Mother-Daughter Murder Night(94)

“Mr. O’Dell!” Lana clicked her heels a little faster across the gravel.

The man turned around. Dark stubble covered his jaw, and his arms were tangled in a mess of wires and purple-tinted light bulbs. He gave her a short nod and took a step back toward the side of the building. Lana closed the gap between them before he reached the service door.

“Mrs. Rubicon,” he said.

“Ms.”

“We’re closed.”

“I’m aware of that.”

Lana dropped into silence, watching him juggle the awkward assembly of light bulbs.

“How can I . . . uh . . . help you?” His voice broke over the back half of his sentence, as if the words came out against his own volition.

“Scotty—can I call you Scotty?—I need to talk to your business partner.”

A mix of confusion and pride streaked his face. “I own this place myself. Well, me and the bank.”

“Not this business,” Lana said, gesturing at the building. “That one.” She pointed at the heat lamps he was trying not to drop.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Scotty said.

“Scotty.” Lana smiled. “Have I ever told you about my friend Gloria?”

He stared back at her. Before this moment, Lana had never told him about anything except a crusty table knife she wanted replaced.

“One day, Gloria was opening her mail,” Lana continued, “and she noticed her electrical bill had skyrocketed. It was four times what she expected. So she went on a little hunt for the culprit. Had she been using the jacuzzi too much? Leaving the blow dryer on? Had her boyfriend gone overboard with his beard trimmer? She couldn’t figure it out.”

Scotty shifted his weight and shot a longing glance at the side door to the yacht club.

“Then one day, she felt warmth coming from the attic. Gloria never went up there, but she wondered if maybe the heating system was out of whack. She pulled down the ladder, which was surprisingly clear of spiders and dust bunnies. And when she got up there, do you know what she found?”

“Ms. Rubicon, I really need to—”

“Plants. Hundreds of them. Her no-good boyfriend was running a clandestine grow operation, right under her own roof. He’d wired up a bunch of fans and a whole string of those”—she nodded at the tinted light bulbs—“and it was chewing through her electrical bill.”

Finally, one of the bulbs slid out of Scotty’s grasp and hit the ground at his feet, breaking with a sharp snap. When he looked up, stress streaked across his face.

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to your business partner. Now. Or else I’ll do what Gloria didn’t have the sense to do. Call the police.”

“Growing is legal now,” Scotty said.

“With a permit, it is. Without one, it’s a federal crime.”

Scotty looked around the parking lot for a saving grace. His eyes paused on the black-and-white parked at the Kayak Shack. Lana saw it too.

“Looks like I won’t even have to make that call,” she said.

“You better come with me,” he said.

After an awkward fumble of heat lamps and doorknobs, Scotty begrudgingly handed Lana his key ring. She unlocked the yacht club and held the service door open wide, relishing her newfound proprietorship of the situation. The door opened onto a narrow hallway, made tighter by the crates of onions and toilet paper lining the walls. The smell of fish and old fry grease hung in the air. Lana tried to hold her breath and not touch anything.

They reached a metal door near the end of the hallway, far from the kitchen and the restaurant dining room. Scotty stopped and took a long look at Lana. “You sure you want to peek behind the curtain?”

“It’s just the two of you, right?”

Scotty nodded.

“You swear?”

Scotty made an ill-advised attempt to draw the sign of the cross without dropping any more light bulbs.

“Okay, then. Let’s go.” She dangled his keys. “Got to get those lamps unloaded before another one breaks.”

Lana unlocked the door and entered a dank, pungent lair. She clamped one hand over her nose to keep from gagging on the smell. The stench of wet skunk and lemon peels hung in the air, slipping between her fingers to fill her nostrils with an acrid fog.

It was a storeroom. Or it used to be. Boxes were shoved together and stacked in the middle to form a long, uneven table, covered by a large blue tarp. On top of the tarp, a makeshift greenhouse was taking shape. Rows of small, leafy plants had been hastily potted and interspersed with box fans.

Lana’s eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light. Her other senses, however, were overwhelmed. The wet-skunk smell had a sweet, fruity underlayer, like berries left to rot in the sun. And then there was the sound, which was almost as bad as the smell. Punk music was pounding from a speaker, harmonizing with the whirring box fans to create the kind of noise Lana imagined you might hear if you ripped the wings off an airplane mid-flight.

Paul was at the far end of the table, bobbing his head to the music, twisting himself over the boxes to rig up a scaffold over the plants, presumably to hold the heat lamps.

“Took you long enough,” Paul yelled over the noise, turning toward the open door. Then he saw Lana. “What the hell is she doing here?”