Dead Men Don't Eat Cookies Read Free Page A

downstairsin the kitchen making sandwiches and coffee. Did I hear you mention you’d finished baking some cookies?”
    Olivia answered her mother’s question without turning her head. “Oh, sure, Mom, eat the cookies, drink the coffee. There’s plenty of both.”
    “You’ll need to move some dough off the table,” Maddie said. “Just wad it in a towel and stick it in the fridge.”
    The workers shuffled closer to the wall to get another look inside. “You guys clear out,” Calliope said. “You can take the rest of the day off, with pay. Stop for lunch on your way out. Wait for me in the kitchen and don’t leave before I get there.” The men whooped. “And if I find out you’ve told anyone about what we discovered in that wall, I’ll fire you on the spot. Understood?”
    The workers all nodded vigorously and filed out of the room.
    “Everyone in Chatterley Heights will hear about these bones by sundown at the latest,” Maddie said. “You know that, right?”
    “Sure, I know that,” Calliope said. “But I’m betting my threat will slow them down, maybe make them think twice. I’m paying them well, and they need the work.”
    Jason and Calliope leaned the plywood against the wall, revealing a cavity more than a foot deep. The area seemed generous for a wall, but Olivia knew that walls had often been thicker in the past. No one spoke for a time. There wasn’t much to say because there wasn’t much to see beyond some bones. Olivia was too embarrassed to admit, at least in public, that she’d envisioned a skeleton more like the plastic one her family had hung on their front door every Halloween.
    “Huh,” Maddie whispered. “Is that all there is?”
    “Jeez, sorry to disappoint you guys,” Jason said.
    Olivia felt something brush against her ankle. She glanced down to see Spunky sneak toward the cavity. His fluffy tailswished with eager curiosity as he sniffed the air. “Spunky, no!” Olivia grabbed him and lifted his tiny body to her chest. “Those bones are not for you,” she whispered in his ear. He squirmed in her arms, clearly not convinced.
    Olivia ran her finger over several small holes along the outer edges of the wall. “Are these nail holes? So that plywood was actually nailed to the wall?”
    “It was,” Calliope said. “Sloppy job. I’d have re-plastered the whole wall. No one would have been the wiser, at least until the site was cleared for development. Even then, the bones might have been crushed by a bulldozer before anyone saw them.”
    Olivia peered into the wall cavity, taking care not to step inside. “This area seems large for an inner wall,” she said. “Shouldn’t there be insulation or something?”
    Jason snorted. “Inside walls don’t need insulation. However, despite the dumbness of your question, I agree that the space is larger than I’d have expected. My guess is this might originally have been a shallow storage closet. It goes along half the wall. There would have been another closet in the room sharing this wall to fill in the other half. For some reason, the closets in both rooms got plastered over to make them into walls. Don’t ask me why. Maybe the closets were disintegrating. Anyway, the building was abandoned years ago. Somehow the wall got damaged, and someone covered the whole thing with plywood. That’s all I can figure.”
    “Let me have another look.” Calliope peered around the cavity. “You might be right, Jason. I’d say this wall has been through several renovations, mostly on the cheap. It started out good and solid. Then maybe somebody decided it used up too much valuable space and tried to make a closet out of it. Not a very good closet, but by then the inhabitants were probably too poor to need much storage space.” Calliope shook her head. “Too bad. This was a decent building once. I hate to see good construction go bad.”
    “Forgive me for interrupting such a fascinating and poignant discussion of wall design,” Maddie