The Haunted Heist Read online

  “Ah,” I said, placing my samples on the desk in front of him.

  He eyed me carefully, as if he knew he was about to cross a line but planned to forge ahead anyway. “Maybe you and Lauralee can take her out sometime. Show her how to act like a nice Southern girl.”

  Oh my. “That’s a lovely idea,” I said, refusing to commit.

  Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind helping Em feel more comfortable in Sugarland, as long as she was willing to give our town a chance. I’d consider it a victory if she could learn to love it like I did. What I didn’t like was the idea of a person as a project. It had to be her choice.

  In the meantime, I showed Reggie a project of my own: the custom branding work I’d done for Greenville Bank. I also presented the more conservative brochures and overall business design I’d done for J&B Financial Advisors. By the time Reggie finished sharing his vision and we started discussing ideas for the First Bank of Sugarland, he was already nodding at every point I made.

  “Yep. Still precise. Still focused.” He glanced up. “Just like when you ran home and got me a nickel when you didn’t have exact change at your grandma’s peach stand.”

  I paused over my designs. “You remember that?”

  “I remember everything.” He leaned forward as if to share a secret. “I’m good because I pay attention to the people I surround myself with. I don’t waste time, either, so I’ll put it to you plain. I’ve got five big projects coming up and I’ll hire you for every one of them if you can handle the workload. It’ll be more than full time to start.”

  My brain flooded with a big, loud yes as the relief of a hundred hours of worry rolled off my shoulders. I was back in business. I could buy groceries. Coffee. Heat the house to seventy degrees.

  I felt lighter. I stood taller. This meant…everything. I wanted to hug him. “Thank you so much,” I said, grinning so wide it almost hurt.

  “You’re asking too little as an hourly, though.” His eyes darted to a place over my head. “Lauralee is making the same mistake with her catering. Kills me that she won’t fix that.” His attention returned to me. “But I can do something about you. You need to be asking fifty percent more from each of your clients.”

  My one client. “Well, you see, I’m still trying to attract business—”

  “Do it,” he said, brooking no argument, “because that’s what I’m going to pay you and I don’t like to be overcharged.”

  “Okay,” I said, appreciating his generosity, but not crazy about being told how to run my business.

  Reggie seemed to read my mood. “Don’t worry, Verity. You’ll get that and more once everybody sees the work you’re going to do for me.” He clasped his hands together on the desk between us. “Never undervalue your time or what you do. It’s the biggest mistake people make in business and in life.”

  “You do have a point.” Reggie didn’t get to where he was in life by being timid. Still, I wasn’t a high-powered banker. I was quite happy as a small-town designer. This kind of assignment was so much more than I’d ever expected, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I took a deep breath to slow my racing heart. At least I wasn’t chasing down ghosts anymore. This should be safe and predictable. It was banking, for goodness’ sake. Any and all excitement would come from my marketing campaign. I could handle this. I pulled my notebook out of my bag. “Then let’s agree to some due dates and deliverables. I can send you a cost estimate this afternoon.”

  The door to Reggie’s office clicked open and a woman poked her head in. Her hair swung at cheek-level in a crisp, dark bob. “Sorry to break in on you, Reg.”

  “Carla,” he said, greeting her enthusiastically, “get in here and meet my brilliant new marketing guru.” Reggie leaned his elbows on the desk. “Verity here reminds me of you when you were first starting out.” He grinned. “I’ve managed Carla’s career from the time she was an intern at East Chicago Mortgage. Now she’s my vice president.”

  “I’d love to talk in a sec,” she said to me, more crisp than rude, “but, Reggie, they need you downstairs.” She cringed, glancing at me as if she wished I wasn’t present to hear what she had to say next. “It’s happening. For real this time.”

  Reggie stood. “Right now?”

  She nodded. “Stan says if you hurry down, you can hear it for yourself.”

  “Great,” he said, skirting around his desk. “Give me five minutes, Verity. My head guard has been claiming this bank is haunted. I told him to call me if something actually happened.”

  I tried to smile and failed. Whatever was going on down there, I had a feeling it had to do with my gangster buddy. Please don’t let him be doing something crazy. I smoothed my skirt.

  Carla noticed my discomfort as Reggie left. “It’s a historic building. There are plenty of other explanations for the noise,” she assured me.

  “Naturally,” I said, although I didn’t believe that for a second.

  She folded her hands in front of her slim-fitting, black sheath dress. “All the same, we would appreciate it if you didn’t spread the ghost story around town.”

  “Your secret is safe with me,” I assured her, quietly and efficiently adjusting my bag on the floor, making sure Frankie’s urn was safely hidden. “Ghost sightings are a regular occurrence in the South.” Especially for me.

  “All those old Southern belles and Civil War soldiers?” she teased. “Up in Chicago, we probably had gangsters.”

  I wasn’t even going to touch that one.

  Stan paused in the open doorway behind her. “It’s freezing cold down there. And you’re not going to believe the—”

  She held up a finger to me and drew Stan out into the hall.

  Frankie was never coming to work with me again. Even if he hadn’t started the problem, he was exactly the type to make it worse. What had I been thinking, taking him to a bank? Especially the one he’d been trying to rob when he died?

  “…in the vault,” I heard Stan murmur.

  Ah, yes. The vault—where my ghost buddy went as soon as I let him out of my sight.

  I reached for my bag on the floor. I could just leave. Then Frankie would have to go with me.

  Of course, then I’d be crazy Verity walking out on Reggie while no one was looking.

  I turned back toward the desk. Darn it. I wouldn’t put it past Frankie to help one of his old buddies pull off a heist in the middle of my business meeting.

  Reggie had given me a second chance, and in return, I’d given him a full paranormal experience downstairs.

  Calm down. I blew out a breath and waited for one long minute. Then another. Maybe it would be all right. Maybe—

  A loud metallic scrape echoed from the basement.

  I had to go. I’d tell Carla…something.

  I walked out into the hall to catch her, but Stan and Carla were nowhere to be seen. The corridor and the steps leading down to the underground level stood empty.

  Okay. I smoothed my sweaty palms on the skirt of my dress as I forced myself to walk slowly back to my seat. I straightened my stack of work samples. Everything would be fine.

  A bloodcurdling scream echoed from the floor below. A live woman’s scream, and she sounded desperate.

  My samples scattered as I raced out of the room and down the narrow staircase, into the marble-walled basement of the bank. To the left, near the bottom of the stairs, the immense bank vault door yawned open on its hinges.

  Stan stood just beyond it, gaping. I passed him and found a panicked Carla leaning over the prone body of Reggie Thompson. “Call the ambulance! Call the ambulance!” she wailed. My stomach lurched. It was too late for an ambulance. There was no helping the banker now.

  He wore a look of horror, his eyes wide open, blood pooling around his torso. He’d been shot in the heart. His right cheek had a bloody X slashed into it. And he seemed to be staring straight at me.

  Chapter 4

  Oh, God. Not again.

  A silver-haired security guard walked up
behind us. Jeb had worked at the bank for as long as I remembered. “I called the paramedics.” He rested a hand on his gun belt. “Won’t do any good.” His mouth turned down, the heavy set of his jowls deepening. “Reggie’s gone.”

  Carla went rigid.

  “Let’s hope for the best,” I fudged, in a vain attempt to protect her, as if I could change what had happened.

  Calmly, and with a stoicism I hadn’t known I possessed, I kept my breathing steady and ignored the gut-deep urge to beat feet out of there. I tried not to look at Reggie’s prone form or at Carla’s narrow, shaking shoulders.

  My impulse to run wasn’t just part of my distress at finding Reggie this way. The air was at least ten degrees cooler inside the old bank vault, and an unsettling desperation drummed like a heartbeat. No doubt the space was haunted. With what, I had no idea.

  Steel sheeting and modern fluorescent lights stretched over the ceiling. Ornate bronze safety-deposit boxes lined the walls to either side, and directly ahead stood a modern steel safe that took up the entire back wall. There were no dark corners, no creepy shadows. Even so, this place felt more wrong every second I spent inside of it.

  “Did any of you see what happened?” I asked. We were standing in the spot where a murderer had struck minutes before. He couldn’t have gone far.

  “I know what I see now,” Jeb said, eyeing me. “We got four people downstairs and one dead body.”

  “You can’t be sure it’s only four of us,” I said, ignoring his insinuation.

  He stood in the rounded entryway, blocking us in. “Pretty dang sure. I’ve been watching both doors this entire time. Nobody else has come in. Nobody’s slipped out. What are you doing down here anyway?” he asked, with an almost accusatory tone.

  Wasn’t it obvious? “I heard someone scream.”

  Stan drew a hand over his face. “She was upstairs with Reggie right before…”

  Carla retreated toward me and I realized the wide pool of blood had seeped farther across the pink marble floor.

  I took her by the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Jeb kept a keen eye on us, but he let us out of the vault. The air warmed the second we passed the bronze security bars and the thick round door.

  “Did anyone hear the shot?” Stan asked the group.

  “The vault door was closed. I found Reggie like that when I opened it,” Carla stammered.

  “It’s soundproof,” Stan said, shoving his hands into his pockets.

  “So no one would have heard the gunshot,” I concluded.

  We stared at each other uncomfortably.

  The guard hardened, his attention settling on the security camera posted over the vault door. “Son of a—”

  “There’s no red light,” Carla breathed out.

  “It was working when I got here this morning,” Jeb insisted.

  Carla reached for it. “There’s a burn mark on the wall.”

  Jeb stopped her. “Don’t. That’s evidence.”

  “And you’re saying you never took your eyes off the vault door,” Carla said, her trembling voice going hard, “but the security camera blew and you didn’t notice.”

  The guard stood woodenly. “I might have had a momentary lapse.”

  She drew a sharp breath. “You were outside smoking again, weren’t you?”

  For the first time, Jeb appeared flustered. “I stood right outside that door,” he vowed. “That door’s my post, and I didn’t leave it. Nobody got past me. The entire time he was in that vault—”

  Stan leaned close to the guard as he murmured, “Jeb, I need to head upstairs and have the tellers close down the bank for the day.”

  “The police can do that,” Jeb ordered. “They’ll be here soon. In the meantime, we need to stay put.”

  Just then, a slow, eerie scrape echoed from the floor of the vault.

  My breath caught in my throat.

  Jeb flinched before crossing his arms over his chest, as if determined to wait it out.

  “I heard the same sound upstairs,” I said, moving toward the glass doors that led outside. I didn’t like the idea of being trapped with whatever was making that noise.

  Stan shivered. “That was the ghost in the vault,” he said, as if it were fact.

  “Ghosts.” Carla’s voice hitched. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?”

  Jeb eyed her. “I’ve been hearing odd noises since I took this job in 1973, but I gotta say, in all that time I never heard nothing like the sounds coming out of that vault since Reggie blew into town.”

  Carla shook her head. “Please don’t talk about Reggie that way.”

  “What kind of noise?” I pressed.

  “Digging,” Stan said, his gaze darting to the open vault. “Under the floor. That’s what it sounds like to me, at least.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Only there’s at least four feet of concrete under that marble floor. No man alive could dig through that.”

  Jeb exchanged a glance with Stan. “Reggie believed us when we told him about the noises, but he wanted to check it out for himself. He was in there with the door shut for five minutes, maybe. Not long enough to be dangerous.”

  “I don’t understand,” I told them.

  “The vault is airtight,” Stan said. “Safe for a little while, but you have to watch it.”

  “Reggie seemed fine,” Jeb insisted. “I went back over to stand by my post at the glass doors, and when Carla went to check on him”—his voice choked up—“she found him shot through the heart.”

  Poor Reggie. “So nobody saw anyone go in with him?”

  “Where were you?” Stan asked Carla.

  She stiffened. “After we finished talking, I went down to check on Reggie. He was fine, so I stepped around the corner, into one of the privacy booths, to make a phone call.” She glanced back at the small hallway at the rear left side of the lobby, toward the narrow row of old wood cells that had always reminded me of the professor’s offices in the old part of campus at college. “I wanted to be close by in case Reggie needed me.” She notched her chin up at Stan. “What about you?”

  He appeared uncomfortable as all eyes turned to him. “Upstairs. Working.” He fidgeted with his tie. “Ask Marcie. I changed out her drawer.”

  “Well, if none of us are responsible, then there’s somebody else down here,” Carla said, lowering her voice as the group drew closer. “I didn’t see anyone in the privacy booths. All the doors were open.”

  We all turned toward the only other hiding place—a small alcove on the right side of the lobby. The cutout area housed a bronze drinking fountain at the back. The ladies’ and men’s room doors stood opposite each other.

  Stan gave the security guard a curt nod.

  Someone could be in there. Armed and dangerous.

  “I’ll check it out,” Jeb said, drawing his gun.

  He entered the men’s room. I didn’t know if I wanted him to find a killer or not.

  Jeb emerged a short time later. His forehead shone with perspiration. “Nothing in that one,” he said.

  He entered the second room and we barely had time to brace ourselves before we heard a scream.

  On instinct, I grabbed hold of the nearest person, which happened to be Carla. She went stiff at first, then grabbed me right back.

  Moments later, Jeb emerged clutching the elbow of a flustered Em.

  I straightened and let go of Carla, suddenly feeling rather foolish. “Em? What are you doing down here?”

  “Hiding out,” Jeb said grimly.

  She shook him off. “Hiding where, you dolt? You just dragged me out of the ladies’ room. Wait until I tell my father.” She straightened her jacket and did a quick check of her earrings. “What are you all doing standing around?”

  “Oh, Em—” I began, not sure how to deliver the news.

  “This is ridiculous,” she interrupted, adjusting her purse over her shoulder. “I’m going out to lunch.”

  “The
re’s been an accident,” Carla said, instinctively glancing back toward the vault and Reggie’s prone body inside.

  Em followed Carla’s gaze, her face falling when she saw her father’s prone form.

  She rushed to the open vault before anyone could stop her and let out a cry when she saw all of him.

  I hurried for Em, who stood inside the rounded doorway, her hands touching over her mouth as if she were praying.

  “Oh, my God,” she stammered, unable to look away. Her purse dropped from her shoulder. “I—Dad is dead.” I touched her on the arm and shivered at the chill clinging to her. “What does that mean? Where am I going to live?” she asked, focused on the gruesome scene in front of her. “What do I do now?”

  The wail of sirens sounded outside. “The police are here,” Stan called.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said, wrapping an arm around Em’s shoulder and gathering her purse. “Step outside and wait with us.”

  I guided her to a small reception area by the door and helped her into one of the wingback chairs.

  Em sat motionless, staring at the floor.

  Jeb stood away from the group and eyed us as if he expected one of us to make a move in the time it took for the police to enter the building. I understood his caution. One of the four people with whom I was now locked downstairs was most likely an armed killer.

  And only the killer knew exactly what had happened.

  Unless my ghost friend had seen any of this. I searched the lobby, but caught no sign of Frankie.

  Two police officers rushed down the main stairway. “Open the side entrance,” they ordered.

  Jeb propped open the doors to the outside.

  Seconds later, paramedics pushed through, followed by Homicide Detective Pete Marshall.

  The detective—who also happened to be the bane of my existence—wore a suit coat, a white shirt with what appeared to be a coffee stain, and a hard expression. “Stan.” He nodded. “Jeb,” he added, matter-of-fact as he followed the paramedics toward the vault. “And you,” he said, eyes narrowing at me, his voice lingering in the downstairs lobby as he entered the vault.