Skinny Dipping with Murder

by Auralee Wallace

  Laurie studied my face; then she moved to shut the door. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got bigger problems.”

  “Exactly. That’s why you need to go to the police! If Candace knows that you know about the deal, what’s to stop her from killing you?” I asked, reaching to keep the door open. “Or … or! What if Tommy makes a deal with the police first! Then … then you could be left with charges of withholding evidence or … aiding and abetting. I don’t know exactly what charge, but do you want to take that chance?”

  I searched Laurie’s face to see if I had any hope of changing her mind. All I got back was steel.

  “Fine,” I said, reaching to my pocket for my phone. “If you won’t go to Grady, I’ll get Grady to come to you.”

  She slapped my hand, hard, sending my phone spinning.

  “Listen, Erica. I talked to Tommy. He’s leaving this rotten lake, and I plan to do the same thing. You may think you’re the answer to all my problems, but—”

  “I am!” I threw my hands into the air. “Well, not me, but the police!”

  She laughed. It was an ugly sound. “The police aren’t going to help me.”

  A voice called out behind us.

  “Everything all right there, honey?”

  I looked over my shoulder. Grandpa Day. And he had his gun.

  “Fine,” Laurie shouted back. “She’s leaving.”

  Grandpa Day pushed the brim of his hat up with the point of the gun. Something about his stance looked more threatening today. Laurie had probably told him she was in trouble. I made a sound low in my throat but picked up my phone and turned back toward the dock.

  I clenched my fists as I walked.

  Fine. She was scared. But the police could help! Unless she had accepted money too. Maybe she was afraid she’d be charged. Or maybe she was just too afraid of being next.

  I spun around one last time. I had to try, despite Grandpa Day’s itching trigger finger.

  “Laurie, please—”

  “Forget it! Grandpa?”

  I heard the cocking of a gun.

  “Don’t come back, Erica! I know all I need to know! You don’t scare me!”

  My shoulders slumped in defeat as I turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the dock.

  Suddenly this day kind of sucked, but I still believed Laurie was the key to clearing my name. Maybe I should still call Grady and get him out here to question her, but she’d probably just stonewall him the way she had me. Still—

  A thin ray of sunlight peeked through the clouds.

  Wait … maybe …

  New thoughts tumbled through my mind.

  Maybe I didn’t need Laurie herself. Maybe I just needed the threat of Laurie.

  Why hadn’t I thought of this before!

  I killed the engine and pulled out my phone.

  “Freddie?” I said, taking a deep breath. “I think I’ve got us a trap.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Raspberries. Raspberries with beaver teeth. They were everywhere. Chasing me—

  My eyes snapped open as I jerked up in bed.

  “Stay back!” I flung my arms out toward the fifteen or so startled women hovering around my bed.

  I slapped my hands over my face and fell back onto the mattress.

  It took me a moment to sort everything out. I had planned to spend the night at Freddie’s before I remembered his horrible snoring. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember that until two in the morning when he woke me up with it. Moving to another floor hadn’t helped, so I decided to come back to the retreat with the intention of getting up and out before the women. Apparently that plan had failed.

  “Sorry. Sorry,” I said, from between my fingers. “Bad dream.”

  “We understand,” I heard my mother say. “It’s the day.”

  The Raspberry Social.

  Time had run out.

  It was here.

  I took a deep breath.

  I didn’t have time for this. I needed to rally. I had real problems, and now that I had come up with a way to trap Candace, I was going to solve those problems.

  Time to focus.

  Job one was to keep the women off my scent. While they had proven themselves to be terrifyingly useful in many ways, this trap would need subtlety. And I was fairly certain it was a mathematical impossibility for this many people to stay subtle at one time. I just had to figure out a way to separate myself from them without rousing suspicion.

  “Honey, we were thinking that maybe you should lay low today,” my mom said.

  I peeked one eye through my fingers. “Huh?”

  My mother’s blue ones stared back at me, rounded like some baby animal’s. “The entire town is going to be out today, and they’ll all be talking … mainly about you.” She patted my leg.

  “Yes,” Lydia Morgan added, “but we wanted you to know that we’re still on the case.”

  The birdlike woman, whose name I still hadn’t learned, piped up next. “Seeing as it’s our last full day, we’re going to give it our all. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  It just couldn’t be this easy.

  “We thought we might go interview that Shelley person at the Salty Dawg,” Maria Franelli said, rolling her shoulders, then tilting her head back and forth. “She’s been holding out on us.”

  While I knew that they were barking up the wrong tree with Shelley, at least that would keep them from barking up mine.

  I swallowed and tried to smile away my lies. “That’s a great idea, ladies.”

  The women all gave me pitying looks before turning to leave.

  “Be careful though,” I said, remembering my bar fight. “Shelley can get a little wild at times.”

  “No problem, Martha here,” my mother said, pointing to a short, compact woman, “knows jujitsu.”

  The woman jumped into a fighting stance.

  “Wow,” I said, keeping my eyes on her. “Wow … and thank you. Really. Alpha Team, Beta, you guys have been great.”

  I meant it too. They had been great, but now it was time for the team that was higher than Alpha to take over … the Freddie and Erica Team … the Über-alpha Team.

  Oh, that was good.

  I made a mental note to tell Freddie. He might want it for his book.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Freddie and I were gliding across the lake on our way into town. The festivities got started early on social day. Local businesses had to set up their sample booths, covering everything from preserves to ammo; judging needed to get under way for the bake-off, and the speakers needed to be set up for the bands.

  A few minutes later, we pulled into the town’s tiny marina—if you could call a bunch of docks tied together a marina.

  I stepped out of the boat and took in the beauty of the day. The sun beamed brightly, all traces of clouds long gone, and a slight breeze rippled through the cheery red banners lining the town’s street.

  It was beautiful … really. So freaking beautiful I wanted to peel all my skin off.

  “Snap out of it, buttercup,” Freddie said, in a voice that sounded like something out of a black-and-white movie. “This investigation needs you.”

  My feet stayed rooted to the dock. “Freddie, it has been brought to my attention recently that I may have been a little embarrassed by what happened at the social eight years ago. In fact, I may still be a little embarrassed.”

  “What a truly startling discovery,” Freddie said, without much shock at all.

  “I know.”

  “Erica,” Freddie said, moving to stand beside me. “Because I’m a really awesome friend, I’m going to give you three choices.”

  I said nothing.

  “One: we can hug this out. You can cry. I’ll cry. Then we can walk into town, holding hands while smiling at the haters, blinding them all with our positivity.”

  “Ew,” I said, not taking my eyes off the scene ahead. “What’s option two?”

  “We turn around, go back to my place, eat a lot o
f pizza, and mess with people’s fortunes on the Internet.”

  “Except your computer’s dead.”

  Freddie gasped. “I had forgotten. Just for a moment. Now I have to feel the pain all over again.” He heaved a sigh. “It’s probably better this way. Leaving would mean no trap, and putting your future in the hands of the Otter Lake Police Department.”

  I sighed. “Okay. What’s three?”

  “We man up and do this thing!”

  Freddie pushed me hard on the shoulder toward the town.

  I spun and hit him on the chest.

  “Yeah! That’s it!” he shouted, pushing my other shoulder. “Hit me again!”

  I did, harder this time.

  “Yeah!”

  I balled my hands into fists and struck out twice more, lightning fast.

  “Okay, that’s good.”

  I wound up to hit him again. His hands shot up. “Seriously, stop hitting me now.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  We walked shoulder to shoulder, footsteps echoing underneath the dock, until we reached land.

  “So, Freddie, Grady was saying that most of the townspeople felt bad about that night. That they understood what really happened. Is that true?”

  “For some,” he said with a nod. “In fact, it probably would have been everyone if Betsy hadn’t died shortly thereafter.”

  “She did?”

  Freddie nodded again. “Hard to say if it was the shock or the raspberry tart,” he added, squinting his eyes.

  “Or old age!”

  He shrugged.

  “But it’s not like people talk about it anymore. I mean—”

  Suddenly, a boy in a striped shirt, maybe eight or nine, zoomed by screaming and clutching his chest.

  I pointed. “That wasn’t supposed to be m—”

  “And so it begins,” Freddie murmured.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Let’s just get out of here before anyone else sees us.”

  A little while later, we were crouched in some bushes taking in the scene. We needed to do some surveillance before we launched our attack.

  “Okay, so how do you want to play this?” I whispered to Freddie.

  “Me?” Freddie asked, shuffling to make more room in the bushes. “How do I want to play this? It’s your plan.”

  “Exactly,” I said, pushing down a branch to peek through the greenery. “I’m the big-picture person. You’re the details guy.”

  “I never agreed to that.”

  I muttered a few unpleasant things under my breath. “Fine. We can sort that out later, but in the meantime, what do we do?” I had been thinking my trap was beautiful in its simplicity, but now I was worried it was just simple.

  Freddie didn’t answer.

  The plan had two parts, and if we couldn’t get Part One off the ground, we’d never get to Part Two. And Part Two, well, Part Two was where all of our hard work paid off.

  We both stared at Candace’s back about twenty yards in front of us at the MRG booth. She was handing out gift bags to the happy citizens of Otter Lake. Beside her stood the man the ladies had shown me in the picture, Bryson Maxwell, head of PR, Candace’s boss. He was as handsome as his photo, but I couldn’t seem to get past the fact that he actually wore a pink sweater tied around his neck, draped over a white polo shirt.

  “We’re just going to have to go in,” Freddie said suddenly, getting to his feet and brushing the dirt off his shorts.

  “Just go in?”

  He nodded while ducking from the flight path of a dragonfly. “It will be like we practiced. We’ll say the lines loud enough so that she can hear, but not so loud that it looks like we want her to hear.”

  “What about her boss?” I asked, chewing the corner of my lip.

  “That might help. She’ll be even more on edge. She won’t even see the trap coming. And if we stick to the script, PR Ken won’t have any idea what we’re talking about.”

  “Right,” I said, getting to my feet. “Go team.”

  Freddie and I walked a long circle out from the bushes so that we ended up at the start of Main Street by the water. This way it would look like we were walking the strip and coming across Candace by chance.

  Unfortunately, the small street was already filled with people, all of whom seemed to be either looking, pointing, or talking about me.

  “Stop drawing attention to yourself,” Freddie whispered. “You’ll blow our chance!”

  I stopped in my tracks and glared at him. “What would you have me do, Freddie?”

  “Well, you could stop looking so freaked for one. It’s like blood in the water,” he mumbled out of the corner of his mouth. “Go offense.”

  “Offense?”

  “Make them uncomfortable with their rudeness.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  He sighed. “Here. Watch. I call this the old school.” He took a few steps then stopped abruptly, fixing his narrowed eyes on two middle-aged men, who had, up until that moment, been staring at my chest, laughing. Freddie took a deep breath and boomed, “What are you looking at?”

  The men started and turned away.

  Freddie smiled and resumed walking.

  “I also have what I call the George Takei phaser stare and the Corporal Klinger Section 8—I like retro TV—but you need to develop your own style.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “Where’s the Erica Bloom who liked to bite first-graders on the shoulder? Pin people up against walls with bar chairs? Get mad!” he said, giving me a shake. “Where do they get off making you feel this way? Make them uncomfortable!”

  I looked around at the many familiar faces of people walking by … all looking at me. I took in the sight of teenaged girls snickering and clutching at one another, the men of all ages elbowing their friends’ ribs as I walked past, and the church group glaring at me, disapprovingly, from their baked-goods stand. Suddenly, it was more than I could take.

  I stopped and flung my arms out wide, accidentally smacking Freddie.

  “What?” I screamed to the crowd, trying to look at everyone at once. “You want another look!”

  Everybody on the street froze, then backed away slowly, giving me a circle of space.

  “Is that it? ’Cause I’ll do it!” I didn’t even realize it at first, but my hands were pulling up the bottom of my shirt. “I’ll—”

  Freddie shuffled to my side and yanked my arm. “That’s good, Erica. We’re good.”

  “Too much?” I let go of the fabric clutched in my fingers.

  Freddie nodded. “Let’s keep going.”

  “I went offense.”

  He patted my hand. “I know. Remember: steady stream of crazy.”

  “They’re just boobs.”

  “I know.”

  We resumed walking.

  Luckily, it only took a few minutes before everyone was back about their business. Even better, no one was taking the chance to look at me again, helping Freddie and me appear to be two friends simply enjoying a small-town event.

  “Okay, approaching target in less than a minute.”

  I glanced at the MRG stand. It was packed. Those must be some pretty awesome gift bags.

  Candace, at first, looked her normal sunny self, leaning over the counter in her yellow sundress to tie a balloon to a stroller, but on closer inspection, I couldn’t help but think her smile was a little strained, and I noticed slight bags underneath her eyes.

  “Got your lines?” Freddie asked under his breath.

  “Got ’em.”

  “Let’s do this thing.”

  We strolled toward the booth.

  “This is perfect,” Freddie whispered to me. “She’s talking to Dr. Reynolds now. Let’s ease into position.”

  We edged our way through the crowd until we stood right at the counter beside the doctor. Candace spotted us and clearly wanted to end things with the good physician, but he was not one to be easily put off. The sound of
his talk reached my ear. “So he’s holding his sawed-off thumb in the other hand, and he says, I know I don’t have an appointment, but…”

  I tuned out of the doctor’s conversation and looked at Freddie, who had the first line. Now was the perfect time. Why wasn’t he speaking?

  Go! Freddie mouthed.

  You go, I mouthed back.

  I noticed Candace staring at us, a confused look on her face. I held up a finger to her, and mouthed, We’ll be right back.

  Freddie and I hurried out of earshot.

  “What are you doing?” Freddie whispered.

  “Me? You were supposed to go first.”

  “No! We’re doing version two!”

  “No! We agreed version three was better!”

  We argued for a few more seconds before coming to an agreement.

  “Now are we ready?” Freddie asked.

  “Let’s go.”

  We casually strolled back to the booth for a second time.

  “So we sewed the thumb back on right there in the office,” Dr. Reynolds said to Candace, who was still nodding politely but pushing the gift bag at him. “He doesn’t have any movement in it, but at least it didn’t go gangrenous.”

  I looked at Freddie. “They’re finishing. Go.”

  “So Laurie said she has evidence proving who the murderer is?” Freddie said, voice loud, but not too loud.

  “Yeah, she said to meet her alone behind the giant raspberry tonight at nine.” I snuck a glance at Candace. Her body still faced the departing Dr. Reynolds, but her posture was rigid. She was totally listening.

  “Tonight at nine?” Freddie repeated.

  “At nine.”

  “Behind the giant raspberry?”

  “Behind the giant raspberry.”

  “All alon—”

  I slapped Freddie in the belly. The speech had sounded more subtle last night over beers.

  Candace made a move toward us, and was just about to say something, when her boss sidestepped her with large strides, hand outstretched to me.