by Kathy Krevat
“Thanks so much for having us during this…mess,” I said, gesturing across the street.
“No problem at all,” she said. “I just adore your family.” Then she handed me a business card. “This is my lawyer. Please call him and get advice before this goes any further.”
Seeing that embossed card made me even more nervous. “Surely the police will figure out we had nothing to do with this.” Even so, I reached out.
“Of course,” she said as she pushed the card into my hand and then patted it. “But I’ve seen a lot of injustice in my days. Just call him to make me feel better, okay?”
“It’s okay,” my dad said. “I gotta guy.”
“No,” I said firmly and turned back to Annie. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”
My dad frowned.
“You’ll like him,” Annie said, turning her charm on my dad. “He’s from Boston too.”
Annie was one of those people who didn’t need much sleep to think straight and volunteered for the Sunnyside Library, Meals on Wheels, and an emergency hotline. She’d been the one who called to tell me my dad was in the hospital and convinced me to move in. And believe me, that hadn’t been easy to accomplish. She could probably convince David Copperfield to reveal how he made the Statue of Liberty disappear.
It certainly helped that my boss had just warned me that the owner of the apartment building I managed was about to sell and would start using a professional property management company. He gave me a fair shake—offering me a severance package and everything. I put our stuff in storage and moved Elliot and me in with my dad until I could figure out the next step.
My dad and I had a complicated relationship even before I got knocked up when I was eighteen. My mother had died when I was very young, and he’d never seemed interested in dating someone new. He’d been so proud that I was the first in his family to attend college and could never let it go when I dropped out. It made it hard to visit longer than a couple of hours, even knowing how much he loved Elliott, and I usually left feeling like a failure.
He reached out and patted Elliott’s leg. “It’ll work out,” he said. “Nuttin’ to worry about.”
Elliott smiled back, his shoulders relaxing just a bit, and I had to swallow the lump in my throat.
Chapter 4
Annie convinced my dad to take her guest room while Elliott slept on the pull-out sofa bed in her sewing room. I promised her that I’d be comfortable sleeping on the couch, but Trouble and I kept watch on the police activities in a high-backed chair turned around to see out the window. At midnight, I guessed that the warrant arrived because two women and two men arrived in a black SUV, wound crime scene tape around the whole property, and went inside.
I must have dozed, because at five in the morning, Trouble woke me by patting my cheek. The police and their crime scene tech buddies were all gone but the tape remained. I left a note for Annie and my family that Trouble and I were checking out the house and would be back soon. I locked up with her spare key and stood on the sidewalk looking at my dad’s house. Trouble stopped purring for a moment, probably thinking, “Get going! It’s chilly out here, and my food is waiting.”
I stepped over the tape and was confronted by a crime scene tape sticker on the front door. It said something about it being a violation to gain access, blah, blah. Those detectives didn’t know the trick of the living room window; the lock opened easily with a few jiggles, and soon I’d dumped Trouble inside, scrambled over the windowsill, and was standing in the darkened living room.
Trouble rushed to make sure her food and water bowls were still present and accounted for while I turned a light on and surveyed the damage. It could have been worse. The crime scene techs had put some of the stuff back into the drawers, but fingerprint dust was everywhere. My dad’s computer was missing from his small desk, which upset me even though I knew it was going to happen.
The kitchen wasn’t as bad, but they’d taken my laptop and the entire knife block. I had no idea why they’d do that—they already had the murder weapon. I shuddered at the memory.
Upstairs was chaotic. It was good that my dad wasn’t much of a hoarder. They hadn’t bothered to refold any of the clothes taken out of the dressers or closets. I guess it was nice that they’d piled them on the beds. I got to work on my dad’s room first. Elliott might not even notice the jumble in his room. I wasn’t sure how he’d live through the day without his phone or computer.
Underneath my dad’s clothes were two shoeboxes, one labeled “Boston” and one labeled “Colbie.” Of course, I opened my own box. It was full of photos and the first one I saw broke my heart. It was my dad holding me as a baby and the love on his face, so much younger and happier, burst from the photo.
I blamed stress and exhaustion for the sob that escaped me, and shoved the photo back in the box, and both boxes into the closet. Then I noticed my dad’s guitar pushed into the corner. He hadn’t played at all since we moved in. I brought it downstairs and propped it near his chair, hoping he’d pick it up and do something besides watch TV.
Then I got back to work.
* * * *
I woke up to Trouble walking on my chest while my dad’s landline rang in the background. He still had a landline, as did plenty of people in Sunnyside, where a distrust of technology was considered common sense.
I tracked down a phone in my dad’s room and answered.
“Finally!” Lani said. “Are you okay?” She must have heard about Twila to be this agitated.
“I’m fine.” I looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. “Ten o’clock?”
“Yes!” she said. “I sent you a zillion texts. I was about to come over and pound on your door, but Piper found your dad’s home number online. What the hell is going on?”
I tried to shake the wooziness from my head. “Can you come over and see if they took the crime scene sticker off the door?”
“Now that’s something I never expected to hear from you,” she said. “On my way.” She hung up.
First coffee, I decided, and stumbled down to the kitchen, where I got the machine going while Trouble yowled, “Feed me! I’m starving!”
I followed her meowed orders and then woke up enough to realize I could see the front door from the kitchen window.
The sticker was gone, along with the crime scene tape.
I called Annie to let her and my family know that I was awake and to come home for breakfast. Or brunch.
Lani beat them to it, the bell on her bike announcing her arrival. I opened the door to see her bouncing the bike up onto the porch. The bright pink Schwinn cruiser with a flowered basket on front fit her to a T.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Welcome to Crazytown.”
“My kinda place,” she said, taking off her helmet. She’d decorated it with Art Saves Lives stickers. Today her pink-highlighted hair was in a loose French braid, and she wore one of her own creations—a green camisole with contrasting panels of zoo animal prints and capris painted with yellow giraffes. The outfit should’ve looked like a hot mess, but was totally charming on her. “I need coffee and then you can tell me everything.”
Lani followed me inside and I got her a small mug. Piper had told me that Lani had chronic indigestion and caffeine only made it worse, but she loved coffee so much it was hard to tell her, “No. You can’t have the elixir of the gods.”
She knelt down to pet Trouble, who lifted her head from her bowl for a moment to greet her with a short meow. She grabbed the cup and poured creamer in it, then actually slurped. “Ah. Heaven.” She tilted her head. “No one else home?”
“They slept at Annie’s,” I said.
She stared at me over the mug. “Okay, now spill. What the heck happened last night?”
I told her everything, from finding Twila’s body to the search warrant scene with the bloody towel. She gasped at the appropriate momen
ts but didn’t ask any questions until I was done with my bizarre story.
“You’re sure it was a Meowio knife?” she asked, appalled.
I nodded. “Totally.”
“That sucks,” she said. “I hadn’t heard that detail. Maybe the police will keep it from the public, and it won’t hurt your sales.”
OMG! I hadn’t even thought about that. Negative publicity could really hurt a business like mine, where so many new customers came from word of mouth. I already had that one negative SDHelp review.
“Where did that towel come from?” she asked. “The one that set off that Little policeman?”
“You make him sound the size of an action figure.” I thought of all the ways I could torture a Little that size. One of them involved magnifying glasses and the sun. “It doesn’t make sense.” Then I remembered my run-in with the chickens. “Uh-oh. I threw my flip flops in the garbage.”
“Why?”
I told her about the mess from the chicken coop.
“What does that have to do with the towel?”
“It doesn’t,” I said, but I’d seen enough TV shows to realize they might think I was trying to hide something.
“So how did a random towel that may or may not have blood on it get in there?” she asked.
I looked at the floor and then back to her face. “Worst-case scenario?”
She nodded.
“Worst case, that towel has Twila’s blood on it,” I said, fighting back a little shudder. “And we’re prime suspects.”
Her mouth made a little O of surprise. “How is that possible?”
“I haven’t been able to think of anything else most of the night. There’s only one person who would want to frame me.”
Her eyes widened as she’d figured it out too. “The killer!”
I nodded, feeling weak. “I mean, logistically, it has to be. No one could plan to do all that ahead of time, especially to use my knife. It’s a fluke that I went home and left my stuff there at the trade show.”
“I agree,” she said. “We know the towel was planted, so that’s the only thing that makes sense.”
I smiled at her absolute faith in me, despite how worried I was. “So maybe whoever did that to Twila saw my dad and me go to the, you know, scene of the crime and decided then and there to make it seem like I did it.”
“Or your dad,” she said.
I shook my head. “But he’s never even met Twila. And he’s so sick, no one could think he was strong enough.”
She bit her lip.
I said the next part slowly, not wanting to admit it. “And it has to be someone who knows where we live because it was here, in the garbage can, before the police arrived.”
“It’s the perfect crime.” She got up to pace the kitchen. “It was your knife. You were there. You discovered the body. The killer saw you go into the place and then drove here to leave evidence for the police to find at your house.”
I stood to get myself another cup of coffee, even though my nerves were making me feel like screaming. “I’m totally screwed, aren’t I?”
“No, you’re not,” she said. “Because you’re innocent.”
“That’s not what Little thinks,” I said.
She stopped her pacing. “You need to figure out who did it!”
I twisted up my mouth in a yeah right expression. “How?” I asked. “I don’t have the money to hire an investigator. And what I do have I need to save for a lawyer.”
She waved her hand around as if pushing aside my silly idea. “You have to look into this yourself.”
I laughed, but it came out more like a snort.
“Look,” she said. “You’ve met with all of those wacky power moms. One of them has to know something.” She gasped. “One of them may have done it! I knew there was something strange about that group.”
“I’m sure the police will talk to all of them,” I said while my mind whirled with suspicion. Had I made it clear that I heard Bert Merritt open the door at the activity center while he was talking to my dad? Surely that was something the police could check.
Luckily, my dad and Elliott arrived, so Lani couldn’t try to talk me into doing something foolish. Elliott held a bag filled with banana-nut muffins that Annie had just made. The smell from the still-warm muffins spread through the kitchen and we all avoided any talk of murder and mayhem, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Twila.
I looked at my dad, still tired but joking with Elliott about who could eat more muffins.
Elliott shoved a whole muffin in his mouth.
“Oh yeah?” my dad said, and shoved a whole muffin in his mouth too.
That made Elliott laugh so hard he spit out a bunch of crumbs across the kitchen table.
“Oh yeah?” Lani said, and picked up a muffin. Then she took a tiny bite from the side, like a perfect lady.
For some reason, that made Elliott laugh harder than ever, and we all joined in.
* * * *
Since our computers and phones were in the hands of the police, Lani ran home to loan us an old laptop she’d kept as a backup. I was able to login to check my website orders. Then I researched when we’d get our stuff back from the police. Shoot. It could take months. We were lucky that they’d let us back into our home so quickly.
I brought the computer to my dad and he gestured for me to put it where his used to be. “I’m going to buy new phones,” I said. “Do you want to go with me to pick yours out?”
He moved over to the small desk and started poking away at the keyboard. “Nah. I’ll use the home phone for a while.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. How could anyone live without a cell phone these days? “I looked it up. The police could keep them forever.”
He looked at me over his glasses. “Really?” He thought for a minute, as if that might not be such a bad thing. “I’ll wait a couple of days and see if I need it.”
Amazing. I went upstairs to see if Elliott wanted to come with me—of course he did—and when I came down, my dad was frowning at the computer. Trouble had claimed his chair, stretching out diagonally. This is all mine now.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Bert sent me an e-mail that his tech guy fixed the problem and I could move my money.” He squinted through his glasses and poked at a few buttons.
“Did you e-mail him back and ask if he was at the activity center last night?” I asked. “Maybe he saw something.”
He shook his head. “I did. He said the police already talked to him, and that he was at his office with his business partner all evening.”
Damn. I was sure I’d heard the same security code. “Oh.” My disappointment came through in my tone. “I guess I heard it wrong.”
“Or he has the same code,” he said, trying to make me feel better. “I’m putting some of this money in Elliott’s college fund. The most I can do is fourteen.”
I blinked. “Fourteen dollars?”
He scowled. “No. Fourteen thousand dollars.”
I blinked and my mouth took a while to form a word. “You’re giving Elliott fourteen thousand dollars?”
“Well, if I gave him more it could have tax implications,” he said, pushing his glasses up on his nose and squinting at his computer.
“Fourteen thousand dollars?” I couldn’t wrap my head around that my dad could hand over that much money. He’d retired from the local utility company after working for almost thirty years, starting as a lineman climbing poles and getting periodic promotions until he was offered a package to retire early. I’d worried that he’d be bored, but until he got sick, he’d enjoyed his part-time business as an electrician.
Something clicked and he looked up at me, a little warily. “Is that okay?”
I couldn’t help the part of me that wanted to tell him I could take
care of Elliott by myself. But why would I do that to Elliott? I took in the expression on my dad’s face. Or do that to my dad? “Of course that’s okay. It’s just a lot of money.”
He visibly relaxed and looked back at his computer. “What do you think it’s for?”
* * * *
“You’re going to be awesome!” I told Elliott as we got out of the car in front of the Sunnyside Recreation Center. The building was an odd conglomeration of a school built in the sixties with new wings added haphazardly over the decades. Trailer classrooms formed a semicircle in the back. The flowers surrounding the flag pole were already struggling to survive the heat, even though the summer had just begun.
Elliott shook his hands out, trying to get rid of some of his nerves. He was in total focus mode, whispering lyrics to himself as we walked in the front door.
My cell phone buzzed with a break a leg message for Elliott from Lani. Both Elliott and I had downloaded our contacts from the cloud, and I was already used to the new phone. I’d been smart, and went ahead and bought my dad one too. He’d grumbled a bit but had started using it right away.
I’d set my notifications to let me know if I received an e-mail or text, reflecting my own hyper-awareness. Annie’s lawyer friend had said he would use his contacts to find out what he could. His low-key, don’t panic message had made me feel both reassured and anxious, especially when he recommended that I don’t talk to the police without him.
While I’d talked to the lawyer and then went about my normal routine, feeling like another shoe was sure to drop, Elliott had put aside the whole murder drama to focus on his callback. He’d memorized the song and practiced different ways to be in character a zillion times, and he’d shown me a hundred of them. I now knew every line to Alone in the Universe. If I heard the chorus to the song one more time, I might just scream.
Of course, this would be bad place to do that. Elliott put on his grown-up voice and told his name to the mom volunteer at the table with a typed Registration sign taped to the front. I was surprised that the auditions for a two-week summer camp had the same level of organization as a full production. Sunnyside Junior Theater certainly took their summer programs more seriously than Elliott’s regular group.