eyes widened in slight confusion, but she didn’t make a sound as I crept away.
I felt certain that if anyone came around, she would bark and warn me.
After pulling on a pair of latex gloves, I crept slowly toward the back door and listened.
Nothing. No sounds. No light. No nothing. Good.
I slid one of the credit cards into the crack in the door and ran it down. Only one of the five locks was locked! I had totally lucked out. Obviously the local police weren’t nearly as paranoid as Schaeffer. I wasn’t surprised. It was such a small town that most of the residents never even used their locks at all. Some of them even left their keys in the car. There wasn’t a lot of property crime in this town, and there usually wasn’t much violent crime either, although there had been a slight uptick in stats lately, which had resulted in the hiring of some new police—Nash among them.
Best of all for me, the lock the police had chosen to fasten wasn’t a deadbolt. It was a plain-old key in the doorknob contraption—the kind that was so easy to break into you might as well not even have installed it on the door in the first place.
I held my tiny, high-intensity flashlight in my teeth, glancing around furtively, working the credit card until the door was open.
I carried my light low, trying to make sure the beam stayed well below the window sill line and closed blinds as I came to them, shutting my tiny light off from the outside world.
A thrill of excitement vibrated through my core. I had never, ever done anything like this before. I felt high, lifted into the air on wings of pure adrenaline. Part of me wanted to never feel this way again. The other part of me wanted to feel this way every day of my life, from today henceforth to ever after.
I stepped slowly, one foot in front of the other, careful not to disturb anything on the floor.
The body had long since been removed to the Rosethorn morgue. But flicking my flashlight around, I happened upon a small pool of blood in the living room. I shivered, one part nauseated, one part . . . I don’t know what.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw light.
Headlights blazed in severe, horizontal lines through the blinds.
A car drove past the house slowly. More slowly than necessary, it seemed.
I might have been imagining things, but I felt tailed. Watched. Like I didn’t have a lot of time. But no one could possibly know I was here. Could they?
I made my way through the house, looking for document boxes, but not expecting to find them right away. They wouldn’t be anywhere obvious, or Nash would have found them already.
I crept into Schaeffer’s office, which really looked more like an old European-style study. You’d never guess the interior of the house looked this way judging from the outside. After pulling all the blinds tight, I clicked on the light. I bypassed a grandfather clock, an entire wall of bookshelves, a shiny black grand piano, some parlor chairs, and a sofa, heading straight toward his middle desk drawer. Schaeffer had mentioned once that it had a false bottom, which was a little tidbit of information I'd decided to keep from Detective Nash. If he were thorough, he may have already found it. But if not. . .
The drawer was full of the usual desk knick-knacks. Paperclips, pens, pencils, rubber bands. A stray business card or two. I pulled the whole thing completely off its rails and dumped it upside-down on the rug.
Everything fell out—including the false bottom.
And an envelope.
With my name on it.
The false bottom was only a few millimeters deep, which is probably why Nash hadn't noticed it.
Feeling as though my illegal expedition had somehow just been validated, I snagged a letter opener from the pile of stuff on the floor and slit the missive open.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
Another car drove past the house on the street outside. Faster than the first one, perhaps?
I froze and watched the lights fade away.
Once they were gone, I examined the sheet of paper. A literal letter from the grave.
In handwritten block print, Dr. Schaeffer had written: “The end of time.”
That was all.
What on earth? I had risked my livelihood and broken the law for this? For this? A cryptic message that meant nothing?
Time. Time. I racked my brains, trying to think of