SEATTLE CINDERELLA: FOUR-IN-ONE COLLECTION Read online

  From her previous experiences with Brent, she suspected that it would take more time arguing with him than moving around the contents of the garage. She sighed and ran into the house and pressed the button to open the garage door.

  To her horror, the garage was even messier than she remembered. She couldn’t even squeeze around the clutter to get through to the front of the garage.

  She ran back through the house to Brent, who stood at the front of the garage, not moving, his hands on his hips while he sized up the jumble of clutter, old furniture, and a freezer that had seen better days. “When was the last time you had a car in here?”

  “Years,” Annie muttered.

  “Where did you think you were going to put these boxes?” “I don’t know. I don’t remember it being this bad.” Obviously neither had her mother or Zella because the three

  of them had agreed to put these boxes in the garage.

  Instead of picking up a box, Brent inched his way into the garage. “I’ll think I’ll just move some stuff and pile them up here.” He lifted a few boxes and placed them on top of some others to make space for the new ones.

  “No, it’s okay. You don’t have to do that.” Even more than embarrassing, she didn’t want him hurting his back lifting the heavy boxes as high as they needed to be to make room for more.

  “I think I can clear out a space over here.” Without waiting for her response, Brent started clearing a space until he came to an old sleeping bag carelessly tossed over more boxes. On top of the sleeping bag were dozens of empty boxes, strewn helter-skelter. “This should be easy to tidy up,” Brent muttered as he reached for the closest box. When his foot reached the edge of the sleeping bag, instead of hitting a solid mass beneath it, the blanket fluttered.

  Brent lifted the corner of the sleeping bag. “This isn’t boxes under here, it’s…” He lifted the blanket higher.

  Annie’s heart stopped. It definitely wasn’t boxes. It was…

  Brent cleared his throat. “It’s Cindy’s car.”

  Chapter 6

  Brent blinked then said a mental prayer that God would wake him up, because surely this was a bad dream.

  He reached forward and touched the shiny green surface. It was cold. This was real.

  Now he knew why Annie hadn’t wanted him in the garage.

  Brent stared open-mouthed at Cindy’s car, still half-covered and buried in boxes.

  He didn’t know what he felt like doing more—to hit something or to vomit.

  When Annie first saw the Mustang, he’d thought the stars in her eyes were adorable. She’d looked happy for Cindy, even knowing it would be many years before she could have a car like it, between her lack of a job and a student loan to pay back. He’d liked that about her. She’d handled her sister getting her own dream car with grace.

  Or so he’d thought. Now…he didn’t know how to deal with this. No one he’d ever known had stolen anything more than a chocolate bar from the corner store as a child. He’d been raised in a good home, in a good church, to trust people, and to live worthy of being trusted.

  He didn’t want to believe it, but his eyes didn’t lie. He’d wanted to get to know Annie better, but this was something he wished he hadn’t learned.

  “Why?” he finally managed to choke out when he could find his voice again.

  She didn’t reply. Not that he’d expected her to. He didn’t know what he saw more in her wide eyes and pale face—guilt or fear.

  His brain raced as he battled whom to call first—Luke or the police.

  On autopilot, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open, but his finger hovered over the keypad. He still couldn’t believe Annie had done this. He’d thought he could like her; something about her drew him. Like a moth to a flame, apparently. He usually was a good judge of character. He stared at Cindy’s missing Mustang, hidden in Annie’s garage. He didn’t want to believe Annie had stolen it. But with the evidence in front of him, he couldn’t say she hadn’t.

  He aimed for the button to call Luke.

  Annie’s fingers wrapped around his wrist. “Wait. It’s not what it looks like.”

  “How can this not be exactly what it looks like?” He had to force himself to say it out loud. “You stole Cindy’s car.”

  “I didn’t. I don’t know how it got here.” Her voice lowered. “You have to believe me.”

  “I want to believe you, I really do, but you have to give me a good reason why I should.”

  She gulped and tears filled her eyes.

  Tears. He wasn’t falling for that. It was the oldest trick in the book.

  His eyes lost focus, so he turned and looked outside, away from Annie into the fading light of nightfall.

  “I would never do something so horrible. Especially to Cindy. She’s been so nice to me, when for so long I was so rotten to her. I didn’t take her car.”

  “Then who did? Don’t tell me your mother, because I know she’s out of town.”

  She gulped again. “So is Zella.”

  At least she was being honest about that. “Then how did it get here?”

  Annie let go of his wrist and stared up at him through watery eyes. “I don’t know.”

  He hit the button on his phone.

  Luke answered on the first ring.

  “I found Cindy’s car.” Brent turned his back to Annie. He couldn’t look at her while he talked to Luke.

  “That’s fantastic!” The scrape of Luke’s hand covering the receiver echoed in his ear then Luke’s muffled voice as he told Cindy. “Where? Is it okay?”

  Brent’s stomach clenched. He’d only seen the front right fender, but he knew Annie wouldn’t have damaged it. Unless she’d borrowed it without permission then had an accident and was hiding it.

  With one hand he pushed aside as many of the empty boxes on top of the sleeping bag as he could reach then lifted up the sleeping bag as high as he could. “Yes, it looks okay.”

  Luke repeated his reply to Cindy. “You didn’t say where you found it.”

  Brent sucked in a deep breath. “It’s…” He paused, trying to think of the best way to say it, but there was none. “It’s in Annie’s garage.”

  A silence hung on the line. He could imagine that the same string of thoughts were coursing through Luke’s mind that haunted his own.

  Luke’s voice came out sounding choked and very quiet. “How did it get there?”

  “She says she didn’t steal it, but—” He let his words hang. “Luke, I don’t know what to do.” He didn’t want to call the police and have Annie arrested, but this wasn’t a chocolate bar, and Annie’s mother wasn’t going to march her down to Luke and Cindy’s house and demand that Annie apologize and pay for it.

  “Cindy and I will be there in ten minutes.”

  Brent turned back to Annie. He had a feeling this was going to be the longest ten minutes of his life.

  Annie stared up at Brent. Even in her most frightening and disconcerting nightmares, she’d never had a worse feeling of apprehension.

  This wasn’t just a movie or DVD that was easy to steal. Someone had hot-wired Cindy’s car then broken into her garage to hide it. She’d never heard of a thief breaking into a house to leave something. That made it so much worse. The only reason the car was here was to hide it in a place no one would ever look.

  Her mind raced, thinking of how the thief had gotten in. There was no visible damage to the lock or anywhere on the front door. She’d recently opened the patio door at the back to let in some fresh air, so she knew both the glass and the locks were intact. The garage door couldn’t be opened without a remote or from the inside.

  Either someone had come in through a window or had a key. Except the only people who had keys to the house were herself, her mother, her sister, and Cindy.

  “I have to check the windows,” she said to Brent. She ran into the house, running from window to window to check the locks.

  Every lock was fastened and every pin was in pl
ace.

  She froze, her heart stopped, and she couldn’t breathe.

  Someone had a key to her house.

  And if that someone had come into the house once, he could come in again. He could come in while she slept and murder her in her own bed. She was alone in the house for a few days, and apparently someone knew it.

  Her stomach roiled. “I’m not safe here,” she said, her voice quivering. “I’ll go stay at a friend’s house, but I can’t stay away forever. In the morning I’ll call a locksmith and get all the locks changed.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.” Brent stuck out his hand, palm upward, and his eyes locked on hers. “By the way, where’s the car key?”

  All she did was stare up at him. “I…” Her brain stalled. She had no idea where the keys were. “I don’t know. Probably in Cindy’s purse.”

  As if she’d conjured them up by thinking about them, Luke’s car appeared down the block. As Luke pulled into the driveway, Brent walked into the garage, pushed a path to the car door, and looked in the car. “There’s a key in the ignition.”

  Cindy got out of Luke’s car before it had even come to a full stop and ran to the Mustang. While Cindy stood there, looking at her car, Luke approached Annie. “We’re not going to call the police, but we want an explanation.”

  “I don’t know how it got here.” Tears burned her eyes. She turned to Cindy. “You’ve got to believe me. Why would I steal your car? It’s not like I could drive it anywhere.”

  Cindy looked at her with an expression she couldn’t read. “I don’t know. I need time to think.”

  Luke and Brent cleared everything away from the car, and then Luke opened the door as much as he could and inched the car out of the garage.

  Cindy’s eyes turned red and became glassy. “We have to go to the police station now and report that it’s been recovered. We’re going to apologize and tell them a family member borrowed it without permission. We’ve also got to contact the insurance people.” Luke slid out of the Mustang and got back behind the wheel of his own car, while Cindy got into her car, adjusted the seat, and then put it into gear and started moving forward.

  Annie bit her tongue and watched as both cars disappeared down the block.

  Then she looked up at Brent.

  She hadn’t been able to read Cindy’s expression, and she couldn’t read Brent’s either.

  “Please tell me you believe me. I didn’t steal it.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. “I’ll wait here while you pack a suitcase and call someone you can stay with.”

  All she could do was go inside and throw her pajamas and her toothbrush in a bag. She called the first person she could think of who would let her camp out on her couch, and then she got in her car and drove away with Brent standing in the driveway watching her.

  Not that she thought she would sleep. She probably wouldn’t sleep again until she found out who did this. And why.

  Chapter 7

  Brent stared at the computer monitor and ran his fingers through his hair for what felt like the tenth time. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I can’t find this invoice,” he muttered to Luke, who hovered over him. “I know I entered it. We should call Annie over.”

  In unison, both Brent and Luke turned to look out the window, across the parking lot to Cindy’s shop, where Annie sat working at her desk.

  Luke frowned. “No. I’ll call Walter.”

  Brent’s heart sank as Luke picked up the phone.

  He’d done a lot of thinking overnight—he’d hardly slept, with his brain firing in a million directions at once.

  And he had come to the conclusion that Annie couldn’t have stolen Cindy’s car. First of all, stealing it would be stupid, as she’d said. It wasn’t like she could drive it anywhere—everyone she knew would recognize it. She had no means to sell it—she didn’t have those kind of connections, praise the Lord. Most of all, the look in her eyes when he’d asked for the keys told him she really didn’t know where they were. Besides, she wouldn’t have let him into the garage if she’d known it was there. Nor could she have lifted the heavy boxes that surrounded the car.

  What really frightened him was that someone who was strong enough to lift those heavy boxes had had access to her house and garage. At least the locks had been changed. And the thief no longer had the key for the car. Brent had taken the key from the ignition when he saw Luke ready with his own keys, and then before he could offer the key to Cindy, she’d used a key on her keychain to start the car and go home. That meant both keys were accounted for, and a third key had been used to steal it—a key that Brent now had in his pocket.

  Finding the origin of the third key would solve the mystery of who had driven the car into the garage, and the relation between that person and Annie would reveal why Annie was being set up.

  He stared at the prompt box on the screen of the accounting program, stating that the information he was seeking could not be found. Whatever Annie had done to Walter’s system was another mystery; they’d never had any trouble finding an invoice or lease agreement until Annie started working with the program.

  Brent turned to Luke, who appeared to be listening to voice mail. Until now Brent had been the one hesitant about Annie, but now Luke showed a reluctance to trust her. It stung in a way Brent couldn’t explain.

  Luke hung up the phone. “Walter’s not there. We’ll have to call Annie.”

  Brent stood. “No. I’ll talk to her first.” He left without waiting for Luke’s rebuttal.

  Annie flinched when the bell tinkled.

  The first thing he noticed were the dark circles under her eyes, similar to the ones he’d seen under his own that morning.

  He cleared his throat. “We need to talk.”

  She glanced around, but Brent knew Cindy was in the shop with the mechanics.

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to contract your services today. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, but of course I’ll pay you for the required four. I’d prefer to talk to you in private, not here. Can you take a break? We’re so close to the Space Needle, we can go to Seattle Center and have a coffee and a hot dog at the fountain.”

  Annie looked up at the clock then pressed one hand to her stomach. He suspected that, like him, she hadn’t been in the mood for breakfast and was now feeling it.

  “I don’t really want a hot dog.”

  He forced himself to smile. “Breakfast burrito? We can pick up a couple on the way.”

  “I guess so. Let me tell Cindy I’m going out.”

  Annie walked into the shop, stopping at the yellow line. He didn’t hear what she said with the door between the office and the shop closed, but Cindy nodded.

  “I need to be back to let Cindy go for lunch,” she said as she retrieved her purse. On her way out the door, she rummaged through her pocket then popped a couple of what looked like antacid tabs into her mouth.

  For the entire drive to the Seattle Center area, she kept her head turned toward the window, including when he picked up a couple of breakfast burritos at a drive-through. Likewise, she didn’t say anything when he pulled into the parking lot, nor did she say anything as they headed toward the seating area around the International Fountain.

  Brent cleared his throat. “I guess the first thing we should talk about is the car.”

  Her whole body stiffened and she missed a step. “I didn’t steal it. I don’t know how it got in my garage.”

  Clutching her purse to her chest like a shield, Annie came to a sudden halt. Her voice dropped to nearly a whisper. “Are you bringing me here away from everyone so you can tell me Luke and Cindy are going to have me arrested?”

  “Luke never said anything about pressing charges.” Although it had hit him hard when Luke suddenly preferred that Annie not do their accounting.

  “If he does, I’ll be thrown in jail. My fingerprints are all over the steering wheel and the dash and the glove box and everywhere. I even looked in the trunk and un
der the hood when I took it out for a drive the day before yesterday.”

  “But yours won’t be the only prints on it.” He hoped. At a minimum, Cindy’s and Luke’s prints would be on it. Come to think of it, his own prints would be on it, too.

  Annie shook her head and clutched her purse tighter. “Don’t you watch CSI? The crook probably wore gloves. This wasn’t just taking a newspaper from someone’s doorstep. This is grand theft auto.”

  This time Brent’s smile was genuine. “I do watch CSI. All of them. It’s shown me that no matter what precautions someone takes, there’s always something to be found.”

  Annie blinked and her eyes welled up. “But they’re not going to look that close. The car was found the next day, there’s no damage, and no one was hurt. Without a dead body, there’s no reason to call the FBI and have them take days to go through it and pick and test every hair or grain of dust. It was in my garage; I’m the only suspect.” She swiped her arm across her eyes then clutched her purse again. “What if the only reason Cindy’s not having me arrested is that I’m her stepsister?” She sniffled then swiped at her eyes again. “I’m sorry. Maybe we should go back.”

  He ran his hand over his pocket where he had the key, doubly glad he’d kept it. He hadn’t thought about fingerprints until Annie mentioned it, but perhaps something could be proven. He’d learned from CSI that fingerprints on a stolen item didn’t prove a person had stolen it, only that he’d touched it. But certainly it would mean something if Annie’s prints weren’t on the third key. That would mean she never used it, and that should point toward her innocence, even if just by omission.

  “You should eat,” he said. “We’re almost there.” With a gentle nudge he prompted her to continue walking toward the fountain.

  They got a seat close enough to get misted by the water, which cooled him enough to help clear his thoughts. He’d never been involved in something so serious before, and he didn’t know what to do. He only knew that he was holding a key piece of evidence. No pun intended.

  He reached into the bag and gave her one of the burritos then opened his own and took a bite. He pressed his hand over his pocket. “I have the key that was used to steal the car.”