by Mary Bowers
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” I said, getting up to go. “You know, nobody actually saw Kendra on Saturday night. All they saw was big blue eyes and a tattoo.”
I stayed and listened to most of Chrissie’s statement. They wouldn’t let me in the room, of course, but Bill, Howie and I were able to listen in. It unraveled a lot of little knots.
For instance, she explained how she got Asia to give her an alibi. Being her devoted child, of course she was inclined to do what Mother wanted anyway. But Chrissie had told Asia that Eden was dealing drugs, and that some scary men had come and taken Eden from the house while Chrissie hid. If they knew she had been home at the time, they’d come after her. So she needed a rock-solid alibi for most of Saturday, and Asia was willing to give her one. Even the fact that Eden had been murdered seemed to play into the drug-dealer scenario.
And we found out how Chrissie had gotten into Eden’s computer without breaking the encryption. It happened in the most low-tech way possible: Chrissie came home from her shift at Perks that Saturday morning to find Eden passed out in her bedroom with her computer up and running. Eden had come home plastered, booted up her computer, then crashed on the bed. Chrissie simply sat herself down and took herself for a ride through Eden’s computer files while Eden herself snored on the bed beside her in a drunken stupor.
What she found enraged her. Then she remembered Eden was going to be giving prophesies that night at the Halloween Haunted House. She knew her sister. She was an exhibitionist, and enjoyed the power she had over Chrissie now. She might be tempted to show off by giving hints at the crimes going on in Tropical Breeze underneath everybody’s noses, potentially exposing the whole thing. So Chrissie decided Eden needed to be silenced. With Eden blacked out and helpless, suffocating her was easy.
But then Kendra showed up, bursting into the house and coming straight into Eden’s room, wanting to continue the catfight from the night before. She found Chrissie working on Eden’s computer, right next to Eden’s dead body. Chrissie understood enough of what Kendra had already said to realize that she and Eden had had a vicious fight the night before. While Kendra stared at Eden’s corpse in shock, Chrissie grabbed a heavy metal sculpture from the dresser and smashed her over the head with it.
It complicated things, but at the same time, it made things simpler. The two victims had just had a fight in front of witnesses. When they both disappeared, it would seem to be related to the fight. Chrissie had plenty of time alone in her house to work it all out. She would frame Kendra for Eden’s murder, leaving Eden’s body to be found, while Kendra simply disappeared forever. Poof.
Unfortunately, while she was busy working out what she was going to do with the bodies and playing fortune teller, Eden’s computer went into sleep mode. Without the passcode, Chrissie couldn’t get back in and start deleting and overwriting files.
I went straight from the Sheriff’s office to Rita Garnett’s house, only to find that news of the arrest had preceded me. Gossip travels at the speed of light in a small town, and the actual arrest had taken place right there at Chrissie’s house on A1A, where everybody on the beach could look across the street and see, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. When I got to the Whitby House, I found out that the police had also picked up Rusty and Kady.
The volunteers were showing up early, hungry for news and needing other people to talk to about it. There was more wonderment than relief at this point, and everybody was still confused about what it all meant.
As I came into the kitchen, all eyes turned to me.
“Okay,” Bernie said. “Spill it. Kyle won’t answer my calls. What happened?”
“Kyle’s been busy,” I told her. “I’m sure he’ll give you an in-depth interview as soon as he’s got everybody booked.”
“Everybody?” Mayor Rocky said.
“Well, Kady and Rusty for credit card fraud, and Chrissie for the same, plus murder. They’ve got Asia too, but I think when they’ve got it all sorted out, she’ll be cleared.”
As I talked, I was walking over to the goodie table and taking a good look around. I was suddenly starving. Once again, Justine Decker had donated cupcakes and cookies, but I figured they were the last couple of batches. After filling her Halloween orders, she had decided to close The Bakery down until she could find a buyer. Nobody tried to get her to change her mind.
I went to the big pink box, grabbed a cookie and took a bite, I was that hungry. Somebody handed me a cup of coffee and I took it gratefully. When I looked up to say thanks, I saw it was Michael.
“Life with you is just one long thrill ride,” he murmured, pulling out a chair for me. I hiked myself up at the breakfast bar and looked around.
Michael had brought Myrtle from Cadbury House, and Angie was there too. She must have left a skeleton crew at the shelter, and I felt grateful to her for taking over executive decisions while I ran around following orders from my cyber-stalker.
Ed was there, dressed as a magician. His phony moustache was magnificent, worthy of Poirot, but I thought the red satin-lined cape was a bit much – more vampire than magician. Barnabas was in the doorway, dressed as the creepy butler. Florence was stuck at Girlfriend’s, but after six o’clock she was going to lock up and sit outside the store, dressed as a fairy godmother, giving away candy and keeping an eye on that side of Locust Street. I could just picture the shop cat, Wicked, sitting in the display window and watching all the crazy humans run around in strange costumes.
Mayor Rocky was leaning against the counter by the coffeemaker, and she asked me, “If Chrissie was some kind of Internet crime queen, why was she living in a tiny bungalow at the edge of town, working minimum-wage jobs? I mean, why bother?”
“You know why,” I told her.
She stared at me, then answered her own question. “Asia.”
“Right. Asia was the one perfect thing in her life. She wanted her child to be untouched by the grubby things she’d gotten into. She needed to show she was making legitimate income, even though if we really thought about it, we’d have known she wasn’t making enough to get by on, let alone send her daughter to Flagler College. When Eden came back to town, ready to party hardy, Chrissie was desperate. She didn’t want that kind of an influence on her daughter, and on top of that, Eden came in making threats.”
“If Kendra wasn’t the killer, why did she show up for the fortune teller gig on Saturday night?”
“She didn’t,” I said. “Chrissie did.”
That caused a stir, and somebody started talking about the star tattoo. I waved the half-cookie I was holding and said, “The tattoo was a phony. It was just a simple star, remember. It was easy to fake. All Chrissie had to do was draw it on her hand with waterproof eyeliner and pat over it with a little concealer, leaving enough showing to make sure people saw it. Just to be sure, she made a pretense of looking at the customers’ palms, but it was only to show them the fake tattoo. She didn’t start predicting until she looked into the crystal ball. Other than the tattoo, she was just a woman completely wrapped up in a costume with big blue eyes. She wanted us to think Kendra had killed Eden, then did the fortune teller gig to give herself time to get away before we realized Eden was missing. Chrissie hoped Kendra’s body would never be found.”
Michael was frowning. “But as soon as the credit card theft was discovered, wouldn’t it have all led back to Chrissie?”
“No. She’d been covering her tracks for years, and the credit card dumps were coming from places where Kendra used to work. Chrissie never skimmed any information from her own employers. Even when she probed weak systems on the Internet, she did it through a username that went back to Eden. She’d stolen her sister’s identity a long time ago. And for the carding business, all communication with Kendra looked like it was coming from Eden, too. So Kendra’s computer wasn’t a problem for Chrissie, but Eden’s was.”
“Good lord!” Michael said. “Sisters! Each of them using the other in every possible way.”
>
“Right. Kendra had to have known about the username deception; it’s part of the reason she had to die. But Kendra also had personal issues with Eden. On Saturday morning, when she started to sober up, she wanted another go at Eden and barged into Chrissie’s house. She walked right into a death trap.”
“So there was Chrissie,” Angie said, “with two dead bodies to get rid of. How’d she manage that, all by herself?”
“Chrissie’s house has an attached garage,” I told them. “She had all day Saturday, and she had her daughter’s Jeep in the garage. Neither of the dead women was very big. She got the bodies into the Jeep, covered them with a tarp, waited until the wee hours of the morning, and took to the country roads. When Eden’s body was found and Kendra’s wasn’t, people would jump to conclusions. Eden and Kendra had both dated Rusty. Murders have been committed for less.”
“A lot less,” Rita said.
I nodded. “And before anybody was looking for them, Chrissie hoped to have some time to doctor her sister’s computer, deleting files and overwriting them. She was confident of her computer skills, but when she ran into the encryption, she couldn’t crack the code. She could’ve called in sick at Perks the next morning, but she needed to make it look like nothing was wrong, and that meant going in to work as usual. It had to look like Eden had just stayed out all night partying, like she did all the time. It was only a four-hour shift, so she went to work, counting on having at least another day or two before anybody started wondering where Eden and Kendra were. But I needed to talk to her about something else, and that’s when I found out Eden had never come home. I started pushing the issue, and she was forced to call the police before somebody else did.”
“That would’ve looked bad,” Michael said.
“Yes. And Asia found out her aunt was missing and came home. So Chrissie ran out of time.”
“Where is Asia?” Bernie asked.
“The police are still holding her,” I said. “Even if they let her go, I don’t think she’ll give up on her mother entirely, though.”
“Probably not,” Bernie said. “Just because you know somebody’s no good doesn’t mean you stop loving them. What about your friend Victor?” she asked, looking at me.
“What do you mean, my friend? I don’t know him any better than any of the rest of you do. What do you think, Rita?”
“I don’t see him as capable of violence,” she said. “We’ll never get to discuss it with him, though. His business line has been disconnected and the police have been unable to locate his van. He’s done with Tropical Breeze.”
I looked pensive and said, “I think you’re right. We’ve seen the last of him.”
Which turned out to be true. I never saw him again.
At least we could look ahead to Christmas with all the mysteries solved, I told myself. Well, all the mysteries but one: I still had a Recipes file on my computer’s desktop. I wondered if it would magically disappear the next time I booted up, but somehow, I doubted it, and I turned out to be right.
As I got myself into my lioness costume, I thought about hiring an I.T. guy to purge that folder, but from what I already knew know about Victor, he ate I.T. guys for breakfast. The minute that file was erased, Victor might get macho about it and be back with something even more intrusive, so I decided to leave it alone, at least for now. Heck, maybe I’d even try some of the recipes.
After I got into my costume and had my whiskers on, I gave myself a little growl and air-cat-scratch in the mirror. Rita had already gone out to the volunteers’ table on the lawn, and as I came out of the powder room where I was dressing, I found Bernie waiting for me.
“It’s such a nice night, I think I’ll sit with Rita at the table instead of wandering around taking pictures for The Beach Buzz,” she told me. “Let the kids come to me this time. I always leave my Halloween candy on my front porch in a bowl, with a sign saying, ‘Take only one, please.’”
“And does that work?” I asked.
“You’d be surprised. I always want to get rid of all of it, and most years I’ve got leftovers. Listen,” she said, putting a hand on my arm when we were halfway across the lawn, “I know you were listening to some of Chrissie’s statement, but you had to leave early. Kyle just called me. Have you been worried about your friend Victor being involved in the credit card theft ring?”
She was giving me an elfin grin, and I bristled. “Again with the friend thing. What makes you think he’s my friend?”
She shrugged. “Just a little idea of mine. Anyway, the cops have scoured Eden’s computer, and they haven’t found any evidence that Vincent was part of that little gang. There’s too much history there for him to have simply overwritten it and not left any gaps. He was never a part of it. Just thought you’d want to know. Oh – and did you know what it was that Chrissie killed Kendra with?”
“She said it was a heavy statue. Something that had been sitting on Eden’s dresser.”
“They got her to go into more detail after you left. It was a statuette of the Egyptian vulture goddess, Nekhbet. It came from Vesta’s collection of Egyptiana. She must have gotten it at Girlfriend’s. There’s one similar to it in here, in the dining room,” she said, angling her head back toward Whitby House, “but that one is the cat goddess, Bastet.”
“Oh. Yes. I’ve seen it.” At the séance. Glowing in the candlelight. The memory disconcerted me, and I found I couldn’t talk about it.
Bernie was watching me closely; she knew I was holding something back. Then her wizened face pulled into a slow smile.
“I think it was a bad idea,” she said, “messing with one of Vesta’s things. I think she was . . . offended. Listen, I’ll do this shift with Rita at the volunteers’ table. Why don’t you get some fresh air and have a walk around town?”
I nodded, still half-absorbed. “Yeah, I think I will. Thanks.”
It was dusk, and the air was filled with an unnaturally clear light for the last few minutes before darkness fell. The houses were decorated with jack-o-lanterns, the lawns were full of plastic tombstones, and the trees were hung with ghosts. At a house on Palmetto, a party was going on, complete with fog machine and weird music.
As I headed toward Locust Street, I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see figure with a cape billowing out like the wings of a vampire.
“Taylor, wait up,” Ed said.
I stood where I was, watching his busy steps as he caught up to me. Beyond him, at Whitby House, I could just see the corner of the lawn where we had set up the fortune teller’s tent, exactly one week before. When Ed caught up, we turned and walked slowly down 5th Street, side by side.
“We’ve come a long way from the fortune teller’s tent, haven’t we?” I asked.
“Have we? People still yearn to know the future.”
“I don’t mean in terms of civilization as a whole. I mean us, since the night of the Halloween Haunted House. We went from the fortune teller’s tent to somewhere deep in cyberspace and back again. Looking back on the conversations we had with Victor still gives me a headache. I think I’m more comfortable with crystal balls.”
“Me too. And if you really think about it, computers haven’t heralded any profound change in human behavior. It’s a new way for people to connect with one another, but we’ve always looked for ways to do that. It’s another way for people to amuse themselves, but that’s not new either. In the end it’s just a new way to juggle information. Saving it, storing it, sharing it . . . sometimes with the wrong people. We just do it faster now. Sure, a palm-reader can cheat by checking social media pages, but the one thing she can give you that a computer can’t is a look into your future. Nothing in cyberspace can tell you the future, not in the literal sense we all crave.”
“So we’re back to the fortune teller, trying to see what’s going to happen to us. I, for one, am happy to wait and let my life play out. I don’t think I’d like to know that my future is all set out, waiting for me to go through the motions of livi
ng it, only to get where I was always destined to go in the first place.”
“You’re in the minority, then, Taylor. Most people, I think, want to know.”
“Why? It’s so much more exciting to have a whole world of possibilities than to know that only one narrow path is there before you.”
He gently shook his head. “It’s not really about the future – it’s about hope. There’s always hope: that by this day next year, you might be in love, or you might have achieved some lifelong goal, or you might have won the lottery. Every birthday, when we blow out the candles and make a wish, we’re giving voice to a hope. Maybe by the next birthday . . .”
“Our dearest wish will have come true.”
“And with a fortune teller, you don’t have an open-ended wish. You have a prophesy. You will find that one true love, you will see Paris, you will have an adventure. And so we will always have fortune tellers, if only to give us hope.”
“That’s kind of sad, Edson.”
He looked at me and smiled, then set the top hat he’d been holding onto his head. “I’m a skeptic, not a disbeliever. I’m doubtful about it, but I realize that we don’t really know for sure. Perhaps there are some among us who can see the future. Who knows?”
We parted ways then. He crossed Locust and continued down 5th, and I turned the corner and headed toward Girlfriend’s.
On Locust, the old-fashioned lamplight of the business district cast a golden glow down the street and dimmed the shop-window art that would be scrubbed off in a few days. Florence sat outside Girlfriend’s gossiping with Justine and handing out candy and cookies. As I came walking up, she looked me over and said, “A cat? Again?”
I shrugged. “I gotta be me. So how’s it going? Lots of princesses and pirates again this year?”
“Oh, yes. And there was a whole family of bumblebees a minute ago,” she said, looking around, but they were already gone. She looked like a deranged princess herself, in her fairy godmother costume. Her wig with the bun on top made her head look like a big, gray pumpkin.
