Never Thwart a Thespian: Volume 8 (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

relatively tall himself. For much of the boys’ lives they had been the same size, but Mathias had recently hit a growth spurt.
    “Is it really dusty?” Cara’s daughter Lenna, also eleven, asked. “Maybe I shouldn’t have worn these leggings.” Her large blue eyes blinked with distress, and Leigh stifled a sigh. Neither she nor Cara had a clue how any girl born with Morton genes could be such a shrinking violet. Pathological anxiety in general was understandable — in that Lenna was like her Great Aunt Frances. But fear of insects, dirt, sweat, reptiles, and fashion faux pas put the child in sharp contrast to the rest of the Morton women, who — while sporting a variety of other neuroses — were uniformly audacious.
    “They’ll wash,” Leigh assured, closing the last of the doors and locking the van with her remote. “Let’s go on in and check it out. If anybody doesn’t want to stay and work, I can take you back home. It’s up to you.”
    The Pack looked at each other. Leigh knew full well that none of them would back out now, but she couldn’t resist making the offer. Just looking at the outside of the accursed building was enough to give her the heebie-jeebies. But she could hardly justify keeping everyone else out of it based on nothing but bad vibes and a bad joke. At least, she hoped Maura had only been joking. How could the detective be serious, when any number of people, including the police and a bevy of building inspectors, had been in and out of the place multiple times in the years since Marconi had gone missing? There was no rational reason to worry about… that.
    As Leigh led the Pack toward the building, a side door to the annex was opened, apparently by a giant bag of Styrofoam packing peanuts with legs. The figure stumbled to the rental dumpster and the bag was tossed up and in, revealing the shabbily dressed torso of a bulky man in late middle-age with a wild head of graying hair and broken black eyeglasses repaired with duct tape. He caught sight of the group and stared a moment, his jaw slack. “You here to see Ms. Bess?” he asked, his words slow and drawn out.
    “That’s right,” Leigh answered. “She’s here, isn’t she?”
    The man nodded. “She’s in the sanctuary.” His gaze turned to the Pack, and as he stared at them his eyes began to bug as if the children were armed and dangerous. “Are you the kids gonna work in the basement?” he asked tentatively.
    “They are,” Leigh responded, assessing him. The man did not appear to be mentally challenged, but his odd manner could certainly be described as “socially awkward.” She decided that he must be one of the men Bess had hired through a local charity to help with the manual labor. “I’m Bess’s niece, Leigh. Nice to meet you.”
    “I’m Ned.” He said simply, then he turned around and began walking back inside. Leigh looked over her shoulder to see Mathias elbowing Ethan in the ribs and whispering something in his cousin’s ear.
    Ethan grinned. “Yeah, he does!” he said out loud.
    After the man was out of earshot inside, Leigh turned around. “He does what?”
    Ethan looked slightly embarrassed. “Oh, it’s just that he looks like this character in a show we used to watch all the time.”
    “What show?” Lenna asked.
    “You know,” Mathias answered. “The Scooby Doo episode where—”
    Lenna shrieked and covered her mouth with her hands. “The creepy janitor!”
    “Stop that,” Leigh ordered, speaking to herself as much as the kids. “There’s nothing creepy about him. He’s just a man trying to do an honest day's work. I suggest you leave him alone and let him do it.”
    Stay away — far, far away, Leigh added mentally.She could hardly admit it to the kids, but the man was creepy. Which meant that everything about him fit into his current surroundings perfectly.
    They had just reached the door when the cool spring sun slid behind a cloud, darkening the sky. Leigh gritted her teeth and