by Nic Saint
She clearly wasn’t happy about this turn of events. Odelia leaned in. It was now or never. “Mrs. Ackerman—can I speak to you in private?”
Trey got the message. “I’ll be in the next room,” he said, swiftly removing himself.
“What is it you wanted to talk to me about?” asked Angelique, a little stiffly.
“It’s about your son,” said Odelia. “We found a discarded pizza delivery outfit in a trash can near the library. We found blood on the shirt that we think matches your ex-husband’s blood type. A DNA test will be carried out, both on the blood and the shirt, which I believe will put Trey at the scene of the murder. Which means… he killed his father.”
“What are you talking about? What preposterous nonsense!”
“I’m only telling you for your own protection, Mrs. Ackerman. Trey killed his father and I’m afraid your life may be in danger as well. Which is the real reason I came here.”
Angelique stared at her for a long moment, then suddenly burst into laughter.
“Oh, you’re such a naive little wench, aren’t you, Miss Poole? Trey—come back here!”
“No!” Odelia said, jumping up from the chair. But Angelique pushed her back down.
“You’re not going anywhere!” the woman snapped, and suddenly Odelia discovered that she was holding a small silver revolver in her hand, with the barrel pointed at her heart.
“Silly, silly girl,” said Trey, who’d come up behind her and now placed his hands on her shoulders. “Did you really think I’d go to all this trouble without talking to my dear, sweet mother first?”
“Trey adores his mother, don’t you, Trey?” asked Angelique, still pointing that revolver at Odelia. “So when he saw that I was suffering such terrible abuse at the hands of his father, he suggested we do something about it. And so the plan was hatched, and carried out to perfection.”
“Thank you, mother,” said Trey appreciatively.
“You should have burned that outfit, though.”
“Beginner’s mistake?” said Trey, a smile sneaking up his pale face.
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll be out of here and on our way to Mexico before these silly little small-town cops put it all together,” said Angelique. She directed a mocking look at Odelia. “Of course I knew Chris didn’t leave me a single penny. He told me. Which is exactly the reason we emptied out his bank accounts last week, transferring all of his money into an account Trey set up in the Cayman Islands. I had to pay Chris’s accountant a hefty sum but it was definitely worth it. Chris was the one who didn’t have a penny, not me. If he was going to leave me for that stupid editor of his I was going to make him pay. Big time.”
“Let me guess. You left Chris that night, making sure you were seen,” said Odelia, “only for Trey to return later, dressed as a pizza guy. Where did you get the outfit?”
“Stole it from some local pizza parlor that same night,” said Trey. “Easy peasy.”
“Weren’t you afraid to get caught?”
“Nah. Nobody pays attention to the pizza guy. I could just as well have been invisible. I saw that Drood creep on my way out, but I quickly ducked into an empty room and waited him out.” He chuckled—a terrifying sound. “I figured he’d make a perfect scapegoat and he did.”
“Too bad about the outfit,” said his mother.
“Can’t be helped, Mom. If I’d burned it, someone would have seen.”
“You could have brought it back here. We could have disposed of it together.”
“What’s done is done. Next time we plan a murder we’ll pay more attention to the details.” A slow smile crept up his pale face. “So how do you want to die, Miss Poole?”
Chapter 43
Odelia sat trussed up in the small bedroom. Two piglets were staring at her. Unfortunately for her she could speak feline but she couldn’t speak pig. Not that it mattered, for her mouth was taped up with heavy-duty electrical tape and her hands and feet were tied up as well. She’d read somewhere that pigs have very sharp teeth, so they could have set to work freeing her of her restraints. Instead, they just sat there on the bed staring.
She sincerely hoped that Trey Ackerman had been kidding when he told her that parting gag about murdering her. She did not feel like dying, especially now that her life was slowly coming together. Chase was moving in, her cats were all in good health, and she still had both her parents and her crazy grandmother.
Speaking of Gran, she suddenly thought she heard her voice.
Then the door was thrust open and Gran came walking in! More accurately put, Gran came flying in, landed on the floor and then the door was closed behind her.
“Hey, you brute!” Gran cried, balling her fists. Then she spotted her granddaughter. “Odelia! There you are! I thought they’d already filleted you like a fish.”
She crawled to an upright position and crossed the room.
“Are those pigs?” she asked.
“Get me out of this tape!” Odelia cried. Though it sounded more like, “Wepmeouoheeape!” It’s tough to enunciate clearly when your lips are taped up.
“Hold your horses,” said Gran. “I’m getting there. This tape is pretty sticky.”
It took the old woman a while, but finally she managed to yank the tape off.
“Owowoowwww!” Odelia cried.
“Oh, don’t be a baby. Just think of it as a lip waxing. Saves you the trouble to do it yourself. Now how the hell did you get mixed up with those murdering bozos?”
“I could ask you the same thing!” said Odelia, removing the tape from her around her feet.
“I came here to save you, little missy. I didn’t think they’d have a frickin’ gun.”
“You should have called Uncle Alec. Or Chase. Now we’re both going to die.”
“I don’t think so. When I arrived they were packing up. I think they’re moving out.”
“Trey asked me how I wanted to die!”
“He was probably kidding. He looks like a kidder.”
“Gran, he dressed up like a pizza guy then killed his own father in cold blood.”
“Yeah, well, that wasn’t nice,” Gran admitted.
“We’ve got to get out of here. Let’s check the windows.”
They checked the windows. The room they were in was located on the second floor facing the back wall of another building. Too high to jump, and no one in sight they could shout for help at.
“Terrible view,” said Gran. “If I were the Ackermans I’d have lodged a complaint. Who wants to look at that horrible wall all the time?”
“I’m sure they don’t mind!”
“And I’m sure they do. Even killers mind about stuff like that, honey.”
“New plan. I’ll hide behind the door, and when they come in to kill us I’ll rush them!”
“They won’t come in. They’ll pack up and get out of here and by the time housekeeping finds us they’ll be long gone and on their way to Mexico.”
Odelia had to admit her grandmother was probably right. Why add two more murders to their resume when they could simply flee and live out their lives spending Chris Ackerman’s millions?
She sank down on the bed, causing the two piglets to bob up and down.
“They are pigs,” said Gran, taking a seat next to her. “How about that?”
“Hurry up, will you?!” Angelique shouted. “If they catch us they’ll put us in jail and throw away the key.”
“Relax, Mom. They won’t catch us.” Trey gestured with his head to the connecting door. “What about those two?”
“Leave them.”
“We could shut them up forever.”
“When did you suddenly turn into a character from a Quentin Tarantino movie?”
“I guess it’s true what they say about murder. You develop a taste for it.”
“Yeah, well, better develop a taste for escape. I want to go now!”
Suddenly he pricked up his ears. “Do you hear that?”
There was a sound outside unlike
anything he’d ever heard. It tickled his funny bone. It sounded like Ed Sheeran but not. More like someone was murdering the ginger singer.
“I love that song,” he said. “But whoever is singing it clearly hates it.”
He moved over to the window and looked out. Down below, some musclebound moron was belting out the notes like nobody’s business. He didn’t seem to care that traffic had ground to a halt and that people were leaning out of their windows to gawk at him. Hecklers were shouting abuse at the guy and children pelted him with rocks but he just kept on singing, oblivious.
“Probably thinks Carson Daly is staying at the hotel,” chuckled Trey.
‘You suck!’ someone shouted, and Trey thought those were his sentiments exactly. This dude, whoever he was, would never get a four-chair turn. Not even a one-chair turn.
“Let’s go!” his mother bellowed again.
“All right, all right, all right!” he said, tearing himself away from the scene down below. “What about Kevin Bacon and Miss Piggy? We can’t leave without them.”
“You should have thought of that before you locked Miss Amateur Sleuth and her granny in there. Now are we leaving or what?”
He hated to leave his pigs. He loved the little cuties. And as he moved to the door to the other room, suddenly the door to this one exploded and before he knew what hit him a bunch of cops stormed in and the atmosphere erupted into a free-for-all of shouts and screams and pounding boots and angry faces hollering at him to ‘GET DOWN NOW!’
So he did. And briefly wondered who was going to take care of his piglets.
Chapter 44
Odelia was still a little dazed as she was escorted out of the hotel and onto the sidewalk. Cop cars blocked traffic and she watched in confusion as the handcuffed Angelique and Trey were escorted into a squad car and driven off at a high rate of speed, sirens blaring.
“How—what—when—” she stuttered.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” said Gran. “Before I left the house I instructed Marge to wake up Chase and send in the cavalry. I figured he might do what he could to save his sweetheart.”
Chase came hurrying up to them, and she jumped into his arms, happy to be alive.
“For a moment there I thought I lost you,” Chase intimated.
“For a moment there I thought so, too,” said Odelia.
“Oh, don’t be a bunch of saps,” said Gran, which was rich for a woman who loved her soap operas more than anything else. “We’re all fine and the bad guys will be punished so all is well that ends well. Now what’s going to happen to those little guys?”
She was pointing to a cop who was holding two piglets in his arms. He had a mustache and his name tag indicated that his name was Jackson. Odelia recognized him as the cop who wouldn’t let her into the library the night of Chris Ackerman’s murder. He didn’t look happy to have been awarded the particular task of taking care of Trey’s piglets. Especially since his colleagues were busy snapping selfies with him. He was going to become the latest Hampton Cove PD social media sensation, that much was obvious.
“Don’t worry about the pigs,” said Chase. “We’ll find someone to adopt them.”
Uncle Alec walked up, looking distinctly unhappy. “Odelia Poole,” he said gruffly. “What part of ‘I’ll handle things’ don’t you understand? You could have gotten yourself killed, young lady, and your grandmother in the process.”
“I just figured Angelique was innocent and wanted to warn her.”
“Next time do as you’re told,” he said sternly. “When Marge called me with the news that you were in trouble I almost had a heart attack.” He wagged a stubby finger in her face. “Never again, all right? Have mercy on your uncle’s poor ticker.”
“I won’t do it again,” she promised, seeing now how foolish her actions had been.
“Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist, Alec,” said Gran. “I was there. We were fine.”
“They had a gun!”
“I’m pretty sure they weren’t going to use it.”
“You don’t know that, Ma. They could have shot you both.”
“Well, they didn’t, so now are you going to stop crying in your milk and congratulate Odelia instead? She cracked this case.”
Marge and Tex also joined them on the sidewalk, while rubberneckers all around stood taking in the scene. “Honey, I’m so glad you’re all right,” said Marge, enveloping Odelia in a hug. “When your grandmother told me to wake up Chase, I feared the worst.”
“I wasn’t asleep,” said Chase, a little indignant. “In fact I’d been up for hours.”
“He’s right,” said Marge. “He was in the shower when I arrived. Gave me a shock.”
Chase grimaced at the recollection and Odelia suppressed a grin. She would have loved to have seen the look on Chase’s face when Mom walked in on him in the shower.
“The important thing is that the bad guys will get what’s coming to them,” said Gran.
“How did you find out?” asked Chase. “I mean—how did you know where to find that pizza guy’s outfit?”
A momentary silence descended over the small company. Chase was the only one who didn’t know about the cats. “Just one of those hunches, I guess,” said Odelia. “I suddenly wondered about the pizza guy. See, the weird thing about the pizza boxes that we found at the library was that they were clean. Pizza boxes usually have leftover pizza or ketchup smears or chunks of cheese stuck to them. These boxes were brand new. Never used. So that got me thinking. What if the pizza guy wasn’t a pizza guy? What if he was the killer and he’d only dressed up as a pizza guy to throw us off the scent?”
“And then we took things from there,” said Uncle Alec. “In all fairness, though, Odelia found the outfit.”
“And a good thing I did. Today is collection day in that part of town. A couple of hours later and the outfit would have been gone forever.”
“And along with it the blood stains and DNA that will show beyond a reasonable doubt that Trey Ackerman killed his father,” Uncle Alec finished the story.
“Hard to believe that a son would kill his father,” said Chase, shaking his head.
“I don’t think he devised the plan,” said Odelia. “Angelique did. Trey just went along with it and did the actual deed—wanting to spare his mother the more gruesome aspects of the scheme she’d hatched. In fact she probably decided to kill her husband months ago, when she discovered he was planning to leave her for Stacey Kulcheski.”
“There’s only one part about this whole sordid business I regret,” said Gran.
“What’s that?” asked Marge.
Gran threw up her arms. “That I didn’t get to film the grand finale! Those bastards took away my phone!”
“I’m sure plenty of people caught the whole thing on video,” said Uncle Alec. He clapped Chase on the shoulder. “For one thing, they sure as heck caught our rising musical star Chase on tape. Ed Sheeran, watch out!”
“Thanks,” said Chase. “I kinda enjoyed being the decoy.”
“It sure delayed the Ackermans until our team was in place to break down the door.”
“Too bad I didn’t catch the big performance,” said Odelia.
“You saw the private performance,” said Chase, smiling. “Which was the better one of the two.”
Only now did Odelia realize she was missing something. She looked around. “Where are my cats?”
“Right there,” said Chase, stepping aside.
And there they were indeed: Max, Dooley, Brutus, Harriet and… Big Mac. Sitting on the sidewalk and smiling up at her. They were a sight for sore eyes.
“Oh, my babies,” she said, crouching down. They all jumped into her arms. “You caught the bad guys—you saved my life—what would I do without you?”
Chase laughed. “It’s the weirdest thing. Almost as if they can understand what she says.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gran snapped. “Cats don’t talk. Everybody knows that.”
“No, of
course not,” he said, his smile vanishing. “You’re right.”
“Dumbass,” Gran grunted.
“Ma,” said Uncle Alec warningly.
“Just welcoming the kid into the family,” said Gran, and pinched Chase’s cheeks.
Epilogue
“So what did you tell Chase when you went to warn him?” asked Odelia.
“Simple. I told him I had a feeling you were in trouble,” said Marge.
“But how did you explain I was at the hotel?”
Marge took a deep breath, darted a quick look at Chase, who was assisting Tex with the barbecue as usual, then explained quietly, “I told him I’d once seen a documentary about whales being able to feel their babies were in trouble even though they were miles away. I said the same thing applied to mothers and their kids. I said I could sense you were in trouble and I had a hunch you’d had a hunch about the writer’s son and ex-wife.”
“Seems far-fetched,” said Odelia, taking a bite from her hot dog. “He believed you?”
“Oh, he did. Immediately. You’ve got a good man there, Odelia. He’s a keeper.”
They moved off and Dooley glanced up at the sky. It had been a week since the stunning events at the Hampton Cove Star and the world hadn’t ended, which clearly puzzled Dooley.
“Trust me, Dooley,” I said now. “The world isn’t going to end. I mean, at some point it probably will, but not this week. Not even this year or even this decade.”
“You think so, Max?”
“I know so. So you can stop worrying.”
“And stop nagging us,” Harriet muttered.
“So how about those spots of yours?” I asked Brutus.
“You’re not going to believe this but they’re gone!” said the black cat. And to prove he wasn’t lying, he pressed his chest into my face.
“Nice,” I muttered.