Baby, It's Dead Outside

by E M Kaplan

  Whew. What a tangled ball of yarn.

  “And what about Dan Beardsley or Marcy Bates? What role did they play in it?” A little light went off in Josie’s head. More like a tiny pilot lightbulb that reassured her some of her brain synapses might still be working. “Maybe Harris and Marcy were in cahoots. If that front desk grouch is Lynetta’s closest living relative, she stands to inherit the massive fortune that’s currently got my name on it.”

  And more power to her if she inherits it. Just having my name on those accounts is making my skin itchy. I just hope she isn’t part of this whole murder scheme so I can unload all of this onto someone more deserving. Or at least, more needy.

  Josie limped over to the kitchen sink where Jablonski had kindly deposited her toothbrush and toiletries. No doubt about it, she was looking forward to getting off her throbbing ankle. In the morning she’d start fresh by tracking down Dan Beardsley and seeing not only if he knew his own family tree, but if he could lend any ideas about where Sandra might have headed.

  If I were her, I’d be on a plane to Aruba. Or Argentina.

  She squished some paste on her toothbrush and shoved it into her mouth, brushing across her teeth and working up a lather. She blinked several times before she realized her eyes were swimming in and out of focus from exhaustion.

  Lynetta had died less than 24 hours ago. Josie glanced at her phone clock—almost exactly 24 hours, actually. Josie was weaving on her already off-balance feet. A few hours of shut-eye might help her untangle the loose ends and discoveries of the day. If she had any hope at all of tracking down Sandra, rescuing Betty, and discovering who had killed Lynetta, she was going to need to sleep on it.

  Chapter 41

  She’d been fast asleep—dead asleep, to be more precise—on the fussy old couch for less than three hours when a high-pitched scream woke her up. The shriek sounded like it was coming from inside her head, which of course was nonsense and utterly impossible.

  Bert thrashed awake and flopped from his back onto his belly in a drumroll-like percussion of elbows and knee joints banging on the hardwood floor. In the dark, the whites of his eyes shined brightly, reflecting the moonlight coming in through the front window.

  A gunshot rang out, popping like a firecracker.

  The front window shattered. The pane of glass not three feet away from Josie exploded outward into the night, onto the icy hedge and frozen white lawn. Immediately, the room filled with frosty winter night air.

  Josie sprang off the couch, ignoring the twinge in her ankle, and even though she was tangled in her blanket, she immediately crouched on the floor with her arm around Bert, uncertain if more bullets would follow the first. She dialed 9-1-1 and clutched the phone to her ear. Her heart was threatening to pound its way out of her chest, and she forgot to breathe for several beats.

  She listened for a squeal of tires or footsteps. Instead, she heard a door slam and shouts outside—what seemed to be in her backyard and alongside the house. Then she reported what had just happened to the emergency operator who’d answered. Even to her ears, her words sounded choppy and breathless.

  It’s just adrenaline, she thought through chattering teeth. And subzero weather in my living room.

  “Stay here, buddy,” she told her dog and kissed him on the head, dropping her warm blanket on him against the rapidly chilling room. However, as soon as she stood up, he made a beeline for the stairs and hightailed it up the steps and out of sight—like mother, like son, she thought wryly—which was probably for the best. He’d be safe up there.

  She limped across the room, stooping as low as she could, and grabbed her coat. She was going to need her hat and gloves in about thirty seconds at the rate the temperature of the house was dropping. A gust of wind carried some leaves in through the windowless frame.

  Without turning on a light, she crept to the kitchen and peeked out the back window into the dark but failed to see anything. She stayed on the line with the 911 operator with the phone pressed against her ear, peering out the back window, until a dark face suddenly smashed itself against the glass just opposite her own.

  She let out a yelp and backed up, losing her balance thanks to her weakened ankle, and landed on her butt on the hardwood planks of the kitchen floor.

  “It’s me!” Aloysius shouted. “Open the door. Lord Almighty above, girl, let me in!”

  She ratcheted herself up and lunged for the lock, opening it. “Get in here. Someone’s shooting outside. They just took out my front window.”

  It wasn’t until he was fully inside the kitchen with the door shut and bolted behind him that she realized belatedly that he held a gun in his hand. Josie was no expert in firearms, but she had spent a considerable amount of time in Arizona. Her Uncle Jack had been a skilled marksman back in the day, and her Aunt Ruth was no slouch with a weapon either. If Josie had to guess at the caliber of the little gun in Aloysius’s hand, she’d say it was a .38.

  “Did you just shoot out my window?” she shrieked at him.

  She was in an active shooter situation and she’d locked the perp inside with her?

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “I wasn’t anywhere near your window.”

  As she stood there trying to tell if he was lying, mentally rewriting all her theories about Harris and Lynetta and Sandra, trying to somehow include this fussy Jamaican transplant, she shook her head.

  Nope. It can’t be done.

  She had too many dangling threads and no way to tie them all together. Aloysius. Sandra. Dan Beardsley. The Pleasant Valley home.

  Maybe that’s the answer. These loose ends don’t connect.

  “Let’s start over,” she said. “What are you doing running around my yard in the middle of the night with a gun?” Her mind rewound the sound of the shattering glass, the gunshot, and the woman’s scream she had just heard.

  Wait a minute…I know that scream.

  She pointed a finger at him. “That was you screaming your head off. You saw something that scared you, screamed, and shot out my front window.”

  He tried to deny it with some floppy waving of his unoccupied hand, but she was too busy staring toward the front of the house where the blustering night wind was blowing the curtains inward. The movement made her realize the glass had fallen outside the house.

  The glass should have shattered inward if the shot had come from outside the window, and it’s not. But how could he have shot from inside the house?

  “Oh my gawd,” she said. “You were in the basement!”

  “Why would I be there? What basement?” he asked, but he was a terrible liar—even worse than she was, and she was hilariously bad at fibbing. An inappropriate giggle threatened to bubble up her throat at how ludicrous he sounded. He turned on his heel and backtracked to the kitchen door, which he unbolted.

  She followed him to see if he was going to try to prove the door to the basement apartment was still locked. His footsteps thudded down the back steps in a perfect quick-time rhythm that only two uninjured ankles could make. As soon as he got outside, however, he took off running as fast as his lanky legs could carry him and disappeared into the dark. In the distance, she heard a door slam.

  The coward.

  “No need to run,” she muttered, rolling her eyes. “It’s not like I can chase after you.”

  

  “Well that was abrupt—and a fairly good confession of culpability—at least some guilt,” she said to herself. Whatever his part in the mess going on, he wasn’t completely innocent.

  Because why would he run if he wasn’t guilty of something?

  Under the kitchen stairs behind her, the door to the downstairs apartment was not locked. In fact, it wasn’t even all the way closed. She limped toward it and wished she had a flashlight. Hopefully the electricity worked in the basement and wasn’t part of what was being overhauled…because if it wasn’t, she wasn’t up for feeling around blindly in the dark.

  Not even on a good day, but especially not on a day
filled with dead bodies and flying bullets.

  I’m not James Bond. I’m not even Julian Bond.

  Fortunately, the power was on, and when she felt along the wall for a switch, she found the lights on the first try.

  “And why does it smell like cookies in here?!” she wondered aloud. Actually, baked goods and something…earthier. She was in a basement after all. From her limited experience of New England basements, because Arizona houses in general didn’t have them, she knew that no matter how you tried to Yankee Candle them up, they still smelled distinctly of dank darkness and creatures…of…dee…night. Speaking of which…“There’d better not be coffins down here.”

  An uncontrollable gasp of disbelief escaped her lips as she took in two sights simultaneously. The first was several rows of plants under grow lights that had suddenly blinked into brightness, their greenish hue illuminating the flora beneath them, their unmistakable multi-pointed leaves standing out.

  Ganja. Marijuana. Hemp. Pot. Cannabis. So this is what Aloysius was doing sneaking around here. Was he trying to protect his crop…by accidentally shooting out her front window?

  The second thing that drew Josie’s attention made her stomach drop like a stone—because what she saw was a person. An actual, real, live human. The shape of a small person on the floor in the corner of the room had her doing a double-take, ready to run back outside regardless of whether she could put her full weight on her ankle or not.

  With her knees tucked to one side on the cold hard floor of the basement apartment and her back against the half-painted, unfinished white wall, Betty Edwards sat shivering in just a thin turtleneck shirt and skirt, her white granny sneakers muddied at the ends of her hose-covered legs. She stared up at Josie, blinking in the sudden flood of light, looking like a featherless and damp baby bird that had fallen out of its nest before its time.

  Chapter 42

  “Betty, are you all right?” Josie called out and limped toward her as quickly as her wonky ankle would allow. That the woman didn’t even have a sweater wasn’t surprising since they’d found one earlier in the cornfield. Without hesitation, Josie stripped off her own jacket and draped it over Betty’s frail shoulders, trying to keep herself from wobbling off balance.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Josie gave the woman a quick once-over. She didn’t find any signs of injury or blood. No cuts or bruises. Standing over Betty, she got a good look at her head, but saw only her soft gray hair pulled back in a bun. A few strands stuck out, and the errant hairs made her look like a fuzzy chick, but nothing out of place for a tiny little person who’d been taken from her nursing home, dragged who knew where, and was possibly a witness to Harris’s murder, never mind Lynetta’s.

  Betty blinked rapidly in shock, teeth chattering and lips bluish. Her frail, bone-thin hands were icy cold as she placed her fingers over Josie’s when she pulled the jacket tight over Betty’s chest. “Where am I?” she asked, weak and shivering.

  Josie wanted to swaddle her in blankets and carry her upstairs. Unfortunately, she could barely support her own weight on her stupid ankle. She was going to have to wait for police to arrive.

  “You’re in the basement apartment of Sandra’s house. Did Harris bring you here?” Josie asked her. She wasn’t going to mention that Harris had since been killed, if Betty didn’t already know. That news might send the old lady into a tailspin of confusion from which she might never recover.

  “Sandra’s house? Where’s Harris?” Betty’s voice quavered, and Josie hoped the police would arrive soon.

  “Harris was over at his own house,” she said, not exactly lying, but she wasn’t about to tell Betty that her escort-slash-kidnapper from this afternoon had been gunned down in his own living room. Betty absolutely did not need to know that the last time Josie had seen him, he’d been zipped up in a black bag being wheeled to an official county coroner’s van on a gurney. “Have you seen Sandra?”

  “Yes,” Betty said, her voice a scratchy whisper.

  A chill ran down Josie’s spine. Sandra had been here as well? Right in the very same house as Josie, in this basement apartment while Harris lay dead across the street?

  True, the house belongs to Sandra, and she’s probably come through these doors and walked these floors hundreds, if not thousands of times bearing groceries, baking cookies, doing a crossword puzzle on the dining room table. But that was before I thought she was a cold-blooded murderer.

  “Do you know where she went?” Josie asked the older woman.

  “Yes,” Betty said, blinking at them again with that dazed, blank look that made Josie want to check her over again for an injury. Maybe she’d had a knock to the back of her head.

  Heavy footsteps stomped down the hall toward them and Josie turned, fully expecting Jablonski to come into view. However, she should have known by the lack of jangling keys and belt tools that it wasn’t him. Instead, it was Dan Beardsley.

  “What are you doing here?” She eyed him with suspicion wondering if he too could be concealing a weapon under his puffy winter coat. His flyaway blond hair drooped low on his forehead and he pushed it back.

  How can he possibly be wandering around this neighborhood in the middle of the night? What’s his role in all of this?

  “When I have insomnia, I listen to the local police scanner. Usually there’s nothing going on, but I came right over when I heard about your window.”

  She didn’t trust him now that she’d discovered he had the same surname as one of Lynetta’s relatives from England, but she pushed that thought out of her mind for now—put a pin in it, as they said—because hey, a warm body was a warm body, and she needed help getting Betty safe right now before she got sick and ended up dying in a hospital bed just like Lynetta.

  Not on my watch. Not again.

  “We need to get her out of here. She’s confused and I don’t know if she’s injured. I called the police, but we need to get her off this cold floor so she doesn’t get hypothermia.” Even though the basement seemed to be humid and heated—probably so the pot plants wouldn’t suffer—the tile floor was still cold and hard, especially for old bones that didn’t even have a sweater on them. “I don’t see any wounds on her, but—”

  “Holy Mary Jane,” Dan Beardsley said, suddenly noticing the double row of marijuana plants. “Are these Sandra’s? I wouldn’t have pegged her for the homegrown type. Maybe spinning her own alpaca fiber art, but not this. Wow. Just goes to show we don’t really know anyone, do we?”

  “Actually, I think the plants belong to the neighbor, Aloysius. He just ran out of here with a gun.” She pointed up at the ceiling vaguely in the direction toward the front of the house where the window had been shot out. As they both looked upward, they saw the bullet hole in the ceiling plaster at the same time. “Son of a…”

  He really had shot out the window. Not from the outside of the house, but down here. She’d suspected it, but couldn’t figure out how he’d done it. Here was proof.

  “What was he doing, firing a warning shot?” the mayor asked.

  “He could have killed me.”

  “But he did kill her,” Betty said in a shaky voice. With a gnarled hand, she pointed low and across the floor.

  Josie’s stomach dropped. She stooped to look under the grow tables at the same time as Dan Beardsley. Beyond the second row of plants along the wall, Sandra lay on her back with her head turned away, lifeless.

  She braced herself with two hands on the floor as dark spots swam in front of her eyes.

  

  No, it couldn’t have been Aloysius. Not unless it was an accident. Not unless…he had me fooled this entire time. Maybe he purposely drugged Bert and me so that he could commit his crimes without me hearing anything…

  Josie stood in a haze of confusion as the newly arrived EMTs nestled Betty Edwards in one of those shiny silver thermal blankets, making her look like a small jacket potato ready for the oven. They settled her on a gurney and checked her vitals in preparation
for her short ride to the hospital.

  Josie imagined they would keep her overnight for observation and then send her back to Pleasant Valley in the morning if everything seemed all right—at least physically. Josie wasn’t sure if they had a trauma counselor on hand. Betty Edwards had seen some things in the last twelve hours that no one should have to deal with, not even someone from The Greatest Generation or however old she was.

  Dan Beardsley was going to follow Betty to the hospital and make sure everything went all right until Betty’s next of kin could be contacted to come advocate for her—if there were any left now that Harris and Sandra were gone. If Betty was up to it, she would probably have to give a statement to the police, and it was good that someone would be there with her. Maybe it was a weird conflict of interest since Dan was also a local reporter, but everyone in this town was going to have a serve a double role if they wanted to wade through this mess.

  But just in case I’m missing the obvious…

  “Hey.” Josie grabbed his arm before he left. “Weird question, but do you have any relatives named Olivia or Antony? They would have come from England but passed away in the 90s.”

  He frowned and shook his head. “No. I mean, it is an English name, but my grandfather chose it after he immigrated to America from Germany. His name was originally Bernstein, but he wanted something more Anglo-sounding.”

  Huh. So much for that theory. Maybe he always pops up at the right time, in the right place simply because he’s a decent reporter…unless he’s lying, too.

  “What about Marcy Bates? Do you know anything about her family history?”

  “What’s this all about?” he asked. He’d opened his car door and was about to slide behind the steering wheel. The ambulance had already left for the hospital, but Josie could tell he was intrigued by her line of questioning.