by Lynn Cahoon
Shauna looked at the clock. “Seth should be here any minute for his breakfast. This can wait until he’s here to help. Besides, what if there’s some animal holed up in there. That could be the noises you heard last week.”
“So you want me to wait for the big strong man to help save me?” Cat laughed. “I have shooed away wild animals before. I’m not totally incompetent.”
“Now, I didn’t say that …” Shauna’s words were interrupted by the slam of the screen door. Seth strolled up to the coffee pot and refilled his travel cup with the Writer’s Retreat logo Cat had designed. Cat side-eyed Shauna, who ignored her pointed look.
“Who needs a big strong man to save them?” he asked as he took a chair across the table from the women.
“No one,” Cat shot back, and she pinched Shauna for opening up the subject. “Did you leave a flower outside my office the other day?”
Seth took a sip of coffee before he answered. “No. Although if you want, I could order you some. Why?”
She thought about the flower and the phone call. Someone was messing with her, and now, with the letter and the key, she wondered if it had anything to do with her being the one who inherited the house. Even Brit at the bar had known things about Cat and Michael. How much had he told the women who’d followed her?
“You didn’t tell me someone left you a flower.” Shauna’s voice brought Cat back from her mental wanderings.
Cat shrugged. “I kind of forgot about it.”
Seth focused his gaze on Cat. “You need to tell me everything that’s going on. I’m starting to worry about you.”
Cat shook her head. “Let’s handle one problem at a time. I need to talk to you about the attic.”
Cat told him about the note and the key. After she got the story out, he whistled. “I knew there was something funky about the space, but a hidden room? Wow. Your ex was amazing at this secret-life thing.”
“I still don’t know what he meant when he wrote in his journal about putting me in danger.” She looked at the note again. “You don’t think maybe he had a brain tumor too? That might cause delusions, right? I know he died of a heart attack, but maybe there was more.”
“Maybe. I’ve heard of old people getting senile, but then they find out they just have a medicine mix-up. Was Michael on any drugs?” Shauna sipped her coffee but set it down when Cat stared at her. “What? It’s a logical question.”
Cat leaned back into her chair and sighed. “You’re right. The problem is, I don’t know what got into his head. I mean, we were only married for a few years before he, well, we divorced. I was shocked he left me the house. I kind of thought he had family, somewhere.”
Seth picked up the note. “This doesn’t sound like a guy who wanted the divorce. Are you sure he cheated?”
A memory of Michael and the co-ed in a clinch worthy of an old romance-novel cover flashed through her mind. “I caught him in the act. Or at least the opening scenes. And I found the motel receipts on his desk to confirm the affair.”
“On his desk? Like on top of the desk?” Seth leaned against the counter.
Cat ran a hand through her hair. “Yep, right there where I could see them.” The room was silent as she digested what she had just said. “Where I could see them.”
“No guy who wants to hide an affair from his wife keeps the motel receipts. So he wanted you to find out about his extracurricular activities.”
“But why? Was he already tired of playing house?” Cat didn’t want to open up to the idea that Michael had staged the whole affair. Had she been so easy to manipulate into a divorce? She remembered how she’d dropped the receipts twice, her hands shook so bad. She’d pulled herself together for the fight, but that entire day a noise like a freight train had been running through her head, dulling the emotions she let show.
Shauna touched Cat’s hand. “Maybe you need to read the journal. It could tell you what you want to know.”
“That’s just it: I’m not sure I want to know anything. I was happy with what I thought I knew about how my marriage exploded.” Cat finished her coffee and picked up the key, turning it over in her hand. “So, Hardy Boy, you want to go sleuthing with me?”
“Am I the cute brother or the smart one?” Seth followed her out of the room.
Cat paused and turned to look at him at the bottom of the stairs. “I guess we’ll find out if we find Michael’s secret lair.”
They met Linda on the stairway, coming down. “Am I too late for coffee?”
Cat appraised the woman. Instead of the well-put-together author’s wife Linda had appeared when she’d first arrived, now she looked drawn and rumpled. Cat wasn’t sure the woman hadn’t slept in the same clothes she’d worn yesterday. The smell of whiskey hung around her. The grief of being a widow had started to take its toll. Cat wondered if she’d looked this downtrodden when she’d moved out to California after the divorce. She remembered sitting on the beach trying to clear her head of anything related to Michael. It had taken months before her first thoughts were of the life he’d thrown away.
“Of course not. Shauna’s in the kitchen with a pile of muffins, but if you wanted something else she could whip it up in a flash.” Cat leaned against the stair rail. “Did you not sleep well? Sorry if I’m being rude.”
“Actually I’ve been reading Tom’s last manuscript. It’s not what I expected. I think he’d been keeping it from me, giving me an old manuscript to read while he wrote this one.” Linda shrugged. “Of course, he got the mystery wrong. I should have told him the truth years ago.” Linda turned and headed down the stairs.
When they reached the third floor landing and paused at the entrance to the attic, Seth put a hand on her arm. “Do I want to know?”
“Too many secrets floating around. Let’s focus on Michael’s riddle.” She stilled her mind and marched up the last flight of stairs.
In the attic, she turned around a couple times, orienting herself to the floor plan in reference to the rest of the house. The warning in the letter echoed in her ears. What had Michael been hiding? And why hadn’t she been able to see that something was going on with him? Cat struggled with that question the most. Shouldn’t she have seen a problem in the man she’d vowed to love for better and worse?
Shaking off the questions that kept running through her mind, she focused on the attic room. Finally, she stopped and stared at the wall to her left. “There. That’s the wall that doesn’t belong, right?”
“Exactly.” Seth walked over to the wall and ran his hand over the surface. “I thought this was just old wallpaper the prior owner had painted over, but feel how this area is different than the rest.” He motioned her to come and touch the wall as well. “How tall was Michael? Six two?”
“Six three, just a tad shorter than you. He always joked that I’d gone down a size when I started dating him.” Cat felt her lips twitch at the memory.
“I didn’t realize he even knew who I was.” Seth stood so close to her, she wanted to lean on him for support through this, but no way would she let him see how much she was affected by the day’s events.
“We talked about our pasts a lot that first month we started dating. Of course, my list was a hell of a lot shorter than his.” Cat shook her head and ran her hand over the wall. Changing the subject, she reached up on her tiptoes to see if she could find anything that felt different.
“Not that high; go about hand height.” He reached for her hand as she moved it downward. “Not your arm’s reach, his.”
And then she found it. A place where the wall seemed to dip into itself. She felt around the edges of the dip and found a loose edge of what appeared to be wallpaper. Lifting the edge, she peered into the hole and saw the keyhole set deep into the wall. She took the key out of her jeans pocket and put it into the keyhole. Pausing, she looked up at Seth. “You ready?”
He smiled and put a hand on her back. “I should be asking you that. You don’t have to do this, you know. You can leave all this stuff w
ith Michael packed away in whatever box you put the guy into when you divorced. No one would think anything less of you.”
“Except for me.” She faced him. “I know it may change the way I see the guy. Or it may not. Either way, he’s still dead. I’d rather put this chapter of my life behind me today than let it fester for years. I’m living in the house we bought together. There’s too many ghosts already here; I don’t want to add one more.”
Seth put his hand out to stop her from turning. “Right now, he’s just the guy who broke your heart.”
“I don’t know. All I know is, if I don’t figure out what Michael was about, I won’t be able to make any sort of decision.” She smiled. “I think it’s the writer in me. If there’s a void in information, I’ll fill it and my fictional answer may be more hurtful than the truth.”
“Then let’s go all Indiana Jones on this attic hideout and get this behind us. I’ve got a perfect place for dinner on Saturday night.” He leaned down and kissed her lips. Slow, sweet, and promising more.
Cat opened her eyes after he leaned back and smiled. “Did Indiana Jones have a sidekick?”
“Of course—some woman who was always getting him into trouble.” Seth ran a hand up the wall next to where she’d entered the key. “I think it will open inwards, away from us.”
“We need better fictional counterparts. I want to be the main character, not you.” She took a deep breath, knowing she was stalling.
“You’re always the main character in your own life, didn’t you tell me that once?” Seth nodded to the wall turned into a doorway. “Quit stalling and open the door to the past.”
“I think you saw that in a movie. I never said that.” When Seth didn’t answer, she turned back to the door. “Fine, here we go.”
She turned the key and besides a small click, nothing happened. She turned to Seth, who put his hands on the wall above the keyhole and pushed. The wall moved inward. Windows lined the other side of the attic, filling the area with morning light. She realized this part of the attic was directly over her office and this is where the noises she’d heard had come from. In the middle of the space was a large oak desk. And next to that, a table filled with piles of papers. A large mobile white board like the ones in the classrooms at Covington. Michael’s lair looked more like a second office than anything needing to be hidden in a secret room.
Seth walked around the room. “No foot prints, no wild animals, nothing but this desk set up. Do you know what he was working on?”
“Economics stuff? I didn’t really understand when he talked about his work because you know how I am with math. Believe me, I tried to follow, but the guy was a freaking genius when it came to that stuff. Did you know the president’s staff called him once to ask his opinion on a proposed policy change?” Cat sat at the desk and powered up the computer. A password-protected sign-in box leaped onto the screen. “That’s funny.” She keyed in a password and a box telling her the sign on was incorrect covered the screen. She tried a second one. Same result.
Seth was watching over her shoulder. “No luck?”
“Michael didn’t like passwords. He kept forgetting them, so he always used the same two. Both of those failed.” Cat frowned. “He didn’t even set one up on his personal computer downstairs in his office.”
“And yet this one is locked down?” Seth flipped through some pages on the desk. “These all look like graphs and Excel spreadsheets. No smoking gun here.”
“Maybe the brain tumor explanation is more and more logical.” She stood and glanced around the room. “I guess we box this stuff up and move it down to his study until I can figure out what we have here. Maybe one of his colleagues could help me figure out what he was working on.”
Seth examined the wall. “This is all temporary. I can have it down in a day if that’s what you want.”
Cat nodded. “Let’s clear out the secrets. Shauna and I will box the papers up, and we can keep the desk and table up here for the new library.” Smiling, she took Seth’s hand. “I feel a ton lighter knowing that Michael’s secret was probably just a new economics theory. Important to people in the field, but really just academic.”
“Then I’ll get working on taking down the wall. What’s your plan for the day?” He picked a bit of cobweb off her hair and showed it to her, which made her shudder.
“Looks like a quick shower to rinse the bugs off, and then I’m locking myself into the office and writing. I’m still on deadline, and I didn’t get half the word count done I’d planned last week with the retreat. I may have to lower my expectations on what I can get done on retreat weeks.”
As they walked into the other part of the attic, he paused at the top of the stairs. “I think your next retreat should be a bit less complicated.”
“You mean sans murder and mayhem?” Cat laughed as she took the stairs to her own room. “One can only hope.”
Chapter 22
Three hours later, Cat emerged from her writing cave satisfied with the day’s work. She loved this part of the process, where the words just flew on the page. All she had to do now was finalize the final chapter, and she could set the book aside for a week or two while she brainstormed a proposal for a renewal for her agent. The day had been cool enough that Cat had even had to shut her office windows and slip on the sweater she kept by her desk. Winter wasn’t far away.
The noise from Seth’s hammering had stopped, and she wondered if he’d taken a break for lunch. That probably was why the house seemed so quiet. The group of them were probably all in the kitchen with Shauna laughing and talking about little to nothing. Her social-butterfly skill was one of the reasons Cat had offered the partnership to her friend when she’d come up with the idea for the retreat. She knew even though she could be pleasant enough, people loved being around Shauna. The girl had magic.
Cat swung open the kitchen door and bent to pick up a cup that had fallen on the floor and been left there, coffee spilt out onto the floor. “Shauna, you need to clean up these accidents, someone could slip and get hurt.” She stood and looked right into a revolver. Dean Larry Vargas stood in her kitchen, a gun in his hand that he had pointed at her.
“You should have stayed upstairs,” Larry said, his voice calm and even. “Now I have two of you I need to get rid of.”
Cat froze with the coffee cup still in her left hand. “What are you doing? You’re the dean for God’s sake. There’s no way you’re going to get away with this.”
As she talked, she scanned the room. Shauna was sitting wide-eyed, tied to a kitchen chair, a gag in her mouth. Linda stood next to Larry, his free hand gripping her arm. No sign of Seth.
Larry laughed. “My life was over as soon as Tom started writing that book. I always knew he killed Gloria; now he was going to frame me for his crime. There was no way I could let him get away with that.”
Cat looked at Linda trying to communicate an unspoken question. The woman nodded her approval of the diversion, or maybe Linda was just shaking so hard Cat thought she’d seen a nod. Either way, she needed to dive in quick.
“Tom didn’t kill Gloria. And I know you didn’t either,” Cat added quickly as she saw Larry’s shoulders rise in protest.
“You don’t know anything. You’re just a silly girl who married the playboy professor and got her feelings hurt when he cheated on her.” The gun waved toward the table. “Oh, yes, I know all about Michael’s taste for young girls. The school has had to pay off several over the years. Covington’s lucky to be rid of him. Now move over to the table so Linda can tie you to the chair.”
“I won’t,” Linda said, but a cry of pain followed her words as Larry squeezed her arm.
He leaned toward her. “I can see we are going to have to work on your attitude. Obeying me is rule number one. Rule number two is always follow rule number one.” He looked backup at Cat. “Move!”
Slowly Cat inched toward the table, not taking her eyes off Larry and Linda. “Gloria’s alive. I talked to her yesterday.”
>
“Cat, stop. I’ll go with him if he promises not to hurt the two of you.” Linda turned toward Larry and put her free hand on his forearm.
He shook off Linda’s touch. “Impossible. I looked for her for years. Even that cow of a mother doesn’t know where her precious daughter went.”
“So you’ve been following up on her, even now?” Cat stopped walking, turning to face Larry. She might as well get the entire story, especially since she didn’t think Larry would take Linda up on her deal. The guy was ready to kill. Heck, he probably killed Tom, and poor Rose was sitting in jail, paying for his crime.
“I know he killed her, but just to be sure, I call the brat’s bitch every year, just to play the grieving boyfriend. It’s kind of fun, I’ll have to admit. I thought about going into theater as a minor during my college years.” Larry’s eyes were wide and unfocused. Cat knew in that instant the man was completely mad.
“Sounds like you had it all under control. Why this?” With a bravado she didn’t feel, Cat swept her hand around the kitchen. “Why kidnap Linda and threaten us?” Cat avoided the word kill. Maybe she could talk him out of harming her and Shauna if they promised they wouldn’t report him for a while, giving the two a chance to escape. It was a pipe dream, she knew it, but she had to hold on to some hope.
“So you want me to explain all the reasons I killed poor Tom to give your uncle time to save the day? What, is he expected for lunch?” Larry waved the gun toward the table. “Just get over there and sit down. Linda, grab the rope and tie her tight. If you don’t, I’ll shoot the other one.”
Cat moved to the table and glanced at Shauna. Her friend seemed calm even with the situation. She nodded once, and Cat knew Shauna had some sort of plan going on in her head. Maybe Linda hadn’t tied her as tightly as Larry had ordered. But even if they could break their bonds, they still had to deal with the crazy with the gun. Cat didn’t think their odds were good.
“I’m sure my uncle has better things to do on a Monday afternoon than visit me.” Cat sat in the chair and waited as Linda approached her. “So you admit you killed Tom, but why?”
