Lorraine Bartlett - Tori Cannon-Kathy Grant 00.5 - Panty Raid (2 page)

Tori smiled, but it soon faded. “
At least there’s something you enjoy. Right now my life feels so small.”

“How
come?”

“Billy
, mostly.”

Kathy
nodded. She’d never liked the guy. He wasn’t good enough for Tori, but then nobody was. Still, she’d had her share of man trouble and wasn’t about to judge Tori’s choice when it came to a partner.

“We don’t need to go there,” Tori said, selecting a cookie and taking a bite.
She chewed, swallowed and smiled. “Why is it your cookies always taste better than mine?”

“It’s my secret ingredient—the same one my
Grandma Nancy put in all her baked goods.”

“Love,” Tori guessed.

Kathy laughed. “You got it.”

Tori shook her head. “I’m sorry the old gal’s gone.”

“Don’t go there. You’ll have me in tears within a second,” Kathy warned. She sipped her coffee and glanced in the living room where Daisy had flopped in a happy daze. “So what’s been happening around here that’s so mysterious?”

“Theft,
” Tori said simply.

“What have you lost?”

“My underwear.”

“From the laundry room?”

Tori nodded.

“Sounds like a pervert.”

“From what I’ve heard, the really skeevy guys like soiled underwear so they can sniff it when they they…” she paused. “… pleasure themselves.”

“Ugh!”
Kathy said and shuddered. “But your guy seems to like clean underwear.”

“I guess it’s a guy
who’s stealing them,” Tori said. “But how can I be sure?”

“Are there any other women
your size in the building?”

Tori shook her head. “
But if I keep eating these cookies, I’ll soon be the size of one of my neighbors.” That said, she picked up another cookie and began to nibble on it.

“What about in the other buildings?”

“I can’t say I’ve paid attention to those neighbors. I mean, I come home from work, make supper, get on the Internet, and then go to bed.”

“Same routine when Billy’s here?”

“Pretty much. He works nights, remember?”

Billy w
as a bartender, which was how Tori had met him. She wasn’t the kind to bar hop, and had been out with a bunch of her teacher friends for a girls’ night out when the group had decided to patronize an Irish pub in the Park Avenue area of the city. Tori had always gone for working class guys, while it was Kathy who’d ended up with the more cerebral type. Tori’s father was a businessman, but she’d always seemed to identify more with her hard-working grandfather, who ran a bait-and-tackle shop on Lotus Bay an hour from the city. And she’d made no bones about the fact that she felt more at home with her grandparents than her parents. They had that in common, too. Tori at least still had her paternal grandparents; Kathy’s were long gone.

“Has anyone else noticed anything missing?”
Kathy asked.

Tori shrugged. “My one neighbor, Marie, isn’t the chatty type. The bottom two apartments are rented out to guys. I’ve never run into them in the laundry room.
I’m pretty sure one of them takes his laundry to his mother. He’ll go out on a Sunday with a big garbage bag full of stuff and come back hours later with the same bag—not that I spy on my neighbors or anything. I just like to look out the window—especially on snowy nights.”

“And thank goodness we haven’t had any of them for a couple of months,”
Kathy put in. She took another sip of her coffee. “What about the storage lockers?”

Tori looked thoughtful. “I hadn’t thought to see if
ours had been tampered with. It’s got a padlock on it.”

“When was the last time you looked?”

Again Tori shrugged. “Must have been months ago—when I put the Christmas decorations away.”

Kathy
drained her cup. “Why don’t we go have a look?”

“Why not?”
Tori agreed. She, too, drained her cup and rose from her seat. She grabbed her keys from a rack on the wall. “Come on.”

Kathy
followed her friend across the living room and down the stairs to the shared laundry room, which was quiet, with nothing in either the washer or the dryer. A door straight ahead led to another room. Like the outside door to the building, it wasn’t locked, either. Tori switched on the light before she entered.

“Our locker is over here,” she said, but stopped.
“What the—”

Kathy
looked around her. If there was a padlock hanging from the hasp, it was long gone. “I take it Billy’s the only other person with a key.”

“That’s right.”

“Could he have forgotten to lock it last time he was down here?”

“He doesn’t have much in here. There’d be no reason for him to come down here. God knows he’d never do laundry.”

Tori opened the door and inspected the contents. The boxes had obviously been tampered with, as garland and strings of Christmas lights were haphazardly hanging from opened boxes that had been shoved into the space. Tori stood on tiptoe and moved the contents around on the top shelf.

“
Oh, damn! It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”
Kathy asked.

“A bottle of sherry.
I was going to give it to my grandma next time I made it to the bay. I put it in here because I didn’t want it cluttering up my kitchen.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Same time as the Christmas decorations. I really do need to get off my butt and visit my grandparents. They’re not getting any younger.”

“Could Billy have taken it?”
Kathy asked.

Tori shook her head. “Billy
? Drink sherry? Not in this lifetime.”

“Isn’t your grandmother a diabetic?”

“She only has a glass of sherry on special occasions.”

“Maybe we should go to Home Depot and get another lock,”
Kathy suggested.

“I guess,” Tori said.

“We should do it now—before we break open a bottle of wine.”

“I could use a drink about now,” Tori admitted.
She closed the door. “Let me go get my purse and we’ll head to the store.”

“Should we get something to eat while we’re out?”
Kathy suggested.

“I was thinking of ordering a pizza.”

Kathy’s expression soured. “I feel like I live on pizza. That’s all the night crew at the motel ever orders in.”

“
What sounds good to you that’s easy to make?”

“Let’s hit the prepared food section at Wegmans. They have everything,”
Kathy suggested, “and we can nuke it.”

“
Any time I don’t have to cook is a good day,” Tori said.

They left the storeroom, closing the door
, and headed out to the lobby, then back to the apartment for their purses. They had lots of hours to talk about the panty thief. For now, their mission was clear. Get a new lock and get something either decadent or comforting to eat. No doubt about it, they had their priorities straight.

#

The grocery store was bustling with holiday weekend shoppers stocking up on hotdogs, hamburgers, buns, and cold salads from the deli counter. Tori and Kathy walked up and down the aisle, carefully perusing the plastic containers filled with ready-to-eat foods the grocery store had made. “We could get mac and cheese,” Tori suggested.

Kathy
shook her head. “Good as they make it, I survived on a little too much of it the first couple of years after college. It got so I almost forgot what meat tasted like.”

“They have really nice julienne salads.”

“Are you in a diet mood?”

“
Not with those cookies you made still sitting in my kitchen,” Tori countered.

They reached the end of the cooler and started back down again. “Pot stickers are good,”
Kathy suggested.

“Okay, we could get them and at least two more things. We did say we’d stuff ourselves.”

“How about one of these little quiche Lorraine’s? I haven’t had quiche in about a million years,” Kathy suggested. “And then to balance it out, we could split one of those salads, because that would counteract the fat in the quiche and the pot stickers.”

“And the cookies, too?”

“Probably not, but that’s the cross we have to bear.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Tori said.
She got the salad while Kathy got the quiche and they headed for the check-out counter.

“I’ve been thinking about your panty poacher.”

“And?” Tori asked.

“What time of day do you usually do
your laundry?”

“In the evenings.”

“After work or on the weekends?”

“Both.
What are you thinking?”

“We should stake out your laundry room
tonight.”

“That would be kind of
difficult, since there’s nowhere to hide,” Tori said.

“You don’t seem to think your thief is one of the residents, so it must be someone who’s entering the building, stealing your panties, and then leaving again.
”

“Are
you suggesting we sit in my car or something?”

“We could try it. The lot outside your apartment isn’t exactly well lit
, so we shouldn’t be seen.”

“You’re right, and
that’s one of my chief complaints about the complex.”

It was their turn to check out, and they pooled their
resources, paying in cash. Tori carried the bag out to the car.

“How does this guy even know when
I’m doing laundry?”

“The dryer exhaust,”
Kathy said simply. “He can probably hear it.”

“You’re right. I hadn’t thought ab
out that. What if I put a load in, we go sit in my car, and then the guy doesn’t show up?”

“
At least you’ll have clean laundry,” Kathy pointed out.

They got in the car and Tori started the engine.
Dusk was still a couple of hours away when they arrived back at her apartment complex. They trudged upstairs and put the appetizer in the microwave. Kathy got out plates, bowls, and cutlery, while Tori pulled out the toaster oven for the quiche. “Break out the wine and we can feast on the pot stickers while we wait for the quiche to heat through.”

“Sounds good to me,” Tori said, and soon after they were ensconced in chairs in the living room, sipping wine while Daisy lolled at Tori’
s feet, purring with glee.

“So, what time do you think I should put in the first load of laundry?” Tori asked.

“What time do you usually do it?”

“About
nine”

“Good.
It ought to be dark by then.” Kathy glanced at the clock on the wall. “We’ve got a little more than two hours to wait. That ought to give us plenty of time to eat.”

“What if our guy doesn’t show up tonight?”
Tori asked, cutting a pot sticker in half with her fork.

“I’m sorry I can’t be here more than
just tonight, but you’re no slouch. You can lay in wait for the guy tomorrow, or the night after, or the night after that.”

“And do what while I’m waiting?”

“Pull out your e-reader and read.”

“Except that my e
-reader glows in the dark. That would give me away for sure.”

“Listen to the radio and hum?”
Kathy suggested.

Tori laughed. “Yeah, I could do that.”

Darkness had fallen by the time Tori grabbed the laundry basket full of towels from the back of her closet, ready to start the sting. Meanwhile, Kathy gathered up the glasses, wine, and cookies for sustenance while they waited in the parking lot in Tori’s car.

Once the
washer was chugging along, they retreated to the parking lot. Upon their return from the grocery store, Tori had selected a parking space where they could watch the front of her building to see anyone who entered. They settled in for what they hoped would not be a long wait.

“I’ve only got enough dirty clothes for two loads,”
Tori told Kathy, once she’d refilled their wineglasses.

“Who says you can’t wa
sh clean clothes?”

Tori
shrugged and sipped her wine. “I don’t think I’ve ever done this before.”

“Done what? Been on a stake-out before?”

“No, drunk wine in the front seat of my car.”

“So you
have
been on a stake-out?” Kathy asked, her tone light.

“Well, no.
Hand me a cookie, willya?”

Kathy
passed the container. “I’ve never been on a stake-out, either. It looks really boring when they do it on TV; that’s why we have wine and cookies.”