Death of a Batty Genius (Stormy Day Mystery #3) (30 page)

“You broke my nose,” he cried.

He struggled to get back up, but could put only one foot on the ground before he buckled forward, swearing about how much his face hurt.

Amid Butch’s howling and swearing, and the others bawling over who loved Franco more, I could barely hear myself think.

I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled to get their attention. Everyone went quiet, except for some sniffles. The six other people in the room blinked at me expectantly.

“We need to establish a timeline,” I said. “Let’s assume that whatever happened to Franco was truly an accident, maybe from him taking Benji’s alien drugs. There’s nothing to be gained from throwing mud on each other needlessly, if there was no criminal intent.”

They all stared at me. Marie spoke first. “Have you started a timeline as part of your investigation?”

Butch’s head jerked. “Your investigation? Is that why you were at the body site? Why you’ve been following me around?”

The pressure of everyone staring at me was intense.

Benji said, “Stormy, did you tell anyone else you were investigating on my behalf?”

Marie did a double take. “You’re working for Benji? I thought you were working for me.”

“I am,” I said. “Sort of.”

Marie sputtered. “Are you billing him? That’s quite the racket you’ve got. How do we know you didn’t do something to Franco just so you could get paid?”

I held up my hands. “Guys, calm down. I haven’t billed any of you, and I wasn’t going to.”

“Good, because you’re fired,” Marie said.

“Fired,” Benji said. “Fired, fired, fired.”

I raised my eyebrows. From the look of Benji’s huge pupils, he didn’t even know what planet he was on, much less why he was firing me.

Dion shot me a dirty look, then shook his head.

Even Butch seemed to have turned on me, clutching his bleeding nose and scowling at me as though I’d been the one to head-butt him.

The heat of their rage-filled glares threatened to set me on fire. I got to my feet.

A smart person knows when trying to defend herself will only make things worse. This was one of those times.

Chapter 32
 

“That wasn’t the
best wake I’ve organized,” I said to Jessica and Christopher as we walked back to our rooms. “But on the bright side, it was the second-best.”

“You’ve only thrown two,” Jessica said.

“Exactly.”

“I missed your other one due to excessive drug use,” she joked.

Christopher paused on the stairwell to give her a questioning look.

“Cold syrup,” I explained. “She had a cold, and it probably didn’t help that she jumped off a waterfall into freezing cold chuck the day before.”

Christopher grinned. “You said
chuck
instead of water. I’ve missed hearing that. Chinook Jargon, right?”

“Great-grandmother on my mother’s side, but that’s just how we locals talk. Even my father says chuck, and he’s straight-up Irish.”

Jessica interjected, “The chuck that day was skookum, too. Skookumchuck.”

“Skookumchuck.” Christopher chuckled as he continued down the stairs.

We got to the hallway, and Jessica held up her hand, gesturing for us to wait there a minute. She touched her toes once, stretched twice, then started running. Like a gymnast, she did two perfect flips followed by a near-perfect third, just a little wobbly on the landing. She threw her arms in the air anyway, and we both clapped.

“I guess you’re feeling better,” Christopher called out. “You’ve gone from nearly fainting, to flipping down a hallway.”

“Movement is the body’s natural stress relief,” she answered. “But you know all about that, with your yoga practices.”

“I’m very new,” he said. “I’ve only learned enough to realize how little I know about anything.”

She smiled sweetly. “That’s life. I thought Dion was my future Mr. Right, but he’s kind of a weirdo.”

“Kind of? That whole group is nuts,” I said. “No wonder they called themselves
batty
.”

Christopher followed us to our door rather than go to his. “Let’s just hope Marie doesn’t poison us all at tonight’s dinner,” he joked.

Jessica wasn’t laughing.

The three of us entered the room, and once the door was closed, she said in a hushed voice, “We probably shouldn’t eat anything unless it’s from a shared serving bowl and Marie’s eating it, too.”

“Good point,” Christopher said.

Our conversation was interrupted by a rhythmic sound—Jeffrey’s paws on the glass door. He’d had enough of being cooped up in the small room and demanded access to the patio.

We opened the door between our room and Christopher’s, which distracted him for two minutes before he returned to wailing at the patio door.

We couldn’t risk letting him out and having him get lost and then eaten by the local wildlife after nightfall, so the three of us collaborated on a craft project. We used the sewing kit Jessica had packed, plus an old T-shirt I’d brought for sleeping, and created a stylish body harness and leash for Jeffrey.

We put it on him while congratulating ourselves for our excellent invention skills.

Jeffrey, however, was not impressed. He lay on his side, legs straight out and ears back. He looked as happy as one of those cats whose owners dress them up as pumpkins or turtles for Halloween.

“Why’s he acting like that?” Christopher asked. “The harness isn’t tight. It’s not even restrictive. He’s acting like he’s paralyzed.”

“There’s an antidote.” I went to the patio door and opened it.

Jeffrey raised his face and sniffed the cool air coming in. His ears twitched. Beyond the door, birds chirped happily in the warm spring weather.

With a little help, he got to his feet and made his way outside, weaving like a drunk until he hit his stride. The leash wouldn’t let him range very far, and we wouldn’t leave him out unsupervised, but the fresh air promised to help with his cabin fever.

As we cleaned up the craft supplies, I wished it could be as easy for us humans.

My phone buzzed with a message from Peggy, requesting I talk to her using the video chat on my laptop. Since Jessica and Christopher weren’t likely to be leaving the room soon, I confided in them that Peggy had asked for my help on the case.

“The police had better be paying you,” Jessica said. “I know you’re really good at bargain shopping, and you barely take my money for groceries because of all those coupons you use, but you deserve to get paid.”

“Coupons?” Christopher gave me a funny look. “Stormy, you would never—”

I pinched the back of his arm to quiet him. I would explain later. Jessica was too proud to take charity from me, so I had to fib and pretend to get bargains all the time. She paid me rent for her bedroom, but I would have let her stay for free, so I applied the rent money to other things.

“The Misty Falls Police Department will be paying,” I said. “And I wasn’t really charging the others. I only let them think I was working for them, to gain their trust.”

Christopher said, “Your deviousness runs much deeper than I ever imagined.”

Jessica punched his shoulder. “She’s clever, not devious, because she uses it for good.”

I opened my laptop, and after some fussing around to download drivers and reboot to get the soundcard working again, all three of us were on a secure video call with Officer Peggy Wiggles.

Peggy had been to our shared hairdresser since I’d seen her last, and her gray-streaked pixie haircut was on the short side. She took in the addition of Jessica and Christopher without showing any surprise.

“How are things in Misty Falls?” I asked.

“Still running around like a house mouse with a backpack full of catnip.” She turned to bark an order at someone off-screen, then turned back to us. For someone who was technically a rookie, she seemed to have a lot of authority.

She said to Christopher, “You’re the bonehead who insisted on moving the body?”

Christopher raised his hand. “My cousin, Butch Fairchild, insisted. Is that normal?”

She told someone off-screen to bring her a coffee, large. “Yes, that’s normal. It’s normal for civilians to disturb the crime scene and make everything harder for us. It happens all the time. The paramedics show up and the old man’s tucked in bed, wearing a pair of pajamas with no wrinkles except the fold marks from the drawer. Now, maybe he was on the throne when he met his maker, and I can’t say I blame anyone for wanting to protect his dignity, but the body doesn’t tell any lies. The body doesn’t care, and speaks the truth. Like your fellow there. He’s trying to tell us something.”

At the word
body
, Jessica had stood, and now she excused herself. Once she was over on Christopher’s side of the adjoining rooms, Peggy asked us how Jessica was doing. We explained she was holding up well enough, and Peggy commented, “The brave ones can be so delicate. It’s why they have to be brave.” She got her coffee, and asked to review my case notes.

She wasn’t driving and in a hurry, so I was able to go into more details about my inspection of the body, and how the purple bruise-like markings of the pooled blood were on one side of Franco’s body, while the photos of how he’d been found—plus the positioning of his limbs when rigor mortis started setting in—didn’t match.

“He was definitely moved after he died,” Peggy said. “Even before you knuckleheads moved him again. Please, tell me you don’t have a hobby taxidermist there who has already started the embalming process.”

“No, ma’am,” Christopher said. “He’s safe and sound in the walk-in cooler.”

“Fridge or freezer? Tell me it’s not the freezer. You think thawing out a big Christmas turkey takes forever!”

“Fridge,” he said. “He’s on a food trolley. Not like a real food trolley. I mean, it’s a trolley that’s used for food, but we’re not going to eat him. He’s not food.” Christopher’s cheeks reddened with embarrassment, but he couldn’t stop himself from talking. “We know he isn’t food. Sure, we’re trapped up here for heaven knows how long, but we’ve got plenty of food, and even if we didn’t, the Fairchilds are a respectable family, and—”

“Breathe,” she barked. “Count to ten while you breathe in, twenty when you breathe out, and don’t talk again until you reach three hundred.”

While Christopher sat counting and breathing, Peggy and I discussed the case. I tried to find out what she knew, but she declined to comment, saying it was for my protection.

I told Peggy about my trip to the body site with Butch, and then about the disaster that was the wake. She listened with interest, leaning in until her forehead bumped her camera.

“Marie broke her husband’s nose?” Peggy asked. “That woman sounds violent. Steer clear of her.”

“What about the food she makes?”

“Pshaw, y’all are just fine. The mudslide is a good thing, because it’s keeping the killer from being able to eliminate potential witnesses.”

“The killer is on the other side of the mudslide? Are you saying Della did it?”

She waved a hand. “Just pulling your leg. I bet you didn’t know I’m a real prankster.”

She turned and said something to someone offscreen. Then she turned back and started pulling on her jacket. “Stormy and Christopher, I have to go do cop stuff. Keep your eyes open and keep taking notes on everything. Don’t trust your memory. Write everything down.” She held up her hand to wave goodbye, told Christopher it was nice to meet him, and then ended the video call.

“Two hundred ninety-nine,” Christopher said calmly. “Three hundred. I do feel better.”

“I feel better knowing the killer isn’t up here with us.”

“You mean Della? Peggy was just joking around.”

“My father jokes around. Jessica jokes around. You’re not the funniest guy, but you’ve been known to lighten the mood with a quip or two. Officer Peggy Wiggles, however, does not joke around. She doesn’t pull legs and she is not a prankster.”

“Then I guess we’re safe.”

I stepped out to the patio and gazed at the trees and the valley that stretched out for miles, with no other building in sight. Safe? I would feel safe when I got home.

Jeffrey, however, was a happy kitty, even in his harness. He’d found a dark-colored boulder at the edge of the patio to sun himself on.

“Move over,” I said. He gave me a sleepy look, and—just like every other time I’d requested he move over—he ignored me. I found another rock that was almost as good, and draped myself forward over it.

Jessica came out and joined me, lying on her back on a smaller, flatter boulder.

“This is surprisingly good,” she said. “The stone really radiates the sun’s heat, so you feel like you’re in the middle of a sun sandwich.”

“When the resort opens for business, they should put this on the brochure. They could give it a snazzy name, like the Human Lizard Feature.”

“Or how about the Solar-Powered Deep Tissue Release? People would pay good money to cuddle up to a rock!”

I rolled myself over to warm my back. “We should be writing these ideas down to…” A dark object whizzed through the sky at the periphery of my vision. “Jess, did you see that?”

“See what? I hear something, a buzzing, like a giant dragonfly.”

The flying object circled back. “Look, the ranger is spying on us.”