Page 69 of The Progressions

So, I called the big-boss woman back right away. I got her assistant instead, who told me that she had just left for the Woodsmen game, which was midweek and away in Utah. “She’s making it a vacation,” the assistant explained. “She’ll be out of the office until next week.”

“Do you have any idea why she was calling me?”

His voice muffled slightly and I heard him say yes, he would love to go for drinks! They were all cutting out early. “Um…this is about the Wilder Road complex, right? I assume she’s calling about the thefts.”

“Wha—yes,” I said, catching myself. “Yes, the thefts.” The thefts?

“Yeah, I think she just wanted to touch base about police involvement,” he told me. “That’s all the information I currently have, but she’ll call you back first thing next week…no, I see that she’s out until Tuesday, so expect to hear from her then.”

“Great. Thanks,” I said, and hung up and stared at my phone. The thefts? Well, that girl had lost her gold bracelet. I had told her to call the police, that the FBI and CIA wouldn’t care and she should stick local. Was that the issue?

But then I started thinking more, and farther back. We did get thefts here, sometimes. A group of teenagers had rifled through unlocked cars to steal crap, but that had gone on at leastthree years ago, right around the time that my dad had started refusing to go to any additional physical therapy. They had been caught—but there was more, I realized.

I started to make a list of missing items, and then I expanded it to include when residents had complained that things had been moved in their units, touched, or messed with. By checking my notes and emails, I made more than twenty entries in my list. I hadn’t connected them because they’d mostly sounded dumb or minor, like the guy who’d said that someone had bothered his plants, or the woman who had told me that things were disturbed in her bathroom due to mice. There was the guy who’d claimed that all the quarters were missing from his spare change jar…but what about the prescription drugs that had been disturbed in that pirate chest? Some of them had been spilled on the walkway, and what about Hilary and Stu, who had told me that their medications had also gone missing but it had been raccoons? I had been more focused on their smelly bin of rotting compost and had thought they were bananas.

“There’s a ton of stuff and I feel so stupid that I didn’t notice it before!” I told Tyler. The chair he had brought to my office was large enough for two, if one of us was on the other’s lap. That was my position and I loved it, but I was also concerned.

“Hm,” he said, and kissed my neck. Then he picked up his head to look at me. “It’s little stuff.”

“Yes, except for the earring.”

He realized what I meant, and his eyebrows raised. “The diamond? That was lost.”

“Maybe, but Shay Galton said that she lost it in the condo. We looked everywhere and we couldn’t find it.”

“She doesn’t know what happened to it.”

“The pictures proved it,” I reminded him. “She took one on the steps going in, which she posted. You can see a little of my best outfit in the background, and she had both earrings on. But in the picture she took on the way out, one was missing. She didn’t mention that to us, though, and you left, so there was a big window of time that someone else could have snagged it. I know that there was someone skulking around instead of doing his job that day, because I found him later in the laundry room.”

“You mean Oren.” He frowned. “There’s something wrong with him.”

“Obviously, but I never suspected him of stealing!”

“I thought he was the person who pointed out the pills dumped all over the path,” Tyler said.

“He was also the person who was supposed to go in and fix the bathroom fan in the unit next to yours. The owner kept complaining about how loud it was, so I took a ladder and checked it myself. And do you know what was wrong? A screw had fallen down into the cover and was rattling around, vibrating and making noise when the motor was running. All I had to do was find it and put it back where it belonged, and she never complained again. Oren must not have even looked at it. So what was he doing in her condo when he was supposed to be fixing the problem?”

“Did she report anything missing?”

“No, but…” I frowned. “Remember him and the underwear? Maybe he was up to that again. You know, up.”

“I don’t want to think about that. Did the stories about moving plants and missing quarters start when he came to work here?”

“There were a few that predated him,” I said. “The snowblower went missing before he started, and that was the biggest incident until Shay Galton’s earring.”

He was frowning too, but it was probably because I’d said his girlfriend’s name. He never seemed to like to hear it. “I have to go to the hotel tonight.” The team all stayed together at the Wequetong Inn before games or their flights out. “I’m leaving this afternoon.”

“Oren hasn’t done anything to me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m worried that now, he might know something’s up. You told me he had a family member working in the main office and that was why he couldn’t be fired. If the employees there are openly talking about the police, then his grandpa, aunt, or whoever probably told him. He might run, but he might also get mad.”

I looked over at the walkie-talkies, three of them lined up on Iva’s old desk. “He didn’t take his radio and I haven’t seen him today. Maybe he got scared and already bolted. That would be great, except we’d never get your earring back. I’m sure you bought that pair for Shay Galton.”

“I don’t want to hear her name come out of your mouth again,” he told me, and he made sure that I wouldn’t say it by kissing my mouth until I could hardly breathe.

“Ok,” I said, and put my cheek on his shoulder. If I didn’t keep stopping myself, I would rip off his clothes for sure.

“So I have to go to that inn,” he reminded me, “but I think you should come.”

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