Amelia regretted asking the woman behind the counter at the storage space for help the minute she looked up with a face full of her own injuries. What was it about this neighborhood? Amelia had barely survived a mad man who, probably only because he’d let his dog out to pee, had been killed by an extraordinarily handsome young man…who had then died himself.
Amelia considered what she assumed was the storage space’s employee behind the counter, then leaned over to brush some blonde hair out of the woman’s tears. “I’m truly sorry to trouble you at such a time, but has anyone been asking after a petulant young woman with dark hair and a nervous tic that twitches her lips? Awkwardly, I’m unable to supply her last name, but her first name was Jennifer. I believe she has a storage unit here at your facility, so you should have some record of her?”
The blonde woman wrinkled her brow in confusion, looking for all the world like she’d been so distracted by her own problems that she’d forgotten she worked there. Finally she glanced around, eyes widening at the counter between them as if she’d never seen it before, and appeared to get her bearings. “Why?”
Amelia’s heart was heavy. She couldn’t help feeling disloyal to poor, dead Jennifer. Nonetheless, Jennifer could no longer be hurt by her now rescinding what she’d originally told the police in an effort to protect Jennifer. “The murder that was reported here…” Amelia looked down at the dingy floor, still unable to shake the irrational feeling that she was being disloyal. “You must know about it, working here and all. I need to speak to someone about Jennifer. I…I may have told the police something about her that wasn’t correct, that might get in the way of their tracking down the real killer.”
She forced herself to look back up at the woman. Granted, it certainly wasn’t a pleasant subject, but she wasn’t at all prepared for the look of abject fear on the blonde’s face.
