She flipped on the light and shut the door behind herself. One of her mother’s old dining room chairs was pushed against the wall. She sat down in it and pulled a full, flat box of books over to use as a table, and she started on the burrito in earnest.
A burrito was exactly the right thing to eat alone, in a small storage unit that was more dark than bright, even with a light bulb swaying overhead. Nobody wants anybody to see them wrestling a burrito. It’s not dignified. It’s slivers of onion and scraps of carnitas falling on the floor, and never quite enough napkins.
“Son of a bitch,” she complained aloud, her hands covered in runny salsa and sour cream drippings. But there was a box in the unit that had cleaning supplies and trash bags. She’d left it behind after cleaning out her old apartment. It was still hanging out around there someplace, she just knew it.
Before long she found an old plastic bucket with the useful cleaning contents—including half a roll of paper towels.
“Sweet,” Leda proclaimed.
While she was over there, she looked around—burrito in hand, still spilling its innards past the foil wrapping and onto the floor. “Gonna have to get that before I go,” she reminded herself. Rats could be an issue down in the south end, between the sound and Lake Washington. If she helped encourage a rat problem for the storage facility, they’d kick her out. It was written into the agreement she’d signed when they gave her the keys.
Near her there were boxes of books she hadn’t read in decades but couldn’t imagine getting rid of. Over there, the summer clothes she’d worn on spring break to Daytona Beach three years in a row. In that corner, a box of sandals that she didn’t get a lot of call for—except for a month or two in the dead of summer.
And over there, she spied a box with club clothes and late-night dancing gear that she hadn’t made use of in ages. The costumes were probably in that one.
But she resisted opening it right away. She had food. She didn’t want to get food all over the costumes. That’s what she told herself as she wandered the small space, reading labels and trying to tamp down all the memories of hopes and plans that hadn’t gone anywhere.
After half the burrito was down the hatch, she was no longer hungry. She swabbed up the lost lettuce, the fugitive bits of pico de gallo, and the smattering of stray cheese shreds, and stuffed it all into the paper take-out bag. Then she tossed the rest of the burrito after it, brushed her hands off on her pants, and decided it was time to dive in.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she reached into the box where the costumes were most likely to be and started shoving things around.
Fishnet gloves, nah. Crinolines? Yes, probably. She pulled those out and set them beside her. Hooker boots? Lucille Ball would never. Dear God, the early 2000s had really been a hell of a time for patent leather and lace, like some kind of late-Gothic-revival period.
More gloves, fingerless this time. She’d had them since college, when she’d bought them for an eighties-themed social event. She’d worn a banana clip in her hair, too much hair spray, and a bunch of jelly bracelets on top of an outfit Madonna might have tried in 1984. Then again, she might not have. It was kind of a mess from top to bottom, and Leda laughed to remember it. She’d tried to play a piano in those fingerless gloves, but the bows on the back were so big that they flopped over her wrists, and they kept jamming in the keys.
In the keys.
On the piano.
Something flickered in the back of her head.
The keys, her fingers running across them, picking out “Chopsticks” and getting hung up on every other note. She’d been using another name back then. No. She’d never used another name. Yes, and she’d gotten off scot-free. No, that wasn’t it. What was she thinking of?
Electricity sparked between her ears, pinging off her memories, her clues, and her abilities. It was like a circus in there, so bright and loud and sudden that she could hardly see. She rubbed at her eyes, and it only made the light show worse.
“Ugh,” she groaned. Another ocular migraine. Probably it was her own damn fault, brought about by too much caffeine. She’d read somewhere that caffeine could do that. Or was caffeine supposed to be good for migraines? She didn’t know anymore.
Leda dropped her head until it was hanging over her lap, and she rubbed firmly at her temples.
That night in the student assembly hall, playing with the piano keys—even though music was blaring from the speakers on either side of the large television in the gathering area. The TV had been showing some anime or another, with the volume off and the captions on. She didn’t remember what it was called, or what it was about. She’d been playing the piano, a few notes at a time. Two fingers. Tappity-tap.
She’d gotten away with it, scot-free. No one had complained. No one had caught her. No one had seen what she’d done.
No, there was no Scott. Nothing was free. Not the piano. Not the keys.
No, that’s not what her brain was trying to tell her at all. The message wasn’t coming from her own brain. It was coming from the killer’s.
She clutched the sides of her head, fingers tangling in her hair. “What is this?” she asked nobody and nothing. “I don’t understand.” She fell over, curled up in a fetal position. She held her hands over her eyes. Her heart raced. Her vision flashed, again and again and again.
Suddenly, yes. The connections. The electricity. Right before she passed out cold on the floor of the storage unit. She finally understood who Scott was, and where he fit into the puzzle of who had killed Amanda Crombie, and the Gilmans, and Ms. Copeland, and Tod, too.
24.
When Leda Foley woke up, her half-eaten burrito was cold in the bag, but there weren’t any rats yet.
She was winning already.
She dragged herself upright and scrambled around on the floor until she’d collected her thoughts. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before. Nothing so strong and hard, nothing so concrete and fast. It’d knocked her right out.
The side of her head was cold from the concrete she’d left it on, and her right arm was asleep. Her mouth was so sticky and gross that she finished drinking the soda she’d brought—even though it was mostly melted ice by that point. It didn’t make her feel any better, but it didn’t make her feel any worse, either.
And she felt pretty damn good.
Wait, was that right? She wadded up the paper cup and stuffed it into her bag of burrito detritus. Was it good, knowing the answer to a murderous riddle? Or did it turn her stomach?
Maybe a little of both. She scrambled to her feet, collected her trash, grabbed the whole box that held the costumes—she saw the curly red Lucy wig, and she knew she’d found them—and then picked up her purse. She wobbled, straightened up, and corrected herself. “A lot of both.”
The door slammed behind her as she fled.
She staggered to her car, and once she was seated with the engine running and the heater warming, she pulled her phone out of her purse. She called up Grady’s contact info and smashed it with her index finger until it dialed him.
“Leda, I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon. Is everything okay?”
He hadn’t gotten the last syllable all the way out when she blurted, “I know who killed the Gilmans!”