Call Back: Magnolia Steel Mystery #3 (Magnolia Steele Mystery)

by Denise Grover Swank

  I was definitely going there next . . . with or without Belinda. I was having serious doubts about taking her upstairs right now.

  Belinda took a deep breath and pushed it out, then gave me a serious look. “I can do this. Now let’s go.”

  I frowned. It still seemed like a terrible idea, but I wanted her to come along. “Okay. Let’s give it a go.”

  She got out and I met her at the back of the car. When she wobbled, I reached out for her, but she pushed my hand away.

  “I can do it.”

  Belinda seemed to gain more coordination by the time we got to the entrance to the building. I swiped the name tag and the door popped open. “Okay,” I said. “We’re in.”

  We rode the elevator up to the floor for JS Investments. I glanced through the glass door to see if we had any witnesses, but it was after eight on a Thursday night. No one was around the reception area, and all the lights were dimmed, a good thing since Belinda had to slouch against the wall while I swiped the card on the pad beside the door.

  Once we were inside, I turned on my phone’s flashlight and led Belinda past the reception area and into the hallway behind it. “I noticed Roy was using Daddy’s office,” I said, pointing the beam of my flashlight that direction. “Is Bill still in his old one?”

  For some reason, Bill had always had the big corner office, even from the beginning. Daddy had never seemed to care, but it had bugged Momma plenty. I couldn’t see Bill giving it up.

  “Yeah. In the back. But we need a key.” Thank God she seemed to be becoming more alert.

  “Do you have a key?” I asked.

  “Roy has a key. He’s not supposed to, but he keeps one in his desk.”

  “Do you have the key to Roy’s office?”

  She dangled a small key chain and single key in the beam from my phone flashlight, casting giant shadows on the wall. I had to wonder if we were playing this right. If we were caught, we’d look far more suspicious wandering around in the dark than we would if we turned on a few lights. But I preferred no one knowing we were here at all, and the overhead lights would be a dead giveaway.

  No lights.

  Roy’s office was halfway down the hall. Without a word, Belinda moved toward it, and I shined my flashlight on the knob while she unlocked the door.

  I followed her in and glanced around the shadow-cast room, surprised how much it still looked like Daddy’s office. I’d visited this office a few weeks ago, of course, but I’d been too busy dealing with Roy’s $50,000 offer to leave town at the time to pay much attention.

  “Belinda,” I said as she wobbled over to Roy’s desk in the tinny light from my phone. “Why was Roy so desperate for me to leave town?”

  She stopped and glanced up at me. “Magnolia, that’s water under the bridge.”

  “Maybe for you it is, but it’s still pretty fresh for me.”

  “I’m not sure what happened between you two, but he still holds a deep-seated grudge.”

  Understatement of the century.

  She sat in Roy’s chair and I stood behind her while she opened one of his desk drawers. Everything was arranged in a neat and orderly fashion. Just what I’d expected from my tight-ass brother. The keys were in the back corner. She quickly snagged them, then got up and walked toward the door more quickly than I could follow her, leaving me to shine the light behind her, casting long, creepy shadows onto the hallway wall. She seemed determined now, and that determination seemed to have sobered her up. There was barely a wobble in her step as she headed straight for Bill’s office, me trailing behind her with my little light. I held my breath as she stuck the key in the lock.

  The knob turned and she stood up straighter, looking me in the eye. “Whatever we find, Magnolia, I am here for you.”

  I tried to hide my surprise over her statement, not because I was shocked she’d offered her support, but because it almost sounded like a warning.

  Without giving me time to respond, she opened the door and marched right over to Bill’s desk. “Shine the light over here,” she said as she started thumbing through papers. “I remember seeing them on a stack of files. There were more of them this morning.”

  “If they’re not there, maybe they’re in a filing cabinet,” I suggested.

  Rather than answer, she sat in his chair, opened his desk drawers, and started digging around. I was sure it was a wasted effort, but she exclaimed, “Got it!”

  Excited, I hurried behind her and shined the light on the manila folder in her hand. She set it on the desk, and sure enough, my name was handwritten on the tab in block letters—Magnolia Steele.

  I felt like I was going to throw up, but I had to keep it together this time. “What’s in it?”

  She opened the folder and I gasped at what she found.

  Nothing. It was empty.

  Belinda glanced over her shoulder at me, her eyes wide.

  “Did you see anything in it this morning?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “But I saw Emily’s first, and there were papers in hers—a mix of handwritten and printed documents. Bill was looking at the handwritten one on top when I walked in. Sometimes I bring the office staff pastries, and I walked in to bring one to Bill. He wasn’t expecting me, so he only tried to hide it after I slipped into his office. His hands slipped, and it fell on the floor, scattering the papers everywhere. I stooped to pick them up, and I saw the kind of information you’d get from a private detective report. Places she’d lived, where she’d gone to school, even her credit report.” She looked in the drawer again, then back up at me. “Emily’s is gone.”

  “Why is mine empty?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But he became agitated when I started to help him, and told me to leave them alone. In fact, he looked agitated before he even noticed me.”

  “Does he know you made the connection to Emily?” I asked.

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I tried to play it off, but I’m no actress,” she said. “I’m positive he saw my shock.”

  “Belinda,” I said sharply, suddenly wanting to take her far, far away, anywhere but here. “You’re in danger. If Bill’s the killer, and he knows you saw Emily’s file, he might kill you to keep you quiet.”

  She straightened up and looked into my eyes. “This is crazy. I know I brought you here, but now it seems like a big conspiracy theory scenario. Bill wouldn’t do this,” she said, but it sounded like she was trying—and failing—to convince herself.

  I heard a banging noise in the front reception area and someone coughing. My heart slamming into my rib cage, I grabbed the empty file with my name on it and stuck it back into the drawer. “Come on,” I whispered as I snagged her arm and pulled her into a closet I’d noticed by the office door.

  I managed to shove her inside and push in after her before the office door burst open. Someone shuffled into the room, leaving a smoky odor in their wake. It smelled like he or she had been to a bonfire. More coughing followed.

  The intruder was silent for several seconds. Then I heard a man mumble, “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  The sound of running water filtered through the side wall of the closet, and I remembered that Bill had his own private powder room off his office.

  There were splashing sounds and more mumbling, along with more coughing. I considered using this opportunity to make our escape, but it would be dangerous, and maybe we’d find out more by staying. I tried to glance at Belinda, but she held her finger to her lips.

  We stayed put.

  The water turned off, but the noise was replaced by the sound of cursing. Then he was abruptly cut off, and I heard the man gasping for breath as another round of violent coughing overtook him. “Is it here?” he asked.

  Who was out there? It made sense that it was Bill James, but the voice was too shaky and raspy from coughing for me to be sure.

  “I have to find it.” He sounded desperate.

  Oh, God. Don’t look in the closet.

  I heard drawers opening and closi
ng, file cabinet drawers slamming, and even more cursing and coughing, which seemed to be getting worse.

  Did he have a cold?

  The sound of a ringing cell phone broke the silence, and Belinda jumped behind me, making a small thump against the wall.

  I nearly panicked, but at the same time the ringing stopped and the man said in a distorted voice, “Hello?”

  I held my breath and willed my heart to slow down so I could hear his conversation over the whooshing pulse in my ears.

  I strained to hear what he said, but between his coughing and his hoarse voice, I couldn’t make out what he said. Was this the voice I’d heard last night in the industrial park?

  “I still can’t find the gold,” the man said, sounding closer. “But I have a lead, and I think I’ll have it soon.”

  Silence fell, and I held my breath. Who was on the other line?

  “Saturday night. At the fundraiser. We’ll meet there.”

  The coughing became more violent and sounded closer.

  We were going to get caught.

  But the man walked past the closet door and exited the office. We waited until we heard the faint sounds in the reception area disappear and then waited a good ten seconds more before opening the closet door and exiting into the office.

  “Was that Bill?” I asked, spinning around to face Belinda.

  “I don’t know. It didn’t sound like him, but . . .”

  I decided to keep my suspicions about who it might be to myself. “I know where we have to go next,” I said, opening the office door.

  “Don’t you want to search the office more? We still haven’t found Emily’s file.”

  If Bill James had a trophy room like Momma had suggested, I had a sinking suspicion I knew exactly where to find the file.

  I didn’t talk much on the thirty-minute drive to Leiper’s Fork. There were too many thoughts tumbling through my head. It made sense that Bill James would want the gold if he’d been a part of the Jackson Project, and whatever other schemes he and the others had pulled. But why kill all those people? Why murder so many women?

  I needed to turn this over to the police, but I didn’t trust them. I wondered if I should tell Brady about the files in the basement, but I didn’t entirely trust him either. Besides, if I did, I’d never get to look at them. The police would take over. And while I knew that’s exactly what should happen, I had to see the files for myself, even though I had no idea why.

  I also needed to tell Colt the latest about the gold, but I couldn’t do that with Belinda in the car. It would have to wait.

  Belinda was quiet the entire ride too, other than a few short exchanges between us. Even though she’d suspected Bill was a murderer, it had shaken her to overhear that phone call. The person we’d heard had basically confessed to murder. I was far ahead of her on the scary crap train. I needed to let her catch up.

  She didn’t ask where we were going, proof of how much she trusted me. Or that she was still too tipsy to put much thought into it. Maybe both.

  But as I approached the country road I needed to turn onto to get to the house, I knew something was wrong. Smoke billowed thick and heavy into the night sky, and flashing lights bounced off the road and the trees.

  “Oh, my,” Belinda said, sitting upright in her seat. “That looks like a terrible house fire.”

  My heart heavy, I drove past the turn and continued on down the road.

  “Why do I have a feeling that’s where we were going?” Belinda asked.

  “Because you’re smart.”

  “Well, it sure explains the smoky smell. What was it?”

  Now that I thought about it, there might be one bright spot out of all of it. Perhaps burning the place down would bring one aspect of the past to light. “The place where Bill James’s first wife might be buried.”

  “What?”

  I told her about Momma’s suspicions, about how Bill James had bought the house years after Momma and Daddy had moved out of it.

  “Why would he have bought it?” she asked, her forehead furrowed.

  “If you’d buried a dead body under a concrete slab in a basement prone to leaks,” I said, “wouldn’t you want to make sure it stayed buried? What better way than to buy the house? And it’s vacant. No one lives there.”

  “That’s . . . not normal.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you thought we needed to come here.”

  I hadn’t told her about the files I’d hoped to find, and I decided it didn’t matter now—anything flammable in that house had been destroyed—and besides, I’d already told her plenty she’d have to keep from Roy, whose motivations I didn’t begin to understand.

  “Just a hunch.”

  We drove the rest of the way to her house in silence. As soon as we went inside, she turned to me with dull eyes. “I’m going to go to bed. You’ll sleep in the guest room tonight. I’ll show you where.”

  I followed her upstairs, and she stopped at the first door on the left. “Here’s your room. There are towels and toiletries in the attached bathroom. I’ll bring you a nightgown and clothes for tomorrow.” She paused. “I have to be in the office at nine.”

  I could read between the lines. “So what time do we need to leave? Eight forty-five?”

  “I’ll be downstairs making breakfast at eight.”

  “You don’t need to make breakfast for me,” I protested.

  “I do it every day for Roy,” she said with a tight smile. “It’s good to develop and maintain habits.”

  And my Stepford sister-in-law was back.

  “Belinda. You don’t have to stay with him. Come live with me. My apartment’s small, but we can make it work.” I gave her a goofy grin to lighten the mood. “I’ll even let you have the bed.”

  She pulled me into a hug so tight I could barely breathe. Then she let go, looking more defeated than ever. “You can’t tell Roy what we did tonight.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Thank you.” She turned and walked out of the room. “If you want to start your shower, I’ll just put the clothes on your bed.”

  “Belinda,” I called after her, and she came back to fill the doorway. “Thank you for everything. For trying to protect me. For being my friend.”

  Tears filled her eyes again. “I think you and I are more alike than you realize,” she said. Then she turned and left the room.

  What could she have meant by that?

  But I was exhausted and about to drop. I took a quick shower and found a pile of clothes on the bed, just like Belinda had promised. After I put on the nightgown and brushed my teeth with one of the packaged spare toothbrushes in the drawer, I grabbed my phone out of my purse to call Brady about what I’d found.

  But I dropped the phone on the bed when I saw the message on the screen.

  It was a photo of my magnolia necklace on top of a topographical map—just like the map of the Jackson Project I’d seen in the basement of Bill James’s house.

  The text that came with it sent icy fear through my veins.

  Missing something?

  Chapter 23

  Despite my exhaustion, sleep was elusive. After fifteen minutes, I got up and took one of the melatonin pills I’d seen in the bathroom. If I couldn’t sleep safely in Belinda’s fortress of security, I couldn’t sleep anywhere.

  I passed out soon after I went to bed, and slept dreamlessly until my alarm went off at seven thirty. I felt like I’d been run over by a truck, and I was slow to move until the memories of the previous night hit me full force. I sat up in bed and covered my eyes.

  I was still living in a nightmare.

  If the killer had found my necklace in the basement, it made sense that he’d immediately destroyed the evidence there. Which made it all the more likely Bill James was the killer. And he probably assumed I knew a boatload more than I did.

  Shit.

  I needed to tell the police about what Belinda had found, and it made sense to t
ell Brady, even if I didn’t quite trust him. He was the only one who had realized we were dealing with a serial killer. The only one who had made the connection to my father’s mess. It felt like I had no other choice but to tell him.

  As soon as I had a plan, I dialed his number. He answered on the first ring. “Maggie? Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, running my hand through my hair. “Actually no. It’s not.”

  “Tell me where you are; then hang up and call 911,” he said in a panic.

  “No.” I shook my head, realizing I was handling this all wrong. “I’m fine. I just found out something shocking that I thought I should share with you.”

  “Okay,” he said, sounding calmer. “I’m listening.”

  I couldn’t tell him I’d found this out last night, or he’d justifiably wonder why I hadn’t told him sooner. “Belinda told me something concerning this morning at breakfast.”

  “What’s your hesitation, Maggie?”

  “What?” I asked in surprise.

  “I can tell you’re hesitant to tell me. Is it Belinda? Are you still worried about her safety?”

  The fact that he knew I was holding back spooked me. “Uh . . . yeah.”

  “If you tell me, we can protect her, Maggie. And you too.”

  But he’d told me he couldn’t protect her.

  “Bill James,” I said, still not sure what to confess to him. “Belinda told me she saw files on his desk yesterday.”

  “What kind of files?” he asked.

  I stopped. “You can’t tell anyone this came from her. If my brother finds out, he might kill her. Literally, Brady. I know he’s hurt her before.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Maggie, you have to realize you’re hamstringing me. It’s not even my jurisdiction, and I have to have legitimate cause to get the Nashville police involved. What if she makes an anonymous tip like you did with Lopez’s disappearance?”

  “Only a handful of people work in the office. It will be obvious it was one of them.”

  “See?” he said, sounding more hopeful. “Then James won’t even suspect her. He’ll think it was one of his office staff.”