Dead Silence (Stillwater Trilogy #1)(26)
Author: Brenda Novak

“I don’t think so.”

Finally, the men climbed into their respective vehicles and drove off. When nothing but music broke the silence, Grace and Madeline got to their feet.

“Hurry,” Grace prompted, more than a little spooked.

“I can’t trip the lock,” Madeline complained, frustration lining her forehead. “I can’t find the tumbler. It’s different than the ones Kirk had me practice on last night.”

“So we can go home?” Grace asked hopefully.

“No. We’ll have to use the crowbar.”

“The what?”

Madeline was already removing a crowbar from her pack.

“Madeline, we can’t—”

Before Grace could even get the words out, Madeline had inserted the iron bar into the doorjamb. A moment later, a terrible scraping and wrenching blasted the air, then a pop sounded as the door broke open and swung wide. The dog next door barked, then apparently returned to his steak bone.

Grace stared wild-eyed around them. She was positive someone would come this time. But several seconds passed, and she heard nothing to indicate they’d drawn any attention.

“I hope you’re not going to turn on the lights,” Grace said, thrusting her stepsister’s gloves at her as they hurried inside.

“Of course not. Here.” Madeline put a long heavy object in Grace’s hands. A moment later, when Grace found the switch, she realized it was a flashlight.

“You’ve thought of everything, I see.”

“You take that side, I’ll take this one.”

The shop was a rectangular room with a cement floor, a reception counter in front and a bathroom in the far corner. It smelled of motor oil and featured a scarred wooden desk and racks and racks of auto parts—definitely not the kind of place in which Grace felt very comfortable. But now that they’d broken the door, she decided it was better to commit herself to the task at hand. Maybe if Madeline saw that they weren’t going to find any evidence here, she’d give up trying to prove that Jed had caused the death of her father.

“So far it looks like an auto repair shop,” she said.

Madeline swept her flashlight around the room. “There’re some filing cabinets along that wall.”

“There’re some on that wall, too,” Grace said, pointing at them.

“I’ll take the ones behind the desk. You take the ones in the corner.”

With a shrug, Grace moved to the three tall filing cabinets near the bathroom. The drawers of the first were labeled—work orders, parts orders, paid bills and catalogs.

The constant whine of the toilet running in the bathroom got on her nerves as, behind her, Madeline opened and closed file drawers with wild abandon. The beam of her stepsister’s flashlight bounced as she moved—until she found a drawer that was locked.

“Here it is,” she breathed.

Grace turned expectantly. “You want me to help you get it open?”

“No, I’ve got it. You might as well search the rest of the filing cabinets and the desk, just to be sure.”

Madeline took another small tool from her backpack, along with the crowbar, and Grace turned back to her own searching. She didn’t want to watch what Madeline was about to do. The list of their crimes was already scrolling through her head.

When she heard a large bang, Grace knew Madeline had managed to jimmy the drawer open and cringed at the thought of Jed finding it like that in the morning.

“Try not to mess things up too badly,” she cautioned. “I feel terrible about this.”

“I had to break the lock,” Madeline said. Her voice was too filled with anticipation to allow for much remorse. “That’s not a tremendous amount of damage—for a break-in. He’ll hardly know we were here.”

“Right. He’ll probably think he busted his own locks. Happens all the time.”

Madeline didn’t answer. She was too intent on going through the drawer.

“Anything?” Grace asked.

“Not yet,” she murmured.

All Grace could hear of the music at the pool hall was the percussion thumping rhythmically through the walls. Jed had been in business a long time and, as she moved to the second file cabinet, she began to believe he’d kept every slip of paper he’d ever come across.

“Talk about a packrat,” she grumbled. “Some of these work orders are more than ten years old.” The next drawer went back even farther than that.

Madeline said nothing.

“Maybe someone should tell Jed the IRS can’t audit you for tax returns older than seven years.”

“You tell him,” Madeline murmured. She had a folder in her hand and was looking through it carefully.

Grace was still halfheartedly rifling through her own files. “I’m not going to tell him anything.”

“Mmm…” Madeline said.

“Maybe you should write an article on record-keeping for the paper,” Grace suggested. “You could use Jed as an example.”

“Good idea.”

Madeline wasn’t listening. Giving up on the nervous chatter, Grace closed the bottom drawer of the middle filing cabinet and moved on to the third and last cabinet, which was pretty old and beat up. Dust an inch thick rested on top, along with baskets of ancient work orders yet to be filed and even a cracked coffee mug. In here, the records were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old.

“Jeez,” Grace said and almost shut the top drawer before even delving inside. What was the point? Madeline had already found the mysterious locked drawer and was busily combing through it.

But then she noticed something that made goose bumps stand out on her arms. The dates on the folders were growing closer and closer to that fateful night eighteen years ago. She wondered if Jed had kept the work order from when he’d fixed the tractor, and what it might say.

Her scalp began to tingle as she quickly thumbed through the August invoices. She didn’t find one dated that particular night, but she found one for the following day.

Taking off her gloves so she could grip the thin paper, she pulled it from the file. It was made out to her mother, which seemed a little odd. The reverend had always handled everything anyone could loosely interpret as “man’s work.”

Holding it in one hand, she thumbed through the next drawer and the next. All previous invoices showed the reverend’s name. Had the sudden switch occurred because Jed already knew, the very next morning, that the reverend wasn’t coming back? If so, he was the only one. It had taken two days for the community to launch a search. A full-grown man had never gone missing from Stillwater before. The reverend’s car had disappeared, as well, so at first everyone had assumed he’d taken off somewhere and would soon be back.