Scareplane

by Elise Sax

  Lesson 113, Matchmaking advice from your

  Grandma Zelda

  “This is bad,” Larry said.

  It was bad. It was really, really bad. “It’s not so bad,” I said.

  Larry searched the room for an exit after we banged on the door for five minutes with no effect. He put his hands on the walls, touching every inch. “No air. No air. This is bad. This is so bad.”

  “There’s air,” I said, clawing at my neck, sure I was going to suffocate to death.

  “We’re in an airless chamber. I need air! I never learned to swim!”

  Were we going to need to swim? I couldn’t think clearly. Think clearly, Gladie. What do you do when you’ve been locked in an airless chamber with a bank safe door? Think. Think. It was hopeless. I couldn’t think. No thoughts would take form in my brain. It wasn’t the first time I had been locked up against my will, but I had always had air before.

  Air was good.

  I had gotten used to air.

  I had the air habit.

  I needed air.

  “There’s plenty of air,” I said. “Plenty.”

  “Our faces are going to turn blue, and our heads are going to blow up,” Larry said, still looking for a way out.

  That didn’t sound good. I was pretty sure it would hurt to have my head blow up.

  “This has been a doozy of a day,” I said, gasping for air. “You won’t believe this, but I was trapped under a bed today.”

  “That happened to me last Tuesday,” Larry said. “I could breathe better there than here.”

  We sat on the floor in hopes that there was more oxygen down there. That’s when I remembered that I had a cellphone in my purse.

  “I can call for help!” I announced excitedly, holding my purse up. “Can you believe I forgot about my phone? How could I have forgotten about my phone?”

  “Hold the phone away from your face, in case it blows up,” Larry suggested.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It could happen,” he said, nodding. “My curse may be contagious.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. I’m new to this,” Larry said. “But I’ve never gotten trapped with someone else before. Since I was cursed, it’s been a solitary sort of thing.”

  He had a point. I sort of felt like I was cursed. Damn that Twitter! But on second thought, I figured our current circumstances were less supernatural and more human. There were a slew of people in the bank who could have locked me in the room to die. Like the killer, for example. I had been making the rounds, asking a lot of questions, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities for the killer to want me dead.

  First things first… I needed to breathe.

  “I’ll call my friend Bridget,” I said. I was running out of people to call for my emergencies, but Bridget hadn’t saved me for a while and might want a break from tax season.

  When I dug in my purse for my phone, Cynthia’s note fell out. “You know what this is, Larry?” I asked. He shook his head. “This is a pretty worthless clue. It says that the first murder victim loved oatmeal cookies.”

  “Me, too,” Larry said. “I had the best oatmeal cookies of my life right before I was cursed, but I can’t remember where. At work? No, it wasn’t at work. Nope, I can’t recall.”

  I liked oatmeal cookies without raisins. Baked raisins made me gag.

  I began to dial Bridget when the door to the room opened suddenly. There was a rush of air inside the room. We were saved. My head wasn’t going to blow up. It was a miracle. The best kind of miracle. I hopped up and helped Larry to stand. I turned around to thank my savior and possibly kiss him.

  But it wasn’t a him. It was a her. The worst of all the hers.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” she screeched.

  It was Detective Hottie Sadist. I reminded myself that she didn’t know that I had broken into Cynthia’s house and had witnessed her rampage. I also reminded myself that I was trying to kill her with kindness.

  “My hero!” I gushed, planting a phony wide smile on my face. She didn’t smile back.

  “I saw you go into this room. Do you know the bank is closed? Were you planning a bank robbery?”

  “A bank robbery?” I asked. I went from being a buttinski to being a bank robber? I had really given her a bad impression of me.

  “Of course we weren’t planning a bank robbery. Who do you think we are? I’m a good person. I’m just cursed. We got locked in,” Larry explained. “I’m a log cabin Republican!”

  “He’s a log cabin Republican,” I repeated, as if that exonerated us as bank robbers.

  Detective Foul Boobtastic liked that answer, but she still looked at me with suspicion. “I’ve got my eye on you,” she said, pointing at her eye.

  “Did you see who locked us in?” I asked her. “Maybe Frank Fellows?”

  She caressed the gun on her hip, which gave me the creeps. “Don’t butt into police business. You’re butting in. Didn’t we talk about this before? Don’t get on my bad side. You wouldn’t like it.”

  She had a bad side, and this wasn’t it?

  I wanted to stomp my foot and claw out her eyes. I wanted to defend myself. I wanted her to let me butt in. But I was helpless. She took all of my power. She held all the cards, not to mention a gun. It wouldn’t take much for her to arrest me or worse.

  It wasn’t the first time I had been blocked when I was snooping, but this was the most frustrating. There were a ton of suspects, with one of them dead and two of them on the lamb. I still didn’t have a handle on the victims’ days before they were murdered or how they were poisoned. Cynthia was hinting about oatmeal cookies, but Cynthia could have been the killer. So, why should I believe her? I was no closer to solving the mystery than the day Mike Chantage was murdered.

  And now Detective No Cellulite Beelzebub was preventing me from finding out. There was a revving of my determination motor inside me, and I knew there was nothing that was going to stop me from solving the mystery and rubbing it in her face the first chance I got.

  For now, though, I had to play dumb. I was good at playing dumb. I had a lot of experience.

  “I’m so sorry. I won’t butt in again,” I said, still smiling. I took Larry’s hand and left the room in a hurry. The bank was dark, and the bank manager stood at the front door with his key ring in his hand, waiting for the last stragglers to leave. We were the last stragglers.

  “This was your last chance,” Detective Cruel Boobs yelled at us as we left. “If I catch you anywhere around this case again, I’ll arrest you. Don’t think I can’t!”

  Larry and I left the bank and got into my car. “Boy, the hot lady sure is mean,” Larry said.

  She sure was, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have killed Mike and Joyce. In fact, I wish she had killed them so she would be the one in prison.

  I put the key in the ignition and started the car.

  “Where are we going?” Larry asked.

  “I have an errand to do before we go to dinner.”

  “Okey dokey.”

  I had a burr under my saddle. My hackles were up. I was a dog with a bone. I was raring to go. I had been stopped at every juncture, but that only served to make me more determined.

  I had decided to finally figure out who the murderer was. I wasn’t going to stop until the mystery was solved. First up was Frank Fellows. He was one of the three remaining conference participants and one of the two left in Cannes. He had a degree in botany and would have known about daffodils. And he had a juicy motive: Mike Chantage had slept with his wife.

  Frank was going to tell me what he knew. I was done fooling around. I drove straight to his hotel.

  “This is a nice hotel. My cousin stayed here when she visited me with her family last year,” Larry explained.

  It was the hotel where all of the conference participants were staying. Actually, it was a small, country inn more than a hotel. It was shaped like a large log cabin, surrounded by tall
trees. The inn ran the old-fashioned way, with no computer and just a penciled-in guest book with all the names and room numbers of the guests. Luckily, Larry got caught in the automatic doors, which distracted the woman at the front desk just long enough for me to sneak a peek at the book. Frank was in room three.

  As soon as Larry was free from the doors, I gave him a signal, and he met me in the hallway, out of sight.

  “Whoa, that was a close one,” he said. “It was almost the urinal episode all over again, but it only got a couple of my buttons.” He pointed at his shirt where two buttons were missing. “Who are we visiting?”

  “Frank Fellows.”

  “Oh, the botanist. Gotcha.”

  “We need to be careful,” I told him, as we walked to room three. “We can’t draw attention to ourselves. Just be cool.”

  Larry tucked his shirt into his pants. “Don’t worry about me. I’m real cool.”

  I knocked on the room’s door, and the door swung open. I stuck my head in. “Frank?” I whispered. There was no answer. “Frank?” I called, again. “He’s not there,” I whispered to Larry. “Come on. Let’s check it out.”

  “Good. I need to give this bum toe a rest,” he whispered back to me.

  I held the door open, and Larry walked in first. There was a small entranceway with the bathroom to the right. I went into the bathroom and checked it out while Larry walked into the room to sit down and rest his foot.

  The bathroom was a mess with wet towels strewn over the floor. Frank had the usual toiletries on the counter: a razor, shaving cream, and a bottle of cholesterol medicine.

  “Gladie,” Larry called from the room. “Can you come here?”

  I stuck my head out of the bathroom. “Larry,” I whispered. “You have to be quiet, remember?”

  “Sorry,” he whispered back. “Can you come here?”

  “What is it?”

  “You kind of have to see it.”

  I walked into the room. “Is this the fellow you were looking for?” Larry whispered, pointing at a body on the floor. It was Frank Fellows, and he was dead, stabbed through the eye with a letter opener.

  I was a squeamish person. In my life, I had passed out from the sight of bleeding gums. But in the past few months, I had seen my share of death, so I had gotten beyond fainting at the sight of blood. However, I wasn’t used to seeing a man with a letter opener through his eyeball. I got dizzy. The room spun around me, and I realized that I had been holding my breath. Quickly, I sucked air, and the room stopped spinning. Somehow, in the midst of my shock and repulsion, I had a moment of clarity. I knew what we had to do.

  “Folks are dropping like flies around here,” Larry noted.

  He was right. With Frank, three of the five conference guests had been murdered. Since they were all considered California top cops, law enforcement had been dealt a bad blow.

  “I’m cursed, but at least I don’t have a letter opener through my eye.”

  “Larry,” I whispered. “We’re going to back out of here very carefully and pretend that we were never here.”

  I expected him to argue with me and play the good Samaritan, but I guessed being cursed and faced with a dead man who had a letter opener through his eye had made him slightly less good Samaritan and slightly more careful. We had just been threatened with arrest if we got involved, and here we were at the scene of a murder. It looked like we would be the number one suspects if we were caught in the room with poor dead Frank Fellows.

  “Okay,” Larry said. “He’s dead, right?”

  “I’m pretty sure he is.” He was deader than a doornail. Stiff as a board. “Be careful to not touch anything. No one will ever know we were here.”

  “Good. I don’t want the mean looker cop to know we were here.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “She’ll toss us in jail and throw away the key. You didn’t touch Frank, did you?”

  “Nope. I’ve watched CSI. I know what I’m doing.”

  That was fortunate. I didn’t want us to leave any trace of us behind. No fingerprints, no hair, no DNA, whatsoever. I wanted to get out of there and get Larry his pork chop without Detective Hubba Hubba Heinous finding out I was ever near poor Frank Fellows’ dead body.

  Ever so softly, we both took a step backward. As our feet touched the carpet, the ceiling light made a popping noise and it fell, the cord ripped from the ceiling. The light knocked Larry’s back as it fell to the floor, throwing Larry off balance. He shot me a horrified look, as he realized that he was going over but was hopeless to stop it.

  Larry fell over fast and landed across Frank’s torso. Once he was down, he froze in disbelief, and so did I.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” I whispered. “Just get up carefully and don’t touch him.”

  Larry put his hands on the floor and pushed himself up, but the boot on his foot was caught on the bed frame. He pulled his leg, but he couldn’t get it free.

  “I’ll help,” I whispered.

  I leaned over his leg and tried to free him, grabbing his boot and yanking. Finally, I got the boot loose with one hard yank, but the bed moved with it, knocking the nightstand and making a potted plant on it come crashing to the floor. The dirt from the plant flew up and over to us, coating Larry, Frank, and me in a fine lawyer of potting soil.

  Larry rolled off Frank and sat up. “This is nothing like CSI,” he whispered.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I whispered back.

  “I don’t think it’s too bad. I didn’t touch him with my hands.”

  He was right. It actually wasn’t too bad. We hadn’t touched the body with our fingers, so there weren’t any fingerprints. I took a deep breath and willed my heart to slow down. “All right. Let’s get up slowly and get out of here.”

  “Okay,” he said and then closed his eyes and opened his mouth. “I’m…I’m…going to…”

  Sneeze. He was going to sneeze. The dirt must have gotten up his nose, and now he was going to sneeze. Larry pinched his nose, in an effort to stop the sneeze, but it didn’t help. Larry was a big sneezer. He sneezed with his whole body. A little pinch couldn’t compete.

  “Ah…choo!” He practically exploded with his sneeze.

  “Cover your nose! Cover your nose!” I urged, but it was too late. The sneeze went everywhere. There was sneeze all over the room, sneeze all over Frank’s body, and sneeze in my open mouth as I told Larry to cover his nose.

  “Uh oh,” Larry said, looking at Frank.

  I thought, quickly. I had to get rid of Larry’s sneeze DNA. I went to the bathroom and picked up one of the towels from the floor. I went back into the room and wiped off every surface I could find, including Frank’s face, which was wet from the sneeze. I worked quickly, dusting with the towel.

  “There,” I said, after I had finished. “All done. Now we can go.”

  “What’s that? Blood?” Larry asked.

  “Where?”

  “There. On the towel. And your hand. And…” He pointed at Frank’s face, as blood dripped onto it.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “There. It’s coming from your hand. You must have cut it on the bed frame.”

  I inspected my hand. Sure enough, there was a little cut on the side, and it was bleeding all over Frank’s body. The towel was bloody, too, which I hadn’t noticed before when I had used it to dust the entire room.

  “Sonofabitch,” I said. “What do they do in CSI when this happens?”

  “I don’t know. I must have missed that episode.”

  I wrapped the towel around my hand. The room was a complete mess. We were doomed. Frank was coated in our DNA. He was head to toe doused with Larry’s snot and my blood. I was going to jail for the rest of my life. Spencer would stop loving me.

  “What’re we going to do?” Larry asked.

  “Give up. Throw in the towel,” I said, looking down at the bloody towel.

  “The mean, pretty cop probably wouldn’t believe that we just found him here,” Larry said,
thoughtfully.

  “Nope.”

  “So, we’re going to have to do something crazy,” Larry said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, crazy.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Matchmaking is a wonderful career, bubbeleh. I think of it as my calling. It’s not for those who want to kibitz around, believe you me. But even though it’s a calling, it doesn’t mean that you can’t take a break every once in a while. Stop and smell the flowers! If all you do is work, work, work, how will you enjoy the rewards? This business can suck you in and take over your life. The tumelt can make you crazy. So, it’s up to you to stop, take a breath, and smell those delicious flowers.

  Lesson 67, Matchmaking advice from your

  Grandma Zelda

  I had been in the shower at home, scrubbing myself down for twenty minutes when Spencer walked into my bathroom. He pushed the shower curtain aside, sat on the closed toilet seat, and watched me, as I loofahed myself with a vengeance.

  “This has been the single weirdest day that I’ve ever had. Ever,” he announced.

  I squeezed shampoo onto my hand and lathered my hair for the third time since I had gotten into the shower.

  “First, I was called over to save my girlfriend, who had gotten stuck under a bed in a stranger’s house,” he said.

  “It was my match’s house, not a stranger’s,” I corrected and began to rinse my hair.

  “Then, I had to interrogate my new detective, who seems to be…”

  “Unbalanced?” I supplied. “Sadistic? Hyperactive?”

  “I was going to say, overeager.”

  I squeezed conditioner onto my hand and combed it through my hair with my fingers.

  “And then I get a call from a local hotel. An inn,” he said, and I almost jumped out of my skin, but I managed to hold myself together. “Frank Fellows is dead.”