My light glinted off the metal nozzle of a hose bib.
“What are you doing?” Vero asked as I stared at the front of the trailer, my light making a slow pass over the siding and trim. Steven had to have a key hidden out here somewhere; he always did. My ex-husband was no Boy Scout, but he was always prepared. His uncanny planning and organizational skills were how he managed to live with one woman while sleeping with another, sliding in and out of doors unnoticed. He always had an exit strategy.
And he always had a key.
My light landed on a concrete splash block under a downspout at the far corner of the trailer. When I lifted the edge, a glint of silver winked back at me from a depression in the mulch. “Thank you, Mrs. Haggerty,” I whispered. Vero raised an eyebrow as I wiped the key on my jeans. “Steven used to leave a key outside our house for Theresa when they were having an affair,” I explained as I slipped it in the lock. “Mrs. Haggerty saw her sneaking it from the splash block under our drain. He’s a creature of habit.”
“He’s a sleazeball is what he is.”
I stepped inside the darkened trailer. Vero bumped into my back as I froze beside a flashing red light on a keypad on the wall. “What’s that?” she asked as the red light and I blinked at each other.
“A security system.”
“You said he didn’t have a security system.”
My stomach took a nosedive as the light blinked faster. “Apparently, he has one now.”
“What do we do?” she asked, her popcorn breath hot on the back of my neck.
“We need a code to disarm it.”
“What’s the code?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“You knew where he kept the key!”
“That was different! We never had a security system in the house.”
“Did Theresa have one at her place?”
“No. Steven hated them.” Probably because they made it too hard to come and go without being tracked.
“Okay, think,” Vero said, pushing me toward the panel. “The codes for these things are usually four digits, right? What number would Steven pick?”
“I don’t know,” I sputtered as the red light sped up.
“Try the code to your garage door.”
I punched in the four-digit code to the garage door. The panel stopped flashing.
“Did it work?” Vero whispered. The only sound was the tick of the clock on the wall and the thermostat clicking on.
“I think so,” I said through a shaky exhale. I closed the door behind us. With my phone light held aloft, I cut a swath through the shadows to Bree’s old desk and switched on her lamp. The soft glow of the bulb felt brighter than it was, and I hoped no one could see it from the road. “Let’s get what we came for and get out of here. Steven’s accounting books are probably in his office. See what you can find in his desk. I’ll search the one out here for anything suspicious.”
The hardwood planks creaked under Vero’s feet as she crept down the hall. A lamp snapped on in Steven’s office, and I heard the fast glide of file drawers and the frantic rustling of folders as Vero searched. I pulled aside Bree’s desk chair, hurriedly opening and closing drawers, rummaging through them for anything personal she might have left behind … anything that might help me find her. If Steven had made any enemies through his work, his assistant was likely to know.
A message book sat open beside the phone, the kind with a spiral binding and perforated tear-away sheets that left duplicate copies on thin yellow film. I flipped through a few dozen messages, but none of them jumped out as odd. As I set the message book back in its place, I noticed a plastic file box marked TIME CARDS beside the phone.
I thumbed through the index cards where Steven’s hourly employees clocked in and out of their shifts, pausing on the only woman’s name in the box: Breanna Fuller. This had to be Bree.
I snapped a photo of the card with my phone, capturing her contact information and the times and dates of her most recent shifts. Her last day of work was a Saturday … October 26?
That couldn’t be right.
That was the day Nick and I had come, pretending to shop for sod, when Bree had given us directions to the fescue field. The day before the police dug up the bodies. But Steven said he’d let her go after the news broke.
I turned over the card, but the back was empty. Her last day of work had been about a month ago. Steven had always been an excellent liar, but why bother lying about this?
The clock on the wall ticked. I stuffed the card back in the box and moved to a set of file drawers. A pile of personal items had been tucked inside, and I rifled through them. A pair of faux leather gloves, a collapsible umbrella, a tube of lip gloss, a bottle of sparkly blue nail polish … I paused, withdrawing a well-worn copy of a familiar romantic suspense novel—one of my novels. The edges of the book were stamped, property of the local public library. I flipped clumsily to the back cover and fished the library card from its sleeve. The book was weeks overdue. If these were Bree’s things, why hadn’t she come back for them? And of all the romantic suspense novels she could have checked out of the library, why had she chosen one of mine?