A Christmas Peril

by J. A. Hennrikus

  “I didn’t mean for you to be involved, Sully. Really I didn’t.” Frank had pushed the door open a little and was standing at the doorway. Who knew how long he’d been standing there. I looked at Regina, and she looked at me, shaking her head gently.

  “Why don’t you sit down and tell me about it, Frank?” I asked, working hard to keep my voice gentle and forgiving.

  Regina hauled herself off the chair and motioned for Frank to sit there. She stood next to me. The office was cramped, really cramped, but Frank closed the door anyway. I looked at her, and this time she nodded. If I asked Frank questions, it was one civilian to another. Technically she could ask him questions, but it would be less messy if I did it.

  “Brooke came by the theater yesterday around five thirty. She was freaked. She asked for my help. She needed me to tell people she’d been at the theater earlier too, to give her an alibi. But I told her that I’d been with other people all afternoon and couldn’t give her an alibi.”

  “An alibi?” I asked.

  “She’d found Mr. Holmes … you know.”

  “Dead?” I asked. Frank nodded and looked down at his hands, which he then wiped on his jeans.

  “Did she kill him?” I asked. I was being obtuse, but I wanted to make sure to get the whole picture.

  “No, man, no, she couldn’t.”

  “What time did she find him, did she say?”

  “Around four.”

  “But you couldn’t provide an alibi for that time. So you couldn’t help her.”

  “I couldn’t tell anyone she’d been at the theater. But I could figure out a way to make people think Terry had been alive later.”

  “Other people being me?”

  “Yeah. Gabe was supposed to come in before you. I figured he’d tell his mom, like he did with the other stuff. I had some footage I’d taped while we did a test run on camera locations a few weeks ago. I was getting ready to play it for Gabe when you came in.”

  A faint buzzing sound interrupted the stunned silence that followed Frank’s admission. Connie’s tinny voice called out, “Frank? Frank, are you there?”

  Frank pulled the walkie-talkie from his belt and considered it for a second before he pushed the talk button.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Could you come back in here? The computer is frozen again and we’re stuck in the future Cratchit house.”

  “Be right there,” Frank said. “That’s how I knew you found the files, Sully. I had to go back onto my computer to reload the files, and went in to see if I could find an earlier file. Noticed that other things had been looked at, figured it was you.”

  “It was her all right,” Regina said, sounding slightly disgusted. I wasn’t sure if it was at Frank or at me. “Frank,” she continued, “you need to come down to the station with me. And we should grab your computer.”

  “Yes ma’am. Can I go and reboot the computer for Connie first? My laptop is in there. I won’t be a sec.”

  “You have two minutes. And do not, I repeat, do not make me come after you, do you understand me? Do not leave the building. Do not take the wrong computer by mistake, because if you do, by God, I’ll take every computer in this building into custody. Am I clear?”

  “Yes ma’am.” Frank ran out of the room. I had little doubt that he’d be back. Regina took her coat off the back of the chair and put it on.

  “Regina, do you want me to come and make a statement?”

  “No, let’s see what we have first. I know where you are. Besides, you may want to call that handsome ex of yours. Frank may need some help.”

  “Frank definitely needs some help, but Gus can’t help him. Conflict of interest,” I said.

  “Off the record, Sully, do you think Frank is mixed up in this?” Regina asked.

  “Mixed up as in helping Brooke with an alibi? Yes. As in murder? I don’t think so. But I’ve got to admit, he makes a pretty good suspect, doesn’t he?”

  “An excellent suspect,” Regina agreed. “He made an excellent suspect before, and this isn’t going to help his case. Yup, Frank will need some help.” Frank had taken Gabe under his wing, helping Regina navigate some pretty rough waters stirred up by her teenage boy. I knew she considered him a friend, as did I.

  “I’ll call Freddy Sands and get someone down there. If you think it will help, I’ll come down to the station.”

  Regina shook her head. “Sully, I appreciate that you’re not pushing me for more details. And for coming clean with information as you get it. I know that you understand, hell, you understand better than anyone what a bitch this job can be.”

  I nodded.

  “And you could have called in favors from me, gotten more details, played PI. But you didn’t,” she said. “At least not that I can tell. Not that knowing that the bottle Peter Whitehall had tested was full of ethylene glycol would have told you anything. Or that he was worried that a certain recently deceased son-in-law might be poisoning him. Nope, you didn’t push for any of that. I appreciate it. Call Freddy. Then call handsome Gus and let him know what’s going on. Keep in touch, okay, Sully?”

  Ethylene glycol. Ethylene glycol. Ethylene glycol. I kept repeating it as I typed it into Google, or did the best I could. Fortunately, Google thought for me and let me know how it was supposed to be spelled. A toxin. Syrupy-sweet tasting. Death resulted from renal failure. According to the medical WikiDoc on the subject, “Symptoms of ethylene glycol poisoning usually follow a three-step progression, although poisoned individuals will not always develop each stage or follow a specific time frame.” I kept reading. “Stage 1 consists of neurological symptoms including victims appearing to be intoxicated, exhibiting symptoms such as dizziness, headaches, slurred speech, and confusion. Over time, the body metabolizes ethylene glycol into other toxins; it is first metabolized to glycoaldehyde, which is then oxidized to glycolic acid, glyoxylic acid, and finally oxalic acid. Stage 2 is a result of accumulation of these metabolites and consists of tachycardia, hypertension, hyperventilation, and metabolic acidosis. Stage 3 of ethylene glycol poisoning is the result of kidney injury, leading to acute kidney failure. Oxalic acid reacts with calcium and forms calcium oxalate crystals in the kidney.”

  Neurological symptoms included seeming intoxicated, experiencing dizziness, slurred speech, confusion … I hadn’t seen Peter Whitehall in a while, so I didn’t know whether he’d showed those symptoms. But I had met someone who’d exhibited them—and she’d died last night in a car crash.

  I drove to the Anchorage, my mind still in a muddle, but clarity was starting to prevail, at least a bit. And I had a good idea of someone who could illuminate things more. To what degree, was the real question. And the very real concern.

  There was still a considerable army at the house, and I had to run a gauntlet again in order to gain entrance. I must have been on some sort of list, because they directed me to Gus without an escort. I found him in the dining room, hunched over an open laptop at one end of the long table. The cabinets still hadn’t been repacked from earlier in the day. There was caution tape all around the area, but the room hadn’t been cordoned off.

  “Did you crash the crime scene?” I asked as I slid into the chair to his left.

  “I couldn’t use Peter’s study or Terry’s office, and the living room and kitchen are taken over by various officials. This was the quietest place for me to work.”

  “For a mansion there really isn’t a lot of practical space, is there?” I asked, looking around.

  “Don’t you have a show tonight? What are you doing here?” he asked, ignoring my pithy observation.

  “I came by to check something with Mrs. Bridges. Thought I’d check up on, um, everyone. How is it going? Is Emma okay?”

  “For now. They’re being very careful and solicitous. Too solicitous, if you ask me. I’d feel better if they did something instead of stomp
ing around, resentfully doing nothing.”

  “I think that I’m getting a sense of what happened, but proof is going to be a problem. And without proof, this family is going to live under one hell of a cloud.” Someone walked by the door, slowing her pace when he realized that Gus wasn’t alone. I turned. Emma was hovering in the doorway.

  “Sully, you came back?”

  “I did, to talk to Gus, but I’m leaving again soon.”

  “Not on my account, please. I came in to tell him that I’m done in. I don’t know the protocol. Can we make them leave soon? Do you think they’re going to make any of us go with them? Eric passed out an hour ago, and Amelia has locked herself in her room. Mrs. Bridges has run away to the greenhouse. Clive is still here, holding down the fort, but he’s pretty exhausted as well.”

  “Let me go and speak with Lieutenant Black,” Gus said. “He’s the one in charge now, right?”

  “I think so, I’ve lost track.”

  Gus got up and crossed over to Emma, squeezing her arm before going into the hall. I led her back to the table, giving her my seat and taking Gus’s. I closed his laptop without reading the screen, a rare moment of decorum. But I didn’t want the distraction for Emma or myself. I had questions for Emma, and probably not much time to ask them.

  “Sully, Gus is a wonder. He’s been a—”

  “Emma, do you still want me to help you?”

  “Of course. Anything you can do.”

  “Emma, I wish there was an easy way to ask this, but I don’t have time and I don’t see how the effort could help. Who killed Terry?”

  She had the good grace to look taken aback, and the better grace not to comment on it. “I honestly don’t know, Sully. We argued, I told Terry he needed to leave. He tried to talk to me about it, but I went into my office with Clive. He stormed into his office, and it was the last any of us saw him.”

  “And your office is—”

  “On the other side of Terry’s office. We made the old library into two offices. Had a wall built between them eventually.”

  “Eventually?”

  “Last summer. It seemed like a good idea. Daddy agreed. We put the telecommunications room between them. You know, servers, wiring.”

  “Could Terry access the server from his office?”

  “No, the only door is from my office. But Daddy had the only key.”

  “So the only way into Terry’s office was … ?”

  “The hallway. I didn’t hear anything, but then I couldn’t. The tech room is climate controlled, with thick walls. Terry and I couldn’t hear anything in each other’s offices.”

  “Why did you go to his office?”

  “Like I said, I was on the phone in the kitchen, on a call. I noticed that Terry’s line was lit up. I was angry that he was still there, and I went down to confront him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t really see him at first, you know. I went in and only … only then I saw how he was … the blood, and his eyes. His eyes were wide open. It was awful. I screamed. And then turned and puked in the hallway.”

  She looked over her shoulder and turned back to me, leaning over the table even closer to me. “I also found something in the office. It may have been there for days. Or maybe someone dropped it—”

  “What was it?”

  “Mrs. Bridge’s key chain. Only Mrs. Bridges and my father had keys to the entire kingdom. She never let the keys out of her sight. But there they were on the floor, next to Terry.”

  Mrs. Bridges?

  “What did you do with them?” I asked.

  “I gave them back to her, of course.” And then Emma looked straight at me, daring me to say aloud what we both were thinking but couldn’t possibly be true.

  I found Mrs. Bridges in the greenhouse, tying an apron around her waist and surrounded by a seemingly organized cacophony of pots, plants, soil, and gardening implements. “What a nice surprise,” she said. She didn’t bother to take her hands out of the dirt she was mixing.

  I felt like a cad.

  “Hello, Mrs. Bridges. I hope you don’t mind my coming over like this. Unannounced.”

  “Surely we’re past formalities, aren’t we, Edwina? Do you think you could call me Clara?”

  “I could try, but it’s going to be tough. Clara. Do you mind if I talk to you a bit?”

  “No, not at all. If you’ll help me with these orchids. They haven’t been touched since Mr. Whitehall passed, and they’re in a sorry state.” She handed me an apron and a pair of gloves, both of which I took reluctantly.

  “I’ll help, but I warn you, I’m not very handy with plants.”

  “It isn’t that difficult. Just some separating and repotting that needs to be done. I’ll show you.” For the next few minutes she explained the procedure of taking the old plant out, dividing it, trimming the excess, and repotting. It didn’t seem difficult, but it did seem complicated, at least at first. After a while we developed a rhythm. Mrs. Bridges, her division-of-labor experiment quickly abandoned, took the riskier job of separating, and I took the repotting task.

  After a few minutes of quiet work, she finally broke the silence. “You wanted to talk?”

  “I do,” I said, taking my gloved hand out of the pot I was working on and placing it on her arm. “Please know that you don’t have to answer my questions, though. It’s all really none of my business.”

  “Answering your questions will be good practice for others, who will likely be asking similar ones later.”

  “Not all of them, I shouldn’t think. Like what your keys were doing next to Terry’s body?” I asked.

  She paused and looked right at me. “So you’ve seen Emma? Good. That couldn’t have been easy for her, carrying that around all day. My keys. Edwina, I don’t know what they were doing there. I lay down after we got back from the reading, and when I got up, I couldn’t find them. I went looking for them, thinking I must have mislaid them, but had no luck.”

  “Mrs. Bridges, did you know what we would find in the tea set?” I asked.

  “Your tea set?” she asked innocently.

  “Don’t,” I said, gently.

  She smiled and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “It was worth a try.”

  “I went into Brooke’s room to look for my keys. She’d been in such a state, I didn’t know if she’d left for a drive or gone for an overnight. Her room was a mess. I found some notes from Mr. Whitehall to myself, and to Emma. I barely had time to register their existence when I heard the scream … Emma had found Mr. Holmes. I went down to help with that and put the notes in my pocket. I didn’t even remember I had them until later that night.”

  “What did the notes say?” I prodded gently. “Are you sure they were from Peter?”

  “Oh, they were from him all right. His note to me was to let me know about certain arrangements he’d made in the event of his death.”

  “That’s awfully dramatic, isn’t it? When was the note written, do you know?”

  “Last summer, I’d imagine. A little dramatic, certainly. But he’d been under some strain. He had a heart attack around the 4th of July. Nothing he couldn’t get past, but it had made him feel vulnerable in a way that he wasn’t accustomed to. He started taking stock. That, coupled with Emma’s meeting with you about Terry. I think he wanted to get his house in order.”

  “Did he know Emma thought Terry was having an affair?”

  “Yes. And that she’d hired someone to follow Terry.”

  “Who found nothing.”

  “Found enough to get Mr. Whitehall thinking. And doing some investigating on his own. Prompted him to make some changes.”

  “The will,” I said.

  “And other things.” She went back to futzing with the plants but kept talking. “Sometimes I think his heart attack was one of the best thi
ngs to have happened to him. It helped him realize what was important.”

  More likely he got scared of the chains of hell that awaited him, I thought uncharitably.

  “We had a long talk, Mr. Whitehall and I, around Veteran’s Day. He wanted to let me know about some changes that were coming up in the household. We hadn’t had a talk like that in a long, long time. He’d thought of himself for so long, he’d forgotten he had a family he could count on. Anyway, he told me that Mr. Holmes wouldn’t be living at the Anchorage much past the new year, if that long. He asked me to keep an eye out for Emma. And he asked me to clear out the guest quarters over the garage for after the new year.”

  “For whom, did he say?”

  “I asked, but he told me that it would all be dealt with after the new year.” Mrs. Bridges took off a glove and wiped at the tears running down her face. “Poor man. If only he’d let me know.”

  “You know who it was for, don’t you, Mrs. Bridges?”

  “I can guess now. For Brooke, I’d imagine.”

  “Brooke?”

  “I found out right after Mr. Whitehall’s death. You and Mr. Knight had visited. Brooke was distraught, even more than normal. Terry was trying to calm her down, but she kept screaming and crying. I finally went in to see what I could do, and she clung to me as if she were a child. I told Terry I’d take her upstairs and put her in bed. That perhaps we should call someone, but he told me no, she’d be all right. She started crying even more. I finally got her up the stairs. Told her I’d sit with her until she fell asleep. Just as I thought she’d drifted off, she said to me, ‘He killed Peter, you know, Clara.’”

  I’d stopped repotting in the middle of her story, and she looked surprised when she handed me the next plant.

  “He being?” I asked, going back to the task.

  “Terry Holmes, of course.”