A Hard Bargain (21 page)

“Think we ought to follow him home?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

We followed at a discreet distance. When we saw the red taillights turn onto the road to Autumn Fields, we decided Hayden could make it the rest of the way.

“Now we can go mantis hunting,” Jerry said. “Where’s Kirby’s hideout supposed to be?”

“Half a mile beyond the covered bridge, we’re looking for a sign that says Lucky Lakes. Past the sign and some big rocks, we start looking for mantis activity.”

Jerry rolled down his window. The night air smelled of clover and honeysuckle. “I’ll be on the lookout for gleaming red eyes.”

Poppy Farrington’s directions were accurate—-up to a point. Half a mile past the covered bridge, we saw a worn wooden sign propped on a tree stump declaring, “Coming Soon! Lucky Lakes, A Luxury Development!”

“Are there any lakes, and are they lucky?” Jerry wanted to know.

“Apparently not. Do you see any big rocks?”

“I don’t see rocks of any size.”

We drove on. The road narrowed until paving stopped and dirt took over. Shadowy woods lined both sides of the road. Abruptly, the road went over a slight rise, dipped down, and stopped. Just beyond a dark field, we could see the gleam of water.

“A lucky lake,” Jerry said.

“Looks more like a lucky pond.”

He pointed. “Big rocks.”

Sure enough, at one edge of the small lake was a clump of large boulders. “Guess we continue on foot,” I said. I turned off the car. Jerry and I picked up our flashlights and got out.

“This is just like on ‘The X Files,’” he said, making his light dance on the trees. “You know, where Mulder and Scully go into spooky basements with nothing but flashlights.”

“Somehow I think Willet is long gone from this place, but we’re here. We might as well check it out.”

Grasshoppers and other insects whizzed and jumped as we walked through the field to the rocks, which loomed large and black against the night sky.

“It’s certainly a good place to have a hideout,” Jerry said. Then he stopped. “Mac, do you smell peanuts?”

I sniffed. “I think we’re on the right track.”

I heard a thud and a groan. At first I thought, in true Jerry fashion, he’d run into a tree. Then I saw him sprawled on the ground. An impossibly tall, thin figure stepped over him. The figure had bulbous eyes and a wicked triangular face. It swung its long arms like clubs. I ducked the first arm and grabbed the second as it whizzed over my head. The arm felt like a solid lead pipe. For a moment, my feet left the ground. Something ripped. I fell, my hands full of ragged strips. For a horrible moment, I thought it was diseased alien skin. Then a heavy clunk nearby made me realize I’d torn the creature’s arm off.

I snatched up the limb, aware of the cold texture of metal. The rest of the mantis recoiled. A male and very human voice said, “Don’t hit me!”

I raised the arm. “Who are you? What are you doing out here?”

“First you tell me who
you
are and what
you’re
doing out here.”

I kept a firm grip on my weapon. “I’m Madeline Maclin. I’m investigating the disappearance of Kirby Willet.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

The mantis took off its head. The pale thin man inside the elaborate costume gulped and said, “I’m Kirby Willet.”

Good lord, I thought. I’d just been joking with Shana when I said the mantis was Willet. We stared at each other until a groan from Jerry made Willet jump.

“Is he okay? I didn’t mean to hit him. I just wanted to scare you away.”

I helped Jerry sit up. “I’m all right,” he said.

“Suppose you explain yourself,” I said to Willet.

“I want people to stay away. I have work to do, important work. People don’t understand. I need my privacy.”

His eyes and his voice were jittery. I tried to stay calm. “Okay, we’ll leave you alone. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

“I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill Josh. I know that’s what everyone is saying. They think I’m still angry about that scholarship, but I’m not! I have other ways of getting money. I have lots of money safely hidden away. I wouldn’t kill anyone. Why have you been looking for me? Are you some sort of policeman?”

“You left some things at Frannie Thomas’ house.”

His voice rose in panic. “Those are
my
things! What’s happened to them?”

“In storage. She needed the room for her mother.”

“Everything’s in storage?”

“Except for the money. The police have that.”

“That’s
my
money!”

“Look,” I said. “Is there someplace we can go talk about this?”

Willet looked left and right as if expecting someone else to attack. “No. You should leave. Right now.”

“I can explain about the money,” I said.

I could tell he was torn between his need for privacy and his need to know about his cash. Jerry helped me out by groaning artistically, his hand on his forehead.

“Gosh, I’m really dizzy. You might have to call for an ambulance, Mac.”

The thought of an ambulance and possibly the police screaming up Lucky Lakes road was enough to make Willet say, “No, no. No more people. Come with me. You can rest for a minute, and then you have to leave.”

He turned and lumbered up past the rocks. Jerry shone his flashlight in his own face so I could see him wink.

“Thank you,” I said. “I promise we won’t stay long.”

I had several ideas about Willet’s lair, but I certainly wasn’t expecting a shiny blue and white RV parked in a grove of pine trees. Inside, every possible surface was covered with wires, bulbs, bits of machinery, and jars of peanuts.

Willet cleaned off a white plastic chair. “Sit there. I’ll get you some water. There isn’t room for you to sit, Ms. Maclin, but you won’t be staying long.”

Jerry was fascinated by all the gadgets. He pointed to a piece of folded cloth. “What’s this?”

Willet radiated pride. He pressed a lever on the cloth and a small umbrella shot up. He tapped the clothespin-like attachment. “This is a book umbrella for when you want to read in the shower.”

“Neat! And this?”

The next invention looked like two sets of metal claws. “A shoelace tier. It’s for people who don’t have time to tie their shoes.”

“These are great. Have you sold any?”

“I’m very very close to a breakthrough.”

Very very close to a breakdown, I thought. As Jerry continued to admire Willet’s weird devices, the inventor relaxed. He brought Jerry a glass of water with an odd-looking piece of plastic.

“Is this a two-hole straw?”

“Yes, so you can share a drink with a friend.”

“And this gadget?”

“It’s a toothpaste tube cleaner. You know how that extra gunk around the opening gets all hard and crusty? This scrapes the gunk away.”

I was amazed that Jerry could keep a straight face. “I can see why you’d want to keep this place a secret,” he said.

Willet reached for the nearest jar of peanuts and shook some into his hand. Crunching his favorite snack seemed to calm him even more. “It’s extremely important neither you nor Ms. Maclin tell anyone about this.”

“No problem.”

Kirby looked at me. “I won’t tell a soul,” I said, “but you have to explain something. Jerry and I found a package of poison hidden in room sixteen of the Wayfarer Motel.”

He didn’t seem surprised. “Isn’t it obvious? Someone is trying to frame me.”

“Why?”

His gesture sent peanuts flying. “Because I’m a loner! Don’t you people watch TV? It’s always the loner. Just because I’m eccentric, keep to myself, have no close friends, and only come out at night. It’s not fair. I just want to be left alone to work on my inventions.”

“What about your film, the one that lost the scholarship contest?” I asked.

“What about it? It was just an experiment. I’d rather pour my creativity into my inventions.”

“I thought your movie was brilliant.”

“Me, too,” Jerry said. “It could’ve used a car chase, though.”

Willet shook out another handful of peanuts. “Thank you, but it’s not my thing. I want to know about my money.”

“The police are keeping it for you,” I said.

“Why are they involved?”

“Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money to keep in a box. I thought I’d better take the money somewhere safe.”

His thin brows drew together. “What were you doing looking in my boxes?”

“Frannie didn’t know where you were or how to get in touch with you. We thought we might find an address in one of the boxes. If you don’t mind me asking, where did you get that much cash? Did you sell one of your inventions?”

Again he puffed with pride. “I won a contest.”

“An invention contest?”

“No, I wrote the winning jingle for Blue Ribbon peanuts. ‘Superior in taste and size, Blue Ribbon peanuts take the prize.’ Pretty good, huh?”

“Who knew you’d won this contest?”

“I can’t think of anyone I’d tell.”

“You don’t have any friends in town? What about Bernice?”

“I don’t know if I mentioned it to her or not.”

“But she’s the one who suggested you store your things at Frannie’s. Did she know about the money?”

“I don’t know. Now that you mention it, she’s the one who thought I should enter the contest, seeing as how I’m a fan of Blue Ribbon peanuts.” He poured another handful from the jar. “If you see her, tell her I won. I really don’t want to go into town. I’ve got things to do.”

“Were you planning to give Gaskins the money?” I asked.

He nodded. “I was willing to take a chance on his movie. We made movies back in school, and his were excellent. I always knew he’d become a famous film director.”

Not only was Willet a bad inventor, he wasn’t much of a critic, either. “When was the last time you spoke with Gaskins?”

“He called me a couple of weeks ago and said he was coming to Celosia to film a movie.” He crunched on the peanuts and swallowed. “I knew my money was safe, so I told him he could get it whenever he needed it.”

“But didn’t he contact you when he got to town?”

Willet took a sudden interest in a box of test tubes. “Well, he might have. I don’t know.”

A bad inventor, a lousy critic, and not much of a friend. I looked around the cluttered workplace for all-purpose glue. I didn’t see any. “He couldn’t find you, could he?”

He wouldn’t look at me. “I may have gotten involved with a project and forgot.”

I was trying to understand the relationships here. “So why would anyone want to frame you for Gaskins’ murder?”

Willet lined up the test tubes on the counter. “I have no idea. Someone must have the mistaken idea that Josh and I are enemies or rivals, which is ridiculous. We were up for the same scholarship in high school, that’s all. I wasn’t upset when he won. I told you, I thought his movie was excellent. He deserved to win.” He finally looked up. “Eventually, I would’ve remembered to give him the money. I’m not stupid, just absent-minded. I’m supposed to be absent-minded. I’m a genius, not a murderer.”

I was beginning to believe him. Even if the real murderer didn’t have a grudge against Willet, the inventor was a convenient suspect. Everyone in Celosia knew Willet was strange and unpredictable. People would have no trouble accepting him as the culprit.

Now he glared at Jerry. “I trust you’re recovered?”

Jerry set the glass with its goofy two-hole straw on top of a pile of scrap metal. “Yes, thanks.”

“Then if the two of you would please go.”

“I need to ask you one more question,” I said. “The night Gaskins was killed, where were you?”

“Here, of course, doing my work.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Actually, I can,” he said. “I videotaped myself.”

In anticipation of needing an alibi? “Are you in the habit of taping yourself?”

“Yes, I am. I need a record of my attempts to perfect my inventions. Last night, I was here, fine tuning my musical tweezers.” He leaned over and snapped on a TV, pressed a few buttons, and there he was on screen, hunched over a tangle of metal and wires. I could hear the first few bars of “Hair” twanging faintly in the background. Willet let us watch a while and then smiled a tight, unfriendly smile. “So you see, Ms. Maclin, I haven’t let my filmmaking skills go to waste. I believe you and your friend were leaving?”

***

Jerry and I trekked back to the Mazda, batting away the mosquitoes that swarmed up from the lake.

“Okay,” Jerry said, “he’s a genuine nut, but he’s got a great alibi.”

“He’s a genius, all right,” I said. “A genius at filmmaking, wasting his time on dead-end inventions.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“No, but I can’t think of anyone who’d go to all the trouble to frame him, either.”

“It would have to be someone who knew about Willet and Gaskins and has the wrong idea about the Baker Scholarship.”

We stopped in the tall grass and looked at each other. “Twenty,” we said.

“But she’s not the only one, remember?” Jerry said. “County Maxwell said the whole senior class hated Gaskins.”

I started walking. “It has to be someone else, someone with a motive other than a bad memory from high school.”

Jerry almost tripped over a clump of weeds. “Don’t forget the film crew.”

“But how many of them know Willet?”

“Maybe somebody’s mad because they didn’t get the money.”

I stopped again, and Jerry almost ran into me.

“What?” he said.

“What did you just say?”

“Maybe somebody’s mad because they didn’t get the money.”

A face had appeared in my mind, a severe disapproving face topped with steel wool hair. “I need to talk to Bernice.”

“You think she knew about the cash? Willet wasn’t even sure she knew he’d won the contest.”

“Everyone in town knows about the money.”

“Yeah, but would Bernice think she’s entitled to any of it?”

“That’s a very good question.”

When we got home, it was almost midnight. I’d have to wait and call the library tomorrow. Jerry and I were both too wired after our encounter with the Mantis to go to bed, so we got some cookies and cola and sat down in the living room. Jerry turned on the CD player. I passed him the bag of cookies. I pulled off my sneakers and sat back on the sofa, finally able to relax.