Murder Hooks a Mermaid (16 page)

“It’s worth a shot,” she said.

She tried to stuff the note into the doorjamb, but the door was loose in the frame and the note wouldn’t stay put. Karen jammed it in the space and tried to pull the door tighter.

The knob turned in her hand, and the door swung open.

“Hello?” Karen called softly. “Anyone home?”

No answer.

Karen looked back at me, then pushed the door farther open, and called again.

No answer.

Convinced there was no one in the apartment, she pushed the door wide and stepped inside, motioning me to follow her in.

I shook my head, but she waved insistently. “Hurry up,” she hissed, “before someone sees us.”

I glared at her, but I followed her in, and she closed and locked the door behind me, stuffing the note back in her bag.

The stink of stale cigarette smoke assaulted my nose, and I stifled a sneeze.
Unpleasant
was an understatement to describe the stink of smoke and fast-food grease mixed with the faint rubbery smell from the dive gear.

“You mean someone like that woman who talked to us?” I asked. “Someone who might, I don’t know,
remember
two women at the door of the apartment when no one was home?”

“She doesn’t like these two, and she won’t be going out of her way to tell them anything. We’re fine.” Karen dismissed my concerns as she prowled through the living room–kitchen area. “We won’t be long,” she promised.

Somehow, I wasn’t reassured.

“What are we looking for?” I asked, wandering aimlessly through the cluttered space. A sound system with giant speakers dominated one wall of the living room. There wasn’t much furniture, just a battered secondhand sofa and a couple rickety-looking stools standing near the kitchen counter, but the space was crammed with diving gear and trash. From the looks of it, the two men lived on fast food and take-out Chinese.

Karen flipped through a stack of papers piled on the kitchen counter, shaking her head. “Junk mail.” She put the stack back where she found it.

I looked at the mound of diving gear. It was the only clean, organized thing in the apartment, as far as I could see. Leaning closer, I noticed identification tags on several of the pieces.

“Karen.”

She glanced up from where she was rummaging through papers. “What?”

“Come look at this.” I waved her over.

She looked at the tags I pointed out, then dug into her bag, coming out with her cell phone. She tapped at the screen, pointed the phone at the tags, and snapped several pictures of each one.

Satisfied, she went back to looking through papers.

My heart pounded so loudly, I was sure the neighbors could hear it. We didn’t know how long the two would be gone, and I was sure they wouldn’t take kindly to our invasion of their space.

“Can we go?” I whispered. “What if they come back?”

“One minute,” Karen said. “I just need to see if there’s anything else that might help me figure out what’s going on.”

I felt like I wanted to throw up. If these two were responsible for what had happened to Bobby, I didn’t want to be here when they got back.

Just as the thought entered my mind, I heard a car door slam outside, and voices coming up the walkway from the parking area.

Frantic, I looked for a place to hide, but there was no place in the living room.

I made a hissing sound at Karen and scurried down the hall toward the back of the apartment.

She followed me, and we crouched at the end of the narrow space, next to a closed door that I suspected led to
a bedroom. Given the state of the living room, I didn’t want to open the door. But there might be a back way out, or even a window, and I would do it if I had to.

The voices came closer, and I held my breath. Beside me I could hear Karen’s breathing stop, and I knew she was holding hers, too.

I heard the sound of keys rattling, and then a door opening.

On the other side of the alcove.

A neighbor.

Adrenaline washed through me, leaving me shaky and unable to stand up for a moment.

When I finally got to my feet I turned to Karen. Her eyes were wide, and I knew she had been as scared as I was.

“Can we go
now
?” I asked.

Chapter 19

NOTHING WITH KAREN WAS QUITE THAT EASY
.

We waited several minutes while the neighbors came and went, taking things in and out of their apartment. Each passing minute brought us closer to the time when Irving and Davis would return and sent my pulse racing.

Karen, unable to stand still, turned the doorknob and looked into the bedroom. I took a deep breath and looked over her shoulder.

The room was messy, with clothes strewn around, left wherever they had fallen. It smelled of unwashed socks and cheap body spray. A bare mattress filled the center of the room, with two rumpled sleeping bags on top of it.

On the far side of the room, covered by dun-colored drapes, was a set of sliding glass doors. The sun had set, but it was still light out, and a sliver of light shone through the gap where the drapes hadn’t been closed tightly.

A closet, its sliding doors shoved to one side, covered another wall. On the floor of the closet, two suitcases stood open, their contents spilling across the carpet as though someone had dug through looking for clean clothes, and just left the unwanted items wherever they landed.

Karen started to back out of the room when we heard a key in the lock of the front door.

I shoved her in front of me and managed to get the bedroom door closed silently before the front door opened.

From the living room, two deep male voices floated down the hallway. They were discussing their dinner, which I gathered from their conversation consisted of burgers and fries from a fast food chain a couple blocks away.

Within seconds their voices were drowned out by the thumping of a bass guitar and the wail of a woman’s voice bemoaning the loss of her man.

Fighting the shakes, I shoved Karen toward the sliding glass doors. It was our only way out, unless we wanted to pass the two residents of the apartment on our way to the front door. Not a good idea.

The slider was latched.

Karen ducked inside the drapes.

She managed to throw the latch and shove the door a few inches before it jammed against the broomstick in the track with a loud
clunk
.

I reached down and grabbed the stick, pulling it out of the track.

I wasn’t worried about making noise any longer. If the clunking sound hadn’t been covered by the heavy thump of the music, they’d heard the door and they would be coming down the hall right this second.

Now all I wanted was to get out of the apartment without getting caught.

I ran out the door after Karen, pulling it shut behind me. It wouldn’t slow the two men down much, but it was all I could do.

I turned around and realized we were in a tiny enclosed courtyard, a few square feet of bare concrete and scrub grass surrounded by a six-foot tall wooden fence.

Karen had already made an instant assessment of our predicament and decided on a course of action. She was busy prying back a loose board at one corner of the fence. The opening looked too small for a full-grown woman, but it’s amazing what you can accomplish with the proper motivation. Namely, when two men you’re sure are criminals—and who have good reason to be angry at you—are chasing you.

Karen and I squeezed through the fence, not caring what or who was on the other side. I pushed the fence board back in place.

From inside the fence I heard a man’s voice, one of the two we’d heard inside the apartment. “Chuck, did you leave this slider open again? Dammit, I told you to be more careful!”

The other voice, higher pitched and more nasal, responded, “I swear, Freddy, I latched it, and I put the stick in. No way I left the place open with all our gear inside.”

I fought back the urge to laugh out loud. Yes, he had locked the slider to the completely fenced yard, and put the broomstick in the track.

He’d just left the front door unlocked instead.

Karen and I started back toward the car on shaky legs.
My breath came in little panting gasps, and I didn’t speak, for fear my voice would come out as a squeak rather than actual words.

The farther we got from the apartment, the more I relaxed. My legs stopped shaking, and my breathing evened out. We had made it out of the apartment without being seen, we were almost back to the car, and Karen had taken several dozen pictures that we could scour for clues later.

“Did you find your friends?”

Karen froze and I nearly ran into her. On the sidewalk just a few yards from our car, a laundry basket propped on one hip, was the woman from the upstairs apartment.

“They didn’t get back,” I said, shaking my head. “We waited around a few minutes, but I need to get home. We left them a note.”

Karen recovered enough to join in. “Maybe when I see them I can mention the thing about the stereo.”

The woman’s eyes widened, and she looked like she was afraid of the men. “Oh no. You don’t need to do that,” she said hastily. “I don’t want to be a bad neighbor. It’s not that big a thing. Really.”

She hefted the laundry basket. “My sister gave me some clothes for the baby,” she explained, her words running together in a nervous rush. “Her little one outgrew them. I need to go put them away…” The rush of words trailed off as she took a wide berth around us and headed back the way we came.

“Really, Freed?” I said, unlocking the doors of the Civic. “Did you have to say that?”

“You saw her,” Karen glanced over her shoulder at the retreating back of the small woman. “She won’t say a word to those two, for sure.”

“Well…” I slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. It coughed and sputtered but reluctantly came to life. “You still scared her. It wasn’t very nice.”

“And if she told those two about us? How nice would that be?”

I backed out of the parking space and looked back at the woman carrying the basket. She was walking away, but she stopped to cast an apprehensive glance over her shoulder before she hurried on.

She was probably memorizing my license plate.

“Tell me again why we had to take my car?”

“Hey, you’re the big investigator,” Karen said. “I’m just a reporter. Besides, Riley’s using my car to take his family to visit Bobby.”

“His family has plenty of cars.” I turned out of the apartment complex and headed back toward Keyhole Bay. Now that we had some distance between us and Charlie and Freddy, the whole thing began to feel like a foolish juvenile prank.

What did we think we were going to accomplish?

IT WAS GETTING DARK BY THE TIME I PARKED THE
Civic behind the shop and unlocked the back door. Karen followed me into the front while I checked on Bluebeard.

He’d been busy while we were gone. A stack of T-shirts had been knocked to the floor, and one was unfolded on top of the mess. On the front of the shirt, a treasure chest spilled its contents across a sandy ocean floor.

“Bluebeard!”

He stuck his colorful head out of his cage and gave me a beady-eyed stare. “Trying to #^*^&$% sleep here!”

I crossed the room to his cage and returned the stare. “Don’t give me that baloney, Bluebeard. You tore up the shop while I was gone. Why?”

He refused to look at me, craning his neck to look past me to where Karen was refolding the shirts and putting them back on the shelves in their proper order.

“Sunken treasure!” Bluebeard said, as though that explained everything. “Nasty pirates!”

“Not you, too! I know Jake didn’t want the pirate thing in the window, but it’s only for a couple weeks. You know that.”

“Nasty pirates,” he said again, before retreating into his cage. From the dark recess I heard a muttered “Trying to #^*^&$% sleep.”

I didn’t believe it. Bluebeard wasn’t given to commenting on my marketing choices, or my decorating skills. When he chose to leave me a clue, there was usually a more important message than disapproval of a store display.

Besides the shirts, a row of snow globes had been shoved around and one had toppled over into a basket of shell bracelets on the shelf below, and several pockets of postcards had been emptied onto the floor.

I picked up the snow globe and checked the dome for leaks before putting it back on the shelf. It took a minute to re-sort the rows so I could get the tiny scuba diver with a treasure chest back into his proper place.

Now I was certain Bluebeard was trying to tell me something. I just had to figure out what.

“I guess he knew where we’d gone,” I said to Karen, showing her the displaced globe. “That’s the one he took off the shelf.”

She helped me pick up the postcards and sort through
them, looking for an explanation to why Bluebeard had chosen those particular ones.

There were shots of the Gulf, impossibly blue water full of beautiful yachts and tall-masted sailing ships. There was a peg-legged cartoon pirate with a parrot on his shoulder and a treasure chest at his foot. A word balloon warned the recipient to “Keep yer hands off mah treasure!”

Nothing that I hadn’t already figured out. Pirates and underwater treasure. The exact thing I’d set up to promote Southern Treasures to the spring break crowd. It felt like there had to be more to Bluebeard’s selection, but I was suddenly mentally and physically exhausted from our near miss at the apartment complex.

“Sorry you don’t like it,” I said as I put the merchandise back in place. “But you like your treats, and there won’t be many of them without the tourists, so too bad for you.”

I turned out the downstairs lights, leaving the faint night-lights to keep the shop dimly lit.

Upstairs, Karen sat at the kitchen table while I rooted around in the refrigerator for some dinner. I found leftover soup from the previous night that I put on to reheat. There weren’t any biscuits left, so I dragged out a frying pan and started water heating for fried cornbread.

Karen spread her gadgets out on the table and started transferring pictures from her phone to her tablet. Occasionally she would go “Hmmm,” or “Huh?” but for the most part we were quiet while we worked.