by Edie Claire
Leigh set down her tea. “Oh?”
Bess nodded. “Sonia Crane has regained consciousness.”
Leigh felt her own worry lines deepen. No wonder Maura had avoided the question. Stroth would want to witness Bess’s reaction to the news firsthand; Maura couldn’t take a chance on Leigh or Allison tipping Bess off. How awkward.
“What is Sonia saying?” Leigh asked hesitantly.
Bess made a growling noise low in her throat. “She’s not completely with it, yet. She’s just sort of babbling… like she’s delirious. But according to Stroth, there are two things she keeps saying over and over.”
Leigh took a sip of tea and waited for it, her heart thudding in her chest.
“My name,” Bess said heavily, “and black magic.”
The tea spewed. “Sorry,” Leigh apologized, wiping up the drops with a paper napkin. “I wasn’t expecting… I mean… what?”
Bess let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Little known fact about Sonia Crane, kiddo. She may look all tough and businesslike, but underneath that lizard skin, she’s as superstitious as they come. I heard it first from a lawyer friend of mine who used to work with her at a firm downtown. But Cara said the same thing just a couple days ago. Even back in college, Sonia was reading tarot cards and running séances, pretending to be a medium… and a wiccan, and a voodoo priestess, and a psychic. Lord only knows what else. You name it, if it’s not provable by science and a little bit twisted, Sonia Crane is into it.”
Leigh recalled with sudden clarity how Sonia had tried to warn her and Cara away from the building the first day they met. She had mentioned the human sacrifice rumors, and she had blamed it all on black magic.
“Oh, my,” Leigh murmured. She looked her aunt square in the eye. “Sonia Crane is scared to death of you.”
Bess’s shoulders lifted with the tiniest of shrugs. “It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”
Leigh gasped with sudden understanding. “The bathroom at the sheriff’s sale! Aunt Bess, what did you do to her?”
Bess hid her face behind her teacup. “A little harmless opposition research, that’s all. I knew she was determined to outbid Gordon. I found out she had a thing about the occult. And what can I say? One can order just about anything on Amazon. Is it my fault that the woman had an unnaturally strong reaction to ten dollars’ worth of cardboard pentagrams and a bloody rubber rooster?”
Leigh banged her forehead on the tabletop. “Aunt Bess!”
“Well?” Bess defended hotly. “It worked, didn’t it? She took off out of that building like her pants were on fire! And as I said before, I never touched her. She did connect me with the incident somehow, however.”
“Clearly,” Leigh said heavily, lifting her head. “And what you’re telling me is that now, for whatever reason, Sonia’s delirious brain has decided that you were to blame for the assault as well?”
Bess’s lips pursed again. “That would be about the size of it. Me and my ‘black magic.’”
Leigh exhaled roughly. “Then she didn’t see who actually assaulted her.”
“Evidently not.”
“Did you tell Stroth the truth? About everything?”
Bess threw her chest out indignantly. “Of course I did! You know I never lie unless it’s absolutely necessary!”
Leigh decided not to go there. “Do you think he believed you?”
“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly. “But your friend Maura will. Won’t she?”
Leigh considered. “I think that under the circumstances, your past history with Detective Polanski will weigh in your favor.” As a relatively harmless crackpot, she refrained from adding.
Bess’s smile, for the first time that morning, seemed genuine. “Well, that’s a relief. Thanks, kiddo. I knew you could cheer me up.”
Leigh smiled back. “No problem.”
Chapter 15
Leigh was on her way back to her van when she caught a glimpse of Gerardo carrying a pair of pruning shears around the rear of the building. Bess had said she didn’t completely trust him, yet she had made no move to fire him. Nor, as far as Leigh knew, had Bess specifically confronted him about the language question. On the surface, that seemed odd. But with Bess, odd behavior was relative. If Leigh had to guess why her aunt continued to tolerate Gerardo’s presence in the building, she would say that Bess still believed Allison’s theory that he was a spy for Gordon, and she was keeping him around to play with him like a cat with a mouse.
In fact, Leigh was sure of it. And she was feeling rather feline herself at the moment.
She put her keys back into her pocket and walked across the lot and around to the rear of the building. The annex had been built to within ten feet of the property line, leaving a narrow alleyway of grass between the building and a neighbor’s overgrown hedge and detached garage. Leigh walked past a concrete stairwell that led down to a metal fire door and window on the lower floor of the annex. She paused a moment. The metal door was scratched up and dented; the window was an opaque casement type that had clearly seen better days. She walked down the steps for a closer look.
The fact that the building had been easy to break into at various points in its history was a foregone conclusion. Churches and fraternal orders always had numerous keys floating about. The banquet halls and dance studio might have kept a tighter grip, but there were double-hung windows on the second floor of the annex that would be vulnerable to anyone with a short ladder who could pick a lock. The first floor, which was half underground at its rear because of the upward slope of the block, had only casement windows. Also easily picked, but inherently safer because the opening would be too small for an adult to crawl through.
Leigh studied the metal door. It had a new one-way locking mechanism, with no knob on the outside. She knew that it also had a sliding deadbolt on the inside, because she had checked it herself a few times when they were working in the evenings. According to Bess, Gordon had hired a company to replace all the locks as soon as he bought the building, and the only keys at the moment belonged to her and to him. The double-hung windows within easy reach had also had been outfitted with sash pins, so the building certainly should be secure now, even without the expensive monitoring system Bess hoped to purchase for the theater down the road.
Of course, no building was ever 100% secure. Glass and doors could be broken; bombs could explode. But there were no obvious holes in the building’s current armor, either.
Feeling slightly mollified, Leigh climbed back up the steps and walked around the other rear corner of the building to the side opposite the parking lot. Here, the building fronted a narrow secondary street which ran uphill into a residential neighborhood. Between the crumbling sidewalk and the brick wall were a few small trees and any number of seriously overgrown bushes and shrubs, one of which Gerardo was now pruning with a vengeance.
Inspiration struck.
“What are you doing?!” Leigh cried with alarm, running toward him. “That’s a diffelostra, for crying out loud!” He stopped in surprise, and when she reached him she pretended great interest in what was left of the bush. “You have to cut them back in the fall, not the spring! If you cut them back in the spring, they won’t bloom all season, possibly two! Everybody knows you can’t prune diffelostra in the spring!” She faced him straight on, her tone and eyes accusing. “Most especially professional gardeners!”
He stared back at her, calculating and a little defiant.
She stared straight back.
“Give it up, Gerardo,” she cajoled. “You know you want to.”
They stood staring at each other for another long moment before his brown eyes suddenly twinkled.
“I do not want to,” he responded, with no trace of any accent besides well-educated middle-American. “But it doesn’t look like I have any choice. I underestimated you and those kids from the beginning.”
“Uh huh,” Leigh agreed. “But don’t feel bad. It’s a common error.”
He dropped the pruning
shears at his feet and wiped the sheen of sweat off his brow with a sleeve.
“The question is,” Leigh pressed, “Why?”
Gerardo’s dark eyes flashed with sudden insight, making Leigh all but certain she was about to be lied to.
“Mr. Applegate is worried about his investment here. He wants somebody on the inside, watching how Bess is handling things, making sure all is well. I’ve been working for him for years, basically as a glorified gofer, so he put me on it. The no-English thing was his idea. He figured I could find out more that way — that people would leave their guards down around me.”
“A very smart and devious man, that Mr. Applegate.”
A grin played at his lips. “You have no idea.”
Leigh’s bravado faltered suddenly. And what, exactly, was she going to do now? She was not afraid of Gerardo, although rationally speaking, she should be. All ancient-history murders aside, somebody had knocked Sonia Crane unconscious, and she couldn’t be sure that somebody wasn’t him. She couldn’t be sure of anything.
He surprised her by addressing her next question before she asked it. “If you’re feeling obligated to go spill everything to Detective Stroth, be my guest. Mr. Applegate and I spoke with him together last night. He’s fully aware of my… employment situation.”
Leigh frowned. “But Bess is not.”
Gerardo shook his head. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. She knows I can speak English, even though she pretends she doesn’t. She knows I work for Mr. Applegate. She could fire me anytime she wanted to. Why she doesn’t — what she guesses his motives to be, I have no idea.” His eyes caught Leigh’s with another flash of insight, but this time Leigh construed his words as genuine. “I’m not convinced even Mr. Applegate knows exactly why he put me here. But whatever reasons he gives her are his business. I can promise you I’m not here to make trouble, just feed information to a very rich, inquisitive, and libidinous old man with too much time and money on his hands. I hope you can believe that. And if it ever gets back to him that I said those last few words, I will deny it with my dying breath, which it definitely would be.”
Leigh considered. “And if I tell Bess—”
“Tell her anything you want — aside from the libidinous part. Mr. Applegate won’t be shocked that you’ve found me out. But I have a feeling not much will change. Those two seem to like playing games with each other, if you haven’t noticed.”
Leigh chuckled. “Oh, I’ve noticed.”
“I do have one request,” he began tentatively, “One plea.”
Leigh took in his expression, which was notably more distressed than at any other point in their conversation, and her mouth curved into a smirk. “You don’t want Chaz to know you speak English?”
“God, no,” he said heavily. “I’d lose my mind. I have no idea how long Bess will want to keep us on after the opening, or how long Mr. Applegate will want to keep his charade up. Have mercy, please?”
Leigh smiled. She didn’t trust Gerardo, but she couldn’t help liking him, either. As Allison and the Pack had also perceived, his intelligence and sense of humor were evident even without speech.
“I won’t tell Chaz,” she bargained, “if you’ll dish on him and Ned.”
He smirked. “What do you want to know?”
“Are they really what they appear to be?”
His eyebrows tented. “You mean a lazy idiot and a hardworking oddball?”
Leigh nodded.
“As far as I know. But for obvious reasons, they don’t confide in me.”
She sighed. “Well, keep an eye out, will you? For anything… even more strange than usual?”
He grinned at her shamelessly. “That’s why I get the big bucks.”
Leigh stepped away from him and had just started down the sidewalk when he called to her with a stage whisper. “Hey! What other bushes am I not supposed to be hacking, here? What kind did you say this was?”
Leigh smirked and gave a shrug. “Damned if I know. Looks like a weed to me.”
***
Leigh knew the risks when she decided to walk back around the front side of the building. Subconsciously or otherwise, she had wanted it to happen.
“Yoo-hoo! Miss Leigh! Come on over!”
Don’t mind if I do.
Leigh crossed the traffic and joined Merle and Earl on their front porch, which had been divested of its dining room chairs but still offered two extra lawn chairs and a bean bag. She sat down in one of the original deck chairs next to Earl, who beamed at her. “Had a detective come over here yesterday,” he said proudly.
“Did you?” Leigh encouraged.
“Yes, ma’am,” Merle agreed, sitting on Leigh’s opposite side. “Fine young fellow. Works for the county police. In homicide, you know.”
“I met him, too,” Leigh admitted. “What did he come over here for?”
“His name was Toth,” Earl informed.
“It was Struth,” Merle corrected.
“It was what?” Earl demanded.
“Smith! His name was Smith!” Merle snapped, rolling her eyes. She hid her mouth behind her hand and spoke to Leigh in a whisper as loud as her regular voice. “He can’t hear worth a damn, you know.”
“Can too!” Earl protested.
“What did the detective ask you about?” Leigh inquired, intervening.
“Oh, the same thing everybody asks us about,” Merle answered. “What we see happening from over here. Who goes in and out of the building, and when.”
“His name was Toth.”
“He also asked us about what everybody else was saying way back when,” Merle continued. “You know, what the people around here thought when Marconi went missing. He wanted to know which of the neighbors had lived here since then besides us.”
“David Toth.”
“Of course, there’s not all that many long-timers around here anymore. It’s all rentals on this side, and the houses across the way have a lot of younger families. They come and go pretty quick, you know. But I gave him a few names of people who’ve been here even longer than we have.”
“Was it David or Raymond?”
“Not that many of them can see what goes on in the building, though,” Merle informed. “We’ve got the only view of the front, besides those next door. We can’t see the parking lot or around back, but nobody living over there can either, really, because of that hedge being so overgrown. Easy as pie to slip in and out one of those doors without being seen, that’s what I told Mr. Struth.”
“I think it was Raymond,” Earl concluded.
Leigh was beginning to get dizzy from whipping her head around.
“He was plenty interested in everything we’ve seen happen since Mr. Marconi came around,” Merle boasted. “I told him about those awful haunted houses. Did you know the borough turned on the power and water for a month every year just to suit those crazy hoodlums? No mystery how all that happened — one of them was the son of a councilman, you know. Our tax dollars going for that nonsense! Come November, they’d shut everything off again. But Earl and I, we saw lights over there all year round. Flashlights I imagine, but lights.”
Leigh’s pulse quickened. She had heard the claim before, but now it seemed more than idle fancy. If someone, obviously not Marconi himself, had regularly been visiting the building at night, what was their purpose? They had done no obvious damage. They could have stolen things they didn’t steal. No single item in the basement had any great value in terms of pawning, but a decent amount of it taken together would have some value. Why break into an abandoned building with a flashlight just to sit in the dark and the cold?
A flash of inspiration struck. Were they looking for something?
“Did Detective Stroth tell you why he wanted to know?” she asked anxiously.
“Stroth!” Earl shouted triumphantly, raising a pointed finger in the air. “I told you it was Stroth!”
“He didn’t say much,” Merle answered. “He just asked questions. That’s how they do
, you know.”
“Was it Raymond Stroth?” Earl questioned.
“I expect he’ll be calling us back any time now, though, and I might just ask him then,” Merle mused. “What all he thinks is up. We saw them lights again last night, you know. That’s what I plan to tell him. But he didn’t answer his phone, so I just left my number.”
“It was David,” Earl proclaimed. “David Stroth.”
“It’s Daniel,” Leigh supplied, then swiveled in her seat to fully face Merle. “Wait, when last night? You know they had the dress rehearsal — I’m sure it went pretty late.”
Merle shook her head. “Oh no, I mean after that. It was all quiet over there by midnight, but then I got up again around three because Earl was snoring—”
“You were snoring!”
“And I saw a little light bobbing over there again, down low like, in the basement. We can see those windows all up the side, you know.”
“I saw them too,” Earl insisted. “Her snoring had me up at five. The detective told us to keep an eye out, so I did.”
Leigh’s mouth seemed to have gone dry. She swallowed painfully. “You’re saying you saw lights in the building just last night, after the actors had all left?”
And since Gordon Applegate had all the locks changed?
“That’s what we’re saying,” Merle confirmed.
Earl nodded his head along with her.
Leigh felt the color drain from her face. “But you couldn’t have,” she protested. “There’s… no way to get in the building. Not anymore.”
Merle chuckled. “Oh, there’s always a way. When somebody puts their mind to it.”
“Damn hippies,” Earl added.
Leigh rose. “I’m sorry, but I need to go. I need to tell my Aunt Bess about this.”
“Oh, we already did,” Merle offered pleasantly. “She popped over again earlier this morning, all excited to tell us that the inspection came through and that it was official — tonight’s the night!”
“I’m wearing a tie,” Earl said with a smile.
“I may have to break out the panty hose myself,” Merle added. “Much as I hate the damn things.”
