A Chorus Lineup (A Glee Club Mystery) (25 page)

“
Scusa
, Paige.”

I blinked at the Italian voice. “Aldo? Sorry; I thought you were my aunt. Are my students okay?”

“
Si
. The students are fine. Your aunt is why I am calling. She asked me to drive with her and Killer to the theater building so she could talk to the lady who is the head of the competition.”

Oh no. I’d told her not to talk to Christine. “What happened?” I braced for the worst.

“Well, your aunt and Killer went inside the building. When they no come out after thirty minutes I go in. Killer was in the lobby with the woman your aunt went to meet.”

“Where was Millie?”

“Well, that is the problem. You see, no one has seen your aunt.” Aldo’s breath caught. “She is a-missing.”

Something had happened to Aunt Millie.

Fear punched into my heart, stealing my breath. “Are you sure?” I whispered.

Mike took his eyes off the road and gave me a hard look.

“The lady in charge had the entire building searched. I even took Killer to see if he could find her. But she is nowhere.”

In the background I heard Killer let out a howl that turned into a heartbreaking whimper. It was that sound that made this real. My hands shook. My throat tightened, and tears built behind my eyes. When the first one fell, Mike pulled to the side of the road and took the phone out of my hands.

“Aldo?” he asked, putting the car in park. “It’s Mike Kaiser. What’s going on?”

Mike asked dozens of questions. When he finally hung up, he took my cold hand in his, promised me that everything would be okay, and punched the button that made the cop lights flare to life. Up until that moment, I’d thought the scariest driver on the planet was my aunt. Mike proved me wrong. The car zipped forward and around traffic as Mike pulled his own cell out of his pocket and started dialing. Mike looked and sounded calm and cool as he drove his car into short-term parking while at the same time ordering someone on the other end of the line to call the Nashville PD.

By the time he’d parked the car, I had a newfound respect for NASCAR drivers and their ability to deal with high speeds. I also had a new appreciation for Mike’s ability to drop any signs of frustration from our earlier conversation and focus on the problem at hand. And part of the problem was me, because I was having a hard time pulling it together. Millie and Aldo needed me to be strong, smart, and resourceful. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the tears to stop falling. Aunt Millie was my support system. She believed in me like no one else. I wasn’t sure what I would do if it turned out she wasn’t found. Or worse, if she was found . . .

“Hey.” Mike put down his phone and wiped a tear from my cheek. “Your aunt is going to be okay. I just talked to the Nashville Police Department. The head detective on the hit-and-run case is going to give me a call and let me know what’s going on. He was already on scene when your aunt vanished. Technically, the police can’t officially rule that she’s a missing person until twenty-four hours have passed, but with everything else going on, they’re treating her as a person of interest and using that technicality to start a search. In the meantime, the two of us are going to go over every detail you can remember from this week. If the cops haven’t found Millie by the time we land, we’ll have come up with a few thoughts about where else to look.”

“We?” I asked as he grabbed my bag out of the trunk.

For the first time since Mike had talked to Aldo, he smiled. “Yeah. We. Because there’s no way in hell I’d ever let you go through this alone. Come on.”

Somehow Mike not only managed to get me moved to an earlier flight; he also got himself the seat right next to me. Flashing a badge had its advantages. Forty-five minutes after entering the airport, we were taxiing on the runway and headed for Nashville. En route, Mike kept me calm by writing down a step-by-step account of the week’s events. I relived everything from the drive on the bus, the request to teach a master class, to the conversation I’d had with Millie last night. When I was done with the timeline, I let out a sigh of relief. But Mike wasn’t finished. The questions he asked were baffling. Frustrating, even. What did it matter what LuAnn was wearing when she accused me of destroying the costumes? But I answered every question because Mike was the expert and Millie’s life could be on the line. Nothing was more important than that.

The pilot announced our descent, and Mike stopped asking questions. He just studied the list. Occasionally, he made a note to himself. Every time he frowned, I stiffened as I waited for him to make some amazing revelation or reveal something terrible. By the fifth time, I turned and stared out the window at the ground far below. Millie was down there somewhere. I wanted to believe that Mike could help find her, but I couldn’t see how. Yes, he was a cop, but he wasn’t from Nashville. He didn’t know the parties involved in this case. All he knew was that LuAnn was wearing a pink shirt when she accused me of the mad-seamstress routine and a red one that matched her boots when she was killed later that night.

I blinked. LuAnn had changed her shirt. Now that I thought about it, LuAnn wasn’t only wearing a different shirt. Her makeup had been different, and she’d changed her pants. She’d been wearing slacks instead of blue jeans. From what I remembered, the look wasn’t sexy. It was professional. Well, as much as a person could look professional after being run over by a car. None of the parents who came on trips with Music in Motion bothered to spruce up after the day of rehearsals was over. They were too tired after refereeing teenagers to care what they were wearing. I know that was how I always felt.

But after a day of volunteering at registration, playing with scissors, helping with rehearsal, and almost being beaned with a light bar, LuAnn had altered her look and come back to the theater. The lack of a plunging neckline and sexy heels made me believe it wasn’t a man she was meeting. At least not one she was interested in. LuAnn was at the theater to conduct business, and the wardrobe was chosen to make sure she was taken seriously.

Who had she been meeting? Obviously not the guy coming to get the boxes. A college-age kid in a hoodie sweatshirt wasn’t someone LuAnn would bother to dress up for. Me? Yeah, right. Even if she was my mystery caller, intent on threatening or harassing me, I doubted LuAnn was impressed with me enough to undergo a transformation. No, the person she was looking to impress had to be the one behind the wheel of the car.

The car.

I’d been so focused on the missing purse detail and the boxes filled with mason jars that I’d overlooked the car. Mike had asked a dozen questions about it. The size. The make. The model. The color. I couldn’t be very specific about any of it. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that LuAnn was mowed down by a car. That meant the person driving it was most likely local or one of the volunteers who came to Nashville early, because most coaches and students came in vans or buses to these events.

Of the people I’d talked to about LuAnn, the ones who were from Nashville were Christine, Donna, and Kelly. Christine might have had cause to bash LuAnn with her bumper, but I couldn’t see her cast in that role. Not unless she’d missed her calling as a world-class actress. Her surprise over LuAnn’s death and the cause of it had felt too real.

Donna? The woman might have been willing to do whatever it took to keep her reality dating show, but she had an alibi. She and Scott claimed to have been together, schmoozing a new potential sponsor for the contest, during that time. Would they lie for each other? You betcha. But I was betting they were telling the truth since there was a third party who, if questioned, would have to verify their story. While they might lie to keep each other out of jail, I didn’t think the money guy would be interested in risking his current address and wardrobe for orange jumpsuits and a room with a view encased by bars.

That left Kelly and her sparkly jewelry. Kelly who had listened at our staging room door. Who worked year-round on this competition and would have known about LuAnn’s threats to have the sponsors pull their cash. If that had happened, Kelly would not only have been saddened to see the students lose this creative outlet that she and her husband had helped create; she would also lose her job.

Huh. Her job. Why did Kelly have a midlevel job for an organization that her husband and she helped create? If I remembered the bio from the competition website correctly, Kelly had only been working as a member of the office staff for a few years. Could that have been just after her husband, daughter, and granddaughter were killed in the car crash? I was pretty sure that it was. The sparkles on Kelly’s fingers suggested money wasn’t the reason behind her employment. The need to stay busy and connected to her family was. And LuAnn put that connection at risk. LuAnn threatened not only the financial future but the reputation of the organization that Kelly’s husband and she had together helped create. The organization that was one of the few things she had left of her family. Did I think Kelly was the type to sit back and take that threat lightly? No. No, I really didn’t. And if Millie went to talk to Christine about my ransacked room and ran into Kelly instead . . .

As the plane wheels hit the tarmac, I said, “I think I know who killed LuAnn Freeman and who kidnapped Aunt Millie.”

I had to run to keep up with Mike as he barreled through the terminal, toward the exit. All while we walked, Mike talked to the lead detective on the case and I read my texts, which told me that, though Devlyn and Larry had been informed about my aunt’s disappearance, my students were in the dark. Good. I didn’t want them to be upset. Between the dozens of texts from Devlyn, Larry, Chessie, and the rest of the team, I almost missed the one sent by a vaguely familiar number.

I stopped walking as I realized why I knew that number. It was the same one that called and told me to meet at the theater on Tuesday night. Ignoring the people swearing as they walked around me, I tapped the screen to display the message sent an hour ago.

Let’s trade. Your aunt for the bag. 3:00 at Parthenon. Don’t be late.

The bag? What bag? Aside from what was in my hotel room, the only bag I had was currently on my shoulder. Kelly wasn’t going to be interested in my toothbrush, driver’s license, and sheet music. She wanted something specific. Something, if I had to guess, that would incriminate her in LuAnn’s death. A bag she must have been looking for when she stole the band boys’ key and ransacked my room.

Suddenly, I knew exactly what Kelly was looking for. LuAnn’s missing purple purse. The purse that LuAnn never let out of her sight. The purse I told the police was missing after she was run down. I’d assumed the person in the car must have taken it before they raced away. According to this text, I was mistaken. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the purse. So who did? And how was I going to keep Millie safe without it?

“I’ll be there,” I typed back. I wasn’t sure what I would do when I got there, but I’d just have to jump off that bridge when I came to it.

A new message appeared. “Come alone or else.”

Clearly, Kelly was getting her cues from bad action flicks. The cliché made me want to roll my eyes even as it made my worry level spike.

“What’s going on?” Mike asked. “I turned around and you weren’t behind me.”

I showed him the message. His fist clenched, either from Kelly’s words or my response, and he said, “First things first, we get a rental car and figure out where this place is. We’ll call the Nashville police on the way.”

“But she said to come alone.”

“Don’t worry. If we do this right, she’ll think you’re flying solo. Unless, of course, you want to face a killer alone.”

Been there. Done that. “No.”

“Then what are we fighting about? Let’s move.”

The Parthenon was exactly what it sounded like. A replica of the building in Greece, complete with columns and fancy stonework. As my phone’s GPS directed us through the city streets, Mike called the lead detective and ran him through recent events while I called Aldo and let him know where we were headed. I watched the dashboard clock. We had thirty minutes to meet Kelly or the “or else” part of her message might click in.

The Parthenon was located smack in the middle of Nashville’s Centennial Park, which meant it should be easier for Mike and the police officers who were on their way to blend in. Right? Kelly couldn’t expect a public park to be empty of people. She was crazy, but I didn’t think she was completely nuts.

Mike parked the car a block east of our destination. The sky was dark. Rain threatened. The clock read 2:35. Twenty-five minutes until I needed to meet Kelly.

“Stay here. The Nashville police gave me a description of the suspect’s car. I’m going to take a quick look around and see if I can spot where she parked. If she does plan on making a swap, your aunt will most likely be waiting in the vehicle. The suspect isn’t going to want to risk bringing your aunt out in the open. Don’t go anywhere until you hear from me.”