buttermilk-marinated, double-fried chicken smothered in Laverne’s special family recipe coleslaw and served on a bun with a homemade dill pickle on the side. A cocktail toothpick pinned a small strip of paper to the top of the sandwich.
Mackenzie freed the paper. Laverne Crawford was a devout Christian spinster who believed in spreading God’s word far and wide. No sandwich left her shop without a Bible verse tacked to it. The typewritten words on the paper strip read: And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. Hebrews 9:27. Jesus saves!
She set the paper aside.
While she ate the sandwich, she checked the photographs of the body she’d taken with her phone. The resolution on the cell phone’s display wasn’t great, but the shots remained pretty gruesome. She didn’t know why she’d taken photos in the first place. The difficult task of identifying the victim and her killer fell to the police, not her.
In the corner of her eye, she registered movement across the table. She flicked a glance sideways, expecting to see Jo-Jo or someone else she knew. Instead, a strange woman sat in the chair, staring back at her.
“Excuse me,” Mackenzie said around a bite of sandwich while trying to hide her mouth behind a raised napkin, “but I’m not—”
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the woman disappeared.
Mackenzie blinked. She absently swallowed the mouthful of chicken and coleslaw, drank the rest of her cappuccino and licked the foam off her lip. In her experience, people didn’t wink out of existence like a blown candle flame.
Could someone be playing a trick on her? How? Why?
She fixed the woman’s image in her memory. Her main impression was a lack of color, just silver, gray and black—pearly skin tinged with gray, darker gray lips, sloe eyes lined with black lashes and thick black hair drawn back from an oval face. Not unattractive despite the lack of color, but the woman’s unsmiling expression had been cold.
No, not just cold and unfriendly, she decided. Positively frigid.
Her empty coffee cup rattled in the saucer for a second and fell over, the rim cracking with a sound like a gunshot.
Jo-Jo’s exclamation carried clearly above the noise of the espresso machine.
Mackenzie rose hastily, left a tip for D’Ante, and hurried out of the coffee shop with her soiled blouse clutched under her arm.
Chapter Four
Mackenzie crossed the street quickly, feeling chilled despite the heat. What the hell had happened back there in the coffee shop? An image of the gray woman, especially that flat, black gaze, sprang to mind. Cold. Unfriendly. Almost menacing.
She told herself to stop being silly.
Fact: people did not vanish into thin air.
Fact: coffee cups did not spontaneously break of their own accord.
Fact: eyewitness testimony was unreliable. Human memory was fallible, the senses imperfect, the brain given to filling in blanks with fantasy. Just because a person claimed to have seen something did not mean they actually saw it. They just believed what they saw, a subtle but important distinction.
The inevitable and reasonable conclusion: she had spilled coffee on herself, become flustered and caught a glimpse of someone—maybe a woman seated elsewhere—which her agitated brain had imagined as a ghostly figure that subsequently disappeared. Afterward, she’d jerked in surprise or bumped the table, breaking her coffee cup.
Satisfied by the logical explanation, she entered the dry cleaners and dropped off her blouse. By the time she reached her office, the event had become a memory of clumsiness and her own embarrassing suggestibility. Tomorrow she’d have to apologize to Jo-Jo for making such a fuss over nothing.
Maynard was still at her office, supervising the removal of the mummified remains into a black station wagon illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant. He’d been joined by Dr. Hightower, a tubby, short, balding gastroenterologist from the hospital over in Trinity, a town about a half hour away. Hightower acted as Antioch’s part-time medical examiner at need.
“Don’t make faces at me, Jimmy. I spilled coffee on my shirt and Jo-Jo let me borrow one of hers,” Mackenzie said when she approached. “I need to change.”
Maynard shrugged. “Not my problem. See that yellow tape? Do not cross.”
“You know I live above the bakery next door. I’m not snooping. I want to go home. There’s a shower with my name on it and a shirt that isn’t covered in flowers.”
“What did you hope to accomplish by sticking your nose in my crime scene, Kenzie?” he asked, giving her a decidedly evil eye. “You could’ve compromised evidence.”
She returned his glare, though her heart wasn’t really in it. “I call shenanigans, Jimmy. There’s no evidence and you know it. We already had this argument. As I recall, I won.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Besides, it’s my damned office. I have files in there, things I need to have so I can find things for my clients and make money. I make money, I pay my taxes. Your salary is paid by my taxes. See the way it works? The circle of life. Now do we still have a problem?”
Looking irritated, he waved her through without another word.
Mackenzie sidled past Dr. Hightower. She unlocked a green painted metal door set into a narrow wall between the building that housed her office and the bakery next door.
A fluorescent light flickered on when the door closed behind her, revealing a flight of cement stairs sandwiched between the outer brick walls of the two buildings. The space was claustrophobically small, airless, and hotter than outside. The air was redolent of baking, scented with cinnamon and spices, sugar, yeast and chocolate.
Mackenzie trudged up the steps, trying not to brush her borrowed T-shirt’s sleeve on the stained bricks. Another metal door at the top of the stairs—this one painted peacock blue—yielded to another key, and she went inside her apartment, blessedly cool since she’d had the foresight to leave the air-conditioning
set on seventy-five degrees that morning.
She dropped her keys on a small table, added her wallet and cell phone and kicked off her shoes before going to her bedroom.
In the act of pulling the oversized pink T-shirt over her head, Mackenzie paused when she caught her reflection in the mirror above the dresser, half expecting to see a silver-gray woman. She relaxed when the mirror only showed familiar amber eyes gazing back at her, set in a face that resembled her maternal great-grandfather more than her mother or father. She’d seen pictures of the stiff-backed old man, long dead before her birth. He’d been a quarter Cherokee and a quarter Creek and two-thirds son-of-a-bitch according to her grandmother. His complicated ancestry lent her complexion its reddish-brown tint, as well as the prominent cheekbones and chin that gave her face a proud aspect.
She changed into a worn cotton shirt and shorts, and ran a brush through her thick, coarse black hair. Moisture in the air had made her naturally kinky hair more unruly than usual, puffing it up into a frizzy mare’s nest. Gathering the mass together, she secured the ponytail high on her head with an elastic band to keep it off the back of her neck.
In the living room, she flopped down on the L-shaped sofa and reached for the remote control, which should have been on the side table. When her groping hand closed around nothing, she grimaced, trying to remember where she’d left the remote control. Not on the coffee table. She checked the floor, the chair, even the bookshelves lining the walls. Her search unsuccessful, she returned to the sofa. Where had the remote gone?
She stuck her hand between the sofa cushions, coming up with two dollars and forty-nine cents in change, a silver bracelet she thought she’d lost last week, a handful of popcorn kernels, a ballpoint pen and a lint-fuzzed peppermint. At last, her fingers closed around a solid plastic shape. The remote! Smiling, she drew out…her cell phone.
What the hell? She frowned, certain she’d left her cell phone on the table in the hall.
