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THAT NIGHT I GOT ready for bed around eleven o’clock but realized I was too wound up from the events of the day to go to sleep. I tied the sash of my fuzzy yellow robe and padded back downstairs in my slippers. Sexy Beast followed me, grumbling. He’s a creature of habit and believes in retiring punctually at a civilized hour every night. But his strong pack instinct won’t let him sleep alone while his alpha female is rattling around downstairs, getting into all sorts of mischief and risking attack by whatever beasts and intruders he imagines might crawl through the window in his absence.
In the kitchen I poured myself a small shot of excellent añejo tequila, a gift from Martin during the summer when he’d been trying to talk me into letting him bunk at my place for a while. Okay, that’s not strictly accurate. By the time I’d discovered his intentions, he’d already moved in. The insanely expensive tequila had been intended as both a distraction and a bribe. If I tell you it worked, will you think less of me?
You were supposed to say no.
And for the record, the padre had slept in the first-floor maid’s room and never once tried to slip into the master bedroom. I would have been ready if he had. You may take that any way you want.
“Cheers, SB.” I took the first small sip and shivered as a trail of golden heat streaked down my gullet. Sexy Beast emitted a snort of disapproval. He can be so prissy sometimes.
Suddenly I remembered the mushroom-shaped salt shaker Allison’s mom had given me. My purse sat on the granite kitchen island. I rooted around in it, located the little piece of pottery, and unwrapped it. It looked even prettier and more distinctive by itself, away from the rest of Allison’s pottery collection.
Well, no reason not to use the shaker for its intended purpose. I retrieved the cylindrical box of salt from a cabinet and pried the small cork from the bottom of the shaker. That’s when I got my first surprise.
Stuck to the inside surface of the cork was a blob of soft putty, the kind people use to attach posters to walls. The end of a small metal object was stuck into the putty. I peered closely at it, turned it this way and that. It appeared to be a flash drive. Jeez, these things were getting smaller all the time. This one was just over an inch long.
I plucked the flash drive off the putty, which had kept it from rattling around in the shaker. I’d have to call Joleen in the morning and arrange to get it back to her.
I set the little object down on the granite and stared at it. For a long time. Yep, that’s what I’d do, all right, return this thing to Allison’s parents pronto. No matter who ended up inheriting her belongings under her revised will, it rightly belonged to them and, based on the pains their daughter had taken to hide it, probably contained information of a personal nature.
I certainly wasn’t going to insert this flash drive into my computer and check out the contents. That would be a violation of Allison’s privacy. Right?
I picked up the tiny thing and turned it in my fingers. I set it back down. On the other hand, it was entirely possible the contents of this drive might be shocking or hurtful to her folks. I mean, it could be anything. Did Joleen and Doug really need to see, I don’t know, their daughter’s sex tapes? Not that she’d seemed the type, but what did I know? I’d met the woman precisely twice.
Her parents had hired me to assist with the funeral arrangements and stuff. Okay, I just added that and stuff. There was nothing in our agreement about stuff. But I felt an ethical and moral obligation to minimize the pain they were going through in any way I could. It was another part of that Death Diva code of honor I mentioned earlier.
An unwritten code of honor can really come in handy at times like this.
And yes, I was curious as hell, but that wasn’t the only reason I carried the little device into the maid’s room, which I’d turned into a sort of cozy office. I turned on the floor lamp. The room contained a daybed, an overstuffed chair, and a small antique lady’s desk, currently occupied by my laptop computer.
Without giving myself time to reconsider, I sat at the desk, opened the computer, and inserted Allison’s flash drive into one of the USB ports in the side of the machine.
A window popped up, demanding a password. I muttered a naughty word. Well, of course she would have password-protected the drive. After all, she’d gone to the trouble of hiding the thing in a darn salt shaker.
I leaned back, drummed my fingers on the desk. That was it, then. I’d scarcely known the owner of this drive. There was no way I could guess her password.
My fingers stopped drumming. But I knew someone who might be able to. Hadn’t the padre deduced my own computer password last spring when he’d let himself into the nasty little basement apartment I’d been living in back then?
No, I hadn’t given him a key! I’d just met the man, for heaven’s sake. Back then I didn’t know about the adorable set of lock picks he never left home without.
And yeah, so my password had been my wedding anniversary. Pitifully easy to guess. What’s that you say? You chose your anniversary as your password after having been divorced for how many years? It’s just that I’m sentimental, that’s all. I already told you, I’m not still hung up on Dom. I mean, he’s getting married again, right? For the fourth time! How could I possibly still be hung up on him?
Okay, you know what? Let’s move on to something else. Like what the heck is on this flash drive. I was curious before I’d tried to peek at the contents. Now that I’d been presented with an impregnable roadblock in the form of a password, I was rabidly curious.
I’d left my cell phone on my nightstand. I sprinted upstairs for it, a process that took longer than you might think, considering the size of my house: five bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, home theater, gym, et cetera. It was your basic mini mansion, squatting on five of the most exclusive and expensive acres on Long Island.
If you’re wondering how I could afford such luxurious accommodations after having lived in the aforementioned basement apartment in a working-class neighborhood far from this rarefied burg, the answer is, I couldn’t afford it. Irene McAuliffe left me the house in her will. No, that’s a lie. She left the house to Sexy Beast. And she asked me to be his guardian, which meant I got to live there with him. What can I tell you? That was Irene. She also left enough money to maintain the property, but I still had to work for a living. Overall, not a bad deal.
I called Martin as I resumed my seat in front of the computer, setting the phone to speaker and placing it on the desk near me.
“How’d the funeral go?” he asked by way of greeting.
“You missed the fireworks,” I told him. “It turns out Allison disinherited the boy toy she married a few months ago.”
“I heard. He was banging the bestie.”
“Are you at work?” I asked. “Sounds like it.” I heard a hum of voices in the background, conversation and laughter. Martin tended bar at Murray’s Pub, a popular local watering hole that had been a Crystal Harbor fixture since the late nineteenth century. No doubt it was hopping on this Saturday night. He lived in the apartment over the bar.
“Hold on a sec.” I heard him take someone’s order for a Manhattan and a glass of Pinot Noir.
I said, “Well, did you hear—”
“That the boy toy and the bestie are looking forward to a blessed event?” he said.
I wasn’t surprised the news had gotten back to Martin. Even before he started tending bar at Murray’s, he’d had a way of knowing everything that went on in town. I said, “Listen, I need your help with something.”
“I get off at two,” he said. “Wear that green lace teddy.”
He knew about the teddy? I’d bought it ages ago. It still had the tags on. I’d get to use it one of these days. Or nights, rather. And yeah, the padre was an irrepressible flirt. I think you’ve learned that by now. As for his knowing the contents of my closet, well, the infuriating man came and went as he pleased. Remember that set of lockpicks? I’d gotten used to it. Well, sort of.
“I need you to crack a password,” I said.
“For what?” He didn’t sound at all surprised. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“A flash drive.”
“Whose flash drive?” he said.
“Allison Zaleski.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Did she have a pet?”
“Just the new husband,” I said.
“Try his name.”
I typed Nick into the little box and hit Enter. “That’s not it,” I said.
“Try all lowercase and all caps.”
I did. “Nada. Let me try the first husband, Mitchell. He was the, you know, real husband.” That one didn’t work either.
“Did she have any kids?” the padre asked.
“Nope.”
“I assume you’ve tried password?” he asked.
“That’s why I called you,” I said.
“No, I mean the word password,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many people use that as their password.”
“For real?” I tried it. “No.”
“Welcome,” Martin said. After a few moments he said, “Jane? You still there?”
“I thought you were talking to a customer. You want me to try the word welcome?” I asked.
“Yep. And qwerty.”
“What?”
He spelled it. “The first six letters on your keyboard. That’s another common one.”
“Nope. Maybe she was too smart for these obvious passwords.” It was probably some completely random and unguessable combination of letters, numbers, and symbols.
“There are a few more we can try,” he said. “What kind of car did she drive?”
“I don’t know. I never went into her garage.”
“Favorite movie?” The sound of rattling ice in the background. “Color? Hobby?”
I perked up. “Photography. She was a serious shutterbug.”
“Try any words associated with that,” he said. “Camera, snapshot, stuff like that.”
After we’d exhausted photography-related words, Martin made a bunch of other suggestions, including obvious strings of numbers and, yes, her birthday and wedding anniversaries, which I didn’t happen to know.
“I can come around tomorrow,” he offered, “see what I can do.”
“Thanks, but don’t bother. Maybe it’s just as well. I really shouldn’t be snooping like this.”
“That’s a joke, right?” he said.
After I hung up, I sat staring at the screen and that tormenting little password prompt. “Come on, Allison, talk to me,” I muttered. “What are some of your favorite things?” This line of thinking installed that song from The Sound of Music in my cranium. I shook my head vigorously, determined to keep it from turning into an earworm.
I kept at it, trying her parents’ names, the words pottery and ceramics, and all the words I’d already tried in combination with numbers, including her street address. I knew it was a losing battle, knew I should go to bed and start fresh in the morning, but at that point I was too invested to stop.
What were some of her favorite photographic subjects? I thought of her nature shots. The picture of white mushrooms growing on a fallen log popped into my head. It wasn’t the only photo of mushrooms adorning the walls of her home. I thought of the little ceramic mushroom that had concealed the flash drive. What was it Joleen had said? Allison had loved mushrooms.
I typed in mushroom, singular and plural. Nothing. All caps. All lowercase. I tried tacking on 123, her street address, and other alphanumeric combinations. Was there another word for mushroom? Fungus, I typed, and fungi. Another one came to me. I typed shrooms.
Bingo. I was in.
It took a moment for my mind to register it. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, frozen in place, as if one wrong move could undo what I’d worked so hard to accomplish. “I don’t believe it,” I breathed.
I was looking at a list of files contained on the flash drive, a couple of dozen of them. The file extension indicated they were videos. A stab of alarm shot through me. Please don’t let these be sex tapes, I mentally pleaded. But I’d come too far to abandon this project without even checking them out. Within seconds I was viewing the first video, dated the previous June.
At first I saw only an upholstered chair, the same easy chair Nick had occupied earlier that day in Allison’s office. Then I saw a female figure from the back as she moved from the camera to the chair and sat on it, tucking her feet under her. It was Allison Zaleski. She wore a summer nightgown. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her lovely face, free of makeup, appeared sad, almost drawn.
At first she simply stared into the camera lens. As the seconds dragged on, I sensed her mental struggle. She didn’t know how to begin. Finally she said, “I can only do this if I’m talking to you, Jim. You’re the only one I was ever able to open up to. Even Mitchell...” She looked away briefly as if fighting to govern her emotions.
When she once more faced the camera, she said, “I buried him three weeks ago today. I never thought I’d find someone to love, I mean truly love, after you. Please don’t be jealous. If I hadn’t lost you so long ago... well, the whole trajectory of my life would’ve been different, wouldn’t it?”
I knew I should turn off the video at this point. Allison no doubt meant for this to be kept private. She certainly hadn’t meant for me to view it. I can’t say why I felt compelled to continue watching. My motive wasn’t voyeurism. As soon as she’d started speaking, I felt an undeniable connection.
“Mitchell’s daughter, Brenda...” Allison shook her head sadly. “I tried so hard with her. She and Mitchell had been estranged since he divorced her mother. She blamed him, of course. This is going back decades. I thought I could help heal the rift. Brenda and Lou have three kids, and Mitchell barely knew them, barely knew his own grandchildren.”
I thought about Brenda Yates, whom I’d met earlier at the reception. We’d engaged in a little small talk. Brenda was a part-time bookkeeper for a group of doctors. I sensed she hated the job. She and Lou had three kids, all under the age of eight.
“I managed to get them together a few times,” Allison said. “Birthdays, Christmas, that sort of thing. Mitchell was hopeful at first, that he could finally have a relationship with his daughter, his grandchildren. Brenda, though, she just kept this wall up, accused him of trying to buy her children’s affection with presents. God knows what she was telling the kids about us when we weren’t around. They never did warm to him. Or to me, but that would take a miracle, considering how Brenda feels about me.”
Allison gave an incredulous shake of the head. “You’re not going to believe this, Jim. She thinks I killed him. Brenda thinks I murdered her father.”
My heart banged. This was taking an ugly turn.
“We were hiking in this gorgeous forest upstate.” Her voice was husky with emotion. “Mitchell... he wanted me to take his picture in front of this steep ravine. It would have been a spectacular shot—the trees, the stream. The sky was startlingly blue. I was about to take the picture when he backed up suddenly. He must not have realized how close he was to the edge. He lost his footing and—” She broke off, with her hand over her mouth.
My eyes filled. What a horrible way to lose your spouse.
As I watched, Allison composed herself. “Brenda claims I pushed him. She even tried to get the police involved. The way she sees it, I married a much older man for his money. Mind you, she didn’t concoct this accusation until after she found out he left everything to me. Although how she could’ve expected to inherit anything after pushing him away for more than twenty years is a mystery.” She looked pensive. “His grandchildren, though, they had nothing to do with that.”
Allison was silent for a minute. I watched her expression gradually soften. “There’s this guy. No, that doesn’t sound right. He’s not... It’s not like that. Not so soon after... He’s just this sweet guy I met while taking pictures at this old-timey restoration village. It’s a bunch of old buildings that were all moved to one location. They have a few houses, a general store, a church, a one-room schoolhouse, that kind of thing. They hire people to dress in Colonial clothes and work in the village.”
I knew the place she was talking about. It was a popular destination for families with young children.
“He plays the blacksmith,” Allison said with a little smile. “He’s good at it. I mean, he learned how to forge iron and everything. He was making a horseshoe. It was really hot in that little blacksmith shop.” An embarrassed smile. “All right, so I’m a sucker for a good-looking guy sweating over a coal fire. Not that it’s like that,” she repeated. “Nick is just a friend, a sweet guy, like I said. He understands my pain. I can talk to him. If the situation were different, if I weren’t grieving, then maybe there could be something more.”
And yet Allison had ended up marrying this “sweet, understanding guy” a mere three months after making this video.
“Please don’t be jealous, Jim.” She took a deep breath, her eyes glistening as she stared straight into the camera lens. “I don’t know why I say that. It’s not like you could ever see this video. There isn’t a day you’ve been gone that I haven’t thought about you. I still miss you so much.”
Allison kissed her fingertips and extended them toward the camera lens, her eyes welling. Then she got up and approached the camera. The video ended.