Face Time by Hank Phillippi Ryan

want her joining me up here just yet.
    With a metallic click, the drawer finally rolls all the way closed. I look at the document in my hand, and then I hear my name again. The voice is getting closer. I grab my tote bag and dig out my cell phone. This had better work.
     
     
    “I PROMISE YOU , there wasn’t anything to see down there,” Franklin reassures me as we pull out of the Sweeneys’ cul-de-sac. “You were taking so long upstairs, I just went down to the basement myself, figuring you’d arrive sooner or later. Too bad it was too much later,” he adds. “You should have checked your watch.”
    I know he’s teasing, but it drives me crazy that Poppy threw us out before—well, she hadn’t exactly thrown us out, but even though she’d politely tucked my business card into her files, she had made it clear our time inside was up. Luckily Franklin was resourceful enough to investigate the basement himself. So far, he hasn’t stopped talking about what he saw downstairs long enough for me to show him what I found upstairs. Just as well, since I’d rather wait until we can get somewhere private. And I do want to hear about that basement, even if he thinks it wasn’t revealing.
    “It was all…” Franklin wrinkles his nose, remembering. “Bleachy. The concrete floors, all spotless.” He glances at me. “You know, spot-less. No stains, if that’s what you’re imagining.”
    I had been, actually. He knows me too well. “What’s at the top of the stairs? Are the steps steep? Were there railings? Are the floors all concrete?”
    I’m wondering about Oscar Ortega and his investigators accepting the story that a woman of Dorinda’s size, a “little snip of a thing” as Poppy had called her, got control of her hulk of a husband and managed to push him down the stairs. Not to mention how she bashed him with an iron. “According to the news articles,” I continue my thoughts out loud, “they’d gone home after having an argument in that bar. The Reefs? Dorie hit him with the iron while he was passed out on the couch, then dragged him to the basement steps and pushed him down.”
    I pause, imagining the scene, and Dorinda, and how heavy her dead husband would be, and why the daughter didn’t wake up, and how much blood and evidence there would be on the path from the couch to the basement steps. “You’d think Oz’s crime-scene people could easily tell,” I begin, “whether someone actually—”
    “She confessed,” Franklin reminds me, interrupting. “Oz and the Swampscott police probably didn’t even bring in a trace evidence team. Wouldn’t have needed to. Case closed, you know?” Franklin clicks on the car’s turn signal. “Dunkin’s okay?”
    “We’ve got to talk to her. Got to.” I say, probably for the millionth time, as we head into the parking lot of the coffee shop. There’s a line at the drive-through, so Franklin pulls up to the front door. “Wait,” I say, turning toward him. I make a quick check around the parking lot, although with Poppy long gone, who’s going to be watching us? I zip open my purse.
    Franklin looks at me inquiringly. “Did you forget to go to the bank machine again?” he asks. “I’ll spring for the lattes.”
    “Nope,” I reply. I pull out my cell phone, and click into My Photos. “I just want to show you something. Look what I found in the Sweeneys’ bureau,” I say, holding up the phone so Franklin can see it too. “It’s a picture of Dorie from high school. See? It had slipped behind a drawer, you know? Underneath. I took a snap of it with my phone. She’s wearing a Swampscott High hoodie sweatshirt, so it must have been taken years ago. You can tell how young she is. And she’s giving the peace sign. Very eighties teeny bopper.”
    “You took it? From a drawer?” Franklin is focusing on the process, not the picture. I’d hoped he’d ignore that part. “You opened their drawers?”
    “Yeah, yeah, so I opened the drawers,” I