What We Found Read Online Free PDF Page A

deep. I didn’t see anyone among the long tables filled with plants, but I heard someone moving to my left. The sounds were coming from big racks of equipment at one end of the room. At the other end, I spotted a closed door in a plain white wall. Maybe an office? Worth a try.
    I crept toward the door and paused before it. Was Jay inside? I knocked lightly. No answer. I tried the handle and pulled open the door to reveal an office, small and cluttered with boxes on the floor and piles of paper stacked high on a desk. And next to a computer, my phone.
    Finally, something was going right! Relief flooded me as I grabbed it.
    I swung toward the door, caught my foot on the desk chair, and stumbled. How did a big guy like Jay maneuver with all the stuff in here? Two four-drawer file cabinets were stuffed so full the doors wouldn’t close all the way. Long, plug-in lights—grow lights, maybe?—leaned against the wall next to a golf bag. Boxes were stacked three and four deep, some labeled and some not. Jay might have a green thumb, but he didn’t have organizational skills.
    I crossed the room and slipped out the door—and found myself face to face with a stranger. He was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and gardening gloves. “What are you doing?” he snapped.
    I instinctively hid my phone behind my back and then realized that carrying a phone wasn’t suspicious but hiding something was. I dropped my hand and gave a casual shrug. “Looking for Jay. I guess he’s gone for the day?”
    “You just missed him.”
    I smiled and edged past the guy. “Okay, I’ll catch him tomorrow.”
    When I reached the outside door, I glanced back. He was still staring at me, his face suspicious and grim. I fumbled with the door handle and ran the first few steps away from the building.
    I forced myself to slow. The man probably wasn’t suspicious at all. Why would he be? I was just suffering from my own guilty feelings.
    Halfway to the parking lot, a bench sat beside the building, facing the golf course. I slumped onto it, tipped my head back, and closed my eyes. What a day. I was going to be late for dinner, but I needed to collect myself before I faced going home.
    I opened my eyes and looked across the golf course toward the woods. What was going on in there? What clues were the police finding—and how many of them led straight to me and Jay?
    A man stepped out of the woods. I jumped, even though he was a couple hundred feet away. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, and I didn’t think I’d seen him before.
    He paused, head bowed, and lifted a hand to cover his face. He stayed like that for a full minute. It was only when he dropped his hand that I noticed his other arm. It ended just above the wrist.
    I shivered. So he’d had some kind of accident and lost his hand. Big deal. That shouldn’t be creepy. But combined with everything else that had happened, with seeing him suddenly appear from the woods where a dead body lay, it was.
    He straightened and strode toward the parking lot. What had he been doing in the woods? Just a random tourist heading that way by chance, or a busybody who’d seen the police and wanted to learn the gossip? Neither possibility explained his reaction.
    I got up and followed him. I had no plan, just a strange curiosity about this mystery man. Maybe the woman in the woods and the investigation of her death were none of my business. But I was involved, as much as I’d been involved in anything in my life. If her death wasn’t natural—if it might be, as the officer had hinted, murder—I wanted to see it resolved.
    My gut told me this guy was involved as well. But how?
    I lost sight of him for a minute in the parking lot, but then I heard a door slam. I headed in that direction, past SUVs, minivans, and nice sedans—the typical vehicles of our mainly upscale tourists. Two police cars had pulled into the fifteen-minute parking spaces. A faint, strange sound, like a rusty door closing, drifted through