Free A Slice of Murder by Chris Cavender Page A

of red tape,” I replied. Then I remembered retrieving our will from ours after Joe died. “Sheila, is there any chance you were listed on the account, too?”
    “I don’t know. I signed a few things for Richard over the years, but I can’t remember what they were.”
    I nodded. “Then at least it’s worth a shot. Why don’t I drive us?”
    “Someone needs to stay here and keep working,” Sheila said as she looked at all the bags I’d generated. “Have you gone through everything?”
    “No, I need to have space to sort things out, so I thought I’d take them home with me. I was going to ask you first, of course.”
    “I don’t know,” Sheila said, the doubt heavy in her voice. “I hate the thought of anything leaving the house until I have a clearer idea of where things stand.”
    Maddy spoke up. “Why don’t I go to the bank with you, and Eleanor can stay here and keep sorting through those papers?”
    I was about to protest when Sheila said, “That would be perfect. Thank you both so much. Just let me grab my purse.”
    As she ducked into the living room, I said, “Thanks for nothing. I wanted to go to the bank myself. After all, I found the key.”
    “Does it really matter which one of us goes with her, as long as one of us does? I didn’t mean to throw you under the train tracks like that, but I was afraid she was getting ready to say she was going by herself, and then we might never know what was inside. Forgive me?”
    “I guess so,” I said as I looked at the bags of papers I’d so cavalierly thrown together. If they’d been separated by any type of system before, it was long gone. I was afraid I’d made myself even more work than I’d meant to.
    Sheila was at the door again. “Are you coming, Maddy? If you’d rather stay here and work, I could always go by myself. I’ve got my broken-down old Mercedes parked in the garage.”
    “Nonsense,” I said. “She’d love to go with you. Besides, you don’t know anybody in town, so having Maddy with you might expedite things at the bank.”
    I knew full well they wouldn’t, but I was counting on Sheila not knowing that personal contacts went only so far in our banking institutions.
     
    After they were gone, I focused on the bags in front of me. I quickly developed a triage system to deal with the masses of paperwork. One area was for discards, while I put possibly useful information in one of the boxes I’d scavenged away from Maddy. Once the system was in place, I had a neat stack of papers in one box, and half a dozen trash bags on the front porch that were ready for the shredder or the landfill.
    I looked over what I’d found and wondered when Maddy and Sheila would return. There were five bank envelopes, each containing two brand-new one-hundred-dollar bills. I’d nearly thrown them away, since they’d been buried in banded stacks of fifty envelopes from the same bank, the others all empty. After finding the first two bills by accident, I’d slowed my search until I was certain I’d found every bill in the stacks. It told me one thing besides the fact that Richard liked to have cash around the house: he liked to hide things in plain sight, something I was going to have to keep in mind as I kept searching. The bills weren’t the most unusual of my finds, though. I’d also found six separate deposit slips for the same bank where Sheila and my sister now were—each for nine thousand nine hundred ninety dollars, dated the first of each month for the past six months.
    Maybe I could catch Maddy while they were still there. I used my cell phone to call her. “Hey, it’s me.”
    “Hi. I should have stayed there with you. This is taking forever.”
    “Then Sheila’s name wasn’t on the safety-deposit box account?”
    Maddy snapped, “It was there, all right. The problem is, the only employee with the proper key to let us in is on her lunch break, and as of right now, she’s seventeen minutes late.”
    “Sorry about that,” I