Chapter Forty
Normally, Sarah respected Harlan’s privacy, especially when his office door was closed. Not today. With Bill and Richard dead, the refrigerator sabotaged, someone tampering with the brownies that Grace and Emily ate, and the fire damaging Southwind, she felt Harlan’s out-of-character appointment with Jacob made him fair game. Sarah made a beeline for Harlan’s office. The door was locked.
She hesitated, surprised and confused Harlan felt the need to do more than close his office door. Was he deliberately keeping her out or had he locked it out of the same skittishness that made her hurry to lock the front door? No matter, she was on a mission now.
Returning to her desk, she found the small jewelry box she kept in the back of her center drawer. She removed the extra passkey to Harlan’s office he’d given her on her first day of work. “Sarah,” he’d said, “you’ll need this only if I want to avoid someone and escape out the back door or if I hit the lock button by accident.”
Up to now she’d never needed to use it, but then again, Harlan had never locked her out before. Sarah slipped the key into the lock. It turned easily.
Inside his office, she closed the door, flipped the overhead light on, and looked around to see where the file or memo might be. She checked his “out” basket first, but it was empty. A quick glance revealed the coffee table and the small, round, marble inlaid conference table in the corner of his office had nothing on them. If he hadn’t taken it home, that left Harlan’s desk as the logical place for the memo.
Rather than trying to read the few things lying on his desk upside down, she walked around the well-polished mahogany piece. She moved his leather chair back a few inches to allow her to slip her legs under the lip of the drawer. She’d never realized how high Harlan’s chair was set.
There were no papers stuck in or on the desk blotter. A marble-based gold pen-and-pencil set was centered on the desk above the blotter. An etched United States Supreme Court building and the slogan JUSTICE FOR ALL adorned a glass mug filled with sharpened pencils and a few pens that sat to the far side of the blotter. Two manila folders were stacked next to the blotter.
She pulled the handle of the middle desk drawer, but it didn’t give. A quick check revealed all the drawers were locked, so she turned her attention to the file folders. Sarah opened the first one and skimmed the pages in it. One was Bill’s codicil to the animal trust naming Jane RahRah’s trustee, and the other documents were the ones relating to Bill’s estate that Harlan previously showed her—only these were stamped “draft.” She flipped through the other pages in the file quickly but slowed when she came to a group of deeds she hadn’t seen before.
All of them conveyed property to B&E, Inc., a corporation Sarah wasn’t familiar with, but none were signed. Several of the sellers’ names sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place them until she examined the fourth deed. It purported to sell the property of George Rogers to B&E, Inc.
Sarah went back to the first deed and looked more closely at the address of the property being sold. It was on Bill’s street. She went through the other deeds quickly. Each of the unexecuted deeds was for the sale of one of the properties belonging to one of Bill’s neighbors.
Behind the deeds was a paper headed “Buyouts,” but buyouts of what? She glanced at the list of five names. Next to four were recent dates. The fifth name, which didn’t have a date beside it, was Jane’s. There were no other papers in the file, so she opened the second folder.
It contained title descriptions and maps of some of the properties included in the stack of deeds in the other folder. There also was an artist’s schematic rendering of “Main Street.” The diagram showed multifamily housing, restaurants, and shops. Notations on the drawing caught her eye. She held it closer to the light to read the words “Southwind Restaurant” with a question mark written on Bill’s house.
Sarah studied the labeling on the rest of the diagram. The two houses to the right of Bill’s weren’t marked. Mr. Rogers’s house and the one next to his were designated as a restaurant and store, respectively. Two smaller homes, farther down the street, read “gallery” and “craft center.” There was nothing written on the homes she knew already were subdivided into apartments.
She thought about the house that had been torn down. Sarah checked to see if anything had been written in its space. It had. It read “park.”
Unsure of what she was looking at, but wanting to be able to study it in more detail, she started to take the pages to the copy machine. As she approached the door, a creaking sound made her jump. She stopped and listened. Nothing. She inched to the door and pressed her ear to it. Could someone be out there? But how could they have gotten in? She looked around for a weapon to defend herself. She heard another creak, this time behind her. She jumped around, her heart in her throat. No one was there. She felt foolish reacting so dramatically to the sounds of a settling house.
Still, in case Harlan came back, she didn’t want to explain why she was at the copy machine with folders from his locked office. She whipped out her smartphone and quickly shot copies of the schematic, a sampling of the deeds, and the buyout list. She started to put the files and Harlan’s chair back in their original positions but decided she’d also like copies of the documents supposedly giving Jane custody of RahRah.
The unmistakable crunch of tires in the alley behind the office made Sarah jump. Abandoning her task, she shoved the pages back into the files, straightened them to look like she had found them, and switched off the light. As Sarah pushed the lock button of the door while she pulled it closed behind her, she realized she no longer heard a car’s motor.
She plopped into her own desk chair, grabbing the top document from her to-be-filed pile in her trembling right hand, while throwing the key to Harlan’s office into her desk with her left.
The door from Harlan’s office opened. “I didn’t expect to still find you here.”
“Just finishing up. I thought you were gone for the day.”
“I forgot a few things, so I swung by to get them before I went to the contest.” He looked at his watch. “You better hurry if you don’t want to miss the beginning. The Civic Center parking lot was almost full when I passed it.”
Sarah nodded. She didn’t know if he was merely being helpful or wanted to get rid of her. It didn’t matter. She grabbed her purse and fled, without enlightening him that she had walked to work.
Outside, Sarah let out a sigh of relief as she distanced herself from Harlan’s building. One part of her wanted to go straight home and review what she’d just recorded with her phone, but the desire to bounce everything off Emily before the contest began made her quicken her steps toward the Civic Center. She was sure anyone she passed could see her knees shaking. She wished she’d never gone to the office today, but there was no turning back the clock.
Nothing made sense to her. It was apparent from the artist’s rendering and the unsigned deeds that someone had major designs to develop Bill’s street but that was all it was—drafts and plans. The renderings appeared to be final schematics, but none of the deeds were signed. Plus, Jane and RahRah setting up a permanent residence in the carriage house and Sarah’s recent run-in with Mr. Rogers underscored that whoever was behind this project lacked the most important thing—ownership of the properties.
Was Harlan the one trying to buy up the properties or was he representing someone else? Could sweet, kind Harlan be part of something shady? She didn’t want to jump to the conclusion he was a backstabber, but she had found the papers on his desk. The deeds obviously were drafted by someone with legal knowledge.
Then again, perhaps things were more innocent than they appeared. Maybe Jane’s call and the papers on his desk were because he was drawing up a new deed or will for her.
Sarah knew she’d never typed the deeds or seen them before today. That was strange because, with Harlan being a terrible typist, her job required her to type everything, including his personal correspondence. Of course, nothing could have stopped him from asking someone who didn’t work for him to type the documents or having another lawyer prepare them for his review.
Sarah wondered whether he or a developer really thought they could convince the various owners to sell their properties. What would it take to have no holdouts? She couldn’t imagine Mr. Rogers letting anyone push him from the house he loved. No, he wasn’t going to move off the street until he was carried out of his home in a pine box.
At the idea of Mr. Rogers protecting his property to the end, another thought crossed her mind. Maybe Bill was dead because of his unwillingness to sell his property to the mysterious developer.
Up to now, Sarah and Emily had linked Bill’s and Richard’s murders to food or Southwind. The idea of economic development introduced completely different possibilities. From reading mysteries and what she’d learned living with Bill, Sarah knew a good detective always followed the money. There might be money in food, but there certainly were bigger profits to be made from being on the ground floor of a project of this magnitude.