Was Bernadette happy?
The thought haunted Jazz even while she and Nick shared that bottle of wine. Even when he asked if he could stop by the next day, just to check on her.
She thought about it while they went out for coffee on Sunday afternoon, while she took her days off—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—and worked with Wally on long stays and handled the admin work that went along with keeping things in the search and rescue and cadaver dog group running smoothly.
She was still thinking about it Thursday morning when she arrived at St. Catherine’s to do the million last-minute things to prepare for the first session of summer school.
It was early, and the school was dark, empty. Jazz’s sneakers slapped against the floor, the sound echoing back from the high ceilings.
She hit the security code on the pad outside her office door and got herself settled.
If only it was so easy to quiet the questions that whirled through her brain.
What had happened that day on the fourth floor?
And why?
Who could have hated Bernadette enough to take her life?
Or wasn’t it hate at all?
Eileen was due to come in at ten, and while she still had time and plenty of quiet to let her mind work over the problem Jazz made herself a pot of coffee and watched, lost in thought, as it brewed. She poured a cup and stopped cold. It wasn’t her imagination. She’d heard the soft sounds of footsteps behind her.
She wasn’t alone.
The memory of what had happened on Friday night washed over her like an icy wave. She held on tight to the coffee cup, all set to hurl its contents at the person behind her. Muscles tensed, she drew in a breath, turned.
And let out a squeal. “Why didn’t you say something when you walked in?”
Sarah laughed and sidestepped Jazz to get a cup of coffee. “I did say something. I said I was here to get the art studio ready for the first group of girls next week. You were so out of it, you didn’t hear me.”
“Sorry.” Jazz went over to her desk, but she didn’t sit down. She was too tense. Too dissatisfied with spending her days thinking and worrying and wondering—and getting nowhere fast.
She took a drink of coffee. “Thinking,” she told Sarah.
“About your weekend?”
It wasn’t the question; it was the sly smile that lit Sarah’s expression, the sudden color in her cheeks that perfectly matched her pink skirt and top.
Jazz cocked her head. “What do you know about my weekend?”
“I know a certain cop stopped by to see you.”
Jazz grumbled, “Nick talked to my brothers.”
“Hal specifically. And Hal talked to Matt of course.” Way too proud of herself for having the inside scoop, Sarah sashayed to the nearest chair and sat down. “Matt called me from the station to tell me the news.”
“There is no news,” Jazz told her, but even before she said it, she knew Sarah would never be satisfied. Not with an explanation that flimsy. “I got jumped on Friday.” To prove it, she pointed to the bandages on her knees and elbows.
Sarah’s mouth dropped open and she sat up. “Why didn’t you call—”
“I knew you were out with Matt. I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Honey, life-and-death things are not a bother.” Sarah got up, the better to take a close look at the scrape on Jazz’s forehead, the tiny cut on her throat. She narrowed her eyes. “I hope Nick took the son of a bitch down.”
“I didn’t see him.”
“How much did he get?”
“I wasn’t robbed.”
“Then why—”
“Why do you think?”
Sarah dropped back into her chair. “Someone wants you to stop asking questions.”
“And that only makes me want to ask more questions.”
“Are you getting any answers?” Sarah wanted to know.
Jazz had called Eileen on Monday and told her what she and Nick had found out about Bernadette over the weekend, so she didn’t feel guilty sharing the news with Sarah, and when she was done telling the story of the Little Sisters of Good Counsel, of the convent, and the fact that Bernadette had been unceremoniously kicked to the proverbial curb, Sarah nodded.
“It explains a lot about her,” she said.
“But it doesn’t tell us anything about how she died.” All weekend, Jazz had been thinking about what she’d do at school that morning when she thought she’d have a few hours to herself. She still had the time, and she wasn’t going to let the fact that Sarah was there stop her.
She went into Eileen’s office and came out carrying the ring of little-used keys. She jangled them at Sarah.
“You coming?”
Sarah gulped. “To the fourth floor? I always thought it was creepy to have a part of the school that’s all locked up and never used. Now that I know there was a dead person up there…” She bounded out of her chair. “You bet I’m coming. I wouldn’t miss this for the world!”
At the locked door that led to the fourth-floor staircase, Jazz stopped and counted off the keys.
“Number six.” As if would prove something, she showed the key to Sarah. “Eileen always keeps the keys in the same order and number six is the key to this door. It’s back where it belongs now, but on Assembly Day when we came up here to get the room ready for the dog demonstration, the key was out of place.”
Sarah wrinkled her nose. “Eileen used it and put it back in the wrong place?”
They both knew Eileen didn’t make those kinds of mistakes.
It seemed like a no-brainer to Jazz. “Or someone else used it and put it back in the wrong place.”
“Like the killer.” Sarah made a face. “Or maybe Bernadette. Maybe she took someone up to the fourth floor. Or invited that person to meet her there. Maybe she didn’t realize how carefully Eileen kept the keys on the ring, how she kept them in a certain order.”
“Except if it was Bernadette…” Jazz stuck the key in the lock and turned it. “How did the key get back on Eileen’s key ring?” She swung open the door. “Ready?”
Sarah’s gaze darted up the steps. “I’m not so sure. What do you think you’re going to find up there?”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Jazz swung out an arm, inviting Sarah to go first, and once she did Jazz stepped into the small landing at the bottom of the stairs and closed the door behind them.
“You’re not…” She was already on the stairs, and Sarah’s face was a pale oval in the half darkness. “Are you locking us in up here?”
Jazz had been examining the door and yes, that’s exactly what she was planning on doing. “Just trying to figure it out,” she said. “If you were meeting someone up here … or you were coming up here with the intention of killing someone, how would you know you wouldn’t be interrupted? But see.” She turned on the flashlight app on her phone, the better to show Sarah what she saw. “You don’t need a key to lock the door from this side. There’s this turn thingie.” Jazz turned it and the old lock clunked into place. “You could be up here, locked in. And no one would know it.”
“That’s not very comforting,” Sarah grumbled, and when Jazz gave her a poke she scurried up the steps.
Up in the dormitory, Jazz looked around. Except for the scuff marks from the shoes of so many police officers, so many technicians picking and poking at Bernadette’s bones, nothing had changed from the day Jazz brought the dogs to the attic.
“Bernadette’s cousin told me that when he delivered a pizza that last day before Christmas break, there was a woman in Bernadette’s classroom with her,” she told Sarah. “You think the woman could have come up here with her?”
“And killed her?” It was warm outside, hot and stuffy in the attic, but still, Sarah chafed her hands over her arms. “Another teacher?”
“I wish I knew.” Jazz walked the perimeter of the attic, checking out the room from every angle, looking at the stairs, the windows. “According to Nick…” She ignored the look Sarah slanted her at the mention of his name. “Bernadette was strangled. So I’m thinking the killer came at her…” She rushed up behind Sarah and wrapped her fingers around Sarah’s neck, and after an initial second of surprise Sarah played along. “There probably would have been a struggle. This is probably just about right where Bernadette fell.”
“Well, I’m not getting down on the floor.” Sarah wiggled out of Jazz’s grasp. “I just took this skirt out of the wash.”
“You don’t have to lay on the floor.” Jazz stepped back and looked at where they were in relation to the door of the utility area where the bones were found. “It’s not far, but there’s a reason it’s called deadweight. Bodies are heavy. My guess is especially if the killer was a woman, she wouldn’t have been strong enough to carry Bernadette. She would have had to drag the body over to the utility room.”
“And she would have had to know the door was there, right?”
Jazz knew what Sarah was getting at. “You mean, she would have had to know that little room was a convenient place to stash the body? You’re right, but you know what, that brings up something even more interesting.”
The door was tucked into the space where the sloped ceiling and wall met, and Jazz hurried over to it and opened the door. Unlike the last time she’d fought with the door, it swung open easily. Like last time, it was dark inside the tiny room. “The killer would have had to be prepared,” Jazz said. “Nothing’s stored up here.” Just to be sure, she looked all around the attic. “That plastic the killer used to wrap the body must have been brought up here ahead of time. It was all planned. Down to the last details. The killer knew what was going to happen before he … or she … came up here with Bernadette.”
“But why here?” Sarah wanted to know. “Why would anybody willingly come up here? How did he … or she…” She echoed Jazz’s words. “What do you say to someone, ‘Come on up to the never-used attic because I’m planning to kill you and nobody’s going to find the body up there’? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“It really doesn’t,” Jazz agreed. “Unless there was something they had to get. Could something have been hidden up here? Stored up here? The girls, they’re always talking about how the fourth floor is haunted, how they sometimes hear footsteps. Maybe somebody—”
The theory would have to wait.
From the bottom of the stairs they heard a key slide into the lock.
“Come on!” Jazz whispered, and when all Sarah did was stand there, her gaze fixed on the stairway, her eyes wide and her cheeks as pale as the bits of dust that floated in the humid air, Jazz darted forward and grabbed her hand. “Sarah, come on! Over here.”
They stooped to fit through the doorway, slipped into the little room where only weeks before Bernadette had lain forgotten, and closed the door behind them.
It was stifling, cramped, and, except for the sliver of light that flowed from the attic beneath the door, pitch-dark in the tiny place, and Jazz didn’t dare use her flashlight app. She stood motionless, and when she saw Sarah twitch she put a finger to her lips, grabbed Sarah’s hand, and held on tight. Was she trying to calm Sarah? Or herself?
They listened to the clunk of footsteps coming up the stairs. They heard the shuffle of shoes on the wooden floor of the old dormitory.
Walking to her right.
Jazz made a mental note of it.
That meant the person was headed to the left of the stairway.
Now closer to that never-used roof access door.
The creek of rusted hinges made both Sarah and Jazz flinch.
Roof door. Jazz mouthed the words and pointed, but she doubted Sarah even noticed. Her body trembling, it took every ounce of courage she had for Sarah to keep still. To keep quiet.
Jazz couldn’t blame her. It was hard enough to keep calm when the person who might be the murderer was walking just a few feet way.
It was even harder if Sarah, whose imagination was way more lively than Jazz’s, was thinking what Jazz was thinking—they were in the dark. In the place where Bernadette had been entombed.
As quickly as the thought occurred, it raced out of Jazz’s head when the footsteps came back the other way and a shadow blocked the light. The handle on the utility room door jiggled.
And a phone buzzed a text message alert.
Thank goodness it wasn’t from Jazz’s or Sarah’s phone. Jazz slapped a hand over her own mouth to keep from gasping just as the person outside the door turned and went back down the steps.
If it was up to Sarah, they would have escaped the tiny room in a heartbeat. But Jazz stopped her, a hand on her arm. They waited a minute before Jazz let go the breath she was holding and signaled Sarah that they could leave.
“Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” Outside in the dormitory, Sarah shook off the fright and the dust that coated her newly washed skirt. “Jazz, that could have been—”
“Yeah, I know,” Jazz conceded. She didn’t wait. She went over to the roof access door.
“Word is this door has been nailed shut since forever,” she told Sarah, and at the same time she grabbed the handle and pulled the door open.
As it turned out, the door didn’t lead directly to the roof but to a small boxlike structure that had been built to provide extra insulation between the actual roof door and the inside attic door, extra protection against cold Cleveland winters.
Jazz stepped back so Sarah could see into the little room. “Something was in here. Look, you can see the way the dust is disturbed on the floor. Whoever that was, he just came and got something and took it downstairs. And if we’re quick enough—”
Jazz rushed down the stairs and into the third-floor hallway, but whoever had been up in the attic with them was not around now.
“But Jazz…” Behind her, Sarah whimpered. “What if—”
“Shhh!” Jazz heard a door bang closed and tried to gauge where the noise came from, but in the stillness, with the sound bouncing and echoing against the walls, it was impossible. “We’re good,” she assured Sarah. “We’re fine.” She looked at the cobwebs trailing from Sarah’s hair and laughed. “But whoever it was, we can’t let them see us like this.” She locked the door, and together they ducked into the nearest ladies’ room. “Let’s get cleaned up before we go back downstairs.”
It didn’t take Jazz long to brush her fingers through her hair, splash some water on her face, and dust off her shorts and T-shirt. Sarah’s pink skirt needed a little more tending to, as did Sarah herself. After the initial cleanup, Jazz left her in the art studio, still shaking, but with a box of vegan-approved chocolates open in front of her and the electric teapot she kept near her desk nearly at the boil.
They made a lunch date, and Jazz went downstairs. She stopped short at the door to her office.
But then, she didn’t expect to see Sam Tillner.
“How did you get in?” It was the wrong way to greet a guest to the school, but after the experience in the attic, Jazz couldn’t help herself. Suspicion hung in the air like the dust motes that floated around the attic.
“Sorry.” Tillner had been waiting in her guest chair and he stood. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t startle me; you confused me. We have a security system. How did you get in the school?”
“Oh, that!” Unlike at the funeral where he should have been in his Sunday best, he was dressed formally, in dark pants, a crisp white shirt, and a blue silk tie that was understated and all the more impressive because of it. He grabbed a plastic grocery bag that had been on the floor next to the chair.
“I tried to come in the front door, but it’s locked tight, and I knocked and a guy named Eddie came by and let me in.”
“Eddie should know better.”
“I told him…” Tillner closed in on Jazz. “I told him I just wanted to stop by and give you this.” He handed her the bag and Jazz peeked inside.
From what she could see, it was filled with bits and pieces of paper—a rubber-banded-together stack of cream-colored note cards with a border of blue flowers, a legal pad, a book of daily devotionals.
“It’s Bernadette’s,” he told her. “I found it all in a drawer, a piece of furniture I’m having refinished. It doesn’t look like much, but since you have the rest of her things, I thought you might want it.”
“Thank you,” she told him at the same time she looked him up and down. If he’d been up in the attic, his dark pants showed no traces of dust. But then, she and Sarah had taken the time to clean up. “How long have you been waiting?”
“Not long.” He checked his watch. “Which is a good thing, because I’ve got to get to work. There’s an auction today and a lot of work that needs to be done before it starts.” He stepped around Jazz and out into the hallway, and a minute later she heard the front door of the school close behind him just as Eileen stepped into the office.
“Bernadette’s cousin?” The principal glanced in the direction where Tillner had gone. “What did he want?”
Her mind spinning, Jazz went to her desk and deposited the grocery bag on it. “That’s a very good question.”