Dew Drop Dead (4 page)

“You got it,” David said.

Corrie nodded, glad to be going along, but even gladder she was being spared another look at the corpse.

* * *

AS IT TURNED OUT, Corrie was not the only one to be spared.

Sebastian rolled down the patrol car window as soon as he saw Alex and Rebecca making their way back from searching the inn. It felt as if they'd been gone forever.

“There's no body,” Alex announced.

“What?”

“We searched all the rooms,” said Rebecca. “There's no one there. Dead or alive.”

Sebastian and his friends exchanged bewildered looks.

“But we
saw
him,” David said.

Alex got the same bemused expression on his face he had worn earlier. This time, it was mixed with a small measure of annoyance. “I'm afraid you
thought
you saw him,” said Police Chief Alex Theopoulos. “It's easy to convince yourself you're seeing things when you're alone in a dark house.”

“But we weren't alone,” said Sebastian. “There were three of us, and we all saw the same thing.”

“That happens, too,” Alex said. His dismissive tone of voice as he opened the car door and slid into the driver's seat made Sebastian angry. He and his friends were not playing pranks. Nor were they imagining things. Whether or not he was there now, someone had been lying on that bed. Sebastian had to find
a way to convince Alex that that much at least was true.

“Can we go back in the house with you?” he asked.

Alex's hand hesitated on the ignition key. “In the daylight,” he said into the rearview mirror. “Meet us at the station at one o'clock tomorrow. Rebecca, do you mind putting in a couple of hours on your day off?”

“I don't if you don't.”

“Settled,” said Alex. He started the car and repeated, “Tomorrow. One o'clock.”

IT WAS
two minutes to one. Josh Lepinsky, his hands warming in the pockets of his heavy corduroy pants, moved briskly across the village green. Sebastian, David, and Corrie had to run to keep up with his pace. They were all relieved to reach the door of the police station, but their relief vanished the moment they entered.

“Welcome to the Pembroke Sauna!” Alex pulled himself up from the desk, where he was going through some papers, and lumbered toward them. “Your tax dollars at work.”

“They're working overtime,” said Josh, peeling off his down vest. He nodded toward the kids. “The tribunal of parents conferred last night and decided one of us should be present this afternoon,” he informed the chief, who, aside from Sebastian's mother and father, was his closest friend. “After hearing about your new deputy, I felt it should be me.”

Alex laughed. Josh had been a widower for some time, but it was only in the last couple of years that he'd shown any interest in dating. “I'd call you a wolf,” Alex said, “except wolves have more hair.”

“Do you think she'll notice?” Josh asked, running a hand over his bald spot.

“Notice, yes,” said Alex. “Care, no. Ah, here she is now. Rebecca, come meet our local celebrity. This is Josh Lepinksy, author of the famous Flinch detective novels. Josh, Rebecca Quinn, former Miss Teenage New Hampshire, graduate of Boston College—Phi Beta something, third-generation cop, and newly appointed deputy chief of police, Pembroke, Connecticut.”

“I'm impressed,” Josh said.

The deputy's eyes brightened as she extended her hand to shake Josh's. “I'm a fan of yours,” she said. “I loved
The Case of the Enigmatic Fortune Cookie.”

“Now I'm even more impressed,” said Josh.

“I had no idea you lived in Pembroke,” Rebecca told Josh. “Alex, you've been keeping secrets.”

“Yes, Alex,” said Josh, not taking his eyes off Rebecca, “you've been keeping secrets.”

“I'm charged with protecting the public interest,” said Alex. “I thought I was doing my civic duty by not letting Rebecca meet you.”

“I'm the public, too,” Josh said. “What about my interests?”

David cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “Before we all melt, weren't we supposed to look for a body this afternoon?”

“I think it's cute,” Corrie whispered to Sebastian.

David shot Corrie a look that said, I may puke.

“Right,” said Alex, “let's go. Rebecca, why don't you take Josh in your car? The kids can ride with me.”

“Do you think your parents would mind if I moved in with you?” David asked Sebastian as they were leaving. “I don't know if I can stand being in the same house with a father who's going through writer's block and adolescence at the same time.”

Sebastian laughed. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe being in love will inspire him.”

“Right,” said David.
“The Case of the Brain That Turned to Mush.”

“THIS IS IT!” Josh cried as they entered the inn. “Inspiration at last! A body found in an abandoned inn.
The Case of
. . .
The Case of
. . .”

“Corrie had a good one,” said Sebastian.
“Dew Drop Dead.”

Josh snapped his fingers.
“Dew Drop Dead
! I love it. Do you mind if I use it, Corrie?”

“I don't mind,” Corrie said, looking with a mixture of fond and uneasy familiarity at the grandfather clock in the front hall, “but, well—”

“What?” Josh asked.

“It doesn't seem like something to kid about anymore,” she said. “I mean, somebody really died here. We saw a body.”

Josh's face immediately sobered. “You're right,”
he said. “I guess I'm still assuming it was all a misunderstanding. Are you sure what you saw wasn't just a bunched-up blanket or something?”

“Dad,” said David, “we've been through this. How many times do we have to tell you guys? There
was
a body.”

The chandelier suddenly blazed with light. A moment later, Alex entered from the area of the kitchen. “I just threw the switch,” he said. “I had the electricity turned on this morning.”

“On a Sunday?” asked Josh, surprised. “That's service. What I want to know is, if you coppers can get the lights turned on in an abandoned house on a Sunday morning, how come you can't get anybody to regulate your heat?”

Alex shrugged. “There are some mysteries in this world that are destined to remained unsolved,” he said. “That's one of them.”

“It's dark as night upstairs,” Rebecca pointed out. “We had to have more light to investigate properly. We've already been out here once this morning.”

Alex caught the look of surprise on Sebastian's face.

“I'm sorry, Sebastian,” he said. “But I wasn't having you kids walk into a dangerous situation. We did find some evidence to support your notion that someone has been here, though. Want to take a look?”

“Sure,” said Sebastian.

As the kids climbed the stairs, they couldn't help
thinking how different everything appeared with the lights on. Sebastian wondered if his friends were thinking, as he was: Maybe we
did
imagine it.

But when they stood at the threshold of the bedroom, he knew they'd imagined nothing. It was true no one was lying on the bed this morning, but that was just the point.

“If it had looked like this yesterday,” Sebastian said, “don't you think that's how we would have remembered it? I'm telling you, a man's body was right there.”

“He was on his back,” said Corrie. “With his arm hanging over the side.”

“The flashlight fell here.” David pointed to a spot by Sebastian's left foot.

“I believe you,” said Alex.

“You do?”

“Yes. I have no doubt that someone was here. It's obvious even at a glance around the room. Look at the indentation on the pillow, the way the blankets are disturbed. Look at all the bottles under the bed. And there in the corner.” He pointed to a heap of liquor bottles and crumpled-up bags spilling over with empty food containers and cigarette packs.

“Someone was living here,” said the deputy. “Our guess is that a homeless man—or woman, although it appears to have been a man—discovered the inn and had the idea, a good one at that, to call it home.”

“There are other signs of life,” Alex said. “The
bathroom down the hall has been used. And there are cigarette butts and remains of food downstairs as well.”

“I'm amazed the place isn't crawling with rats,” Josh said.

“It may be,” said Alex. “We just haven't seen any.”

Corrie felt a chill run down her spine. Rats.

“But the body—” Sebastian said.

“Our theory on that,” said Alex, “is that you
did
see a body here last night. Not a
dead
body, but an unconscious one. It doesn't appear that whoever was living here had been around very long. At the same time, look at the number of bottles. He was obviously a heavy drinker.”

Rebecca nodded. Clearly, she and Alex had talked the whole thing over earlier. “We think your ‘corpse' was someone sleeping off a serious drunk,” she said. “He was so out of it he never heard you, so he never moved.”

“But if he didn't hear us,” Sebastian said, “why wasn't he here when you came back later?”

“It's possible he was just conscious enough to have sensed someone was here and that he was in danger—the way we sense real sounds and events entering our dreams sometimes when we sleep. Or he may have simply awakened and left.”

Alex reached into his pocket. “Here's something else to support your story. We didn't find it until this
morning.” He pulled out a small piece of red-and-black cloth. “This was caught on a nail sticking out of the sash of the dining room window. We assume the man left in a hurry, and this was torn on his way out. It matches what you described as the shirt worn by the person on the bed.”

“From the look of it,” Rebecca said, pointing out the small black button that was still attached, “we'd say it was ripped from the sleeve cuff.”

“I can't believe it,” David said. “Here we thought we saw a body and all it was was a stupid lush.”

“Try not to sound so disappointed,” his father told him.

“Really,” Corrie said. “We should be glad whoever it was wasn't dead.”

“Other than the fact that it's no longer occupied, is there anything different about this room from what you saw last night?” Alex asked, reaching to turn off the light.

Sebastian shook his head. “We didn't really look around much up here. We were mostly downstairs.”

“Then let's take a look down there,” said Alex.

As they were descending the stairs, Corrie asked, “What happens now?”

“We close the place up and try to find the owners,” Alex told her.

“I don't mean that,” Corrie said. “What happens to the man who was staying here? This was his home.”

“It wasn't really his home,” Alex said. “No place is really his home, unfortunately. As for what happens to him now, that's a bigger question than I can answer.”

Corrie looked back up the stairs and felt overwhelmed by sadness. She tried to imagine where the man was, but she couldn't even think what he looked like, who he might be. Her imagination failed her utterly.

“The magazine isn't here,” she heard Sebastian saying. He was kneeling by one of the chairs in the sitting room. “There was a detective magazine lying here on the floor yesterday. I guess he took it with him.”

“There's nothing like a good mystery,” said Josh.

Sebastian stood. “Here's another one,” he said.

“What's that?” Alex asked.

“A mystery. See all those photographs on the mantel? There was one of a family in front of a sailboat. It's gone.”

“He must have taken that, too,” said David. “That's weird. Why would he do that?”

Corrie studied the blank space on the mantel and said to herself, although loudly enough that the others heard, “Happy Times.”

ON MONDAY MORNING
, several members of the police department cleared the Dew Drop Inn of refuse and sealed it up with fresh sheets of plywood. A large sign was posted out front, along with smaller ones on the windows and doors:
NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF THE PEMBROKE DEPARTMENT OF LAW ENFORCEMENT. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Corrie's father, fired up by her emotional recounting of what she'd seen at the inn and the police's theory of what had really gone on there, was even more determined to set up a program for the homeless at First Church. He asked Corrie if she would head a youth-group committee to work with the program, to which she readily agreed. The Reverend Wingate spent most of Monday on the phone to congregants, hoping, as he put it, “to light a fire under their sedentary behinds.” After school, Corrie used the second phone line in the church office to call all the members of the youth group and tell them there would be a special meeting on Wednesday night. By five o'clock, she had fifteen people who said they
would come—not counting herself, Sebastian, or David.

Monday was a busy day for Josh Lepinsky, too. Other than quick trips to the kitchen for coffee and his usual break around eleven to shoot the breeze with the mailman, he never left his office. His new Flinch mystery,
Dew Drop Dead,
was taking shape with an ease and energy he hadn't felt in months. He was as surprised as his children when he looked up at six o'clock and found them standing in his doorway.

“Aren't you going to stop?” Rachel asked plaintively. “What are you making for dinner?”

“A phone call,” Josh answered. He jumped up, ordered pizza, and went back to work. While they were eating, he made another call, this one to Rebecca Quinn, allegedly to query a technical point about police procedure, the sort of thing he used to run by his friend Alex. Rachel and David exchanged knowing looks.