Buttoned Up by Kylie Logan Page B

peoples’ faces when they realized the star of the show had just taken off like a bat out of hell. He might not have been able to hear exactly what they said, but he would have been able to catch the excited hum of their conversation, just like I could hear the overlapping voices of the crime-scene techs at work around the exhibit.
    This was a possibility Nev and I hadn’t considered and, wondering if it was actually feasible, I sat down in the nearest pew to think.
    I stood up again just as quickly when I realized how slick the wooden pew was.
    Of course! It made perfect sense. Laverne said that church services were conducted in the basement. Which meant that except for the art shows up front, most of the old church went largely unused and wasn’t cleaned often. This pew was coated with dust and that meant the others were, too.
    Quickly, I headed to the front of the church, then back down the aisle, glancing left and right as I did. If Forbis crouched down in any of the pews, he would have left a smudge in the dust, just like I had when I sat down.
    Only he hadn’t.
    He didn’t.
    Except for the spot where I’d just sat down, the light that flowed in through the stained-glass windows showed that the dust was undisturbed, a slick, smooth coating on each and every wooden pew.
    Sure I was disappointed that my hunch hadn’t worked out, but I am nothing if not determined. Ask all the friends and family members who’d given me weird looks when I told them I’d decided to quit my admin job at an insurance company and open up my own button shop. Ever practical, I knew it was time to move on to Plan B.
    This would actually have been a really good idea if I had a Plan B.
    Grumbling, thinking, and grumbling some more, I wandered out the door at the back of the church and into the vestibule. There was no use going outside. I’d been out there the night before—me and hotness personified, Gabriel Marsh—and I knew there wasn’t anything to see. Not anything that would help me figure out what happened to Forbis, anyway.
    I was just about to throw in the towel and go back into the church when I realized all wasn’t lost. There were other possibilities. Two of them, in fact. To the left of the main doors was an alcove that contained a baptismal font, and to the right, the stairs that led to the choir loft.
    Like so much of the church, the baptistery was dusty and obviously unused. That left the choir. I took the steps two at a time, and by the time I got up to the loft that spanned the width of the church, my heart pounded and I was breathing hard.
    I didn’t turn on the lights. That would only have attracted the attention of the cops swarming the art exhibit and, for now, I wanted to keep this little piece of the investigation to myself. If it panned out, I would certainly mention it to Nev. And if it didn’t, well, there was no use in him knowing that I’d tried and gotten nowhere.
    Then he’d only have another reason to compare me to beautiful and brilliant Evangeline.
    I slapped the thought out of my head. It was unworthy of me. Not to mention small-minded. Besides—a slow smile spread across my face—Evangeline might be an expert when it came to vudon and Barrier Islands culture, but I had it all over her when it came to buttons, not to mention murder.
    The thought firmly in mind, I took a look around.
    There was a rose window to my left, a long way off and directly opposite from where the old altar used to stand. With the morning light streaming through, it was breathtaking, but I tried not to get distracted by the pools of blue and purple and red that stained the old wooden floor. The night before, the choir loft would have been completely dark and not as easy to negotiate.
    There were five rows of pews up here, each a little higher than the one in the row in front of it. That made sense, of course, both from the perspective of the congregation, who could look back and see the singers, and for the singers