by Bill Alive
The man rounded on us and sized us up with beady eyes. (I know there must be lots of nice people out there with smallish eyes, but just FYI, make sure you compensate with a big smile for your first impression.)
He didn’t smile. “What do you want?” he demanded.
Mark cleared his throat. “We’re here to ask a few questions.”
“Are you with the police?”
“Ah, no.”
“Then who the hell are you?”
Mark and I blurted at the same time.
“Concerned citizens,” Mark said.
“Private detectives,” I said.
There was an awkward pause.
“Yours is better,” Mark admitted.
“Get out,” the man said. “I’ve got no time for looky-loos.”
We all have our triggers. If Mark’s was fat Santa types, one of mine was decisive older guys who clearly have their shit together. I had this principal once who could reduce an entire high school gym to silence with a single whistle. We called him Von Trapp. Until he found out. Today, we still call him Von Trapp on Tribesy … but only in private chats.
So I was basically ready to leave. And I was super impressed when Mark stayed right there and said, “Sir, we’re here to help your business. The last thing you need is the unexplained death of a client.”
The man’s eyes squinted, and his doughy cheeks went hard. “Who the hell are you to tell me my priorities?”
Behind us, another old guy voice snapped, “Priorities?”
This guy was even older, at least sixty, but he also somehow felt younger, with a lean face and gray stubble, and a baseball cap and a ratty leather jacket. He strode past us and leaned over the counter into the man’s face. “That was our student, Hollister, and she crashed in our plane.”
“Your student,” snapped the beady-eyed man, who was apparently called Hollister.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hollister looked eager to snatch this conversational bait, but he gave us a venomous glance and mastered himself. Not in front of the kids, I guess. He took a step back and said, with forced calm, “Let’s take it down a notch, Waterbury. Yes, it’s a tragedy, but the police are saying the woman had a seizure. I’m sure they’ve consulted her excellent doctor … what was her name again? Jane? Genevieve?” He smirked.
Whatever the smirk was about, I hadn’t caught the joke, but Waterbury grimaced, and his lean forehead reddened with rage.
“We think she was murdered!” I piped up.
“She may have been murdered,” Mark said. He was frowning with concentration, possibly shielding.
“Dude, you’re sure!” I said.
“Murdered?” said Waterbury. He looked shocked. He seemed to forget his beef with Hollister, and he scrutinized us, well past the point of discomfort. Then his bright eyes snapped with decision. “You two come with me.” He glared at Hollister. “Don’t skip out again.”
“I’ve got a meeting,” Hollister said, with sullen defiance.
“Yeah. With me,” Waterbury said. “Morning, Peggy. You look nice.”
She fluttered a smile and a thank you, but he was already striding for the side door.
Outside, he led us on a long walk down the runway to a big steel-roofed shed that turned out to be a hangar, where he started doing open-heart surgery or something on a tiny plane. If you’ve never seen a tiny plane, it’s hard to believe at first that they’re for real, not some elaborate toy. Once, for my birthday, Dad drove me out to this very airport and paid for a plane ride. It was awesome, but it kind of felt like riding in a car. Through the sky. Very weird. Because I almost got used to it. Of course, if we’d ever gone into a nosedive like Lindsay … oh man …
Anyway, Waterbury started talking. Non-stop. Like he was finally discharging a rant that had fermented for weeks.
“Murder! I hadn’t even thought of that. I was thinking there was some problem with her meds.”
“Really? Do you know her doctor?” Mark tried to cut in.
But Waterbury kept rolling. “Murder! Who would murder Lin? That woman was a saint. She was devoted to that boy, and she never said a word against his father, even after they split up. Some bastard said she must have crashed herself on purpose—”
“Suicide?” I said.
“Don’t you believe it!” he said. “You should have seen her when she first went up, she lit up. Like she’d been waiting her whole life to fly. Why would she kill herself when she was finally free?”
He trailed off, engrossed in some mechanical puzzle. Then, without looking up, he said, in a warm tone with a hint of frost, “So who the hell are you guys?”
I decided Mark could take this one. He looked uncertain, then said firmly, “We’re detectives.”
“Are you now?” Waterbury said. “Licensed?”
Mark cleared his throat. “Well … at the moment …”
“I’d hire you,” Waterbury said.
“Really?” I blurted.
“But you can’t pay a private investigator in Virginia until they’re licensed. It’s against the law.”
“Oh! What about for free?” I said. “Yeah! Then we can tell people, ‘We need to ask you a few questions, and we’ve been hired as professional detectives.’ It’s perfect mental perseveration!”
Mark groaned. “No, that would actually be true.”
“I thought that was the point.”
Waterbury grinned. “Free works. You’re hired.”
“Sweet! Wow!” I said.
Even Mark cracked a smile.
But Waterbury’s lined face went hard. “If there’s even a chance someone meant Lin harm…”
“I’m surprised her doctor let her fly,” Mark said. “Don’t you have to pass a medical to get a pilot license?”
“Not for a glider license, that’s the bottom of the ladder,” Waterbury said. “You sign it yourself, you promise you’re not a danger.” His eyes flashed. “And Lindsay was no danger! She had a driver’s license, didn’t she? They won’t let an epileptic back on the road till six months seizure-free. Lindsay hadn’t had a seizure in years.”
“Gotcha,” Mark said. “What was that doctor’s name again?”
Waterbury frowned. “Lindsay probably had lots of doctors,” he said. “I’m telling you, she’d beat those seizures clean. I don’t need you to hassle the medical people, I need you to find out if anyone could have…” His voice trailed off, and though he leaned into the engine and squinted so hard that I almost expected to see lasers, his thin lip trembled.
Awkward.
“Did you, ah, attend the funeral?” Mark said.
“Of course!” he said gruffly. “We all did.”
Mark wilted a little. “Including Hollister? And that workman with the big beard?”
“You mean Jonas Lynch? Yes. Absolutely. How’d you meet Lynch already?”
“He gave us a welcome glare.”
Waterbury growled. “I keep talking to him about that. Spooks the customers. We’re always getting complaints. Don’t like it myself, you never know when you’re going to look up smack dab into those buggy eyes.”
“Did Lynch know Lindsay?” Mark asked.
“Course not, he’s just a hired instructor. But we all went to that funeral. Peggy too. I insisted. Never had one of our own crash before. Least we could do to show our support. Not to mention make the business look a little less incompetent.”
Mark hesitated. “About your business … you and Hollister are partners, right? Co-owners?”
“That’s right,” Waterbury said, but his voice had abruptly lost interest. He checked his ancient digital watch, then said, “Son, I’d love to chat all morning, but Saturdays are busy around here. Give me your card, and I’ll call you if I think of anything.”
Mark cleared his throat. “We actually haven’t—”
“Fine, what’s your website?”
“Oh yeah, we should have a website!” I said.
Waterbury looked amazed.
“You don’t have a website? Everyone needs a website these days.”
Mark was giving that tight smile again.
“Mark makes websites,” I said proudly.
“Do you really?” Waterbury said, with a surge of entirely different interest. “How much would you charge to give our site a complete overhaul? Just a ballpark.”
Mark’s smile was visibly straining his jaw muscles. “I’d really have to dig into the details,” he said, his voice a super-professional Fake Polite. “Websites vary quite a bit.”
“Oh, but ours is a mess. None of us can update it, and the guy who built it went off and became a caramel monk!”
“Carmelite?” Mark said cautiously.
“That might be it. And he didn’t leave the passwords! Must have been five or six years ago. And now our hours are different and we’ve raised the fuel price several times, and plus I have this idea where pilots can log in and pay their rental fees online, because the pricing structure is complicated and everyone’s always confused by the forms. Does that sound doable? How much do you think you could do for two hundred bucks?”
Mark flinched, like he’d been slapped in the face and wanted to hit back. He managed to reassemble his smile. “I tell you what,” he said smoothly. “Why don’t I focus on this investigation for now, and we can circle back to your website after?”
“All right, then,” Waterbury said. “Don’t forget now.”
Mark gave him one last freelancer smile, then turned and made his escape.
In the car, he rubbed his face and groaned. “Everyone always wants a website! For like, nothing! It’s worse than being a doctor.”
“Cheer up,” I said. “We’re officially detectives now.”
“Who really do work for nothing.”
“Just this first case,” I said, with my trademark delusional optimism. “So what’s next? Did you get any vibes?”
“Not really,” he said. “I mean, he obviously had a major crush on that woman, but I’m sure you picked that up.”
“Oh yeah,” I mentally perforated. “But how is that a clue?”
“No idea,” he said, with morose glummage. “But we’d better see about that doctor. He was clearly covering for her.”
“Really?”
“Couldn’t you tell? But why would he do that? Maybe she was incompetent, and screwed up Lindsay’s meds?”
“But you felt Lindsay’s panic!” I said. “And some serious physical pain!”
“Yes, but it’s possible she was only feeling the onset of the seizure. Which can be painful.”
“But what about the funeral? You said that that hate felt murderous!”
“True.”
“She must have been poisoned, Mark. There’s got to be tons of poisons where she’d feel fine at first, long enough to start flying. Then the pain would hit…”
“You’re probably right,” he said. He revved up Thunder and pulled out of the parking lot. “But we’ll never know for sure if they don’t do an autopsy.”
“We don’t need the autopsy!” I shouted over the roar as we picked up speed. “We just need to figure out who’d want to kill her and get them locked up! Interview the family!”
“Doctor first,” he said. “We’ve got to rule out a natural seizure.”
I groaned. “We don’t even know her name! How’ll we ever find her?”
He twinkled me a knowing smile. “We won’t have to.”
Chapter 12
“Your Linux User Group?” I demanded. “We’re going to ask a bunch of computer geeks?”
Mark had stayed mysterious all the way home, but now he was trying to work on his computer, so my pestering had worn him down.
“They’re smart guys,” he snapped. He adjusted one of the two extra monitors that were jacked into his giant CPU. The pine board shelf creaked; he’d bolted it himself into this “office corner” near the stove, but I was never clear on exactly how that worked with the concrete walls. The fake wood paneling had ruptured around the screws, and it was a sobering thought that no one was ever going to care. “Very smart,” he continued. “They’ll find this doctor in five minutes.”
“Yeah, but only after they try to explain how they’ll do it, in all the glorious gory geekly details, for like two hours. Right?”
Mark slid me a sidelong glance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Mark! I can’t listen to that tech stuff! It’s like a thousand tiny jackhammers on my skull!”
“Maybe something’ll finally get in.”
“I’m serious!”
“Okay, okay, whatever you say.” He paused and typed for a few long moments of reproach. Then, still looking at the screen, he muttered, “No matter what, he says…”
I groaned. “Fine. Maybe they’ll actually talk like human beings.”
Mark snorted, then tried to look serious. “Sorry,” he said. “Allergies.”
The Linux Uber-Geeks were meeting that night, which was of course a Friday. Not that I had any lady plans, or a car to go anywhere … not to mention that it often feels like the only singles under forty in Back Mosby are me and Ceci … but still, it rankled. On principle.
Also, they were meeting at a game store. Of course they were.
I hadn’t even known we had a game store in Back Mosby. Honestly, it’d been awhile since I’d seen Main Street. Have I told you about our Main Street? We have two busy roads in town, and Main Street is neither of them. Main Street is like this Old Town shortcut between the two real roads, if you want to zip from one to the other at, say, one mile an hour.
I guess the lack of traffic has helped keep Main Street “Old Towney”, instead of transmogrifying into another strip mall. But the trickle of conscientious Main Street connoisseurs can only support so many antique stores, revolving restaurant slots, and quirky boutique shops with a business model of, “Oh my gosh, isn’t our logo so freaking CUTE?” Since the game store wasn’t an antique store, and it had already been open for at least a month, this was probably my one chance to see the place before it evaporated.
When we pushed through the front door, we failed to disrupt an epic battle of some huge card game with monsters. The game sprawled down a long table, which was packed with adolescents of various decades embroiled in one huge argument.
“Nice place,” I said, with willful snark, as I followed Mark toward the back of the tiny store, squeezing between the oblivious gamers and an aisle of crazy expensive board games I’d never heard of.
“Better than meeting at the library,” Mark said. “That was super lame.” He hitched his laptop backpack higher on his shoulder. “Zack just opened this place. Cool, huh?”
I couldn’t believe Mark hadn’t vibed how underwhelmed I was, but maybe the air’s sheer density of testosterone and male body odor was acting as some kind of Empathy Diffuser. It was clearly an effective Female Repellent.
I tried to be nice. “I’m glad he’s making it pay.”
Mark scoffed. “Are you kidding? He has a two-hour commute to Bethesda. Government contracts. Why do you think this is only open on the weekend? At night?”
“Oh.”
We reached a ratty door in the back wall. The door hung open a crack. Mark took the knob, then paused, his brow furrowed.
Was he nervous?
“So … how’s this going to work?” I said. “We just ask them to find this doctor?”
“I wish,” he said.
From beyond the door, a piercing black voice boomed, “Is that Mark? Mark! The prodigal has returned!”
Mark flicked me a rueful smirk, then turned to face his friends.
The geeks were arrayed in geekly glory around a long folding table, with laptops terrible and mighty to behold. Thick wires snaked everywhere, writhing around towering sodas and warrior-size bowls piled with mountains of chips. It was like a wedding dinner where the groom had planned everything and only invited his friends. Maybe for an arranged marriage. And if he were fourteen.
Excep
t these dudes were way past fourteen. All but one were well past thirty. And I don’t want to be all stereotypical, but that one young guy didn’t look like he’d made eye contact with a girl since the invention of the smartphone.
“Come here and let me look at you,” boomed a black guy in his mid-forties. He had to be Zack, the owner / leader / Alpha Geek. Zack was skinny for someone so loud, and he had retro glasses that hadn’t quite yet hit their Coolness Expiration Date pinning his graying temples. “Let these old eyes rest on our long-lost comrade. How the years have changed us!”
“It’s been three weeks!” Mark said. “I got busy.” He took a seat at the far end of the table, away from Zack’s Alpha Geek place at the center.
“Four,” corrected a chubby guy with an accent that turned out to be Polish. His glasses had some kind of bulky tech embedded.
“Whoa!” I blurted. “Are those the glasses with the camera where you see everything through Google? They’re still making those?”
Everyone stared.
“I am running custom OS, of course,” Glasses Guy said icily. “I had to patch drivers so I could interface with my refrigerator.”
“Really? Cool!” I said. I had no idea how or why you would remote control your fridge, but I had to admit I was intrigued. This Grade A geekery might not be so brain-numbing after all. “So what’s an OS? Like an app?”
There was a sharp collective intake of geekly breath. They turned on Mark with eyes bewildered and accusing. In a low voice, Zack said, “What is this?”
Mark was studiously extracting his clunky old laptop from his pack and setting up. “My new housemate,” he said, not looking at them. “Thought I’d give him a little mind expansion.”
“Where’s his rig?” said Zack.
“Let’s wipe it and install Ubuntu!” chirped the Kid, who was maybe nineteen, or possibly twenty-seven. It was hard to tell with his incipient mustache sprouting like grass seed at a construction site.
“Ubuntu’s a security nightmare,” intoned a balding dude with a gray ponytail, a short-sleeved collar shirt and a tie with some cartoon penguin. “Might as well install an FBI keylogger.”
“Guys, he didn’t bring a laptop,” Mark said.