Never Thwart a Thespian: Volume 8 (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series) (23 page)

Leigh’s brow furrowed. When coal furnaces went the way of horse-drawn buggies, the chute openings on both ends must have been bricked in. The rough remnants of a line of mortar were still obvious along the inside frame, where the debris on the floor must have come from. She picked up a broken chunk of brick left just inside the chute, and noted that unlike those in the wall around it, it bore no stains of coal ash. Yet even the newer bricks must have been placed a very long time ago. Why would they fall out now? She leaned over the pile and shone her flashlight up the chute. The bricks at the other end were still intact.

That was weird.

She turned her light back toward the door to the basement. Enough of the boiler room for her. It bore entirely too much resemblance to the attic.

“Hey, Ms. Leigh,” Ned said politely, filling the doorway in front of her. “Don’t you worry about that hot water heater. I’ve lit that pilot before. I worked for the banquet hall, did you know? It was always going out.”

Leigh stepped back out of his way, but remained close to the exit. “I thought you worked for the dance studio,” she said absently, remembering the Pack’s warning about not being alone with him. She still believed they were judging the man too much on his appearance, but still — no way was she getting stuck in a boiler room with anyone whose tee shirt read “Magic Man.”

Ned smiled sheepishly and moved away from her and on into the room. “Oh, I did them, too. I expect I’ve cleaned half of West View at one time or other. I’ve done the water treatment plant and the chocolate factory — I used to work summers at West View Park, too. Cleaning up trash. Your mum likes to clean, just like me. She’s a good, moral lady and she says being a cleaner is important work.”

“Here, Ned,” Bess said, entering behind him with a giant flashlight. “You want me to hold the light for you?”

“That’d be fine, Ms. Bess.” Ned dropped to his hands and knees beside the hot water heater, and Bess aimed the light in his direction. “Yep, it’s out,” he announced. “I’ll have it lit in a jiffy.”

Leigh had been primed for escape, but now she couldn’t step out without both dislodging her aunt and disrupting Ned’s light. “What do you think happened to these bricks, Aunt Bess?” she asked instead.

“Oh, Lord only knows,” Bess answered. “I’m just glad they waited to fall out until after the inspector left.”

“Would anyone in the cast have come down here last night during the rehearsal?”

“A few of them do have to walk through the basement for entrances and exits,” Bess explained. “But I can’t imagine why they would come in here, no.”

Leigh considered the implications of the timing, and a growing chill began to gnaw at her insides. If the bricks had fallen out by themselves, how had a trail of mortar dust come to cross the basement on the other side of the door? Someone
must
have been snooping around down here, both inside and outside the boiler room, after both the inspector and Frances had left for the day.

But who? And why?

She shone her flashlight beam back onto the floor under the coal chute. Had someone busted out the bricks intentionally? There were enough on the ground to fill up the hole; if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the false front of the chute, they obviously hadn’t done it to steal the bricks. She stepped forward and pushed a few of the pieces around with a toe. Her gaze fell on what looked like a thick cigarette, and she reached down and picked it up.

The object was roughly a cylinder, about an inch and a half long. But its ends were wider than its middle. And as the significance of their curved smoothness hit her already confused brain, she felt suddenly weak in the knees.

She held the object between her thumb and index finger, and her hand began to shake. Slowly, she moved her opposite hand holding the phone light up beside it.

It couldn’t be. It really,
really
couldn’t be.

Her own hands had enough finger bones, thank you very much.

By no stretch of the imagination did she need a spare.

Chapter 16

“Aunt Bess?” Leigh said with a squeak. “What does this look like to you?”

Bess craned her neck, but couldn’t move without depriving Ned of his work light. “Can’t see that far, kiddo. Bring it over here.”

Leigh stepped over on shaky knees. Pretty much all of her was shaky.

Bess lowered her spectacles and squinted a moment. “Chicken bone,” she pronounced.

“Chicken?” Leigh asked weakly. “In a coal chute?”

Bess waved a dismissive hand — a hand which, it occurred to Leigh, had been doing a lot of dismissive waving lately. “A pigeon, then,” Bess conceded. “What of it? Lord knows how many bat bones are in the attic!”

“Bird bones are hollow,” Leigh stated. “This one isn’t.”

“So, a rat then,” Bess persisted. “Or a squirrel. What does it matter?”

Leigh could hear her own pulse pounding in her ears. Maybe she was thinking crazy. Maybe it was just an animal bone. If she’d swept it out from behind the furnace, she wouldn’t give it a second thought. But the facts were this.
Somebody
had been in the basement last night. That somebody had gone into the boiler room, broken apart the bricks blocking the lower end of the coal chute, left the bricks, and trailed mortar dust back out. Why leave a trail of dust… unless you were carrying something dusty?

Why bother at all, unless the object you were after was very, very important?

“Aunt Bess,” Leigh said more firmly. “Somebody was in here last night, and you know it. I don’t believe those bricks just fell out of the wall, and I don’t believe whoever did this was looking for squirrel bones. I think…” She swallowed hard. “I think this bone might be human.”

A loud thump made both women jump. At the word “human,” Ned had scrambled up from the floor and bonked his head on an air duct. Unfazed, at least by the air duct, he stood stock still for a good five seconds, staring at the object in Leigh’s hands with his eyes bugged and his mouth agape.

Then he pushed past Aunt Bess and ran out the door.

“Oh, now look at what you’ve done!” Bess said irritably. “Why did you have to say it like that? You’ll have the poor man hiding under the desk in the office again! And I need him to stay on here. We’ll never find anyone else willing to clean this place so cheaply!”

Leigh blinked in disbelief. Bess thought
her
behavior inappropriate? With Ned running and hiding under a desk…
again?

“Aunt Bess!” she said even more firmly. “I’m no expert on bones, but you can’t just ignore the possibilities, here!”

Bess let out a harrumph. “I most certainly can.”

“You can’t deny that it
could
be human,” Leigh argued.

“But what are the odds?” Bess countered. “People find little bones here and there every day!”

Leigh raised one eyebrow. “Well,
people
didn’t find this one, did they?
I
did!”

Bess’s left eyelid twitched. Her determined facade began to falter. “Well, hell.” She plopped herself down on the edge of the furnace.

“We have to tell Stroth,” Leigh pushed.

“Oh, no, we don’t!” Bess argued, jumping back up. She glanced about with desperation. “Why don’t we just put it back where you found it? Nobody knows about it except us and Ned, and he won’t say anything if I tell him not to. We’ll just close the door behind us and go our merry way, and then first thing Monday morning—”

“No,” Leigh declared.

“But it’s obviously an
old
bone! Surely—”

“No!”

Bess crossed her arms over her chest and pouted. “Oh, I suppose you’re right. But I just know they’ll throw us out of the building again! And what if we can’t get back in by tonight? The box office opens at six!”

Leigh sighed. Realizing she was still holding what could very well be something she didn’t want to touch, she crossed to the chute and laid the object down just inside the remaining rim of mortar. Then she took her aunt by the hand, pulled her out of the room, and closed the door behind them. “Look, the sooner we call him, the sooner this will get resolved,” she reasoned.

Bess nibbled on a fingernail. “But if the neighbors see anything… if the press gets wind of it before tonight…”

Leigh considered. “We’ll call Stroth directly and tell him we want to show him something. Maybe he’ll just put it in a bag and that will be that. There won’t be any need for sirens and a coroner’s van… not for one bone, and not when we don’t even know whether it’s human or not. Right?”

Bess looked faintly hopeful. “They’ll have to do testing or some such thing. Surely that will take some time!”

“Almost certainly,” Leigh agreed. “It could be days before anything at all gets reported by the media.” She wasn’t terribly confident about the last part, but as determined as her aunt was to open the show
tonight
— come hell, high water, or an apparently unlimited number of corpses — she felt justified in telling one white lie. They had not yet set up the bail fund, after all.

“All right,” Bess said evenly, “I’ll go call Stroth right now. My phone is… in the office.”

Leigh’s eyes narrowed with skepticism. “No, that’s okay,” she insisted. “I’ve got my cell phone right here. I’ll call him.”

Bess’s lips puckered with annoyance. “Well, in that case, I’ll go tend to Ned.” And with a flounce, she headed toward the stairs.

Leigh pulled out her phone, quickly talked her way through the county police’s switchboard — a process she was unfortunately familiar with — and left an urgent voicemail on Stroth’s private line. Bess did not return immediately, and after standing around alone in the empty basement for several minutes, Leigh began to get antsy. A part of her felt she should stay and guard the boiler room door until the detective’s arrival. But a stronger part of her couldn’t stand the thought of it — not when she had no idea when he might arrive. It could be hours.

She thought a moment, then was inspired. She sprinted up the stairs into the annex and opened a closet where she knew Bess had stashed some basic office supplies. Then she pulled out a clear tape dispenser and returned to the basement. After sticking about forty different pieces of tape from the door across to the frame at a variety of angles, as well as from the knob to the door, she declared herself satisfied. No one could possibly turn the knob and open the door and get all the tape back in the same configuration afterwards, including her Aunt Bess, whom she had no doubt was the most likely person to try it.

Leigh pocketed the dispenser, took a series of photographs of the tape on the door with her phone, then texted one of them to Bess with the caption, “Don’t even think about it.” Then she turned her attention to the dust trail.

There was little to go on in the far half of the room, but it was clear to Leigh that whoever was dribbling mortar dust had been headed for the stairs. Another small splash of powder midway up the steps confirmed it. But she saw nothing more in the hallways on either route leading to an exit. Nothing except fresh grass clippings, which Ned had obviously just trailed in. She could hear Bess talking to him in the office, insisting that her “overwrought niece” had merely been imagining things.

Leigh gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate. If someone had intentionally hidden something in the coal chute, and she was doing her best not to dwell on
what,
how long must it have been there? Surely coal furnaces would have been obsolete by the fifties, at the latest. The chute could have been bricked up at the same time the furnace was removed, or it could have sat idle for a while, or been boarded over temporarily. For a congregation without much money — which all the former occupants appeared to be, considering the history of default — prettying up the entrance to a coal chute wouldn’t seem a high priority.
Unless…

Allison’s voice popped into her head, rattling off information from the newspaper archives. Leigh hastened to the rear fire door, slid back the bolt, and started up the crumbling concrete steps. One… no, two spots of distinctive gray-white powder were visible on the otherwise dirty pavement. She stepped carefully over them, into the alley, and around the corner to the secondary street side of the building. The brick on the annex, she noticed now, was different from the original brick on the sanctuary. Both were red, but the new brick was slightly darker and more uniform. It was easy to tell where the original building ended and the annex began.

Leigh continued around to the front corner of the building, where the coal chute would have opened to the street. She found the spot without difficulty, although she would never have noticed it had she not been looking. A square section, several feet off the ground. The brick in the square didn’t match the brick around it.

But it did match the annex.

Leigh stood back and looked from one to the other. It wasn’t her imagination. The bricks were a match. And why wouldn’t the church go ahead and fill in the coal chute when they were already paying for a batch of new bricks? And who better to grab a few and take on that odd job, if those bricks happened to be around at just the right time?

She dashed around the front of the building, hoping Merle and Earl weren’t currently watching. Since they didn’t call out to her, she assumed they were not. She made her way to the parking lot and the main entrance to the annex. If what she was looking for existed, it would be there.

It was. Leigh halted in her steps and stared a moment. The cornerstone was right in front of her face, and she read it out loud, feeling equal parts victorious and nauseated.
Educational Building 1961.

Bill Stokes the custodian had been murdered in 1961. Murdered a matter of weeks after the disappearance of another man… a man who had never returned.

And Bill Stokes, Leigh remembered her daughter reporting, had once been in the navy.

He had also been in the bricklayer’s union.

***

“They’ve been in there forever,” Bess fretted, pacing back and forth along the aisles in the sanctuary. “You’d think they’d at least let us get started on the floor!”