Bethany tapped the canister of the fire extinguisher on the wall. “Was there one of these on the deck? It’s heavy enough to crack a skull.”
Val remembered seeing a fire extinguisher on the open deck. “Good point, Bethany. It’s also possible that debris hit Otto in the water and caused the injury.”
Bethany glanced at her watch. “I’ll leave you two to puzzle it all out. Time for me to go home. Chatty’s coming over to give me a free facial. I’m so glad she moved back to Bayport in time to play on our tennis team this spring.”
“I’m glad too.” Val walked Bethany toward the front door and refrained from saying that few people could resist buying Chatty’s overpriced beauty products after her free facials. “Thank you for tracking the ins and outs of the guests with us. Our timetable might help the police figure out what happened.”
As they reached the sitting room, the phone in Bethany’s bag jingled.
She pulled it out and glanced at the display. “It’s Cheyenne.”
While Bethany had the phone at her ear, her eyebrows shot halfway up to her hairline. She listened for the next two minutes, her face as expressive as her few words.
“No! . . . Really? . . . Are you okay?”
Granddad came into the sitting room as Bethany ended the call with the advice, “Be brave.”
She hung up and sighed. “Otto’s head injury was a bullet hole.”
Chapter 8
“So Otto took a bullet,” Granddad said. “That shoots the accident theory. We’re down to suicide or murder.”
Bethany tucked her phone away. “The police told Cheyenne not to say anything about their findings until the autopsy confirms them. Then they’ll make a public announcement. Until then—”
“Mum’s the word.” Granddad tapped his index finger on his lips.
Val remembered her cousin Monique’s warning about Chatty’s facials: She spikes them with truth serum. She’ll coax you into telling her things you’ve never told anyone else. “Be careful, Bethany, that you don’t tell Chatty about the bullet hole. It’ll be all over town by morning.”
Bethany turned to Val. “Do you think Otto was the type of person to commit suicide?”
“I can’t say. I just met him. But I know he went to a lot of trouble to get every detail accurate for his Titanic dinner. Killing himself in the middle of the meal doesn’t make sense.”
Bethany started toward the hall and then stopped. “I almost forgot to tell you. After Cheyenne said she never wanted to go back to the yacht, I offered to pick up the leftover food before it spoils. That was fine with her. She didn’t want any of it. Once the police are done with the yacht, I’ll salvage anything edible and bring it here.”
Val hated to waste food, but this was one batch she’d be tempted to dump. Otto’s death would make it hard to enjoy the second half of the dinner he had planned. The aroma of baking apples wafted into the sitting room. “You’d better check the oven, Granddad.”
He hurried to the kitchen. She saw Bethany to the door and then joined him.
He poked the baked apples with a fork. “These are perfect. Tender, but not too soft. The next step is combining milk, eggs, and sugar to pour on top.”
“How about I do that? Mixing ingredients relaxes me and helps me think.”
“Good. Leave dinner to me. I’ll go fire up the grill.”
She didn’t remember buying anything they could grill. “What are we eating?”
“Ned picked up a big piece of sirloin and asked me to grind it. He gave me a hunk of the ground beef, enough for both of us to have burgers tonight and one for the freezer.” He hurried out to the backyard, possibly to forestall any pushback on his dinner plan.
She wondered if he’d talked his friend Ned into buying that hunk of beef. Though she kept Granddad on the low-fat diet his doctor recommended, she suspected he cheated on it when he ate dinner with friends and when she left him to his own devices.
While whisking the milk with the eggs, she stirred up questions in her mind about Otto’s death. She had them ready when Granddad returned from lighting the charcoal. “If someone fired a gun on the yacht, wouldn’t we have heard a shot?”
“Not inside the saloon. The windows and doors on that yacht are heavy and tight. Besides, the minute Otto left the room, Cheyenne turned up the music. It was so loud that I had to lower the volume on my hearing aid.”
“But what about the guests who left the saloon? They might have been on a different deck from Otto and not seen him, but they couldn’t have missed the sound of a gun firing.”
“Someone using the head wouldn’t necessarily hear any more than we did, what with noises from the exhaust fan and the plumbing.”
Val added sugar to the milk-and-egg mix. “A gun means premeditation, not a spur-of-the-moment killing. A man could have come on the yacht with a gun in his tuxedo pockets. Women don’t tote shoulder bags like mine while wearing gowns. They carry clutches or evening bags, not much bigger than a wallet and too small for a gun.”
“An ankle holster works with trousers and long dresses.” Granddad pointed to his lower leg. “Or maybe the gun was already on the boat. Only Otto or Cheyenne could have put it there. One of them is dead, and the other benefits from his death.”
Val stopped mixing the dessert ingredients. Her grandfather had fixed on the obvious suspect when the victim is married—the spouse. “You’re assuming Cheyenne inherits Otto’s money, but that’s not necessarily true. Given Otto’s obsession, he might have earmarked his entire fortune for a Titanic monument or museum.”
“It doesn’t matter what his will says. As long as Cheyenne expected to inherit, she had a motive. That’s number one.” Granddad held up his hand with the thumb up. Then he extended his index finger. “Two, she covered the windows so no one could see what was happening outside on deck. Three, she turned up the music so loud that it could drown out the gunshot. Four, she sent Louisa to the downstairs bathroom to keep her off the deck where she might hear or see Otto’s murder go down. And five”—Granddad’s pinky joined his other splayed fingers—“she waited until everyone else had visited the head and no one was on the aft deck before she went out there by herself.”
“But Homer went out to the side deck after that. He would have heard the gun go off if that’s when Otto was shot.”
Granddad tapped his ear. “Homer wears hearing aids like mine. They don’t work right when it’s windy, like last night on deck. Sometimes mine whistle so loud that I can’t hear anything else.”
Val poured the egg mixture over the apples. “You’ve decided Cheyenne’s guilty and closed your mind to other possibilities. She didn’t go out on deck until Otto had been gone for twenty minutes. Where was he all that time when no one saw him?” Val didn’t wait for Granddad to respond. “I think he was already dead, shot by either Stacy or Trey. They were the first to leave the room after he did. No one saw him after that.”
Granddad tilted his head from side to side as if weighing her theory against his. “They didn’t act real friendly to Otto. I’ll put them second on my suspect list, after Cheyenne.” He stood up. “Time to slice the onions. What’s a burger without fried onions?”
Val had just put the pudding in the oven when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it.”
Granddad took an onion from the pantry. “I wish people wouldn’t come visiting at dinnertime. I wanna put the meat on when the charcoal’s hot, not after it cools down.”
Val hurried to the front hall and opened the door to Althea’s nephew. “Jerome!” He looked more young, vulnerable, and uncomfortable in his Sunday clothes than he had yesterday piloting the inflatable tender in his T-shirt and jeans.
He ran his finger under the collar of his crisp blue shirt. “Can I talk to Mr. Myer?”
“Of course. Come in.”
As she closed the door behind him, he inhaled audibly. “Something smells—wow—great.”
“An apple pudding is baking in the oven. My grandfather’s working on d
inner. Let’s go into the kitchen.”
He peered at the walls and high ceiling as she led him through the sitting room, the dining room, and the butler’s pantry. “This is a big place.”
Granddad looked up from slicing onions. “Howdy, Jerome.”
The young man gaped at him. Understandable, because Granddad was wearing bright blue swim goggles with mirrored lenses and looked like a bug. Val signaled him by making circles around her eyes with her thumb and index finger.
“Oh, yeah.” Granddad took off the goggles. “Forgot I was wearing these. I use ’em when I cut onions so my eyes don’t burn.”
Jerome relaxed and grinned. “That’s a good idea.” The smile disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. “I can come back some other time if you’re busy. I don’t want to hold up your dinner.”
“You won’t hold us up, as long as you stay and eat a burger with us. We’ve got lots of beef, and the grill’s almost ready.”
“A burger.” Jerome breathed the word as if it had magic power. “I haven’t had homemade burgers in a long time. Aunt Althea doesn’t eat meat.”
“You’ve come to the right place.” Granddad took the ground beef from the fridge.
“When I try to make them, they don’t turn out so good. Maybe I can learn how to do it by watching you.” Jerome joined Granddad at the kitchen island.
Val took dinner plates from the cabinet near the dishwasher. The breakfast table was too small to fit three comfortably and the dining room table too huge and formal for tonight’s meal. The picnic table would be perfect. “Let’s eat outside this evening.”
“Our first cookout of the season.” Granddad unwrapped the meat. “Now watch how I handle this beef. You hold it like a baby. You don’t poke or press or smash it down, unless you want to turn that baby into a hockey puck. You gotta have nice pockets in the meat to hold the juice.”
Val had never before heard Granddad’s hamburger tips. She found an oilcloth cover for the picnic table and wrapped the utensils in napkins.
“Do you add barbecue sauce to the meat before you cook it, Mr. Myer?”
“Nope. Only pepper and salt. The kind with big crystals—kosher salt. You salt the meat right before you put it on the grill. Otherwise, you’re pulling all the juices out before you have a chance to taste them.” After forming the three patties, he put them on a plate and made an indentation in the middle of each of them with his thumb.
“Why are you doing that?” Jerome said.
“Because the meat shrinks when it cooks. It can turn into a meatball. This dent keeps it flat.”
Val credited Grandma with teaching her how to cook and Granddad with staying out of the kitchen. But, come to think of it, he’d served as the meat chef for barbecues during her visits here as a child. She hoped tonight’s burgers would taste as good as the ones in her memory.
With Jerome’s cooking lesson winding down, she decided to explore his memory of last night. “Althea told me you thought someone on the yacht slipped drugs into your food. What did you eat?”
“The dinner you brought me.” He looked apologetically at her. “Nothing tasted funny. I liked the salmon a lot.”
And probably the asparagus less. “That platter of food was all you ate?”
“I had some of those marshmallow and chocolate crackers. S’mores.”
As far as Val knew, he hadn’t been on the open deck where Bethany was making s’mores. “Did you leave the bridge to get some?”
Jerome shook his head. “I stayed at the controls the whole time. Otto brought everyone in to look at the navigation instruments. When they all left, the s’mores were in a dish, next to the plate you made up for me. Do you think there were drugs in them?”
Maybe. “That would be hard to prove. Unless you left a few on the plate and the police tested them.”
“I ate every last one.”
Whoever wanted to drug a young man could safely bet he’d gobble up warm, gooey sweets sooner than he’d eat cold salmon and asparagus.
While Val made a salad, Jerome meandered to the breakfast table. He slumped into a chair and stared at the wood floor.
Granddad put the sliced onions in a frying pan. “Something bothering you, son?”
Jerome looked up. “I haven’t talked to Aunt Althea about this yet. Promise me you won’t tell her.” He glanced nervously at Val, apparently viewing her as a possible blabbermouth.
“We won’t repeat anything,” she said, “unless you give us permission.” She just hoped he wasn’t going to confess to a crime.
Jerome propped his elbow on the table and clutched his forehead. “It’s my fault.”
“What is?” Val and Granddad said simultaneously.
“What happened to Otto.”
Chapter 9
Granddad signaled to Val to watch the onions and sat down across from Jerome at the table. “How is what happened to Otto your fault?”
“I should have been paying more attention to the radar. There was nothing to worry about one minute, and the next time I looked, the bad weather was almost on top of us. My head was all fuzzy. Otto told me to leave the autopilot alone, but I had to adjust it to change course. By the time I did that, it was too late to get out of the squall.” Jerome gulped. “If I’d gotten away from the bad weather, no one could blame me for Otto falling off the boat.”
Val’s heart ached for him. She exchanged a look with Granddad. They both knew Jerome hadn’t done anything on the yacht that made him responsible for Otto’s death, unless he’d pulled the trigger on a gun. But they weren’t free to share that information with him or anyone else.
Granddad stroked his chin. “Did Otto blame you for what you did about changing course?”
“No!” Jerome said loudly. “I didn’t see him after he went down to the main deck for dinner.”
“You have blanks in your memory,” Granddad reminded him.
Jerome took a moment to respond. “If he’d come to the bridge, he’d have known I was having trouble. He would have taken over the controls.”
Good point. Val stirred the onions. Jerome obviously feared his moment of inattention or indecision had done irreparable harm. How could she set his mind at ease without mentioning the gun wound? She chose her words carefully. “I can’t tell you how I know this, Jerome, but nothing you did or didn’t do when you were piloting the yacht caused Otto’s death.”
“Really?” Jerome sounded eager to believe her, but his face remained tense. “I know you’re friends with Chief Yardley, Mr. Myer. Could you put in a good word for me? I have to be drug free to get my license. I wouldn’t do anything to ruin my chances.”
“I’ll make sure he knows how much that means to you.”
“Should I tell the police Otto said not to touch the autopilot without talking to him and I did it anyway?”
Val had no idea whether that mattered, but she knew the general rule that applied here. “You should talk to your lawyer before you tell the police anything. Is Althea going to represent you?”
“I guess so. I don’t have the money to pay anyone else. She’s free.”
Granddad returned to the stove and took over the onions. “If you need a lawyer because you’re suspected of a crime and you can’t afford one, you get assigned a lawyer. You never know if that lawyer will be any good. But your aunt is one of the best around.”
Jerome’s jaw dropped. “She is? I mean, I love her and all, but she doesn’t talk much about her work. So I don’t know anything about it.”
“You have to work at getting to know people in your own family.” Granddad glanced at Val and moved the pan off the burner. “The fire should be ready. Let’s go grill the meat.”
Once they went outside, none of them mentioned Otto’s yacht. As they ate at the picnic table, Granddad talked about the changes he’d seen in Bayport over the last fifty years and asked about Jerome’s family in southern Maryland.
Later, after Jerome had left, Granddad loaded the dishwasher. “I like that young
man, but he’s got a big problem unless there’s proof someone drugged him. When Otto left the saloon, he said he’d take care of getting the yacht to calmer waters. It sounded as if he was going up to the bridge, where Jerome was. That makes Jerome the last person to see Otto alive.”
“And drug-related amnesia isn’t the strongest defense.” Val believed Jerome, but would the police? A few times in the past year, when she was afraid they were building a case against an innocent person, she’d brought their attention to other suspects. “If we want to help Jerome, we’ll have to find evidence against someone else. Otto made everyone play a game in which they accused each other of wrongdoing. Maybe those accusations had a basis in reality and one of the guests feared exposure.”
“Or maybe it was just a game.” Granddad closed the dishwasher. “Didn’t Otto say he’d found it online?”
Val dried the frying pan Granddad had used for the onions. “What he said wasn’t necessarily true. I’ll look online myself.” She put away the frying pan and hurried out of the kitchen.
While Granddad watched TV from his easy chair, she sat at the computer in the study and searched for Titanic mystery game. Links to video games appeared on the screen. She scrolled through them until she saw a link to a downloadable Titanic dinner party murder mystery game.
Val followed the link. The site gave enough information about the game to convince Val that Otto had used it as the basis for his evening’s entertainment. The game entailed eight people taking the roles of Titanic passengers and attempting to solve a crime over a dinner that re-created the final meal served on the ship. Each participant received a character sketch and a question-and-answer booklet with sections for four rounds or scenes. And each was a suspect in the crime. Otto had used the same format.
As Val read more about the game, she realized he’d made crucial changes. The mystery to be solved in the downloadable game was the murder of an officer on the Titanic, whereas the object of Otto’s game was to determine responsibility for a young woman who went overboard. In the original game, the players assumed the parts of actual Titanic passengers, like “the Unsinkable Molly Brown.” Otto hadn’t done that. He could have used the downloaded game as is. So why had he gone to the trouble of changing the crime and inventing new roles for his guests to play? Val might be able to answer that question if she read all of Otto’s scripts.
S'more Murders Page 7