Death of a Batty Genius (Stormy Day Mystery #3) (26 page)

“Benji, is there anything else I should know? Any information you’ve been holding back, for any reason?”

He looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “No.”

I thanked him and let myself out. In the quiet hallway, my hand trembled as I reached for the door handle to my room. I’d remained calm under pressure while questioning Benji, but it had not been easy. When he’d asked about Peggy, I’d fought a powerful urge to flee.

Benji seemed harmless on the surface, but he had lied to me at least three times. I’d caught him on the lie about the book, but he still had information he wasn’t telling me. Both times I’d asked him about theories, he’d answered while looking me directly in the eyes instead of his usual habit of focusing on my mouth or the floor.

Had I just been alone in a room with a killer? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

I let myself into my room so I could make notes and report back to Officer Wiggles.

The curtains were drawn to block out the afternoon sunshine, and Jessica was under the covers in her bed. Without waking her, I left the big book with my other things, checked on Jeffrey, then quietly let myself out again.

What next? Christopher wasn’t back yet with the body, or he would have messaged me.

The hallway was quiet, except for a sound similar to water trickling. The sound was coming from down the hall, from the open door leading to the room that had been Franco and Della’s.

Chapter 28
 

From a distance,
the sound of fingers tapping on a computer keyboard mimics the sound of trickling water.

I stopped by the half-open door of Franco and Della’s room and listened.

There were no voices, just the sound of fingertips on a keyboard.

Somebody was up to something. Quietly, I pushed open the door and crept in.

Dion sat with his back to me, at the room’s desk, which was pushed up against the wood covering the smashed door. He was focused on the laptop screen and didn’t acknowledge me.

I read over his shoulder, scanning an archived article from the Misty Falls Mirror. The date wasn’t visible, but the headline was clear: Police Admit No Leads in Mysterious Hit and Run.

I didn’t need to read the text to know what the article was about. I’d been seven years old, young enough that my father was reluctant to share all the details of cases, but old enough to ask him questions. I wanted to know—and the whole town wanted to know—if the local police would ever solve the case.

A male victim had been struck while crossing the street. The driver of the vehicle fled the scene, scraping other cars and even knocking over a mailbox.

Luckily for the pedestrian victim, his injuries weren’t fatal. He suffered a broken leg, and that would’ve been the end of it, but a local reporter seemed bent on turning the investigation—or lack of one—into a huge scandal. As a child, I was too naive to understand the issues. One night, I told my father that he could make the whole thing go away if he would just track down the bad person driving the car. He paced the kitchen for a while, then promised me ice cream for a month if I never brought up the topic again.

The ice cream bribe had worked, and I hadn’t thought much about the case until seeing Dion’s screen.

Accompanying the article was a photo of the pedestrian, with the same dark eyes and curly hair as Dion.

“That was your father,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

Dion jerked around, startled. He closed the laptop. The computer’s lid was covered in stickers and rhinestones, spelling out the name
Della
in swirly cursive.

“And your father was the investigator,” he said. “I try not to think about it, so even when I heard your last name was Day, I didn’t put it together until now.”

“My father was troubled by that case. It was the first time he brought his work home with him. We had boxes of statements in the living room.”

He scoffed. “For all the good it did.”

“My father did everything he could to track down that driver,” I said. “It was a terrible time for him.”

“Was it? Did he go on painkillers for his broken leg and get hooked on the drugs? Did he have lingering nerve pain the doctors couldn’t treat, pain they said was all in his head? Did your father drink himself to death within a year? Because mine did.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He looked at the laptop as he traced the rhinestone letters with his finger. “Don’t be sorry. It wasn’t all bad. My father wasn’t that great. When he took that final dose, everyone’s life started getting better. My mother remarried, and then Della was born. In a way, my father died so that she could live.”

“You seem to really love your sister. How is she doing? How did she take the news?”

“She’s not returning anyone’s phone calls, so the sooner we can get ourselves out of here, the better.”

“Do you need some help packing up her things?” I glanced around the gloomy room. In her haste to leave, she’d left not just her laptop, but also clothes, toiletries, and platform shoes. In light of her boyfriend being dead, she probably wouldn’t care about any of those things for a while, but getting them to her was the right thing to do.

Dion thanked me, and said he could use my help.

Together, we went over the entire room and bathroom, picking up all the items that belonged to either Della or Franco. We used the room’s pillowcases as temporary bags.

While we tidied, we talked about growing up in Misty Falls. I mentioned Benji’s blueprints for the treehouse, and Dion relaxed with a big laugh.

“He wanted to put in a working elevator,” Dion said. “You should have seen his schematics, with pulleys and levers and counterweights. The guy was already over-thinking everything. If we could get him to laugh and lighten up once a week, it was a miracle.”

“It sounds like he was careful, even as a kid.”

Dion smiled as he slid Della’s laptop into the pillowcase. “He was always wound up so tight. You know how Superman squeezes a lump of coal into a diamond? We used to joke that one day Benji would get a C-minus on a science exam, and there would be a little crackle sound, then he’d be gone, and there would just be a diamond sitting on his chair.”

I laughed. “That doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would drive his car into the wall of his garage. What year did he do that, anyway?”

Dion’s expression turned serious. “I don’t remember.”

“Doesn’t matter. We all do dumb stuff when we’re kids.” I laughed. “I was a cheerleader. You should have seen me and Jessica in those days.” I gave him a warm smile. “She seems to like you.”

He grinned and looked away. “She’s really nice.”

We finished packing up the things, and I reached for the pillowcase with the laptop. “You’ll be coming in my car back into town, right? Jessica will probably insist. I’ve got room in my bag, so I’ll pop this in there for you.”

He looked as though he might object, but I backed my way out of the room quickly.

Back in my room, I sat cross-legged by the door so I didn’t disturb Jessica.

Della didn’t have her computer password protected, which I had expected, given that her brother had been on it.

I was able to pull up the history for the computer and check the files that had been opened recently.

The Misty Falls newspaper article had been accessed recently by Dion, probably from the same link in the browser history that I could see. The article about the hit-and-run had been accessed first on Sunday night, with that laptop.

At the same time, someone had been going through photos of the clubhouse gang, in their youth. The laptop had an archive of photos from before Della was born, so either it was actually Franco’s laptop or the couple shared it.

Except for the gleaming metallic braces on her teeth, the Marie in the photos looked the same as the Marie at the lodge. She had her brown hair in a ponytail and wore glasses in the style of the day. She wore a pair of large sweatpants in several of the pictures. I could understand how she’d earned the nickname of Monsterpants.

Dion had a big smile and wore his curly hair longer in those days, fanning out in a wide oval. Benji wore too-short trousers in every picture, and sported a haircut that looked as if his mother had put a bowl on his head and snipped around it. Franco always stared defiantly into the camera lens with one eye, the other covered by a dark forelock of hair.

I couldn’t tell how long each photo had been looked at, but I could see through the history on the slideshow application that the ones accessed for a larger view all contained a boxy, dark blue car—Benji’s Plymouth Volaré. It wasn’t the sexiest, its shape resembling the police cruisers on the road in those days, but the kids seemed to enjoy posing in or on top of the vehicle, even decorating it for parades.

Benji’s Plymouth was absent from all photos dated after the unsolved hit-and-run accident. From that point, the kids posed with a station wagon driven by Marie.

I closed the laptop and ran my finger over Della’s rhinestones.

I’d interrupted Dion before he’d gotten to the photos with the car, which meant that he might not have put together the puzzle of what Franco was trying to blackmail Benji over.

Whether it was true or not, Franco, or someone else using Della’s laptop, had connected the hit-and-run of Dion’s father with the disappearance of Benji’s car.

When I returned to Misty Falls, I would need to speak to my father about the accident, but in the meantime, I would keep it to myself. If Dion found out while we were all trapped at the lodge, no good would come of him accusing Benji of hitting his father.

On the positive side, now I understood what was going through Franco’s head on Sunday night.

On the negative side, the facts didn’t look so good for Benji, who had a powerful motivation to get rid of his blackmailer.

Before I could dwell on my discovery too long, my phone buzzed with an incoming message.

Christopher was letting me know they were back with the body.

I quickly stuffed Della’s things into my suitcase and pulled out a cardigan to wear inside the walk-in cooler.

Chapter 29
 

If you need
to store a corpse without freezing it, the optimal temperature is between 36°F and 39°F. Not so coincidentally, this is the same range at which you’d keep your home refrigerator, to prevent spoilage of pork chops and other meats.

If you won’t be getting to your pork chops or your corpses for a long time, you’ll want to go for negative temperature storage, at 14°F or colder. That’ll freeze your stored items and seriously slow down decomposition.

The Fairchild cousins were preparing to load the body of Franco Jerico into a 37°F cooler when I arrived in the kitchen.

Butch looked up at me and deadpanned, “A good friend will help you move, but it takes family to help you move a body.”

Christopher gave me a pained look. “Butch has been practicing that line for the last half hour.”

“How’d it go, other than the bad jokes?”

Christopher answered, “We didn’t see any cougars, but the birds followed us all the way back to the lodge, flitting from branch to branch and cawing. I felt like I was in an Edgar Allen Poe story.”

“On the bright side, you’ve both earned your body-moving Boy Scout badges. Good job getting him back here in one piece.” I reached for the edge of the blue tarp covering the body, then paused. “He is still in one piece, right?”