“What are we going to do?” Bay asked.
“We’re going to close,” I said. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“We have other things to do—people to investigate, leads to follow, a memorial to throw.”
Hector’s face lit up. “We’re going to keep trying.”
“Damn skippy,” I said.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Bay looked like she wanted to be excited, like she wanted to jump on board, but she also looked like she feared I’d been possessed by a demon.
“No. But I think something bigger is going on, something we didn’t know about.” I told them what I’d realized, that everything seemed connected: the grant, the murder, the vandalism. I was at the center of it, but not for the reason the cops thought. Our little attempts to investigate had pissed someone off, and that told me we’d been doing something right, even if we weren’t doing it well.
“You think all of this is about the grant money, then?” Bay said.
“Maybe. Not necessarily, but maybe. They say money and sex are behind most murders, right—well, there’s money mixed up in all this.” Not that twenty-five thousand dollars was enough to murder someone over, but it was more than enough to make or break a small business. “I’ve been thinking—Donald has been mixed up in all of this since the very beginning. And he was here the night of the murder. So was Meghan. What if, somehow, they met, and they were talking about trying to fix the grant process or something? Donald wants the money for his building. We know from Craig that he’s wanting to make some other investments. What if Wes overheard the two of them—Meghan and Donald—conspiring?”
“Meghan and Craig were arguing that night, too,” Hector said. “Maybe it was them.”
I shook my head. “No, we know Craig left. Max saw him.”
“He saw Donald, too,” Bay objected.
“Yeah, but no one else saw Donald that night, remember? He lives alone. And he goes everywhere in this building. He has keys. Max just saw him on the main floor. He could have left and come back or taken the maintenance elevator.”
“I’m not sure that hangs together.” Bay bit her lip. “Look, Autumn, I’m all for figuring this out, but I just don’t see how Donald could have committed the murder. I know he’s giving us a rough time, but he’s no Voldemort.”
“Maybe Meghan did it, and Donald’s helping her cover it up,” Hector said, ignoring her. “He’s the only one with access to the building at all times. And he’s always here—he could have vandalized the shop at any point.”
“We don’t need to prove he did it,” I said. “Just that he had motive, remember? And he’s been weird about this stuff from the beginning.”
“What do we need to do?” Hector asked.
“Well, I have some ideas. We need to check into Donald’s whereabouts that night. I’ll ask Craig if he actually saw Donald leave. And we need to get into Meghan’s store—she definitely didn’t want me in there. Maybe she’s hiding something.”
“Do we need to worry about you getting arrested?” Bay’s tone was light, but her eyes were serious.
“I don’t think so—Jordan can protect me. Anyway, you guys know I didn’t murder Wes. I was here the whole time. I’m not really a suspect. Detective Keller just wanted to scare me.” I was totally bluffing. Jordan wouldn’t be able to protect me without jeopardizing her job, and I wouldn’t ask that of her. And Detective Keller had succeeded in scaring me—but that was before Donald pissed me off. I wouldn’t let an old bully cow me into submission, especially when my store, my dream was on the line.
“You still want to have the memorial?” Bay said.
“More now than ever,” I said. “We need to invite everyone, talk to everyone. And it’ll be a good cover for doing some investigating. If we have it during late business hours, someone could probably sneak down to Meghan’s shop later in the night.”
“Donald will be pissed.”
“Yeah, but he won’t want to upset people by saying we can’t have a memorial. Everyone would hate him, and that’s so not what he wants.”
“We should invite Cody,” Hector said.
Bay and I both turned to stare at him. “Why on earth would we do that?”
Hector shrugged. “I still think he’s up to something. Maybe he’s the one working with Meghan if Donald isn’t. He could be doing the vandalism. And no one knows where he was when Wes died. Plus, he’s just weird. Sneaky-like, you know?” He narrowed his eyes suggestively.
“Um . . .” Bay and I grinned at each other. “How about you pursue that lead?” I said. Hector nodded, oblivious to our mockery.
“So, first, we plan that memorial for tomorrow. After that, we pursue Meghan and Donald—and Cody, I guess, since Hector wants him to be a villain.”
“He is a villain,” Hector said. “I’m telling you. Ever since that game, he’s been acting even shadier than usual. And whoever has been vandalizing the store knows how to mess with us. Donald wouldn’t know a Spellcasters card from a birthday card. Plus, he never gave anyone a solid alibi.”
There was a long pause as Bay and I both stared at him. She turned to me and said, “He may have a point, actually.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Good thinking, boy wonder. Ask him more about that night. See if he gets nervous.”
“I bet he’ll come if I invite him,” Bay said. “He’s mad at you two, but he might listen to me. He gamed with Wes for a long time, after all. He should be there.”
Hector grinned, pleased we had listened to his idea. We fell into planning mode, our heads together, working out the best way to honor Wes’s memory and the best ways to cover up our mischief.
We had hope again, and that changed everything.
13
THE NEXT NIGHT, MUSIC blared from the stereo Bay had set up in the back corner of the store. Her partner, Allison, was DJ, and Wes’s parents, a quiet, shell-shocked looking couple, had brought a selection of their son’s music. The gentle, loving memorial should have suited Wes. We had his music, his friends, his favorite games, his favorite foods. We tried to throw a party he would want to go to, not a party that would have bummed him out.
But in spite of our forced cheer, it wasn’t a very good party. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very good memorial, either. Paige lurked, red-eyed, in one corner while everyone else avoided her. Bay had actually persuaded Cody to show his grumpy face at the gathering, and he and Hector glowered at each other over a plate of cupcakes decorated with paper TARDISes on sticks. Nick had not shown, which must have contributed to Paige’s woeful mien.
Wes’s death was the elephant in the room. Everyone wondered if someone present had killed him. No one wanted to discuss the things he loved, because he had loved Ten Again and gaming with his friends, and, to all appearances, those were the very things that had gotten him killed. Add to the mix the fact that this might be the store’s last hurrah, and you had the world’s saddest party.
“I wish Nick had come,” I muttered to Jordan over the bowl of potato chips I was painstakingly arranging.
She took a chip and crunched it in my ear. “Why? Isn’t this weird enough? We’ve got a bunch of sad, socially awkward people with nothing to say to one another standing around a doomed venue on a Tuesday night. We’re one disco ball and some balloons away from a sixth-grade mixer in hell.”
“Not helping,” I said. “It doesn’t look good, him skipping out on this. Like he’s guilty or something.”
“He probably is guilty.” She took another chip. “And believe me, you don’t need that hanging around, especially when you’re already going to piss off half the town leadership by throwing this party.”
I rotated the bowl of chips another six degrees. “You guys aren’t going to arrest me, are you?”
“Nah.” She didn’t elaborate.
“What about our plans to investigate?”
Jordan rolled her eyes and gave me a sideways glance.
“What plans?”
“Right.”
She took a fistful of chips and sidled toward the dip. She had made it clear as a broken window: no more amateur sleuthing for her. She couldn’t know about it, couldn’t help, couldn’t even acknowledge that I’d spoken about it. I let her off the hook and moved toward Hector and Cody, still eye-wrestling over the desserts.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Cody said. He tossed back the dregs of a can of soda, refusing to meet my eyes when I joined them.
“No?” Hector said. “You can ask around—no one saw you that night. No one but Max, downstairs. You left the release party. Where were you?”
“I went to talk to Paige and Nick. Ask her.”
“Yeah, but that didn’t take the whole time. We know you went after Wes.”
The soda can crunched in Cody’s fist. “Stop saying that. You don’t have any proof.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
This was the world’s most pitiful interrogation. Over the speakers, an angsty hipster sang to an acoustic guitar. I heaved a sigh.
“How did you leave the building, then?” Hector persisted. “You didn’t come through the store.”
“I went out the back. The service exit.”
I blinked. “Wait—you went out the service exit down the hall on this floor? The cops were down there.”
“Not when I left, they weren’t.”
“Did you see anyone else down there?”
“No.” He still wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“You’re lying!” Hector snapped.
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“Not even Donald? I—heard he was down there sometime before Wes died.”
Cody shook his head. “Nope. The only person I saw before I left was that security guard before I went downstairs.”
Donald’s story was weakening like it had been hit with a Klingon disruptor beam. He told Craig he went downstairs, but Max saw him leave on the main floor. And no one could say when he had left or where he had gone before then.
“Did you talk to Wes before you left?” Hector asked Cody.
Cody put his can down hard enough that it made a metallic crinkling noise. He clenched a fist and shoved it in Hector’s face. Hector took a step back. “I have answered these questions for the cops, like, fifty times. If my answers were good enough for them, they should be good enough for you.”
Jordan appeared as if Cody had pulled her out of a hat. “Easy boys,” she said. She wasn’t in uniform, but she took the square-shouldered cops’ stance that made her look sturdy as a linebacker. She could take Cody out, and he knew it.
He stepped back, breathing thickly. “I’m sick of this guy’s questions. Wes was my friend, too.” He shouted this last, looking toward Wes’s parents, still standing with Bay in the corner.
Wes’s mom put a hand over her mouth. Bay muttered something to her, and I could see Mr. Bowen nodding. Apparently they weren’t fans of Cody, either. I wondered if they’d gotten angry phone calls about his character’s death just like we had. Around the room, people were shifting and looking at the four of us with wide, frightened eyes. The last thing we needed to liven up this particular occasion was a fistfight.
“Let him be,” I said to Hector. “We’re all here for the same thing.” I looked at Cody as I said this.
He nodded grudgingly, then took another step back. Jordan let him pass, and we watched him disappear back into the crowd.
“That guy.” Hector shook his head. “He’s hiding something.”
“Maybe,” Jordan said.
We both stared at her, shocked. She shrugged. “Call it a gut feeling or just training. He’s hiding something, but I’m not convinced it’s murder.” She made a finger gun and pointed it at Hector. “Good work, kid.”
Hector flushed, pleased. If I could have, I would’ve elbowed Jordan to shut her up. We did not need Hector thinking he was good at this little cops-and-robbers game we seemed to have invented. Join the Ten Again LARPers, solve murders, put away the bad guy—but we play for keeps, so someone has to die before we can get started.
I moved away from them before Hector could start quizzing Jordan on the best ways to distinguish between gut instincts and mere biased suspicions. I thought, idly, that I would go talk to Wes’s parents, try to reassure them that not all of our customers were rage-filled weirdos who couldn’t separate a character from a friend. I’d been where Cody was, losing a character, betrayed by a gaming group, misunderstood and full of woe.
The difference was, I could separate the game from life. Cody wanted the fictions to be the realities, and when he couldn’t rewrite his life, reroll the dice, he tried to make everyone else feel like a loser, too. Poor guy. I almost pitied him.
At that very moment, when the tide of my sympathy was at its highest, I saw Craig standing outside the mall door, peering into the window like Oliver Twist. I almost dropped my own plastic cup of soda when I spotted him.
When he saw me, I waved, too shocked to think of a rational response to seeing my ex crashing the memorial of a kid he didn’t know. And Craig didn’t even game anymore, so it wasn’t like he was supporting the community.
He beckoned me. I made my way through the crowd and closed the door behind me.
“What are you doing here, Craig?”
He looked sheepish, standing there with his hands in his pockets. “I wanted to warn you—Meghan heard you guys are doing this. She’s on the warpath.”
“She called Donald?”
“I think she called the cops.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you serious?” Donald may have asked me to close for a few days, but as far as I knew, I wasn’t doing anything illegal. The wake wasn’t even loud. There was no alcohol, no one in the hallway, nothing to complain about beyond our very presence.
“Yeah. She’s upstairs. I got there a few minutes ago, but I heard her talking to a dispatcher, I think.”
“You think?”
“She said, ‘Yes, they’re here,’ and ‘No, I haven’t talked to them,’ and, ‘Could you send a car?’”
“Well, that doesn’t sound too promising.” I grimaced. “Thanks for the warning.”
“It seemed fair. I know you guys aren’t up to anything.” He looked over my shoulder, peering into the party. “It’s a nice thing you’re doing. Paige has been devastated.”
“Yeah. Thanks, I guess.”
“Everyone says he was a good kid.”
“The best.” I gave him a half-hearted smile. “This is the least I could do.”
Craig leaned sideways against the window, still looking in. “Do you ever think of just . . . throwing in the towel?”
“What?”
“Just giving in. You’ve got a great crowd. I know your customers love you. And that poor kid . . .” He looked at me. “You could just move across town. Get out of the building, give it up. You’d do just as well closer to campus or even in that new retail district on the other side of town.”
“Are you . . . trying to sell me property?” I asked, a sour taste in my mouth.
To his credit, Craig’s jaw dropped. “God, no, Autumn. You just looked so . . . worn down . . . standing in there. I want you to be happy. And you’ve been doing nothing but fight this place for months now. First the grant, now this. Aren’t you sick of it?”
The brutal honesty of his question caught me completely off guard. It took me a moment to find my voice. “Yes,” I said. “Yes. I’m sick of it.” It hurt to say it.
“So why keep fighting?”
“I—”
I didn’t have an answer. Not an easy one, and not right away. He was right. It had taken me ages to get Donald to even agree to my grant application, and from the day I’d started that process, I’d been fighting against my very nature. And back when I rented the store, Donald had been dubious about my role in Independence Square Mall. I wouldn’t do well, he
said, there was no market in the building for a game store.
On the other hand—
“What else am I going to do?” I said.
Craig smiled. He reached out a hand like he wanted to touch my face, thought better of it, and tucked his hand into his pocket. “You could just run your store. Game tournaments. Swords and sorcery. No grants, no politicians, no investigations.”
“I could,” I agreed. “Always assuming there are no murders on the other side of town.”
He didn’t laugh. “You should think about it.”
“I will.” That was a promise I could keep. I might have no choice but to think about it if Donald got his way.
The awkward silence that always fell between us hung thick in the air. Craig’s hazel eyes traced my face, as if he could read my thoughts written in my skin. I didn’t know what to think, what to say.
“I should go try to talk to Meghan,” I said. “Or at least call Donald.”
“I’ll talk to Meghan,” Craig said. Before he took a step to go, though, he froze, looking in the store window. “Is everything okay in there?” he asked, pointing.
“What?” I looked over his shoulder. Inside, I could see that a crowd had formed near the center of the store. Hector stood at its outskirts, his cell phone to his ear, while Bay was at the register, the store’s phone in her hand, her other arm in the air, waving toward me. Mrs. Bowen stood behind her, crying. Jordan stood in the middle of the crowd, one hand holding tight to Cody’s arm, the other extended toward—
“Damn it, Nick,” I muttered. I pushed the door open and strode back into the store.
Nick drew back his arm, preparing to swing at Cody. “You did this to us,” he shouted.
“Come on, son,” Mr. Bowen said. He grabbed Nick around the chest, surprising me. He hauled his son’s friend backward, but Nick was younger and had the strength of anger on his side. He broke free, pushed Jordan aside, and hit Cody in the face. Cody fell backward into the table of refreshments, sending him, the table, and the desserts crashing to the floor. Someone shrieked as cherry filling, red as blood, gushed everywhere. Nick dove for Cody. His head met Cody’s chest with a thud, and Cody grunted before he sagged backward into the cookies. Jordan was a mere instant behind Nick. She slugged him in the gut, and he crumpled, wheezing. She grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and dragged him off of Cody.
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