A Deadly Inside Scoop

by Abby Collette

  “You leaving me by myself?”

  “I trained you, and I think you mastered everything right off. You feel comfortable being here alone?”

  “I’ve been alone all my life,” she said.

  I didn’t have anything to say about that. It was too sad to think about.

  “You ready to go?” Maisie asked. I think she knew to get that conversation steered in another direction.

  I let out a sigh and glanced up at the clock.

  “I guess,” I said. “You know I don’t like doing this. Trying to be an amateur detective.”

  “I do,” Maisie said, and smiled.

  * * *

  - - - - -

  The library was all glass and wood. It had large sliding partitions inside and big windows across the front. There were wooden bookshelves, tables and chairs scattered all about.

  Maisie pushed up next to me once we got inside. “We should use the computers in the basement,” she whispered in my ear.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “So no one will know what we’re doing.”

  I hadn’t thought about that. “Maybe we should do this at home?” I raised a brow. “We could go to my place. We’d have to pick up the laptop from the store first, though.”

  “No,” she said, grabbing my arms and pulling me along. “The police might do a trace on your computer. You know, if they raid your house for evidence.”

  “Maisie!” I said. “Don’t say things like that. Why would they come to my house?”

  “Precautions,” she said. “We’re just taking precautions.” She pointed to the stairwell. “Basement.”

  We walked down the aisle between the stacks of books, a faint, sweet smell coming from the leaves of the old tomes. I loved the smell of books. I sat at one of the computers and Maisie pulled up a chair next to me.

  “Where should we start?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maisie said, and shrugged.

  “How about we look up Stephen Bayard’s prison record?” I suggested. “See if he actually got caught for anything. O said that the prison site would have a picture of him.”

  “You know he likes you,” Maisie said, leaning in and giving my shoulder a push with hers.

  “Who?” I said.

  “O,” she said.

  “Oh, brother,” I said, and turned my attention back to the computer. “Shoot,” I said. “I need a library card to sign in. I don’t have mine with me.”

  “I’ve got mine,” she said, digging down in her book bag.

  We put in her card number and password and I looked up the site. We figured out how to get in and I read the instructions.

  “Looks like we might not find him here,” I said, and tapped my nail on the screen. “Unless he meets all of the criteria listed here.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to try,” she said.

  I typed his name in and hit enter. Puppy Guy was the only face that popped up.

  “That’s him!” Maisie said.

  “Who?” I asked. “Peter Sellers?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Oh wow. That feeling I had was right. I just knew the guy who worked at Molta’s was the one you found down by the falls.”

  “Yep, that’s the guy I met that morning,” I said, staring at his picture. “He had seemed like a nice guy.”

  “Until your mother set you straight.”

  “You heard us talking?”

  “Your mother can’t whisper,” Maisie said. “Especially when she’s upset.”

  “You heard what she said about my dad?”

  “That he would kill the guy?” Maisie asked. “Yeah, I heard her say that.”

  I groaned. “Don’t repeat that to anyone,” I said.

  “Like I would,” Maisie said. She poked out her hand for a fist bump. “I got you.”

  “Thanks, Maisie. Okay”—I blew out a breath—“let’s see what we can get from this.” I pointed at the screen. “It looks like he went to jail for fraud, passing bad checks and theft.”

  “Terrible man,” Maisie said. “Here it says he was down for eighteen months.”

  “Down?”

  “You know, locked up.”

  I groaned. Maisie was too into this.

  “I wonder what he did,” Maisie said.

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head. “But doesn’t that just create another mystery for us?” I said. “That realization doesn’t clear up anything and it makes it harder to narrow down the killer.”

  “How?”

  “Because.” I pointed at the monitor. “He did something bad to someone somewhere else. Maybe it wasn’t someone here that killed him. This says that the crime was committed in Hamilton County. Maybe someone followed him here, killed him and left.”

  “You can’t look at it as a bad thing,” Maisie said. “You have to think about it as another piece to the puzzle.”

  “Puzzle?” I sucked my tongue. “What puzzle? I don’t see how this helps,” I said. “Knowing what he looked like. Which I already knew. And what crimes he committed.” I flung a hand toward the computer monitor. “This is going to be hard.” I had to chuckle at the absurdity of me thinking I could solve a murder. “How am I going to make them stop thinking of my dad as the prime suspect?”

  “Did that detective say that?”

  “He may as well have said it.”

  “What exactly did that Bayard man do to you guys?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure, exactly,” I said. “Something bad enough for my mother to say what she said.”

  “We know your father didn’t do it,” she said, “but that’s a good point.”

  “What is?”

  “We have to find out what Peter Sellers did that made someone mad enough to kill him.”

  “How?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know,” Maisie said, and took in a breath. “On all the shows I watch, they go around questioning people.”

  “Who are we supposed to question?” I asked, my voice squeaky. “Ari? Because searching the restaurant didn’t help any.”

  “It gave us a clue,” she said. “A cryptic one, but a clue. And we didn’t talk to him.”

  “Okay, say we do,” I said. “What are we going to say? ‘Did you kill Stephen Bayard?’”

  She hunched her shoulders. “Why not?”

  “For some reason, Maisie,” I said, squinting one eye, “I don’t think that’ll work. Whatever we do, I think we need to be more analytical about it.”

  “That’s your strong suit,” she said. “You’re analytical.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and gave a weak smile. “But me being that way isn’t working so well for us right now.”

  I thought about my whiteboard at home. My stacks of sticky notes.

  “We’ll figure it out.” She rubbed my shoulders. “I brought bananas and orange juice from your store,” she said, and went into her book bag, pulling out both. Holding one in each hand, she offered them to me. I shook my head no. “Here,” she said, unscrewing the top of the juice. “It might help.”

  I took the bottle from her. I didn’t give a second thought about Maisie carrying food around. After all, she’d been raised by Rivkah Solomon. “I mean it’s all so weird,” I said, taking a sip out of the plastic bottle. “Why was he here? In Chagrin Falls.” I swiped a hand across my forehead. “Did he really come just to harm my family?” I turned in my chair and looked at her. “I mean, he’d already done that. Years ago. And how would he know he’d run into me in front of the store?”

  “Maybe he’d been watching you,” Maisie offered.

  “How?” I asked. “It was the first day the store was open. I’d gone to the shop every day, sure, but not at five in the morning. I wasn’t making ice cream any of those other days. And he didn’t say anything mean or threatening to me even though my famil
y thinks he did.” I shook my head.

  “Not one mean word?” Maisie asked. I shook my head.

  “And why kill him with succinylcholine?” I turned back and stared at the computer. “Had someone set out from the beginning to frame my father?”

  “Succi-what?”

  “Succinylcholine. It’s a muscle relaxant used during surgery.”

  “Ohhhh . . .” she said, her eyes wide. “Your father is a surgeon. That’s why they think he did it.”

  “With your insight,” I said, shaking my head and closing down the prisoner-search site, “we’ll have this thing solved in no time.” I turned the bottle of orange juice up, took a big gulp and set it on the desk.

  Maisie overlooked my sarcasm. “Well, you never told me why they suspected him,” she said.

  And I hadn’t told her. I hadn’t had to. I’d asked for help, and she’d blindly come to my rescue. No questions asked.

  I needed to be nicer.

  “Sorry,” I said. “This is so frustrating.”

  “I know,” she said. “And no reason to apologize. Here, have a banana.”

  I took the banana.

  “You know what might help?” she said, scooting up in the chair. “Knowing about the instrument of death.”

  “The instrument of death?” I wanted to laugh, but instead I peeled back the skin of the banana and took a bite. “And how does knowing that help?” I said with my jaw full.

  “Because,” she said, “maybe we could narrow down the pool of suspects.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh that time. “We don’t have a pool of suspects, Maisie. We don’t even have one.”

  “We have Ari.”

  “Okay, but one does not a pool make.” I shifted in my seat to face her.

  “Let’s look at this logically,” she said. “Women, when they commit murder, like to use poisons and heavy objects. Men like guns and knives.”

  “Is that what you learned from watching all those BBC television shows?” I said, shaking my head.

  “No.” She blinked her eyes a few times. “Yes.” She rocked her head back and forth. “Maybe.”

  “Well, if your theory is true, Ari Terrain can’t be the killer.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I’m pretty sure that injecting succinylcholine into someone would be considered poisoning. That would mean a woman did it.”

  “Injecting is sort of like stabbing,” she said. “So it could be a man.”

  “We’re not going to go about this scientifically, huh?”

  “Of course we are. How about this for being scientific? It probably was a man because whoever did the deed would have had to overpower this Stephen/Peter guy, use that stuff on him and push him down the hill. That would take strength.”

  “That makes sense.” I nodded. “And I guess it narrows us down to looking for a man.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. What else can help us narrow it down? Maybe even down to the exact man?”

  “Other than snooping?” Maisie asked.

  “Snooping on who?” I asked.

  “Good point.” She sat back and thought for a moment. “Okay, let’s look at this from a different angle.”

  “Which angle were we looking at it from before?” I asked.

  “Just listen,” she said. “How could someone have gotten the . . . sucki . . . cylowin stuff in the first place?”

  “Now that’s a good question,” I said, not bothering to correct her pronunciation. “Because that’s the reason, I think, that they are thinking it’s my dad. Maybe other people have access to it, and we can see which people around here could have gotten ahold of some.”

  “Right,” Maisie said, and nodded excitedly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s look that up.” I took another sip of my juice, then typed, Where do I get succinylcholine?

  “Okay,” Maisie said, leaning over my shoulder. “Let’s look at that one.” She pointed to a link that read, Succinylcholine: Is it the Perfect Murder Weapon? Not Exactly.

  “That’s a blog,” I said, and pointed underneath to the URL address. “It’s not what we’re looking for.”

  “It might help.”

  “Alright, I’ll try it.” I clicked on it and we both started reading it silently. At least for a few minutes, until Maisie needed to share her reading of it with me. Aloud.

  “It’s a neuromuscular paralytic drug,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, still reading the article. “I read that. Not that I know what that is.”

  “Oh my gosh!” she said, pointing to the screen. I swatted her hand out of the way. “It says that it paralyzes all the muscles of the body and the person can’t breathe.” Her voice slowed as if she was telling a scary story. “They die from asphyxia while they are wide awake. Argh!”

  “Yeah, I see that now,” I said. “Let me read, please.”

  “It’s used in anesthesia,” she said, ignoring me. “To help get the tube down a patient’s throat so they can breathe while they’re asleep.”

  I took to reading out loud. Quietly. Moving my lips, I mumbled each word so I could understand what I was reading. It was the only way I could concentrate with her reading in my ear.

  “And they use it in lethal injections,” she said. “It’s part of the three-drug cocktail they give to inmates on death row.”

  I gave up and sat back in my chair. There was only one more paragraph left in the article. I might as well let her tell me about it because she wasn’t letting me find out for myself. Plus, I probably didn’t want to read about lethal injections for prisoners anyway. Not after what O had told me.

  “It says that succinylcholine must be injected and it works very quickly—within seconds to a minute. It also says that succinylcholine is hard to test for in an autopsy.” She sat back in her seat. “So how do they know that was what killed him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But that part about how quickly it kills really gets to me.” I turned and looked at her. “I was sitting on Grandma Kay’s bench for at least twenty minutes before I decided to go down there and get some snow. It might be possible that I was sitting there when he was killed.”

  “Oh, that would be awful,” Maisie said. “And scary. Did you see anyone?”

  “No, not really. Just that little boy with the scarf.”

  “What boy?”

  I told her the story about Glynis Vale and her son. How I’d seen the scarf on him and on the ground, and how she’d lied.

  “You couldn’t think a little boy killed him?”

  “That’s the same thing the detective said to me when I told him my father didn’t do it.” I looked at Maisie. “And no, I don’t think he did it.”

  “Good. Because that would be awful.”

  “Right. And we’ve already decided it was a man, well, more than likely a man, that was the killer, so that would probably leave his mother out as a suspect.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Maisie said. “Well, did you see anyone else?” she asked. “Like did you see Ari?”

  “No.” I shook my head and tried to think about if I’d noticed anything.

  “Ms. Devereaux might have seen something,” I said. “She said something weird to me that night after the police arrived.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘He deserved it,’ or something like that.”

  “Who deserved what?” Maisie asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just what she said.”

  “We should ask her about that.”

  “You know,” I said, “come to think about it, I went inside to get a bowl and scoop to get the snow with. I went to the restroom and stopped to talk to Felice.” I shook my head. “I probably was inside when it happened.”

  “Awww, that’s sweet.”


  “What?”

  “Felice, my little sweetie pie, saved you.”

  “How?”

  “Because if you had been sitting on that bench when the murderer was around, he would have had to kill you, too, because you were a witness.”

  “Don’t go all Jason Bourne on me, Maisie.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have ever thought of it that way. And it’s probably true that the killer had to have committed the crime there.” I started clicking my nails. “Stephen Bayard couldn’t have gotten there on his own after he was injected, it works too quickly.” I turned back to the screen and tapped it. “In a minute or less.”

  “Seconds even,” Maisie said. “Seeing that you didn’t see anyone, that means the killer was there committing the murder in the short time it took you to get that metal scooper.”

  chapter

  TWENTY-FIVE

  So many thoughts were running around in my head that the things in the room started to blur.

  One thing stuck out: Detective Beverly was right. Someone had planned this. They would have had to lure Stephen Bayard to the falls with the intent of killing him there.

  Or maybe, I thought, they gave him the drug in a car and pushed him out. No. I shook my head. He would have landed in the street or on the sidewalk. The edge of the hill didn’t come out far enough. If that had been the case, they would’ve had to drag him out of the car, across the sidewalk, and drop him down the hill.

  Was I gone long enough for anyone to have done that?

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “What?” Maisie said.

  “I was just thinking,” I said. “About how this could’ve happened.”

  “We probably need to keep this information,” she said. “We’ll probably want to go over it a few times.”

  “What information?” I said.

  “What we found out. The prison record, the info on that succinyl stuff,” she said. “Let’s print it out.”

  I clicked print and checked a few of the other links before circling back to the prison website. I printed the page that told the crime he’d committed, his release date, birthdate and place of incarceration. I didn’t know if I’d ever need it for anything.