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Sandra laid her cheek against the green room’s door. “You guys doing okay in there?”
Corina’s response came immediately. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Sandra waited for more information, but none came. “Gloria? Do you want me to take her?”
“Absolutely not. She can either hold it or go in here.” She sounded exhausted and terrified. “We’re not coming out, and we’re not letting anyone else in.”
“Anyone else? Why, did someone try to get in?”
“Yes,” Gloria whispered. “Matthew. He said it was warm in here, but it’s not that warm anymore.”
“Did he try to force his way in?”
“No. He just begged.”
“Good.” Sandra looked up and down the dark hallway. “You guys are doing well. Did you find the phone?”
“No.”
She said it so quickly that Sandra wondered if they’d really looked, but how could she nag them about that? “Are you still looking?”
“No.” Another quick negative.
Sandra tried to think of a way to be tactful and couldn’t so she decided tact was unnecessary right now. “Did you do a thorough job? We really need to find it. Have you looked everywhere?”
“Yes!” Gloria’s voice was closer to the door now. “And I really don’t give a rat’s buttock about that stupid phone.”
Sandra tried not to be annoyed, and failed. “Even if it lets us catch the killer?”
Gloria snorted. “Catch him? What are you going to do with him then? What good does it do to catch him? Won’t that only make him mad?”
While Sandra was trying to figure out a way to respond to that, Bob appeared beside her with wet hair and flushed cheeks. She hadn’t known angels could get flushed cheeks. “I found it!” He opened his palm to reveal a giant iPhone in a bejeweled hot pink case.
Sandra gasped. “Where was it?”
“Where was what?” Gloria asked from the other side of the door.
“Uh ... nothing. Sorry.”
“Come on, let’s go to the prop room,” Bob said.
She couldn’t get there fast enough. Bob opened the door as if it had never been locked, and then Sandra stared around the room in wonder. It had been a mess before. Now it looked like a cyclone’s ground zero. “Uh ... what happened here?”
“Sorry,” Peter whispered, not looking the least bit sorry, his left hand full of ropes of varying sizes. “I’ve been looking for the phone.”
“In the rope box?” Bob asked.
Peter shrugged. “Seemed as good a place as any.” Despite her near-rabid curiosity about where Bob had found the phone, Sandra did pause to appreciate her son’s ingenuity.
Bob held up the phone. “You don’t need to look anymore.”
Ethel rushed over to peer at the phone. Peter folded the top of the rope box shut and sat down on it.
“Where was it?” Sandra asked impatiently. She was considering throttling an angel.
“Outside.” Bob looked around for a seat and then rearranged some totes to fashion himself a perch.
“Tell us!” Sandra almost-hollered.
He grinned mischievously. “Okay. So, I watched Jan find it. And it was weird. She found it in the sound booth, and she seemed surprised to find it. It was clear she hadn’t hidden it there. It was also clear she was greatly relieved to find it. She immediately tucked it into the waistband of her pants and then sneaked outside.
Sandra tried, but she couldn’t picture Jan sneaking anywhere.
“I followed her outside. She shuffled all the way across the lawn, only falling once, and then she—”
“She fell?” Ethel asked, her voice sweet with concern.
“Yes. For a minute, I thought I’d have to rescue her, but she managed to get herself upright and then she continued toward the drop-off on the side of the lawn.”
Sandra again tried to visualize what Bob was describing, but she didn’t know about any drop off. The lawn was huge, and she could believe, in this mountainous terrain, that there was indeed a drop-off at the edge of it.
“And then she wound back and threw the phone into the woods.”
“Over the edge?” Peter asked.
“Over the edge.”
They all took a few seconds to absorb that.
“Why would she do that?” Sandra asked.
“It’s a good thing you were the one to go get it,” Peter mused. “It would’ve taken me forever. I’m not even sure I’d be able to climb back up here.”
“Yes, I admit that I didn’t do much climbing.”
“Why would she throw the phone away?” Sandra asked again. She didn’t give a hoot about how difficult it would be for a human to climb back up the mountain. That was why she’d invited an angel to assist her investigation.
“I have no idea,” Bob said.
Sandra held her hand out. “Can I look at it?”
Bob handed it over. The phone was still on, though the battery was low. Sandra wasn’t surprised by this. It seemed reasonable that Treasure would put a hurting on her phone battery, especially out here in the willywacks where there was no signal. She scrolled through recent messages, hoping to find something interesting, but found nothing of note. She did notice that Treasure didn’t have a lot of female contacts. She opened the photo gallery and gasped.
“What?” Peter asked.
Sandra’s cheeks got hot, and she hoped people wouldn’t notice in the dim light. She looked up at Bob. “There’s a photo ...” Words failed her.
“Of?”
She handed the phone back to him, and he looked down at the screen. “Oh dear.”
“Exactly.”
He swiped the screen with his thumb. “Oh dear,” he said again. He swiped again. “Oh my.”
“The third one got an ‘oh my’ instead of an ‘oh dear,’” Ethel said. “That one must be a doozy.”
Sandra snickered. “I only saw the first one, and I wish I could burn it out of my brain. I’m afraid it may be lodged there till the day I die.”
“What is it?” Peter asked. “Is she naked?”
Bob nodded. “And she’s not alone.” He turned the screen off and looked up at everyone. “But the man in the pictures isn’t anyone here, so I don’t think the pictures are related.”
“But there must be something incriminating on the phone, or Jan wouldn’t have thrown it off a cliff,” Sandra said.
Bob nodded. “I’ll keep looking at it. And in the meantime, we need to keep a close eye on Jan. She’s obviously involved.”
“It wasn’t Jan who dragged me to the shed.”
“Are you sure?” Sandra asked. “Jan is a strong woman.” She’d seen her move giant sets like they were made of paper.
Doubt flickered across his face. “I don’t think so. Maybe she smells like a man. I’ve never sniffed her. But I doubt she has hairy arms.”
“That’s it!” Bob bounced to his feet.
“What’s it?” Sandra asked, after giving him time to elaborate.
“As strange as it sounds, I think we need to go around and let Peter sniff people.”