Black Oil, Red Blood

Chapter 7



Nash walked me to my front door. I was unclear on the protocol. I knew it hadn’t been a date, but he was hovering awfully close. I thought maybe he might even lean in for a hug, if not a kiss, but given the fact that I knew I was about to break the law for the second time that day, I stepped back.

“Well,” he said. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “For nothing.” Nash had frustrated me to no end. It was hard on my already bruised ego. It made me feel like being rude. Not the best way to be, I’ll admit, but I hated feeling like an ineffective, pansy pushover.

“Nothing?” Nash ran his hands through his hair in a way that might have seemed self-conscious, if it were possible for Nash to feel such an emotion. “How about for dinner? If it weren’t for me, you’d be eating Ramen.”

“A temporary inconvenience,” I said.

“I have no doubt.”

He lingered. I could hear Lucy scratching at the door, impatient for me to come inside.

“Have a good night,” I said, shifting my weight back and forth on my feet uncomfortably.

“You too.”

We shook hands, and he left.

When I went inside, Lucy seemed unusually perturbed. She was always excited for me to come home, but tonight, she seemed more hyper than usual. She danced around, eyes bulging, tongue lolling out. She was shaking, kind of like she does when a big thunderstorm rolls through town, or when a stranger invades her territory.

Alarmed, I looked around, but nothing seemed to be out of place.

I scooped her up to soothe her. “Whatsamatter?” I asked. “Did the big, bad detective scare you? It’s okay, baby. He’s a nice detective. But between you and me, he’s a little anal.”

Lucy wagged her tail slightly, but continued to shake.

“Honeypie!” I said. “It’s okay! What’s wrong?”

If only dogs could talk. No matter how much I stroked and soothed her, she wouldn’t calm down. I couldn’t leave her like this, and I knew I had to leave immediately. Or at least once Nash was good and gone.

“Ride in the car?” I asked. She perked up. Those were the magic words. “Yeah! Momma will take you for a ride in the car!”

Lucy loved to ride in the car. One time I had taken her on a car trip to Florida—a thirteen hour drive. When we got there, I was exhausted, and so was she. As a joke, after I unpacked, I asked her if she wanted to ride in the car again. She hopped back in, ready to go. I had to forcibly pull her out and bring her inside.

She leapt out of my arms and pranced in circles in front of the door.

“Ride in the car?” I cooed again. She bucked like an impatient horse.

I fished around in my purse for my car keys.

I debated about whether or not to call Miles. The bottom line was, I needed Schaeffer’s files. While I knew Miles would love to get his hands on them, his livelihood wasn’t on the line like mine was. Right now, Miles just flat out had more options in life than I did. And if I was about to break into a crime scene illegally and disturb the evidence, why should I involve him? If I called and asked, I knew he would come even if he didn’t want to. But if I didn’t call him and I got caught, Miles would have complete deniability.

I decided that Lucy would be a perfectly good lookout.

I glanced out the window to make sure Nash was long gone. I didn’t see any trace of him. Just to be on the safe side, I waited another five minutes before loading Lucy into the car and heading to Schaeffer’s place. I used the time to do a quick and dirty Internet search on how to pick locks with credit cards. Schaeffer, who had been extremely paranoid in life, had about five on every door. It was going to be interesting trying to get in. For good measure, I also dropped a small hammer in my purse, in case I had to break a window—but that would be my last resort.

After sending the lock-picking information to my iPhone and double-checking my credit card count, I hit the road. If I ruined a couple cards in the process, no biggie. They had no credit left on them that I could use, after all. I was completely maxed out.

Schaeffer’s house was an old 1950s ranch-style house with beige brick, a low-pitch roof, and small windows. It was his second house, which he’d had custom built to keep him comfortable while he was doing research here in town. Seeing as how he charged seven hundred dollars an hour, he could afford it.

The exterior was pitch black. The crime scene tape glinted yellow only in the gleam of my headlights. Everything else was dark. I drove past the house a few times to make sure everything was quiet. If any of the neighbors happened to be window-gazing tonight, I would surely appear suspicious. But somehow, “casing the joint” made me feel a little better about what I was about to do.

But what did I know?

Only what I’d seen on TV, that’s what. And of course, what I’d just learned on the Internet. Ahh, the Internet. How did anyone ever live without it?

I shut off my lights, pulled the car around back, and parked in the shadow of a fence. I cracked the windows for Lucy and got out of the car. Ordinarily, I would never leave my dog in the car on a summer day, but the evening was cooling off significantly. I estimated the temperature was now back down into the eighties, and there was a nice breeze blowing. I knew Lucy could handle that.

“Good dog,” I said, leaning in to pet her. “Stay right here and guard the house, okay?”

She wagged her tail. Her eyes widened in slight confusion, but she didn’t make a sound as I crept away.

I felt certain that if anyone came around, she would bark and warn me.

After pulling on a pair of latex gloves, I crept slowly toward the back door and listened.

Nothing. No sounds. No light. No nothing. Good.

I slid one of the credit cards into the crack in the door and ran it down. Only one of the five locks was locked! I had totally lucked out. Obviously the local police weren’t nearly as paranoid as Schaeffer. I wasn’t surprised. It was such a small town that most of the residents never even used their locks at all. Some of them even left their keys in the car. There wasn’t a lot of property crime in this town, and there usually wasn’t much violent crime either, although there had been a slight uptick in stats lately, which had resulted in the hiring of some new police—Nash among them.

Best of all for me, the lock the police had chosen to fasten wasn’t a deadbolt. It was a plain-old key in the doorknob contraption—the kind that was so easy to break into you might as well not even have installed it on the door in the first place.

I held my tiny, high-intensity flashlight in my teeth, glancing around furtively, working the credit card until the door was open.

I carried my light low, trying to make sure the beam stayed well below the window sill line and closed blinds as I came to them, shutting my tiny light off from the outside world.

A thrill of excitement vibrated through my core. I had never, ever done anything like this before. I felt high, lifted into the air on wings of pure adrenaline. Part of me wanted to never feel this way again. The other part of me wanted to feel this way every day of my life, from today henceforth to ever after.

I stepped slowly, one foot in front of the other, careful not to disturb anything on the floor.

The body had long since been removed to the Rosethorn morgue. But flicking my flashlight around, I happened upon a small pool of blood in the living room. I shivered, one part nauseated, one part . . . I don’t know what.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw light.

Headlights blazed in severe, horizontal lines through the blinds.

A car drove past the house slowly. More slowly than necessary, it seemed.

I might have been imagining things, but I felt tailed. Watched. Like I didn’t have a lot of time. But no one could possibly know I was here. Could they?

I made my way through the house, looking for document boxes, but not expecting to find them right away. They wouldn’t be anywhere obvious, or Nash would have found them already.

I crept into Schaeffer’s office, which really looked more like an old European-style study. You’d never guess the interior of the house looked this way judging from the outside. After pulling all the blinds tight, I clicked on the light. I bypassed a grandfather clock, an entire wall of bookshelves, a shiny black grand piano, some parlor chairs, and a sofa, heading straight toward his middle desk drawer. Schaeffer had mentioned once that it had a false bottom, which was a little tidbit of information I'd decided to keep from Detective Nash. If he were thorough, he may have already found it. But if not. . .

The drawer was full of the usual desk knick-knacks. Paperclips, pens, pencils, rubber bands. A stray business card or two. I pulled the whole thing completely off its rails and dumped it upside-down on the rug.

Everything fell out—including the false bottom.

And an envelope.

With my name on it.

The false bottom was only a few millimeters deep, which is probably why Nash hadn't noticed it.

Feeling as though my illegal expedition had somehow just been validated, I snagged a letter opener from the pile of stuff on the floor and slit the missive open.

Inside was a single sheet of paper.

Another car drove past the house on the street outside. Faster than the first one, perhaps?

I froze and watched the lights fade away.

Once they were gone, I examined the sheet of paper. A literal letter from the grave.

In handwritten block print, Dr. Schaeffer had written: “The end of time.”

That was all.

What on earth? I had risked my livelihood and broken the law for this? For this? A cryptic message that meant nothing?

Time. Time. I racked my brains, trying to think of any discussions we’d ever had about time.

We weren’t rocket scientists or quantum theorists, for crying out loud. When had we ever discussed time?

We did know filing this case meant we were in it for the long haul. We knew we weren’t up for a quick win. So the end of time meant. . . what?

The literal end of time? Surely not.

I flicked my flashlight around the room, stopping at the grandfather clock. I rushed over to it, opening its cabinet and poking around.

I found nothing.

What else?

I went back to the desk and went through the drawers. I found a pocket watch and opened it up. Nothing. I grabbed a pair of scissors and pried open the case. The thing fell apart. Still nothing, except a freshly ruined watch.

Frantic, I rushed to the bedroom, examining his watch case, his bedside clock, anything related to time.

Nothing.

Frustrated, I went back to the office and stared at the note once more, silently willing it to tell me its secrets. There was nothing else on it except for the bare block print. I even shined the flashlight on it, looking for watermarks or smudges or anything else except the uninformative words neatly printed in black ink.

I sat in Schaeffer’s desk chair, debating about whether or not to turn on the light. Maybe if I could see properly, something else would come to mind.

I decided against it, but flicked the flashlight around the room, hoping something would stand out.

A gleam of red caught my eye.

Yes! Not time, but TIME with a capital T! As in, the magazine! An entire row of Time magazines filled the second bookshelf down on the south wall. It was not an external wall. This wall backed up to the bedroom, if I was not mistaken.

I stepped out into the hall and peered into the bedroom, trying to gauge the distance between the door and the wall that divided the bedroom from the office.

It was dark. But either it was my imagination, or there was a slight discrepancy in the distance to the end of the room and the distance down the hallway to the office.

Could the boxes be in a chamber be behind the shelves somehow? But if so, where was the switch? These shelves felt like they were miles long. They covered the entire length of the wall, which was not insubstantial. The house itself, being ranch style, was unusually long to start with. The trigger could be anywhere, assuming there was a trigger at all. It would take me all night to empty the shelves. There had to be a better way. Think! I told myself. Brains over brawn. The only way a girl could survive.

In the distance, I heard a dog bark. But it wasn’t Lucy, so I figured I was still okay.

I checked the windows again, and seeing no car lights, I crept back to the office and went back to the magazines. They were organized by date, the earlier ones to the left and the most recent ones to the right. I pulled out the last chunk of magazines—the ones to the far right. The “end of Time.” When I stuck my hand into the bookshelf, I felt nothing out of the ordinary.

I pressed the back wall.

Nothing.

I pressed in various other places.

Still nothing.

Plopping onto the floor, I propped up my light and paged through each of the magazines, hoping to find a dog-eared page, a piece of paper. Something. Just something.

Finding nothing, I started to work my way backwards through all of the magazines, pressing in various places on the shelf, paging through each copy. I worked my way all the way through the very first issue of the magazine on the shelf—the January 1991 copy—before I finally admitted to myself that I had reached a dead end.

Now what?

I scrupulously replaced all of the magazines in the correct order.

As I bent down to pick up the last magazine, I noticed an old copy of a family Bible crammed into the corner of the bottom shelf. Unlike all the other books around it, it wasn’t covered in dust.

Surely not. But there it was. Revelation, I wondered? A book about the literal end of time?

I pulled out the old Bible and flipped to the last page of Revelation. Tucked inside was a small scrap of paper that read: “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

Was he kidding? Sending me on a goose chase like this just for the files that were already mine?

It was a good thing I happened to be familiar with the reference. I took the clue and ran my flashlight over the bookshelves until I found a volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I flipped it open and found the short story titled “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which featured Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes. I riffled through it. Nothing. I crossed my fingers, replaced the book on the shelf, and pressed it firmly in.

A clicking noise shattered my blanket of suburban silence, and I jumped.

Realizing that I, myself, had caused the sound, I blew out a sigh and relaxed. Feeling along the wall, I found the uneven space where the bookshelf had popped away from the wall.

Pulling it back, I shined my flashlight into the newly revealed space.

One, two three. . . thirty boxes of files.

Ten boxes were missing.

Someone had been here.

And yet, the envelope with my name on it in the desk had been sealed. How could anyone else have known?

Visions of men in black going all Jack Bauer on Dr. Schaeffer flashed through my mind. Had he been tortured? Had he died a slow death?

I thought about that for a second, and then wished I hadn’t.

A high-pitched bark ripped my attention away from horrifying past and future possibilities into the even more horrifying present.

It was Lucy. Her bark was not one of idle boredom, or a mere shout-out to the neighborhood dogs barking in the distance. Its pitch was the one she reserved for neighbors trespassing on her sidewalk, or the mailman delivering the mail.

Someone was here.

I hastily pressed the bookshelf back into the wall, dumped everything back into the desk drawer, and slid it shut. Then I grabbed the envelope and piece of paper addressed to me. Confident I had left everything else as I found it, I ran to the back door, locked the doorknob lock from the inside, and slipped out.

Lucy had stopped barking. She must have scared away whoever was here.

I debated about whether or not to go back inside. Was it worth the risk of leaving and possibly losing the files? Or staying and risking the loss of something even worse. . . like my life?

Okay, reality check. Maybe somebody bad had been out to get Schaeffer, but I didn’t know anything worth killing over. Deep breath. The worst that could happen is that I might get caught breaking and entering, and then I’d just have to lawyer myself out of jail. No biggie. I could do that in my sleep. But it would take time, and that was a luxury I really didn’t have.

I decided to leave and come back later. I would park farther away and watch the house from a distance to make sure no one was there.

I left through the same door I’d come in, locking it again behind me. Then I slid into the driver’s seat of my car. Lucy hopped into my lap and started licking my face madly.

“Good dog,” I whispered. “You told ’em, didn’t you?”

I didn’t wait for her to settle down before sliding the key into the ignition and starting the car.I twisted my wrist with maximum force and jerked the car into reverse, pressing down on the gas pedal as hard as I dared.

In a few moments, I was out of the driveway and humming down the street.

Even though I kept manically checking my rearview mirrors, I saw no one. I took the long route home, driving through three different neighborhoods, out to the river and back before I satisfied myself that I wasn’t being followed.

When I got home, Detective Nash was waiting for me on my doorstep. Oy.