“It’s enough to make you want to keep the curtains and blinds closed at all times, isn’t it?”
I let my breath ease out of me, realizing for the first time that it had pent up with all the intense discomfort I had felt flipping through some other woman’s sexy-times photo op. “No kidding.” I shuddered, releasing even more energy. “Creepy. He had quite the thing for naked women. Multiple naked women.”
“Well . . . most men do,” he admitted, not entirely apologetic about it, either.
I laughed in spite of myself. “True.”
“But there’s a difference to these pictures, I think.”
I nodded. “Because the women had no idea they were being photographed. That is what you were getting at, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Exactly that.”
“The sameness in the photos. Did you notice that, too?”
Marcus nodded.
“It’s because they were taken there, at the apartments. The mirrors. Did you get far enough past the ever-present boobage to recognize that the mirrors were all very similar? Big, heavy, over the bed . . .”
“I did, in fact, notice that,” he said.
“Good. Anyway. The apartment I looked at had that exact same kind of mirror. Now, I didn’t go through the other apartments, obviously, but it can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“Like Liss, I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“The mirror in the apartment I looked at was cracked. Like it had been hit with something. Maybe when the previous tenants had moved out, I don’t know. I didn’t like the mirror at all. Locke told me he’d put it on the repair list. I asked him if it couldn’t just be removed, and he refused. He said it was a built-in, so it would have to be repaired. I didn’t question him.”
“Hm. I mean, it could be part of the original design of the apartments, I suppose. You did say they were an older place that was being remodeled. Maybe built-in mirrors over the beds are common to that design era.”
“I think the brochure said they were built in the seventies. I don’t know if all of the apartment buildings were constructed at the same time or what, but I’m guessing they were. I seem to remember riding past them years ago on one of the many townwide bike excursions that Steff and I made as marauding teenage girls, looking much the same. The apartments, not Steff and me. So . . . maybe. But if they were being remodeled to bring them up-to-date, the way that Locke suggested to me that they were, why would they leave a design element in that was so very outdated?”
Neither of us had an answer for that particular question. Chalk it up to poor taste or bad advice, I guess.
“What comes next?” I asked him.
“I take these to Tom, along with the copy I made of all the files. And we’ll see what he says.”
“Do you think he’ll be surprised?”
“Does anything seem to surprise him? Really?”
Hm. He had a point.
“I thought Tom said he had a record for child pornography. How on earth does this fit in with that?” I wondered.
“I don’t know. We’ll let Tom worry about how to connect the dots, huh?”
We’d been out here long enough, so I told Marcus I was going to have to get back. He kissed me quickly and told me he was going to go pay a visit to Tom at the police department. “I should be back in time to take you home, no problem,” he promised. I watched him drive off, waving as he pulled away, and then went back inside.
The group at the counter had been joined by a party of one, I noticed. I made my way over. The addition was a woman who might have a few years on me, but no more than that. Brown hair, medium length. Pretty enough, but perhaps a little tired, if the strain around her up-tilted eyes was any indication. Jeans, sturdy tennis shoes, a thin jersey hoodie . . . this was a down-to-earth working woman, with a worldliness in the lines that were starting to etch themselves into her forehead and between her brows. There were hundreds of women like her in town. Never would they be a part of Mel’s coffee clique. They had more important things on their mind. Like day-to-day survival.
“All taken care of?” Liss asked, smiling.
I nodded. “I think so.” I wished I could confide in her about what Marcus had found. She had been my sounding board on everything for almost a year. I trusted Liss with my life. She was the most conscientious person I knew, and she was also the most connected, spiritually. And with that in mind as we found our way through these troubling times, in my opinion the more she knew about everything that was going on in this town, the better I felt. Knowledge was power. Forewarned is forearmed.
But I couldn’t. Not with the confidentiality agreement binding me as effectively as any spell. I had given my word . . . and no matter how hard it was to keep things from her, I had to uphold that promise. “Abbie’s mother has come to pick her up,” Liss told me. “Becky Cornwall, meet my assistant and right-hand woman, Maggie O’Neill.”
Becky Cornwall held out her hand, and I shook it. “Nice to meet you,” she said.
Abbie had transferred her gaze to the floor the instant I came back into the store, an obvious effort to lie low and deflect attention.
“My daughter tells me that you’re the one that found Mr. Locke’s body, Miss O’Neill,” she said, getting straight to the point. “I hope it wasn’t too awful. I know that the police spoke with Abbie today with her school counselor present. I assume that means they will be in contact with me, too. Guess that’s just how it works these days.”
Surprised, I glanced over at Abbie. “Oh, I wasn’t aware she—”
“Told me? Yes. She can be headstrong, but she’s a good girl.”
I nodded my understanding. She was a teenager. Headstrong came with the territory. “From what I understand they are trying to speak to as many individuals who might have had contact with Mr. Locke as possible. And since Abbie and I both saw him the day before he died, it was inevitable that we would be among the first.”
She looked confused. “Abbie saw him?”
“Yes, at the . . . at the apartment building that day . . .”
Behind her, Abbie cringed. Evie and Tara were frantically shaking their heads.
Uh oh
.
She looked at her daughter. “I thought they questioned her because we used to live there.”
“Now, Mom, before you get all psycho about things, just remember . . . the guy kicked us out. For no reason.” Abbie Cornwall pleaded for understanding.
Her mother looked stunned as realization dawned. “I can’t believe you . . . you went back there? Didn’t I tell you, never go back?”
“I know, I know. Mom, geez. I was safe.” Abbie met my gaze. Stared me down, actually.
“And now this . . . this murder. Abbie, tell me you’re not mixed up in this. You and JJ. Tell me.”
“Mom! You know we’re not. It wasn’t about that. You think I could ever do something like that? I’m not crazy, I’m not violent, and I’m definitely not stupid. Sheesh. And JJ would never—he was on standby to protect me, Mom. To make sure I was okay. And for your information, JJ was at the high school gym, working out on the weight machines, when the cops said it was all supposed to have gone down. There were a lot of guys there. You can ask any of them.”
“That may well be, but I still think you and I and JJ need to have a talk. Tonight.”
I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Cornwall, unless the police find some evidence to the contrary, there’s no real indication that Abbie had anything to do with Locke.”
“Ms., not Mrs.,” she corrected automatically. “I never married.” Frustration tightening her already thin features, she raised her arm and pushed her hair off her face and shoulder. As she did so, her thin jacket slipped from her shoulder. Before she could pull it back on, a colorful bruise on her shoulder caught my eye. Not a bruise. A tattoo of a hummingbird poised over a daisylike flower. Just under her collarbone.
Becky Cornwall was one of Locke’s ladies. I was sure of it.
She saw me looking and blushed, straightening her jacket. “I got it when I was just a little older than Abbie is now. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I always have to cover it up. Gives people the wrong idea, you know?”
Liss chuckled. “Don’t all of us girls do silly things at that age? I’m convinced these are the things that remind us of our true selves when we’ve become lost in time and duty and responsibility. They remind us of who we are when we let ourselves be free and frivolous and playful. That’s not such a bad thing as one heads into one’s crone years.”
I laughed, too. “You know, I don’t care how old you get, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see you as a crone.”
She pretended to be wounded by my words. “Oh dear. And I do try so hard, too.”
Ms. Cornwall relented but only slightly. “You’re right. Now is the time for them to make mistakes if they’re going to. I just wish she’d listen a little more closely.”
Abbie looked down at her feet. “Sorry, Mom.”
“Never mind that now. Go on and start the car for me, would you? We’ll talk later.”
For some parents, that might come off as a threat, but I didn’t get that vibe from Becky Cornwall at all. She waited until Abbie hit the front door before turning back to us. Tara and Evie took that hint that she wanted to talk to the grown-ups of the group and sidled away.
“I appreciate you telling me about her being there, Miss O’Neill. Raising a teenager is hard enough these days without people keeping secrets from you because they don’t want to rock the boat. Lord knows the kids keep enough secrets on their own time. Straight talk. There’s not enough of that these days.” She hesitated a moment and then admitted, “Well, not that there ever was. If there’d been more of that with my parents back then, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up an unwed single mom at the age of seventeen. Not that I regret having her, but . . . I want more than that for Abbie.”
I nodded. “I understand completely. But you are right, she seems to be a nice young girl. She obviously respects you. You’ve obviously done a good job of raising her, despite the wrinkles in the fabric that occur along the way.”
“Thank you. I appreciate you saying that. But when I said she can be headstrong . . . she should never have gone back to that place. The manager threatened to sue me for misrepresenting myself on the lease and lying about Abbie’s age. I know, it wasn’t the best thing to do,” she said hurriedly, frowning to demonstrate her own contrition, “but raising a daughter on one salary isn’t always easy, and . . . we needed a place to live that I could afford. I tried to explain when Locke confronted me, but he wouldn’t listen. We were living out of my car for three weeks in May—I’m afraid Abbie has never forgiven him for that. Or Miss Cooper.”
“Miss Cooper?” I echoed.
She nodded. “The upstairs neighbor. A teacher at the high school. I guess she recognized her and mentioned it to Locke. I don’t think she meant anything by it, but when Abbie found out, she flipped. She thought Miss Cooper had told him on purpose, because of some joke she told in class that didn’t go over too well. I don’t know, though. I have to say . . . once I found a new place for us and could breathe again, I was almost glad it happened. I don’t know why, but I never really felt safe there. Sometimes our things would move around. On our dressers. In our closets. Even when both of us were gone. It was the strangest thing. I never knew quite what to make of it . . .” Her voice trailed off, and from the way that she shrugged and then bit her lip, I knew she was embarrassed by the inherent “weakness” of her uncertainty. I wondered what she would say if she knew that, nine times out of ten, a person’s instinctive nervousness comes into play for good reason? That, like a mother’s instinct for her child’s well-being, such things are instances of intuition kicking in, and a person would be well-advised to heed the warning. “And then, when Abbie kept hearing things . . .”
“Abbie was hearing things?” I echoed. “Where?”
“In the bedroom. My bedroom. You see, she still gets nightmares that scare the bejesus out of her, so sometimes she’ll still to this day crawl into bed with me when she can’t stop shaking. I never minded. I mean, it’s always been the two of us, on our own, her and me against the world. I always felt like I had only borrowed time with my girl anyway. But when she kept hearing sounds . . .”
“What kind of sounds?” Liss wanted to know.
“Odd sounds. Clicking. A strange whirring, like the wind in the walls, whispering at us. I actually started thinking I was hearing them, too.” She shook her head self-consciously. “Funny, the way imagination spreads from person to person in the dark.”
But was it just imagination? Or were they really hearing something . . . there, in the darkness? Whatever it was, I didn’t have the sense that it was spirit related, despite my momentary worry early on when Tyson Hollister and Locke were arguing. From what Becky Cornwall described, they could easily have been hearing something . . . mechanical. Not the heating and cooling systems. Those sounds would have been familiar, heard so often as to become nonexistent to a resident. They wouldn’t even have registered. So what was it that Abbie and her mother were hearing that had been freaking them out?
I really wanted to ask her about the photos, but . . . no one was supposed to know. There was no way I could broach the topic with her without going against my confidentiality agreement with Tom. My lips were tied. Sealed. Whatever.
Becky Cornwall was just leaving when I heard Tara exclaim from the back office, “What are you doing back here? You just left!”
“I thought I’d grace you with my presence doubly, cuz. Make your day truly special.”
Marcus! But what was he doing back here so soon?
“You wanna make my day special, you coulda just brought me a brownie or something. I am starved. S-T-arved. They had fish sticks for lunch today. You ever had fish sticks at the high school? It’s like glue. Rolled in corn flakes. Yum, let me tell ya.”
He laughed. “Sounds awesome. Where’s Maggie?”
“She’s in there. Same bat counter. You know the drill.”