Hide nor Hair (A Jersey Girl Cozy Mystery Book 2) (19 page)

I soon decided on a different tactic.

I called HAK Heating and Cooling early Saturday evening to report a fictitious problem with my thermostat. The office was closed, and I left a message on their answering machine. I was surprised when half an hour later, a woman called me to set up an appointment.

“I can have someone come out to your house tomorrow afternoon to take a look at it,” the woman said.

“On a Sunday?” I asked, surprised.

“I’ll say it’s an emergency. I know we recently installed a new furnace and central air unit, Mrs. Caruso, so they would have replaced your old thermostat, too. The new ones are a little complicated. It’s probably nothing more serious than that. I know I can’t program mine by myself. I make my husband do it.”

I realized the caller was one of the two women who worked at the HAK office during the day. Apparently, they retrieved their phone messages after hours in case of an emergency.

“Actually, it was Matthew Oliver who installed my units. I’d feel better if he came personally. He explains things so well …”

“I’m sorry. Mr. Oliver is away for a couple of days,” she informed me. “He should be back by Monday. I can send someone else …”

“Monday?” I interrupted. “It can wait until Monday. I think the heat is over and done with, and we’re certainly not expecting snow. It’s good he’s gotten away. I hope he’s someplace fun and exotic.”

The woman on the other end chuckled. “Not likely. He’s off to Atlantic City again. He flew down with his pilot friend this morning. They both needed to get away. No need to tell you, of all people, why.”

I thanked the woman and hung up. I felt a quiver of excitement inside me. Matthew Oliver’s timing was perfect. He was gone and wouldn’t be back until Monday. He even brought Hank Barber with him—two extremely recent widowers consoling themselves at a blackjack table. I called upstairs to Sara that I would soon be going out for a while and to keep an eye out for Bobby, since he was still at his grandparents’ house watching a movie with my father. Next, I searched online for Matthew Oliver’s address. HAK Heating and Cooling had a post office box, but further research yielded an address listing out on Route 34. I grabbed my keys and jumped in the Sentra before giving myself the chance to think it through.

What if this house belonged to a different Matthew Oliver? It wasn’t exactly a unique name. Though Matthew had told me his house felt too quiet, what if someone else lived in the house with him now that Dizzie was gone—another woman perhaps, or worse, his parents. Derek Oliver looked like a miserable old man. His bulk and his constant sour expression, undoubtedly from years of unclogging area toilets, were meant to intimidate.
Okay
, I thought,
I could at least drive by and see if there’s any activity on the property
.

Traveling north on Route 34, I was able to spot the address right away because of the position of the mailboxes. They were all placed near the highway for the convenience of the mail carriers. The homes were far apart and set back on acres of land, many hidden by trees along that mostly rural stretch of the road. Traffic was light, and I was able to do an illegal U-turn and go back. I slowed to a crawl and put on my flashers when I reached the property. I spotted an HAK Heating and Cooling truck off to the side of a triple-width driveway and pulled in. There were many trees on the lot, but not nearly enough to provide the privacy I needed. I drove up close to the house and turned the Sentra around so the car would be pointed nose out in case I had to leave in a hurry.

The night was dark and clear, and the lot was illuminated by a bright full moon and solar landscape lighting. I reached inside the glove compartment and took out a flashlight before getting out. I doubted anyone could see activity on the property from the roadway. The closest house to Matthew’s place was directly across from his on Route 34. Unless the neighbor was particularly nosy, I doubted anyone in that house would be able to see me.

I eased the car door shut and stepped out.

The front yard seemed to be filled with pumpkins. A crazy cardboard skeleton hung from the front door. Some of the shrubs had fake spider webs on them that draped from their clipped tops and cascaded to the ground. The effect was good. Matthew must have done all the work by himself. Dizzie had died in September—too early for Halloween decorations.

So far, so good
, I thought and went around to the back of the structure. The rear of the property had enough trees to fill the Amazon rainforest. I gave one last glance to my surroundings and tried the basement door.

I didn’t expect it to be unlocked, and it wasn’t. I climbed the stairs leading to the back deck and jiggled the handles on the exquisite French doors leading into the Olivers’ kitchen. They, too, were locked up tight.

I flicked on the flashlight to find my way back down the stairs to Matthew’s basement. The door was one of those flimsy types, with three rectangular panes of glass on the top and three rectangular recessed wood panels on the bottom—a burglar’s dream entry. Unfortunately, in order to unlock the deadbolt, I would have to break the glass—something I didn’t have the nerve to do. I returned to the steps that led to the deck and sat down to think things through.

Suppose Matthew locked himself out of the house? What would he do?
I wondered. I knew what I would do—go to my mother’s house to get the spare key. And if my mother wasn’t home, then what would I do? Why, I would go to the pile of stones beneath my deck and get the spare key I hid there in a fake rock made specifically for that purpose. I turned on the flashlight and aimed it at the stones under the deck.

There, among the smaller stones, was a rock so ridiculously like the one I had at home that I lifted my hand to my mouth to stifle a laugh. The deception wouldn’t fool a blind burglar at either of our houses, and I felt glad Matthew Oliver was as stupid as I was. I crawled on my hands and knees and retrieved the rock, opened it, and lifted out the key.

I returned to the basement door, which opened so easily I was sure something was bound to go wrong. I swung my flashlight toward the doorjamb and searched for a sensor that would indicate an alarm system had been installed. There wasn’t one.

I entered the house and closed the door firmly behind me.

Inside, Christmas decorations were tossed haphazardly in a corner. Plastic storage bins had been neatly stacked beneath the stairs that led to the first floor. Mops and brooms rested against a large utility sink, which stood beside the matching front-loader washer and dryer. Halfway in, I spotted a large, new-looking furnace, and one of those compact hot-water heaters similar to those I had once seen on
This Old House
.

I went to the stairs and started to climb. The door at the top, luckily, wasn’t locked. I entered the Oliver’s kitchen and took in the cooking island, the French-country kitchen table and chairs, and the beautiful white cabinets with glass fronts. On the table was the remainder of a meal. A portion of the leftover food had congealed. In a corner of the plate, something else had turned an unappetizing dark brown and had hardened. I couldn’t tell what any of it had once been.

“Yuck!” I whispered. Matthew wasn’t the tidiest person in Tranquil Harbor. Obviously, he hadn’t shacked up with anyone since Dizzie’s death. No woman on the planet would stand for something like that.

I left the kitchen and crossed a formal dining room. At the front of the house in the living room, I glanced out a large picture window. I could see the driveway and the HAK truck parked off to the side and, further down, my own Nissan. With the exception of the solar lights in the front yard, everything else out front looked dark. I scanned the room with my flashlight and found the steps that led to the upstairs bedrooms. Dizzie’s jewelry, of course, would most likely have been kept up there.

I took each riser slowly, careful not to trip and fall. There were five doors in the upstairs hallway. I swept the doorways with the flashlight. Two of the rooms were guest rooms, one room had been converted into a home office, and one of the doors led to a gorgeous master bath. The fifth door opened to a spacious bedroom suite.

“Wow!” I said, thoroughly impressed with the size of the room. I lived in a fairly large house, but my own bedroom was on the cramped side by comparison. The furnishings had a distinctive French whorehouse look. However large and impressive, though, the room looked like something out of the TV show
Hoarders
.

Apparently Matthew deemed it easier to toss his dirty laundry around the room rather than simply drop the soiled garments in the hamper. There were used paper plates on the dresser, the nightstand, and on the console that held a flat screen TV. The blankets and sheets on the king-size bed were rumpled and spilling over onto the floor. I spotted half-empty cans of soda and half-f cups of coffee that looked like they’d been sitting around for several weeks. Dizzie would have killed her husband for creating such a mess, if she weren’t already dead herself.

A faint scratching sound came from somewhere behind me, and I spun around to take aim with the flashlight. Something had moved beneath a pile of clothes near the open door of a walk-in closet.

“Rats!” I muttered, feeling far more grossed out than I had downstairs in the kitchen. My heart stopped pounding when I heard a muffled meow and spotted a calico-colored cat pawing its way out from beneath the soiled laundry. “Here, kitty,” I whispered. The little cat ambled toward me.

I turned back and kept the beam of the flashlight pointed down as I gingerly crossed through the chaos on the floor to reach the jewelry armoire. It sat beneath a high window that overlooked the backyard and the woods beyond. I slid open one of the many drawers. Inside were several bangles and watches. Another drawer yielded a few chain-type bracelets—all gold and very familiar-looking. These were all pieces that Dizzie had usually worn on a day-to-day basis.

Another drawer produced a stash of earrings. These, too, were familiar to me. The top of the armoire lifted up like a hinged lid. Inside were several compartments meant to hold earrings and rings. I recognized Dizzie’s wedding band right away when the beam from the flashlight caught it. The four other rings failed to jog my memory.

Two doors on the outside of the armoire were also hinged, and I opened these together. Inside, various chains hung neatly from hooks. These were unfamiliar to me, as Dizzie rarely wore chains that dangled from her neck. I searched again through each drawer and compartment. I couldn’t find the prized Tiffany bracelet.

“Could it have been a robbery gone wrong after all?” I asked myself. I didn’t know if Matthew had something to do with Dizzie’s death or not. But if he had pawned the Tiffany bracelet somewhere, why would these pieces, which were obviously worth a good amount of money, still be in her jewelry case?

I heard a muffled sound beyond the bedroom door. I called out, “Here kitty kitty,” and swung the flashlight around to look. There were footsteps on the stairs, made by far bigger feet than the little calico cat’s dainty feline paws. I killed the flashlight a second before a powerful beam of light temporarily blinded me.

The lamps on the nightstands sprang to life. Officer James O’Reilly snapped off his flashlight and shoved it into a loop on his belt.

“Nice to see you again, Mrs. Caruso,” he said. For the first time since I’d known him, he wasn’t smiling. “I’m sorry, but I have to take you in.”

18

I had never actually been deep inside the Tranquil Harbor police department. On my one and only visit there to pay for a speeding ticket, I had gone to a small window just inside the entrance that was dedicated expressly for that purpose. That window was where my familiarity with the local police department both began and ended.

I had always imagined the inner workings of the Tranquil Harbor PD to be like a police station from an old black-and-white gangster movie, except there was no high desk with a humorless sergeant seated behind it who gazed down at the cops dragging in handcuffed criminal-types for interrogation. I was surprised to find a moonfaced, middle-aged, uniformed officer seated behind a bright counter decorated with pumpkins and comical-looking plastic goblins. The waiting area consisted of a dozen uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs, a vending machine, and deep blue carpeting in desperate need of steam cleaning. There were double glass doors behind the desk sergeant, which led to a short, brightly lit hallway. I noticed a wide staircase off to the right. The place reminded me a little of the motor vehicle office.

“I put in a call for Ron Haver to come down,” Officer O’Reilly told the man behind the desk. “I know he’d like to speak to this woman.”

I wasn’t in handcuffs and thought I was fortunate not to be. I don’t know if my kids would find any of this amusing, but they might. My mother, on the other hand, would be furious. Between my night with Ken Rhodes and now this, she would curse me out in Italian and drag me off to confession the minute I made bail.

Officer O’Reilly had a pretty firm grip on my arm. I wondered if he thought I’d try to make a break for it. I looked down at the floor, hanging my head in shame, humiliated by the entire situation.

“Take Room 5,” the sergeant behind the desk told him. “It’s private enough so you can beat a confession out of her without too many witnesses.”

I looked up at the man behind the desk. He winked at me and smiled broadly.

We walked past the squad room, where the desks stood mostly unoccupied. Only two looked as though someone had been recently working at them, with screen savers flickering random images and papers cluttering the desktops. A woman carrying a coffee mug excused herself as she temporarily blocked our way and went into the office to sit at one of desks.

“Saturday night,” O’Reilly informed me as he guided me further down the corridor. “Everyone’s out on calls.”

I heard, rather than saw, several voices behind a door with a small wire glass window. Officer O’Reilly didn’t have to explain this area of the police station to me.

“9–1–1. State your emergency,” a dispatcher said in a loud, clear voice from behind the closed door.