A Hard Day’s Fright (6 page)

A tiny smile sparkled around Ariel’s mouth, and that darned lip stud winked at me. “Cross my heart,” she purred.

I might have actually believed it.

If I thought the kid had a heart.

I
t was Ariel’s idea to start out at the Shaker Heights Public Library.

This worried me, and not just because I was embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it myself. I figured we’d start at the high school. She pointed out that I’d never get past the security desk with my lame-ass story about how I was looking into the disappearance of a girl who’d gone to school there forty-five years earlier.

We didn’t have security desks when I went to high school.

I felt old.

I shoved the thought aside, and in the library’s reference room, I slid a stack of Shaker Heights High yearbooks—from 1966 to 1970—in front of me. Only five books, but to me, it looked a little too much like homework. And I was never very good at homework.

Unless I took advantage of my assistant?

I turned to where Ariel was sitting next to me. “Why don’t you—”

She shushed me with a hand signal. She was texting a mile a minute and never managed to break her stride. I was actually impressed.

I got to work without her.

I started with 1966 and flipped through the pages that featured the junior class. There was Lucy in all her golden glory, smiling like a beauty queen.

Of course, I knew I wouldn’t find her with the senior class in the yearbook from 1967, but I looked, anyway. On the last of the pages dedicated to the seniors, there was that same picture of Lucy, along with the caption,
We miss you
.

“Somebody didn’t,” I grumbled.

Fingers flying, Ariel shot me a look.

I continued on, paging through the senior class, looking for the kids both Ella and Lucy had told me were at the concert with them the night Lucy died.

Darren Andrews was a cinch to find. Early in the alphabet, and with none of the nasty acne the other boys on his page were subject to.

Darren was a sandy-haired charmer, all right, I could tell that from the sparkle in his eyes. His hair was a little shaggy in a 1967-I’m-rebelling way, and he was wearing a turtleneck sweater and yup, just like Ella said, there was that gold medal he always wore. Except…

I took a closer look.

It was silver, and a crucifix.

So much for Ella’s memory.

While I was at it, I checked out Bobby Gideon and Will Margolis, too—nondescript guys with teenaged goofy smiles and bad hair. In the junior class section, there was a picture of Janice. I could see why she terrified people. Janice had the hair and the makeup down pat. And the look…formidable, that was the word. Janice Sherwin was a force to be reckoned with.

Rather than stare into that face, I looked around for Ariel and discovered that while I had been busy researching, she’d disappeared.

Part of me was grateful.

That would be the part of me that didn’t know I’d catch hell (a kindly phrased sort of hell, of course, and given to me with the utmost understanding and teary eyes, too) from Ella if she found out.

Exasperated, I pushed back my chair and went in search of her, and I really wasn’t all that worried until I couldn’t find Ariel anywhere. But then, I’d been a teenager, too, once, and I assumed if I followed the sounds of heavy breathing, I’d find her in the stacks either smoking or making out with a guy. With no panting noises to follow, I had to devise a Plan B. I was trying to figure out what that was going to be when I heard the murmur of a guy’s voice. I did a U-turn in the stacks where I was searching, zipped past the encyclopedias, and rounded a corner.

Maybe I was getting old, because I was certainly surprised by what I found.

No lip-locks.

No nicotine.

In fact, Ariel was sitting cross-legged on the floor across from a kid who might have been her twin except that he was about thirty pounds heavier.

Same black jeans and sneakers. Thank goodness he wasn’t wearing a pink T-shirt. His was black. So was his hair. Except for the streaks of color. My guess was he and Ariel had shared a bottle of dye. That would explain the magenta stripes.

He was reading to Ariel from a battered notebook.

“You must be Gonzalo.”

I had the advantage. But then, a five-foot-eleven redhead usually does.

They both sucked in breaths of surprise and looked up at me. Ariel had tears in her eyes.

Damn my luck for getting drawn into lives—present and past—that really were none of my concern and certainly none of my business. I stepped forward, narrowed my eyes, and propped my fists on my hips.

“What’s going on?” I asked, my gaze skimming from Ariel to Gonzalo and back to Ariel again. “Why are you crying?” I asked her. “And what…” I slid a laser look back to him. “What did you do to her?”

He hopped to his feet. But not nearly as fast as Ariel. “He didn’t do anything,” she said, her stance a mirror of mine. “He was reading to me. Beautiful, sensitive, wonderful…” She sniffed. “Poetry.”

This, I wasn’t expecting.

I was never very good at babysitting so I proceeded cautiously. I didn’t need an all-out rebellion. I had enough to worry about.

“Poetry. Great!” I mustered as much enthusiasm as I could for a subject that had never made any sense to me in the first place. “When you’re done…” I poked my thumb over my shoulder back toward the table. “I could use some help,” I told Ariel. “I’ve never been very good at this research stuff.”

“You’re not serious?” When Ariel’s lip curled, I looked away. “Looking stuff up, it’s a piece of cake. It’s the only thing about school that’s really cool.” She was sounding a little too much like she actually enjoyed one little piece of her life, and she caught herself and flipped her hair. “What I mean is that research is a chore. You know, like living. But if you really need the help…” Her shoulders drooping from the weight of her responsibilities, she dragged herself back to the table. Gonzalo came along. While Ariel and I looked through the rest of the yearbooks, he scribbled in his notebook, stopping now and again to sigh.

Ariel grabbed for the one marked 1970 and flipped the pages until she found a fresh-faced Ella Bender, her smile exactly as bright and sunny then as it was now. Her long, dark hair skimmed her shoulders, and Ella peered at the world through a pair of dark-rimmed glasses.

Ariel’s eyes went wide. She slid off her glasses and tucked them in her backpack.

“Let’s see what else is in here,” I said, slipping the book in front of me. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but if nothing else, I figured I could get a glimpse at what it was like to be a high school student back in the day. In the section about school activities there were three whole pages devoted to a visit from some poet named Patrick Monroe, jeans-clad, bearded, and with hair so long and straggly, it made Ariel look well groomed. At the end of the book was a picture of a kid I recognized, Bobby Gideon. Ella had told me he was dead. What she hadn’t mentioned was that he’d been killed in action in Vietnam.

“So…” Ariel leaned closer, the better to hide her enthusiasm. “What does all this tell us? What did we find out?”

I didn’t have the heart to put a damper on the kid’s excitement, but the answers seemed pretty clear, at least to me.

I had a dead client.

And trying to find her body…well, I’d pretty much hit a dead end.

T
he next day, I didn’t have any tours scheduled at the cemetery. This was good news for a couple different reasons:

1. It meant I didn’t have to put up with senior citizens, flower lovers, or (worst of all) kids on school field trips who talked all at once, vying for attention, asking questions I couldn’t answer and mostly just annoying me.

2. More important, it meant I didn’t have to wear my standard-issue Garden View khakis and polo shirt. I was free to be fashion forward, and in the spirit of the season, I took full advantage. When I arrived at the cemetery that day, I was wearing an adorable new one-piece dress that looked like two. Let’s hear it for the inventive genius who thought of pairing a solid-colored scoop neck top with short ruffled sleeves along with a curve-hugging tweed skirt shot through with metallic threads. All in a shade of olivey green that was at once both a salute to spring and a complement to my hair.

Oh yeah, I looked good and I knew it, and I walked tall—literally and figuratively—in my suede pumps.

That is, until I rounded the corner from where I’d parked my car and realized that the entire cemetery administration staff was standing outside the building. My first thought was fire drill. Until I noticed the especially weird fact that every single one of them was clad in work clothes. I do not mean work-at-the-cemetery-administration-office attire. I mean grubby stuff.

I stopped short and stared just as Ella stepped forward. Her dangly earrings sparkled in the morning sun, the bright orange and yellow beads a stark contrast to her army green boots and gray sweatshirt.

She may have looked disappointed, but she didn’t look surprised when she asked, “You didn’t pick up your phone message from Jim last night, did you?”

I didn’t want to dash all the misplaced confidence Ella had in me, so I didn’t tell her that when I see the cemetery’s number come up on my cell, I pretty much never do. “Battery is dead,” I said, “and I couldn’t find my charger.” As if it would somehow prove it, I got my phone out of my purse and waved it under her nose. “What’s up?”

She shushed me with a look, and like her short, round body had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually concealing tall, thin me, she stepped in front of me just as Jim, the cemetery administrator, walked out the door of the building. He looked even more farmery than the rest of them. But then, in addition to his jeans and boots, he was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and a red-and-white-checked flannel shirt.

“Now that we’re all here…” Jim slid me a look, and honestly, since I wasn’t more than a couple minutes late, that didn’t exactly seem fair. “We can get to work. As I told you in my message last night, we’ll be doing this once a week from now on.” Another glance my way, and this time, he skimmed a look over my gorgeous new outfit, too. Was the man trying to tell me something? “Every Thursday, so be prepared. OK, everybody. Move out!”

They did. I didn’t. Good thing Ella stayed put, too. I needed an interpreter.

“Cost-cutting measures,” she said, like that was supposed to make some kind of sense, and she led me over to the entrance of the building, where there was one more pair of rubber boots waiting by the door.

My reaction was predictable. And automatic. I stepped back. “You don’t expect me to—”

“Jim says everybody, and everybody means everybody.” Ella crossed her arms over her ample chest. “You know I don’t like to be tough on you, Pepper, but I’m sorry, I’m going to have to insist.”

It was very un-Ella-like for her to be so firm. About anything. I guess that’s what made me realize she was serious.

I sidled my way up to the unattractive boots, peering down into them just to make sure there were no surprises lurking inside. When I slid off my pumps and slipped on the boots, I made a face. “We’re not some kind of cult now, are we?” I asked, and yeah, I knew it was close to impossible, but stranger things had been known to happen at Garden View. “We’re not going to—”

“We’re going to clean up the cemetery grounds.”

I was bent over, adjusting the boot on my left foot, and I jumped up and would have twirled to face her with something like gracefulness if the boots weren’t so big that my feet got tangled. I steadied myself, one hand against the stone administration building, and blurted out, “You’re kidding me, right?”

Ella looped an arm through mine. “I’m not any happier about this than you are,” she assured me.

She was wrong. There was no way she could be as unhappy as I was.

“I didn’t sign on to do groundskeeper work,” I wailed.

Ella’s lips compressed into a thin line. “None of us did. But…” She released my arm and looked over her shoulder to make sure Jim wasn’t anywhere near. He wasn’t. He was across the parking lot near a memorial with an urn on top of it, poking the ground with a long, pointed stick to pick up a fast-food paper bag that had blown onto the grounds from the other side of the iron fence that bordered this part of the cemetery. She leaned closer and whispered, “We’ve got to save money, and Jim is convinced that one way to do it is to cut down on the groundskeepers’ overtime hours. If everyone in administration helps out—”

“We won’t get done all the work we need to get done and then we’ll have overtime hours.”

Her smile was fleeting. “Administration staff is salaried.”

“So our overtime hours will essentially be a donation.”

“It’s not ideal.”

“That’s an understatement.” I knew better than to speak too loud. Being Garden View’s one and only full-time tour guide is not my idea of a job made in heaven. But it is a job. And my job paid my bills. Ella’s, I knew, paid hers, too, and it would soon be putting Rachel, then Sarah, and maybe someday (if she wasn’t in jail by then) Ariel through college. Neither one of us could afford to let Jim think we were planning a rebellion, so I tossed a look in his direction, too, and forced myself to keep my voice down.

Which doesn’t mean I was ready to throw in the proverbial towel.

“I don’t clean up litter,” I said.

Ella’s response shouldn’t have been a smile. “Neither do I.”

“But I look…” Just in case she missed it, I stepped back so she could get a gander at my new outfit. Thanks to the boots, it was suddenly not nearly so cute. Which didn’t keep me from doing my best to preserve it. “This has got silk in it. It’s dry clean only.”

“Come on,” she said, latching on and dragging me in the opposite direction from where Jim was working. “This week, I’ll do the schlepp work.” As we passed a pile of big fabric bags, she grabbed one and handed it to me. She took a pointy stick for herself. “Next week, you can do the poking and I’ll do the carrying.”

By the next week, I hoped to have some way out of what was looking a little too much like manual labor for my liking. For now, though…

Pouting, I clumped along at Ella’s side, and when she stopped near the fence and got to work stabbing the trash there, I held the bag open so she could deposit it inside. Needless to say, I also held it far, far away. I wasn’t going to take the chance of getting stains on my new dress. Dry clean only, remember.

“This is dumb.” I could safely say this; Jim was nowhere near.

“Yes, it is.” Ella stabbed and dumped. “But it’s only for an hour. Every Thursday morning. We’ll get some exercise, and we’ll help the cemetery’s bottom line. That’s not such a bad thing.” Leave it to her to find the silver lining, even in a cloud this dark.

I wasn’t so sure. In fact, the only bright spot I could see was that I finally had an excuse to buy that pair of True Religion five-pocket bootcut jeans I’d had my eye on. I was just deciding if I’d do that over the weekend or wait until the next week, when Ella jabbed a page of newspaper, lifted it, and said, “Hey, look at this!”

I shook myself out of my pleasant, denim-clad thoughts to find that Ella had jammed the front page of that morning’s paper two inches from my nose. I stepped back, the better to read the fat headlines that screamed across the top of the page. They were all about some deranged serial killer named Winston Churchill (I’m not making this up) who’d been apprehended overnight. The story was accompanied by a photograph of the accused, handcuffed and being marched into a waiting car by the cop who’d made the collar.

“Oh.”

It goes without saying that had I been prepared, I would have said something far more clever than this. I wouldn’t have stared, either. But let’s face it, the last thing I expected to find behind a headstone in the cemetery was a photo of Quinn.

Stare I did, any ingenious comment I might have made caught up behind the sudden knot in my throat. The photo showed Quinn right behind the perp—cool, calm, and collected in spite of what he must have gone through to get his hands on the guy. As usual, he was as tempting as sin and looked like a million bucks in a suit he shouldn’t have been able to afford on his detective’s salary.

Like it or not—and believe me when I say I didn’t like it at all—it was impossible to pull my eyes away. I grabbed the newspaper out of Ella’s hands and stared awhile longer—at the dark hair, the impossibly green eyes, the complete and total deliciousness of Quinn.

“I shouldn’t have pointed it out to you.” Leave it to Ella to feel guilty. I dragged my gaze away from the picture to find her on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry, Pepper. I was just so surprised to see the picture, I reacted without thinking. I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

And I was supposed to say…What?

Rather than say anything at all, I decided to demonstrate. I wadded the newspaper into a ball and stuffed it into my trash bag.

“Well…er…yes.” Ella cleared her throat. She poked around the ground with her pointy stick. Her troubled expression cleared when she saw a way out of the awkward moment in the form of the Pepsi can over near the fence, and she scurried in that direction to retrieve it.

“We’ve been so busy, I forgot to tell you about Ariel,” she said, dropping the can in my bag. Not exactly a subject that would take my mind off my Quinn troubles, but hey, any port in a storm. With a tight smile, I encouraged her to continue.

“She told me what you two did yesterday. How you took her to the library. Pepper, you’re a genius.”

This went without saying.

The only question remaining was what made Ella think so.

“She actually talked to me at dinner, Pepper!” Ella twinkled as bright as the daffodils (or were they jonquils?) blooming nearby. Still grinning, she did a sweep around the nearest headstones. Garden View’s nearly three hundred acres are usually pristine, thanks to the groundskeepers, who would be royally pissed once they learned they’d no longer be getting overtime pay. But all things considered, Jim couldn’t have picked a better day to begin his cost-cutting campaign. A brisk spring breeze had kicked up during the night, and debris from the surrounding neighborhood had snuck in through the fence and now littered the ground all around us. I was grateful not to have pointy-stick duty.

“Ariel told me how you two sat down and went through the old yearbooks,” Ella said, practically crooning the words. “That’s more sharing than she’s done in as long as I can remember. We had a bonding moment, Pepper, a real bonding moment!”

I might have been as excited as Ella if only the library/ yearbook exercise had gotten me anywhere in terms of my investigation.

When Ella ambled over to a clearing surrounded by the monuments to a family called Greenleigh, I galumphed along behind her, thinking all the while. “You know,” I said, lying through my teeth without so much as a pang of guilt, partly because I was getting really used to lying and partly because, even as I said it, I realized it was a good idea. “I don’t know if she mentioned it to you, but I asked Ariel to do some research for me. You know, about your friend Lucy. I thought if I put her in charge of a little project about Lucy—”

“It would help drive home my message about staying safe and keeping in touch. Yes!” Like an Olympic athlete, Ella poked a fist into the air. Right before she did a little dance step and spun around. I’m not sure how she managed since her boots were as clunky as mine. I can only think that a woman who habitually wears Earth Shoes is more used to making do when it comes to oh-so-unfashionable footwear. “I told you you’re a genius. This proves it.”

“Well, I could be more of one. If I knew more.” I pinned Ella with a look. “Are you sure there isn’t more you can tell me about Lucy? Anything that would help?”

“You mean help Ariel realize the dangers of being out in the world alone.” Ella nodded. “Yes, I see.” There was a teeny heap of fast-food wrappers piled against a headstone, and rather than risk damaging the stone with her metal-tipped poker, Ella bent and plucked the papers by hand. She dumped them in my bag and brushed her hands together, nodding all the while. “It does sound cruel when you come right out and say it, but this is all for Ariel’s own good. We want to make this whole running away and being missing thing look as scary as possible. We’ve got to emphasize how it can have dire consequences. Even if Lucy really is still alive, Ariel doesn’t have to know that.”

The only way I could keep my mouth shut was to bite my lip. And keep my mind on my investigation.

“Is there anything you haven’t told me about Lucy?” I asked her. “Anyone you think could have been involved in her mur…er…disappearance?”

“Well…” Ella jabbed her stick into the ground and leaned against it. By now, the sun was peeking over the trees and the air was quickly heating. She swiped one sleeve of her sweatshirt across her forehead. “There was Patrick Monroe, of course.”

The name was vaguely familiar, but it took a second for the why of it to click in. When it did, I grinned. “You mean the poet? The one who visited your school.”

“Senior year. That’s right.” Ella was pleased I’d noticed it in the yearbook. “Oh, he was something, all right. Patrick Monroe.” She tipped her head back. “Every girl in school was madly in love with him.”

This did not exactly scan with the pictures I’d seen in Ella’s yearbook. I gave her an uncertain look. “Beard? Dirty jeans? Long scraggly hair?” I demonstrated, my hands raking over my own anything-but-scraggly locks. “Are we talking about the same Patrick Monroe?”