Thou Art With Me by Debbie Viguié

breath.
    “Well, then there might be another way.”
    “What? How?”
    She smirked. “I have a key.”
    “Then what are we waiting for?” Mark asked, standing up.
    Twenty minutes later they were pulling into the driveway of a house large enough to be called a small mansion. Mark had let Melinda drive. She parked the car and they both got out and headed for the front door.
    “He always had me running back and forth picking up things for him,” Melinda said as she unlocked the door and let them inside. She swiftly disarmed the alarm system and then led him into a large office on the first floor.
    It was nicer than the offices had been at the law firm, done all in dark paneling and leather. It had a very old school feel to it.
    Melinda went straight to a bookshelf, lifted a particular book, and retrieved a key that was there. She then moved over to the filing cabinet and unlocked it. She began to flip through the files while Mark walked around the office.
    “Do you believe that Kent’s accident was truly an accident?” he asked after a minute.
    She froze, her shoulders bunching up. She finally said, “I thought it was at first. Just a terrible, terrible accident. But then I began to wonder. Something seemed off about it to me.”
    “What was that?”
    “Well, for one, the area he was driving in. Everyone knows how treacherous that road is on a good day. In fog it’s nearly impossible. And it was nowhere near his house. There was no way he would have taken it from his home to the office. He was going somewhere else or coming back from somewhere else. That’s the only thing I could figure.”
    She took a deep breath. “No one wanted to talk about it, though, or pursue it. For a while I convinced myself that it was because it had to do with something confidential he or the firm had been working on for one of their clients.”
    “But you stopped thinking that?” Mark pushed.
    “I started going through the files, one by one, looking for some reason why he might have been out where he was. I drew a complete blank, though. Nina caught me looking, too, and I had to make up some lame excuse. I think she’s been watching me since then, though, just waiting for a chance to fire me. She’s a strange one. It’s like she lives for getting people into trouble.”
    “And yet her job is to get people out of it.”
    “Like I said, strange.”
    Mark had come to accept that anything that touched Not Paul’s life had been strange.
    “There’s nothing under the Ds, but I’ll keep looking,” Melinda said, closing the top drawer of the filing cabinet and opening the next one.
    Mark sat down at the desk and began to open drawers. It felt weird to do something like this without a search warrant. He kept telling himself that it was okay. Melinda had a key and Kent had authorized her to use it. Of course, that didn’t extend to him. He’d just have to claim that he was with Melinda if they got caught.
    He went through all the drawers on the right hand side with no success. Melinda moved down to the third drawer of the filing cabinet.
    Mark switched to the drawers on the left hand side, but still had no luck identifying anything about Paul. A couple minutes later Melinda finished up with the filing cabinet and shook her head. “I’ve got nothing.”
    “Did he have a safe of any kind in here?” Mark asked.
    Melinda frowned. “He does, but I don’t think it will help.”
    “Do you know where it is and how to open it?”
    She nodded and moved over to a large hunting picture on one wall. She swung it forward to reveal a wall safe behind it. “I know, it’s terribly cliché, but what can you do? He was a traditional kind of guy.”
    “Let’s hope he was traditional enough to leave something laying around that we can use,” Mark said grimly.
    The safe was a combination one and he stood back a couple of feet to give Melinda space. She spun the dials and a moment later was unlocking the safe.
    Mark craned his neck to see