Liz Jasper - Underdead 02

by Underdead in Denial

  “Do you think I did it?”

  “No.” He grinned suddenly. “If you wanted to kill him, you would have beaten him to death with your sundae spoon that night at the diner. You wouldn’t have poisoned your own cookies. You’re not that stupid.”

  “That stupid? I’m not that stupid?”

  I stood, hands on hips, and if he could have expired from a look he would have keeled over.

  Putting Fluffy gently on the floor, he got to his feet with the speedy grace of an athlete. He ate up the distance between us in two large strides, grasped my shoulders and shook me. “What is wrong with you tonight?”

  He was so close I had to tilt my head back to look at him. His eyes had gone silver. A strange warmth coursed over me, robbing me of my breath.

  Gavin released me. He moved past me with as wide a berth as the small kitchen allowed and headed for the front door. “I’ll call you tomorrow around dusk to make sure you made it home safely. Try to stay out of trouble.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “You noticed? Good. Maybe it will stick. Make sure your windows are locked.”

  And he was gone.

  *

  I had to hit the snooze alarm twice before I was able to haul myself out of bed the next morning. As I drove my seven-minute commute down the peninsula to Bayshore, I fought hard against the impulse to pull a U-turn and go back to bed. Calling in sick was a luxury I couldn’t afford, now that I was involved, however peripherally, in another murder. If I didn’t show up, everyone would think I was in jail.

  The first bell rang as I squeezed the Volvo into a compact spot a few inches wider than the rectangle of the car. I had five minutes to get up to my classroom and let in my homeroom kids. I made it in four and a half, and that included a pass through the faculty room to get the morning announcements out of my mailbox.

  Wheezing, I stuck my key in the lock and pushed open the door just as the bell rang. There was a chorus of disappointed groans as my eighth-grade advisees followed me in. We’d made a deal that if I was late three times I had to bring doughnuts, and my count was already at two.

  I handed the still-warm half sheet of school announcements to one of my advisees to read. “Stop your whining,” I told them. “You’ve already gotten doughnuts three times.”

  “Four,” someone corrected.

  Jeez. “Listen to the announcements. Go ahead, Quentin.”

  Quentin was a slow speaker. By the time he finished the announcements, the bell rang and our five minutes of homeroom was over. I sagged in relief as they hefted backpacks and scurried to their first classes without mentioning the haunted house. Apparently, the news of Tom’s murder hadn’t yet made the rounds.

  My first class came in and sat down with the usual quiet distraction of a test day. While they drew atom orbitals and made density calculations, I sifted through my astronomy notes from last year. With all the things vying for attention in my head, my opening lecture wasn’t fine tuned beyond, “The universe is really, really big.”

  My students and I worked industriously on our respective tasks right up to the bell. They left without comment, aside from the usual fretful moaning from the A students about how hard the test had been.

  A few hours later, when the lunch bell rang and my students didn’t bolt for the cafeteria, I knew the first feelers of gossip had made the rounds. I distracted them with a comment about needing to grade tests and kicked them out. I gave the hallways five minutes to clear, donned my protective sun gear and ran downstairs to find Becky. The next wave of students wouldn’t be so easy to put off and I needed to brainstorm ways to shut them down.

  Her classroom was locked. Again. I caught a glimpse of movement in the back of the room through the little window in her door and knocked. She hurried over and let me in.

  “Lock that behind you, will you?”

  I followed her to the back room where she stored the chemicals. She was wearing a fitted lime green lab coat and elbow length rubber gloves in preparation for scrubbing glassware at the sink. In a sudden spurt of jealousy, I forgot why I had come.

  “Where did you get that lab coat?” Mine had come with my classroom. It was standard-issue white and made for a much shorter, stouter person. It had mysterious stains. And a burn mark on the left cuff, but that was mine.

  “You can have them special ordered in any color,” Becky said, plunging a bottle brush into a test tube.

  “And Roger will pay for it?” I asked, surprised.

  “How much sleep did you get last night?”

  “Oh right,” I muttered. Our department chair wouldn’t pay for a new set of whiteboard markers without a fight. Like the sleek lab goggles she wore instead of the bulbous classroom ones, Becky had paid for the coat herself. As she often said, if you had to spend ten hours a day somewhere, you might as well look good.

  She broke from cleaning and I stared back in surprise at the fatigue etched on her unusually pale face. Becky bragged about how she didn’t need more than four or five hours of sleep a night, and it was a fair claim. She could—and did—go clubbing on a school night before a day of double chem labs, and when school ended, she would stay for another couple of hours cheerfully cleaning and grading.

  “What time did you get home?” I asked in concern.

  “They didn’t let me go until four.” She put the last test tube on a rack to dry, pulled off her gloves and slumped wearily against the spotless blacktopped counter. My concern grew. Becky leaned coolly, if she leaned at all. She didn’t slump.

  “Four? Why? Who’s ‘they’?”

  This earned me another flash of impatience for a slow mind. “The police. Who else?”

  “Are you kidding me? I was home by nine.”

  “Yeah, I got the message that hunky cop drove you home.” Her black eyebrows danced suggestively under the green spikes. “I always wondered if there was something going on with you two last spring.”

  “Please. Gavin thinks of me as an annoying little sister. He’s very happy with his girlfriend.” Plenty of enthusiasm, he’d said. I pushed away the thought and the unexpected flash of jealousy that accompanied it. His social life was none of my business. I certainly didn’t care whom he dated.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Trust me. He barely thinks of me as human.” That was all too true. And if I slid any further into the gray area between normal person and vampire, the honorable Detective Gavin Raines wouldn’t think twice before plunging a stake through my chest. “Stop changing the subject.”

  Becky stared unseeingly at a The Far Side poster of a fat kid trying to push his way into The School for the Gifted through a door marked “pull”. She was silent so long I began to wonder if she’d fallen asleep with her eyes open. Yet another critical teacher’s skill I needed to master as soon as possible. Without it, I didn’t think I’d make it through another year of faculty meetings with my sanity intact.

  “Becky?”

  “The police think I tried to poison Dan.”

  “That’s ridiculous! Wait…Dan? Drama Dan?”

  “Yes, Dan. Tom died from cyanide poisoning after eating some of Dan’s gingersnaps.”

  “How the hell do you know all this?” I demanded.

  “The police aren’t exactly a model of discretion.”

  “In my experience,” I said, “they’re pretty good at keeping things to themselves in a possible murder investigation.”

  “I don’t think they realized how good the acoustics are in the theater.”

  Becky looked a little guilty. I was pretty sure what the police hadn’t realized was that Becky had been eavesdropping.

  She waved an impatient hand through the air. “My point is—”

  “It doesn’t make sense. I made the cookies. If you’re right, I should be the primary suspect.”

  She looked offended. “I didn’t tell them you made the gingersnaps.”

  “Becky!”

  “Like I was going to sic those idiots on you when you had n
othing to do with it.”

  “What makes you so sure I didn’t do it?” I was genuinely curious.

  “Whoever did it probably used potassium cyanide or sodium cyanide. You can order either over the Internet pretty easily. They’re both white powders. You know as well as I that you rolled your cookies in those big pieces of clear crunchy sugar. What’s that called?”

  “Turbinado,” I answered automatically. “But that hardly—”

  She shook her head to silence me. “If you’d put cyanide on the cookies, we’d both be dead. We transferred them to the Frankenstein tin I got for Dan, remember? Cyanide absorbs through the skin into the bloodstream like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  “Becky, you need to tell them. Gavin—Detective Raines—knows I made the gingersnaps. I offered him some last night.”

  She stared at me wide-eyed and then started to laugh. “Only you, Jo.”

  “How was I supposed to know? Anyway, I still could have done it. You don’t know for sure that it’s cyanide. The police still have to get the autopsy results back.”

  “Please. The tests are just official pieces of paper to cover their asses for when they go to court. Cyanide’s easy to identify, especially if your medical examiner is one of the fifty percent of the population who can detect the almond smell. Even if he lacks the gene, I’m sure someone on his staff has it.”

  “Exactly how long were you eavesdropping on the police last night?”

  I had a passing thought that she knew an awful lot about this, and chided myself for even thinking it. Becky hadn’t killed Tom. It was too sloppily done, for starters. If Becky wanted someone dead, she would have come up with something that was undetectable by police labs and absolutely untraceable to her.

  “I still don’t see why you think someone was trying to poison Dan. If someone sprinkled cyanide powder on the cookies, anyone could’ve eaten one. It’s just Tom’s misfortune that he’s so piggy and he got to them first.” I couldn’t keep a note of disgust out of my voice.

  Becky leaned forward, her face earnest, her dark eyes intent. “You don’t get it. I know Dan usually puts food out to share, but he’s crazy about gingersnaps. He hid the tin under his sweatshirt and it was still there when the police went to look for it. Tom must have found the cookies by accident, snitched a few and put the tin back so Dan wouldn’t know.”

  “If cyanide is so toxic, why didn’t Tom keel over in the dressing room?”

  “Don’t you remember his zombie costume? He wore gloves.”

  Oh. I sat heavily on a stool and looked up at her, not sure whether I believed it or not, but quite sure I didn’t want to. This was getting uglier by the moment. “But who’d want to kill Dan?”

  Chapter Seven

  “Apparently, me.” Becky tried to look as if she didn’t care, but it was about as convincing as her green hair.

  “Oh please. The police are clueless if they think you tried to kill Dan. Have they seen the way you look at him? It’s sickening.”

  My jollying got me a ghost of a smile that lasted only a second before it twisted beyond recognition.

  I blew out a sigh. “I wish I could tell you it’s going to get easier, Becks, but I can’t. You’re on the police radar and until they figure things out, you’re going to get treated with suspicion.”

  “I know.” She pulled a cheap brown paper towel from the holder over the sink, swiped a couple of times at her nose and flung the wadded ball into the trash. “Which is why we’re going to find out who did this.”

  “What do you mean, we?”

  “C’mon, Jo. It’s obvious the police aren’t going to figure it out. They still half think Tom was the target and that Dan and I did him in.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Becky shot me the same look Fluffy had given me that morning when I’d tried to foist on her a can of Chicken Dinner instead of the Tuna Delight she favored.

  “We can start sleuthing tonight. They’re setting up another haunted house in the parking lot.”

  “What?” I sputtered. “Why would anyone want to do that after what happened to Tom? Is it even legal?”

  “Marty already has the permits. He wanted the hunted house out there all along. All those people tromping through his theater, wearing out that ugly, forty-year-old carpet?” She snorted. “Point is, ‘His Cheapness’ doesn’t want all the advertising to go to waste, especially the free advertising. After the news of Tom’s murder hits the papers, people are going to come in droves.”

  Her voice took on a pleading quality. “All the haunted house workers will be there tonight, setting it up. We ask a few questions—”

  I held up my hands and backed up. “No. No way. Not a chance.”

  “It gets dark at six, Jo. There won’t be any trouble with your sun allergy.”

  “This isn’t about my sun allergy and you know it. We are not going to do any sleuthing. That’s called interfering with an investigation.” I wasn’t sure if that was strictly true, but I didn’t really care. “Trust me—you want to stay far, far away, before people start labeling you a love-crazed mass murderer.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You’re not love-crazed?”

  Becky didn’t respond.

  “It’s stupid and dangerous, Becky. Let the police do the investigating. It’s their job.”

  “Tell me you believe that if you’d left things to the police last spring you’d still be alive right now.” She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the edge of the sink.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but no words came out. What was I supposed to say? Well, Becky, I would gladly have left it to the police. But it was a little hard to avoid them, seeing as I had a detective sleeping in my living room so the vampire who tried to turn me didn’t finish the job. And now the vampire is back again, with Lord only knows what on his agenda, and spending time in a parking lot at night really isn’t a good idea for me right now.

  “Didn’t think so. We can do this, Jo,” she pleaded. “We’re scientists, trained to look at evidence and draw conclusions. And since we’re not police, people will tell us stuff. All we have to do is apply our talents to the problem and we’ll figure it out in no time.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t want to help, especially after what you went through last year. You were a social pariah for months! You know you’re going to be one again if this doesn’t clear up fast. It’s going to get around that you made the cookies.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “You’re going to sit by and let other people go through the same horrible things you went through,” she said incredulously.

  “It’s hardly the same thing, Becky!”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No! You have no idea what happened to me! You dealt with a few suspicious looks for a few hours. That is nothing! I—”

  It was pointless. Becky would never understand because I would never tell her what was really going on. I forced myself to take a breath and calm down. “It’s a bad idea,” I said finally.

  Becky stood facing me, hands clenched, her eyes luminous with disappointment.

  “Fine. I’ll do it alone. You’re free to follow your conscience. I have to follow mine. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some prep work to finish before my next class comes in.”

  “Becky…”

  She turned her back to me and busied herself putting clean glassware in the cabinets.

  I stomped out, shut her door with exaggerated care and strode rapidly through the maze of indoor hallways and covered corridors to the cafeteria. It was obviously pointless to reason with Becky. She couldn’t recognize reason right now if it bit her on the butt. Otherwise, she’d realize that the police must believe the cookies were poisoned after she gave them to Dan. Or else she’d be talking to a lawyer right now and Gavin would never have let me off so lightly when he learned I’d made them.

  They’d questioned Becky, not because they thought s
he’d murdered Tom, but because they hoped she could direct them to the person who had.

  And speaking of faulty logic, I wasn’t so sure I agreed Dan was the intended victim. From what Becky had told me about cyanide, using it to kill someone required a lot of planning. And yet the killer had carefully targeted Dan by…doctoring cookies left under a sweatshirt where anyone could have found them?

  It was too random. I wasn’t buying it. And if Becky was her usual logic-minded self instead of this half-crazed emotion-driven Dan groupie, she wouldn’t be buying it either.

  “Hi Laurel. Could I trouble you for some more…ah, that’s it. Thanks.”

  As I took my slab of pot pie, with an extra spoonful of gravy, from the grandmotherly woman who ruled the lunch line, Carol waved to me from the back of the cafeteria.

  I slammed my tray onto the table and sat heavily in an orange plastic chair across from her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I poked at my pot pie, assessing the beef to vegetable ratio. “Is it just me, or has the student health club gotten to them again?” The cafeteria made lunch from scratch, mostly. “This is all carrots and peas.”

  Carol pursed her lips in disapprobation. It was a little like watching Glinda the Good Witch try to look angry. If the Oz witch had had brown hair, gold rimmed glasses and a few more pounds around her middle.

  I pushed a bright green pea to the side of my plate, the way I’d corralled onion slices in my mom’s spaghetti sauce as a kid.

  “I swear, you’re worse than the seventh graders. Eat your veggies. They’re good for you. Now, what’s wrong, besides lunch? Your students been giving you a hard time about the haunted house?”

  Carol was just as tuned in to the school gossip network as the librarians—if not more so. The difference was that she used her powers for good, keeping abreast of the rumors to correct the stupid and hurtful ones where she could.

  “Not really,” I said. “Chemistry test. But we start astronomy tomorrow.”

  She nodded, immediately understanding that our grade-obsessed students wouldn’t waste time gossiping on a test day, but they would waste time like crazy at the start of a new unit, especially when that unit was astronomy. Tomorrow, I was doomed.