Home for a Spell (24 page)

Later in the afternoon, the two of us were sifting through voluminous amounts of packing peanuts, trying to track down by touch the precious gems hiding within, when we heard Tara and Evie breeze into the store. “Back here!” I called out to their hellos as they attempted to locate us.

I felt their presences before I turned to greet them—their energy levels were always raised, which I supposed was probably the natural state of a teenager high on life. “How was school today?” I asked without turning around.

“Fine. Mrs. Lancaster gave a pop quiz, which utterly sucked . . . for the people who weren’t prepared. I aced it, of course.”

I heard Evie groan as if in pain. “I read the chapters she assigned, but I guess I was one of the unprepared ones. I’ve been having so much trouble concentrating lately!”

“It’s no big deal. She’ll let you take a do-over. You’ll ace it next time. And hey! We brought you a surprise, Maggie,” Tara said, all in a quickie blur.

“Aw, that’s awfully sweet of you,” I said, turning around to find . . . not quite what I would ever have expected.

Because my surprise was Abbie Cornwall, eyeliner, Chuck Ts, and all.

“Um, hi,” she said, raising a hand in a shy wave and then biting her lip.

“Hi,” I said right back, while my gaze darted first to the left to meet Tara’s and then to the far right to peer at Evie.

“It’s Abbie Cornwall,” Tara said, a little unnecessarily. “Abbie, this is Maggie O’Neill.”

“Uh-huh,” Abbie said. And then didn’t say much else. Which was only adding to my whole sense of the bizarre about the encounter.

Liss jumped in to save the day. “Well, hello there, Abbie dear. It’s nice of you to stop in today. Do you like tea? Most girls your age haven’t tasted a good cup of tea. Would you like to try one?” She squinted down at petite Abbie in assessment mode. “You look like a blend of oranges and spice and maybe a little zing that I will keep to myself.”

“Um . . . sure?” Abbie said, obviously not quite certain what to make of Liss, who today was wearing a dress that was straight out of the early Edwardian era and probably unlike anything the jeans-and-sneaker-clad teenager had ever seen before.

Liss tottered over to perform her tea magick, leaving me to stare at the girls, wondering what on earth had brought us to this moment.

“Abbie has something to say,” Tara finally said, nudging her forward when it became apparent to all that Abbie wasn’t going to say anything without a little prodding.

She cleared her throat. “S-sorry for all the trouble the other day.”

“You didn’t know I was there?” I offered helpfully.

She nodded. “I just wanted to get out of there before the jerk came back out. I heard him stumbling around back there, dragging his knuckles.”

I laughed at the image. It was probably irreverent of me, considering the knuckle dragger she was referring to had ended up dead the next day. “You didn’t mean to nearly knock me over.”

“Nope.”

“I didn’t think so.” The two of us sized each other up while Evie and Tara watched. “You know, Abbie, the police are going to want to talk to you about that day. Not that they’ll think you had anything to do with what happened—um, you have heard what happened?”

She nodded.

“Anyway, they’re going to want to talk to you about it—”

“They already have,” she said. “They called me to my counselor’s office this morning. I thought it was for my annual consult, but nope. I guess you must have been the one that turned me in, huh?”

“Well, I did mention our brief encounter. Not to get you into trouble, but in the event that perhaps you had seen anything or knew anything. I know the cop who is leading the investigation, and I’m pretty sure that right now they are looking for anything that can help them.”

“Tea!” Liss called from the café counter.

“Ooh! I’ve been thinking about this all day!” Evie turned to hightail it over. Tara followed. Abbie hesitated a moment. I mouthed,
Over there
, to her and indicated the counter with a nod of my head. She followed suit, uncertainty making her scuff the toes of her Chucks over the old uneven floorboards.

Liss had poured four cups, steaming hot, and they were waiting for us with the usual accoutrements of honey, pure cane sugar, cream, and ground nutmeg on standby.

“There you are . . . Abbie, is it?” She nudged the cup at the girls’ school friend. “Good for everything that ails you. Try it with honey—just a dollop—and a dash of nutmeg. Go on. Try it.”

I could tell by Abbie’s face that tea wasn’t her usual drink of choice, but she lifted it to her lips anyway. The surprise in her eyes was a delight I never grew tired of. “Yum!”

Liss beamed. “Ah, my dear. I’m glad that you like it. It always makes me especially happy to introduce the genteel pleasures of tea to a new generation.”

“So,” I said when given the opportunity, “you said that the police talked to you at school, then?”

Abbie nodded glumly. “I am going to be in so much trouble when my mom finds out.”

“She doesn’t know that you were at the apartment complex?”

“I was supposed to be at school. I ditched.” She met my eye, a ferocity in her own. “But I’m not sorry. I just wish I’d found it.”

“I’m sorry. I’m a little lost. What were you looking for exactly, and how did you come to be there? You obviously had a reason.”

Abbie took a sip of tea, bracing herself. “I used to live there. My mom and me. That was our apartment last summer, and that jerk of a manager booted us out. My mom and me, we were homeless for three whole weeks before she lucked into a new place for us. That guy didn’t care, though. He just said we broke the terms of the lease, so it was at his discretion.”

I frowned. “Broke the terms of the lease. How? Oh. You mean the age thing?”

Abbie nodded. “But it was the only place we could find that my mom could afford, so you can’t blame her for making him believe I was over eighteen,” she said urgently. “And it was a stupid rule anyway. It’s not like I was going to make any trouble at the complex. Anyway, I didn’t do anything wrong. Except for the breaking into the apartment thing, which technically speaking wasn’t
breaking
in since I had a key and everything. It’s not my fault the jerk didn’t think to change the locks.”

Teenage sensibilities. Wasn’t it wonderful the way the mind worked?

“Why did you break in . . . I mean, go back?” I asked her, curious.

She shied away from the question. “I didn’t find it. You guys got there before I could. And he got what was coming to him, as far as I was concerned,” was all that she would say. “After the way he treated my mom, and . . . everything . . .” Her voice trailed off.

The answer troubled me. A lot. What did she know? And my thoughts kept coming back to her boyfriend, JJ, who had logged off from his conversation with Tara rather than reveal what he knew. And I hoped desperately that neither of them had anything to do with it.

But my questions slipped away from me when I heard my cell phone ringing away back in my purse in the office. The rousing strains of the
1812 Overture
, trumpeting triumphantly away. I had changed it to something less . . . extreme . . . several months ago, but Marcus had changed it back to my ring tone for him and only him one day after I broke my ankle. He said it brought back fond memories, and who was I to complain when he was being romantic?

“I’ll get it for you, Maggie,” Evie offered, sliding from her stool and racing toward the back of the store without even waiting for me to thank her or protest. She found it in my purse with much less trouble than I usually had and came running back out in record time with it suspended in front of her. “It’s Marcus,” she whispered. Unnecessarily, since it was still ringing and there was no way Marcus would have heard her, and he wouldn’t have minded in the least if he had.

I quickly grabbed it and clicked Send before the call could go to voice mail. “Hey!”

“Hey, sweetness. You free?”

“For you, yes.”

“Hmm. I like the sound of that. So, is it all right if I stop in?”

“Yes, of course.” My heart started beating faster; I knew it couldn’t be just another social call. Could it have something to do with his project for Tom, so quickly? Anticipation settled in all my nerve endings “Aren’t you going to give me any hints?”

“Nope. You’re just going to have to be patient.” I could hear the smile in his voice.

“Fine,” I said, pretending to pout. “What time will you be here?”

“How about now?”

I heard the store’s back alley entrance open and close, followed by the booted footsteps my ears were attuned to pick up anywhere. “Excuse me, everyone!” I sang out and hurriedly crutched my way toward the office. We met in the middle when he flung back the violet-hued velvet curtain.

“Sneaky,” I said. “Very sneaky.”

“I was already here.”

“So I see.”

“I figured Liss wouldn’t complain.”

“And you were right, ducks,” Liss said, waving at him. “Are we all set for next Monday?”

“We are indeed. Or at least we will be as soon as we buy our books.” He looked at me and grinned. “I love using the royal ‘we.’ ”

Liss laughed.

“Mind if I steal Maggie away for a few minutes?” he asked her.

“Of course not. Steal away.” She returned to the girls at the counter, smiling to herself.

“So . . .” I said. “Where to?”

“Any suggestions?” he asked. He flicked his gaze over my shoulder. “Little pitchers and all that. Including an extra today, I see.”

I nodded. “I’ll explain in a minute.” I called to Liss to let her know I’d be outside a few minutes, and then I followed Marcus out the back door.

“So?” I said, my natural curiosity getting the better of me. He indicated his truck, which was parked in my usual but currently unused space behind the store, and held the door for me while I slipped inside, out of the sun.

“All right, I’m in,” I said when he entered from the driver’s side and closed the door behind him, rolling down the window. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

“Not.” As my face fell, he relented and said, “I’m going to show you.”

He reached behind the seat and drew out a big, heavy duty envelope. A big,
fat
, heavy duty envelope.

“
I
”—he said, his voice pumped up with pride—“managed to get the thumb drive operable.”

His proud moment was my proud moment. “As if there was ever any doubt. So . . .?” My eyebrows lifted expectantly. “Was it important?”

“I think so. And I think it makes it that much more important that Fielding and his crew locate the old drive or any backup drives that may be hanging around Locke’s office or apartment. Makes me wish I had done a full backup on my own, but once all the files were transferred from the old drive to the new with no errors, there was no need.”

“What was on it?” The suspense was killing me. A part of me wanted to see . . . and a part of me was cringing at the uncertainty of what he might have found.

Without a word, he opened the envelope and handed me a stack of papers, upside down. Slowly, I flipped the stack and turned it lengthwise so that I could see properly without my mind having to make that small adjustment.

It was a photo of a young woman. The photo was a little grainy, as though it had been taken from some distance away, with lines across it, and the apparent subject, the young woman, was in a state of half undress, bra and panties only to cover her bits, her blond hair draped over her face as she bent down to her upraised leg to slip off a shoe.

“Locke had a girlfriend?” I proposed, hoping beyond hope. Except it didn’t seem like the kind of pose a girl would adopt when trying to be sexy for her boyfriend. There was something altogether too casual about it, even unaware. Like she had just gotten home and was getting ready for the shower and had no idea a camera was recording the event.

I flipped to the next page in the stack and tried not to be surprised to find it was another photo.

Another partially clad woman.

With brown hair.

In other words, not the young woman in the first photo.

This pic, too, seemed to be shot from a distance but zoomed in, with the same type of fuzzy lines in the foreground, although perhaps from a slightly different angle. And again, the girl was seminude, wearing nothing but a towel around her waist, her arm raised to bare her breasts as she pulled her hair from her neck as she faced a mirror that showed all, but only from the mouth down. Just below her collarbone was a tattoo of what looked like a bird.

Both women were quite lovely in form. Enviably so. The faces, though, in these two photos were not captured.

There were more pictures of each of them, many catching them in the middle of doing very innocuous things. Brushing their hair. Their teeth. Putting on a pair of boots. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, typing on a laptop. Darting naked from the shower with hair wrapped turban-style, as though on the hunt for fresh undergarments. Sometimes their faces were shown, sometimes the focus was more on their bodies. Okay, always on their bodies. The faces seemed to be extraneous details. And then there were the shots that were more . . . risqué . . . like when they brought male company back to their place, and the usual activities ensued. Then the sheer volume of frame-by-frame pics became really intense. And not once did I get the impression that these sessions were staged for the camera. Not once.

The hair on the back of my neck had risen, prickling its way up to my scalp. A warning.

There were more women, too, in similar situations. This had been going on for some time.

Who were they?

There was a sameness to the photos that leapt out at me, the deeper into the pile I traveled. The rooms. There was a similarity to them. A sameness of design. Different bedding, but the angles of the rooms seemed to match, even when the angle of the photo did not.