Just then the band reached the frenzied crescendo of a song. The cacophony made us both wince and clutch our ears.
Then the sound ended. A few seconds of stunned silence followed, and then the patter of applause so faint that I suspected everyone not related to the band had fled during the last number.
“Keep the trapdoor open? And listen to that?” Randall asked. “No thanks.”
He reached up for the trapdoor, but the band spoiled his snappy exit line by waiting until the last feeble claps died away before starting their new number. When the first chords of the second song rang out, Randall winced and slammed the trapdoor shut.
This time it was the guitarist’s turn in the spotlight. He launched into a solo riff that seemed to have no redeeming characteristics, apart from the virtuoso speed with which he executed it. And “executed” was definitely the right word. Like the emperor in Amadeus, I found myself muttering, “Too many notes.”
About a century later, the guitar solo ended and the vocalist leaped back into the fray. I braced myself against the noise and stepped outside again. And remembering Rose Noire’s tirade about death, violence, and primitive emotions, I tried to focus on the words, to see if they were as bad as she claimed.
The guitar player’s frenzy prevented me from even hearing the vocalist during the second number. But the third song started out with a much slower tempo. More of a rock ballad. Now that was more like it. And instead of leaping about like a frog on a hotplate, the vocalist had draped himself over the microphone like a weary praying mantis. I could not only see him, I could see his mouth move. Surely I could decipher the words of this song.
The singer rather mumbled the verses, as if he’d half-forgotten them, and I caught only a few phrases—“nasal chains,” and “a drywall knight.” But he belted out the chorus.
In a cowbell
Honesty has arrived
Oh bwana
Dental align!
“I give up,” I said aloud—not that anyone could possibly have heard me. “It could be death and violence and primitive emotions. Or his mother’s to-do list. The kid needs a speech therapist.”
I brooded through the rest of the song. Was I turning into my parents? Completely unable to understand the music of the new generation? Actually, I reminded myself more of my childhood friend Eileen’s father, who during our teen years regularly outraged us with what I now realize were probably rather amusing parodies of our favorite rock songs.
“Psst! Meg!”
I wouldn’t have heard the whisper if it hadn’t come in the several seconds between the end of “In a cowbell” and the moment when the stunned audience began dutifully applauding. I turned around to see who was calling me.
Stanley Denton was peering out from behind a large trash can.
Chapter 33
“Meg?” Denton called. “Is the coast clear?”
I strolled over toward the trash can and pretended to deposit something in it.
“I don’t think there’s anyone in the tent, if that’s what you mean,” I said, as I smiled and clapped along with the rest of the audience. “But let me go inside first and check.”
I strolled casually back inside the tent. No one there. No one visible in the crawl space, either. I pulled out my cell phone and sent a text message to Mr. Throckmorton: “Tell Randall to keep his crew in the tunnel. Possible hostile in the tent.”
I tapped the send button, then walked back to the tent flap and gave a thumbs-up sign to the waiting night. I stepped back inside, and a few seconds later, Denton burst into the tent. He pulled the flap closed, looked around, and then sat down behind one of the big wooden instrument cases that hadn’t gone into the crawl space.
“No one here,” I said. “What in the world is going on?”
“Don’t let anyone know I’m here.”
“I won’t,” I said. “But tell me why not? And where have you been all day, anyway?”
“Long story,” he said. “You don’t happen to have anything to eat, do you? I’ve been hiding out all day. Haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.”
“Lots of leftovers in the mini-fridge,” I said. “And a microwave to heat them up with. Help yourself.”
I was a little nervous at letting Denton into the crawl space again, but he barely glanced at the huge speakers and other clutter. He ransacked the mini-fridge and inhaled several slices of country ham and about a pint of cole slaw while I microwaved a plate of leftover pulled pork and mashed potatoes and found some bread to transform the pork into a sandwich. And then I led him out of the crawl space again by putting the sandwich on a plate and taking it with me. He sprawled on my folding recliner and dug in.
He still wasn’t giving the food the attention it deserved, but at least he was eating the sandwich slowly enough that I stopped worrying quite so much that he’d choke.
“Thif if great,” he said. Under the circumstances, even Mother wouldn’t have rebuked him for talking with his mouth full.
“So why are you hiding out?” I asked him, when he’d slowed down a little.
“Someone took a potshot at me last night when I was getting out of my car,” he said.
“At the Caerphilly Inn?”
He nodded, still chewing.
“I didn’t hear about it,” I said. “Wait—I bet you didn’t report it to the police, did you?”
He shook his head.
“You told your employer?”
He shook his head again.
“You didn’t tell anyone?”
He swallowed the food he was chewing.
“I’m telling you now,” he said. “And I’m not opposed to telling your chief of police if you can let him know I’m here without giving away the show to anyone who has a police radio. But I’d really rather not let my employer know where I am. Make that former employer. I have a strict policy against working for anyone who tries to kill me.”
“Not that I want to argue with you, but is there a particular reason you don’t trust the Evil Lender?” I asked.
“Because I’m more than half convinced that it was someone in their employ who shot at me.”
I nodded.
“I’m betting they’re also the ones who blew up your car this afternoon,” I said.
He choked on a bite of pulled pork sandwich at that and had to be pounded on the back.
“They blew up my car?” he asked when he could speak again. “How? When? Was anyone hurt?”
“No one was hurt,” I said. “It blew up when the Shiffley Towing Service was hauling it off the parking lot of the Inn at a little past noon today. While I was waiting for the chief to interview me, I overheard one of the State Troopers speculating that it was an acceleration detonation device, but we won’t know until the State Bureau of Investigation finishes analyzing the debris.”
“Debris,” he said. “Not wreck or hulk—debris?”
I nodded.
“Maybe the rumor mill exaggerated the damage?”
I shook my head.
“I saw the explosion,” I said. “It was raining car parts. Tow truck’s not in such good shape, either. Debris. Charred debris.”
“Damn,” he said. “I was fond of that car. Two hundred and twenty thousand miles and still chugging along. More to the point, I’m damned lucky. I was considering sneaking back to get it at around three a.m., but I decided they might have staked it out.”
“It’s possible they didn’t rig it to blow up until after that.”
“Also possible if I’d tried it they’d be picking pieces of me out of that debris. And identifying me with DNA.”
I didn’t argue with him. He took another bite of his pulled pork sandwich and chewed thoughtfully.
“You saw the explosion?” he asked, when he’d finished that bite. “How’d you happen to be over at the Inn just then?”
“I went over to burgle your room,” I said.
He paused in the middle of a bite.
“Find anything interesting?” he asked.
“Only Leonard Fisher doing his own burgling.”
“He caught you?”
“No, I hid on the balcony.” I figured there was no need to implicate Caroline as well.
“Wrong room, then,” he said. “My room doesn’t have a balcony.”
“Actually, it’s more like a window ledge with a view of the loading dock,” I said. He nodded. “I could tell you what brand of toothpaste and dental floss you use if you want me to prove I was there, or you can take my word for it. I saw Fisher take all the papers you left behind—not that there were many of them, just copies of your weekly reports to him. And I hope you didn’t have anything interesting on your laptop. I couldn’t check myself because of the password protection, but I’m sure the Evil Lender can find someone to get past that. Why do you think someone from FPF shot at you?”
“Presumably because they think I’m a liability to them,” he said. “Or maybe even a threat. Wish to hell I knew why. Nothing I’ve run across in the past few weeks seems all that useful or interesting to me.”
“Actually, I didn’t mean what their motive was for doing it, but why you were so very sure it was them,” I said.
“I’ve got no evidence it wasn’t, say, some gun-toting local who resents my being here,” he said. “But every instinct I have says it’s FPF.”
“And you trust your instinct even with no evidence?”
He leaned back in the recliner and looked thoughtful.
“In my experience,” he said, “instinct is your subconscious adding up the evidence before you even know you have it. I trust my instinct, absolutely. I’d be long dead by now if I didn’t.”
I was tempted, briefly, to repeat the words I overheard Fisher say. Maybe he could make more sense of them than we could.
And maybe I should wait until we were a little more sure what side he was on. After all, we only had his word for it that anyone had taken a shot at him at all.
“Any objection if I stay here in your tent tonight?” he asked. “I don’t much fancy going home—or anyplace else where FPF knows where to find me.”
“Bad idea,” I said. “The whole town square is swarming with tourists, townspeople, police, and Flying Monkeys. You couldn’t take two steps out of the tent without being spotted.”
“Then I’ll stay here in the tent.”
“Apart from the lack of a bathroom, what are you going to do when all the performers and craftspeople start showing up in the morning? I can’t swear that they’ll all keep your secret.”
“Hide under the bandstand?”
“Where half the women stow their purses, and the tech crew from the college spends half its time crawling around trying to fix the antiquated sound system? No, actually, you won’t have to worry about the people showing up in the morning. This place will get pretty busy when that wretched band finally knocks off, and you can’t hide under the bandstand because they had so much crap I made them shove half of it in there. You might as well hide up there onstage.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” he said.
I thought for a few moments.
“Michael and I have plenty of room,” I said finally. “You can come home with me and hide in one of our spare rooms.”
“And just how am I going to get out of the tent now without being spotted?”
Good question. The rolling box I’d used for the evidence bags was a little small. Maybe in one of Rancid Dread’s humongous speaker boxes?
Then inspiration struck.
“I have just the thing.” I ducked into the crawl space and plucked Horace’s gorilla suit down from where Rose Noire had hung it up to air.
Denton studied it dubiously.
“I just put this on and walk out?”
I nodded.
“No offense, but that doesn’t exactly sound like the most unobtrusive way to get around.”
“Trust me,” I said. “If you walk out of here beside me wearing that, no one will give it a second thought. A few people might say “Hi, Horace!”
“Your cousin wears this?” Denton took the suit and held it out at arm’s length.
“Not all the time, just when he needs to relax.”
“Been wearing it quite a bit today, apparently.” He wrinkled his nose.
“Not since yesterday.” I reached out to touch the fur. No longer still sopping wet, but still a little damp. Not surprising. The suit took forever to dry under optimal conditions, and a humid Virginia heat wave was about as far from optimal as you could find. “Look, it’s scruffy and smelly and more than a little weird, but it’s the best way I can think of to get you out of this tent without anyone being the wiser. You want to stay here until someone with no reason to keep your secret shows up?”
Denton opened the suit’s zipper and began to step in.
“Just one thing,” he said. “What if we run into your cousin while I’m wearing this?”
“Last I heard, he was down in Richmond delivering some evidence to the crime lab,” I said. “And he’s only on loan to Caerphilly—his real job is in Yorktown, and he’ll be on duty there tomorrow, doing crowd control at their Fourth of July celebration. And if anyone who knows his schedule spots you, both places are only about an hour away—he could easily have popped back for some reason.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just stick close so I don’t have to pretend to be Horace if anyone comes up to us.”
“Slouch a bit, and I’ll explain that you’ve had a very long day,” I said. “Horace often goes nonverbal when he’s wearing the suit. But I vote we don’t stay for the end of the concert. Let’s take off as soon as you’re ready.”
I called Rob and asked him to take over for me at the tent. Then Denton and I slipped out and hiked to my van. The rest of the town was curiously deserted, as if everyone not actually attending the concert had either fled to the surrounding countryside or retreated to the most soundproof portion of their houses and hunkered down to ride it out.
I waited until we were on the road to interrogate him.
“So what were you and Colleen Brown arguing about the night before she was killed?” I asked.
He sighed.
“Nothing’s very private in a small town, is it?”
I waited. I was about to prod him again when he finally answered my question.
“It wasn’t really an argument,” he said.
“You were heard shouting ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me sooner?’” I said. “Told you what sooner?”
He frowned slightly.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “She’d probably just told me about Leonard Fisher bringing in the falconer to harass Mr. Throckmorton. Something about Fisher, anyway. That was what our whole conversation was about. We both thought he was up to something.”
“What?”
“We had no idea. She kind of thought maybe he was trying to set her up to take the blame for the fact that they still hadn’t gotten the hermit out of the basement.”
“Seems a little far-fetched,” I said. “Since she only came here a month or two ago, and he’s been here since the day they seized the building.”
“That’s what I thought,” Denton said. “But according to her, half a dozen FPF execs have seen their careers wreck on the shoals of Caerphilly. Apparently, assigning you to come down here and work on the problem is FPF’s way of saying, ‘Hey! Get your resume ready!’ So maybe it’s not so paranoid.”
“And what did you think he was up to?”
“No idea,” he said. “That’s not what we disagreed about. She wanted to confront him about what he was up to. Have it out. Clear the air.”
“You thought that was a bad idea?”
“The guy’s a seasoned corporate weasel,” he said. “You don’t have it out with someone like that. You get the goods on him if you can, and otherwise you steer clear. I told her it was a stupid thing to do. Stupid and dangerous.”
The last word hung in the air for what seemed like a long while. Then he spoke again.
> “Of course, I only thought it was dangerous to her career,” he said. “I didn’t think her life was in jeopardy.”
“You think Fisher killed her, then?”
Another long pause.
“No idea,” he said. “I’d have pegged him as sneaky, not violent. A knife in the back, maybe. Or setting it up so it looked as if she committed suicide. Something well planned and executed. And unless the picture has changed a lot since last night, the murder doesn’t sound very well planned. More like a crime of impulse or opportunity, and one the killer didn’t think through very well—at least not if he was trying to frame Mr. Throckmorton.”
“True,” I said. “Of course, maybe it was planned to look like a crime of impulse. Is Fisher that devious?”
He shrugged.
“Yeah,” he said. “I just can’t figure out how he’d benefit from this. But one thing I can tell you—if the theory is that the murderer changed his clothes between the time of the murder and the time they evacuated the building, Fisher could do that, easy. He always wanted to look snappy if some corporate dignitary showed up or if one of the local TV stations wanted to interview him. He’d always have a change of clothing in his office, and in weather like this, probably several changes. The guards, on the other hand—can’t see any reason for them to keep a change of uniform lying around.”
I nodded.
When we got home, I ushered Denton into a room on the third floor—one of the few not already occupied by Festus’s paralegals.
“You’ve got your own bath,” I said. “The door beside the bureau. I hope you won’t be insulted, but I’m going to lock you in and keep the key myself.”
“How can I possibly be insulted?” he asked with a yawn. “I’m not actually conscious. Thanks, and good night.”
As I walked downstairs again, I pulled out my phone, intending to tell the chief that I’d found Denton. But when I hit the second floor, I ran into Kate Blake trudging up the stairs from the front hall.
“There you are!” she exclaimed.
Chapter 34
“Evening,” I said. “What can I do for you?” With luck, she wouldn’t have seen the moment of panic on my face as I realized how close Denton and I had come to running into her on our way in. And I couldn’t remember whether I’d let Denton take his gorilla head off before he got to his room.
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