Original Secrets

by Shawn McGuire

  There were also the circumstances around my grandmother’s death. No matter how many ways Tripp and I had tried to piece together the details of how she died, according to the letter my family had received from the sheriff, we couldn’t make it fit. The only way I’d be able to figure out the truth was from her autopsy report, which was missing from her police file. I’d ordered a replacement, but who knew when that would arrive.

  “To Whispering Pines again?” Dr. Bundy’s assistant asked. “Are you serious?”

  My thoughts exactly. “I’m serious. We have another dead body. I haven’t investigated yet; I’m on my way to the scene now. I don’t know what the situation is, but the witness says he’s not breathing. She performed CPR and couldn’t get a pulse.”

  “Sounds like a stiff.”

  I turned to Lori. “You guys are staying over at the rental cottages? That’s where Barry is?”

  She confirmed the location, which I passed on to the woman on the phone.

  “Okie dokie, Sheriff, I’ll tell Dr. B to get over there.”

  I whistled for Meeka, who crawled halfway out of her napping spot.

  “Come on. We’ve got a scene to check out.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Meeka, working.”

  The command put her into K-9 mode and she sprang out of her hidey hole and made it to the back door before I did.

  That’s when I realized the problem with kayaking to work. I had no vehicle. I dug through my desk to find the extra set of keys for the station’s van parked in the small lot behind the building. It had never occurred to me that I would need to use the vehicle, so I had no idea what was inside. It should have everything I’d need for an investigation, but I’d have to take a full inventory sooner than later.

  The inside of the old Chevy cargo van, with “Whispering Pines Sheriff” in big bold black-and-gold letters on the side, smelled a lot like the prior deputy. My nose was assaulted by the combination of body odor, motor oil, and the salty-sweet aroma of trail mix. I’d never seen the man without a bag of the stuff. Meeka refused to get in until I opened the passenger’s side window to let in fresh air.

  Once we were situated, I called to Lori as she backed her older model Explorer out of the lot. “Okay, lead the way.”

  The southeast section of Whispering Pines’ two thousand acres held a cluster of rental cottages. I’d been past the spot numerous times on my way to Sundry, the general store, but I’d never gone into the area. Lori led me to the very farthest end of the grounds, to the point where the narrow gravel drive started to circle back toward the entrance. There, I found two small A-frame cottages, one close to the road, the other set back behind it.

  “We’re renting both of these cottages,” she explained.

  “Barry mentioned that. How many of you are there?”

  “Twelve.”

  “How many bedrooms per cottage?”

  She looked away and quietly said, “Two in the first. Two plus a sleeping loft in the other.”

  “What’s the maximum capacity per cottage?”

  She didn’t answer that question. They were way over capacity, but that wasn’t what I was here for.

  In the back of the van, I was happy to find a camera case. The batteries in the 35mm camera were dead, but there were extras in the case. I could use my cell phone to take pictures, but then I risked my phone getting confiscated for the evidence inside it, so I only used it in an emergency.

  “Which one is Barry in?” Taking the camera bag and the well-stocked investigation kit, I followed Lori to the cottage at the back, Meeka at my side.

  This second structure was slightly bigger than the one closer to the drive, so I assumed it must be the one with the sleeping loft. And if things went the way they normally did in situations like this, Barry’s body would be up in that loft.

  Lori opened the front door and stepped aside so I could enter first. There, I found ten people—seven men and three women, all in their mid- to late-twenties—gathered in a living area big enough to hold only a loveseat, a lounge chair, and a small round kitchen table with four dining chairs. Half of the people were crying; the other half wore shocked expressions. As soon as they saw me, everyone pointed upstairs.

  “Barry is up in the loft,” Lori said.

  I knew it. “Have any of you been up there?”

  “I was,” Lori said. “Like I told you, I tried CPR on him. Rochelle and Blake went up there, too.”

  Two people, presumably Rochelle and Blake, stood.

  “Did either of you touch anything up there?” I asked as I slid a pair of latex gloves out of one of my cargo pockets and snapped them on. “Anything at all?”

  “There are two twin size beds up there,” reported Blake, a pale blonde guy who looked like he spent too much time watching Netflix or playing video games. “Barry was using one of them, I took the other. So yeah, I touched a lot of stuff up there.”

  “I only touched the ladder to climb up,” said Rochelle, an average sized redhead, hair twisted into a bun that wobbled precariously on top of her head. “And Barry’s shoulder. I was the first one up there. I went up to check on him and tried to shake him awake. I got Lori, because she’s the only one of us who knows CPR.” She covered her face with her hands for a second. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  I scanned the group as the three spoke, watching body language for both appropriate and inappropriate reactions. The only one that stood out to me was a dark-haired stocky guy sitting alone at the kitchen table. He looked angry; an uncommon initial reaction to a death. Normally, I saw shock and tears. Disbelief. Sometimes hysteria. But not anger.

  “How did this happen?” one of them asked.

  “I’ll do my best to figure that out,” I promised. “Right now, I’m going to investigate the area. I want to talk to all of you later, so stay here. As in, stay in the area. I need you all to leave the cottage so nothing else gets disturbed. Lori, Rochelle, and Blake, I’ll want to talk with you three first.”

  The other eight people stood, popping up randomly like the critters in a Whac-A-Mole game, and left the small cottage in silence. Lori, Rochelle, and Blake were ready to start telling me their versions of the events, and I held up a hand.

  “Not yet. I want to see the scene upstairs first without any prior knowledge. When I’m done, we’ll talk. Why don’t you three wait for me right out front?”

  I was about to tell them not to talk with each other about what had happened, but if the group was going to create a story, they would have done that before Lori came to get me.

  A trained cadaver dog, Meeka had indicated that she scented a corpse in the loft the moment we entered the cottage. Currently, she was standing at attention, her gaze locked on the loft.

  “Good, girl,” I told her with a scratch behind the ears. “At ease, partner. I’ve got it from here.”

  With the crime scene kit over one shoulder and the camera bag over my other, I climbed the simple wooden ladder to the small, steeply-peaked sleeping loft. From the top of the ladder, I immediately noticed the body on the bed, but before looking more closely at him, I took in the condition of the room. It looked and smelled like a typical guys’ dorm room. Clothing was scattered all around, piles shoved under each bed. The empty bed was unmade with the white sheets crumpled in a heap at the foot. Pillows were scattered across the bed, one on the floor. Despite the lack of reception in Whispering Pines, cell phones were charging on the nightstand between the two beds.

  I scanned from the right side of the room to the left as I stepped off the ladder onto the floor. Tucked between the bed with Barry’s body and the nightstand was a violin case. Partially visible beneath the bed was what looked like a bicycle tire. Finally, my gaze came to a rest on the body. He had seemed familiar to me out on the pontoon, but I’d been more concerned about his safety at that time than to figure out why. Now I knew.

  “You’re the Speedo-wearing violin-playing unicyclist.”

  Chapter 4


  The Speedo-wearing violin-playing unicyclist had become popular around the village as he followed the local nun on a bicycle. They were a strange pair, but they seemed to fit together, and everyone, tourists and villagers alike, would stop, watch, and wave as they went past. Did they know each other, or were they simply riding buddies?

  Dark-haired Barry was lying on his back, and as Lori had reported, his partially opened eyes were staring up at the peaked ceiling. With gloved hands, I pressed my fingers to his carotid artery even though it was obvious there wouldn’t be a pulse. There wasn’t.

  Other than to check for a pulse, I wasn’t supposed to touch him, so I did a thorough visual search of his body. There were no signs of trauma, nothing out of the ordinary. Except . . .

  I leaned in a little closer and saw what looked like fine white fibers around his nose and mouth. His skin had a slight blue tint, which told me that at some point he had suffered from a lack of oxygen.

  The bed on the other side of the small room had three pillows—two at the head and one lying three-quarters of the way to the foot of the mattress. The pillow on the floor lay at the bed’s foot. All of them had pillowcases that matched the white sheets. Had one of the pillows been used to suffocate him? Was that what the white fibers around his nose and mouth were? Bits of pillowcase?

  Using a small penlight, I looked as closely as I could into his partially opened eyes. Suffocation often created petechial hemorrhaging, tiny dots of blood in the whites of the eye. His eyes weren’t open wide enough for me to tell, but even if petechia was evident, it wasn’t a guarantee of anything nefarious. Coughing could cause blood vessels to burst and create the dots.

  I backed as far away as I could, to the top of the ladder, and tried to visualize events through Barry’s perspective.

  I’m exhausted from struggling to stay above water in the lake. It’s taking all my remaining energy to climb this ladder and fall into my bed. I lay down . . .

  And then what? An image of Lori at Barry’s side filled my vision next.

  I can’t feel a pulse, and he’s not breathing. I have to do CPR. First, I have to lay him flat . . .

  At that point she would have tossed the pillows aside. That would explain why they were all on the other side of the room. My mind had immediately gone to murder, but I had no reason to believe that was true. The village’s murder rate was making me paranoid. I had to stop creating a story and gather the facts to uncover the truth.

  Since I couldn’t do any more with the body, Dr. Bundy would take care of Barry when he arrived, I did what I was able to do. I took pictures from every possible angle in the small space, including multiple shots of the body, and all the items in the room including those beneath both beds. Then, I climbed down the ladder, ready to interview witnesses. Meeka, surely bombarded by the smell of the body upstairs, was sitting in the fresh air of the open front doorway waiting for me.

  “There’s a violin and unicycle in the loft,” I told the trio waiting for me outside. “Barry’s the guy who’s been riding around wearing the Speedo and following the nun, right?”

  They laughed at this.

  “Yeah, that was Barry,” Lori offered with a fond smile. “He could be a goofball at times. Stuff like that was his way of blowing off stress.”

  “I first saw him a few weeks ago.” I smiled with them, then got back to business. “This morning, he mentioned that you all have been coming and going for the last few weeks. Has he been up here all this time?”

  “Pretty much,” Lori confirmed.

  “As long as the internet connection held,” Blake said, “a few of us can work remotely. Barry could.”

  I jotted that in my notebook. “That’s what caused his stress? His job?”

  “He worked in finance. High stress.” Blake paused, considering something. “He was so excited when he got the okay to work from here.”

  “How was he acting?” I asked. “After his trouble in the lake this morning, I mean.”

  “He seemed tired,” Rochelle said, “which was understandable, I guess.” She tapped her chest. “He had this cough, but otherwise he was okay.”

  “He did seem tired,” Lori agreed, “but fine while we were out there, joking around with everyone and stuff. We stayed out on the pontoon for maybe another hour after you dropped him off.”

  “That’s when he started getting crabby,” Blake added. “The cough was bugging him, so we figured it was best to come in. I asked him if he wanted to go to that health place you mentioned.”

  “You mean the healing center?” I asked. “Did you feel he should go?”

  “I didn’t see any harm in just running over there,” Blake said. “He kept insisting he was fine, though, and that he just wanted to take a nap.”

  “Is that what he did? Took a nap?”

  “Yeah,” Lori said. “He went right upstairs to bed when we got back.”

  I jotted more notes, calculating the approximate time they had returned here, and then asked, “Do any of you have any reason to believe that anyone from your group could have harmed him?

  “Why would you ask that?” Lori wanted to know, angry at the accusation.

  Blake and Rochelle glanced nervously at each other.

  “Something you two want to tell me?” I asked the pair.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Blake said. “Barry had this thing for Marissa.”

  “She’s one of the women staying with you here?”

  “Right,” Blake said.

  “Is there a problem with him having a thing for Marissa?”

  “Only because,” Lori began, “Angel has been after her, too.”

  “Hang on.” I thought back to my conversation with Barry. “Angel arranged the swimming race, right?”

  The three agreed that he had.

  “What’s the issue with Angel?” I asked.

  “Angel is a hothead,” Rochelle said with her own fiery anger. “He and Barry are always going at it. They don’t want to be in the same car with each other. Then they don’t want Marissa to be in a car with the other guy. It’s so juvenile.”

  “If we’d go somewhere as a group,” Lori continued, seemingly as annoyed with the guys’ behavior as Rochelle, “we’d have to take multiple cars to keep the two of them from killing each other.” Her eyes went wide. “Wait, I didn’t mean that literally.” She objected more when I wrote this in my notebook. “I mean, sure, Angel has a temper, but he would never hurt anyone.”

  “How did Marissa feel about this attention?” I asked.

  “She’s sick of it.” Rochelle shook her head, disgusted, the wobbly bun on top popping loose in places. “She was kind of flattered at first, but it was getting stupid.”

  “Was Marissa interested in Barry?” I asked.

  “No,” Rochelle said. “Not Angel either.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that.”

  Rochelle and Lori exchanged a look.

  I gestured between them with my pen. “What’s that look for?”

  Lori gave an encouraging nod.

  “Marissa and I have been together for four months,” Rochelle admitted.

  She seemed confident in her relationship status, but that didn’t mean Marissa wasn’t playing around. Maybe she’d been more flattered by the guys’ attention than Rochelle knew.

  I turned to Blake. “Do you think Angel could have done something to Barry?”

  “Doubt it,” he said. “Angel and Barry have known each other for a long time. They just get into it sometimes. Arguing mostly, pushing each other’s buttons. We did our best to keep them separated whenever the group was together.”

  “It wouldn’t take long to sneak up there and do something.” I pointed toward the upper floor of the cottage. “You’re saying someone was at Angel’s side every moment since you got back from the pontoon?”

  None of them had a response for that.

  “You resort to taking three cars,” I said, “but there are only two cottages. Barry told me this is the first tim
e the whole group has been together. How did you handle them up here? I assume they couldn’t be in a cottage together, so one was in a cottage with Marissa. That had to cause problems.”

  “Yeah,” Blake said, “that was a problem. Since this is the bigger cottage, it’s been the four women in the two rooms downstairs, with me and Barry upstairs.”

  “Angel couldn’t be very happy about that,” I noted.

  “That’s an understatement,” Rochelle muttered. “Honestly, I’m not sure Barry really even liked Marissa that much. I think it’s just that he didn’t want Angel around her.”

  I knew a guy in high school like that. He’d be really interested in going out with me if I was dating someone else. Soon as I was single, nothing.

  “Interesting dynamic you all have going on here,” I told the threesome. My nice way of saying that as a group, they were a disaster. A disaster waiting to happen? Had a death been inevitable? “The medical examiner will be here soon. Once he’s doing his thing, I’m going to talk to everyone else. I might have more questions for you afterwards. In the meantime, I’ll need your contact information in case I have follow-up questions.”

  While waiting for the ME, Meeka and I inspected the area around both cottages. The ground beneath all the pine trees was bare, which meant there was nothing for evidence to hide beneath. The rental office ground crew kept the area clear of debris. That was for both aesthetic and fire safety reasons. Dead pine needles could ignite in a flash from a blown campfire ember or carelessly discarded cigarette butt. We found nothing during our search, not that I expected we would, and were waiting by the Cherokee when Dr. Bundy and an ambulance pulled into the driveway.

  “I’m starting to think I should move my office closer to Whispering Pines,” Dr. Bundy said while tugging on a pair of gloves. “I’m here more than anywhere else.”

  “Just make sure to pad out your gasoline budget,” I suggested.

  “What have we got this time?”