Flipped Out

by Jennie Bentley

  He asked Josh the same questions I’d asked, and Josh gave the same answers. Wayne went on to ask Josh whether he’d noticed anyone in the parking lot when he came out of the restaurant earlier, and Josh said no. He also hadn’t seen anyone he knew inside, and had never noticed Derek and me. He’d been too preoccupied with Shannon to notice anything or anyone else. He didn’t say that, but it was definitely the impression I got.

  “What about you two?” Wayne turned to us, standing at the edge of the road while the paramedics were busy getting Shannon situated in the back of the ambulance and while Josh sat in the open door waiting his turn.

  “I didn’t notice anyone.”

  Derek shook his head.

  “We did ask the staff about Nina and Tony,” I added.

  “Anything?” Wayne asked.

  “Not much. The waiter said they seemed to get along reasonably well. They weren’t arguing but their conversation seemed ‘intense.’ He only caught a few words. Someone never meant for something to happen, and the name Rory. Or maybe Corey or Laurie.”

  “Except he said he could have misheard and it might have been ‘sorry,’ ” Derek added.

  “If it’s Rory,” Wayne said, “or Corey or Laurie, that would help.”

  “When we leave here, I’m going to go online and see what I can discover about the TV station in Missouri that Tony and Nina worked at twenty years ago, and anything that might have happened then. I’ll keep an eye out for the name Rory. Or Corey or Laurie. Unless you need us to go to the hospital with you?”

  I glanced from him to Kate, sitting next to Shannon inside the ambulance. Kate didn’t seem to have heard me, but Wayne shook his head. “I’ll make sure she calls you when something happens. You two both look like you should go home and get cleaned up. We’ve got this.”

  I nodded. Derek and I both looked a little worse for wear. His jeans were stained and dirty and had a rip at the knee from sliding down the hillside, while the soles of my feet were scratched and bloody, and my skirt was torn to shreds. Silk and tulle are lovely materials, but they aren’t meant for crawling around in the dirt.

  “Whoever did this,” Derek said, “wasn’t Melissa.”

  Wayne looked at him in silence for a moment. “Let’s make sure it was deliberate before we go making pronouncements, yeah?”

  “Fine. But if it was deliberate, and we both know that’s the most likely explanation, Melissa didn’t do it. She wouldn’t know how anyway, but she’s been in lockup since last night.”

  “And she’ll stay there,” Wayne said, “until I say otherwise. Thanks for finding the murder weapon, by the way. Connor called.”

  “My pleasure.” Well, sort of.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more important things to worry about.”

  He stalked away, already on the phone with Peter Cortino, the local mechanic, making arrangements to have the Honda pulled out of the water and taken to Peter’s shop, where Peter would determine whether the brake failure had been mechanical or induced.

  “Shall we?” Derek said. I nodded and turned to Josh, who’d been watching the exchange between his father and Derek from the open back of the ambulance.

  “Tell Kate we’re going, would you? I’m not sure she can hear me right now. And remind her to call me when Shannon wakes up.”

  Josh said he would, and Derek picked me up again and carried me to the truck and put me inside. A minute later, we were on our way down the ocean road toward Waterfield and home at a much more sedate pace than earlier. There’s nothing quite like a really bad scare to make you face the fact that bad stuff can happen anytime, anywhere.

  Mischa was lying in wait in the hallway at Aunt Inga’s house and launched himself at Derek the minute we walked inside, growling menacingly. I unhooked him and lifted him to my face, where I buried my nose in his soft fur. He immediately began purring.

  “He’s looking at me,” Derek said with a scowl, hands on his hips.

  “ So?”

  “He looks like he thinks he’s won. What does he think this is? A competition?”

  “Probably. I’m his human. You’re another guy. It makes sense that he’d be jealous.”

  “He wasn’t like this on the island.” He’d preferred me there, too, but he hadn’t been openly hostile to Derek. Not like now.

  “This is my home,” I said. “That he’s sharing with me. He probably thinks you’re an interloper.”

  “He’ll have to get over that. I’m not going anywhere.” He leaned in to kiss my cheek and pulled back when the kitten hissed. “Stupid cat. I’m gonna take a shower. After that, you should soak in the tub. Make sure all the sand and dirt gets out of your scratches. I’ll bandage your feet when you’re done.”

  “You’re so nice to me.”

  “I love you,” Derek said. “Cat and all.”

  He blew me a kiss and headed up the stairs, two steps at a time.

  Still holding Mischa, I wandered down the hallway toward the kitchen and utility room, wincing as my feet protested with each step I took. In the back of the house, I made sure that Mischa, as well as Jemmy and Inky, had food and water before I put Mischa down and made my slow way back to the front hall and up the stairs.

  Jemmy and Inky were curled up on the love seat in the parlor. Inky twitched her tail in greeting and Jemmy opened an eye to look at me as I went by, but that was the only reaction I got. They were getting used to Mischa, though. He had learned to stay off “their” love seat, and as long as he didn’t try to eat their food—which he did, occasionally, still being a growing boy—they got along just fine. They weren’t friendly, but they weren’t unfriendly, either.

  A lot like Nina and Tony, according to Grant the waiter.

  That thought brought me back to what had just happened tonight, and as I dragged myself up the stairs and into the bathroom and slipped into the tub of hot water that Derek had drawn for me, I thought about the car accident on the cliffs and what might so easily have happened had Josh been a worse driver and less used to the roads in and around Waterfield.

  If I’d been on my way down the ocean road last fall when my brakes gave out, I didn’t think I’d have been able to do what Josh did. I hadn’t lived here long enough to know where to turn off from the road, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep the truck under control on the way down, either. I’d grown up in New York City, and although I’d had a driver’s license and had made sure I kept it up, I was a far from experienced driver. Josh was only twenty-one, but he’d been driving these roads for years and had been riding with his dad before that. Whoever had done this had either counted on Josh’s inability to handle the car or hadn’t realized that Josh knew the roads as well as he did.

  Had the accident been meant to kill them, then? But if so, which of them? Or did that even matter? Who in the world would want to kill either Josh or Shannon? They were perfectly harmless, rather lovely young adults who had never done anything to anyone. True, Josh had helped his dad dig up evidence on a few cases, but surely that wasn’t reason enough to want to kill him? And as for Shannon . . .

  Now, if it had been the other way around, and it had been Fae in the car instead of Shannon, and I hadn’t known Shannon as well as I do, I might have postulated—for just a second, in a completely unbiased, impersonal way—that maybe Shannon had been trying to get rid of Fae. Not that she’d do anything like that, of course, and wouldn’t have, even if Fae wasn’t going to be leaving town in a few days. Not Shannon. But someone who didn’t know her the way I did might think so, perhaps.

  Fae . . .

  When I’d seen Josh at the Waymouth Tavern, I’d assumed he was having dinner with Fae again. She and Shannon did look alike, especially from the back, which was all I’d seen. Fae’s hair was jet-black, obviously dyed, while Shannon’s was a deep black cherry with red highlights, but that difference wouldn’t be obvious in the romantic dusk of the restaurant. And those sparkly stars she’d used to hold her hair back on one side looked like
something Fae might own.

  Was it possible that someone had sabotaged the car, thinking they were getting Fae, while really, they were getting Shannon?

  “Why would someone want to get Fae?” Derek asked when I was out of the tub and lounging on the bed in shorts and a T-shirt while he applied salve and Band-Aids to my feet. He had pulled on a clean pair of jeans from the small stash he keeps in a drawer of my bureau for occasions like this, but he was still bare-chested, and the view was distracting. Nice, but distracting. “This isn’t too bad. You might be a little uncomfortable walking for a day or two, but it’s no big deal. Just shallow scratches. Nothing deep. Stay there.” He got to his feet.

  “Why?”

  “I’m gonna get you a pair of socks. They’ll make your feet feel better.”

  I stayed where I was while I answered his earlier question. “I have no idea why anyone would want to get Fae. But that seems more likely than that someone would want to get Shannon. Fae’s part of the TV crew, and someone did get Stuart. And Tony.”

  “Tony wasn’t part of the crew,” Derek said, coming back with a pair of the fluffiest socks he could find. After he had pulled them on my feet, I wriggled my toes luxuriously.

  “No, but he was part of the renovation. If someone wanted to sabotage the show, they might have decided to target Tony, since the house was his. Or wait a minute—”

  “Yeah?” Derek said, helping me to stand.

  “What if Tony drove by the house on Cabot on his way home from dropping off Nina, and he saw someone there, someone who was staging some sort of accident? And then that person killed him, so he wouldn’t tell?”

  Derek blinked. Once, then once more. “That actually makes sense.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. Someone from the crew, then, since whoever is staging these things was around when Stuart was electrocuted, too.”

  “It’s a small suspect list,” Derek said. “Nina. Fae. Wilson. Ted. Adam.”

  “None of them had an alibi, that I know of.”

  “Wilson and Ted were together, weren’t they? In Portland?”

  “So they say,” I said, “but they could be in it together, right? It doesn’t have to be just one of them, it could be two of them working together, too.” Although if Wilson was working with someone, surely it was more likely to be his niece. “Fae watched movies with Shannon and then went to her room. Nina said she came home at ten thirty, but no one saw her. And I have no idea where Adam was.”

  Derek nodded. “Didn’t you say you were planning to do some research on these people?”

  We started down the stairs to the first floor, me walking very gingerly but really liking the feel of the fluffy socks on the abused soles of my feet. Since they were quite slippery, I held on to the banister with one hand and to Derek with the other. My great-aunt had died from tumbling down these stairs, and I had no desire to follow in her footsteps.

  “Not specifically on these people,” I said when we got to the landing, “but now maybe I will. I was more interested in that time twenty years ago when Nina and Tony worked together. But I’ll see what I can find out about the rest of the crew as well. And Grant.”

  “Maybe he’s had cosmetic surgery and he’s really Adam,” Derek suggested, depositing me safely on the floor in the entry.

  “Or he’s had a sex change and he’s really Fae.” I padded toward the front parlor. “Do you have something to keep you busy while I do this? It could take a while.”

  “I thought I might have a go at that old Adirondack chair in the shed. Get the drill out and give you Swiss cheese.”

  I smiled. “Sounds like fun. Knock yourself out.”

  “I’ll just drill the holes tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll take it over to Cabot Street and you can use the leftover paint from the utility room to paint it.”

  “Works for me.” I sat down at the desk and pushed the button to boot up the computer. Meanwhile, Derek went to the window behind me and lifted the bottom sash.

  “This way we can talk,” he explained.

  I nodded, already preoccupied with how to best tackle the Internet search.

  I’m fairly computer literate. I’m on a nodding acquaintance with Google and I’m familiar with most of the big social networking sites. I’m not a computer genius, though. For anything more complicated than the basics, I rely on Josh, who knows ten times more than I do. Or Ricky, but he was back in Pittsburgh with his family and with Paige. And, of course, Josh was at the hospital. Looked like it was up to me this time. I cracked my knuckles and set to work.

  Behind me, outside the open window, I heard Derek moving around. A big sort of hollow thump was the sound of the Adirondack chair from the shed being dumped on the wooden slats of the porch floor. Derek moved around some more—pulling out the electric drill and plugging it in—before I heard the whirring of the drill itself being tested. Then the sharp whine as the drill bit into the wood and the occasional muffled swear word floating in through the window screen when something didn’t go Derek’s way. Every so often, he’d stop—I realized later it was to change the drill bit; Swiss cheese needs holes both big and small—before the drill started up again.

  Meanwhile, I let my fingers do the walking on the keyboard, with varied results.

  Since it seemed logical—and easy—I started by googling each of the members of the crew by name, and coming up with the expected information. Adam and Fae both had Facebook and Twitter accounts; Wilson, Ted, and Nina did not. She had a LinkedIn profile, and so did Adam, but none of the others did. She was mentioned in a couple of different articles over the years—nominations for Emmy awards, presence at award shows and industry functions—and so were Wilson and Ted. There were pictures: Wilson with his lovely wife, whom I recognized from the photo he kept in his wallet; Nina and Ted individually and sometimes together. Adam was mentioned a few times in the cast of low-budget films and the equivalent of off-off-Broadway theater productions. Once he’d landed a recurring role in a cable TV show, but his part had been cancelled, or not renewed, after just four episodes. That wasn’t what he’d told me that first day I met him, when he told me his life story while Derek went home for another T-shirt. Then, he’d made it sound like it had been his choice to leave the cable TV show to go on to bigger and better opportunities.

  I found a couple pages of photos of him: He photographed extremely well, of course, and had quite the sixpack tucked away underneath those tight T-shirts. In several of the pictures, he was lifting the shirt to show off his abs, which I found more than a little icky, especially since he glistened as if he’d rubbed himself with Crisco for the occasion.

  Fae had no professional presence at all; from what I could make out, she was just your average college student who happened to have landed a summer gig in television, thanks to her uncle Wilson. She studied at Kansas City University, but then I already knew that. What I didn’t know, or didn’t realize, was that Kansas City U happened to be located in the great state of Missouri.

  All right, yeah, I knew there were two Kansas Cities. Somewhere in the back of my head, from a geography class years ago, I remembered that. I just hadn’t realized that when Fae said she was from Kansas City, she was actually from the state of Missouri, not the state of Kansas.

  “Hey,” I called out to Derek through the window; this realization happened to strike during a lull in the drilling, so he could hear me. “Josh told me yesterday that Fae’s a college student. This is just a summer job. And guess what? She’s studying at Kansas City University.”

  “Missouri or Kansas?” Derek called back.

  I made a face. Of course he’d catch that immediately, when I hadn’t. “Missouri.”

  “That’s interesting.” He leaned down so he could look through the window and see the computer screen.

  “I thought so. But that’s about the only interesting piece of information I’ve managed to find. Adam’s struck out repeatedly in pretty much every career direction he’s tried. Theatre, TV, movies. Nina has won
a few awards, and I discovered that she moved to Flipped Out! from another series at the same network, which was cancelled. It was called Burb Appeal.”

  “As in ‘suburb’ appeal?”

  “I guess so.”

  “No wonder it was cancelled,” Derek said. “What about the old host? Grant? And Stuart, the guy in the hospital?”

  It hadn’t crossed my mind to search Stuart, but now I did. And found very little. He’d been a rank nobody when he landed the gig as the host of Flipped Out!—a charming, aw-shucks young man from somewhere in Oklahoma who’d sent an audition tape to the network. He didn’t get picked then, but a year later, when Grant had failed out, he was offered the job. I read that in a press release the network had published to explain the changeover. It also gave Grant’s last name—Cummings—and said he’d left due to “creative differences.”

  Stuart’s accident last month got a mention on the Flipped Out! blog, followed by a few hundred comments, most of them from women offering wishes for a rapid recovery and a few other things I won’t mention, and they probably shouldn’t have, either. There was no mention of foul play.

  Grant Cummings was all over the Internet. He had a Facebook page, a MySpace page, a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter handle, a website, and a fan page, and after checking all of them, I could say with a lot of certainty that I was pretty sure he hadn’t had anything to do with Stuart’s accident or anything that had happened here in Waterfield. Unlike Adam, he really had gone on to bigger and better. After hacking around Hollywood for a year or so, doing very little—or very little I could find—he had landed a small, recurring role on a soap opera and had managed to translate it into a two-year run. His Facebook page said his contract had just been renewed for the new season. So he clearly had no time and less reason to want to sabotage the show that had dropped him.

  “Bummer,” Derek said.

  “It was just a thought. I suspected all along this had something to do with Nina and Tony and Missouri, not Grant. But it’s good to be able to eliminate him.”

  “Come have a look at your chair. How many holes do you want?”