After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez

Author:Angelina M. Lopez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carina Press
Published: 2022-05-05T15:48:48+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Alex made sure that all the outside doors were double-locked with the new dead bolts Joe had installed before she invited Jeremiah the next day to spread the Hugh Building blueprint on Loretta’s clean desk. If Doody-meyer was going to spend his Sunday searching for the second deed, he’d have to look somewhere else.

She’d finally whipped Loretta’s office into a state where a clean surface was possible, where terrifying bills weren’t going to jump out of the endless stacks of paper and piles of old church announcements and used Bingo cards weren’t going to drown anyone. Studying the blueprint in one of their bedrooms would have been a bad idea. She weighed down one corner of the blueprint with the heavy crystal rocks glass she received when she was named the best bartender in Chicago and another with a neat stack of notes and sketches for her future bar.

She tried not to be annoyed that Jeremiah seemed to be more interested in what she’d held the third corner down with: a jar of Loretta’s hand cream. She should just gift wrap it and give it to him.

“This isn’t the blueprint the builder used,” she said, hands on her hips.

“No, it’s not the original,” Jeremiah confirmed, standing next to her, his arms crossed over his rust sweater vest as he looked at the drawing. With his glasses on and that soft plop of hair on his forehead, he was really projecting the hot professor vibe. “This is from the early sixties. The Freedom Historical Society nominated several local buildings to be added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Hugh Building was one of them. They paid to have the building assessed and the lost blueprint redrawn. The owner certainly wasn’t going to pay for it; the Hughs had sold the building decades earlier and it passed from one harassed owner to another.” He huffed. “They complained that the building was so troublesome it must be haunted.”

He stopped and frowned at her. “How did you know this wasn’t the original blueprint?”

Alex smiled. He wasn’t the only smarty-pants in the room. “Because of what’s missing.”

“What’s missing?”

She smiled wider. “Bring it. I’ll show you.”

At least he was gentle with her stack of bar plans as he moved them.

She led him into the hallway where she’d already put out buckets to catch the inevitable drips. Cold rain had settled in for the day. When she opened the door to the long storage closet next to her room, it sounded comforting plunking off the roof.

“When I was a kid and off from school, I used to come to the bar every few days with my Granmo,” she said, flipping on the light. “When I got in trouble, which happened a decent amount, my Granmo made me come up here and reorganize the stock areas. She knew I hated being on my own.”

The closet was a room’s length long but narrow, and she motioned him in then led him past built-in wooden shelves filled with neatly stacked toilet paper rolls, cleaning supplies, and linens for the tenants.

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