Chapter 17
Her
Levi and I stood outside the dilapidated building that’d been Red’s Auto Shop, peering into the window.
Turning to him, I asked, “Can I borrow your phone for a sec?”
He reached into his back pocket and handed it over, no questions asked. I was starting to really love this guy.
The screen was severely cracked, but the phone was still functional. I felt my insides twist a bit; Levi had to make this phone last because he couldn’t afford a new one. It made me all the more determined to get him that reward money.
After tapping at the screen a few seconds, I handed it back to him and turned my attention once again to the window, squinting into the darkness again.
“What’re we looking for?” he asked.
Through the window, I shined the flashlight I’d borrowed from the tool kit in the storage room from Wanda’s. “That,” I said, pointing across the space to the far wall, where a security camera hung from a bracket that’d been bolted to the ceiling.
Levi hedged closer to me, peering over my shoulder. “A security camera?”
Instead of answering him, I stepped back from the window, looking up at the structure. “In twenty-five years, this place has never been torn down, sold, or renovated. Don’t you find that curious?”
Levi shrugged. “Small town with limited resources. Hell, my mom used to gripe that the town hadn’t updated any of the playground equipment at the elementary school since her mom went there. All of it’s falling apart.”
I considered that. “Still,” I began, “who installs a security camera in an old, abandoned building?”
“How do you know the camera wasn’t put there by Red Shoemaker?”
“First of all, the security cameras twenty-five years ago didn’t look like that modern black dome in there. They were boxy and looked like actual cameras.”
“How do you know that?”
I stared at him for a beat. How did I know that? “I…just do. But that’s only half of it. My other point is to ask why Red Shoemaker’s heirs—assuming he had any—would need to mount a security camera inside this abandoned building?”
Levi shrugged again. “Maybe Red left behind some valuable tools, and his heirs keep ’em stored here.”
I shone the light around the exterior of the building. Garbage, dead leaves, and overgrown weeds were sprouting up everywhere. Some graffiti tattooed the side of the building, and a broken window had been boarded up at some point.
I put my flashlight up to the dusty window again, cupping my hand around my eyes to better see inside.
“If there’s a camera in there, and it’s working, then there’s electricity running to this place, and Wi-Fi, which is probably more expensive to run than renting some storage shed somewhere for any expensive tools or machinery, which would definitely be more secure than this dump.”
I glanced up at Levi, who’d cocked his head slightly. “That is weird.”
“There’s something in there, Levi. Something someone wants to protect. Something more than tools or machinery.”
“Like what, though?”
“Secrets,” I whispered. “Nobody goes to this level of expense for twenty-five years without the fear of exposure.”
“So, what do we do?” Levi glanced nervously around. There was no one anywhere nearby. It had gotten late and darkness had fallen, so I was fairly certain I could propose what I wanted to do next with relatively few witnesses—other than the most important witness, that is.
I moved over to a piece of the curb that had crumbled over time next to the building. Picking it up, I shuffled to the window and threw it against the glass with all my might.
The window shattered, and as the tinkling of glass petered out, I turned to Levi, who was standing stiffly and with huge, wide eyes, and said, “We break in.”
“Maddy, are you crazy?!”
I paused to consider that before reaching through the window to unlatch it so that we could get inside. With a shrug, I said, “Maybe? I had a pretty severe concussion, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility.”
“You can’t go in there!”
I reached carefully past the jagged pieces of glass that still clung to the window frame and unlatched the sash lock, then pulled back my hand and pushed up on the lower pane. It rose all the way up, which allowed me to hoist myself up onto the ledge and swivel inside.
Hopping down to the floor, I turned back to Levi, who continued to stare at me like I’d suddenly gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. “Apparently, I can, Levi. It’s fine if you don’t want to join me, but it’s necessary for the next part of the plan.”
I didn’t wait for him to make up his mind, I simply turned and followed the beam of my flashlight over to an object that I’d spotted across the garage. My intuition had lit up the second I spied it, and I knew it was the key to a twenty-five-year-old mystery.
Before I got there, I heard scuffling behind me, followed by hurried footsteps, then I felt Levi come up next to me. “We gotta get out of here, Maddy! This is breaking and entering!”
I glanced around at the empty garage. There were no tools. No machinery. Nothing of value anywhere. That’d all been taken out not long after Red Shoemaker’s death, I imagined.
What was even more apparent, however, were the big holes in the wall all over the interior. It was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, trying to find a secret room or a stash of some kind.
And I had little doubt that’s exactly what the killer had done.
Red Shoemaker had been murdered for the same reason Doug Maydole had been murdered. He knew too much about yet another murder.
“Maddy, what’re we doing here?” Levi asked anxiously. I could hear the tremor in his voice. I knew I was putting him at risk, but I needed to tie him to this moment so that there’d be no question about who the reward money should go to.
“Just give me a sec, Levi,” I muttered as something caught my eye.
Nearly straight ahead, on the wall was a horseshoe, turned upside down to keep the luck in.
It was somewhat corroded, which told me it’d been on that wall for a long time.
And that’s when something somewhat extraordinary bubbled up to my conscious mind.
I remembered being around four years old and standing in front of the TV as several adults in the room were yelling at the screen.
Unfolding was a horse race where a beautiful red colt, ridden by a jockey in powder blue and pink silks, barreled down the track and crossed the finish line three lengths in front of any other horse.
I remember being lifted high into the arms of a man whose face I couldn’t remember, and he danced with me around the room, overjoyed and calling me his lucky charm.
I couldn’t pull forward any other details, except that the man holding me aloft shouted, “Willie Shoemaker for the win! Shoemaker for the win!!!”
It dawned on me in that abandoned garage that Red’s last name was the same as the famous jockey, and I suddenly wondered if there was any relation.
But, as I stared at the horseshoe, something else happened, and it’s hard to describe, but when I looked at that horseshoe, I felt like I wanted to pull on it.
Which was somewhat ridiculous, but still, the urge was so strong that I couldn’t resist.
Walking to the horseshoe, I reached up, curling my fingertips around the top ends, and tugged.
There was a creaking sound and, to my surprise, the horseshoe fell forward while still attached to a small section of the wall—a hatch drawer that was probably twelve-by-twelve inches total.
A weight behind the lid of the drawer helped it open, and as I stood on tiptoes to peer inside the drawer, my breath caught when my gaze landed on a leather ledger measuring about seven-by-nine inches.
“Whoa! What’s in there?” Levi asked.
“A ledger.”
Reaching in, I took out the ledger and opened it, revealing that it was a three-ring binder, filled with pages of receipts, each taped to a blank white page. The dates on the receipts began in August 1998, and the last one was written October 17, 2000. The same day that Cash’s dad was murdered.
The receipts themselves were interesting. Almost all were for very minor repairs, and probably seventy-five percent were for a broken taillight or a headlight replacement.
Judging by how thick the binder was, the number of taillights and headlights that Red was replacing was eye-popping. There were at least five a week, sometimes considerably more.
But that wasn’t even the most eye-popping part. That honor went to the fees each car owner was charged for the repair.
Most were around two hundred dollars, but here and there, there were receipts in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars.
A thousand dollars to replace a taillight was beyond suspicious. It was criminal…and goosebumps lined my arms when I realized I was holding the smoking gun.
“Hey,” I said to Levi, who was still standing nervously nearby, while glancing over his shoulder out at the street. “Come here and look at this.”
He frowned but ambled on over. I showed him the ledger and held up the flashlight so he could read the receipts.
“Eight-hundred dollars to replace a turn signal?” he muttered. “What was it, made outta gold?”
I puffed out a breath. “More like made out of the cheapest plastic money could buy. But you’re missing it.”
Levi turned a few more pages, his brow deeply furrowed. “You’re right. What’s so important about these that Red needed to hide them in the wall?”
I was about to answer when the floor and walls of the garage lit up with the glow from a set of headlights.
Protectively, I took the journal out of Levi’s hands and said, “Get behind me.”
But Levi was frozen, his face a mask of fear. “Shit!” he hissed. “Maddy, we gotta make a run for it!”
I latched onto his arm, gripping it tightly. “You run and you’ll die, Levi,” I said. And that, I knew in my gut.
Levi and I were safer inside this place than out, and as if to reassure myself, I glanced up at the black globe that housed the security camera.
Footsteps outside the garage sounded, and my attention went quickly back to the front door.