A Box Full of Trouble

by Carolyn Haines

  * * *

  Erin knew she was taking a big chance by going by Julie's house so soon after the discovery of her body, but she headed there anyway with the key that Julie had insisted on giving her years ago. Parking the Challenger in the small municipal lot on the hill above Autumn Street, she double-checked her shorts pocket for the key and walked the half-block to where the stone wall along Julie's backyard met the road. It was a low wall, only about four feet high, yet it had seemed enormous to Erin when she was a little girl. She'd had to work to climb over it back then, but she was pleased to find she remembered exactly where the best toe-holds were. She was in the yard in seconds.

  Julie's backyard was a gardener's paradise and was often a featured stop on the New Belford Garden Club's spring tour. The fuchsia blooms on the banks of azaleas were wan and edged with brown, but the dahlias and coneflowers and trellises of morning glories and giant pots of hibiscus and a dozen flowers Erin couldn't name showed their bright faces along the garden's winding paths. Best of all, for Erin, were the tall fans of exotic grasses and Japanese maples that screened her from the windows at the back of the house.

  The house looked abandoned, and Erin was suddenly overwhelmed by its emptiness. She would never see Julie again. Never have tea with her again in the funny little room she called the solarium. It was the room in which Erin slept when she went to Julie's for overnights after her mother died, so that she would wake up bathed in morning sun, the smell of coffee and blueberry pancakes filling the house.

  Julie had been her mother's closest friend, and now Julie was no more. The pain of Julie's death felt new, but also very old, like a reopened wound.

  Knowing who killed Julie and why was important to her, but that wasn't why she was here, trying to figure out if there were already police in the house. Her father was very much alive, and he needed her help.

  The key worked just as she'd known it would. Julie had wanted her to always have a place to come if she needed to get away from her own house and, Erin guessed, Shelby Rae.

  Nothing looked out of place. From what she could tell, there’d been no fight, and there was no blood anywhere. She was grateful for that, because she knew she would've been violently ill if she'd found any. The only things she wanted to find were the photos Julie had shown her father so she could get them out of the house. There would be too many questions if the police found them.

  Julie was tidy, but not obsessive. Yesterday's Courier-Journal lay re-folded on the coffee table, and in the kitchen, Erin stepped on a couple of flower stems on the floor near the sink. There were fresh bouquets of garden flowers in every room. Two wine glasses and an empty bottle of French merlot sat on the kitchen island.

  "I was at Julie's early last evening. She asked me to come by for a glass of wine."

  One of the glasses was nearly full. The other had only a dried spot of purple-red in its bottom. The full one must have been her father's. Or had Julie entertained someone else after her father left? Maybe she had drunk the rest of the bottle herself.

  "Damn it." Erin looked around the kitchen. She didn't really want to be here, but she also didn't want anyone to know her father had been there.

  The only thing to do was to wash both glasses. After putting on Julie's dishwashing gloves, she ran some hot water and soaped up the bottlebrush near the sink to clean them inside and out. When she was finished, she put them in the drying basket beside the sink. By the time she was ready to leave, they might be dry enough to put away. Then she rinsed out the wine bottle and put it in recycling, just the way Julie might have done it. The rug was a deep red oriental with an intricate pattern so there was no obvious spill where Julie had tossed wine at her father, so she left it alone.

  Feeling a little ridiculous, she kept on the kitchen gloves as she went to search for the photos.

  Her search was as methodical as she could make it. Julie wasn't all that complicated, and so her hiding places wouldn't be too difficult. Unless, of course, she was worried about someone else besides Erin's father finding them.

  No, I'm not going to psyche myself out about this.

  She started in the living room, at the enormous antique roll top desk that had belonged to Julie's husband. Her fingers were clumsy in the rubber gloves, but she riffled through the neatly organized papers and the desk's many drawers quickly. She even squatted down to look at the underside of the desk for signs of a hidden compartment. Nothing.

  Nothing in the bookshelves or the highboy Julie used as a linen press for her many fancy tablecloths and napkins. Nothing among her several sets of china or neatly piled magazines on the coffee table. Every so often she would run to the front of the house to peer out the window for signs of the police. Not yet. One thing she did notice—Julie's car wasn't beneath the old-fashioned brick carport attached to the gracious house. She hadn't seen the car among all the police cars at the lake, either. It was good news, considering it might be a clue in Julie's death. But it did her no good at all when it came to the photos of Shelby Rae and the unidentified man.

  Erin headed upstairs, daunted by the fact that the house contained four large bedrooms. It would be hard to escape unnoticed if the police showed up.

  The photographs were important to Julie, Erin reasoned. So she probably kept them close.

  In Julie's bedroom, Erin caught a glimpse of herself in an elegant, full-length mirror. In her shorts and fitted blue T-shirt, long braid, and with her sunglasses on top of her head, she looked like her normal self—well, except for the rubber gloves. She found it hard to believe she was ransacking a dead woman's bedroom.

  She looked swiftly through Julie's dresser drawers, trying not to mess things up too much. It couldn't look to the police like someone had been here, searching for something after the murder. Then she searched the tall jewelry dresser, marveling at Julie's collection of expensive jewelry. It made her understand how modest Julie really was. When she went out, she rarely wore more than a watch and earrings, and maybe a gold necklace. But the small drawers were filled with velvet boxes containing delicate diamond and sapphire and emerald bracelets and necklaces. There were tiny boxes with rounded edges that held diamond and gold earrings and several pairs of pearl earrings that glowed with exotic warmth. For a while she became lost in the jewelry, wondering why Julie never wore it. Though there weren't many events in New Belford where she might wear them without looking a little silly.

  She jumped at the sound of a car door and ran to the window, feeling her heartbeat pounding in her throat. Not the police, but a pizza delivery car across the street. Her body flooded with relief.

  Turning around, she surveyed the room. She hadn't searched the big closet yet, or the bed and bedside tables. Despairing of not only the very full closet, but also the other four bedrooms, she sighed. She was certain the photos must be in the house. Her father had seen them, and it seemed unlikely that Julie would've taken them anywhere with her.

  Avoiding the closet for now, she went to the first bedside table and pawed through the debris that wasn't dissimilar to what was in her own—too many bookmarks, pencils, lip balm, lotion, eye drops, a small flashlight. Eyeglass cloths, Tums, a tin of mints. Julie's drawer also held a prescription bottle with a label that said Lorazipam. It was a drug that Shelby Rae also occasionally took "for her nerves." Though Erin couldn't imagine Julie joking about it as she washed it down with a glass of wine, as Shelby Rae did.

  Before she went to the other side of the bed, Erin bent to look beneath the big four-poster. There was no awkward dust ruffle, and she could see across the rug beneath straight to the other side. When she was little, her parents had had a similarly high antique bed—Shelby Rae had insisted on an entirely new bed when she married Erin's father—and Erin had loved to lie on her back underneath it looking up at the slats and slipping her small fingers between the rough-cut, slightly uneven slats and the box springs. She had imagined hiding treasure there, or even a knife or other weapon, just in case. No one would ever guess it was there.


  Now she stretched out, the worn, hand-loomed rug soft against the back of her legs, and scooted beneath the bed. For a second she had that momentary thrill of fear that the bed might fall on her, but took a deep breath and focused on looking for something hidden in the slats.

  It was a big bed, and she wished she had the flashlight she'd seen in the bedside table drawer. Taking off the rubber gloves, she ran her fingers along the wooden slats, wary of splinters. She'd been at it for two or three minutes and was beginning to feel stupid when her searching fingers hit the corner of something that bent as she touched it. An envelope.

  Yes!

  Erin didn't have any time to celebrate and only confirmed that the envelope held photographs of Shelby Rae in her SUV with a man Erin didn’t recognize. She stuffed the envelope into her slim leather crossbody purse, and glanced around the room to make sure nothing was out of place. Satisfied, she ran down the stairs to put the gloves back in the kitchen. Could they get fingerprints off of rubber? She wasn't sure. But the thought of stealing the gloves and having to dispose of them made her feel like a true criminal, and she wasn't really a criminal, was she? She hesitated, uncertain, and was about to put them in the cabinet beneath the sink when someone banged on the front door. It was not a polite banging, either.

  She hurriedly wiped the two wineglasses dry, set them on the counter, and ditched the gloves.

  The voice from outside was muffled, but she heard it clearly enough.

  "Police. Open up the door, Miss Walsh. We know you're inside."

  * * *

  The chief deputy loomed over Erin, who sat in a wing chair by the fireplace in Julie's living room. As New Belford had grown, the sheriff's department had gotten bigger, and only a very few of its members were known to her. This woman wore a name tag that read PIERCE in big block letters, and her thin, sun-worn face and pale eyes gave her a rugged look that belied the graceful hang of her brown and black uniform. She looked like a fashion model, thirty years on. A second, male deputy, was stationed at the front door.

  "The lady next door said you arrived here about twenty minutes ago. How did you get in?”

  “I have a key. Julie gave it to me years ago.”

  “What have you been doing since you arrived?”

  As soon as Erin had heard the voice at the door, her mind had begun working. She was nervous but she knew she had to make her lie convincing.

  "I guess I was afraid Julie's relatives would take the things she had that were my mom’s. There’s a painting my mom did in college, and some clothes Julie was keeping for me. She'd told me she'd found some photographs, too, that I should have."

  Deputy Pierce looked around the room. "Where is everything?” Her voice was skeptical. She seemed the kind of person who expected everyone to lie to her.

  Erin wrapped her arms around herself. “I got here and I guess I was too sad to really look for anything. I did check her bedroom and all the bookshelves for the photos, but I couldn't find them. It's like they've disappeared."

  "Really? You didn't find any photographs at all?"

  "Just her family albums. She said there were some from high school she forgot she had. She and my mom were both cheerleaders at New Belford High School before it closed down and got consolidated."

  The deputy didn't seem impressed. "Did you tell anyone you were coming here? Mrs. Berry's body was found near your house yet didn't you think the house might be off-limits during the investigation? Her family might consider this trespassing. I know I do."

  It sounded entirely possible to Erin. Julie's only family was an older brother and sister-in-law, and their adult children weren’t very pleasant. They never came to visit Julie, and she never visited them.

  "I guess I didn't think about that." The emotion clouding Erin's voice was genuine. Julie was dead. There would be a funeral, and Erin would never see her again. "I panicked. I wasn't thinking about them. Only about my mother. And Julie." She stared at the floor.

  "May I see the key you used to enter the house?"

  Erin dug the key out of her front pocket, relieved she hadn't put it in her bag.

  "Wait here." The deputy walked to the back door, opened it, and inserted the key in the lock. As she turned the key, the deadbolt slid out. When she turned the key again, the deadbolt disappeared, and she shut the door firmly to relock it.

  Guess I won't be going out that way. What will the sheriff say? She thought of Abel Bowen and how nice he'd been to her. He'd probably be both suspicious and pissed off to hear she'd been at Julie's house.

  To Erin's surprise, the deputy handed her back the key. Erin noticed the perfect buff manicure on the woman's long fingers. The nails weren't long, but were beautifully shaped.

  "Hey, Pierce." They couldn't see him, but Erin assumed it was the deputy guarding the front door.

  "Yeah?"

  "Need to talk with you a minute."

  Pierce nodded to the unseen deputy. "Right there." She looked at Erin. "Sorry. I need you to stay here for a moment. I'll be right back. Please don't touch anything else."

  "Sure."

  When Pierce was gone, Erin's hands went to her bag as though to reassure herself that the photos were still inside, though she wouldn't dare look. Her being in Julie’s house was suspicious enough. She'd left the lake house while Sheriff Bowen was talking to her father. What would he say when he learned she'd gone to Julie’s? She hoped he'd be glad, and hadn't decided to tell his friend the truth under questioning. The worst that could happen right now was that she might be taken to the police station. At least her father would understand, but Shelby Rae would be ape-shit.

  Except she wouldn't be here at all if Shelby Rae hadn't been sneaking around. And maybe, just maybe, Julie wouldn't be dead. Although she didn't know for sure that the two things were connected, the coincidence seemed way beyond happenstance.

  Finally, Deputy Pierce returned. She didn't look very happy, but her voice was oddly smoother. Kinder.

  "You can go, Miss Walsh. We're requesting that you don't take anything from the house at this time. We need to do a thorough investigation in order to determine if a crime was committed here, or if there's evidence pertaining to Mrs. Berry's death."

  "All right."

  "Did you bring anything with you into the house? Bags or boxes to take things with you?" This was said with a slight tilt of her head, that made Erin think of the deputy as a model, asking a friend if she'd brought her makeup with her to a shoot.

  Erin gave her a slight smile. "No. Nothing." She stood, self-consciously tugging at the edges of her shorts. What made the woman so friendly all of a sudden? She started to the back door.

  "You'll need to go out the front door. Please don't return without checking with us first. Sheriff Bowen says you can contact him directly.”

  Ah, so that explained what was up. Abel Bowen had vouched for her. But it could also mean he would ask her himself what she was doing there. "Thanks. I won't." Erin was almost to the front door when the deputy spoke again.

  "We'll be in touch, Miss Walsh. I'm certain we'll need to get your fingerprints to eliminate any confusion. We'll contact you."

  When she was out of the house, Erin tried not to break into a run. Only then did she realize how terrifying the whole incident had been. She felt like her chest would burst. The thought of going right home made her feel even worse. She needed to tell her father that she had the photographs, but she needed to be alone for a little while, away from the police.

  * * *

  As grateful as Noah was to Bruce Walsh for giving him the paid day off, there was no way he was going back home. His father was probably just getting up, perhaps having a beer and frozen waffles or Pop Tarts for breakfast. As a kid Noah had frequently asked his mother why he was only allowed to have oatmeal, generic Cheerios, or shredded wheat for breakfast, while his father ate cookies and doughnuts and soda.

  "Because I said so. Because I want you to have teeth when you're old." She might have added, because I don't
want you to end up like your father.

  His father would only grin at him and wink. But he never so much as gave one doughnut to Noah when his mother was out of sight, even when Noah begged. His father was irresponsible, but not exactly playful or generous.

  Normally if he had a day off, Noah would go fishing. He tried to imagine ever returning to the Walshes' place to fish. The image of Julie Berry's body would be forever linked to the swampy weeds and bracken near the lake's edge. How could he be anywhere near there without thinking of her lying in the shallow water, her blank eyes staring at the sky?

  The weather was good and he took his motorcycle out on the county highways he knew well, avoiding the rough and gravel roads that were better handled in a car. There was very little traffic, and he finally relaxed. Maybe relaxed wasn't the word. The problem was that it was full on summer, and as the sun got higher in the sky, it burned down on him even though it wasn't yet noon. The helmet felt glued to his head, but at least it wasn't evening, so the bugs weren't a plague.

  After a couple of hours, he was tired and ready to come back to town. A part of him wanted to go to work to get his mind off Julie Berry's stiff body, and Erin's cold-shouldering. Work saved him from getting too far into his own head.

  He rode by the police station, but he didn't see Zach Wilkins' truck. Maybe he was still out at the Walsh estate. How long did it take to process a crime scene like that?

  Zach could give him information about Julie Berry. It bugged him that her death had happened right on top of both his father getting out of prison and Shelby Rae's kidnapping. He wouldn't ask him for specifics.

  Why do I care? Erin's the one who really wants to know this stuff. It's none of my business. I'm just a grease monkey with a parolee for an old man.

  He slowed the motorcycle to a couple miles an hour below the speed limit as he entered town. He was about to turn left at the old furniture store that had been turned into medical offices when he saw Erin's Challenger parked in front of The Village Bean. As he circled the block to get a better shot at a parking place, he tried to imagine what he would say to her when he got inside. Would she be alone, or perhaps with MacKenzie? How was she feeling after what happened that morning to her friend, so close to her own house? Parking the bike, he told himself he would never know what she was doing there if he didn't go in and ask.