by Maia Chance
Bud’s office was just as messy as the last time we’d been there, including the package of Oreo cookies on the desk. Oh, and the desk chair was tipped over.
Effie leaned over the desk. “Oh, dear God,” she said. “Another dead body.”
My brain turned to oatmeal.
Otis leaned over to look on the other side of the desk too. “Crud,” he said. “Bud’s dead. Let’s get out of here.”
Crud? Otis said crud? That was my word! “Wait,” I said. “Are you sure?”
Otis, Effie, and I squeezed around the desk and bent over Bud. He was dead, all right. No gunshot wounds that I could see.
“I’ll bet it was a heart attack,” Effie said, straightening. “That bluish-gray skin! And you see, he’d been convulsing for a bit. See the disarray? God, I need a cigarette. My third husband Raoul died of a heart attack in the sauna. Drinking scotch with the pool boy.” She shivered. “Let’s go.”
Otis was already unlatching the window behind the desk. “There’s a screen,” he said. “I’ll try to get it out.”
“Hurry,” Effie said.
Since we were there, I picked up a file folder from Bud’s desk and flipped through.
“What are you doing?” Effie asked me. An unlit cigarette dangled from her lips.
“I don’t know, looking for clues?” I said. The file folder held only what appeared to be alcohol delivery receipts.
“Something tells me Megan and Bud weren’t the type to handwrite love letters to each other,” Effie said. “They’d sext.”
“Sext?”
Effie went over to a filing cabinet and yanked it open. “Haven’t you heard of sexting?”
Part of me was afraid our escapades were going to land Effie in the hospital. But another part of me felt like she was corrupting my flowerlike innocence.
“Oh my,” Effie said. “What have we here?”
“What?” I clumped over to Effie and the filing cabinet as fast as the gold pumps would allow.
“Um, you guys?” Otis said, still fiddling with the window screen. “I don’t think touching that stuff is a good idea. There’s a dead body in here.”
“Natural causes, Otis dear.” Effie waved a smallish pad of paper at me. I squinted. The top said Dr. Jason Lawrence, Lakeshore Family Clinic, Rochester, NY.
“A prescription pad,” Effie said.
“Megan’s husband’s prescription pad,” I said. “This is huge! Put it in your purse!”
“Are you crazy?” Effie stuffed the prescription pad back in the filing cabinet and slammed it shut.
“Wait!” I dug out my phone. “I’ll take pictures.”
A thump shuddered the door. “Hey!” came Jentry’s muffled yell. “I know you’re in there, you stupid cows!”
Otis rattled the window screen. “It’s stuck.”
“Open up!” Jentry shouted. The doorknob twisted.
“Hurry!” I whispered to Otis.
“I’m going to have to cut it.” Otis dug a pocket knife from his jeans and flipped open a blade. He sawed at the screen. “Unfortunately, this is going to make this office look like a crime scene.”
Effie opened the filing cabinet again, and I took pictures of the prescription pad, getting the filing cabinet and other papers jumbled in the drawer for context. Effie slammed the drawer. I stuffed my phone in my backpack.
A huge thump. Jentry was trying to kick the door down. He bellowed, “If you snitch to the cops about anything, I’m gonna kill you!”
Effie’s face went stony. Her eyes narrowed, and she marched to the door. “Yoo-hoo, Jentry,” she called.
Silence.
“Oh, good,” Effie said. “You’re listening. Jentry, darling, if you threaten me or my niece again—or follow us about in your pickup truck—we will snitch to the police. How do you like that for a catch-22?”
We didn’t wait for Jentry’s reply; Otis had finished cutting a big flap in the window screen. Effie and I climbed through into the wet alleyway. Otis went last.
“Run!” Effie cried.
“I am,” I said. I mean, I was trying to run, but in the gold pumps, it was more like a reindeer prance. We slid and crashed past dumpsters and around the corner of the building onto Main Street.
I slammed right into someone and sent them down onto the sidewalk.
“Oof,” a familiar voice said. A girl squealed.
I pried my eyes open. I was staring down into Roger’s appalled face. Oh—and I was clutching his shoulders and astride him.
“I know it’s going to be terribly difficult for you, Agnes,” Roger said gently, “but you’re going to have to at least try to get over me.” He writhed out from under me, and I fell back onto my butt on the wet sidewalk, legs splayed. I didn’t even feel like crying. I just felt like dissolving and washing away into the streaming gutter. Roger’s arm curled around Shelby, and they both studied my shoes.
I knew what they were thinking: Rebound shoes.
“What are you two staring at?” Otis said to them, emerging from the alleyway. Then to me, “Come on, Agnes.” He held out a big, strong hand, pulled me to my feet, and wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “We’d better get going.”
In the meantime, Effie had lit her cigarette despite the rain. “It’s only been two days since you dumped Agnes,” she said to Roger. “How is she supposed to have moved on already? It’s a bit much to ask. You should be ashamed of yourself.” She pointed her cigarette at Shelby. “You too.”
“The heart wants what it wants,” Roger said loftily.
Gross. I turned to Otis and Effie. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Otis loped alongside Effie and me to the Cadillac, and we didn’t see Jentry. Maybe he was still trying to smash Bud’s door down. We all climbed in, Effie in the driver’s seat and Otis and me, for some reason, glued to each other in the back seat. His hard, heat-radiating body felt like the only thing keeping me from bursting into tears and/or frantic giggles. This fact annoyed me but not enough to unglue myself. I’d process it later.
“Obviously, we have to call the police,” I said, digging for my phone.
“Obviously,” Otis said.
“Wait,” Effie said. “How are we going to explain to the police what we were doing in Bud’s office? And unless Jentry somehow succeeded in breaking the door down, it’ll be locked, and they’ll find the cut screen . . .”
“I’ll ask Lauren to call the police,” I said. I dialed Lauren. She was still inside the club with Chester. I explained how Jentry was after us and how we’d found Budzinski dead from what looked like a heart attack in his office. “So could you call nine-one-one?” I asked.
“Sure,” Lauren said coolly. “And you know what? I’ll steal a phone from one of these college kids—their phones are lying around all over the place—and call from that so no one will have to explain a thing.”
“You’re a genius,” I said. “Call me if anything weird happens.” I punched end call. Then I went to my photos to see how the shots of Gothboy’s drug deal and the prescription pad had turned out. “The drug deal shot is blurry, but the prescription pad shots are crystal clear,” I said and put my phone away. “In the movies, the police labs can always enhance those blurry shots.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure the Naneda Police Department has spy-thriller technology,” Otis said.
“I hope Bud really died of natural causes,” I said, “so they won’t be looking for fingerprints—of which we left about five million.”
“Could I make a suggestion?” Otis said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Stop this investigating stuff before you get killed? Go to the police and tell them about Jentry’s pot operation and the drug deals and the prescription pad? And then, I don’t know, go on vacation to Brazil for six months?”
I shook my head. “Number one, Aunt Effie and I can’t go on vacation anywhere. We’re persons of interest and have been forbidden to leave town. Number two, Aunt Effie could be arrested for trespassing at the inn, and
both of us could be arrested for trespassing on Jentry’s farm even if he is growing pot.” I didn’t add that if I was arrested for anything, even if the charges were immediately dropped, it would break Dad’s heart.
Effie said, “Detective Albright thinks you’re some kind of seductive little criminal too, Agnes.”
“Really?” Otis said.
“And number three,” I said, “we have some really amazing leads! Dr. Lawrence’s prescription pad? Hello, that makes Megan look really bad—and it makes Bud and Jentry look bad too. And Roland Pascal is an ex-con, remember? Who knows? He could’ve been imprisoned for drug charges. Kathleen Todd’s murder was about drugs—prescription drugs—and I’m going to prove it. So no. Wild horses couldn’t make me stop this investigation now. I’m so close to cracking it, I can almost taste it.”
I didn’t add number four, which was something like, This investigation is the only thing keeping me from wallowing in a miserable pile of chocolate chip muffins while throwing darts at a target with a photo of Roger’s smug, jerky face scotch-taped on the bull’s-eye.
I leaned forward between the seats despite the toxic fume cloud roiling around Effie. “Aunt Effie, I do think you should come and stay at Dad’s—”
“Hell, no,” Effie snapped. “The threats of arrest for trespassing and of ghosts won’t keep me out of the inn, and neither will Jentry. I’ve got pepper spray, and I’ve lived an exceptionally full life and have no fear of death. I’m not budging.”
Otis groaned and slouched back on the seat. “You two are the most stubborn people I have ever met.”
“Thank you,” Effie and I said in unison.
Chapter 19
The rain kept up overnight. In the morning, I dawdled upstairs, lounging in bed, taking a marathon shower, doing laundry in Dad’s upstairs stackable, blow-drying my hair—something I never do—and deliberating endlessly between two ill-fitting high school outfits. The thing was, I was trying to avoid Dad. I could hear him in the kitchen talking with Cordelia. But nine o’clock came and went, and I realized that he wasn’t going to go to work without talking to me first. I bit the bullet and went downstairs.
“Good morning, honey,” Dad said from the breakfast nook. The pouches under his eyes looked puffier than usual. Great. I was killing my Dad.
“Hi.” I went to the coffeemaker. Luckily, Cordelia wasn’t in the room.
“Fun night?”
“What? Oh. Yeah. I went out with Effie, Chester, Lauren, and Otis Hatch—you remember him?—for a drink. Just a mellow, laid-back night.” I poured half-and-half in my coffee to avoid eye contact. I’d downed only one and a half drinks last night at Club Xenon, but the liquor they used was the kind that came in huge plastic jugs. So yeah, I had a headache, and my tongue felt like a pinecone.
“I didn’t know you drank,” Dad said.
“Oh, now and then.”
“I hope Great-Aunt Effie isn’t leading you—”
I waved a hand. “Don’t be silly.”
“The owner of Club Xenon on Main Street died last night.”
I gulped coffee. “Oh?”
“Police Chief Gwozdek said it looked like a heart attack, but they sent the body in for an autopsy just to be sure, what with Kathleen Todd’s death and all.”
“Makes sense.” I took a muffin from a plate on the counter. “Say, Dad, why aren’t you at work?”
“I wanted to ask you about something—”
Here it comes.
“—something a little, well . . . let’s just say I hope there was some kind of misunderstanding.”
I furrowed my brow, “innocent and confused” (I hoped), as I bit into the muffin.
Dad cleared his throat. “Megan Lawrence called my office yesterday and said you and Aunt Effie had stopped by her house, saying you wanted to start some kind of neighborhood watch group?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I coughed on a muffin crumb, and my eyes watered. “Well, no. I knew Megan didn’t understand what Aunt Effie said. What happened was, we were there sort of canvassing because Aunt Effie is interested in putting herself up for historical society chairman.”
“Really?” Dad’s big shoulders sagged in relief.
“Yeah.” Mental note: tell Aunt Effie she is considering putting herself up for historical society chairman. “We were just asking Megan Lawrence about the break-in at her house—did she tell you about that? yeah?—and Aunt Effie wanted to ask her how she’d feel about a historical society chairman who took a special interest in, uh, home-security issues.”
“Well, Agnes, your hearts are in the right place, but that would really be outside of the bounds of the historical society’s role. The police are in charge of—”
“I know, I know. It was Aunt Effie’s idea. She gets kind of carried away with these grandiose plans.”
“She sure does.” Dad looked like he wanted to say more, but he didn’t.
He was doing me a favor and, true to his word, keeping out of it. I’d thought that that would allow me to retain some shreds of my adult pride, but, ironically, him indulging me this way only made me feel like a touchy teenager.
Dad stood. “Well, I’ve got to get to work, but I’m glad we talked, Agnes. I was starting to worry again that you two were meddling in the murder investigation.”
“Us, meddle?” I chuckled weakly into my coffee mug. “We’re way too busy for that.”
* * *
By the time I rolled up to the Stagecoach Inn on my ten speed, my clothes were as waterlogged as my spirits. Lying to Dad felt awful. It was like lying to Teddy Ruxpin. No way was I backing off on my investigation when I felt so close to the solution, but I needed to wrap it up, and quickly, before I ruined my relationship with Dad forever. Luckily, seeing that prescription pad and those drug deals in Club Xenon last night had been a breakthrough. Kathleen Todd’s murder probably had been about prescription drugs, and Megan, Bud, Jodi, and Jentry all looked really sketchy. The problem was figuring out how to pursue this lead without getting into another dangerous situation with Jentry.
I leaned my bike on the kitchen porch railing and went inside.
Effie and Chester were at the kitchen table. The orange-striped cat crouched on the kitchen table on top of some catalogs or magazines, licking what looked like milk from a bowl.
“Gross,” I said, shutting the door behind me. “If kitty litter gets in your food, you could get all kinds of disgusting diseases, you know. There’s even a parasite that makes you crazy and love cats.”
Effie said, “We’re not eating food, darling. Perish the thought.”
I looked at Chester. “What’s with you? Going manorexic?”
“He’s love-sick,” Effie said.
I snorted. “Lauren’s out of your league, Chester.” I had texted with Lauren that morning, thanking her for calling 9-1-1 and giving her an update. I’d also asked her if there was any chance she’d ever go out with Chester. She’d written back: Eye roll.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m not eating?” Effie blew a stream of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling.
“No.” I leaned my butt on the counter. “You never eat.”
Effie ignored that. “The ghost came again last night.”
“Oh really? Did you leave any cigarettes out for him?”
“I woke up to a shattering sound that penetrated my earplugs,” Effie said. “I grabbed my pepper spray and went downstairs, and I found a plate right in the middle of the dining room floor, broken into about ten pieces.”
“Oh, okay,” I said in a this is redonk voice. But goose bumps prickled up and down my back. “And the ghost shattered the plate?”
“I think so, yes,” Effie said.
“Where’s the plate now?”
“Still on the floor. I couldn’t bear to touch it. Chester said he would clean it up, but he seems to be afraid of it too.”
“Afraid of poltergeist slime?” I said to Chester.
He made a nyah-nyah face at me.
“Speaking
of slime,” I said, “are we still not going to report Bud and those prescription pads to the police?”
“You don’t need to,” Chester said. “At the bakery this morning, everyone was gossiping about Bud’s death and the prescription pads the police found in his office. Oh, and the cut window screen.”
Great.
“The police will be asking Megan’s husband about those prescription pads for sure,” Chester said, “although I guess Kathleen Todd’s funeral is today, so they might have some delays.”
“That means that we’ll have a hard time talking to Megan today too, unless we crash the funeral,” I said.
“No crashing.” Effie scratched the cat’s ears. The cat flicked his tail. “Too high profile.”
“Then what?” I said. “I want to do something.”
“Can’t we work here a little, first?” Effie said.
I stifled a sigh. “Sure.” Putting off the next step in our sleuthing felt like torture, but I had accepted a cash advance from Effie.
“I’m so glad you’re in your dumpiest work clothes,” Effie said.
I looked down at my outfit: the Rocky sweat pants and a red Star Trek T-shirt.
“Of course,” Effie went on in a contemplative tone, “you probably weren’t expecting to see Otis today.”
I spluttered on coffee. “He’s coming?”
“Well, not that I know of,” Effie said, “but he does have a way of showing up whenever you’re around.”
Chester snickered.
I narrowed my eyes.
“Come on, Agnes,” Effie said in a sweet voice. “There’s no need to pretend with me.”
“Pretend what?”
“That Otis isn’t a gorgeous, hot-blooded male who’s clearly smitten by you and with whom you’d love to dive into the sack. I’m not blind. I had laser surgery on my eyes only two years ago.”
“I don’t even know how to respond to this,” I said. Warmth crept up my neck. “Sure, maybe I gave Otis the wrong idea last night because I’d been drinking—”
“Oh, yes? Enough of a wrong idea that he felt inclined to swoop you into his arms after Roger and that stick of sugarless gum—”
“Swoop? He didn’t swoop.”