Peachy Scream

by Anna Gerard

  I had just set up the serving cart ready to wheel everything into the dining room when I heard a murmur of voices beyond the closed dining-room door. I glanced at my watch and grimaced. Only 7:20 AM. Someone was early to the breakfast party.

  But before I could register a flicker of exasperation, another sound pierced the silence … this one a blood-curdling shriek of, “Oh, no-o-o-o!”

  Forgetting my pique, I abandoned the cart and rushed through the swinging door into the dining room, nearly smacking into Radney in the process. I tossed the man a quick apology and glanced about for any signs of mayhem that would have elicited such a scream. But as far as I could tell, there were no dead bodies beneath the dining table, and no smoking guns on the sideboard.

  Instead, all I saw was Tessa, wearing a surprisingly stylish knee-length, white seersucker sundress and sitting at the table in front of an open laptop. Her expression was one of abject horror.

  By now, the Marshes had walked into the room, Len in his usual khakis and company polo, and once again conspicuously limping. Susie looked ready for a fancy brunch in her pink capris and coordinating pink flowered top, her lipstick the same rosy hue as her outfit. Both appeared as confused as I felt but joined the professor at the dining table, taking the same seats where they had sat the night before.

  “Tessa, is something wrong?” I said, feeling a bit foolish asking the question, since something obviously was amiss. Then, when she made no response, I turned to Radney. “Any idea what happened?”

  He shrugged. “Not a clue. We walked in together, and Tessa sat down at her laptop while I walked over here to see if there was any coffee yet. And that’s when I heard her scream.”

  “Scream? Who screamed?”

  This from Marvin, who ambled in wearing an oversized red-and-black Atlanta Falcons jersey over torn jeans.

  Radney replied, “Something’s up with Tessa.”

  As the woman seemed fixated on her computer, it occurred to me that maybe she’d received some bad news in an e-mail. But before I could ask that question, Bill had joined his wife at the table.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” he ventured. “Can I help?”

  “No one can help!” she wailed. “My laptop has a virus-s-s-s!”

  While Tessa frantically punched keys on her laptop, Harry and Chris entered the dining room. Harry was wearing an Elizabethan-esque flowing white shirt over tight jeans (and looking surprisingly manly despite the floofy blouse). Chris wore an oversized plaid shirt—this one yellow and black—and jean shorts cut off at the knees. Both winced along with the rest of us as Tessa shrieked again, threatening permanent damage to our collective eardrums.

  And then Harry took charge.

  “Tessa, settle down and let’s see what’s going on here,” he said in an authoritative tone, marching over to the table and taking the seat beside her. “What makes you think your laptop is infected, and why do you think someone here is responsible?”

  With an offended sniff, the woman angled her laptop so he and the rest of us could see the screen.

  “Because it worked fine last night,” she answered in a calmer voice, “but when I turned it on just now, all I got was this blue screen that said Your Laptop is Infected.”

  Sure enough, large white letters against a bright-blue screen said exactly that, along with several lines of text that included phrases like fatal exception and critical error, followed by a line of frowny face emojis.

  “The Blue Screen of Death,” Marvin intoned, using the phrase that struck fear into the hearts of inexperienced computer users everywhere.

  Tessa gave everyone an I told you so look.

  “I told you so,” she exclaimed. “Someone came down here last night and deliberately sabotaged my laptop!”

  While the rest of us gave silent thanks that it wasn’t our laptop that was so infected, Harry shook his head.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Tessa. People get computer viruses all the time. All it takes is clicking on the wrong link somewhere online. I know it’s upsetting, but it’s probably just one of those things.”

  “Sure, just like it was one of those things”—she gave the words air quotes—”that Radney’s body wash spilled in his luggage.”

  I suddenly recalled my private conversation with Radney in the kitchen the night before. Before Marvin had interrupted, the R&D engineer had started to say something about the body wash incident not being the first “accident” that had happened recently among the troupe. Could this seeming computer sabotage be another?

  Harry, meanwhile, turned to Marvin. “Fine, you’ve told us what the problem is. You’re an engineer, so can you fix it?”

  Marvin raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, I’m hardware, not software. We need an IT guy.”

  We all looked at Radney, who shook his head.

  “Mechanical,” he said succinctly. “You got a CAD problem”—computer aided design, I knew he meant—“I can help. Otherwise, like Marv said, you gotta call IT.”

  A glance at Len elicited a similar response.

  “Manufacturing and sales,” he said with a shrug. Then, nodding in Chris’s direction, he added, “Why don’t you ask the kid? People his age all know computers backward and forward.”

  “That’s true,” Susie, who’d been silently watching the drama, suddenly exclaimed. “My little niece in California is eight years old, and she can program every device in my sister’s house.”

  Harry nodded. “What about it, Chris? Do you think you can help?”

  While everyone else had been absorbed in Tessa’s drama, the youth had been eyeing the boxes sitting on the sideboard. At Harry’s question, he returned his attention to the group.

  “Yeah, sure, whatev,” was his sighing reply as Harry vacated his chair and then gestured Chris to sit down beside Tessa.

  The youth plopped into the empty seat, turning the laptop to face him as he reached for Tessa’s mouse. He clicked and typed furiously for perhaps thirty seconds, then set down the mouse and shoved back in his chair.

  “Seriously? This prank is so 2010. I can’t believe anyone was fooled by that.”

  “Prank?” I echoed, leaning closer in an attempt to see the laptop screen.

  Meanwhile, Tessa had grabbed the mouse and spun the computer around for a look. She did a few clicks of her own and gasped.

  “You fixed it. The blue screen is gone, and my shortcuts are there!”

  “Well, duh.” Chris rolled his eyes behind the oversized glasses. “You never did have a virus. Someone hid your shortcuts and changed your wallpaper to that fake blue screen. Now can we eat? I’m hungry.”

  He hopped out of the chair and headed for the sideboard again, with me on his heels. Gesturing him to wait a minute, I began unloading the mini-quiches onto a tiered plate. The rest of the troupe erupted in commentary.

  “Kid is right,” Marvin said. “It’s just a dumb joke. I remember someone did that to our HR gal on April Fool’s Day a few years back. About got fired for it too.”

  “But how could someone put that fake error message on Tessa’s computer? Wouldn’t you have to be an IT person?” This from Susie, who’d apparently forgotten her contention that such things were well within the realm of even eight-year-olds.

  Radney shook his head. “Not at all. I bet if you go online right now and Google computer pranks, you can find instructions on how to do it. All someone would need was a thumb drive with a PDF of a fake blue screen, and access to Tessa’s computer.”

  “But you’d need to know my password,” the professor protested, pulling the laptop closer to her.

  Len snorted as he lined up behind Chris waiting for me to finish putting out breakfast.

  “You use a touch-screen password,” he reminded Tessa. “All anyone would have to do is watch you enter it a couple of times and they’ve got it.”

  “Or look for smudges on the screen,” Marvin added, joining the line. “Them fingerprints show up pretty easy, especially if you’r
e eating greasy egg rolls while you’re using your laptop.”

  “Especially if your password is a big old T,” Susie agreed as she queued up behind Marvin. Then, realizing that she’d spilled the digital beans, the woman slapped both hands over her lipsticked mouth in exaggerated dismay.

  “Oh, Tessa, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to give it away.”

  “Well, if even you could figure it out,” the older woman replied with a sniff, “then I guess it wasn’t any big secret. I’ll change my password after breakfast.”

  She shoved her chair back and stomped over to the breakfast line, followed by Harry. By now, I’d unpacked all the pastry boxes and hastily arranged the food on plates and platters.

  “Help yourself, everyone,” I said. “I’ll be right back with the cart with the drinks and rest of the food. And don’t forget, we’ve got mimosas on the menu this morning.”

  But as I returned with my wheeled cart, over the clink of serving utensils on china, I heard a mild “Excuse me.”

  It was Bill. He was still seated at the table while everyone else was busy filling their plates. When his polite attempt at gaining attention failed, he summoned a surprisingly strident voice that probably served him well in the classroom.

  “Excuse me!”

  Marvin chuckled. “Simmer down, Woodstock. You got something to say, we’re all ears here.”

  Bill didn’t appear to appreciate the nickname, for he gave the other man a sour look before continuing. “We seem to have forgotten the most important thing here. We’ve established that anyone could have pulled this prank, but we still don’t know who did it.”

  That observation stopped everyone except Chris, who took the opportunity to slide a second breakfast burrito on his plate. Then denials and accusations began to fly.

  “Not me,” Radney insisted, shaking his bald head. “You can ask Marvin. Once my head hits the pillow, it’s lights out until the alarm goes off.”

  “Yeah, pretty much like he said,” that man agreed. “I hit the hay maybe five minutes after we finished last night, and I was asleep in bed all night.”

  Then, with a nod in his former partner’s direction, he added, “But it sure is convenient that old Len here managed to swing himself a private room downstairs. Heck, he could have tinkered with the laptop and then pocketed all of Number Nine’s fancy silverware, and no one would be the wiser.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Len countered, tanned cheeks flushing. “I spent last night with my bad knee propped on pillows trying to get some rest. The effort it would take to wander around in the dark without causing myself further injury wouldn’t be worth any sort of practical joke payoff.”

  “I believe you, honey,” Susie piped up. “Now, all y’all quit picking on Len. He’s still injured.”

  “Oh, please.” This from Tessa, who was loading up on the breakfast burritos herself. “He only limps when he thinks someone’s watching. And for all we know, you could be the prankster, Susie. After all, you were alone in a room last night too.”

  “Yeah, well, so was Chris,” Susie shot back.

  The youth gave them both a baleful look. “Nice. I was the one who fixed Tessa’s laptop, remember?”

  “If it helps with the timeline,” I spoke up as I arranged the yogurt cups, “I did a final lockup of the house around 11 PM. I checked this room along with the other public areas, and I remember seeing a closed laptop sitting here on the table.”

  “We shut things down around ten,” Marvin confirmed. “So there would’ve been time between then and when you saw the computer for someone to mess with it. But my vote’s that Tessa did it herself. You know, looking to get herself some atten—”.

  The shrill blast from what sounded like a referee’s whistle calling a time-out split the air, cutting his comment short.

  “That will be enough,” Harry coolly proclaimed, rising from his seat and dropping a silver coach’s whistle into the breast pocket of his poufy shirt. “My guess is that whoever desecrated Yorick is our culprit.”

  He turned the skull back around to face us. I saw in surprise that Yorick now sported what presumably was one of Len’s cigarettes clamped between his teeth.

  I stifled a giggle, earning a stern look from Harry, who continued, “I don’t care who messed with Tessa’s computer, or why, but this is the last prank I want to see. Something like this happens again, and I will replace every single one of you with kids from the Cymbeline High drama club. Understood?”

  Chapter Eight

  Apparently satisfied that he’d gotten his point across, Harry consulted what was either a Rolex wristwatch or—more likely—a Chinese knockoff of same.

  “It is now 7:40. Everyone has twenty minutes to eat, and fifteen minutes after that to attend to any personal needs. At exactly 8:15, I want to see everyone and their scripts outside in the Shakespeare garden. If we’re lucky, our hostess will give us a quick tour of everything growing there to put you in the Elizabethan mood. And after that we’ll spend the rest of the morning out on the patio REHEARSING. OUR. PLAY!”

  “Uh, Spiel—, er, Harry?” Marvin ventured, raising a beefy hand as the echo of Harry’s last words died down. “The temperature’s supposed to hit in the high nineties before lunch. You sure you don’t want to rehearse inside?”

  Harry gave the man the patented Harry Westcott brow raise. “Tell me, Mr. Lasky, where will we be performing during the festival?”

  “Uh, outside?”

  “Exactly.”

  He gestured at Marvin’s black-and-red jersey with its stylized falcon logo. “You don’t see your football team holding practice in a nice air-conditioned gym, do you? They drill outside in the heat to acclimate themselves so they’re not keeling over during an actual game. We’re merely taking a page from their playbook.”

  Which made sense. Even though the performances were scheduled for the evening, the nighttime temperatures wouldn’t drop all that much. Adding in the costumes and the stage lights, it would make for hot conditions for the actors.

  At Marvin’s nod, Harry checked his watch again. “It is now 7:42. I suggest that everyone fill your plates and start eating.”

  While everyone finished up at the sideboard, I played bartender. I hurriedly stirred the peach nectar into the pitcher of orange juice, then filled the champagne flutes halfway with the mixture and drizzled in a touch of grenadine. I’d gotten pretty proficient at opening champagne bottles, but Radney gallantly jumped up to do the honors while I sliced a fresh peach and plopped a narrow wedge in each glass. That done, I filled the flutes the rest of the way with champagne.

  “Oh, doesn’t that look pretty!” Susie exclaimed. Setting down her plate in front of her chair, she added, “Here, let me help you hand out the drinks.”

  I gave her a grateful nod. Carrying the mimosas two at a time, we sidestepped the rest of the troupe as they began settling back in their respective seats. There was a brief moment of confusion when I came back with my second round and noticed that Chris had apparently absconded with someone else’s mimosa. Now, flute in hand, he appeared ready to take a swig.

  “Sorry,” I told him with an apologetic smile, swooping over in that direction. “If you want to drink, I need to see your driver’s license first to make sure you’re over twenty-one.”

  I thought for a minute the youth would comply, for he stuck his hand in his shorts pocket as if going for his wallet. But then, he shook his head.

  “Fine, never mind,” he muttered, and handed his glass to Len beside him. I had deliberately left one flute of the juice and nectar mix unadulterated and now handed Chris a virgin version of mimosa minus the champagne.

  Once everyone was settled, I returned to the bar cart for a mimosa of my own—hey, no reason the innkeeper can’t indulge—and lifted my champagne glass in a toasting gesture.

  “If I can have your attention everyone, I’d like to give you an official welcome to Fleet House,” I told my guests with a smile. “We’ll be here together for almost two weeks
, and I’m looking forward to making friends with you all. May your stay here be a memorable one.”

  While everyone did the obligatory Hear, hears and clinking of glasses, I set down my flute and went back to the sideboard to do a bit of rearranging so that the platters still looked full. It was a trick I’d learned from Gemma. Nothing looks worse than picked-over food, she’d warned me.

  As I arranged, I could hear the comments on my signature drink, mostly positive. Only Len muttered, Tastes a bit sour to me, though he took another large sip from his glass despite that. Buffet touch-up done, I served a plate for myself. Then, reclaiming my mimosa, I took the only empty chair, which happened to be alongside Harry.

  I wasn’t trying to crash the troupe’s meal. As ye olde official innkeeper, it was my job to hang out at the breakfast table with my guests, at least on their first full day. It gave them the opportunity to ask me questions about the house and grounds, or about the town and places to see. But this morning no one had time to ask about anything. All energy was being expended on shoveling down Daniel’s awesome baking.

  Except for Harry, of course. He’d moseyed up to the sideboard after everyone else and filled his plate sparingly with the high-protein and low(-ish) fat offerings, then poured a cup of hot water for tea (his own). The last was currently steeping before him as he casually forked up small bites of quiche. At exactly 8:00 AM per my watch, he picked up his knife and lightly tapped it against his crystal water glass.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, time is up. Please take your personal breaks and then meet in the garden in fifteen minutes.”

  The announcement was met by muttering, but the troupe gamely rose from their chairs, Tessa with laptop protectively tucked beneath her arm.

  “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “I’ll keep the leftovers warm in case Captain Queeg here gives you a mid-morning break. And there’s still peach mimosa mix and champagne on the drink cart. Feel free to grab a refill now, if you want.”