Flipped Out

by Jennie Bentley

  “Damn,” I said.

  Adam narrowed his eyes at me. “Oh, you can talk.”

  “A little. My voice is hoarse and my throat hurts.”

  “You should have been dead,” Adam said, dropping the pants again.

  “You should have hit me instead of just pushing me inside the shed. I broke a hole in the wall and got out.”

  Adam smiled unpleasantly. “Deke said he rescued you.”

  “I would have made it out on my own,” I said, since it was true. Although being dragged through the door was a whole lot more pleasant than having to squeeze through the tiny hole surrounded by flames would have been, so I wasn’t complaining.

  “You won’t make it out this time.” Adam scooped up the bakery bag, which I should have realized didn’t have a scone in it as soon as it hit the floor. Scones don’t thunk. Adam pulled out a gun instead.

  I stared at it. “Where did you get that?”

  “It’s Wilson’s,” Adam said. “The big boob supports the NRA.” He shrugged. “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “About the gun? Oh, I’m surprised.” Not to say shaking in my boots. It was the third time someone had held a gun on me in the past six months, and I’d survived the other two times, but there was something about staring into that black hole that still gave me the jitters. “But I’m more surprised it’s you. You’re the only person I didn’t suspect.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Adam said.

  “So why did you kill Tony? And try to kill me?”

  He stared at me. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Of course I don’t know,” I said. Duh. Would I really be asking if I did?

  “You threatened me yesterday.”

  “What? No, I didn’t!”

  “Sure you did,” Adam said. “When we were talking about Nina and Tony and Ted and Fae and that girl who died. You said, ‘You’ve done things you don’t want anyone to know about.’ ”

  Or something like it. I remembered the gist of the remark if not the exact wording. I was pretty sure I hadn’t put it quite that strongly, but it didn’t seem worth arguing about.

  “So?” I said. “Hasn’t everyone? You looked like you were thinking of blackmailing Nina into letting you keep your job, and . . .” I trailed off.

  “I need this job,” Adam said. “I’ve tried theater, and movies, and now TV. If this doesn’t work out, I’ll have to go back to valet parking. This is my last chance to be somebody!” His eyes gleamed fanatically.

  “So was it you who put Stuart in the hospital? You turned the electricity back on and electrocuted him?”

  Adam nodded. “I figured if he was out of the way, Nina would give me a chance.”

  “I guess she didn’t realize you wouldn’t be able to do the job.”

  “I can do the job!”

  “You can’t even remember my name!” I said. “It’s Avery, Adam! Not Ivory, not Ivy, not Evie. Avery!”

  “I would have gotten it right,” Adam said sulkily.

  Maybe not soon enough for Nina, I thought. “So you got rid of Stuart. I guess it was just pure, dumb luck that he didn’t die. Did you even care one way or the other?”

  Adam shrugged. Probably not.

  “What about Tony? Why did you kill him? He wasn’t a threat to you.”

  “Nina was having dinner with him,” Adam said. “She told me to stay home and practice, to write down everything I wanted to say on camera the next day and memorize it all while she went to dinner with Tony. I thought she was going to offer him my job. She kept talking about how great he was on camera.”

  “So you killed him?”

  “It made sense at the time,” Adam said.

  “What were you even doing at the house that night? You couldn’t have known that Tony would be there.”

  “I waited,” Adam said, “outside the B and B until he’d dropped Nina off after dinner. And then I flagged him down. I made nice-nice and asked him to help me out. Asked him if he’d mind driving over to the house and going through it with me to help me come up with some patter that would impress Nina. I laid it on thick and told him how great he was and how much I admired him. He lapped it all up. When we got there, I used the key to open the door and then, when we got into the kitchen, I stabbed him with the screwdriver that was lying there.”

  His voice was chillingly indifferent, as if he were talking about swatting an insect that was buzzing around his head. It was as if the only thing Adam cared about was what happened to Adam; everyone else was of lesser importance. A lot lesser.

  “And then you took the tools because you thought it’d make it look like someone had broken in to steal them?”

  Adam nodded.

  “Where are they? Surely you didn’t carry them all the way back to the B and B on foot. Did you?”

  “They’re in the Dumpster,” Adam said. “Under some wood. I figured nobody’d think to look there.”

  And no one had that I knew about. The old “Purloined Letter” trick; hide something in—almost—plain view and watch everyone ignore it.

  “What about Melissa? Did you text her? Or was that Tony?”

  “Thought she might go down for it,” Adam said with a shrug.

  Right. So Adam had texted Melissa. I focused on keeping my voice steady. “What about Shannon and Josh? The car accident? What happened there?”

  “I thought he’d be going out with Fae again,” Adam said.

  “And why would you want to get rid of Fae? Did she know that you’d killed Tony? Did she see you go outside that night or something?” She might have, since her room was downstairs close to the back door.

  He looked incredulous. “Of course not. Wilson was filming her goofing around for the camera and saying how great she was, and I thought maybe he’d tell Nina to let Fae do my job instead.”

  “So you almost killed two innocent people because you thought Wilson might suggest that Fae take over your job? She’s a summer intern, Adam! In another month, she’ll be back in college.”

  “If she got my job, she might not go back to college,” Adam said stubbornly. “Who would?”

  It was clearly a rhetorical question, so I didn’t bother answering. He was way beyond reasoning with, anyway. Through all this, the gun in his hand hadn’t wavered, and I hadn’t heard a sound from upstairs, either, where I was pretty sure Brandon was hanging over the railing, waiting for an opportunity to fell Adam. But it was a tough situation. Adam had a gun, too, and if Brandon shot him, Adam might shoot me. If Brandon so much as made a sound, Adam might shoot me.

  Hell, Adam might shoot me for any reason, or no reason at all, anytime he wanted. So far, his reasons for killing, or almost killing, everyone else hadn’t exactly been well considered.

  So I tried to keep him talking, hoping that something would happen to tip the scales in our favor. “And yesterday you decided to get rid of me. Because you thought I knew that you’d killed Tony.”

  “It made sense at the time,” Adam said again. “You know, Evie, you shouldn’t go around threatening people if you don’t want them to come after you.”

  “I didn’t threaten you, you dipstick! You were the one person I absolutely didn’t think could be guilty. Until I saw the scratch marks on your leg just now.”

  “Stupid cat,” Adam growled, scowling at Mischa still cradled in my arms. Mischa hissed, the hairs on the back of his neck standing straight up. “I should shoot the damn thing right now.” Adam raised the gun and aimed it at Mischa’s head.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” I said, covering the cat, who took the opportunity to bite my finger. “Ouch. Dammit! He was just protecting his house. You’re the one who came in here and started messing with him. How come he didn’t scratch your hands, too?”

  “Gloves,” Adam said, lowering the gun again. Just enough to point it at my stomach instead of at the cat. Which was something of a relief. Not just because I didn’t want Mischa to get shot, but because if he shot Mischa, the bullet would probably go straig
ht through the tiny cat and into my chest. If he shot me in the stomach, we both stood a better chance of surviving.

  “So you took him outside and put him in the shed, and then you waited for me to go looking for him?”

  Adam nodded, a pleased smile on his glossily toohandsome face.

  “And when I got there, you pushed me in and bolted the door and set fire to the shed. And then I guess you ran away, since you thought the fire truck might show up.”

  “I figured it would,” Adam agreed, “but I thought it’d be too late to save you.”

  If it hadn’t been for the spade, and for Derek, it would have been.

  “So you thought I was dead?”

  “Until this morning,” Adam said, and his bottom lip jutted out in a sulky pout. “When Deke said you’d survived. But he said you couldn’t talk, so I thought there was still time to fix things, if I got to you before you could tell anyone what you knew about me. And now I guess it’s time.”

  He lifted the gun, and time slowed down while everything around me became very sharp and clear. I threw the cat at him, watching everything unfold in slow motion. Mischa sailed through the air with a drawn-out scream, legs stiff and claws extended. He landed square in Adam’s face, exactly where I’d aimed him. Adam yanked the gun up and pulled the trigger, his own scream muffled by seven pounds of fur, and I swear I could feel the bullet part my hair as I dropped to the floor. A second later, Brandon Thomas had dropped, too, straight out of the sky. Or more accurately, over the railing from the second floor. It took him a few seconds to orient himself once he’d touched down, but then he threw himself at Adam and knocked him down. Adam fell with a crash, the back of his head making a very satisfying crack against the hardwood floor. The gun went flying, and so did Mischa, in another arc through the air. He landed on all fours, the way cats do, before he straightened himself, shook, and turned to survey the scene. I scooped him up and cradled him, my hands shaking.

  “My hero.”

  That was the scene that met Wayne’s eyes a few minutes later when he walked through the front door with Derek right behind him.

  The latter quirked a brow, surveying the carnage. “This brings back memories, huh?”

  Just a few weeks after I’d moved into Aunt Inga’s house, just over a year ago now, someone else had tried to kill me. It had been on the top of the stairs rather than the bottom, but I’d been wearing this same terrycloth robe. A cat had been involved then, too: Inky had tripped the bad guy and sent him tumbling down the flight of stairs to end up in a heap on the hall floor, just a few feet from where Adam was laid out now.

  “This time it wasn’t me,” I said. “Brandon landed on him and sent him flying. He’s still out.”

  Derek looked in that direction. “Breathing, right?”

  I nodded. “Brandon checked. Twice. We want him to survive to stand trial.”

  “Definitely.” Derek turned back to me, obviously more concerned with my well-being than with Adam’s. His eyes were searching. “You all right, Tink?”

  “I’m fine,” I said hoarsely.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “I will be, once I’ve had time to rest. And once the TV crew leaves tomorrow.”

  “I can’t wait,” Derek said, wrapping me in his arms. “Remind me never to do this again.”

  I put my head on his shoulder. “No worries. This isn’t something I ever want to do again, either.”

  “Let’s get you upstairs and to bed.” He picked me up.

  “But the house—”

  “Between Cora and Beatrice and Kate and I, we’ll get it done. You rest. I’ll come get you this afternoon so you can be part of the final filming. Until then, I want you to sleep.”

  He skirted Adam’s recumbent body and started up the stairs.

  “I will,” I said, since rest sounded pretty good right then.

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  Epilogue

  “Good riddance,” Derek said, sotto voce, the next morning, as we stood outside the Waterfield Inn and waved good-bye to the television crew and the white van.

  I’d spent the previous day in bed, until Derek came and picked me up late in the afternoon so I could be there for when Wilson shot the “after” footage of the cottage.

  Yes, Wilson was still on the crew. As Nina had explained when I evinced surprise, he was the best, and she wasn’t about to lose him over something so silly as a string of poison-pen letters. They’d worked together for years with no problems, and she was fully prepared to forgive and forget. She was prepared to forgive Fae, too, although Fae was being dispatched back to Kansas City tout de suite. Which seemed fine with Fae, since the only reason she’d signed on to the crew in the first place was to torment Nina. She’d never planned to work for Flipped Out! past the summer in any case.

  It was her grandmother—Aurora’s mother, Wilson’s mother-in-law—who had mailed the letters, after writing them on her old-fashioned typewriter. Once the crew got to Waterfield, and Fae realized that our Tony was the same Tony who had been in Kansas City when her mother died, she’d decided to include him in the mailings. She had called her grandmother, and Grandma had put a letter in the mail to Tony within the hour; that was how it had gotten to us so fast. Of course, by the time it arrived, Tony was dead, and Fae swore up and down she’d had no intention of actually harming anyone. She knew Nina and Tony hadn’t done anything criminal, that Aurora herself was ultimately to blame for what happened; she just wanted them to feel bad about their part in it.

  My cheeks were still pink and my throat sore on Saturday morning, but I felt a lot better from resting so much. The shed was a total loss, though. The insurance company had come and gone. They had agreed to pay me for it, however, and Derek had promised to build me a new one. Bigger and better. With a real potting bench and maybe even a sink, if we could figure out how to bring water to the shed. That’d be useful the next time someone locked me in there and tried to burn me alive, too, as Derek said.

  Adam would be staying in Maine for the time being, and most likely for the foreseeable future. He’d be standing trial for killing Tony and for attempted murder of Josh and Shannon—or Fae—not to mention attempted murder of me, along with arson. It’d be a while until he got to go anywhere else, but once he did, Kentucky wanted him, so they could try him for attempted murder of Stuart, as well.

  Once Fae figured out that Adam had damned near killed Stuart just to get his job, I thought she might blow a gasket. She was so mad she was practically spitting nails, and Adam should consider himself lucky he was in police custody at that point, since I think Fae might have tried to kill him herself.

  We managed to get enough of the work on the house done by evening—with the help of Bea and Cora, Kate and Josh, and even Ted and Fae and Nina—that the shoot wrapped on time, and Wilson said he had enough footage for the editing person to piece together a decent show. It would air in a few months, and someone would let us know to look for it. And then we all went to our various homes—temporary and permanent—and got a better night’s sleep than the night before. In the morning, Derek and I dragged ourselves over to Kate’s B&B in time to wave the crew on their way, precipitating Derek’s remark.

  I snuggled into his side. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  He stared down at me, incredulous. “Not that bad? Tony died, Shannon and Josh almost died, and you almost burned to a crisp. Plus, Melissa spent two nights in jail. How can you call that not so bad?”

  I shrugged. “I thought you meant the renovation and the TV taping. And it could have been worse, you know. We all survived. Well, except Tony. But even Melissa seemed a lot more concerned with saving her skin than with mourning him. And the fact that she had to spend two nights in jail was actually a sort of bonus. Plus, I did prove that she didn’t do it. Maybe she’ll be nicer to me after this.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Kate said. She was standing there with us, waving good-bye, as well, and probably feeling the same
way Derek was. “So what are you two up to today?” She looked from one to the other of us.

  Derek shrugged. “There’s still a lot of work to do on the house. But I think Avery could use another day off. We both could. And it’s not like we’re in a hurry anymore. How about we take the ferry out to Rowanberry, Tink, and spend the day out there? Pack a picnic, lay on the beach? It’s still our house; Melissa hasn’t sold it yet. And it’s plenty warm enough to go in the water. What do you say?”

  “That sounds great. You wanna come, Kate?”

  But Kate shook her head. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, too, and mine can’t wait until next week. I’ve got new guests coming in tonight. But you two go and have a good time. You deserve it. I’ll see you later.”

  “That you will,” Derek said, and turned to me. “Ready, Tink?”

  “Ready.”

  I took his hand, and we wandered down the road toward the harbor, side by side.

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