Creep - Jennifer Hillier [67]
Morris stared at her. Jesus Christ, he hadn’t even thought of that. “She didn’t ask me, actually. I—I lost my key.”
“That’s odd.” Mrs. Shelby’s gray hair was blowing in the chilly night wind. “If she didn’t ask you and she didn’t ask me . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked toward Sheila’s house. “You want to go in and look around?”
It took a minute of jiggling before Morris got the door open. The alarm was beeping and he stepped inside quickly to enter the code the neighbor had given him, 0–6–1–5 for Sheila’s birthday. The beeping stopped, and he pocketed the key. The sudden silence was jarring.
It was ridiculous to think they were engaged and he didn’t have a key to her house, nor did he know the code to her security system. He’d asked Sheila a few times over the past year, but she’d always joked that she didn’t want him walking in on her with her other boyfriend.
In the end, it hadn’t really been a joke, had it? She’d always been a private person, and now he knew why.
He stepped farther into the house. Immediately, something didn’t feel right. And it wasn’t because she’d covered the holes he’d made in her wall with an old mirror she’d been meaning to donate to Goodwill.
The throw pillows on the living room sofa were in disarray. A minor thing, but it wasn’t like her—she hated to leave the house messy if she was going to be away for an extended period. Once, before a weekend trip to Las Vegas, she’d made him wait an hour while she straightened and vacuumed the entire house.
In the kitchen, the sink was filled with dirty dishes. One even had a chunk of dried chicken still stuck to it. Sheila would never have left those dishes to sit overnight, let alone for eight weeks while she was in rehab.
Something was very wrong here.
He crossed through the kitchen into her study. The desk lamp was bright and the computer was still on. The screen saver was flickering, and when Morris hit the ENTER key, he was prompted to enter a password. She had locked her computer—no surprise there.
His eyes gravitated to the little fishbowl that always sat on her desk. His heart sank.
The water in the bowl was cloudy. Mercury, the goldfish he’d won for her on their first date, was floating belly up, his bright orange color faded to a dull yellow.
Sheila would have never let that little fish die.
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911.
CHAPTER : 23
There was no immediate danger, the desk sergeant on the phone informed Morris, so it would be forty-five minutes to an hour before somebody from Seattle PD would be at the house to take his statement. Or he was welcome to come in and file a missing-person report. Neither choice sat well with Morris, but he opted to stay at Sheila’s house and wait for an officer to arrive.
He rifled through her desk drawers while he waited. Everything was meticulously organized, and he found nothing unusual amid the pens and Post-it pads.
A small stack of invoices lay beside the computer, waiting to be paid. Electricity bill, gas bill, mortgage statement; all were unpaid for the month. He noticed her gas bill payment was due five days ago. He wasn’t intimately familiar with Sheila’s bill-paying habits, but it seemed odd that she wouldn’t have taken care of these things before she left. In the stack he’d grabbed from her mailbox there were more bills—why hadn’t she forwarded these to the rehab facility? Or arranged to make the payments some other way?
He took one last look at the lifeless little goldfish, then headed down the hallway and up the long, straight staircase.
Two bedrooms and a bathroom were on the second level. One bedroom was done up as a guest room, and the other was bare except for a treadmill and an old TV. He checked both rooms and the bathroom, even looked inside the closets, but nothing of note was in any of them.
Turning down the hallway, he took the final set of stairs up to the third floor, which was entirely Sheila’s bedroom. By the time he reached the top, his knees were aching from carrying