The Unkindness of Ravens by M. Hilliard (fastest ebook reader txt) 📕

O’Donnell stuck his hand out. I looked up. His spine was rigid and his lips pursed.

“You didn’t know about these,” I said, handing over the envelope, watching his face carefully. “Helene forgot—Helene! The alarm company! They call—”

“She’s been informed of the situation. I’ll speak to her later, and Ms. Hunzeker as well.”

“Oh God, Anita.” I dropped my head in my hands. “She’ll have a fit.”

“I’m sure I can handle it,” he said, pocketing the envelope. “Now let’s talk about today.”

“From the time we closed?”

“From the time you opened. Don’t leave anything out. I want to know everything that happened in this building today that you’re aware of.”

I went through the day. I had to fudge a little here and there to explain why I was in the attic on my lunch break, but I emphasized the number of strangers wandering the building and implied they made me nervous. He took notes and nodded a few times, but didn’t say much. The only tricky part were the questions about the end of the day.

“Why were you here alone?” he asked.

“I hadn’t planned to be but I wanted to check something, and everyone else had plans. I thought I’d only be a minute.”

I had debated about this while relaying the day’s events to O’Donnell. If Mary Alice had already called him, he might be waiting to see if I told him the truth. If she hadn’t gotten to him yet, she would, which would only corroborate my story.

“There’s a little girl, Sadie Barrett. She’s here a lot. She saw something the night of the murder. But what she said didn’t make a lot of sense. I wanted to see for myself. Come with me. I’ll show you.”

I walked him over to the beanbag chair, and ran through my conversations with Sadie and Mary Alice and my end-of-day experiment. He listened without interruption. I was gratified—what I was saying sounded farfetched even to me.

“Conclusions?” he asked.

“Sadie saw something. She saw it more than once, and if she saw it again, she would recognize it, even if she couldn’t tell who or what it was. Whoever it was probably couldn’t see her, but I can’t be positive, and that scares me. And drawing attention to her scares me, too.”

“Rightly so.” He stepped into the hall, had a brief chat with a uniformed officer, and came back.

“Did you hear or see anything unusual while you were checking on what the kid saw?”

The whole place turned into a freaking fun house. But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the manor itself that was the problem. Whatever walked there. I rubbed the back of my neck, reliving the feeling of being watched. But nothing on the sensors. I was starting to doubt myself. Not enough sleep. But Vince’s presence proved I hadn’t been alone.

“A couple of books fell over. I found a window not quite closed, and decided I better check them all. Then I thought I heard a door close, somewhere close by, but I’d already checked. Everything was locked, and still locked when I left. And nothing registered on the motion sensors. I looked there first. No one could move that fast.”

“Walk me through it.”

I started with the window I found open and ended where I was standing when I heard the door. He turned in a circle and led me to the main hall and the glass fire doors.

“Everything look all right?”

I scanned both sets of doors, turned to answer him, stopped, and turned back.

“The crash bar.” I reached toward it. O’Donnell put his arm between me and the door.

“Just tell me,” he said.

“It’s stuck. It wasn’t before. It sticks just enough to keep from locking so we always check it and I know I did. Besides, this wasn’t the right noise. The noise I heard was quieter.”

I peered through the glass. The dead bolt was still shot.

“It had to be Vince,” I said, looking around the hall and thinking through the events of the evening.

“Most likely. We’ll ask him.”

“If it wasn’t Vince,” I went on, “it was whoever hit him, and whoever it was had a key. No one went by me, so someone left this way, and either didn’t know about the crash bar, or didn’t take the time to check. But the deadbolt is locked.”

He looked through the glass. He asked, in a tone devoid of all hope, “Do you know if there was an outside key, or a master key, in that envelope?”

“No outside or master in there. No need. Anyone who knew about the keys at the reference desk would already have a key to the building. I’m sure Helene could give you a list of those people if she hasn’t already.”

O’Donnell muttered something that sounded like “half the village,” and asked me a few more questions. Five minutes later he sent me home, but accompanied by an officer since I’d had some car trouble.

Fine with me. This girl detective thing was wearing me out.

Chapter Eleven

It was Sunday morning and the cupboard was bare. My stomach was rumbling. By the time I had gotten home the night before, I’d had just enough energy to mix a medicinal martini and go to bed. The young officer who escorted me home had walked me upstairs, carefully examined my porch, and preceded me inside, turning on lights and having a general look-see. I didn’t have the sense he was conducting an informal search, though O’Donnell might have told him to keep his eyes open for blunt instruments propped in corners. It seemed more like he was doing a general safety check. He didn’t look under the bed, but he did ask if anything seemed out of place. When I told him everything seemed fine, he reminded me to get my car checked and left. I watched him hop into a patrol car that pulled up to the curb. I saw another, lights out, at the end of the street. Whether they were watching me because I was a suspect or the next