Corpse in a Crate

by Winnie Reed

  “You just don’t know when to leave well enough alone, do you?”

  “Nope. I guess I missed school the day they were teaching how to leave well enough alone.”

  We got out of the car before he could threaten to lock me inside.

  From where we parked, I could see the broken window which was now boarded up. “Such a shame,” I murmured, shaking my head.

  “Yeah, I agree. It is a shame.” Joe joined me, folding his arms as he looked up at the boarded window. “I admired it when I came here over the weekend. It was really something.”

  “I wonder who did it,” I murmured. “I mean, I assume it was Kevin. He must’ve been pretty ticked off when the police cleared this place for renovations. He was the one telling everybody in town that his cousin was involved in a murder investigation, after all. He wanted to stir up trouble.”

  “Yes, I can see him doing something like that.” But he didn’t sound as though he believed it.

  “You’re not so sure, are you?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m not so sure. That seems overly petty, even for him. He would rather stir up trouble in town, in front of people. If it were him, it would’ve been accompanied by a lot more pomp and circumstance. He would want attention. Hell, he might even announce that he’d done it. Just to make sure his cousin knew.”

  “That makes sense, sadly enough.”

  I followed Joe around the back of the house until we reached the infamous trench. “You sure you can keep your footing this time?” he sais over his shoulder.

  “You know, a smart man wouldn’t tease me like that when he’s right near an open hole and I’m standing behind him.”

  “You’re right, you’re right. Sorry.” But he didn’t sound sorry as he chuckled to himself, dropping into a crouch and shining a flashlight around the area.

  “What are you looking for?” I whispered, following the flashlight beam over the ground.

  “Anything that looks out of the ordinary. They’ve extended the trench since the weekend, but I’m wondering if there might be a disturbance someplace else. It would be near here, I guess. Whoever did this would have been afraid of the digging getting too close to where the body was buried.”

  “I’ve never buried a body before—”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Joe muttered.

  “I could start, you know. I might even decide I like it. Anyway, if I were burying a body, I’d do it under the trees. Otherwise, it would be easy to pick out a bunch of soil that had been disturbed, wouldn’t it? Just this big mound of earth for no reason in the middle of empty space?”

  “You make a good point.” Joe extended his area of interest, then, and I followed him into the trees.

  I swatted a bug as it flew in front of my face. “I forgot my bug spray,” I joked. “I love summer, but I hate bugs so much.”

  “Bugs almost never bother me,” he said in an offhand, distracted way as he continued focusing on the ground.

  “I guess I’m just so sweet, they can’t resist me,” I snickered.

  “Or maybe it’s all the sugar running through your veins all the time.” He glanced over his shoulder to find me giving him my filthiest look. “What? I was just guessing. Your mom runs the café where you do a lot of the baking.”

  For a second there, he reminded me of Deke. And that didn’t exactly work in his favor. “Let’s keep our focus on the matter at hand, okay?”

  “Whatever,” he shrugged, walking along the tree line. Another half a minute passed before he stopped dead in his tracks, leaving me to smash my nose against his broad back and rebound off him.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he grunted without turning around. “The ground has been disturbed here.”

  That almost made up for my sore nose, which I rubbed as I came up beside him. Sure enough, the ground all around the area where Joe trained his flashlight beam was smooth, flat, speckled with grass and weeds. This particular patch of soil, on the other hand, had been overturned and patted into place with a shovel.

  What was it about this sort of thing that excited me so much? There was a buzzing sound in my ears, and I held my breath as I examined the area without touching anything. “Any footprints?” I asked, my eyes peeled for the sight of them.

  “Not really. There have been workers walking through here, see?” Sure enough, tracks from heavy work boots ran in all directions.

  “Sure, they’ve been pruning back the trees and clearing the land.” I snapped my fingers, disappointed. “Darn it.”

  “Not necessarily. You never know what you might find.” There was an edge of excitement in Joe’s voice, and he quickly dropped to one knee. “Look at this.”

  I crouched beside him, looking at what he found. Half-buried in the soil was a crumpled bit of paper. “Whoever filled this hole in lost this along the way,” he murmured. “I wish I had thought to bring gloves.”

  He took the paper by the very edge and pulled it free. It looked like a receipt. “I can imagine that whoever did this must’ve pulled something out of their pocket to wipe away the sweat,” he mused, leaving the paper on the ground and shining the flashlight on it. It was filthy and difficult to read, and Joe lowered his face until it was practically touching the ground.

  “Can you tell anything?” I asked.

  “It looks like it comes from a coffee shop, or someplace like that? It says one coffee, one paper, two doughnuts.” He glanced up at me with a shrug. “Not exactly anything relevant. And they paid in cash, so there’s nothing to go off of there.”

  He stood with a sigh. “I can pass this tip onto the detectives. Somebody might want to dig down here and see if there’s any evidence of human remains being stored under this patch of ground. They can sift through the soil, that sort of thing.”

  I groaned, looking up at the sky through the trees. “Great. And they’ll push it aside, and tell you it’s not your business, and all this will have been for nothing.”

  “It’s all I can do, Emma. For all I know, they’ve already considered this possibility.”

  “Then why is that receipt there? It’s dated ten days ago, so it’s been sitting here all this time. And nobody has noticed it, nobody’s moved it.” I looked at the house, sitting there dark and silent. “It’s like they really don’t care. This was somebody’s life, and they’ve been buried here all this time and nobody cares.”

  “Not nobody. You care. I care. That’s a start, and probably a lot more than some people get.”

  “You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” I murmured, glancing his way.

  “Oh, come on. After some of the things I’ve seen? You know I do.” And he sounded sick. “I’ve been to funerals where I was the only person there, just going to pay my respects to someone whose body I found. Homeless people, young kids who probably ran away from home, junkies without a friend in the world. That sort of thing. They generally get buried in unmarked graves, and I tell myself I’m going just in case somebody shows up. Somebody with a guilt complex, somebody who wants to celebrate having committed murder.”

  “Does it ever work? I mean, do they ever show up?”

  He snickered. “What do you think? I’m still the only person standing by the grave as it gets filled.”

  Right then, all I wanted to do was hug him. His mask had slipped. Maybe we’d spent too much time together today and he was tired of pretending to be a tough guy. There was a heart of gold underneath all that toughness. Just seeing the way he reacted at the thought of Kevin hurting Lola was enough to tell me there was more to him than met the eye.

  And what met the eye was already good enough.

  The thought of him standing alone by the grave of a perfect stranger made me want to cry for him.

  “I wonder if we can get inside.” He started walking toward the house, and it took me a second to catch up with him both physically and otherwise. I was still stuck in his story, while he had changed gears like it was nothing.

  “You mean you want to break in?
” I hissed, scandalized. “Isn’t that sort of against the law? Shouldn’t you know better than that?”

  “I’m not trying to get in to take anything or to do anything wrong,” he informed me, walking around the exterior of the house until he reached the back door. “I’m more interested in how somebody else could have gotten in. How did they do it without anybody noticing after the fact? As far as I know, there were no reports of a break-in here.”

  I watched, fascinated, as he examined the lock on the door. It was an old lock, one which looked like it hadn’t been replaced in decades. “Here. Hold this? Train it on the lock, please.” Joe handed me the flashlight before pulling a slim packet out of his back pocket.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I whispered. “You carry lockpicking instruments around with you? Or did you already have the idea of getting into the house before you started out earlier? Don’t lie to me, now.”

  “Don’t pretend you’re not jealous that you didn’t think of it first.” It took maybe twenty seconds for Joe to pick the lock. He swung the door open slowly, lifting it a little so the hinges wouldn’t squeak.

  “Why are you taking precautions like this?” I asked. “Nobody’s here.”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right, the thought of making a lot of noise.” It made sense when he put it that way. So dark and quiet, the house might have been a mausoleum.

  The fact that it had been in a way up until maybe ten days earlier made me shiver.

  There was no kitchen to speak of, only because most of it had been torn out. The space was big enough, with plenty of potential. “They could easily feed fifty people at a time in a kitchen this big,” I decided as we walked through, careful to avoid chunks of plaster on the floor and broken bits of wood and tile.

  “Looking for a new job?” he joked while we passed through to the spacious dining room. It was more like a banquet hall, really, and I could imagine big parties being thrown there in days gone by.

  “Hardly,” I snorted. “I can’t imagine cooking big meals for so many people. Thanksgiving dinner is about as elaborate as I can get for more than a few people at a time.”

  “All desserts?”

  “Would you stop making fun of me? And no. I at least cook a turkey. I’m not a barbarian.”

  He was chuckling as we left the dining room, and somehow the sound of it made the entire experience that much more eerie. The sound doubled and tripled in the mostly empty space, bringing to mind all sorts of ghoulish things. “Gosh. This place could be a haunted house,” I murmured, rubbing my arms to calm down the goosebumps. “Nate could’ve turned it into one and made a fortune all throughout October.”

  “He doesn’t need to make a fortune,” Joe quite reasonably pointed out. “Here. Take my hand.”

  I hesitated before accepting his outstretched hand, then understood that he was only trying to help me over a pile of rolled-up rugs which some bright light had left at the foot of the stairs.

  “What?” he asked when sensing my hesitation. “You afraid I’ll bite?”

  I plopped my hand into his and stuck my tongue out. No, I wasn’t afraid of a bite. There were much more frightening things to be worried about.

  Like how nice his hand felt. It was big enough to engulf mine, and warm and sure. There was no hesitation as guided me over the mini mountain of rugs.

  I made it a point to drop the hand while climbing the stairs, though. I’d been climbing stairs since I was old enough to walk.

  “What are we doing now?” I asked as we tiptoed along. “You know it would’ve been easy for somebody to get in here without alerting the work crew the next day. What’s left to be discovered?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice took on a frustrated edge, but for once I had the impression it wasn’t frustration with me that had him feeling that way. “Something about this situation has irked me from the beginning, but I can’t put my finger on it. It’s the sort of thing where I know I ought to let it go because it worked out well enough for most people involved, but I can’t.”

  “Most people involved?”

  He snorted. “I don’t think Matthew Patterson would be too happy with the way it went.”

  “Good point.” I was about to make a comment about him being dead and as such long past the point of caring when noise from outside stopped my heart. The instantly recognizable sound of tires rolling over earth. An engine cutting ff.

  Our eyes met, and even in the darkness, I saw surprise in his. “We’re not alone.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Come on.” Joe took my hand again, looking around.

  “What are we doing?” I asked as he dragged me from room to room. I stumbled over tools somebody had left behind, but even then he didn’t slow down.

  “We’re hiding. What do you think?” We reached a room with an open closet and he all but threw me inside before following, closing the louvered door behind him.

  Oh. Stuck in a closet with Detective Sullivan. Raina’s head would explode when I told her.

  “Why are we hiding?” I whispered, trying to ignore how close we stood to each other. Very close. There was barely room for a breath between us.

  “Because it might be Nate,” he breathed. “Or the police. I don’t know why, but it could be.”

  I held my breath, deliberately ignoring—or trying to ignore—the presence of Joe’s body practically pressed against mine. We were face-to-face, so I turned my head away in favor of looking through the louvered slats. Nothing was really visible, of course, especially with hardly any light coming through the windows.

  “Do you hear anything?” I asked.

  “Only you talking,” he whispered back. “Quiet.”

  I settled for rolling my eyes. The seconds stretched out into what felt like an eternity, waiting to hear what would happen while trying every way I could to keep from brushing against Joe’s chest, arms, stomach.

  And so on and so forth.

  The creaking of a door just about stopped my heart. I grabbed Joe’s arm and squeezed with all my might. The image of Detective Wallace discovering us in the closet flashed across my consciousness and made my pulse race hard enough to leave me lightheaded.

  What would my parents say when they found out I was arrested for breaking and entering? I would never live it down. Dad would do everything but lock me away and never let me go anywhere on my own ever again. Mom would take to her bed and might never recover from the shock and shame. The town would never stop talking.

  Footsteps sounded downstairs, though it was amazing I could hear them over the rush of blood in my ears. The worst part was, every time Joe shifted or brushed against me, my heart only raced faster. It would explode soon, wouldn’t it? I would die right then and there, with the scent of his cologne on my clothes. A musky, heady scent that made me yearn to bury my face in his neck.

  This wasn’t good at all.

  I looked up at him, studying his profile, my eyes taking in every part of him that I could see in the dark. Who was this man? A man who attended the funerals of friendless people who’d died without anyone caring. Who had rushed to my rescue earlier, when Kevin had me pinned against his fence.

  “Shh!” He held a finger to his lips, bringing me back to the matter at hand. Right. My hormones weren’t the problem right now, though they would soon be if I didn’t get it together.

  Sweat rolled down the back of my neck, cold and clammy, as the approaching footsteps grew louder all the time. Who was it? What were they doing there? They didn’t seem to be in any hurry, that was for sure. It was like being in a horror movie where the killer took their time.

  I’d always wondered why they did that. Like, just get it over with.

  The louder the footsteps became, the closer our unseen visitor was. I held onto Joe for dear life and almost didn’t notice how firm his arms were. Almost.

  A somewhat familiar but out-of-place sound filled the air next. A shushing sound followed by a rattling noise.

  “Sp
ray paint,” Joe breathed in my ear. “Vandals.”

  I gasped. The person who’d thrown the rock? If that was true, I wanted to know who it was. Detective Wallace, if it was him, couldn’t arrest us while he was in the middle of vandalizing the house. Could he? Joe was a cop, too, and could easily… do something. What did I know?

  Nothing. I knew nothing. All I could do was leave it up to Joe, and I was never much good at taking a back seat at times like this.

  What was he thinking? He was tensed, for sure, his entire body like a coiled spring. Whoever was doing the spray painting was in the hall, just beyond the doorway. We were just inside that doorway. The vandal could be on the other side of the closet wall for all I knew.

  “I’ve gotta know who this is,” he breathed, and I tried to ignore the shiver that ran up my spine at the sensation of warm air against my skin.

  “What if they try to fight?” I whispered. All of a sudden, it seemed like a really bad idea for Joe to take a risk like that. Not only was I not keen on being alone in that closet with some faceless threat wandering the halls, but Joe was starting to grow on me, surprisingly enough.

  He snorted softly. “I think I can handle it.” Now I knew what he felt like when I brushed off his concerns.

  He drew a deep breath, then another. On the third, he burst out of the closet all at once.

  Whoever was out in the hall dropped the can—I heard it rattle on the floor—and took off running with Joe yelling at them to stop.

  I crept out of the closet with my heart in my throat, sure I was going to find Joe’s dead body at the bottom of the stairs.

  But no. He made it just fine. He was still yelling at the person to stop when he reached the first floor, but the sound of a revving engine and squealing tires told me he’d been just a moment too late. There was no point in breaking my neck to catch up to them.

  Besides, what the vandal had scrawled along the wall in the hallway took my breath away and left me unable to take a step.

  “Emma? You all right?” Joe joined me, a little winded but in one piece. “I got the plates on the truck. Shouldn’t be hard to track them down. It was a grown man, all right, but taller and slimmer than Wallace.”