Free A Catered Tea Party by Isis Crawford

reach it.
    â€œI need something to stand on,” Bernie said, looking around the room. The armchair. She pushed it across the floor and hopped up on it. “Here goes nothing,” she said as she reached up, grasped the dragon’s tail with both hands, and yanked down on it.
    Bernie and Libby heard a creak and felt motion. She pulled down harder. This time the dragon moved. Bernie instinctively held up her hand to catch the curtain rod in case it fell, but it stayed in place. “We have game,” she said as she jumped off the chair.
    She and Libby rushed back inside the closet. There was a small, visible space where the crack in the wall had been.
    â€œIt is a door,” Bernie said as she bent down, grabbed hold of the edge, and pulled.
    The door opened a little wider.
    Libby looked at the opening. “I don’t know,” she said. “This opening would be a pretty tight fit for Zalinsky.”
    â€œHe could still wiggle his way through,” Bernie said as she peeked inside.
    She couldn’t see anything. It was all blackness. She took out her phone and opened the flashlight app. Suddenly the tunnel came into view. She moved her phone up and down. The ceiling was low. She wouldn’t be able to stand upright, but she could get down on on her hands and knees, and she’d been right, it was wide enough to get her shoulders through with a couple of inches to spare on either side.
    She crawled in a little way and played the light over the walls. A couple of feet down, she spotted a box sitting on the floor. Books were piled on top of it. She crawled in a couple more feet, removed the books, and dragged the box out. It was your standard brown cardboard carton, the kind one sent packages in, and it was sealed with packing tape.
    â€œIt’s heavy,” Bernie noted as she lifted the carton up and put it on Zalinsky’s bed.
    Then she got her keys out and slit the tape with the key to the van. Libby looked over her shoulder as Bernie opened the flaps. There was a dark green backpack smushed inside. Bernie lifted out the backpack and unzipped it.
    She let out a low whistle. “Wow,” she said as she shook out the contents.
    â€œFor sure,” Libby agreed.

Chapter 10
    L ibby studied the backpack’s contents lying on Zalinsky’s bed. There was a small notebook with nothing inside, twenty thousand dollars in cash, a small envelope containing five one-carat diamonds, probably one hundred gold Krugerrands, a Glock .9mm, two boxes of ammo, and an American passport sporting Zalinsky’s picture and the name Louis Zebb.
    â€œInteresting that Zalinsky kept the same initials,” Libby commented as she picked up the passport and thumbed through it. It gave no evidence of being used.
    â€œI suppose it’s easier to remember your new name that way,” Bernie observed. She pointed to the issuing date. “He got this in April. Maybe he knew trouble was coming.”
    â€œOr maybe he was just covering all his bases,” Libby said as she picked up a large, square leather case that had been inside the backpack and opened it. It was full of jewelry, each piece wrapped in purple tissue paper.
    â€œCould be,” Bernie said. “I guess if you’re someone like Zalinsky, you’ve got to have all your bases covered.”
    â€œNot bad,” Libby commented, lifting out a tennis bracelet and a pair of two-carat diamond earrings. “Not bad at all.” She went through the rest of the jewelry. There were two Cartier watches, several more diamond bracelets, four sets of diamond earrings, two diamond pins with stones set in a flower design, and a number of necklaces. Seven of the pieces had women’s names attached to them, none of which, Libby noted, were Erin’s. “He was quite the ladies’ man,” Libby observed.
    Bernie picked up a pair of earrings and held them up to the light. “I wonder if they’re