Free Skeleton Key by Jeff Laferney

track laborer, engine repairman, and unloader. Whatever they ask me to do besides drive the trains and supervise.”
    Tanner and Clay liked him right away. “Not to mention, he’s a really good friend,” Erika interjected. “Say hi to Stacy for me.”
    “ Sure thing. Buenas tardes, amigos.”
    “ Let’s head on in, Gentlemen,” Erika said.
    After Roberto drove away, Tanner said to his dad, “If we go in those front doors, we should walk in and turn to the right to go to a waiting area. If we go straight through the lobby and down a hallway, there’ll be a stairway on the right, heading to the second floor.” He led his dad and Erika through the doors, and sure enough, it was just as he described it. They headed up the stairs. When they reached the second floor, Tanner turned to the right and walked down a hallway. When he reached the second office door, he turned right, then looked to the wall on the right and pointed at a family picture of Erika, Adrian, and Logan Payne. Logan looked to be about nine or ten years old. “There it is.”
    “ That is what called you here? That picture in my office?”
    Tanner shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Clay marveled at his attitude. Clay had lost his wife, but Tanner had lost his mother . She loved Tanner with all her heart, and Tanner knew it. Yet, less than a year later, he could smile, laugh, and not take himself too seriously. They had found the picture, and now it was everyone else’s responsibility to figure things out. His cell phone buzzed; he took it out of his pocket, read the message, and laughed. “Big Jake came to our room to see if we had any flu medicine—he’s a player on our team who’s been sick,” he explained to Erika—“so my roommate, Mike, let him in and they headed for the bathroom. Mike says, ‘You don’t look so good, Jake,’ and Jake says, ‘How can you live in here? It smells so bad!’ and the next thing, he was puking his guts out in the toilet. Mike says he couldn’t leave fast enough.”
    Clay and Tanner started laughing again. “Tanner hypnotized Jake ’cause he was hangin’ out too much in their room. Every time he’s there in the room and hears his name, he believes the smell’s so bad that he leaves.”
    “ Or he pukes and then leaves. That’s priceless!” Tanner was laughing again, and so was Erika.
    Clay was intrigued by the mystery, however, so he was right back to business while the other two were enjoying their laugh. He was studying the picture. It was simply a family picture of Erika, Adrian, and Logan Payne outside the Depot with an old orange-colored train caboose in the background. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He removed it from the wall and looked at the back of the picture, feeling it to see if possibly there was something hidden on the back. There was nothing unusual that he could see. “Erika, do you mind if I take the picture out of the frame? Maybe there’s something inside.”
    She gave the okay, so he took a couple of minutes to remove the picture and check everything thoroughly, still discovering nothing unusual. He flipped the picture over again and studied the photo. He began to feel a coolness in the room, like the temperature had just rapidly dropped a few degrees. Clay looked up to see if someone had opened a window, but Erika and Tanner were standing and talking about some wooden carvings that were on Erika’s desk.
    “ Yeah, Logan is really talented. I’m planning on getting him some real wood carving knives for Christmas. He did this with his jackknife. ”
    “ Wow,” Tanner said. “Look at this, Dad. He carved a train, some train tracks, and look at this horse. This one is really good.”
    As Clay started to look away from the picture, he heard, “I’m looking a dead horse in the mouth.” It was a kind of whispery male voice. He looked around, expecting to see someone else in the room.
    “ Did you hear that?” he asked.
    Erika shot him a curious look, but Tanner quickly