Stormy Day Mysteries 5-Book Cozy Murder Mystery Series Bundle

by Angela Pepper

  While we tidied, we talked about growing up in Misty Falls. I mentioned Benji’s blueprints for the treehouse, and Dion relaxed with a big laugh.

  “He wanted to put in a working elevator,” Dion said. “You should have seen his schematics, with pulleys and levers and counterweights. The guy was already over-thinking everything. If we could get him to laugh and lighten up once a week, it was a miracle.”

  “It sounds like he was careful, even as a kid.”

  Dion smiled as he slid Della’s laptop into the pillowcase. “He was always wound up so tight. You know how Superman squeezes a lump of coal into a diamond? We used to joke that one day Benji would get a C-minus on a science exam, and there would be a little crackle sound, then he’d be gone, and there would just be a diamond sitting on his chair.”

  I laughed. “That doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would drive his car into the wall of his garage. What year did he do that, anyway?”

  Dion’s expression turned serious. “I don’t remember.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We all do dumb stuff when we’re kids.” I laughed. “I was a cheerleader. You should have seen me and Jessica in those days.” I gave him a warm smile. “She seems to like you.”

  He grinned and looked away. “She’s really nice.”

  We finished packing up the things, and I reached for the pillowcase with the laptop. “You’ll be coming in my car back into town, right? Jessica will probably insist. I’ve got room in my bag, so I’ll pop this in there for you.”

  He looked as though he might object, but I backed my way out of the room quickly.

  Back in my room, I sat cross-legged by the door so I didn’t disturb Jessica.

  Della didn’t have her computer password protected, which I had expected, given that her brother had been on it.

  I was able to pull up the history for the computer and check the files that had been opened recently.

  The Misty Falls newspaper article had been accessed recently by Dion, probably from the same link in the browser history that I could see. The article about the hit-and-run had been accessed first on Sunday night, with that laptop.

  At the same time, someone had been going through photos of the clubhouse gang, in their youth. The laptop had an archive of photos from before Della was born, so either it was actually Franco’s laptop or the couple shared it.

  Except for the gleaming metallic braces on her teeth, the Marie in the photos looked the same as the Marie at the lodge. She had her brown hair in a ponytail and wore glasses in the style of the day. She wore a pair of large sweatpants in several of the pictures. I could understand how she’d earned the nickname of Monsterpants.

  Dion had a big smile and wore his curly hair longer in those days, fanning out in a wide oval. Benji wore too-short trousers in every picture, and sported a haircut that looked as if his mother had put a bowl on his head and snipped around it. Franco always stared defiantly into the camera lens with one eye, the other covered by a dark forelock of hair.

  I couldn’t tell how long each photo had been looked at, but I could see through the history on the slideshow application that the ones accessed for a larger view all contained a boxy, dark blue car—Benji’s Plymouth Volaré. It wasn’t the sexiest, its shape resembling the police cruisers on the road in those days, but the kids seemed to enjoy posing in or on top of the vehicle, even decorating it for parades.

  Benji’s Plymouth was absent from all photos dated after the unsolved hit-and-run accident. From that point, the kids posed with a station wagon driven by Marie.

  I closed the laptop and ran my finger over Della’s rhinestones.

  I’d interrupted Dion before he’d gotten to the photos with the car, which meant that he might not have put together the puzzle of what Franco was trying to blackmail Benji over.

  Whether it was true or not, Franco, or someone else using Della’s laptop, had connected the hit-and-run of Dion’s father with the disappearance of Benji’s car.

  When I returned to Misty Falls, I would need to speak to my father about the accident, but in the meantime, I would keep it to myself. If Dion found out while we were all trapped at the lodge, no good would come of him accusing Benji of hitting his father.

  On the positive side, now I understood what was going through Franco’s head on Sunday night.

  On the negative side, the facts didn’t look so good for Benji, who had a powerful motivation to get rid of his blackmailer.

  Before I could dwell on my discovery too long, my phone buzzed with an incoming message.

  Christopher was letting me know they were back with the body.

  I quickly stuffed Della’s things into my suitcase and pulled out a cardigan to wear inside the walk-in cooler.

  Chapter 29

  If you need to store a corpse without freezing it, the optimal temperature is between 36°F and 39°F. Not so coincidentally, this is the same range at which you’d keep your home refrigerator, to prevent spoilage of pork chops and other meats.

  If you won’t be getting to your pork chops or your corpses for a long time, you’ll want to go for negative temperature storage, at 14°F or colder. That’ll freeze your stored items and seriously slow down decomposition.

  The Fairchild cousins were preparing to load the body of Franco Jerico into a 37°F cooler when I arrived in the kitchen.

  Butch looked up at me and deadpanned, “A good friend will help you move, but it takes family to help you move a body.”

  Christopher gave me a pained look. “Butch has been practicing that line for the last half hour.”

  “How’d it go, other than the bad jokes?”

  Christopher answered, “We didn’t see any cougars, but the birds followed us all the way back to the lodge, flitting from branch to branch and cawing. I felt like I was in an Edgar Allen Poe story.”

  “On the bright side, you’ve both earned your body-moving Boy Scout badges. Good job getting him back here in one piece.” I reached for the edge of the blue tarp covering the body, then paused. “He is still in one piece, right?”

  They assured me he was. They’d used a stretcher from the safety supplies in the trekking hut and strapped him to it for the hike back. Once they reached the lobby of the lodge, they loaded him onto Marie’s rolling kitchen cart, then wheeled him into the kitchen on the makeshift gurney.

  The secondary walk-in cooler had been emptied of food supplies in preparation for its temporary use as a morgue. Christopher opened the silver door, but his cousin seemed reluctant to wheel the body into the chilly space.

  I asked Butch, “What’s the matter? You got him this far. Are those last ten feet too cold, or too creepy for you?”

  He answered, “More like the payment on that piece of equipment is too recent. It was a custom job. The manufacturing alone was a fortune, let alone the installation.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “The cops aren’t going to take the cooler as evidence. We’ll put that extra tarp underneath, to cover the floor, but the whole reason for refrigerating him is so that he won’t putrefy and leak fluids all over.”

  At the word putrefy, Butch had already started fleeing the kitchen.

  Christopher didn’t look so eager to hear about leaking corpse fluids, either.

  “Let’s wheel him in,” I told Christopher. “The guy’s not going to get up and walk himself into the morgue.”

  With his lips pressed tightly shut, Christopher took hold on his side and we rolled the body in.

  We stood inside the walk-in cooler, the tarp-covered form between us. We looked at each other in silence. Butch hadn’t returned and likely wouldn’t. I pulled on the warm cardigan I’d brought with me.

  Christopher said, “I feel like we should do something.”

  “And we will. Help me get the tarp off. We’ll check the body for signs of trauma and try to determine the cause of death.”

  Christopher stared at me in apparent horror. “I meant maybe we should say a prayer.”

  “Good idea,”
I said. “You pray while I check the corpse for bullet holes, entry wounds, or ligatures. Pray he doesn’t have one of those cadaver spasms and give me a heart attack.”

  He stepped back, eyes wide as he watched me unfasten and remove the tarp. Seeing Christopher’s horror had a stabilizing effect on me. I felt more capable in comparison to him, and more confident by the minute.

  Franco wore the same clothes I’d seen him in Sunday night, jeans and a black T-shirt with a screen-printed tuxedo design on the front. A visual inspection of the front of the shirt and jeans revealed no signs of blood or breaks in the fabric.

  I asked Christopher, “Was he like this when you found him?”

  “Dead? Yes.”

  “No, smarty-pants. I meant his body position. See how his right leg isn’t flat, how the knee is bent? And the left arm is bent as well. Was the surface of the ledge flat, or were there rocks propping up these two limbs?”

  He pulled out his phone and showed me the photos they’d taken as evidence before moving the body. The surface was flat and didn’t explain the body’s condition.

  I gently grasped the left arm and tugged it. The whole body shifted, but the arm didn’t release its pose. I pulled up the T-shirt and shooed Christopher away from the light source, which was a lamp overhead.

  The body had an even purple haze all along the left side of the torso. On the crime shows, they refer to this as lividity or liver mortis. The suggillation, or hypostasis, was the pooling of heavy red blood cells that happened after Franco’s heart ceased beating.

  I explained my findings to Christopher, who nodded mutely while I continued the examination.

  Time flew, and I was glad for my warm cardigan.

  Who knew spending time with a corpse could be so much fun? I did feel a little bad about enjoying Franco’s company much more after he was deceased.

  I was careful not to disturb the body any more than it already had been.

  On his right hand, he had a sticky, yellow substance across the palm. It smelled familiar, yet not exactly like pine sap. Some small twigs were stuck to the goo.

  We gently tipped him to the side so I could examine his back. There were no wounds, nor was there any blood. Even if the rains had given him a thorough rinse, there would have been residue or stains on the clothes if he’d been stabbed or shot. Other than some superficial cuts and scratches on his hands, plus a few crow nibbles on one cheek, he had no visible injuries.

  “However he died, it was on his side,” I said. “He was on his side for maybe six to twelve hours, then someone moved him onto his back. There’s some dark purple across his shoulder blades, see, but not much. He was already quite dead when someone rolled him onto his back. Rigor mortis had already started setting in on his left arm and right leg, which is why they’re still bent.”

  Christopher continued staring—at me and at the body, his expression equal parts awe and horror. “I’m really glad you know all this stuff, but… someone moved the body? I almost wish I didn’t know. Someone could have killed him.”

  “He might have died of natural causes, or from alcohol poisoning. He was only drinking beer, that I saw, but we don’t know what happened inside his room. He could have hit the strong stuff.”

  Christopher blinked. “Yes, alcohol poisoning. Let’s check for that.”

  “I need access to his liver. Marie’s got that machine for slicing pepperoni. I’m sure with some modifications, we could…”

  Christopher started moving toward the cooler’s door, presumably to get the pepperoni slicer.

  “Come back,” I said. “Get back in here. I was just kidding about the slicer. Are you always this literal? I don’t have the medical training to start digging around in corpses. I shouldn’t even be looking under this one’s fancy tuxedo T-shirt.”

  Christopher opened his mouth and let out a sound that was almost a burp, but not exactly. He stepped toward the door again, shaking his head. “Nope. Can’t do it.”

  “We’re almost done here. Grab the tarp.”

  With his help, I covered the body with the blue plastic tarp. Christopher kept making the burp-like sound the whole time, to his chagrin.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Wait! Look at his boots.” In my single-mindedness to examine the body, I’d missed the fact that his boots were on the wrong feet.

  “We didn’t touch his boots,” Christopher said. “What does this mean?”

  “Either he was in a hurry, or he was already dead when someone else put these boots on his feet.”

  Christopher made the burping sound again.

  “He must have died inside the lodge,” I said. “Rigor mortis peaks around twenty-four hours, give or take a bit for various factors including temperature. He’s quite stiff right now, so he could have died about this time yesterday, either late morning or mid-afternoon. He wasn’t in the room at dinner time, when Butch and I were in the room with Della.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He wasn’t there… because someone had already put his boots on and hauled him outside. They tossed him over that ridge to make it look like an accident.”

  “Who?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Your cousin, Butch. Either he or Della discovered that Franco was dead in the room and then one of them—or maybe both of them—hauled him outside. Butch had been talking to the insurance company that morning. He’s worried about money, and about bad publicity. That ridge was outside of the property line, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t like this side of you,” he said. “That’s my cousin you’re talking about. This isn’t a game.”

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me with him out of the cooler. He pulled hard. I twisted my arm to get free, angled my body, and stopped just short of throwing him onto the kitchen floor. I let go of his bent arm and he stumbled back, a confused expression on his face.

  I didn’t say anything, except with my eyes.

  He shook his arm and stayed in place. “Stormy, I didn’t mean to grab you like that. I’m sorry.”

  “You would have been double sorry if I’d swept my leg.”

  “I swear I’ll never grab your arm again.”

  We stared at each other for a tense minute. Finally, I said, “I know you mean well. You care about your cousin, and maybe you even care about me, and you’re trying to protect both of us. But you need to keep your eyes open.”

  I glanced at the open door of the walk-in cooler, and the tarp-covered shape within.

  “You’re right,” he said solemnly. “I need to keep my eyes open.”

  “We’re a good team, and you’re tougher than Jessica. If there’s something going on up here, and we’re in danger, I need to know you have my back.”

  He took a deep breath and nodded. “I’ve got your back. Say the word, and I’ll do anything. Even if it means going against my family.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that. We’re going to keep a low profile and ride this out until the roads clear and the police show up. Not a peep to anyone about what we found out, or what we’re thinking.”

  “Not a peep.” He mimed zipping his lips.

  We’d stopped talking just in time. By the sound of the footfalls, someone was approaching the kitchen in a hurry.

  Chapter 30

  When you can’t see the solution for a problem, start telling someone how impossible it is. Inevitably, the answer will come to you before you’ve finished your thought.

  Christopher and I needed to secure the body in the cooler, or at least set a trap so we would know if anyone tampered with it. Someone was approaching the kitchen, and we had no time. I started telling him that a trap would be impossible, unless we had a powdery residue we could sprinkle on the floor around the gurney. My gaze fell upon a bag of flour, left out from the pancakes, and I had my solution before I could finish telling Christopher there wasn’t one.

  Working together, we quickly set up the trap inside the walk-in cooler. He unscrewed all but one of
the interior light bulbs, and I sprinkled a light dusting of flour on the floor while we backed out. If someone entered, they’d track footprints through the white flour and not notice, because of the dim light.

  We exited the cooler and nearly bumped into Marie, who looked bleak. Even her gray clothes seemed more drab than the day before, her brown ponytail less springy.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  Marie pushed up her glasses and snapped, “I’ll be better when people stop talking to me like I’ve turned stupid.” She went to the pantry and started pulling out loaves of bread. “I don’t care about what you’re doing inside that cooler. I’m only here because people still need to eat, so I’m going to make lunch.”

  Christopher and I went to the sink and washed our hands thoroughly. We should have been wearing gloves when we handled the body, but it was too late for that. I would keep gloves in mind for my next amateur autopsy.

  Marie pulled out pots and pans, making enough noise to wake the dead. She watched me out of the corner of her eye while I made a Do Not Enter sign for the door of the cooler.

  Christopher and I both offered to help with lunch, but she declined, saying she’d hired Jessica for the rest of the day, then she kicked us out of the kitchen.

  We met Jessica in the dining room, on her way in. She looked better than earlier, with just a little puffiness around her eyes. She’d put her red hair up in a tight bun, and looked professional in a crisp, white blouse and black skirt she sometimes wore for catering.

  She glanced around the empty dining room, then asked us in a hushed tone, “Did you really put the you-know-what in the walk-in cooler?”

  “There’s a sign on the door,” Christopher said. “You won’t stumble over it by accident.”

  She looked only mildly relieved by the news.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  She gave me a weak smile. “You know how Jeffrey likes to smell your mouth after you brush your teeth? I was on the bed, and I let him do that, and he sneezed right into my mouth.”