“Peggy, I want to help, but you should know I don’t have my license, or even half the hours.”
“I can’t think of a better way for you to get your hours.”
“Then I’m on the case. I’ll start working on a timeline. The last person to see him was Della. What’s she saying?”
“That you’re a real mean five-letter-word who blocked in her car and got what she had coming.” Peggy snorted. “Don’t worry. I didn’t believe her about that. But I do believe her when she says she has no idea what happened to Franco after she left the room yesterday morning.”
“Poor girl.”
“Don’t you worry about Della. I’ll keep an eye on her. As for your investigation, let’s keep this between us for now. Find out anything and everything you can, within reason.”
“Anything and everything,” I repeated. “Within reason.”
She ended the call before I could clarify what she meant by within reason.
Butch and Christopher would be back soon with the body, and Peggy had mentioned her suspicions about it having been compromised.
I pulled out my laptop to review the notes from my online course in the basics of forensic pathology.
Sometimes it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.
Chapter 27
Everyone’s got secrets, big or small. Some secrets lurk beneath the human heart, some are written in password-protected computer diaries, and others are kept in plastic canisters inside the bathroom medicine cabinet.
I tapped on the door to Benji’s room. “How are things going in there?”
No answer.
I knocked again, harder. “Benji, I’m worried about you. It’s okay if you don’t feel like talking, but could you make a noise to let me know you’re alive? Give me one of your now-famous rooster noises.”
The door opened. Benji hadn’t changed his clothes since breakfast, and smelled of body odor. His glasses were so smudged by fingerprints, I was surprised he could see through them.
With no trace of humor, he said, “I don’t usually go around making rooster noises.”
He didn’t invite me in, but I went in anyway, coughing and pointing at my throat. “Water,” I croaked.
He stood aside and let me into his washroom. Still coughing, I closed the door and turned on the taps.
I’d made some notes before dropping in, and my first goal was to see if he was taking any medications that would explain his mood swings. Just like a bad party guest, I rifled through his things. Benji’s shaving bag contained a razor, products for sensitive skin, vitamin D, a crinkled and empty tube of foot cream, but no prescription medicine.
I left the washroom holding a full glass of water. He was trying to tidy the room, stuffing clothes into a suitcase.
“Don’t clean on my account,” I said. “Jessica’s getting tired of my company, so I thought I’d kill some time by checking in on you.” Uninvited, I took a seat on the room’s chair, positioned with its back to the patio door.
He shot me a wary look and continued packing. I fought the urge to confiscate his smudged glasses and clean them for him.
“You must be shaken up,” I said. “Seeing a body is shocking, and it can play tricks on your head. I’ve been through it a couple of times myself.”
“My head’s okay,” he said. “I wanted to pack anyway, so I can leave the minute I’m able.”
“Did you drive up? Which car is yours?”
He slowly folded a shirt while staring at my mouth instead of my eyes. Benji wasn’t an eye-contact sort of guy, so that wasn’t out of the ordinary for him.
“You’re asking a lot of questions,” he said. “Just like that cop. She’s acting like this is a murder. Now you’re in here asking me things. You must be after something.”
“I want the same thing everyone does.” I sipped my water slowly, giving the impression I had all day. “I want to understand what happened. What possesses a man to throw a lamp through a sliding glass door, and then wander into the forest alone? Franco must have had a reason for going out there. You’re his friend. What do you think happened? Did he have a fight with Della, or did someone call and tell him something upsetting?”
Benji kept staring at my mouth. “I couldn’t possibly know what happened,” he said. “I wasn’t there. We were all at breakfast.”
“How about later in the day? You didn’t see Franco when you were on your way back from snowshoeing with me and Jessica?”
“No.” He turned his focus up to my eyes briefly, then down to the floor.
“You’re a smart guy. Do you have any theories about what happened?”
He met my gaze and held it, his eyes piercing behind the smudged lenses. “No.”
“Was it always just the four of you who were best friends? Was there anyone else? Someone who didn’t get invited to the reunion?”
He whipped his head and looked out at the patio. “Someone else could be up here. They could have done everything.” His voice betrayed his excitement about this new idea. “It wasn’t one of us.”
“Who’s out there, Benji? Who popped into your head just now?”
“Nobody.” His posture crumpled. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at his feet, at the hole in one of his socks. “For a second, I had a person in mind, but it was vague, like the scary killer in a slasher movie. There’s nobody out there. Nobody with a name.”
“The gang was always just the four of you. Like the four tree frogs on your Rainforest Delight.”
“We weren’t exactly popular.”
“I bet you guys had some fun together.”
“We did. We were so young when we built that treehouse.” Benji smiled at the memory.
With patience, I asked him about those early days.
He told me how Marie’s parents had supplied the lumber, and he’d drawn up a blueprint for the treehouse, but Dion and Franco had been too busy clowning around to follow the plans. They were more interested in banging nails into things than getting wood cut to the right length.
The treehouse was between their four homes, and they met up constantly, without having to call each other. “You showed up whenever you wanted to be alone, or have some company, and it always worked out,” he said wistfully. “We kept a bunch of our books in there, and sometimes other kids went inside, but they didn’t wreck anything because they were afraid of Franco.”
“Franco used to intimidate other kids? Like a bully?”
Benji abruptly got to his feet. “Thanks again for stopping in.” He reached for the two books on his nightstand. He chucked the sci-fi paperback into his suitcase, then handed me the other one—the thick book about criminal code that I’d loaned him. “Thanks for the book. I found it very interesting. I read some chapters during the power outage. I’ll finish packing, and maybe I’ll meet you and Jessica in the recreation room to play a board game later.”
I accepted the book, but wasn’t ready to go. Buying time, I flipped it open to the middle page.
The book let out a very loud, very telltale crack.
Benji flinched.
“That was the spine cracking,” I said. “This book has never been opened, which means you just told me a lie.” I crossed my legs and my arms.
He got flustered immediately. Nobody likes being called on their lies, especially not people who desperately want to be adored by others.
Rubbing his forehead, he hyperventilated, seemingly on the verge of swearing, then spat out, “Franco was trying to blackmail me.”
“Was he after one of your chemical formulas?”
“No. Money.”
A moment of silence passed. “Did Franco have something on you? Some crime from your youth? Is that why you were interested in the criminal code book? To see how bad whatever you did was?”
By Benji’s stunned expression, I knew I was on the right track.
His voice cracking, Benji said, “I didn’t look in the book. I decided to pay him, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m innocent. If
people would listen to me, they’d know.”
I uncrossed my legs. “I’m right here, and I don’t have anywhere else to go. I promise to listen with an open mind.”
I relaxed my posture, leaned back, and nodded to let him know he could unburden himself without interruption.
He took a deep breath. “Franco was wrong, but he still thought he could get some money before it was all gone. He said he knew about my old car, the Plymouth. He came to my room on the first night, not long before your cat wandered in.”
He stopped talking, so I gently asked, “What happened with the car? At dinner, the story was that you’d smashed it into the wall of your garage while parking. Is there more to the accident?”
“What happened wasn’t what Franco thought, I swear. But he might have told someone else.” He paused and pushed his smudged glasses up his nose. “What do you charge for investigations?”
“I’m not taking new cases at the moment.”
“I just need to know one thing. What happened to Butch last night? He says it was no big deal, but he has that lump on his head. He’s hiding something, or he knows something. Someone tried to get rid of him.”
“He’s too tough to get rid of easily. What did you see outside yesterday evening, during the storm?”
“Nothing. I was right here in my room. All night. I have proof.” He pulled his laptop out of his suitcase, tapped away for a moment, then turned it to show me a video of himself. The sound was off, but he appeared to be alone, talking to his laptop.
“Here’s my alibi,” he said. “I started making a video, but then I got distracted when the power went out. The laptop switched to battery backup, and the recording ran for hours. If somebody was outside last night, knocking out Butch, this proves it wasn’t me.”
He fast-forwarded through a couple of hours of himself sitting on the bed reading a paperback sci-fi novel, using his phone as a flashlight. He slowed the video to regular speed and zoomed in on the narrow gap between the curtains covering the patio door. A face appeared in the darkness. My face. It was me, knocking on doors the night before, after the mudslide.
“I’m your alibi,” I said. “That’s pretty solid. It’s too bad you were hiding in here and didn’t answer the door. We might have stopped whoever it was before they whacked Butch and got to Franco.”
Benji hung his head. “I know. I feel terrible.”
“Della was already gone by that point, so that clears her, unless she hit Butch on the back of the head before she left, maybe suspecting that he told Franco about the two of them kissing.” I shook my head. No, that wasn’t likely. She’d left in the late afternoon, so it would have been a long time for someone to be knocked out in the storm, even a tough guy like Butch.
Benji said, “Marie hates her husband right now.”
“Sure, but Butch also could have been fighting with Franco, or even Dion.”
“Or Christopher.”
“My Christopher? He was with me in the car, then we checked the caves…” And then he went out to the generator by himself. But why would Christopher hit Butch? It made no sense. A good investigator keeps an open mind, but that was just too far open.
“How does this work?” Benji asked. “Do I pay you by the hour, or by the day? Name your fee. Someone should get a piece of Biggs Foods before the lawyers rip it apart.”
“Let me think about it.” I got up to leave.
“I need you,” Benji pleaded. “You and that cop both think someone murdered Franco. You’re already investigating me as a suspect, so let me pay you to look wider.”
I pursed my lips and cursed myself for being so obvious. Benji was a genius, after all. “How did you know?”
“You’re good, but I heard the click of the medicine cabinet when you were in my bathroom. Before that, I heard the high-pitched ring of your phone through the wall, right after I finished my video call with the police. It was Peggy Wiggles phoning you, right?”
I moved closer to the door.
Benji pleaded, “Help me.”
“I don’t know if I can help you.”
“You can’t make things worse. Please. I’m not good at asking for help, but here I am, asking.”
Time passed. I heard my father in my head. Stormy, it never hurts to have one more friend. He typically used it as his excuse for flirting with every woman he encountered, but it was still good advice.
Benji’s eyes looked so sad behind his smudged glasses.
“Sure,” I said with a long exhale. “But you can’t tell anyone I’m working for you, and I don’t guarantee results.”
He rummaged through his suitcase for his checkbook, then wrote me a check with no dollar amount. I accepted the check with no intention of cashing it. I was already working for Peggy, and I would only pretend to be working with Benji to ensure his cooperation.
“Benji, is there anything else I should know? Any information you’ve been holding back, for any reason?”
He looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “No.”
I thanked him and let myself out. In the quiet hallway, my hand trembled as I reached for the door handle to my room. I’d remained calm under pressure while questioning Benji, but it had not been easy. When he’d asked about Peggy, I’d fought a powerful urge to flee.
Benji seemed harmless on the surface, but he had lied to me at least three times. I’d caught him on the lie about the book, but he still had information he wasn’t telling me. Both times I’d asked him about theories, he’d answered while looking me directly in the eyes instead of his usual habit of focusing on my mouth or the floor.
Had I just been alone in a room with a killer? It wouldn’t have been the first time.
I let myself into my room so I could make notes and report back to Officer Wiggles.
The curtains were drawn to block out the afternoon sunshine, and Jessica was under the covers in her bed. Without waking her, I left the big book with my other things, checked on Jeffrey, then quietly let myself out again.
What next? Christopher wasn’t back yet with the body, or he would have messaged me.
The hallway was quiet, except for a sound similar to water trickling. The sound was coming from down the hall, from the open door leading to the room that had been Franco and Della’s.
Chapter 28
From a distance, the sound of fingers tapping on a computer keyboard mimics the sound of trickling water.
I stopped by the half-open door of Franco and Della’s room and listened.
There were no voices, just the sound of fingertips on a keyboard.
Somebody was up to something. Quietly, I pushed open the door and crept in.
Dion sat with his back to me, at the room’s desk, which was pushed up against the wood covering the smashed door. He was focused on the laptop screen and didn’t acknowledge me.
I read over his shoulder, scanning an archived article from the Misty Falls Mirror. The date wasn’t visible, but the headline was clear: Police Admit No Leads in Mysterious Hit and Run.
I didn’t need to read the text to know what the article was about. I’d been seven years old, young enough that my father was reluctant to share all the details of cases, but old enough to ask him questions. I wanted to know—and the whole town wanted to know—if the local police would ever solve the case.
A male victim had been struck while crossing the street. The driver of the vehicle fled the scene, scraping other cars and even knocking over a mailbox.
Luckily for the pedestrian victim, his injuries weren’t fatal. He suffered a broken leg, and that would’ve been the end of it, but a local reporter seemed bent on turning the investigation—or lack of one—into a huge scandal. As a child, I was too naive to understand the issues. One night, I told my father that he could make the whole thing go away if he would just track down the bad person driving the car. He paced the kitchen for a while, then promised me ice cream for a month if I never brought up the topic again.
The ice cream bribe had worked, a
nd I hadn’t thought much about the case until seeing Dion’s screen.
Accompanying the article was a photo of the pedestrian, with the same dark eyes and curly hair as Dion.
“That was your father,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
Dion jerked around, startled. He closed the laptop. The computer’s lid was covered in stickers and rhinestones, spelling out the name Della in swirly cursive.
“And your father was the investigator,” he said. “I try not to think about it, so even when I heard your last name was Day, I didn’t put it together until now.”
“My father was troubled by that case. It was the first time he brought his work home with him. We had boxes of statements in the living room.”
He scoffed. “For all the good it did.”
“My father did everything he could to track down that driver,” I said. “It was a terrible time for him.”
“Was it? Did he go on painkillers for his broken leg and get hooked on the drugs? Did he have lingering nerve pain the doctors couldn’t treat, pain they said was all in his head? Did your father drink himself to death within a year? Because mine did.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He looked at the laptop as he traced the rhinestone letters with his finger. “Don’t be sorry. It wasn’t all bad. My father wasn’t that great. When he took that final dose, everyone’s life started getting better. My mother remarried, and then Della was born. In a way, my father died so that she could live.”
“You seem to really love your sister. How is she doing? How did she take the news?”
“She’s not returning anyone’s phone calls, so the sooner we can get ourselves out of here, the better.”
“Do you need some help packing up her things?” I glanced around the gloomy room. In her haste to leave, she’d left not just her laptop, but also clothes, toiletries, and platform shoes. In light of her boyfriend being dead, she probably wouldn’t care about any of those things for a while, but getting them to her was the right thing to do.
Dion thanked me, and said he could use my help.
Together, we went over the entire room and bathroom, picking up all the items that belonged to either Della or Franco. We used the room’s pillowcases as temporary bags.
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