Snowed In with Murder

by Auralee Wallace

  “Don’t talk to the camera,” Julie whispered. “Remember. Natural.”

  I shot her the middle finger.

  “Better,” she whispered happily. “Better.”

  I turned back around, wiping my sweaty palms against my jeans, Rayner’s body right in front of me. A cold gust of wind whistled down the chimney, making the fire crackle. Man, touching Rayner the first time had been bad enough, and then there had been a chance he was still alive. But I couldn’t see what other choice I had. This group was right on the edge of losing it. Brody in particular, who was standing just to the side of me, one arm wrapped around his waist, the other’s elbow resting on it, hand covering his mouth. He was barely hanging on. I needed to prove to them all that Rayner was not murdered.

  But I really didn’t want to touch him again.

  In fact, my desire not to touch him was so bad that suddenly I found my toe inching forward to see if I could just tip him back.

  “Don’t use your foot!” Ronnie yelled.

  I whipped around. “You said you didn’t want to touch him!”

  “Well, I know,” she said folding her arms across her skin-tight mourning outfit, “but you can’t treat rich people like that. Show some respect.”

  She was right. Not about the rich part. But the respect. My gaze suddenly landed on Kyle. I couldn’t read his expression, but he was watching me so closely, I couldn’t help but think he was struggling to put on a brave face. He was still a kid. And this was his father. I did need to show more respect. I sighed and crouched down placing my hands on the dead man’s shoulder. A small shudder ran through me. He was warm … and loose. Man, how long did it take for rigor mortis to set in? And why did I have a life where that was even a legitimate question? I gave a small push, and the former Rayner Boatright rolled onto his back—the afghan still over his face.

  I was going to either have to take the blanket off or reach my hand underneath and feel around. I definitely, definitely didn’t like that second option.

  “Wait!” I suddenly shouted, catching a glimpse of something shiny in a little gap where the blanket draped. “It’s all fine. I can still see the chain around his neck.” I lifted it carefully with one finger. “It’s right—”

  Uh-oh.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I spotted a little ring sliding down the chain as I lifted the necklace up. A broken little ring. That probably used to hold a capsule full of deadly poison.

  I looked over my shoulder to see Ashley holding Rayner’s glass up to the light. “Look.”

  A tiny voice in my head said, Sure, now she thinks to look in the glass.

  We all leaned forward to get a closer look.

  There it was, swirling around the bottom of the glass, dancing in the light from the fireplace.

  The missing capsule.

  You might be tempted to think all hell broke loose just then. But it didn’t.

  Nope. Not even close.

  There were no screams. No gasps. No sudden movements. Instead, everyone just leaned back from the table—almost in unison—as Ashley placed the glass carefully back on the table.

  It felt like a good three, maybe four minutes passed before anyone said anything at all.

  “So Uncle Rayner was right,” Chuck said in a small voice.

  I carefully sidestepped my way around the table back to the other side of the room. “Maybe … maybe it was an accident.”

  Ashley gasped. “It was when the power was out! Everyone was moving around!”

  “Okay, just hang on,” I said. “This doesn’t mean anything. There’s a reason why people don’t go around wearing fifty-, sixty-, seventy-year-old necklaces full of deadly poison.”

  “She can’t do math,” Kenny said matter-of-factly to Julie. When he caught my look, he tagged on, “Sorry. It’s cool. Math’s hard.”

  “I think I heard him yell, Get off of me!” Ronnie took a few steps toward her daughter, but Ashley jerked away to stand by Brody.

  “Somebody could have broken off the capsule and dropped it in his drink,” Chuck said, finishing the thought everyone was thinking.

  “People,” I began, knowing it was useless, “let’s not get carried away. I really think—”

  “Stop telling us to calm down!” Ronnie shrieked. “If anything, we have been too calm. Here we are having dinner with a body on the floor. That is not normal!”

  She had a point. And by the way my heart was hammering in my chest, well, it seemed to think so too. Still, I had to try to keep a lid on this. Rhonda had told me to keep them calm. This definitely did not feel calm. “Look. All I’m trying to say is that we should wait. We are not detectives. I know what can happen when you don’t leave things to the professionals. Suddenly you’re digging up graves in the middle of the night and—”

  I caught myself too late. They were all giving me that look again.

  “That was another situation entirely.”

  “Are you some sort of P.I.?” Kenny asked, peeking around his camera. Then he snapped his fingers. “Oh! Or vampire hunter?”

  “Neither,” I said closing my eyes and pressing my palms to the ground. “But I do know that this could all get out of control very quickly.”

  “Oh, so what should we do? Play Vegan Monopoly?” Ronnie asked, throwing her hands wide.

  My mouth opened. Then shut. Then opened again. “I’m not really sure how that would be different from regular Monopoly, but no.” I shot her a sidelong look. “I think we should all just sit quietly and—”

  “You can’t tell us what to do!”

  “You’re right,” I said, looking around for something, anything, to help get ahold of this situation. Thankfully, my eyes landed on the camera. “But have you considered that everything you’re saying right now is being recorded?”

  Her near frozen face tried to contract again in question.

  “Every word you say will be reviewed by the police.” Oh yeah, I liked where I was going with this. Mental high five. “You wouldn’t want anything being misconstrued. Like, say, toasting a dead man by calling him a son of a bitch.”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Well, I’m a court reporter, and you might be surprised how things can get twisted.” Okay, to be totally honest I really hadn’t transcribed all that many murder cases in my circuit—as in under five, and they were all drug-related, but I had watched a bunch of real-crime shows on TV, so I was pretty sure I knew what I was talking about. Ultimately, I just wanted everyone to stop talking. This entire day had been surreal and pretty unpleasant, but now a new feeling of dread was settling over me. It probably had something to do with the poison in the glass and the dead man on the floor. I could feel small stirrings of panic in my chest at the notion of being trapped with a potential murderer, and panic was not what we needed right now. “Tell them, Chuck,” I said, looking at the lawyer while shooting him a pretty serious you had better have my back on this look.

  “She’s right. You should all probably talk to a lawyer.” He froze for a moment. “I mean, a good lawyer, not me. I mean, I’m a good lawyer, but I’m also a witness, so yeah.”

  “Fine,” Ronnie said narrowing her eyes. “But first I’m calling the police.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “Please. Be my guest.”

  Julie grabbed Kenny’s elbow. “We should call work. Figure out how they want us to handle this.”

  “Good. Good,” I said as everyone dispersed to different corners of the room. “I have a few calls of my own to make.”

  * * *

  I called Rhonda first, but she didn’t answer. Then I texted her. Repeatedly. Still no answer. Hopefully she was on her way to speak with Lake Patrol. I then debated contacting Grady. I mean, I really, really wanted to talk to him, but if he was out on the water trying to find some kids, it didn’t seem right to have him worrying about me. It’s not as though he could leave and come get me. And as bad as this situation was, it seemed contained at the moment. So I settled on a text that rea
d,

  Call me the minute you can.

  I waited a little while to see if he would call back, but when he didn’t, I casually got to my feet and walked off to the darkened corner of the room nearest to the kitchen. Well, at least, I tried to walk casually. It’s kind of hard when you have a room full of people eyeballing your every movement.

  After a few rings, someone answered.

  “Oh no. What happened? I thought this night might not go well, so I bought you some ice cream. I mean, let’s be real, I would have bought ice cream anyway, but—”

  “Freddie, listen, I’ve got a life and death situation here, and I need your help.”

  A moment passed as he inhaled deeply. “I love calls that start this way. How can Freddie help you?”

  Just like with Rhonda, I filled him in on as much as I could as quickly, and as quietly, as I could. Truth was I needed someone to advocate for me on the mainland. Someone who could get the attention of the right people. And if there was one thing Freddie was good at it, it was getting people’s attention.

  When I was through, all Freddie said was “Erica” in a very surprised, scared, and somewhat-accusatory voice. Like I had gotten myself into this mess?

  “I know,” I muttered.

  “What the hell?”

  “I know.”

  “This is bad!”

  “I know!”

  “You’re going to die.”

  “Wait … what?”

  “I’m really sad,” he said. “Who knew that when I bought the ice cream, it would be for me?”

  “Oh my God!” I yelled in a hushed voice, peeking over at Kyle sitting by himself at the end of the sofa. He was throwing me looks again. This time like he had doubts about my ability to tie my own shoes.

  “Okay, okay, you’re right,” Freddie said. “You’re not dead yet.”

  I faced the corner of the room again and whispered, “I’m not going to die! There was one maybe-murder here tonight. One. Maybe.” I was still clinging to my accidental-poisoning theory.

  “Sure. Sure. I’d totally agree with you, but,” he said, raising his voice into quite the skeptical pitch, “the generator tells another story. I saw this movie last week where the killer sabotaged the generator right before he gutted—”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about that movie,” I said, pressing a finger hard into the spot between my eyebrows. “That is not what this is.”

  “No, you’re right. It’s more like … like that Agatha Christie book with the offensive name!”

  I was rubbing my whole forehead now. In fact, I couldn’t quite seem to rub it hard enough to get rid of the tension building there. “What are you even talking about?”

  A beat or two passed before Freddie said quite seriously, “Tell me you completed your assigned readings.”

  I chewed the side of my thumbnail and muttered, “Well, it’s just that I’ve been really into romances lately, and it’s hard to force a genre swit—”

  “Sometimes you really make me tired,” he said. “We are never going to get this business off the ground unless you—you know what? This is a conversation for another time. I’m talking about the book where they’re all trapped on the island? In a storm? Sound familiar?”

  I brought my hand away from my mouth. “That does sound a bit like my situation.” I watched Ronnie pound her phone a few times before sliding it across the table. I didn’t think 911 would be of much help. “Okay, so what do I do, Mr. Security Expert?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” he said slowly. “Let me think.”

  “Well, what do the heroes do in the books?” I asked, pulling back the curtain to peer into the darkness beyond the porch.

  “I’ve got it!” Freddie shouted. “You need to kill yourself!”

  I let the curtain drop. “I’m sorry?”

  “Pretend you’re dead so that you can investigate without anyone knowing.”

  “First, I’m not sure how I would do that, you know, like in real life. Second,” I said dropping my voice again and shooting a quick look over my shoulder to Kyle. “I can’t leave the kid alone.”

  “I heard that,” Kyle whispered. “And I’m not a kid.”

  I threw him a pained smile and a quick thumbs-up before shuffling farther away toward the kitchen.

  “Wait,” Freddie said, dropping his voice. “Did you just say there’s a kid?”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “He’s the one I told you about, who showed up late?” I shot another look over my shoulder. Yup, he was still listening.

  “You didn’t say he was a kid!” Freddie moaned. “Oh jeebus, now you’re going to die for sure.”

  “What?”

  “Seriously, Erica, you need to forget about the kid.”

  “I can’t forget about the kid,” I said tightly through my teeth. “The others”—I stopped briefly to flash another smile over my shoulder—“don’t seem to like him too much.”

  “Not your problem! Look, this plane you’re on is going down. You need to put on your mask first!”

  “I’m not sure your airplane analogies are really help—”

  “You listen to me, Erica Bloom. Kill yourself. Do it now. Or forget about investigating! Just go to the twins’ place. You can make it. Forget about the kid.”

  I dropped my voice even lower. “I can’t forget about the kid, okay?”

  “You can’t forget about the kid,” Freddie repeated in a mutter. “You can’t forget … you know what? Fine. But so help me, if you tell me next that there’s a loveable golden lab with only three legs that needs saving too, I think we just have to accept that you’re going to die.”

  “Can we please just focus? Phone service is not good, and my battery is getting low.” And given the way the lights were flickering again, there probably wasn’t any way I was going to be able to charge it. “What I really need you to do is find out what’s happening on the mainland and impress upon them how serious—”

  “Who can you trust?”

  “What?”

  “Of the group! Who can you trust? This is important.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to casually run a hand through my hair as I looked around the room. “At first I thought, maybe the TV producer. She’s not part of the famil—”

  “Okay, so she’s the murderer.”

  “What?”

  “That’s just how these things work. If you think you can trust her, she’s the murderer. Plus she produces reality TV, so obviously she’s super evil.”

  “No, well, she’s definitely a little evil when it comes to the show,” I said, casting a look over to Julie and Kenny by the fire. “But she really seems all about the show. What would her motive be?”

  “All about the show, huh?” Freddie said knowingly. “All about it enough to kill?”

  “No … at least I don’t think so.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “No, but—”

  “And are you sure the old guy is really, really dead? Maybe you’re just being punked.”

  “Nope,” I said, popping my lips apart. “I’ve already explored that option. He’s dead. But if you’d stop cutting me off, I was going to say”—I dropped my voice as low as I could—“a couple of times I kind of got the feeling that either Julie was hard of hearing or she wasn’t using her real name.”

  Freddie was saying something in return, but I lost it when I caught sight of Kyle making a small waving motion at me with his hand.

  When I met his eyes, he mouthed, It’s not her real name.

  I nodded quickly.

  “Freddie!” I hissed, turning my face to the window. “I’m right. Kyle says it’s not her real name.”

  “Well, did he say what her real name was?”

  “Hang on.” I looked over to Julie to make sure she wasn’t looking. She wasn’t. She and Kenny were watching something on his camera. What’s her real name? I mouthed to Kyle.

  He shook his head and shrugged.

  I nodded again. “He doesn’t know.”

  “He doesn�
��t know? That’s it?” Freddie asked. “Well, that’s just great. Oh my God, I hate kids.”

  I sighed while Freddie let out a noisy breath right into his phone and out into my ear.

  “Okay, well, that’s obviously step one.”

  “What is?”

  “You need to find out her real name and text it to me. I’ve subscribed to some databases for the business, and I’ll find out who she really is.”

  “And how exactly am I supposed to do that?”

  “You’ll figure something out. And get her birthday too.”

  I almost snapped something back, but now that Kyle had confirmed my fake-name suspicions, I couldn’t ignore this bit of information. “Okay fine, but, in the meantime, find Grady or Rhonda or somebody in law enforcement and tell them that things are going south here, and I’m not sure how long it will be before the paranoia kills us all. I mean, this still could have been some sort of accid—”

  “Stop it with the accident!” Freddie said sternly. “Generator tubes don’t cut themselves!”

  I shook my head like he could see it.

  “Listen, you can do this, Erica. The murderer didn’t count on you being there with all your … murder experience.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  “You are the wild card in the anointment. I mean fly. Whatever. It’s a house of cards and you are the wind. It’s—”

  “Freddie,” I said, trying to regain my composure. I could hear how freaked out he was. He was really worried for me, which was really making it hard to not worry about myself! “I get it.”

  “Do you? Do you really?”

  “I don’t have much choice. Just try to get people here.”

  “I’m on it. I won’t let you down.”

  “Okay,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut again.

  “Stay strong. And remember, you’re Erica Doom.”

  A sad-sounding laugh escaped my mouth. I guess everyone really was calling me that.

  “Okay, I gotta go. But don’t die, all right?”

  “All right, but—Oh! Wait! One more thing,” I said quickly. “Before you go, how did the hero in that Agatha Christie book survive?”