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Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon(48)

By:Donna Andrews






    Beneath the IP addresses, I found several long, abstruse legal documents. I got through a few paragraphs before deciding I’d better keep them for bedtime reading.





    And at the bottom of the compartment, I found what looked like a small flashlight. I checked it out - aha! It was actually a small portable black light. Which did solve my problem of how to get my hands on one so I could check the mail cart path. But I couldn’t think of any good reason for Ted to have hidden it here. Everyone knew he was fascinated with the mail cart and had been fooling around with changing its path. Why bother to hide the evidence of his pranks?





“For this, you need a secret compartment?” I said aloud. Then again, maybe he hadn’t built me secret compartment; maybe he’d found it and decided to use it. But even I could have found a better collection of things to hide in a secret compartment. “Jeez, Ted. Is that the best you could do? Is that it?”





    I peered down into the compartment. Yes, that was it. Well, almost it. I saw a small, triangular white shape - the corner of a piece of paper that was trying to disappear through the crack between the side of the compartment and the bottom.





    I grabbed the kitchen knife I’d used to open the trapdoor, and carefully teased the rest of the paper out, before it could disappear into whatever spider-infested crawl space was behind the stairs.





    It appeared to be a printout of a computer spreadsheet, like the ones I used to calculate my budget. Down the left half of the paper was a series of words or phrases, like “the Voyeur,”





“the Ninja,”





“Mata Hari,” and “the Iron Maiden.” Eleven entries in all, and beside each one were a dozen columns of notes in tiny, barely readable type. Some of the words I could decipher - things like “struck out” or “no dice.” But most of it…





“I need more time and better light to deal with this,” I muttered. Although I figured it would be worth dealing with. From the date on the upper right-hand corner, it had been printed on Saturday - only two days before the murder. And one of the labels on the left was THE HACKER. SO maybe the printout would help me figure out the meaning of the strange collection of objects I’d found beneath the trapdoor.





    I found an empty grocery bag in Mrs. Sprocket’s pantry - actually, I found several hundred, but I needed only one - loaded the contents of the secret compartment into it, and stashed it in my trunk.





    But after I locked the house back up, I decided to explore the yard a little. The driveway continued behind the house, although I deduced from the three- and four-foot dogwood seedlings in the middle of it that no one had driven that way for several years. I followed the driveway and discovered an enormous weathered barn.





    My cell phone rang. Michael.





“So what are you up to?” he asked.





“I’m not sure,” I said. “Do you have to be breaking into someone’s actual house for it to be burgling? Or would someone’s barn count, too?”





“I know I’m going to regret this, but whose barn are you burgling?”





“Ted’s. Or his landlord’s.”





    I wedged the phone between shoulder and ear and explained, briefly, what I’d been doing, while rummaging through my purse for something that would serve as a makeshift screwdriver. The door was secured with a relatively new padlock, but since the screws holding the hasp onto the door were already half-loose, it took only a few minutes to remove the hasp entirely.





“There, I’ve got it,” I reported to Michael. “And I bet the police didn’t search in here. They couldn’t have, unless there’s another way in - the padlock was swathed in spiderwebs.”





“You don’t think maybe the spiderwebs are a sign that there’s nothing worth finding in the barn?”





“Not necessarily,” I said. “I mean obviously there’s no evidence of the murder in here, given the spiderwebs; but there could be something that gives me a clue to why he was killed.”





“Meg, be careful,” Michael said.





“I will,” I said. “Stand by, and I’ll give you a blow-by-blow description of what I see.”





    I began pulling open the barn door. I was wondering if I should fetch the flashlight I kept in my car, when something struck me on the head and I lost consciousness.