by Amy Vansant
“Bike or motorcycle?”
“Regular bike. He’s eighteen. He’s a neighbor’s kid from down the road. He’s been working here since he was a kid. His name is Todd. Todd Schafer.”
Charlotte pulled her phone from her pocket as they entered the kitchen and opened her notes app. “And the name of the landscaping company?”
“EarthShavers.”
Charlotte looked up. “EarthShavers? Are you sure?”
Mina waved her hand in the air next to her head. “EarthShapers. Sorry. Shavers doesn’t make much sense, does it. I’m losing my mind.” They walked into the kitchen and Mina sat at the kitchen table. “I need to get a shower. I have prison all over me.”
“You have jail all over you. Very different thing,” mumbled Charlotte.
Mina gasped a sudden sob and Charlotte realized what she’d said. “I’m sorry, Mina. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What if I go to prison?”
“Did you do it?”
“No.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about.”
“But I tried to cover it up to help Lyndsey. It makes me an accessories after that.”
Charlotte opened her mouth to correct Mina and then shut it. Accessories after that did sound less scary than accessory after the fact. Mina’s version made it sound like, if found guilty, she’d have to wear an ugly scarf for a year.
“Can you show me Mr. Miller’s room?” she asked instead.
Mina nodded and headed for the stairs. Charlotte followed her to the landing, flanked by a large window overlooking the back yard. She was about to mount the second half of the stairs when motion outside the window caught her eye. It was her own warped and wavy reflection on a shiny piece of flashing on the edge of the roof line outside. She waved to confirm it was in fact her, and noticed a camera mounted on the roof near the window.
“What does this camera see?” she asked.
Mina stopped and peered down at her from the stairs. “The back yard, little bit of the barn.”
“And Lyndsey lives over the barn, doesn’t she?”
Mina nodded.
“Does this camera keep a history somewhere?”
“There’s an app for it. It’s on my phone.”
“Can I see it? Or did the police take it?”
She frowned. “The police took my phone.” She paused and then raised her index finger to her cheek. “Oh, but the app’s on Kimber’s phone too. You can check that one.”
They climbed the remaining stairs.
“This is the door to the servant stairs,” said Mina, opening a door in the hall. Charlotte looked inside and saw nothing but a very narrow staircase heading into darkness below.
“Where does that come out?”
“In the hall off the kitchen between the girls’ rooms.”
“And the girls have access?”
“Yes. And Sheriff Carter found the rabbit right here on the first step.” Mina pointed down. There was black dust on the step where the crime techs had come back and dusted the area while Mina was incarcerated.
Mina left the door open and crossed the hall to open another door.
“This is the whelping room where I found Lyndsey with the puppies.”
Charlotte could tell by the sink and toilet that the room was really a spare bathroom, but a nest of soft dog beds had been built in the corner and the rest of the floor was lined with newspaper. The odor of dog poop hit her nostrils.
“I haven’t had a chance to clean,” said Mina.
“Where’s the mother dog?” she asked.
A sadness passed over Mina’s expression. “Miller’s Lady Crossing. She actually died birthing her last litter. Kimber was devastated. He loved that dog. She was a champion, you know.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Who fed the puppies?”
“I did.”
“Who walked the mother?”
Mina sighed. “I did.”
“Did Kimber ever leave this second floor?”
“No. It was getting difficult for him to get out of bed. His mind was slipping as fast as his body.”
“So it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that he did fall, as Lyndsey mentioned.”
“He fell all the time. That’s why I helped her. She was in such a panic and I didn’t want her to get in trouble for something I knew wasn’t her fault.”
“Can you show me his room?”
Mina walked to the next door down the hall and opened it. Inside, there was a bedroom decorated in browns and peaches and lined with outdated furniture. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched since the nineteen-nineties.
Blood stained the carpet near the bed and dark splatter covered the wall.
“How old was he?”
“Seventy-two.”
“And you’re his sister? You don’t look a day over—” Charlotte realized she was playing a dangerous game.
“I’m fifty-three. I was an oops if ever there was one.” Mina smiled. “People think it’s strange that I’d signed up to be his housekeeper, but they forget we were so far apart in age, it wasn’t like we ever even knew each other as brother and sister.” She walked inside and opened the top right drawer of the bureau to retrieve a phone. She handed it to Charlotte. “He loved me in his own way, though. He took care of me and I took care of him.”
Charlotte took the phone and found it unlocked. “Do you mind if I look through the camera files?”
Mina shrugged. “Go ahead. He didn’t really use that phone for anything except apps that turned on and off the lights.” She took a deep breath as if she’d needed a moment to find strength. “He’d make the smart bulbs downstairs blink when he needed me sometimes.”
“I’ll take this downstairs if you don’t mind.”
“Do you mind if I get a quick shower while you do that?” asked Mina.
“No, go ahead, of course.”
Charlotte returned to the kitchen, which she found outdated as well. Miller might have been a millionaire, but he didn’t care much for decorating.
She sat on a worn, vinyl-padded kitchen seat and clicked through Miller’s phone. Mina hadn’t been lying. There were very few apps installed, so it only took her a moment to identify the one that operated the camera. She scrolled through the daily log of motion sensor activity and found the day Miller died. There were nearly fifty entries.
The first shot only lasted about thirty seconds. Charlotte searched the yard for movement but saw nothing.
Must have been triggered by a bird. Whatever had moved past the lens had disappeared before the camera had time to register.
The next clip was the same, as was the next.
All birds?
Charlotte returned to the first and played it again. Something in Charlotte’s peripheral vision caught her attention.
What is that?
It took her a moment to realize what she was looking at was the reflection on the flashing she’d noticed earlier. She could tell by the overall shape of the warped image that it was the reflected movement of Mina climbing the stairs.
She played the second clip again and saw the same thing. This time it looked like Mina heading downstairs.
She played a few more clips. Mina up, Mina down. Horse being led by a boy walking across the yard. Mina up. One of the girls out in the yard leading her horse, presumably to the riding ring. Mina down.
Hold on.
As she grew close to the time of death she spotted a new figure in the flashing.
Lyndsey.
That’s Lyndsey going up the forbidden stairs.
Twenty minutes later Lyndsey went back down the stairs holding something large.
A container of puppies, no doubt.
A few minutes later, a Mina-shape came rushing down the stairs.
Fifteen minutes after that, Mina went up the stairs and shortly after that the stairs were swarming with EMTs and police.
Charlotte lowered the phone to her lap and stared at the ancient stove across from h
er as its red digital clock turned from one second to the next.
Everything fits Mina’s story.
Lyndsey went upstairs, summoned, according to her, by Miller himself—
Wait. He was bed-bound. How did he reach her?
She closed the camera app and checked the call log.
There it is.
Miller had called Lyndsey shortly before she was caught on camera heading upstairs.
Lyndsey’s telling the truth, too.
Lyndsey came back down, with the puppies, and then Mina went down to get her phone and call for help. No one went up the main staircase between the time Mina last saw him alive and when she returned to find him dead.
So if someone went upstairs to finish him off, they had to have gone up the servant stairs.
Unless that person was Mina.
Charlotte walked to the hall at the back of the kitchen. Finding it empty, she tried the door on the left that logically should have led to the servant stairs. She guessed right, and found herself staring up the steep steps to the upstairs hallway, the upper door having been left open by Mina.
Fifteen minutes.
The person who went up those stairs and killed Miller with an iron rabbit only had fifteen minutes to sneak up there. They had to know Mina was downstairs and that Miller was still alive.
Very opportunistic. Very small window.
Charlotte scowled.
Very unlikely.
“Charlotte?”
Charlotte heard her name called from the kitchen and walked back down the hall.
Mina had returned in a pair of tights and a long shirt that hung to her knees. Her hair was wet and loosely towel-dried.
“I was looking at the stairway,” she explained.
Mina ruffled her hair with her fingers. “Sorry for the way I look. I figured you’d rather see me wet than wait until I put on my face and did my hair.”
“Who knew Mr. Miller wasn’t dead?”
“What?”
“Who could have known that he was down but not dead?”
“Just me, I guess—”
“And the girls. You said you talked to them here?”
“Oh, yes. Well, I told them he’d fallen and that I was calling an ambulance, so they knew he was alive.”
“And you said you called it out to Lyndsey?”
“Yes, but she was gone.”
“But you did scream it outside? What did you say exactly?”
“I said, he’s alive.”
“So anyone on the grounds could have heard that?”
Mina frowned. “I suppose so.”
Charlotte nodded. “I’m going to go see if the stable boy is here.”
Chapter Twenty
With Mina’s direction, Charlotte walked through the back door, located at the end of the hall she’d just been in. Someone could have sneaked in the back door and up the stairs unseen while Mina was talking to the girls in the kitchen. It would have been fairly easy.
The question was, who would think to do that? Who would hear he’s alive screamed from the house and think, well then, I should probably run up the back steps and brain him with a rabbit?
Maybe it was someone already in the hallway? Maybe someone heard that he’d fallen as Mina was telling the girls and gone up to see. Maybe, finding him supine, they’d grabbed the rabbit in an opportunistic fit of anger and…thunk.
Well, according to the autopsy report, thunk thunk.
Charlotte spotted a turquoise blue bike leaning against the side of a long row of stalls. She found a young man in the third stall down, cherry-picking lumps of horse dung from the hay bedding inside.
“Todd?”
The boy looked up. He was a muscular kid, built thick with a floppy mop of yellow hair that hung over his eyes. He wasn’t bad-looking, with high cheekbones and a square jaw, but he had a crooked nose and a collection of tattoos that suggested he probably hadn’t made a lot of plans beyond his immediate future.
“Yeah?”
“Were you here the day they found Mr. Miller?”
He stopped picking and leaned on the pitchfork. “Boy, you get right to the point.”
“If I was getting right to the point I’d just ask you if you killed him.”
Todd barked a laugh. “You’re funny. You sayin’ he was murdered?”
“No, we’re just making sure all the bases are covered.”
“You a cop?”
“Not exactly. I’m a private investigator.”
“Oh yeah? Who hired you?”
“Mina.”
Todd nodded and returned to mucking the stall. “Well, I didn’t kill him.”
“Were you here the day he died?”
“Yeah, but not when it happened. I worked that morning and was long gone by the time they found the old man.”
“Did you see anyone that morning?”
Todd stopped working again and leaned the apple-picker against the wall. He walked out of the stall and pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Eyeing Charlotte, he lit one.
“How old are you?”
She scowled. “Does that matter?”
“Not to me.” He leered and paused to be sure she’d caught his meaning.
So subtle. She stared at him until he shrugged and continued.
“Lyndsey lives above the stalls here. I saw her first thing that morning. Sometimes we have coffee.”
He smirked and waggled his eyebrows.
Charlotte did her best not to react to his transparent bragging. “Do you and Lyndsey have coffee every morning?”
He shrugged. “If she needs coffee. Sometimes we have it more than once. She likes caffeine.”
Okay. Enough of this.
Charlotte decided to change the implied subject. Any affair Todd and Lyndsey might or might not be having probably had nothing to do with what happened to Miller. Killing him wouldn’t do anything for them. In fact, killing him could lose them both their jobs.
“Did you see the twins that morning?”
Todd took a drag of his cigarette and nodded. “Yeah. They had a show that day. They were all here at four o’clock in the morning braiding the horses and shining their boots and all that fancy crap they do.”
“So the three of them went to a show?”
“Took the two thoroughbreds. Lyndsey drives the trailer.”
“Were you here when they got back?”
He shook his head. “Nah. I usually finish up my stuff by one.”
“How did you find out about Miller?”
“One of the landscapers told me when I got here the next day. Then I read about it in the paper like everyone else.”
“Is the landscaper here?”
“No. Today’s not their day.” Todd looked up at the house. “Did I hear the puppies? Did they find them?”
Charlotte nodded. “They’re back.”
“So who took them? That’s who killed the old man, right?”
“Maybe.”
Charlotte pulled one of her cards from the pocket on the back of her phone case.
“This is my card. Let me know if you hear anything that might be useful.”
Todd pinched the card between his thumb and forefinger and held her gaze. “Sure. I’ll give you a ring.”
Ick.
“Yep.” She let go of the card and turned to head back to the house.
“Maybe we can get some coffee,” he called after her.
Subtle as a sledgehammer.
She kept walking. As she passed one of the Dutch-doored stalls she felt eyes on her and spotted a face peering at her from inside the barn.
One of the twins was staring at her. She paused.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” said the girl.
The lack of a sneer led Charlotte to believe it was Gemma.
“You were here the other day.”
Charlotte nodded and walked up to lean on the half-door. The horse in the stall glanced at her and then returned to watching its food bucket as if
staring at it would make sweet feed appear.
“Is your sister in there with you?”
“Payne’s out with some friends.”
I was right. Gemma.
“She’s a P.I.,” said a familiar voice.
Todd walked into view to stand beside Gemma. The girl looked up at him with wide eyes and Charlotte could almost hear her heart pitter-pattering.
Oh no. Her too? Charlotte wondered if Gemma knew about Todd’s coffee breaks with Lyndsey.
“I’d like to talk to you about the day Mr. Miller died. Mina said she came down looking for her phone and talked to you and your sister?”
Gemma nodded.
Todd lowered his head and said something in Gemma’s ear she couldn’t catch. She glanced at him and shook her head. “Why? I don’t know anything.”
Todd returned his gaze to Charlotte. “She doesn’t have to talk to you.”
“No, but I’d appreciate it.”
“She should talk to a lawyer first.”
“You didn’t ask for a lawyer.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have anything to lose.”
“Well, I’m not a police officer.” Charlotte returned her attention to Gemma. “Do you want to talk to a lawyer?”
Gemma shook her head. “Mina came down saying Uncle Kimber fell. She was looking for her phone.”
“Did you talk with her for long?”
“Payne did. I went back to my room.”
“You weren’t worried?”
Gemma shrugged. “She was calling nine-one-one and, I don’t know...she didn’t seem that panicked. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
“Had he fallen before?”
“I don’t know. Probably. We hadn’t seen him for a long time. I think he was pretty sick.”
Charlotte glanced at Todd. He was staring at her with grim concentration. All his bravado had disappeared.
“One last thing. Is that your room across from the servant stairs?”
Gemma sighed as if she’d been expecting the question. “Yes. But I don’t use those stairs. Not since I was little. We used to play on them when we were kids. Hide and seek and whatnot. If you went to the top it was so dark people couldn’t see you, but we knew not to go out onto the second floor.”
“Why? What do the stairs have to do with anything?” asked Todd.
