Banana Split and Bodies

by Allyssa Mirry

  Leo stepped aside so she could open the door and go inside. He followed her, and they found Sunny deep asleep in one of her doggy beds near a half-open window where there was a nice breeze. She looked surprised but happy when she saw two people that she loved waking her up.

  She stroked the dog’s ears but wasn’t sure how long her French bulldog mix would distract Leo with her adorable yawns. She decided to bring up a new subject.

  “So, were you also on the porch to consider Suzanne Peppercorn’s ideas?”

  “I did like what she had to say about playing up a nautical theme at the house,” Leo said. “I could see how that would attract people. I spoke to her a little more because I had an idea. I thought we might be able to put some of the ships in bottles that Uncle Edgar used to make in the front windows. She really loved that idea. And she’s going to bring over an anchor that we can place on the porch. She said that her specialty is finding interesting anchor décor. And we’ll add some colorful plants too.”

  “It sounds like she knows what she’s doing,” Lydia said.

  “She’s a professional, and she does have natural talent,” Leo said with a grin.

  “And she is the girl that you used to have a crush on?”

  “I bet you can see why. She’s great, isn’t she? I can’t believe that I haven’t run into her in town before, but I guess she has been traveling a lot for work.”

  “And we had been distracted after Uncle Edgar got sick,” Lydia pointed out. “And you do have a job that keeps you busy.”

  “True, but Suzanne is been back in town and has been doing design work here. I would have thought that I would pick up on the name Peppercorn being used. Once I saw that Uncle Edgar recommended her, I immediately thought of Annie.”

  “Maybe you thought peppercorn was a snack,” Lydia joked. “I wonder if that could make for a spicy taffy flavor.”

  “Suzanne really liked your banana split taffy.”

  “It sounds like you talked to her a lot,” Lydia said.

  Leo shrugged. “We’re just catching up a little bit. She remembers me from school, and she wants to know about the changes to the town that I noticed through the years.”

  “Has she asked you about your new case at all?” Lydia asked, hoping she might be able to learn more about it if it was under the guise of talking about Suzanne. “I tried to make you sound impressive in front of her.”

  “I told her a little about it. Women do tend to like a man in uniform who catches bad guys,” said Leo. “Not that there’s much to tell right now. There weren’t any witnesses because the ice cream shop was closed. Amber Allen just went back that night because she wanted to double check her machinery after an apparent incident the night before. And we haven’t discovered a motive after searching the victim’s home. But I did try to put a positive spin on it. I think Suzanne knows what a good detective I am.”

  “I’m sure she does. There wasn’t anything suspicious near the crime scene, was there?” Lydia asked. “You didn’t find the murder weapon there?”

  “With a crime so close to the ocean, there’s always a chance that the killer disposed of the murder weapon in the water and…” he trailed off. “You just tricked me into telling you about the case.”

  “I was just making conversation.”

  “Lydia, don’t poke your nose into my investigation,” he said. “I mean it this time.”

  He made a jabbing motion with his finger for emphasis and then left the house. Lydia looked at Sunny, who tilted her head.

  “Getting involved in this case is complicated,” Lydia said. “Trina doesn’t like that I’m working with Brie and Leo hates that I’m looking for clues again.”

  Sunny nuzzled her to make her feel better.

  “Thanks, Sunny. You always cheer me up,” she told the dog. “And you know what? Leo inadvertently helped too. We’ve been wondering what Norman discovered.”

  Sunny let out a small noise to show she was paying attention.

  “Well, Leo just said that there was nothing at Norman’s house that looked suspicious. That means he couldn’t have kept his research about a cover-up there. But maybe it might be at his place of employment. And what better place to do research than at the library?”

  10

  Lies and the Library

  “Once you say it, it seems obvious,” Brie admitted.

  She and Lydia were headed to the library that Norman Nunn had worked at to see if they could discover what exactly he had been working on. It was pretty close to Lydia’s house, though she hadn’t been there much since she returned to town.

  “I just hope that we can convince them to let us look at his things,” Lydia said.

  “I think your taffy might go a long way to helping us get some information,” Brie said, referring to the box of candy that Lydia was holding. “Though the fact that you made an ice cream flavored taffy did upset Amber.”

  “I didn’t even think of that.”

  “Really?” Brie asked. “We were sure that you did it on purpose to taunt Amber. She can’t make a taffy flavored ice cream for her shop.”

  “I just like to experiment with different flavors,” Lydia said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I wasn’t thinking of Cones and Cola.”

  Brie considered her. “Maybe you’re not as bad as I thought.”

  Lydia smiled. They entered the library and walked up to the desk. A woman with glasses on a chain pursed her lips as they approached. She barely looked up from the computer she was entering information into.

  “Can I help you?”

  “We hope so,” Brie said. “But it’s not exactly about a book.”

  “We brought you some salt water taffy,” Lydia said, placing the box on the desk. “We wanted to let you know that we really appreciate your help.”

  The librarian looked at the candy box with disdain. “Taffy? You might have brought the only snack to rival gum with its danger to book pages. What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Well, I thought you’d eat and enjoy it,” Lydia said, slightly taken aback.

  “Look,” Brie said. “You can throw out the taffy if you want. But we would like to talk to you about your coworker, Norman Nunn.”

  “He’s not here,” said the librarian. “In fact, he won’t be in again. He’s passed away.”

  “We know,” said Brie. “But we think he was working on something. We need to know what it was.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but this is a library. People need silence to focus on their reading and research. I’ll ask you to be quiet with your questions. And if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do. We’re down an employee here.”

  She picked up the taffy box and slid it gruffly back toward Lydia. She caught the box and looked at Brie who shrugged.

  “That could have gone better,” Brie said. “I guess I could have flashed my press credentials, but I don’t want too many people to know who we are.”

  “That’s right. It could be dangerous,” Lydia agreed.

  “It’s always dangerous talking to Ms. Marsh before she’s finished her coffee,” a voice said.

  A young librarian with frizzy hair was pushing a book cart toward them. She smiled at them, but there was sadness in her eyes.

  “Don’t mind Ms. Marsh. She’s under more strain than usual. I guess we all are with what happened to Norman. But maybe I can help you? Did you need to find something?”

  “Actually, it’s about Norman that we’re here,” Lydia said. “We were hoping to talk to someone that worked with him.”

  “Did you know Norman?” the librarian asked.

  Brie nodded. “We were friendly, and he was helping me with a project.”

  “My name is Dory. I’ll do what I can to help. Norman was a great guy, and any friend of his is a friend of mine. We just should move away from Ms. Marsh.”

  Dory rolled her cart into the other room, and Lydia and Brie followed her.

  “Were you close to Norman?” Lyd
ia asked. “We’re really sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. Is that why you brought that box of candy? That’s sweet, but you shouldn’t let Ms. Marsh see it again. She doesn’t like food inside the building, and she has some trouble with her teeth so she hates anything that could be sticky.”

  “Now we find out,” Brie muttered.

  “But to answer your question, I think Norman and I were close. We bonded over the hardship of working for Ms. Marsh, and we had fun working together.”

  “Do you have any idea what Norman was working on recently?” asked Lydia. “It would have been outside of his library duties, but probably involved some research.”

  “I didn’t know exactly what it was,” Dory said. “But I know he was looking into something. He was really excited about it too. He thought the work he was doing was important.”

  “But you don’t know what it was?” Brie prodded.

  “I know that he went to the hall of records before and he had me do some tasks to help, but I didn’t really understand how it related to what he was working on. I looked up blueprints for the community center for him. He also asked me about Dune Investments, but I hadn’t heard of them, and he told me not to worry. He would handle it.”

  “Dory, we can tell that you cared about Norman,” Lydia began.

  “He was truly amazing. He was so smart, and he could make you laugh. I loved coming to work to see him,” Dory said. “And I really liked doing research with him, even if I didn’t understand the full picture. He made you feel important. He really was a great guy. But I guess you knew that if you were his friend.”

  Brie looked away to hide her discomfort.

  “We want to find out what he was working on because we think it might have something to do with his death,” Lydia admitted. “We think that he might have been on to something big. We don’t want to tell too many people about this, but it sounds like he trusted you.”

  “You think the research that he was doing got him killed?” Dory asked with a gasp. “I’ve been trying to wrap my head around who would want to hurt him, but I guess this makes sense. Of course, I’ll do what I can to let you know what he was doing. Do you think we should tell the police?”

  “We will tell the police, eventually. I know at least one person on the force who is trustworthy, but because we don’t know exactly what Norman was on to, we don’t want to let too many people, or organizations know yet.”

  “I’m sorry to say that we might be putting you in harm’s way by including you,” said Brie. “But we’ll try to keep this quick, so you don’t seem involved.”

  “I’m not scared,” said Dory. “I want you to find out who Norman was researching so you can find his killer. Come on. I’ll take you to his locker.”

  She led them behind an “employees only” door.

  “Be careful of the lost and found box,” Dory warned as they entered.

  Lydia was glad that she had been notified because it was close to the door and she almost tripped on it. Several umbrellas and a variety of other odds and ends were sticking out of it. The rest of the room wasn’t much tidier. It seemed that in order to keep the main area of the library tidy, this room was filled with overflowing supplies for events.

  Dory headed to some small lockers against the wall.

  “Ms. Marsh and I discussed how we would need to clean out his locker, but we weren’t sure which family member we should send his things to. We know that none of them live in town. But I know his combination. It’s his lucky numbers highest to lowest. Maybe there’s something inside that could help.”

  She entered the combination and swung open the locker door. Unlike the rest of the room, the locker was sparse. At first, Lydia only saw a sweatshirt hanging inside. However, then Dory grabbed something from the top shelf. It was a flash drive for a computer.

  “Brie, that might have all his research,” Lydia said hopefully.

  “Wait a second,” Dory said. “You’re Brie? Norman mentioned you. He was a big fan of yours.”

  Brie just nodded awkwardly.

  “Well, I hope that helps,” Dory said. “I should get back to work. I don’t want to get in trouble with the boss.”

  “Thank you,” Lydia said, taking the flash drive. “We will do our best to catch Norman’s killer. Don’t worry.”

  “I hope that tells you everything you need to know,” Dory said, before leaving the room.

  Lydia held the flash drive up and grinned at Brie. “I think we might have just made a break in the case.”

  “Let’s find a computer,” said Brie.

  Luckily, they were at the library, and there were public computers available for use. They kept their voices down so they wouldn’t annoy the head librarian, but it was hard to control their excitement. They waited for the device to load, hoping that all the answers would be spelled out for them.

  However, all Lydia could do when she finally saw what the flash drive contained was to say, “What?”

  Once they pulled up the lone document on the flash drive, it revealed only a series of numbers:

  25-7-17

  103-4-27

  213-1-15

  They continued on and on. The numbers filled several pages, but the two women couldn’t make sense of it. Lydia scratched her head. Maybe this wasn’t quite the clue that she thought it was.

  11

  The Code

  “It’s strange,” Daniel said. “I’m not sure what it could be.”

  He stared at the pages that Lydia had printed out of what had been on Norman Nunn’s flash drive. Lydia had been thinking about it for the past few hours after she and Brie had parted ways at the library. She couldn’t quite decide if the numbers formed some sort of code or if this was gibberish meant to confuse anyone who might be spying on him. She hoped that it held some significance for the case and kept trying to come up with different scenarios.

  She was still thinking about it when Daniel asked if she would like to grab a bite to eat for lunch at a boardwalk bistro. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to hide her distraction about the numbers, so she took Daniel into her confidence. He had gained her trust as well as her affection. She also rationalized that he was too new to town to have been involved in a cover-up with the high-ranking people in Ocean Point.

  “I’ve thought of many things that the numbers could be, but dismissed them all,” said Lydia.

  “It’s not longitude and latitude,” Daniel said, staring at the pages as he took a bite of his sandwich.

  “And they’re not dates or combinations that could fit into the lockers at the library,” Lydia said, rattling off some of the ideas she had already discounted. She set down the rest of her sandwich, knowing that she had lost her appetite. “There’s nothing else on the flash drive that we could enter the numbers into. They’re not street addresses in town or banking numbers.”

  “But this does mean that whatever Norman discovered is important,” Daniel said. “He must not have known that it could result in his murder, but he knew it was important enough to encode.”

  “I just wish I knew how to decode it,” Lydia said with a sigh. “The longer I take to figure it out, the longer Norman’s killer is free on the streets. It also means that Brie and I could be in danger if the killer figures out that we’re investigating this. And I guess we’ve put Dory the librarian and you in danger too.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Daniel assured her.

  She nodded, accepting this as true. She only knew a little of his Coastguard background before his wife fell ill and before he eventually moved to Ocean Point. However, she had seen him in action as a lifeguard and knew that he could be fearless when it came to saving people.

  “Taking a long time to solve this also means that I have to keep Leo in the dark for longer. He’s not going to be happy with me about that, and we finally started acting like we used to.”

  “He’s not blaming you for what you inherited from your uncle anymore?” asked Daniel.

&nbs
p; “He seems to have calmed down,” said Lydia. “He’s accepted that Uncle Edgar had a plan and he was helping his family in the best way he knew how. He knows that Uncle Edgar loved him.”

  “That’s progress.”

  “I wish I were making progress with this code,” Lydia said, tapping the table. “It can’t be license plates. I don’t think.”