A Tale of Two Tabbies by Kathi Daley

Luckily, the place was packed with leagues, so it was easy to slip past Benny and make my way to the locker room, which I conveniently found to be deserted. Apparently my timing was good because the leagues had started a half hour earlier and everyone who had to get their equipment from their locker had already done so.
    It only took me a few minutes to find locker 241 and a few seconds more to find out that 0668 did indeed open the locker. The evidence I found inside, however, would keep me reeling for the rest of the night.
     
     

Chapter 8
     
     
    I returned to my cabin, let Max out for a run, and then lit a fire, poured myself a glass of wine, and considered the contents of the locker. Inside there had been a single envelope that contained a dozen photos, taken at least six months earlier. The photos showed my very own Aunt Maggie with none other than the love of her life, Michael Kilian.
    The photos—which, based on the background, were taken in the fall—weren’t improper, exactly, but they were intimate. One photo showed Aunt Maggie and Father Kilian walking hand in hand on the beach. He was dressed in casual jeans and a sweater and he looked so very different than he did when dressed in his priestly garb.
    Another photo showed them sitting at a table looking at a photo album and laughing. There was one of them sitting side by side on a sofa looking in the direction of the camera. I suppose they could have been watching television. Although the photos were very much G-rated, anyone who saw them would come to the same conclusion I had: Maggie’s mystery trips had actually been rendezvous with our local priest.
    How could she? How could they?
    I tucked the photos back into the envelope and wondered what I should do with them. The MH in MHMB241-0668 obviously stood for Maggie Hart. Why hadn’t I seen that before? Probably because I never in a million years expected that Maggie would do something bad enough to get her blackmailed.
    I looked at the photo of the codes and payments I’d taken from the ledger. It looked like Maggie had made five payments. I remembered the first time she’d disappeared, back in October, and realized that was when the photos must have been taken. The main question in my mind was why Maggie would confess to a secret getaway with Father Kilian to him. She wouldn’t. Which left me to wonder how it was that Theresa knew about the meeting ahead of time so she was able to be there to get the photos. The whole thing made no sense.
    After quite a bit of debate with myself I decided to hide the photos until Maggie returned and I could ask her about them. Tara would most likely ask me in the morning what had been in the locker, and I knew I’d have to lie and say it was empty, which did make me feel bad. But still…The fact that Maggie and Father Kilian had been taking off on what could only be romantic getaways would rock the entire community if word of them slipped out.
    I tried to imagine what Maggie and Father Kilian were up to and why after all these years they’d decided to sneak around, but every answer I came up with was unpleasant, so I set my concerns aside and focused on something else. I did, after all, still have a murder to solve.
    I had to believe that Maggie hadn’t killed Theresa, which meant that if our theory was accurate and her killer was one of her victims, the killer, by default, must be VW. The question was, who was VW and where was the evidence against VW hidden?
    With the exception of hiding the evidence against Tom Osborn in a shoe box, Theresa had utilized lockers around the island. We’d already discovered evidence in lockers at the high school, the community center, and the bowling alley. I tried to think about other locations in town where lockers could be found. We’d discussed the fact that the new gym had lockers, but we’d also talked about the fact that it was unlikely Theresa had had a membership. Besides, the clue was SP and the name of the gym was