More icy drops hit my cheeks. We both always knew it would come to this. I shook my head, trying to shake the words away … forever.
Freddie paused a moment then said, “So, we doing this thing?” He had his hands planted on his hips, but his face was turned to the treetops as though he was seriously considering the implications of what were we about to do. He held the pose just a moment before he had to grip the boat’s edge for balance.
“We’re doing this thing.”
“Then let’s go.”
I stared at him a moment.
“Get in the boat,” he prodded.
“How?” I shouted. “Fly? Freddie, that thing’s a monster. Can you beam me over or something?”
“Hater.”
Chapter Fifteen
After several awkward minutes of my hopping from the canoe tied to the dock to Freddie’s boat, I finally managed to board the craft, and we made it across the lake at record speed.
It took me a couple of seconds to find my legs once I was back on solid ground. I couldn’t help but think that humans were not designed to go as fast as Freddie’s boat could take us. Thankfully, he had a pretty fancy new boathouse—better than my apartment back in Chicago—so we didn’t have to fiddle around too much covering the boat from the rain, which was now falling in heavy sheets.
“So Freddie,” I said once we had made it up the rock stairs to his place and inside, “I know your parents are pretty good at keeping you living in the style you’re accustomed to, but I gotta ask…”
“Yeah, I know. It’s a pretty awesome boat,” he said, taking my dripping jacket then looking at it as though I had brought a bag of garbage into his house. “Can this go in the dryer?”
I shook my head no.
“Then out it goes.” He tossed it outside onto a chair. At least it was a covered porch. “It wasn’t my parents, though. I asked my grandmother to invest in the business.”
“And let me guess. You spent all the money on the boat.”
“Well,” he said, having the decency to look a little uncomfortable. “Boat power equals manpower out here. You wouldn’t understand. And I didn’t spend it all on the boat. You’re forgetting my day uniform … and I got a few other things.”
I nodded.
“Okay, don’t just stand there.” He shooed me farther into the house. “You look so cold it’s making me uncomfortable. Let’s turn on the fireplace and put a towel on your head or something.”
“Sounds good, but I want to call my uncle Jack first.”
Minutes later, I was sitting on the stone hearth of the gas fireplace in Freddie’s office slash living room. I hadn’t gotten ahold of my uncle directly, but I spoke to one of his assistants and gave him the details of what had happened. He said he’d give him the message and get back to me. It was a little awkward asking my uncle for help. I didn’t know him all that well, but he had been there for me during my last bout of legal difficulties, and he said I could always call him no matter what the problem. I was also guessing that if my mother hadn’t heard what was going on by now, she would soon, and she’d find a way to contact her brother … maybe telepathically … or with Skype.
“You want a beer?” Freddie asked. He was standing by the little fridge that had been built into the custom bookshelf behind his desk.
“No.” I shook my head. “I’ve decided to stop drinking when I’m home. I can barely keep up with everything when I’m sober.”
He shrugged then twisted the cap off a bottle and took a long swig. After that, he moved to his office chair and dropped into it, making a loud whompf sound. “You know what would go really well with this?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Bucket chicken,” he said, nodding in agreement with his own statement. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The biggest problem with Otter Lake is its total lack of accessibility to bucket chicken.”
“You’ve said that before?”
“Only all the time.”
“Huh.” I wasn’t about to argue. I didn’t want to send him on a tangent.
“Okay,” Freddie said, adjusting himself in his seat. “Tell me everything.”
I twisted my hair behind my head. “I don’t even know where to begin. I guess it started this morning when I talked to my mother about the twins’ past, well, not exactly talked—it was more like charades—and I found out that…”
“I’m sorry,” Freddie said leaning across his desk, cocking an ear in my direction. “You did what?”
Despite the gas fireplace, it felt like the temperature in the room had dropped two degrees. Maybe three.
“I talked to my mother and—”
“So you were working the case without me,” Freddie said with a tight nod. “But that couldn’t be right because you weren’t supposed to be doing that this week.”
“I wasn’t working the case. It was nothing. My mother grabbed me! And then she mentioned, well, mimed actually, that the twins had some sort of connection to a death that happened at the fair years ago, and—”
Freddie gasped … literally, audibly gasped.
“I was going to tell you,” I said dropping my eyes to the floor. “I just got distracted by Matthew … and then Grady … and then Rhonda … and something called Hot Jugs and Mugs?” I peeked up to see his reaction. It wasn’t good. He didn’t even seem to want to take my Hot Jugs and Mugs bait.
“I don’t know what to say to you right now.” He then gasped again. “I saw you this morning! At the dock! You said nothing!”
“I was going to tell you. I just—”
“This is a serious violation of our friendship.” Freddie took a very indignant-looking sip from his beer. “I mean, I get that relationships aren’t exactly your forte … and maybe they’re not mine either. But I do know that people in relationships have things they do together. Only together. You know like how couples have their TV shows? Well, this was our thing. You should have called the minute—the minute!—your mom gave you this lead.”
“I didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t investigating per se. I was just trying to find out why the twins were acting so strangely, and I really believed Mr. Masterson died of natural causes.”
Freddie was staring at the ceiling shaking his head. “I’m pretty shook up about this,” he said quickly. “I’m actually surprised by how shaken up I am.”
“Freddie, I’m sorry.” I flashed him my most remorseful face, dropping my hands to my sides. “But could we get back to what’s really important here—”
“No!”
I pinched my lips shut.
“You will not dismiss my feelings!”
I inhaled deeply and held up my hands. “Okay. I understand. How can I make this right?”
“I don’t know, Erica,” he said, looking away. “I don’t know.”
“There has to be something?” I pleaded. “We don’t have time to fight. We have work to do. The twins need us.”
He scoffed loudly. “Oh us. Now it’s us. Because this morning I thought it was just you.”
I felt my cheeks grow warm, and it wasn’t from the fire. “Fine. You know what, Freddie? If you’re going to be that way about it, let’s talk truth.”
He raised his eyebrows, arms crossed over his chest.
“You want to know why I didn’t tell you about the twins’ past?”
He held my gaze, mouth shut.
“I didn’t tell you the truth,” I said slowly, trying to decide if I really wanted to say this. “Because sometimes you take things a little too far. You lose sight of the people and get sucked into the drama.”
“Too far! Drama!” He slapped the desktop, then cringed as he looked at his palm. Guess that had stung.
“And I didn’t want to make the situation for the twins even worse.”
“Well,” he said, trying to control his facial expression, which only resulted in a lot of cheek quivering and bird-like mouth movements. “Thank you for showing so much faith in me.”
“Aw, Freddie. Come on.”
“No, you come on!” he snapped back. “You should have talked to me about this.”
“I—” Suddenly my mouth snapped shut of its own accord. Grady had said something similar to me a few months back about having a little more faith in people. I thought about it a moment longer and said, “You … are probably right.”
“I … I know I’m right.”
We stared at each other a moment.
“I really do need your help, Freddie. And—” I stopped a moment to take a breath. “—I was wrong and I’m sorry. Will you please help? If not for me or the twins,” I said quickly, putting my hand to my chest, “for the people of Otter Lake?”
He squinted and raised his chin in the air as though gauging my authenticity. “You’re lucky I take the security of this town seriously.” He took another sip of beer … and then another. “That’s the only reason I’m even considering forgiving you right now.” Then he downed the entire bottle and reached to get another one.
“So,” I asked carefully, “does that mean I’m off the hook?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“You need to be all-in, Erica.” His expression turned stony. “No more. Oh, I don’t know if we should be doing this, Freddie,” he said putting on an affected girlie voice while waving his hands in the air. “This is probably illegal, Freddie. My boyfriend won’t like this, Freddie.” He dropped both his hands … and his face. “That last one sounded dirty. But are we clear?”
“Clear.”
“Good. Now tell me everything.”
* * *
I spent the next half hour filling Freddie in on everything I had learned from my mother before moving on to my conversation with the twins. Maybe it was my earlier accusations of drama, but Freddie held a shrewd, contemplative expression throughout the entire recap. He even pyramided his fingers together at one point.
When I finished, he didn’t respond right away, but looked up at the ceiling … then at me … then out the window before settling back on me. He still didn’t say anything, though.
“So?” I asked. “What are we thinking here?
“So very much,” he replied with a slow nod. “The twins certainly seem to be guilty of something, but I can’t quite believe it’s cold-blooded murder.”
“I agree.”
He rubbed his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “Fetch me my violin.”
“I’m sorry, your what now?”
“My violin. It helps me think.”
“Freddie, you haven’t played the violin since you were eight.”
“I’ve taken it back up again.”
“No violin.”
“You are a terrible Watson.”
I didn’t bother to answer.
“Okay, let’s start with what we don’t know and need to find out.”
“Good.”
“One,” he said, holding up a finger. “We need the whole story of what happened to this man who died at the fair a longish time ago … and what he has to do with the twins.”
“Okay, but I want to be careful about stirring up old stories.” I wrapped the blanket from Freddie’s sofa more tightly around my shoulders. It felt like cashmere. Probably was. He did know how to live … and how to shop on the Internet. “It might make Tweety’s situation worse.”
“She’s already been taken in for questioning,” Freddie replied. “I guarantee you people are already talking.”
I sighed. “True enough.”
“Two,” Freddie said, putting up the next finger. “We need to find out Mr. Masterson’s cause of death.”
“Oh,” I said. “I think it was some kind of drug overdose. Grady kind of let that slip. I guess that’s why at first they thought maybe it was—” I snapped my mouth shut, but it was too late.
“Oh my GOD!” Freddie shouted.
“Did I forget to mention that part?”
“Did you forget to mention that part? Did you forget to mention that … when did you find this out?”
“Just earlier today, I swear.”
“All right, all right,” Freddie said, holding out his hands palms down, as though he were putting a lid on all his rage. “Moving forward. We need to confirm this cause-of-death theory of yours and find out what drug we’re talking about here.” Freddie started typing something on his computer. “I bet the murderer thought the ME would just write it off as accidental and not investigate.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, making a scoffing sound, “they didn’t count on me thinking about suspicious deaths when I’m just about to make out with my hot sheriff-almost-boyfriend, now, did they?”
Freddie briefly looked away from the computer to say, “No, they probably didn’t.” His eyes moved back to the screen. “Speaking of hot sheriff-almost-boyfriends, you didn’t say how things were between Grady and you, given the whole taking Tweety in thing.”
Please don’t make this about us.
I shook my head. It’s not like I wanted to make this about us. And I wasn’t exactly upset with Grady for doing his job. In fact, the real question was, how upset was he going to be with me for working with Freddie? Maybe I did have trust issues. I wanted to think that I trusted Grady to do his job. No, I did trust him to do his job … at least I thought I did. But Freddie and I could do things that maybe a sheriff couldn’t. And if we got in trouble for them, well, we’d deal with that. I couldn’t let Tweety go to jail. “Yeah, not great.”
He nodded.
“There are so many drugs that can cause death,” he said, face aglow from the light of the screen. “The time frame is going to be important here. Most of these are pretty fast acting—which is probably why they are zeroing in on Tweety.”
“Crap,” I said with a sigh. “We don’t have much to go on, do we?” I frowned as I thought of something. “Maybe we can find some witnesses who saw Mr. Masterson before he got on that ride … who saw what he was doing … who he was talking to, that kind of thing. Then we could come up with a list of potential suspects.”
“Yeah, there were a lot of people at the fair that day—” Freddie suddenly cut himself off and shot up from his seat, sending his office chair spinning. “We have to go!”
“What? Where?”
“To town! Now!”
“Why?” I asked not really wanting to leave my spot at the hearth.
“No time to explain! Let’s go,” he said, gesturing me to get up. “We’re going to run out of tape!”
“Tape! What tape?”
“Come on!” he shouted, hurtling his boat keys in my direction.
I ducked as the keys bounced off the wall, leaving a nick in the paint.
“Erica!” he shouted. “Learn how to catch!”
“I don’t want to drive Thunder.”
“It’s Lightning, moron.”
“Hey!” I shot back, bending to retrieve the keys from the bamboo floor.
“And you have to drive,” Freddie shouted already headed for the door. “I’ve been drinking.”
“This better be good, Freddie.”
“Oh it’s good,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Maybe even Betamax good.”
Chapter Sixteen
Normally I like boating, but handling Lightning and all her power was a little intimidating, especially at night. It didn’t help that after the rain had cleared up, a strong cold wind had been left behind. I was expecting the boat to launch us over to the next county any second. To make matters worse, every time I tried to slow down, Freddie whacked my arm.
I was dying to demand that he explain himself, but the boat was too loud for actual conversation. Every time I looked over at him, I could see by the light of the dash that he was mouthing the words, Come on. Come on. Come on.
What felt like seconds later, we approached the outskirts of the near-empty town marina by the fill-up stations. Actually the boat had sped so fast, it was possible we had gone back in time … or into the future … however the science worked. I slowe
d Lightning a good way back from the shore, not wanting to cause a mini tsunami.
“Over there,” Freddie said, pointing to the side of the main docks. “The town put in an extension just for me.”
I flashed him a look then muttered, “Unbelievable.” I turned the wheel, gliding toward the dock. “Now can you tell me why we are here?”
He jumped out of the boat more nimbly than I was used to seeing him move and began tying the front end off. “I know you were being all judgmental earlier with the money I spent on Lightning, but it just so happens that I did invest in some town surveillance.”
“You did?”
“Well, you probably don’t remember this, but Coach Waters had a camera set up on the foul line pole on the old baseball diamond, so that he could tape games and give feedback. But no one has used it in forever—not since they built that new diamond at the school.”
“Okay, I’m following.”
“Well, they took down the cage, but not the pole, and being the surveillance expert that I am, I thought it would be a good idea to buy it from him and have it running all the time, you know, just in case.” Freddie lightly smacked my arm. “I can’t believe I forgot it.”
Hot tingles ran up my back. “Are you being serious, right now?”
“Deadly,” Freddie said before running to tie off the other end. “There was a big fight at the town hall a month ago—you know, Live Free or Die New Hampshire and all that—but after the shenanigans of your last visit, everybody finally agreed that it was a good idea—at least during the fair. I was planning on putting it away for the winter.”
It made sense that the town was willing to get on board. It probably wasn’t just the murder and attempted murders that had happened in the summer. Someone had also started a bonfire and danced around it naked in the town square last time I was home pretending to be me … because that kind of thing happened when I came home.
“I programmed the VCR to tape for thirty-six hours before it starts taping over itself.”
I climbed out of the boat onto the dock to chase after Freddie, who was already hustling away. He wasn’t even watching his steps—that’s how excited he was … or inebriated. I caught up to him and asked, “What kind of VCR can tape for thirty-six hours?”
Pumpkin Picking with Murder Page 10