was a lamp. She felt her breath catch in her throat. A lamp that used to sit on a tiny table on the far wall.
Taking a step closer to the table, she checked her boxes more closely. They were still sealed and didn’t appear to have been shuffled around at all. A loud thump upstairs caused her to jump. Her water bottle slipped out of her hands and onto the floor.
Get a grip. It’s just John, you know, the man you told you didn’t spook easily.
Could John have moved the lamp just to mess with her? She thought about her trip to the kitchen, trying to recall if she could still hear him banging around when she’d been cleaning the bucket but she’d grown so used to the noise that she simply didn’t know. Surely, that was it. He was playing a joke on her. Trying to prove she wasn’t as tough as she thought she was. She crossed her arms across her chest, suddenly chilly in the previously stifling room.
Well, it wasn’t a very funny joke, and she wasn’t going to stand for it.
She picked up her water and set it on the table with a thump, then strode down the hall and up the stairwell, ready for battle. She found John in a bedroom at the back of the house, probably positioned over the library downstairs, and he was covered all over with something white.
One glance at the gaping hole in the ceiling and the mess surrounding him on the floor gave her a clear idea of where the white substance came from. “What happened?” she asked.
He was standing on a stepladder with his head poked up in the hole in the ceiling. Leaning down a bit, he looked out at her. “Ceiling fell in is what happened. Didn’t you hear all that noise earlier?”
She remembered the loud crash she’d heard when she’d just finished cleaning. “That was the ceiling? Wow. I guess you were standing under it.”
“Unfortunately. I thought the light fixture was loose but it was the entire ceiling that was sagging. I barely touched it and the whole thing came crashing down on me.” He stepped down the ladder and retrieved a water bottle from the dresser, leaving white tracks everywhere he stepped.
Olivia stared at the white shoe prints then back into the hall. It was dusty and dirty, but not a single white ring in sight.
“Did you need something?” he asked.
“No. I just thought I ought to check and make sure everything was okay…you know, with the noise.”
John narrowed his eyes at her. “So you thought I might be injured but waited a good five minutes to come up and check?”
“Yeah,” Olivia said as she backed out of the room. “Sorry, you’re right. I should have checked sooner, but I was pouring out a bucket of dirty water.” She pointed down at his feet. “You might want to take your shoes off before you walk around much more. Not that the place is clean or anything.”
John glanced down at his feet and frowned. “You’re right. No sense making it worse.” He looked back up at the ceiling and sighed. “This is going to be a real mess to fix.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Olivia said and fled down the hall.
She checked the front door, but the dead bolt was still securely in place. A quick check of the back door in the kitchen revealed the same thing. He could have taken his boots off before coming downstairs. That would make perfectly good sense, especially if he didn’t want her to hear his footsteps on the marble flooring in the entry. But Olivia would swear by his expression that he hadn’t even noticed the state of his boots until she’d pointed it out.
Unless he was a very good actor.
Olivia hurried back to the library, determined to hook up her computer, contact Wheeler and make sure she had all the information she could get on John Landry. She stopped short in the doorway.
The lamp was back in place.
JOHN WATCHED Olivia flee the room and shook his head. For someone who claimed she didn’t spook easily, the woman looked like she’d seen a ghost. She’d obviously come upstairs for a reason, but whatever that reason was, she’d changed her mind about it. He didn’t believe for one minute it was the crash that had brought her scurrying up the stairs. If she had been that worried about it, a bucket of dirty water would have been the last thing to detain her.
He’d thought about pushing the issue, but finally decided that if something was bothering Olivia, that would likely only work in his favor. Staring back up at the ceiling, he sighed. He’d had no intention of creating more work for whoever replaced him, but that’s exactly what he’d managed to do. He dug through the pile of Sheetrock and pulled out the light fixture that had attracted his attention in the first place.
It was coated with Sheetrock dust and any chance of gaining a fingerprint was probably long gone, but he wanted to make sure he hadn’t been imagining things. He wiped the dust off the light fixture’s ceiling plate with the bottom of his shirt. Just as he’d thought—scratches lined the bottom of the ceiling plate close to the screws that held the fixture in the ceiling.
There was no way to tell if the scratches were new, but John would bet everything they were. The ceiling plate had been wiped clean. That’s what had drawn his attention to the fixture in the first place—a shiny plate in a room of otherwise dusty items. He’d brought in the ladder hoping to get a closer look, but when he’d placed a hand on the ceiling to steady himself, the whole thing had come crashing down.
He looked at the light fixture. Maybe the old caretaker had been aware of the ceiling problem and started taking the fixture down to make the repair. He placed the light fixture on the floor and blew out a breath. He was wasting time. It didn’t matter what the old caretaker had intended, or if every upstairs ceiling dropped down on him.
He had to find his sister.
Despite Olivia staying out of his way, this afternoon had been a total waste. He’d found nothing new. No indication that his sister had been on the second floor. And maybe she hadn’t been. If she’d even made it to laMalediction, maybe she’d run into trouble before she’d ever gotten the chance to do much poking around.
He ran one hand through his hair, scattering Sheetrock dust around him. What if he’d made a mistake about her destination? What if she’d scheduled her visit to laMalediction on her calendar and changed her mind? If his sister had never been to this house, he was losing valuable time here. If only he could find evidence, anything that told him for certain that she’d been here. The pink button was a sketchy clue, at best.
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. No messages, but at least it had decent signal strength. He pressed the number for the New Orleans police department and asked for the captain.
“Landry?” Captain Reeves answered the phone. “Where the hell are you? Harrison’s been by your apartment twice and says your phone’s turned off.”
“I went to visit an aunt my mom used to check on. She lives out a ways in the bayou. Cell phone signal’s sketchy.”
“An aunt, huh? So your sister’s missing and your mom’s in the hospital, and you want me to buy that you took vacation time to visit some old lady?”
“Yes, sir,” John replied, keeping his voice steady. If the captain found out he was at laMalediction after Wheeler had forbidden the police to enter the property, he’d have John’s badge. “Is there any news?”
The captain was silent for a moment and John was afraid the man was going to call him on his lie. The captain was no one’s fool and knew John about as well as anyone did. Well enough to know that John wouldn’t bail on the investigation without a really good reason—like a lead that the police didn’t have the authority to pursue.
“Not much. Harrison was just here and said they found a store clerk about twenty miles outside of New Orleans on I-10 who remembers your sister filling up there five days ago.”
John felt his pulse quicken. He’d driven past that filling station on the way to laMalediction. Rachel could have been pursuing another house