Born Under a Blond Sign

by V. J. Chambers

  “Tell me what happened with Preston, Duke.”

  “N-nothing. Nothing at all.” He started to get out of his chair.

  I wrapped a hand around his wrist and stopped him. “I don’t think so. Sit down. Spill it.”

  He sat down, but he didn’t say anything. He just started shaking.

  “You pulled pranks on Preston at camp, right?” I said. “But that shouldn’t be enough to make you this frightened. Unless…”

  He buried his face in his hands. “We didn’t mean it.”

  “One of your pranks is why he’s dead.”

  “We didn’t think he’d drown,” he said, his voice muffled.

  “Duke, look at me.”

  Slowly, he raised his face.

  “What did you and Gilbert do to Preston?”

  “We told him that we’d stop picking on him if he passed a gauntlet. We said there was a series of tests to prove that he could be one of us, and then we’d leave him alone. And the first test was to sneak out of the cabin at midnight and go skinny dipping in the lake. We told him we’d be watching, and we’d know if he did it or not. But we weren’t watching. We thought he’d get caught, all naked out there in the lake. We thought it would be funny.”

  I pressed my lips together. “Instead, he drowned.”

  Duke’s shoulders shook. “We didn’t mean it. We didn’t mean for anything bad to happen to him.”

  “But it did,” I said. “He drowned, and Gilbert wanted to tell the world. But you couldn’t let him do that. You killed him to keep him quiet.”

  “I did not,” he said. “Gilbert was my friend. I would never have done anything to hurt him.”

  “Friend?” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone in your fraternity knows that you hated Gilbert. Even the other campers at Camp Maplewood noticed that the two of you weren’t close after Preston’s death.”

  “We were friends,” he insisted. “I didn’t hate him. We just didn’t like being around each other after it happened. We both reminded each other of what had happened. It was easier not to see each other. That’s all. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t.”

  “How’d you do it?” I said. “How’d you get the gun?”

  He got up again.

  I reached for him, but he stepped backwards, knocking over his chair and evading my grasp.

  “I didn’t kill him!” he said, agonized.

  And then he ran from me.

  * * *

  “Good morning,” said Brigit in a chipper voice.

  “It’s not morning,” I muttered.

  She grinned at me from where she was perched on her chair at her desk. “I’m so glad I beat you into work today. I was beginning to worry that you were going to come to work early all the time from now on.”

  “I’m not.” I went past her, back to my inner office. “But you know, it might not be a bad idea to have someone here in the mornings to field walk-ins and take calls.”

  “We almost never have walk-ins,” she said. “And I’m not coming in before eleven.”

  I set my things down on my desk. “I have interesting things to tell you. Guess who I ran into at the bar last night?”

  “Crane?” she said.

  I poked my head of my office. “Of course, Crane. He’s always there. Why would I tell you that I ran into Crane?”

  “I don’t know, maybe Crane did something interesting.”

  “I ran into Duke Campbell,” I said. “And you’re never going to believe the story he told me.”

  Brigit was out of her desk and coming for my office right away. “What story? What did he say?”

  I related it all to her, explaining about the prank and how he vehemently denied killing Gilbert.

  Brigit shook her head, taking it all in. “That’s insane. So, do you believe him?”

  “You mean after he evaded us and wouldn’t talk and after I find out he’s been lying about this Preston thing for years and years? Do I think he’s trustworthy after all that?”

  “Yeah,” said Brigit. “I see what you’re saying. He’s our best suspect.”

  “Well, he’s basically our only suspect,” I said. “But still, he seems like he might have done it. He’s got the motive.”

  “Right, he wanted to keep Gilbert from telling anyone about what happened with Preston.”

  “Of course, does that make sense?” I said. “Would he kill for that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s bad that they tricked the kid into going skinny dipping, but it’s still essentially an accident. I mean, it’s not as if he could be prosecuted for doing that. The kid could swim and all, he just accidentally drowned.”

  “I guess so,” said Brigit. “But if people knew what he and Gilbert had done, it might make him look bad. And he’s the president of the Tekes, right? He’s obviously got some kind of plan for the future, maybe even in politics or something. A story like that might kill his chances for ever holding public office.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “I guess he might be motivated enough to kill based on something like that.”

  The phone rang.

  “Let me go grab that,” said Brigit, running back to her desk. She picked up the phone. “Ivy Stern, Private Investigations, this is Brigit, may I help you?” She waited. “Hold on for just a moment.” She put the phone on hold and looked up at me. “It’s him.”

  “It’s who?”

  “Duke Campbell.”

  * * *

  Duke was pacing. “What are you guys going to do now? Are you going to tell the police?” He was in one of the lavish rooms inside the golf-clubhouse-turned-frat-house.

  “Well, as you pointed out last night, we don’t have any proof,” I said. “But once we have the missing piece that ties you to the shooting—”

  “Not about the shooting.” He stopped pacing. “I told you last night, I didn’t kill Gilbert. I’m talking about Preston. Are you going to tell the police about Preston?”

  Hmm. He was worried about the drowning from his youth, but not about the recent shooting. Either he was very confident that we’d never pin the murder on him or he was actually innocent.

  Brigit shot me a glance, probably thinking the same thing.

  I wondered how I should proceed. Was there any benefit to making him sweat it out about the drowning? I didn’t really think so. So, I said, “Even if we told the police, it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t be able to arrest you for anything.”

  “They wouldn’t?” he said, looking stunned.

  “No,” I said. “What you did wasn’t right, and it was cruel and horrible, but it wasn’t a crime. You didn’t mean to kill that boy. He drowned.”

  “I thought… she said it would be involuntary manslaughter.”

  “Who said?” said Brigit.

  “Bryn Peterson,” he said. “She found out what we did, and she told us that if anyone ever found out, we’d go to jail.” Duke resumed pacing. “And even knowing that, sometimes Gilbert still wanted to come clean. He said that at least he’d be free of her. He said that I didn’t understand because she wasn’t blackmailing me.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Bryn Peterson was blackmailing Gilbert?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Duke. “She had this huge crush on him, and she wouldn’t leave him alone. She made him take her out on dates all the time. He even had to escort her to her cotillion. And then last semester, she transferred here to this college from Yale, just to be closer to Gilbert. She said that she missed him.”

  Okay, well that sounded weird.

  “So,” said Brigit, “she used her knowledge of the drowning to force Gilbert to do her favors? Not for money or anything like that?”

  “Her family’s rich. Hell, everyone at that stupid camp was rich. Except me. I was there because I had a scholarship. Everyone else was loaded. Bryn didn’t need the money, though. She just wanted Gilbert. She was obsessed with him.”

  “And she goes to this college now?” I said.

 
“Yeah,” said Duke.

  * * *

  “Well, maybe he’s just trying to throw us off,” I said. “I mean, maybe he tosses suspicion on Bryn Peterson so that he can be out of the limelight, and we jump on her and leave him alone.”

  “Maybe,” said Brigit. We were sitting in my car outside the frat house. Brigit was looking on her phone for contact information for Bryn, on the off chance that she lived on campus.

  “So, what do you think? Should we lean on him some more?”

  “Probably,” said Brigit. “We don’t have any reason to think that he’s innocent. I mean, except for the fact that he really seemed worried about the drowning, not about being found out for murder.”

  “Yeah, that bugs me too,” I said. “If he was guilty, would he have even called us?”

  “Well, he would have if he’s manipulating us,” she said. “Maybe he’s some kind of sophisticated psycho.”

  “Right,” I said. “Maybe.”

  We were quiet.

  I spoke up. “You find her number yet?”

  “Nope. The Internet’s slow out here. My phone is being stupid.”

  “Well, if we did lean on him, what would we do?”

  “I don’t know.” She glared at her phone.

  “You think I should tell Miles to lean on him?”

  “We need evidence, Ivy, and we don’t have any. All we have is conjecture. How can we pin this on the fraternity president? What do we have on him?”

  “Nothing,” I said, sighing. “And I’m not even sure that it’s him, anyway.”

  “Which might be why we don’t have anything on him.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Finally,” she said to the phone.

  “You got it?”

  “Yeah, I’m looking her up.”

  “So? Does she live on campus?”

  “Um…” Brigit touched the screen of her phone and waited. Then she grinned. “Actually, yes. She does.”

  “Great,” I said. “So, let’s go find her, huh?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Bryn Peterson had her fingers linked with a boy, and they sat together on a couch. She lived in one of the apartment-style dorms, but not in the same building as the one where Gilbert had died. She was hardly looking at us. Instead she seemed intent on the guy she sat with. She couldn’t keep her hands off him, clutching his thigh, squeezing his fingers. “That’s a fucking lie,” she said.

  “So, none of it’s true at all?”

  “No way.” Bryn brushed the guy’s hair away from his forehead. “Gilbert was an old boyfriend, but I have a new boyfriend now.” She grinned at the guy, moving her face close to his.

  They kissed. It was prolonged and sloppy.

  Brigit and I turned to each other and made a face.

  “Yes, we see that,” I said. “You did go to camp with Gilbert and Duke?”

  “Sure,” said Bryn. “I wouldn’t deny that, because that would be lying. But right now, I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So, you didn’t know about Preston’s drowning either.”

  “Of course I knew he drowned. I was at that camp, same as everyone else.”

  “Yeah, according to the director there, you were really broken up about it. Kept sobbing and sobbing. Did you have a special connection with Preston?”

  “No,” she said. “I was upset because I found out what Gilbert did, and I didn’t know if I could like him after that.”

  “And what did Gilbert do?” It was important that I verify she knew. If she couldn’t tell me this, then it was likely that she was telling the truth and Duke was lying.

  “He and Duke made Preston go down there,” she said. “They tricked him into it. I know they didn’t mean for him to die, but…” She paused, giving us a funny look. “Wait, if you know all about that, why aren’t you arresting Duke for killing Preston?”

  “It’s not a crime to play nasty pranks on a kid,” I said. “And I can’t arrest people. I’m a private detective.”

  “Oh.” She was squirreling this knowledge away.

  “So, how long ago did you and Gilbert break up?”

  She turned to look at the other guy, a pained look on her face. “Sorry about this, baby.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, smiling at her.

  They gazed into each other’s eyes for a couple seconds.

  “How long ago?” I repeated. I strongly suspected that she’d just turned away to her boyfriend to buy time to think of a lie.

  “It’s been a while,” she said. “I don’t remember exactly.”

  “But you did transfer here to be closer to him?”

  She looked to her boyfriend again.

  “Don’t look at him,” I said. “Look at me. Answer the question.”

  “Listen, Gilbert and I are old news,” she said. “I’m not with him anymore. I’m with Dylan. And a good thing too, since Gilbert went all psycho and shot everyone. Hell, if I’d stayed with him, maybe I’d be dead now. Anyway, I think we’re done here.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I still have questions.”

  “Well, too bad,” she said. “Because if you’re not a cop, then I don’t think I have to talk to you, and I’m not going to. So, get out of my dorm.”

  * * *

  “So, something’s off with that girl,” I told Brigit as we drove back to the office. “But I don’t know if she figures into our investigation much.”

  “She seems… manipulative,” said Brigit. “I could just see the wheels turning in her little head.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But none of that really gives her motive to hurt Gilbert. Even if she was blackmailing him, she was obsessed with him, right? She liked him. So, she wouldn’t have wanted him dead.”

  “I don’t know,” said Brigit. “If she was really twisted, she might. Especially if Gilbert wasn’t cooperating with her anymore. She might have thought that if she couldn’t have him, no one should.”

  “That’s true. And she doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d much worry about the collateral damage of killing five other people. But we don’t know anything about her. We don’t even know if she was at the party that afternoon.”

  “And it doesn’t seem like she’s going to talk to us again.”

  I sighed.

  “So,” said Brigit. “What do we do?”

  “We see what we can find out from other sources. About both her and Duke,” I said.

  * * *

  We spent the afternoon on the phone, but we didn’t get much of anywhere. People remembered seeing Bryn at the party that afternoon, but that wasn’t unusual, because people apparently saw Bryn pretty much everywhere that Gilbert was, at least when he was in public.

  There had been a confrontation between Bryn and Charlene Jarrett, apparently. Bryn had called her names, and Charlene had thrown a drink on Bryn’s outfit before disappearing into the room where she would later be killed.

  Brigit and I concocted a possible scenario.

  Bryn had seen Gilbert’s gun earlier, and she’d somehow taken it. When she went into the room, maybe she only wanted to threated Charlene, or maybe she intended to shoot both Charlene and Gilbert.

  But Gilbert saw her, and they struggled over the gun. It went off.

  Then Bryn panicked and shot everyone else.

  It was such a good theory that I shared it with Miles that evening when we were having dinner in my house yet again. This time, we weren’t eating my cooking, because we’d spent the evening loading up a rental truck with all my bigger furniture from my old apartment and bringing it to my new place. Afterward, we were sweaty and tired, so there was no way I was cooking. I’d ordered pizza instead.

  Miles listened to my theory and then thoughtfully munched on a slice of pepperoni and mushrooms. “Well, I guess she sounds pretty unhinged, so it’s possible.”

  “No proof, though,” I said. “And I don’t even scare her, so I doubt I could lean on her and force her to confess.”

  “I don
’t know, Ivy, you’ve been all over the place with this case. There’s a new theory every couple days.”

  “True,” I said. “I wish it was coming together more easily.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing there to find.”

  “How would that make you feel if it were true?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know.”

  We were quiet.

  “Give me a little more time on this before you decide that it’s a lost cause,” I said. “I feel good about this theory. I think this girl might be the answer. I’ve just got to figure out how to find proof.”

  “Okay,” he said. “A little longer, then. But I’m getting to the point where holding onto all of this is just causing me more pain.”

  “I get that,” I said.

  “I feel like, in some ways, losing Gilbert has been good for me. It’s pushed me out of my comfort zone. I didn’t think it would have been possible for you and me to be together before. But now, I feel like life is too short, and I need us to be together now, no matter what it takes.”

  I smiled, grabbing myself another slice of pizza. “And it’s working. This between us is working.”

  He grinned too.

  We just grinned at each other, like we were silly in love.We were doing that a lot lately.

  And then Miles looked away. “We still have work to do.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “No, I mean it,” he said. “So far, we’ve been together practically every night, and it’ll go on that way for a while. We’ll be around each other all the time, because it’s new and exciting. And we’ll think that means that everything is going to be easy, because it will be easy for a while. But at some point, we’re not going to spend all our time together, and you’re going to be out somewhere, and you’re going to get one of your urges.”

  “And then I’m going to call you,” I said.

  He squared his shoulders. “And I’m going to have to… sleep with you.” He didn’t sound particularly excited by the prospect. “Actually, I’m going to need to do that all the time, as a preventative, right? How often did you say?”

  “Miles, I don’t want it to be like that. It shouldn’t be an obligation—”

  “It shouldn’t,” he said. “But you and I are not normal, and this is the best way to deal with our situation. So…” He rolled his neck on his shoulders and stretched his arms. “Take your clothes off.”