The Locked Room Page 6

  AS COLETTE DROVE HER pickup truck down Main Street, Emma Rose tried to wave her over, but she kept going. She couldn’t afford to waste gas chatting and no one could carry on a conversation longer than Emma Rose. Besides, they hadn’t been friends since Ben took her to that school play. Just south of town, Colette turned down the lane that led to the town’s only funeral home and cemetery.

  Most people held funerals in local churches, but Colette wasn’t expecting very many people to show up, so when she opened the door she was glad to find a small chapel with soft piped-in music. There were no flowers and thankfully, no casket awaiting her in the front of the Chapel. A door to her right said Office, so she lightly knocked and then turned the knob.

  CHAPTER 4

  MAKING ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS was easier than she expected, mostly because her father had taken care of the details. Walt asked a few questions, she answered and presto, it was done. She requested a simple graveside service and Walt promised to ask her father’s minster to say a few words.

  Before she left, he handed her a small paper sack and said, “Inside is what we were able to find of your father’s belongings.”

  She opened the sack, peeked inside and was relieved to see keys and a billfold. “Thank you.” She paused a moment before she asked, “How long ago did he pay all the expenses?”

  “Oh, a long time ago. Let’s see, it must be fifteen years or so. It was while he was going through all those awful cancer treatments. Poor man, he was really sick at the time, but then he got better. Of course you know that.”

  Colette blankly stared at Walt. “Actually, I didn’t know.” She folded the sack back up and left without saying another word. Her mind was a jumble and she hardly realized what she was doing when she drove back down the peaceful lane, turned the corner and then stopped. “Cancer?” she muttered. Despite what the sheriff said, it was still possible that he killed himself. “So the cancer had come back, he was dying, closed the restaurant, threw all the food away, and drove his car off the cliff. Why? Too much pain? Is that what he wanted to tell me?” Timidly, she opened the sack again and took his billfold out. She felt a little strange opening it, but she wasn’t surprised to find only four dollars. Other than that, it was as empty as the cupboards at home – no business cards, no receipts, no pictures, and no bank card. “That figures.”

  On her way home, Colette spent three dollars on gas, stopped at the grocery and spent the other dollar on three, twenty-five cent packs of cheap noodles plus tax – meals she could make just by adding hot water. Emma Rose was nowhere in sight when she headed home, which was a good thing. Colette didn’t think she had anything important to talk about anyway. Emma Rose probably just wanted to ask questions and be the first one in town to know the answers. Lost Bell never lacked for gossip or talk of US politics, which was Colette’s father’s favorite subject. He never missed the evening news and had plenty to say on the subject of politics no matter who he was talking to. Right is right, he always said.

  This time, she backed her truck into the driveway. She had a lot of stuff to get rid of before she could sell the house, and hoped she wouldn’t have to make more than one trip to the county dump.

  The front door was wide open, but Ben had turned off the lights. She turned them right back on again. “Just what I need,” she mumbled. Colette tossed her father’s empty billfold and the paper sack in a trash can, and then headed for the office. What was in the locked drawers she wasn’t supposed to see? Apparently, she still wasn’t supposed to find out. None of the keys on his keyring fit the file cabinet. Colette sighed and went upstairs.

  She examined the keyhole in the locked bedroom door, looked for a key that might fit and tried several. None of them worked. With only a few keys left, two of which obviously went to his suitcases, she tried the next and then the next. Enraged, she threw the keys down the hall and listened to them crash against his bedroom door, bounce off and fall to the floor.

  It was almost noon, but she wasn’t hungry when she decided to search his bedroom. Except to do a little cleaning, she rarely entered that room either. “Oh look,” she muttered, “He made his bed before he killed himself.”

  Saying it out loud made her involuntarily shiver. Suicide wasn’t like him at all. She reminded herself that the sheriff said two boys ran him off the road, he didn’t suffer, and she was wrong about him killing himself, she had to be.

  “Where do cranky old men hide their money?” she whispered.

  The obvious place was under his mattress, but she found nothing there and straightened the covers before she moved on. Next, she went to his closet and began to go through his pants pockets. She pulled each pair off the hanger, search the pockets and then hung them back up. She checked shirt and jacket pockets, too. “Empty, empty, empty.” She went through his dresser drawers, pulled out two pair of underwear, two pairs of pajamas and then put them neatly back without noticing how unusually empty the closet and both drawers were. The other three drawers were filled with still more boxes of canceled checks. Instead of opening each, she shook them to see if she could detect a key. She couldn’t.

  Colette sat on the edge of his bed and tried to think. All that was left at the bottom of his closet was two pairs of shoes, one for formal affairs and the pair of tennis shoes she bought him one year for Christmas. As far as she knew, he never wore the tennis shoes, but he seemed pleased to get them.

  It was then she spotted the highly polished wooden jewelry box on top of his dresser and got up. She didn’t think he was much on expensive jewels, but maybe there was something worth pawning. Of course, the only pawn shop was thirty miles away. She lifted the lid and spotted an old watch. It didn’t look like it was worth much, but maybe. The only other item was a man’s wedding ring. She hoped to find an inscription with his wife’s name inside the wide gold band, but it only said 14k. It was probably his wedding ring, but she never saw it on him and if he didn’t care about it, he sure wouldn’t care if she pawned it.

  She put the ring back in the jewelry box and closed the lid. Colette sighed and walked down the hall to her room. A few minutes earlier, she’d heard a lawnmower and sure enough, Ben was mowing his mother’s lawn. The moment she stepped to the window and looked out, he waved. That was not unusual. He always seemed to know when she stood in front of her window. Either that, or he constantly looked for her there. Before she could wave back, he turned the mower off and darted back inside his house.

  She shrugged and the next thing she knew, his dog was barking and Ben was yelling at her through the screen door.

  “Come in,” she yelled back.

  “You see the morning paper?” Ben shouted.

  “No, but I bet you have.” She had just started back down the hallway when he met her halfway. He was holding the top half of the newspaper’s front page up so she could see it. “Is that, or is that not you?”

  Colette stared at the picture of her standing next to the car with the abandoned child in it. The window was already bashed in and she had moved away while the man reached in to unlock the back door. “Oh that.”

  “You’re a hero!”

  She brushed past him and went downstairs. “I don’t want to be a hero.”

  “Too late,” he said following her back into her father’s office.

  “Forget it, okay?”

  “Great, I’m in the Navy for two years and I haven’t made hero yet. What do you have that I don’t have?” He laid the newspaper with the article face down on her father’s desk and then folded his arms.

  “A purse for starters, with rolled up coins in it. Did they catch the mother?”

  “Turns out it was the father and yep, he’s in jail. The baby is in the hospital recovering.” It was then he noticed the article on the bottom of the page. He only had time to read the headline and catch the words, Davet Bouchard, before he turned it over so she wouldn’t see it.

  “Good, he deserves to be in jail.” She went to the file cabinet and tried to pull the top drawer out
again. “You know how to break into this thing? I can’t find the key.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “You got any bobby pins?”

  “Maybe.”

  He watched her leave the room, heard her walk up the stairs, grabbed the paper and began to read the article. “Embezzlement trial,” he whispered, “The money was never recovered? I bet Colette doesn’t know about this either.”

  “How many?” she yelled from above the stairs.

  “Two,” he shouted. Ben looked around for a place to hide the paper, but too soon he heard Colette start down the stairs. All he had time to do was to make sure the embezzlement article was face down.

  “I brought four just in case.”

  “Smart girl. I’ve never done it but I watched a video online one time. First, your removed the rubber tips, and then you bend one like this.” He made an “L” shape with one and straightened the second pin. Five tries later, he managed to get the top drawer open.

  She eagerly pulled the drawer out only to find it filled with ledgers for the restaurant.

  “Want me to open the other two?”

  “Please.” She watched as he pulled the top drawer out, set it on the floor and then reached in and unlocked the next. It held more ledgers, so he pulled it out and unlocked the third.”

  Colette sighed. In the bottom drawer were dozens of photographs from her childhood, report cards, childishly drawn pictures, and a flat blue book wrapped in plastic. She pulled the plastic off, opened the book and found her birth certificate inside. She should have expected it, but she was shocked to find her mother’s name had been whited out. There was one hint, however – she was born in Denver, not in Lost Bell as she always thought. “I have no mother,” she said.

  Looking over her shoulder, Ben nodded. “It was a miracle birth.”

  “Or I was found in a dumpster.”

  “By your father who said you were half Cherokee. How did the dumpster know that?”

  “How indeed. Oh well, it matters not. I was hoping to find money in the cabinet, but no such luck. Jawbone left me high and dry.”

  “He must have a bank account,” Ben suggested.

  “Right, but how do I get into it? Walt gave me his billfold and there was nothing in it but four dollars. Even his credit card is missing.”

  “You think Walt might have...” Ben asked as he shoved the bottom drawer back in the cabinet with his foot and then put the other drawers back.

  “I’ve never heard of Walt stealing from anyone, have you?”

  “No, come to think of it.”

  She set her birth certificate on top of the cabinet and walked to the door. “This whole thing just doesn’t make any sense.”

  He was about to grab the newspaper when she changed her mind, went back to the top file cabinet and started to pull the ledgers out. She set them on top of the newspaper, sat down at the desk, opened the first one and began to look through it page by page.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure, really. I guess I’m looking for a business bank account or something.”

  Ben shrugged and headed for the door. “I’ve got more chores to do. Call if you need me. Let’s go home, Sylvester.” He patted the dog on the head and left.

  She giggled. She couldn’t call Ben because she didn’t have his phone number. Besides, all she wanted was to find was a key to the locked bedroom. Did her father tape it to one of the pages of the ledgers? There were only four and it didn’t take long to look through them. Colette even shook each one to see if a key fell out. Nothing fell out, but then her dad would have been far more exact than that.

  She put everything back, and then sat on the floor in front of cabinet and pulled out the bottom drawer again. Oddly, this drawer was not orderly like everything else in the house, but she didn’t concern herself with it. All the pictures were of her and him, were dated on the back, and maybe someday she would put them in an album – just not today.

  Finding nothing, she got up off the floor, spotted the newspaper, folded it and stuffed it in the trash can. Then she returned to his desk and turned his computer on. It was old and sometimes he talked about getting a newer one, but apparently he never did. He said once that paying the bills online made life easier. Hopefully the bills were all caught up for the month because she sure couldn’t pay them. If nothing else, she might be able to see when her phone bill was due – that is, if she could figure out his computer password. Her name didn’t work, his name didn’t work, her name followed by the year she was born, his name followed by...she didn’t know in which year he was born. “I suppose Walt would know,” she muttered.

  She was starting to get annoyed, not at him, but at herself. She lived with the man, but she seemed to know almost as little about him as she did about her mother. She cast those thoughts aside and entered a few more password combinations.

  Colette slumped in the chair. She could figure it out, all she had to do was think. Before she could, her phone rang so she pulled it out of her pocket and looked at the number. She did not recognize it, feared it was the towing company and hesitantly answered, “Hello.”

  “Miss, Bouchard, this is Larry Phillips, of Phillips...”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Phillips.”

  “I was wondering if you could come to my office.”

  “Today?” she asked.

  “It’s important.”

  “Is it about my father?”

  “It is. What time can you be here?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost one. I have an appointment, but I’ll wait if you can come right away.”

  “Be there in a flash.” She hung up, grabbed her purse, pushed the screen door open, and came face to face with two men dressed in white coveralls. “May I help you?”

  “Miss Bouchard?” Steven asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, closing the screen door behind her and waiting on the top step.

  “Sheriff Steele asked us to paint your house. He’s not real fond of the color and says it messes up the whole neighborhood.”

  “He’s right about that,” said Colette. “I can’t pay you...at least not until I find out if my father left me more than four dollars and twenty-five cents.” Both painters looked sad, so she quickly added, “Just kidding.”

  Steven smiled. “The Sherriff said he’d take care of the bill.” Steven nodded toward Oliver, “He’s a rookie at this painting stuff.”

  “Well, he can’t do any worse than the last painters. I’d strangle them if I could find them, but I guess Dad hired them out of Glenwood Springs. Frankly, it is not worth the gas to chase them down. I mean, who paints both the house and the trim red? Idiots!” In her next breath, she looked at the pails of paint and masking supplies they had already put on the front porch. “That stuff toxic?”

  Oliver had no idea and looked to Steven for the answer. “No Ma’am, it’s water based and nontoxic.”

  “That a relief, I’m not fond of strong paint fumes,” she said.

  “Neither am I,” Oliver admitted.

  “Too late,” Steven said to Oliver. “We already promised the sheriff.”

  Colette grinned at Oliver. “I always make it a habit to do as the man says. He’s the sheriff, you know, with a badge and a gun and everything.” She skirted around the two strangers and headed for her truck. “Paint away, my good fellows, paint away.”

  Oliver laughed, watched her until she got in the truck and drove away. “Margo is right about Colette being spunky. I like her style.”

  “So do I.” Steven nodded toward the front door. “Margo is right about her lack of fear too. She left it wide open and we could be escaped convicts for all she knows.”

  Oliver walked to the pile of rollers, brushes, a water bucket, and three gallon pails of paint. Two ladders were leaned against the front porch post. “Except that she did mention the sheriff has a gun. Seems to me she is made of sterner stuff than Margo thinks.”

  “I hope you’re ri
ght.”

  “Okay, hotshot painter, where do we start?”

  “First, we check the place out.” With Oliver right behind him, Steven walked down the steps and around the house to the back. He made note of the high fence around the back yard lined with rose bushes, and then tried the back door. It was locked. On the other side of the house, the rose bushes also lined the top of the driveway.

  “Davet must have thought the thorns on the rose bushes would keep Paige from climbing over the hedge.”

  “Works for me,” Oliver muttered.

  “If she came, the only approach would be through the front gate.” Steven walked down the driveway and looked at the placement of the streetlights in each direction. While they were positioned at each end of the block, none were near enough to shine much light on the house at night. He went back to the porch, picked up a roll of masking tape and handed it to Oliver.

  “Are you sure we can’t hire someone to do this for us?”

  “And do what, stand around and watch?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Steven chuckled. “Just be glad the house was just painted and we don’t have to wash it or scrap off the old paint.” He picked up a roll of plastic, and then began to show Oliver how to mask off the first window.”

  “What’s the brown paper for?”

  “To mask off the porch so we don’t splatter paint on it.”

  “Mask off the whole porch?” Oliver sighed and a few minutes later, he said, “I need a vacation.”

  Steven laughed, “I’m supposed to be on one now.”

  GOING TO SEE MR. PHILLIPS was not something Colette was looking forward to, not that she had ever been in his office or even talked to him, except for the occasional politeness when he came into the restaurant. Even so, the things she heard about him did not favor him being a standup kind of guy, at least not one a nineteen-year-old could trust. Begrudgingly, she opened the door and went in. Like a doctor’s office, a bell rang when the door closed as though someone would have to come from the back somewhere. There was no need, for the receptionist was seated behind her desk and was already grinning.