Careful What You Wish For by Hallie Ephron

Author:Hallie Ephron
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

20

“We find a dead body and you’re sorting library cards,” Emily said under her breath to Lila. They were waiting in the little office at Inner Peace Storage. Lila held the open hatbox in her lap and was organizing the cards, clipping groups of them together with paper clips she’d appropriated from the office desk. Becca and Mrs. Murphy stood, talking quietly and looking out through the porthole Becca had cleared in the fogged-over window. Two police cruisers had already arrived, but all Emily could see from the office was the light from their beacons reflecting in the moist air. The facility manager had gone back to the storage unit with the police, and the women had been told to wait in the office until they came back.

There was a flash, a loud crack of thunder, and sheets of wind-driven rain pelted the glass.

“What else can I do?” Lila whispered back. She added a card to a clipped group. “This is my way of coping. Stay busy. Focus on minutiae. You know the old saying, don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon. If I were at home and something upset me, I’d be cleaning out my junk drawer.” She gave Emily a defiant frown. “Where do you think you get it from? Don’t judge.”

It was too late for that. Emily went over to a water dispenser in the corner and helped herself to a cup of water. She drank, trying to clear from her head the noxious, cloying smell of a body that had been left for who knew how many hours in a hot storage unit that lacked even basic ventilation. When she returned to Lila, she whispered, “You think the collection is stolen?”

“Shhh. Don’t know yet,” Lila whispered back. “I’m getting things organized, preparing for later when we contact these libraries.” Lowering her voice still further, Lila added, “Once Ruth understands what she’s got, that’s what I expect she’ll want to do.”

Ruth. Already her mother was on a first-name basis with Mrs. Murphy. Emily was glad she’d asked her mother to help out.

Headlights lit up the water-streaked windows as a white emergency van drove past, heading in the direction of Mr. Murphy’s storage unit. Emily had no idea how long it took for a body to stiffen up, but the person rolled up in the rug could have been dead for quite some time. Had the body been there on Sunday? Was it possible that she simply hadn’t noticed it? The thought made her skin crawl.

She took out her phone and thumbed through the photos she’d taken inside the storage unit on Sunday. Found one of the workbench. She enlarged it and lightened the exposure, confirming, to her relief, that underneath there’d been no puddle of water, no rolled-up rug, no baseball cap.

“What’s happening? What are they doing out there?” Mrs. Murphy said. “How long are they going to keep us here?”

The police officer who’d arrived first—Emily hadn’t recognized him from her visit yesterday to the

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