Flour in the Attic

by Winnie Archer

  Miguel pulled around the back of the mortuary. A Jeep and two sedans were parked in the lot, but our attention immediately went to the white Vista Ridge Funeral Home van. Miguel rolled up next to it and threw his truck in park. Less than thirty seconds later, we were peering into the windows of the dark van, but to no avail. The parking lot had no overhead lights, and our own smartphone flashlights simply reflected light back to us. We couldn’t see a thing.

  We gave up, walking quickly toward the back entrance of the building instead. “It’s not going to be unlocked,” Miguel said. I knew he was right, but we had to give it a try. I grabbed hold of the handle and gave a yank. It didn’t budge. Three more tries didn’t make it suddenly become unlocked, either.

  We decided to walk around to the front of the building, but I got sidetracked by the partially constructed brick wall on the other side of the driveway leading down to the mortuary’s workroom. I shined my flashlight along the pavement as I walked, picking my way around to the opposite side of the wall. It was more complete than I’d originally thought. There was still an opening, but the newly defined space was blocked on one side by a cinderblock wall that stood a good eight feet tall. That, I remembered, was in the memorial garden, covered with climbing plants and a wall fountain. Were they planning to rip out that wall to expand the entire garden? The expanded space didn’t make sense otherwise.

  Miguel and I started to head back, dodging the stacks of bricks, cinderblocks, and bags of cement when an idea struck. I stopped short, spinning around, looking at the options.

  “What are you doing?” Miguel asked me in a low whisper.

  “The front door isn’t going to be open,” I said. We were fooling ourselves to think otherwise. I gestured with my hands as I suggested, “But there’s a door inside that leads to the memorial garden. We could go up and over, then into the building through the door.”

  He stared at me. “That would be breaking and entering, Ivy.”

  “Is it, though?” I asked, feigning innocence. “I mean, if you’re visiting your loved ones in the memorial garden, then surely you have a right to be there.”

  “Except my loved ones aren’t in the garden, and neither are yours.” He grabbed my hand to pull me away from my ludicrous idea, but I wasn’t willing to give up just yet.

  “Wait, Miguel, let’s think about this.”

  “Okay, let’s. If Marisol was right about the funeral home directors, then we’re saying he—or she—or both—are murderers.”

  “Right . . .” I said slowly.

  “And someone who’s murdered once—and maybe twice, if we think they were behind David’s death, too—isn’t going to have a problem killing again.”

  “True, but—”

  “What do you think we’re going to find in there, Ivy?”

  “I don’t know, but Marisol is pointing us here. David asked me to figure out what happened to his wife and now he’s dead. I can’t just drop it.”

  “You can wait for Em—”

  “She’s going to need a search warrant and that’ll just give the Alcotts time to hide whatever it is they might need to hide—”

  “Illegally obtained organs to be donated?”

  I thought about the phone call Suzanne had been on when I went into the stainless steel workroom earlier, and then about the man she’d been talking to out on the loading bay. My heart skittered. The man in the van. The van from Marisol’s list.

  “I think Marisol thought they were using the donor service part of their business to harvest and sell without family consent. If she sent them the full version of her letter, there’s their motive for killing her. So that’s what we need to find.”

  My thinking had won him over. “So if David went to accuse them—”

  “He did! Remember, he went to the restaurant first this morning. Let’s assume he found something incriminating. After he left there, he came here under the pretense of bringing the picture of Marisol, but if he confronted them, he would have spooked them. Maybe he left and they followed him—”

  It felt like a lot of supposition, when what we needed was evidence. That proof might be inside the funeral home.

  I bent to shove a pile of bricks, but of course they didn’t budge. My foot caught on something. I bent to untangle it from a piece of plastic that wrapped around the pallet, hitting my shoe against an already torn bag of cement in the process. The gray powder spilled out over the ground. I tried to maneuver it back into a pile, but just made it worse so I left it.

  I gripped the torn-off piece of plastic my shoe had caught. I stared at it. Could it be the murder weapon? Or, well, not this piece specifically, but the plastic from the brick pallets. David had been here. I held up the piece of plastic and suddenly realized what might have happened. “They might have killed him here and then taken him to his house to make it look like he’d been killed there. He was suffocated,” I said, holding the plastic out to show Miguel.

  He stood stationary for a minute, and then, making up his mind, Miguel started moving the loose cinderblocks next to the wall, laying several next to each other before stacking the blocks on top of one another. I helped, heaving up one of the cement blocks and handing it to him. “Use your legs, not your back,” he reminded me.

  I squatted and picked up another, exhaling as I stood. I didn’t think using my legs made it easier to lift, but I did as I was told. If he said it would protect my back, then I believed him. As I lifted the next block, the lights from a passing car reflected off the mirror of one of the cars in the parking lot.

  A sedan.

  A silver sedan.

  Lisette.

  Miguel came to get the cinderblock from me since I hadn’t come to him. “What is it?” he asked, seeing my face.

  I pointed to the four-door car. “That could be Lisette’s.”

  He stacked the block on top of the others, and then came back to stand next to me. “Maybe she left it here earlier.”

  It was possible, but we’d all noticed her absence at the end of the memorial service after we’d cleaned up, and I remembered scanning the parking lot looking for her and her car when we left. There had been no sign of either. “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

  I pulled my phone from my back pocket, scrolled to my voicemail messages, and pressed play on Lisette’s. It’s Lis—can’t leave her—David tried—getting my mom—still there—

  I listened to it again. Had she been telling us she was coming here? David had tried . . . Tried what? To confront Benjamin Alcott? What did she mean, getting her mom, except that’s what David had told her. What had she said this afternoon when she’d driven up, drunk and a mess? David said I had to get Mama from here. That I had to get her and then it would be okay.

  Still there, she’d said in her message. What was still there? Marisol? Did she think her mother was still here at Vista Ridge? My first thought was that that didn’t make sense, but it did, actually. Lisette had vanished after the service ended. She didn’t know that her brother had taken her mother’s ashes and that they were to meet at the pier in the morning.

  “I think she’s here,” I said, my voice lowering with a newfound urgency. If David had told her that she had to get her mother, it meant Lisette had actually spoken to David. Which meant, in turn, that David could have told her his theory. Which meant... “And if she is, then she’s in danger.”

  By stacking the cinderblocks, Miguel had already agreed to go along with the plan to sneak into the funeral home, but now his expression changed and he moved with purpose. “Let’s go,” he said, taking my hand to steady me as I climbed onto the platform he’d created. He’d made it big enough that he could fit, too. He stood next to me, lacing his fingers together so I could step one foot into the crevice. My hands skimmed the sides of the wall as he lifted me. I grabbed hold of the top as he kept pushing me upward. I was able to crook my elbows and heave myself up and over.

  I hadn’t thought this all the way through because there was no platform and no foothol
d on the other side. We hadn’t tried to position our daring climb so we’d wind up at the fountain on the other side. I’d managed to position my forearms on the top of the wall as I catalogued my options. That took all of two seconds, because there were no options. I could only drop and hope for the best. A flowerbed lay beneath me. I carefully lowered myself down, clinging onto the top with my fingers, trying to stretch as far as I could to minimize the distance I’d be dropping.

  “You can do it,” Miguel said, trying to encourage me from the other side.

  I could. I knew I could. It’s not even that far down, I reasoned. The way I was stretched, it was a two-foot drop, max. I pushed off with my feet so I wouldn’t scrape the front of my body and I let go. And then my feet hit the ground with a thud and it was over. Anticlimactic, but at least I was down and uninjured.

  Miguel didn’t have the help of a boost like he’d given me, but he made it up and over the wall as if it were part of a military obstacle course. Easy peasy. I lifted one eyebrow at him as he deftly dropped next to me.

  He grinned sheepishly. “We had a lot worse in basic training.”

  I stepped out of the flora, brushing my hands down the fronts of my thighs and stomping my feet to get the powdered cement I’d landed in off my shoes. Except . . .

  “Why is there cement in the flower beds?” I asked quietly, crouching down to take a closer look.

  As I dipped my fingers into one of the little piles, he said, “It isn’t cement. It’s ashes.”

  I leapt up, scrubbing my hands against my pant legs, but then I stopped. It looked just like the spilled cement on the other side of the wall. It was the same color of gray, and it had the same texture. “It’s not,” I told him. “It’s cement.”

  He bent down, touching his fingers to it, then bringing them to his nose to smell. And then he touched his fingers to his tongue and I cringed. What if I was wrong?

  But then he stood, looking baffled. “You’re right. That’s definitely cement.”

  “Someone must have spilled a bag,” I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I wasn’t sure I believed them. They weren’t building a wall on this side of the memorial garden. There was no reason for there to be cement. It would kill the flowers eventually, wouldn’t it?

  Miguel took my hand and led me down the garden path, pushing the anomaly of cement in the flowerbed to the back of my mind where it needed to be. If Lisette was here, we needed to find her. As we approached the doorway leading into the hallway of the funeral home, I doubted the wisdom of my plan. It was after hours, so it was likely that that door would be locked, too. I didn’t know what we’d do if it was. I didn’t have a plan B, other than trying to figure out how to get back over the wall without the benefit of a cinderblock platform.

  Miguel grabbed the doorknob like he was going to yank the door open, but he didn’t. He twisted his hand on it slowly, sending me a raised-eyebrow look when it turned. Then he pulled, very slowly.

  It didn’t open.

  His brows knitted together and he tried again, but it still didn’t move.

  “It sticks,” I said suddenly, remembering how it had jerked twice before Laura had been able to get through it earlier.

  He turned the handle a little more, cocking his head like he was listening for the click in the mechanism. He must have heard it—or felt it—because this time when he pulled, the door opened. He’d tugged gently, so it opened just a crack, but we both froze, and I held my breath, praying no one was on the other side or walking down the hallway.

  The coast was clear. There was not a single sign of life in the funeral home. All was eerily quiet. I wondered if I’d been wrong about Lisette. Maybe that wasn’t her car outside, and maybe I’d misinterpreted her garbled phone message. But we were here now and there was no turning back, at least to my way of thinking. Miguel left the door slightly ajar—for a quick getaway, I imagined—and we tiptoed down the hallway. The first question I’d asked myself was where Marisol’s letter might be, assuming Benjamin Alcott had it—or anything else incriminating. The obvious answer was Benjamin Alcott’s office.

  I put my ear to the door, listening for any sort of activity or sound inside. When it was apparent that no one was inside, I turned the knob and pushed, just slightly. The lights were out and the office was empty. I slipped inside, Miguel right behind me, the door quietly clicking closed behind him.

  Once we were in the office, the next question that came to my mind was lights or no lights? The low light from my cell phone flashlight wasn’t sufficient to effectively search the office. The blinds were drawn, but that didn’t mean that turning on the lights wouldn’t be noticed from the outside, it just meant that we wouldn’t be seen. It was possible a sliver of light would be visible from beneath the door, as well. It was a risk we were going to have to take. I used my flashlight beam to locate the light switch, then held my breath as I flipped it on.

  No sirens blared and no one came rushing in, of course, so I exhaled and we set to work. I looked at the office with fresh eyes. The high-backed black office chair was pushed in. The blotter pad was perfectly aligned to the edge of the desk. A desk tray cradled a stack of papers. A computer monitor sat at an angle on the right side of the desk, the CPU right behind it. The man was tidy to a fault, which, in my experience, meant that his files would be organized—all the easier to rifle through.

  Miguel sat in the chair and pulled open the drawers while I looked at the brochures I’d noticed last time I’d been in here. I realized, upon closer inspection, that they sat not on a table, but a small wooden horizontal filing cabinet. What I’d taken in at cursory glance the first time I’d been here, I now looked at more carefully, zeroing in on Vista Ridge’s crematorium and donor services. The brochure started with facts: 114,000 people were on the waiting list for an organ donation; viable organ donors are rare because organ donations can only happen when there is brain death, or sometimes after cardiac death; however, tissue donations of eyes, bone, skin, veins, heart valves, and tendons can be made even after the heart has stopped. Vista Ridge donor services specializes in tissue donation; most people, upon death, are potential donors.

  The funeral home, then, couldn’t be selling organs. Those, it seemed, would have to come from a hospital setting where a person was brain dead, but on life support. But the tissue donations—that could be happening here, without consent. If it was, there had to be records of some sort. Companies Vista Ridge sold to. Order forms. Something.

  I pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. The colorful tabs reminded me of the wall of files in a doctor’s or dentist’s office. I quickly realized the two primary colors—blue and red—were code for the type of service Vista Ridge had provided: burial, with or without embalming, or cremation. Those labels marked with an additional black band meant that client had been a donor.

  Miguel had come up with nothing at the desk and pulled up a chair next to me. After I explained the filing system, he pointed to a red labeled folder with a black band and an additional white strip. “What’s that mean?”

  I hadn’t figured that out yet. I handed him one with the white strip and I took out one without. We compared. Each had an intake form attached to the left side of the folder, which included the date, the deceased’s name, address, date of birth, gender, and the family member or person responsible for setting up the contract for burial or cremation services. The contract itself was attached to the right side of the folder. It read like a menu, with specific services checked off, followed by disclaimers requiring the initials of the person in contract with Vista Ridge, and a final signature page.

  Following that, the donor services contract, tissue donation options, and acknowledgment page. It also required a signature and initials, whether or not the deceased’s tissue was to be harvested and donated. Miguel’s folder had one more set of pages. “This one has two donor contracts, but . . .” He paused, looking at each one, then flipping back to the original. “It’s a duplicate, but with consent
given.”

  I didn’t understand. The folders with the black labels had contracts that gave consent. I asked what he meant.

  “Look.” He held the folder open so I could see. “On the first contract, they declined to be a donor.”

  He was right. The decline box was selected and initialed, and the final signature also refused donation services.

  “But the second contract is the opposite. They opt to be tissue donors. This one is for ‘eyes only.’ ”

  “Is it the same signature?” I asked, trying to figure out what this meant.

  He shrugged noncommittally. “It looks the same, but it can’t be, can it? Unless they just changed their mind.”

  I pulled out another white-striped folder. It was the same: two donor contracts, one declined, one approved. We checked folder after folder after folder. Those with just a black-banded label had only one donor contract, and usually it was initialed and signed with acceptance. Those with the white stripe had two contracts, one where donor services were declined, and one where they were accepted.

  “Look at this one,” Miguel said, handing me the open folder he held.

  It had three contracts. It took me a minute to see what was different about them, but then I spotted it. The first had donor services declined. The second accepted them, specifically for eyes and bone. The third, however, had all spaces ticked off.

  “They’re forged,” I said, pointing to the signatures. They were done with different pens, so clearly had been signed at different times, but it was the signature itself that struck me as off. “Look at the loops of the letters M and L on this one.” I flipped to the first, and presumably original, contract. No loops.

  “So they forge contracts depending upon what might be needed at any given time,” Miguel said. He bent over the open drawer, his fingers dancing over the tabs of the folders.

  “What are you looking—” I started to ask, but then realized. The file on his father.

  He sat up. “It’s not here.”

  “They go back six months,” I said. “They must keep the older ones somewhere else.”