Read An Adrien English Mystery: The Dark Tide for Free Online

crew stood in the opening it made. I saw shocked, even pale, faces.
    Fernando called to me, “I think you better see this, Mr. English.”
    “Okay.” I tried to detach Natalie. She clung harder. “Nat. Natty. I have to see this.
    Whatever it is.”
    “No.” She raised a tearstained face. “You shouldn't go up those stairs.”
    Upstairs? I had quick, crazy visions of mysterious locked rooms and madwomen in the attic, which was ridiculous, since I'd been through the entire building and there were no boarded-up rooms or anything more sinister than mold beneath the window casings—which, come to think of it, was pretty sinister.
    I tried pulling her arms from around my neck, and she latched back on like an amorous octopus. “Nat, there's no reason I can't walk upstairs. It's not Everest.” I peeled her arms from around me.
    She cried, “ No . Don't go up there. They found the body.”
    I froze. “What body?”
    “The body that old man told us about this morning. The trumpet player's body.”
    Clarinet player, though he was probably past caring. I turned to Fernando, and he said apologetically, “It's true. We found a body in the floor upstairs.”
    “A body in the floor ?”
    He nodded.
    “There's a body in the floor upstairs?”
    Another nod. “A skeleton. He's been there a long time.”
    In the stricken silence the cat stuck a cautious nose around the nearest bookshelf, whiskers twitching. He sensibly retreated.
    “A skeleton?” Not that I really thought he could be mistaken about this.
    A final nod.
    “It's horrible , Adrien,” Natalie told me. “Don't go up there.”

    20
    Josh Lanyon

    “Which floor?”
    Not that it really mattered.
    “Third,” Fernando supplied.
    Maybe it did matter. The third floor had been blocked off for the last decade or so. That was probably significant.
    “Has anyone called the police yet?”
    “We found him a couple of minutes ago,” Fernando explained. “We showed the lady…”
    He let that trail, probably realizing after the fact that “showing the lady” had not been the smartest move of the afternoon.
    “All right. Now show me.” I thought quickly. “Natalie, you'd better lock up for the day.”
    Bodies under floorboards would not be good for business. Not even at a mystery bookstore.
    She assented, pulling herself together, and shepherding the remaining—and surprisingly reluctant—customers out. They went, offering helpful advice such as telling us to call the paramedics. Personally, I thought it sounded late for that.
    The workmen shuffled in silence to the side as I followed Fernando through the part of the building still under construction.
    We headed up the long staircase, the crew following at an uneasy distance while Fernando explained how they had been ripping up floorboards near the window in preparation for treating the mold.
    “And there he was,” he finished glumly over the crunch of our shoes' soles on bits of plaster and dust and paint.
    This side of the building was three stories tall, as opposed to the two stories on the Cloak and Dagger side. We climbed slowly, Fernando clearly reluctant to return to the chamber of horrors, and me pacing myself. It was my building, and if there was a skeleton hidden in here, I was sure as hell going to see it.
    Could the mystery of Jay Stevens's disappearance really be solved after all these years?
    Maybe solved wasn't the right word. Obviously if his body had been shoved under the floor in the old hotel, he hadn't died a natural death. This discovery might open more questions than it answered.
    We climbed past the second floor, and I absently noted that the crew had finished replastering the walls and sanding the floors. Nice to see that progress was being made, although this latest discovery was guaranteed to set things even further back than the revelation of a bunch of dead rats in the attic had.
    Up on the third story, the renovation was much less further along. In addition to battling fungus and wood