It was Luz.
“She’s been dead for a while, Mel,” she said, her voice gentle. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“But . . . could this be . . . ?” My mind flashed on the Murder House next door. Had its evil seeped onto this property? Could Monty, to all appearances a decent guy in a wheelchair, have been killing women and stashing their bodies in his shed? Could there be a whole cache of bodies hidden in the home’s crawl space?
Don’t be ridiculous, I scolded myself. I was letting my imagination run away with me. Monty didn’t have the mobility to get into the crawl space of his house even if he wanted to. Nor would he be able to transport a dead body here to the shed at the bottom of his sloped yard. He told me he hadn’t even been to the basement floor of his house since his accident. He couldn’t even get out of his house unassisted, which was why we were building the ramp.
Luz’s dark eyes scanned the area, checking out the neighbors’ house.
“Could be anything,” she said. “In fact, I heard those kids talking about drugs being dealt out of the vacant house next door. And the way this shed is situated, it looks like it straddles both properties. Look, there are access doors on both ends . . . are we even sure this is Monty’s shed?”
I shook my head. “I guess . . . not. Monty’s cottage used to be an outbuilding to the big house. Since there’s no real fence . . . it’s hard to tell where one property ends and the other begins.”
“It’s probably as simple as that, then,” Luz said, wrapping an arm around me. “Probably someone bought some drugs, wandered down here for privacy . . . and that was the end of the story.”
The end of her story, that was for sure. Poor woman.
“Cops are on their way,” said Stephen as he joined us. He was as breathless as if he’d run a 5K. “I asked for Inspector Crawford since we already know her. I figured that way you wouldn’t have to go through the whole ‘why do you keep finding bodies’ routine.”
“You think her knowing me from other crime scenes makes my being here less suspicious?”
“I hadn’t really thought of it that way,” said Stephen, his hand flat on his chest, as though willing his heart to slow down. “My heart’s pounding. Are your hearts pounding?”
“No,” said Luz. “My heart’s steady as a rock. Sounds like a guilty conscience—you sure you didn’t kill her, Stephen?”
Stephen ignored her. “I don’t really think I should call back and cancel, though, do you? That would seem suspicious, wouldn’t it?”
“You got that right,” said Luz, glaring at him.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “I’ll just call her myself to explain why we requested her.” I had Inspector Annette Crawford’s direct number stored on my phone as a result of our earlier interactions. Her number was not, however, on speed dial. That was something, I reassured myself.
Inspector Crawford said that she would send over a car immediately and we were not to touch anything. She repeated “don’t touch anything” several times.
Now what? Luz planted herself in front of the shed, arms akimbo, prepared to ward off invading hordes. Stephen stood nearby for moral support, though he was still breathing hard and looked so ill at ease I half expected him to blurt out a spontaneous confession of homicide. The frat boys and a dozen others attracted by the commotion stood around them in a loose semicircle, whispering and trying without success to peer into the shed’s dim interior.
I looked at the volunteers swarming over Monty’s house and wondered, Should I shut everything down? It felt unseemly to worry about such prosaic issues at a time like this, but I hesitated to send everyone home. That might mean leaving the project half-finished, and if that happened I might have to pay my regular, nonvolunteer construction crew to come out here to complete the job.
I crossed over to Luz’s tool cache, unearthed a small brown paper bag, and brought it to Stephen, who was now—quite predictably—hyperventilating.
“Luz, do me a favor?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
“Stop me before I volunteer again.”
• • •
I couldn’t get folks to leave. Although the police had, as I had feared, ordered the renovations suspended pending the outcome of the investigation, most of the volunteers loitered out front, curious about the goings-on. I had thanked them, suggested they volunteer across the street at my dad’s site tomorrow, and offered them the leftover food, but still they lingered.
It’s odd how fascinated we humans seem to be with the demise of other humans, but, like the impulse to check out a car crash as we roll by, it seems to be pretty much universal. Unfortunately, I was learning this with experience.