A Doom with a View

by Elise Sax

  I walked into my bedroom and turned on the lamp on my nightstand. I stripped the bed because I didn’t want to catch Silas’s flu. Thank goodness it was just the flu and not the poison that had killed Stella and Tony. His illness had nothing to do with that.

  Two totally different things.

  Different things.

  Different puzzles.

  “They were different things. They were connected, but they weren’t connected,” I breathed.

  I froze in place, holding the sheets in a ball against my chest, paralyzed by the realization that I had solved the murders. I knew why each one died. Why, how, and by whom. I dropped the sheets to the floor. I needed to call Amos immediately. There was a landline in the kitchen. I left my room and walked past the bathroom and into the dark living room.

  And there he was.

  Waiting for me in the shadows.

  The killer was in my house. He had obviously waited patiently for me to be alone, and here I was. Alone.

  “I knew you would come,” I lied. I had no idea. I thought I would be safe in my own home. But here he was. “You killed Margaret Marshall.”

  “The meanest bitch in Goodnight, although, she was always nice to me.”

  I nodded. It was a common refrain. The town’s bully who was nice to just enough people so that she could keep bullying the ones she wanted to.

  “I knew you figured it out,” he continued. “The day you met me. I saw it in your eyes.”

  “No, I had no idea then.”

  “But you know now.”

  “Yes, I know now,” I said. My voice was barely audible. My throat was constricted by fear.

  “That’s what I figured. You’re the loose end I have to tie up. It’s all been working so well up to now. I don’t want to fuck it up now.”

  “I’m not a loose end,” I assured him. “I promise I won’t tell.”

  He smiled, obviously not believing me. “Pretty girl,” he said. “Pretty girls shouldn’t be smart. It ruins them. If you hadn’t been so smart, we could have been an item.”

  “I was already married to a killer. I’m sort of off them, now. I’ve moved on, changed my type.”

  What was I saying? If I really had been smart, I would have flirted my ass off with him and tried to save my life. Now I was going to be shot through the heart or in the head, if he had good aim. Because he had a gun pointed right at me. Did I mention that?

  “You’re hot for the Goodnight brothers, I know,” he sneered. “They never can leave the pretty women for the rest of the town. The perfect Goodnight brothers. Panty-dropping good looks. And they have money. Well, now I have money, and I have their girl.

  “Who? What girl?” I asked.

  “You,” he said, gesturing at me with his gun.

  “Uh…”

  Between getting raped and getting murdered, I wasn’t sure which one I would pick. But something told me that he wasn’t going to give me a choice. He was going to do both. I was going to be a raped murdered girl. Damn it.

  Where was Boone when I needed him? Had he gone back to the “boonies” for a few weeks, or did he go shopping for bologna and was going to walk in at any second? Either way, I couldn’t count on being saved. I was going to have to save myself.

  Or I was going to die.

  Time. I needed time to figure out how I was going to get out of this.

  “It took me a long time to realize that you were the killer,” I told him. “That’s because you weren’t the only killer.”

  “What’re you talking about? You mean those other old people? Yes, I didn’t even know them.”

  “It was the perfect crime,” I said. “A murder wrapped up in other murders. Different puzzles that fit together.”

  “Whatever,” he said, shaking the gun at me.

  “You know, it started with the letter from Leonard Shetland. He had worked for the witches, and he found out they were going to curse some people. He was warning the Gazette. Later I wondered if he wasn’t actually warning us but rather admitting to the murders, but he died of a heart attack before Tony and Margaret died. So, he couldn’t have been the killer.”

  “Leonard Shetland was a dork. Who the hell sends a letter these days?”

  He had a point. “Jenny and Joyce, the witches, seemed to be the center of everything, the planet that everything revolved around. But it turned out that they didn’t even curse those people. They said they got interrupted. So, they didn’t actually do the curses they were hired for.”

  “This isn’t very interesting,” he said.

  “Sorry. You might find this part interesting, though. Margaret was the one who hired them to curse those people.”

  “Not shocked. She was the meanest bitch in Goodnight. Remember?” He was getting impatient with me, and I knew I would have to speed it up. Jessica Fletcher was never interrupted when she solved a mystery at the end of the show. But I got no respect.

  “Okay. Okay,” I said. “Here’s the interesting part. Margaret had no intention of cursing anybody. She hired the witches to throw the suspicion off of her. You see, Margaret was poisoning the bunch of them. She poisoned Stella’s vaginal soap and Tony’s eye drops. Killed them dead. Stella died before the witches could ever do their so-called curses.”

  “Why did she poison them?” he asked, honestly shocked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think it really matters. I think you answered that before. She was the meanest bitch in Goodnight. She probably just didn’t like them, so she offed them. The joke was on her though because she used a slow-acting poison, so she only lived to see Stella die. Tony died after Margaret did. I mean, after she was murdered.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah, it came as a surprise to me, too. But it was a matter of elimination. Eliminating all the distractions. You know, the other puzzles. I got distracted by the witches and the Tickets to Heaven, and a bunch of other stuff. But once I realized that the poisoning was separate from Margaret’s murder and that Leonard died of natural causes, well, then it was easy to figure out.”

  I was such a liar. I had only just figured it out five minutes ago, and it wasn’t confirmed for me until I was confronted with Margaret’s killer in my living room.

  “Margaret killed Tony and Stella,” I continued. “Cheese killed Leonard. But who killed Margaret? That was the final mystery.”

  He smiled, and his teeth shined.

  “The obvious suspect was Bernard,” I said. “The poor, sweet son who had been abused his entire life. He could have snapped easily, right? In fact, that would have been the normal thing. If I had lived with Margaret for five minutes, I would have pushed her off that cliff. So, Bernard was the obvious suspect, and I noticed that he didn’t have a fear of heights at all. It would have been nothing for him to walk up along that ridge and push her off.”

  “Close but no cigar, then,” the killer said.

  “Yes. Close but no cigar,” I agreed. “The potato burglar thought he saw Bernard push her to her death. But you and Bernard look like brothers. It was an easy mistake to make. And it figured that if one brother wasn’t afraid of heights, then the other brother wouldn’t be afraid of heights either.”

  “We played up there all our lives,” he said. “Climbed down into the canyon. We were mountain goats.”

  “The abused son and the golden son. The son who could do no wrong. The son who was treated like a prince while the other son was literally tortured. It made for a perfect crime. Nobody would expect that Ted Marshall, his mother’s favorite, would have killed her. And yet you did. You brought her up to your brother’s favorite spot, high up above the canyon, and you pushed her off, like she was trash that you were tired of and wanted to get rid of.”

  “She was trash,” Ted spat, furiously. “And I might have been the favorite child, but she treated me like shit. She was a tight-fisted bitch. Sure, she was quick with the compliments for me, but you can’t buy a house with compliments. You can’t buy a car with co
mpliments.”

  Ah, money. It was the number one motive for murder with sex being a distant second. “She didn’t give you any money?”

  “A pittance! She had millions, and she threw me crumbs. Crumbs! The woman had millions, and she couldn’t give me a small percentage of that? Well, who’s laughing now? Who has the millions now? Now, I get to live how I deserve. Now, I’m the one with the millions.”

  He aimed the gun at me. “Now how about we have some fun, new girl?”

  I shuddered. “I’m not big on fun, Ted. I’m a huge party pooper. And not sexy. I have all kinds of body hair. That’s not in fashion at all, you know.”

  “I don’t care about body hair.”

  Swell, I find the only man in America who doesn’t care about body hair on a woman, and it turns out that he’s a rapist murderer.

  “I smell, too,” I continued. “I was on a tractor, and I’m pretty sure I sat in manure, or maybe it was just poop from the sky.”

  “Shut up.”

  Think quick, Matilda. Don’t die. Don’t get raped. As fast I could, I grabbed the thing nearest me and threw it as hard as I could at Ted. Unfortunately, the thing nearest me was a couch cushion. He swatted it away, easily.

  “A cushion?” he laughed. “You’re throwing cushions at me? Accept the inevitable. You’re not going to escape.”

  I turned on my heel and ran as fast as I could. I didn’t care if he was going to shoot me in the back. I was going to escape no matter what. Nobody was going to save me, so it was up to me. I heard Ted start to run after me, and then he screamed, and there was a loud crash.

  I turned around just in time to see Ted disappear into the hole in the living room. He must not have seen it in the dark. As he fell in, his gun flew out of his hand and landed in a dark corner and slid along the floor until it rested under the couch.

  “Help,” he moaned. “My leg’s broken.”

  I turned the light on. Ted was at the bottom of the hole, his leg bent at an unnatural angle. I had broken another man’s bones. I was on a roll. “Thank you, Faye,” I said out loud. “You saved me with your house renovations.”

  With Ted safely at the bottom of the hole with his injured leg, I walked through the living room to the kitchen to call Amos and have him come arrest Margaret’s killer. I needed a drink, too. I wondered if Adele, Faye, and Nora had left me any liquor in the house. Otherwise, I would be stuck with iced tea, and I didn’t think that would cut it.

  Not that I wasn’t happy about catching the killer. But almost getting raped and killed had me shaken. I took a deep, healing breath and reminded my body that the danger was over.

  I flipped the light on in the kitchen and gasped when I saw a man sitting at my kitchen table. “You’re Matilda Dare?” he asked.

  I nodded slowly, afraid.

  “That’s what I thought. My mother gave me your name. You’re a big troublemaker. You went into my mother’s house and decided what? That a nice old lady was better off in prison?”

  Oh my God. It was the potato burglar. He was in my kitchen and angry about me ratting out his corpse-friendly mother. “Chaz Lupo?” I asked.

  He nodded and stood. “You bitch,” he spat. “You need to be shut up. Forever.”

  Oh, geez. Another man wanted me dead? It was an epidemic. I had always thought I was a nice person, but maybe I was wrong. Why else would so many people try to kill me?

  “Can’t we just be friends?” I asked.

  “You put my mother in prison! You wrote about me in the paper! You put in my real name!”

  “Sorry. It’s part of the job.”

  He wasn’t convinced. Sheesh. I was going to be killed by the potato burglar. What a way to go. That was going to be a real humdinger of an obituary. The potato burglar and I would be linked forever.

  Swell.

  I ran to the counter and lunged for a knife to fend him off, but before I could get there, there was a sound behind me. “You bitch!”

  It wasn’t the potato burglar.

  It was Ted.

  Somehow, Ted had managed to climb out of the hole in the living room. He limped into the kitchen, dragging his broken leg behind him. He had found the gun underneath the couch, and he was aiming at me.

  “What the fuck?” the potato burglar said, and he went right for Ted.

  It was killer against burglar. Ted after Chaz. Chaz wasn’t injured, but Ted had a gun. Unfortunately for Chaz, he was focused on me, and he didn’t notice that Chaz was on the attack until it was too late. Chaz ran for him and leaped, tackling him like a linebacker.

  The gun went off, shooting a hole in the ceiling. I decided not to stick around. I ran like hell out of the house and into the forest. I kept running until I couldn’t run anymore. Then, I sat on the forest floor. In the distance, I could hear gunfire and then finally nothing. Silence.

  A moment later, I heard the jingle of my dogs’ tags, as they ran toward me. They greeted me with sloppy kisses. I was so relieved to see them safe and sound. “Let’s just stay here for a while,” I told them. “There are bad guys at the house.”

  But it was dinner time, and Abbott and Costello didn’t have a lot of patience for late meals. So, I followed them home because it was dark, and I was lost. But they weren’t lost. A few minutes later, we were at the house.

  I was surprised to find two sheriff cars in front of the house with their lights flashing. Amos and Wendy were putting Chaz and Ted into their cars in handcuffs.

  “Got a call that the potato burglar was headed toward your house,” Amos told me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. No bullet holes.”

  “Where’s asshole?” Amos asked.

  “Boone took off somewhere. He didn’t tell me where.” And he didn’t say goodbye, either.

  Amos took me to the Sheriff’s Department, where I gave my statement. Then, he drove me home. Adele, Nora, and Faye were waiting for me, and they stayed with me for the night. There’s nothing better than friends.

  Chapter 16

  Faye had been working on my house for four days straight. Mostly she was fixing the damage from the gunshots, the lasso practice, and the renovations she had started and but didn’t finish. First thing she did was fix the hole in the living room, which had saved my life.

  Adele was still frazzled, and she was talking more and more about selling the diner and moving to San Diego. Meanwhile, Nora was despondent. The bank refused to take her back, and now she was completely unemployed without any employment prospects, especially since there hadn’t been any sign of the giraffes since the Cook-off.

  Fifi had even left town, and Quint had decided to go back to retirement. It was almost as if everyone had given up on ever finding the giraffes and returning them to the sanctuary. The poop falling from the sky had also ended. Nobody had been poop-bombed since the Cook-off.

  On Wednesday, Amos came to the house. He was in a fabulous mood, and his blue ribbon was hanging from his rear view mirror. I had asked him to help me find Devyn’s body, and it took him until then to get around to it. Since Saturday, he had wrapped up all of the arrests. He also got most of the money returned to the senior citizens who had purchased VIP Tickets to Heaven. The Plaza was undergoing another paint job, and basically everything was getting back to normal in Goodnight. Searching for a possible dead girl who had spoken to me was further down on the totem pole in Amos’s To Do list.

  I hopped up in Amos’s SUV, and we drove off. “I think I know where to go,” he told me. “A rock shaped like sadness could be up north at the Snake River. There’s a bunch of boulders there, and it’s a good place to dump a body.”

  We drove out to the river. It was a gorgeous spot. Very isolated and wild. A cold wind blew.

  “Autumn is coming,” Amos said. “Most beautiful time of the year in Goodnight. Look over there. Does that boulder look like sadness?”

  There were three large boulders in the middle of the river. One of them had two indentations near the top, and when the spray of water hit th
e rock, it looked eyes were crying.

  “Yes! Oh my goodness, how did you ever find it?”

  “Lived here my whole life,” Amos said. “When Boone and I were eight, we went camping and exploring on our own for a solid week.”

  “Your mom let you do that when you were eight?”

  “My mother used to tame wild horses. She had an understanding of how to treat wild creatures.”

  “By letting them free?” I asked.

  “By letting them believe they’re free. I’m pretty sure she followed us out into the wild, watching us from afar.” Amos stared intently at the boulder and took a deep breath. “I see her blond hair. Oh, Matilda. I’m so sorry for doubting you.”

  He waded into the river, and I watched from the shore. He stopped at the boulders and began to heave something from between them. It was a body, bloated and almost unrecognizable, but it was mostly preserved in the cold water, and it had long blond hair.

  “Oh no,” I said, even though it wasn’t a surprise. “Poor girl. She didn’t deserve this. She was so young. She had so much life left to live.”

  Amos made some calls in his car and then came back. “I’ll bet my retirement that the psycho dumped her a little upriver, and then she got caught here. Lucky for us. Not lucky for him. I’m going up there to see if I can catch any forensic evidence. It hasn’t rained, so I’m hopeful.”

  He took a plastic briefcase out of his trunk and carried it upriver, while I stayed with the body. I was careful not to touch her, but I did look at her, trying to find some clues. Her body was so bloated and distorted that I couldn’t see anything that would point to her killer.

  Amos returned after a few minutes. “Footprints,” he said. “Size eleven, I’m guessing.”

  Deputy Adam Beatman arrived in his car, and the coroner was behind him. Adam shook my hand when he got out of his car. “Thank you for saving me,” he told me. “I owe you one for clearing my name.” It was my first thank you for capturing a killer, and it made me feel giddy.

  The coroner went over the body with Amos when a black SUV arrived and parked behind the coroner’s car. “Feds,” Adam told me. “I guess that means we have a serial killer.”