That was wrong as well. I felt a prickle of apprehension. “Go wait in the car,” I said, stepping past her.
She gave me her “stupid adult” look. “Uh, not likely,” she said, following me inside.
I called out Lily’s name a couple of times, but there was no answer.
“Maybe she’s in the kitchen and has her iPod on or something,” Avery offered.
It was possible, although I’d never seen Lily with an iPod.
I pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen. The lights were on, but there was no sign of Lily anywhere. And there were no loaves of bread cooling on racks. No cinnamon rolls waiting to go in the oven. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. Then I saw the door down to the basement was open.
I turned to look at Avery. “Just stay right here,” I said. “Without giving me a hard time for once. Please.” Something in my voice or my face must have told her not to argue this time.
I walked over to the open basement door, my heart pounding loudly in my ears. Lily was at the bottom of the basement stairs. There was blood on two of the steps. I didn’t go down to check on her. I could tell from the angle of her neck that she was dead.
Chapter 4
I turned around and hustled Avery back out to the SUV.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Just go,” I said, putting one hand in the middle of her back and pushing her ahead of me while I fished my cell phone out of my pocket with the other.
We got as far as the sidewalk before Avery braced her feet. She swung around to face me and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on,” she said. She had the same stubborn look I’d seen many times over the years in her grandmother’s eyes.
“There was . . . an accident,” I said, choosing my words carefully.
“You mean Lily’s dead,” she said flatly, “because if she were just hurt, you’d be in there helping her.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Yes,” I said. “Lily’s dead. Please go sit in the car while I call 911.”
Avery looked over at the bakery. “All right,” she said after a moment. She started for the SUV.
“Avery,” I called after her.
She stopped and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Keep your phone in your pocket for now, please.” I didn’t want her to text her friends with the news before the police had a chance to contact Caroline.
After a moment’s hesitation she nodded. “All right.”
I turned my back to the SUV, swallowed against the sudden sting of tears and called 911.
The first patrol car arrived in minutes. I explained about finding Lily’s body. The officer asked me to stay outside and went in to have a look for himself. After that things got very busy, very quickly. Avery and I waited in the SUV and watched the action swirl around us. When I saw Michelle’s car pull in at the curb ahead of us, I nudged Avery.
“I’m going to talk to Detective Andrews for a minute,” I said.
Detective Michelle Andrews and I had been best friends growing up, at least for two months of the year. We were both summer kids in North Harbor, and each year we’d just pick up the friendship where we’d left off the previous summer. Then at fifteen Michelle had suddenly stopped talking to me. It wasn’t until last winter that I’d found out why. Now we were slowly rebuilding our relationship.
“So stay here,” Avery finished. “Yeah, I know.”
Michelle smiled when she caught sight of me. “Hey, Sarah. What’s going on?” she asked. She was wearing a dark navy parka and heavy-soled boots. A cardinal-red hat was the only spot of color I could see on her. Michelle was tall and lean with red hair and green eyes. Everything looked good on her.
“I came to pick up five dozen rolls for the hot-lunch program at the elementary school.” I stopped for a moment, seeing Lily’s body at the bottom of the basement steps in my mind. “Lily . . . Uh, there was no sign of Lily anywhere. I found her at the bottom of the basement steps. She’s dead.”
Michelle’s eyes shifted to the bakery for a moment and then came back to me. “Did you touch the body?”
Lily had already gone from being a person to a body. I reminded myself that Michelle was just doing her job. “No,” I said.
She frowned. “How did you know she was dead, then?”
This time I was the one who looked away for a moment. “I don’t think anyone’s neck could be at that angle and still be alive,” I said quietly.
“I’m sorry, Sarah,” she said, laying her hand on my shoulder for a moment.
I brushed a strand of hair back off my face and took a deep breath, trying to hold back the tears that were threatening again. “It’s all right. Better it was me that found her and not her mother.”
Michelle nodded. “Okay, tell me what happened, from the beginning.”
There really wasn’t that much to tell, but I went over everything that had happened from the time I’d picked up Avery until the patrol car arrived. As I finished, Nick Elliot’s black SUV angled in at the curb in front of Michelle’s car. He got out, grabbed his gear from the backseat and walked over to us.
“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked.
“It’s Lily Carter,” Michelle said.
He swore, almost under his breath. Then he looked at me. “Sarah, what are you doing here?”
“I was picking up rolls for the hot lunch at the school,” I said, rubbing my gloved hands together. “I, uh, found her.”
“Hey, I’m sorry.” His free hand moved as though he was going to touch my arm, and then he stuffed it in his jacket pocket like he’d suddenly thought better of it.
“Sarah, where’s Avery?” Michelle asked, looking around.
I pointed toward the SUV. “She didn’t see anything,” I said. “We both came back outside as soon as I realized Lily was dead.”
“I’m just going to talk to her for a second,” she said.
I realized she probably wanted Avery to corroborate my story. Friends or not, she had to do her job.
She looked at Nick. “I’ll see you inside.”
He nodded.
I watched Michelle walk down the sidewalk to my car. Avery was already getting out. I turned back to Nick.
“What happened?” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
I pulled my scarf a little tighter around my neck. It was so cold our breath hung in the early-morning air like little smoke signals. “I don’t know. When we got here, there was no sign of Lily. The door was unlocked—which was wrong. Lily never unlocks that door before seven thirty. We went in and . . . she was at the bottom of the basement stairs.”
Nick swiped a hand over his chin. “If they’re like the stairs going down to most of the basements along here, they’re an accident waiting to happen—skinny steps, high risers. I don’t know why we haven’t had more accidents like this.”
I looked down at the sidewalk and scraped at a chunk of ice with the toe of my boot.
“What is it?” he asked.
I looked up at him. His head was tipped to one side, and there was concern in his brown eyes.
“Nick, maybe this sounds crazy, but I know Lily’s morning routine. I’m in here early at least a couple times a week, getting rolls for the school or coffee and a muffin for myself. She wouldn’t have left that front door unlocked, and she wouldn’t have been on those stairs, not in the morning. She always got everything ready for the next day before she left at night.”
Nick shifted the silver case he was carrying from one hand to the other. “She could have forgotten about the door, and people don’t always stick to their routines.”
I shook my head. “You didn’t know Lily. She did things the same way all the time. All the time. She told me once she thought maybe she was a little OCD.” I stamped my feet on the brick sidewalk. The cold was beginning to seep through my heavy boots. “If it were anyone else, I’d agree with you, but not Lily. And you have to have heard how much upset there’s been over her refusing to sell for the North Landing project.”