Literally Stalked

by Eryn Scott

  “According to the article, no.” Liv cleared her throat. “Not that I read it.”

  Laughing, I said, “It’s okay. I read them sometimes too. From a purely self-destructive point of view.” Getting back to the case, I said, “Write that on the list too, and add that there was a rifle under his body.” I shook my head. “Though we still have no idea what that’s all about.”

  While we were pondering that the front door opened. We froze when Carson stepped into the entryway—well, except Hammy. She bounded off the couch to greet him.

  “Hey. I heard about your power, Pepper. Sorry.” He knelt and mussed Hammy’s short fur, making her snort with delight.

  I closed my eyes. “I don’t know why I’m surprised by how fast news moves in this town.”

  He smiled apologetically, as if he were the one who’d turned off my power. Then he turned toward Liv.

  “They staying here tonight?” he asked.

  Liv nodded. “If that’s cool.”

  “Of course.” He stood, leaving Hammy staring up at him as he hung his keys on the hook by the door.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “How was your day?” Liv asked, a tightness to her tone that made even me uncomfortable.

  “Good.” Carson ran a hand through his blond hair. “Busy.”

  “I came by to see you, but they said you’d left early.” Liv cleared her throat. “Weird since you said you had to work late.”

  Carson’s jaw tightened for a split second, but he covered it by rubbing his hand across his chin. “That is weird. I was there.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, I left for a minute to go grab a coffee. That’s probably when you showed up.”

  Liv’s shoulders sagged. I wanted to reach out and hold her hand.

  “Probably,” she said, her voice holding none of the powerful business-lady sureness it usually did.

  “Well, I’ll let you two hang,” Carson said, backing up a step. “I’ve got a shelf project and a bunch of boxes to unpack in the garage.”

  Before we could say anything else, he’d disappeared into the other room. The garage door opened and shut, and while he didn’t slam it, the controlled click that resounded through the house was almost worse.

  I locked eyes with Liv. She was on the verge of tears.

  “Okay, that was odd.” I hadn’t wanted to accept it, but Carson was definitely hiding something.

  “Right?” She slumped to the side, burying her face into the back of the couch.

  “Hey.” I reached over and patted her shoulder. “We don’t know what he’s lying about yet. Let’s not jump to conclusions, okay?”

  She peeled her face up, pouting in my direction.

  “We’ll figure out what’s going on, but until then, we’ve got to trust him.”

  Liv nodded. Hammy, as if knowing her Auntie Olivia needed some cheering up, jumped into her lap and licked her face.

  Reluctantly, Liv smirked. “Thanks, Ham.”

  “How about we have a movie night to take our minds off our troubles?” I suggested.

  “I’d like that,” Liv said. “Living with a boy involves way fewer romantic comedy movie nights than I realized when I agreed to it.”

  I chuckled. “Boys are weird. Don’t they know what they’re missing?”

  We moved into the other room, picking out one of our favorites. And while being with my best friend made almost everything better, I would have to deal with my business, lack of power, school, awkwardness with Alex, and this case tomorrow.

  After my failure today, I doubted my abilities to any of it, let alone all.

  10

  The power was still off at the bookstore the next morning, confirming my suspicion that power-company Jeffery was not going to do me any favors.

  Jess told me she would check on the store throughout the day, since she lived down the street, and I had classes to attend. I tried to settle down, to forget about my business troubles.

  If I wanted to solve this case, talking with Andrea seemed to be key. A good night’s sleep on my old familiar couch and some one-on-one time with Liv had recharged me. I was ready to tackle the day.

  When it was time for Professor Ferguson’s class, I entered the empty classroom early, hoping to talk to Andrea alone. My breath caught in my throat as the door opened. Devin stepped through and tipped his chin up in a greeting. I schooled my features into a smile, worried that my disappointment he wasn’t Andrea might show.

  “Hey,” he said, slipping into the seat next to me.

  “Hi.” My gaze tiptoed back to the door, then over to the clock on the wall. I resisted tapping my fingers.

  “Did you hear when we’re supposed to get our papers back?” he asked conversationally.

  Fergie had mentioned many times, and Devin was a good listener. There was no way he’d missed it, which meant he was trying to fill the silence.

  “I think Fergie said it should be a week or t—” The rest of my sentence cut off as the door opened yet again.

  This time Andrea walked through. Her long blonde hair, and her most-likely-REI-purchased clothing made her appear to be a regular college student. One would never know she was a stalker—and possibly a murderer—just by looking at her.

  Devin must’ve caught the reason for the interruption, because his eyebrows rose, and he leaned forward as Andrea sat next to him.

  “How are you, Andrea?” he asked.

  She sneered at him as if he were trying to sell her something. “Fine,” she said around an exhaled breath.

  Devin pressed his lips together for a moment, then said, “Pepper was telling me she was worried about you.” Devin winked at me.

  I inwardly groaned. I’d wanted an in to talk to her, but not this way.

  “You’re worried about me?” Andrea leaned forward to see around Devin.

  My face heated. “Uh, sure.” I didn’t know where else to go from there.

  Before I could think up a way to segue into my questions about Cole, she said, “Pepper, I’m definitely not the one you should be worried about.” She tsked.

  Her words sent a spike of fear straight down my spine. The first threatening words about Alex repeated in my mind. Alex should watch his back. Was she saying Alex was the one I should be worried about? Had she written the notes?

  I had to know. Wrinkling my forehead in question, I asked, “So Andrea, I’m curious; when did Janet tell you about Alex being my boyfriend? Was it the same day he showed up here to ask you those questions?”

  Andrea leaned her head back in a laugh. “You’re so funny. Janet never told me. I was messing with you. I saw you two in the hallway through the window in the classroom door. You’re very cute together.” The last statement held so much fake sweetness, I almost expected my teeth to begin to ache.

  “Oh. Thanks.” I sent her a smile as fake as her compliment.

  So she'd known that day, which would’ve given her motive to write that note. My mind buzzed with yet another piece of evidence that Andrea may very well be Cole’s murderer.

  But what she said next, hit me like Fergie’s copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare right in the gut.

  “He’s very handsome, by the way. I’ve always had a thing for a guy in uniform.”

  I opened my mouth to say something witty, but the heat rising into my face burned away any coherent comebacks.

  “Plus,” Andrea went on, “he was definitely hiding a darkness underneath his nice-guy façade.” She swiped at her hair and pulled out her laptop. “It’s all I could think about when he was asking me questions, how much he reminds me of Heathcliff, like there’s a wild animal trapped inside.”

  Devin glanced between us with wide eyes, as if stuck in between two lionesses that might pounce at any moment, leaving him as collateral damage. Primal defensiveness made me consider it, but that would only show Andrea she’d gotten to me, which was obviously what she wanted. I couldn’t let her win.

  A grin curled over my mouth. “You’re wrong.”

  �
��What?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “He’s much more of a Rochester than a Heathcliff.”

  To her credit, Andrea didn’t miss a beat. “So he wants to have multiple wives and lie to everyone?”

  I shook my head. “He’s the kind of guy who tries to save people, not a crazed madman who literally digs up someone’s body just to look at their bones one last time.” I mock shivered as I recounted Heathcliff’s actions.

  “You know,” Devin said, clearing his throat. “Gilbert’s a pretty nice, normal guy. I don’t see why more people don’t—”

  Andrea and I shot him a deadly glare. He put his hands up and stopped.

  “The thing is, Alex is the best person I know, which is why I’m with him.” If I’d been standing, I may have put a hand on my hip to go with my defensive attitude.

  The statement made my chest ache with all the weirdness between us lately. Regardless of all that, what I’d just said cut to the heart of the solution: I loved the guy. It didn’t matter if he wanted to move in with me just yet. We’d both had a rough time with losing a parent in the recent past. Taking the time to heal was important.

  “How long have you two been ‘together’ again?” she asked, using finger quotes around together.

  “Almost two years,” I said sweetly.

  “And you still aren’t engaged?” She wrinkled her nose as she checked my left hand. “Shame.”

  Frustration burned in my lungs. I reminded myself to breathe as my mind held firm to the realization I’d just reached.

  The classroom door swung open again. We all turned as Janet walked inside, her smile falling as she glanced around the room—or maybe it was how Devin made a slicing motion across his neck in warning.

  “What’s going on here?” She walked forward, either she was an Olympic-level peacemaker or completely unable to read social cues.

  “They’re fighting over Pepper’s boyfriend,” Devin said, boiling it down in the most uncouth way possible.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “We’re absolutely not.”

  It’s much more sinister than that, I mused. Still unsure if Andrea was, in fact, the one threatening Alex, I kept that bit to myself.

  “Andrea was just telling me how lucky I was to have such a nice, handsome guy in my life. Right, Andi?” I tipped my head.

  Janet’s presence only seemed like a double dog to the crazy dare Andrea had already accepted. She shrugged. “He does seem to work an awful lot, though. You’d better watch out, or he’ll become just like his dad, working all hours of the night, never even going home.”

  Blood pounded in my temples, making the room spin. What had she just said? She was following Alex? Watching his father?

  The door opened, and Fergie swept into the classroom. “Darlings, where were we the other day? Ah, yes. On to more of our great Victorian literature.”

  She often did this, entering in a dramatic flourish and jumping right into a lecture, loving the drama of it all.

  But any theatrics were lost on me. And as Fergie launched into talk of the Brontë family dynamics, I couldn’t seem to hold on to a single word. Andrea was stalking my boyfriend. She had almost surely been the one to leave that threatening note, and if she had also killed Cole, Alex was in trouble too.

  I watched her out of the corner of my eye throughout class. She deserved to be up there with our theatrical professor after giving a performance of her own right from her chair, never acknowledging the creepy thing she’d said.

  As much as I wanted to run out of there and warn Alex, I didn’t want her to know she’d gotten to me.

  I wasn’t as good of an actor, though. Whenever Fergie called on me for insight, I stuttered through only a half-correct response since I’d only been half listening.

  Fergie eyed me worriedly after the third time. “You are of the opinion the Brontë sisters would’ve been better off keeping their work under their male pen names?”

  I blinked. “Uh…”

  Andrea smiled smugly, crossing her arms over her chest.

  Frustration rose inside my chest in tight waves. If Andrea was the killer, she was being sloppy and emotional by leaving me those notes. Which meant that she was prone to slip up again. I needed to turn the conversation toward something that might encourage that to happen.

  Suddenly, an idea came to me as I remembered a piece I’d read during my research for my latest paper.

  “Actually, no,” I said definitively. “I’m sorry, my mind isn’t on pen names, Professor Ferguson. I can’t seem to let go of something I read, a conspiracy theory, but an interesting one.” I glanced over at Andrea, hoping what I was about to say might trigger a confession, proof she was guilty, anything.

  Fergie, always up for literary gossip—and sorely lacking material as everyone had been dead for hundreds of years or more at that point—let her eyebrows raise in interest.

  “Please, entice us with this theory of yours, so we might become equally distracted,” our teacher said.

  I stood, pacing in front of the class, not so much for effect, but because I wanted to watch Andrea’s face. “There’s postulation out there that Charlotte poisoned her three oldest siblings. Branwell, Anne, and Emily died of ‘tuberculosis’ within a year of each other. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  I knew it wasn’t. The first time I’d read the theory, I recognized it was crazy.

  Fergie’s expression went slack. “Well, no, actually. Many people died of consumption, especially close together like that when they resided in the same home as the siblings did.”

  Wagging my finger, I continued the act. “Ah, but isn’t it weird that it happened just years after Arthur Bell Nicholls came to work for their father and began to fancy Charlotte?”

  Fergie pursed her lips in a way that distinctly told me that no, she didn’t feel like it was weird. But it was okay, I was focused on Andrea. Her smile faded slightly, and she looked at the ground. I kept going.

  “Some say Nicholls turned Charlotte against her siblings and helped her poison them, taking her life as his last victim within a year of them getting married.”

  Devin scoffed. “That’s crazy, Pepper. Honestly, why would he kill all of them?”

  “Who knows?” I shrugged dramatically—maybe I was better at this acting thing than I realized. “Maybe it was because he was crazy. Maybe he loved Charlotte so much that he didn’t know how else to make her his.”

  “But she was his, she married him before he killed her,” Janet said, then turned red. “I mean, before he allegedly killed her.” She turned to the class. “I read that she died of complications from a pregnancy, actually.”

  My cover conspiracy was beginning to unravel too quickly. “They wed against Charlotte’s father’s strict objections, though,” I added. “It's possible Charlotte eventually changed her mind and agreed with her father. Nicholls had to get rid of her too.”

  “Or he would’ve been the sole heir to the sisters’ fortune,” Fergie chimed in.

  I nodded. “Yes, that also makes sense.” I turned to Andrea, who was scanning her notes. “What do you think, Andrea? Does it make more sense for a person to kill out of a twisted sense of love or for money?”

  She rolled her eyes, her attitude securely back in place.

  “Maybe both?” I prompted.

  Andrea’s expression darkened as she scowled at me. Then she stood, grabbing her notebook and bag in one fell swoop. “Sorry, I have to leave early today.” She rushed out of the room, letting the door slam in her wake.

  My mind buzzed as I wandered back to my seat, plopping down amid questions, worries, and triumphs. The conversation had obviously made her wholly uncomfortable. It obviously wasn’t enough to convict her, but it confirmed that I was looking in the right direction.

  Thoughts clearing, I focused back on the room. Devin cleared his throat; Janet pretended to be very interested in something out the window, and Fergie stared at me, worry written in every wrinkle on her face.

  “Pepper
, darling, are you okay? I’ve never known you to be one to get caught up in conspiracy theories such as this.” Fergie swept a hand over her wispy blonde hair that lay in a comb-over covering her thinning scalp. “Though, I don’t want to rain on your parade here. If you truly believe—”

  “No, no,” I said quickly, cutting Fergie off. Now that Andrea was gone, my shoulders relaxed. “That story was pure fiction, wacky really. Of course they all died of tuberculosis. The average age for life expectancy back then was something like twenty-five, right? At least they all made it past their thirtieth birthdays.”

  As if she’d been contemplating how to help me through the obvious mental breakdown I was having, Fergie’s face slackened, and a smile took over. “Ah, well. Things like that are always good for a bit of fun.”

  “Yeah.” I narrowed my eyes at the door through which Andrea had just fled. “Fun.” But nothing seemed further from fun than finding out that you might’ve been sitting in class with a murderer.

  11

  By the time I reached the bookstore after class, the power was still out. Cursing myself, yet again—and Jeffery a little because he was the only other name I could attach to this whole situation—I headed over to Bittersweet. One, because I needed to let Nate know I was truly sorry for messing up during his promotion. And two, because it had been a long day, and I needed some of my favorite coffee.

  Stepping inside Bittersweet was always a delight. The roasted scents of bitter coffee mixed perfectly with the doughy sweetness of Char’s bakery creations. It was cozy and warm, immediately making me exhale in relief as the door closed behind me and stopped the icy winds.

  The café was busy, as usual, locals mixed with college students. It was funny how they tended to gather on specific sides: the locals taking up most of the right side of the place, which held the couch and a few worn leather armchairs, while the college students lounged around the small bistro-type tables to the left.

  “Good evening, Pepper.” Nate bowed from behind the counter.