by Rae Davies
Chapter 13
After recovering sufficiently from the shock of my brother being hauled off to jail, I drove home. I thought about following him, but I knew it would do no good. The police wouldn’t let me see him, and even if they would, there was nothing I could do but stare at him and babble some nonsense about how everything would be fine.
I didn’t have time for babbling, or even the guilt I could already feel thundering down around me for letting my brother who, despite being an adult and thus theoretically responsible for his own actions, was in my town and thus under my care.
At least that was how my mother would see it, and, truthfully, I did too.
It might not be logical, but there it was anyway.
So home I went to let out my dog, feed Ben’s goose, and look up Avery Gregor’s number.
Gregor was the attorney that I’d hired earlier in the year when Stone hadn’t been willing to believe that my discovery of a rodeo queen’s body had been as a big of a surprise for me as it had been for everyone else.
I’d gotten myself off the hook by managing to get my life threatened by the real murderer, but I still felt Gregor’d known what he was doing.
Besides, he was the only defense attorney I knew.
With Ben gone, Pauline had settled down. She didn’t seem happy, but she wasn’t attacking me. As I pulled into my garage, I took that as a positive sign.
Maybe the goose and I could call a truce.
I got her out of the Jeep and up to my house without too much problem. She seemed to be giving me the cold wing, which was just fine by me.
I was careful though to act offended. I didn’t want the goose catching on that her act wasn’t bothering me.
Heaven knew what she would do next, if she thought her punishment wasn’t delivering the proper kick.
At the house, Kiska was his usual no-worries self. It was refreshing to see him lounged out and unconcerned when my mind was whirling with so many concerns.
I waited for him to stretch and stretch again. Then waited some more for him to lumber to his feet. Even Pauline sitting on the dining room table didn’t seem to stir too much need in him to move.
Or maybe it was that her presence dimmed any need to move. He did watch her with a slightly wary look on his face.
Finally, five long minutes later, he was on his feet and out the door.
First things first. I walked to my kitchen and got myself a beer. Then I took it back into the main room and drank it while staring at Pauline as if she might be the goose that laid the golden ideas.
Unfortunately, no grand ideas came from either Pauline or my own brain. She, in fact, turned her back on me in a rather impressive display of wing fluffing and honks.
I drank more of my beer, waiting for her to quiet down, then I went to my phone.
I called Gregor first. Lucky me, I had his emergency number.
He showed no surprise at my call. In fact, I got the distinct feeling that he’d been expecting it. Gregor was, I suspected, a bit of an ambulance chaser, or whatever the defense attorney equivalent was.
Whatever his techniques, he took Ben’s information down quickly. I told him I’d bring payment by the next morning for his retainer and then hung up, feeling not one bit better about the day’s events.
Then the phone rang. And it rang again.
Pauline twisted her neck to stare at me.
We both knew who was calling. Maybe the goose wanted to talk to her, but I didn’t.
Two more rings, and I was almost out of time until the answering machine clicked on.
If I answered, I would get lectured. If I didn’t... it would be worse.
The fifth ring sounded. I dove for the phone.
“Sorry, I was just getting home,” I claimed, puffing convincingly into the receiver.
“Humph.” As usual, my mother didn’t sound all that trusting.
“I... uh...” I searched for a way to tell her that things had gone from embarrassing to impossible in the space of a day.
“Your brother’s been arrested. Did you know that?”
How did she—
I didn’t get time to probe into her disturbing connections to the news here. She plowed on, asking me where I’d been, how I’d allowed this to happen, what I meant to do to fix it, and how in the world Ben, the sweetest boy who had ever set foot on dirt, could possibly be accused of killing someone.
It was a lot to answer in a very short time. So I didn’t. I fell back onto my couch instead and stared aimlessly at Pauline.
An indignant “So?” snapped me out of my daze.
“So...” I covered.
“So are you going to do something?”
“I called an attorney. He said he’d go by tonight.” I didn’t know what else she expected me to do. It wasn’t like I could bake a cake with a file in it. I wasn’t that good of a baker.
“An attorney? Well, I guess that’s needed.” Her voice sounded off, as if she was moving around in a hurry as she talked. “It’s a holiday weekend. So it will be tough, but if we leave now, we should be in St. Louis by ten. And I’m sure I can talk my way onto some flight heading west.”
Heading west? My entire body snapped to attention.
“You can’t come here.” Realizing that statement might not have come across quite how I’d wanted it to, I added, “Like you said, it’s a holiday weekend, and it’s late. Even if you can get a seat somehow, it won’t be until tomorrow. And dad shouldn’t drive at night. He’d have to get a room in a hotel.”
My father never stayed in a hotel. Even on vacation, we bummed off friends and relatives, or, if absolutely forced to stay on our own, we camped, in a tent.
Northern Minnesota in November had been fun. Not.
“Oh, that is true.” I could feel my mom turning, maybe to stare at my dad. He, I was sure, was sitting unaware in his recliner thinking his evening ahead was just TV and peanuts. (He ate in-the-shell peanuts, shell and all, like normal people ate chips.)
“He wouldn’t like that.”
I reinforced her doubts with a reassuring, “No, he wouldn’t.”
“Hmm.” She was thinking. I couldn’t be sure if that was a good thing or bad.
I jumped in to push it to the good side. “And I have things covered here. As I said, I called Avery Gregor. He’s the best attorney in all of western Montana.” Who knew if that was true? Hopefully, not my mother.
“Gregor you say? Avery Gregor?”
I froze, afraid my mother and her FriendTime friends had something on Gregor that would disqualify him from defending her youngest and send her scurrying here to my home.
“I haven’t heard of him, but I’ll check...” There were tapping noises, telling me she’d moved to her computer.
“He looks legitimate. I messaged my friend Mary, but she isn’t online now.”
I didn’t know who this Mary was, and while I would have loved to find out, I was more struck by the fact that she trusted whoever this person was over her own daughter.
I said something to that effect.
“Don’t be silly.”
I wasn’t. I was, though, getting a tad miffed.
“I can handle this.”
“Can you?”
“I can.”
“Like you handled that hamster we bought you when you were eight?”
The hamster? Really?
“Ben is not a hamster, and I am not eight.”
“Well, thank heavens. If he was, I’d be afraid that dog of yours would eat him.”
This was in reference to an unfortunate event wherein our hamster disappeared on the same day our cat was discovered in my room, on the hamster’s cage, looking unusually satisfied with life, and, in my mother’s opinion, hamster.
I was not, however, arguing this again. I had some pride.
Fortunately, my mother moved on. “Well, you should be able to handle it. You do have a background in such things.”
“What things?” As far as I knew, my mother did
n’t know all that much about the two bodies that I’d discovered previously. But then, I hadn’t until this week realized how connected she’d become thanks to FriendTime.
“Your reporting, of course. We spent good money on that education. We ought to get something out of it.”
I risked a glance at Pauline to see if she understood this line of reasoning any better than I did.
She didn’t.
“And you’re dating that detective. Surely, he will listen to you if you approach him right.”
And by “right,” I had to assume she meant... I didn’t want to guess.
“Does he like steak? All men like steak.”
I supposed Peter did, but I didn’t really see how that was going to help Ben. However, if this crazy disjointed line of thinking would keep my mother out of Montana, then hell, yes, Peter loved steak.
“That’s good, but you have to do more. You have to investigate.”
Still recovering from the steak suggestion, I wasn’t able to respond before she continued.
“You can’t just sit by and assume the police are going to figure out that Ben is innocent. What do they care if he’s innocent?”
Aside from their sworn duty to uphold the law, I had to guess she meant.
“You need to be proactive. Get out there and figure out how this girl died.”
“Uh...” It felt a bit as if my mother was telling me to interfere with a police investigation, but that would be wrong, right?
“Let’s see. You should start with her. Who wanted her dead? Did she have enemies? A jealous boyfriend or an ex-husband?” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “They say it’s almost always the husband.”
I thought the statistic was “someone they knew,” but I let it go.
“Do you even know what killed her? That could be important.”
And she went on and on, sharing every bit of knowledge that she’d managed to pick up from watching every cop show from the original Hawaii Five-O to the latest one.
I listened until the phone fell from my hand and drool dribbled on my chin.
“So, can you do that?” she asked, sounding as alert as a Jack Russell Terrier spotting an about-to-be-thrown ball.
“Uh, yeah.”
“What? ... I don’t know. I think I should fly—”
“No. Yes. I can do that. Find out about Tiffany. Find out what killed her. Find her killer. Sure. Yes. Of course I can.” And then, when I was done, I’d mix up a gourmet meal, cure cancer, and save the whales.
I was good like that.
After ten more minutes of me assuring my mother that I was Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and V.I. Warshawski all rolled into one, with just enough Jessica Fletcher to make me trustworthy and lovable, I managed to get her off her “I’m coming to Montana” kick and off the phone. Not, however, before having to promise to update her daily.
I knew the last was a ruse. She wouldn’t settle for daily. I’d be lucky to make it through the night without her expecting me to check in with some big break.
But, at least for now, I was free of the threat of her arriving here, CSI kit at the ready.
I’d barely settled the receiver back on the hook when it rang again. Thinking it was Rhonda or Peter, I picked up the phone without checking caller ID.
It was Ted.
I groaned inwardly.
“Your brother’s been arrested.” He made the announcement with no warm-up and without the slightest hint of sympathy.
So very Ted.
“I know. I was with him.” I moved to the couch where I settled in under Pauline’s watchful eye.
“You were with him? And you haven’t called in?”
“He’s my brother.”
“And he was arrested.”
Honestly, I’d been too busy worrying about finding Ben an attorney and dealing with my mother to even think about Ted or his precious scoop.
“You want me to write the story of my brother’s arrest?” It would be hard to claim journalistic distance with that.
“No, but I want someone here to write the story of your brother’s arrest.”
“So, I’m off the story.”
“Yes, but...” I could hear shuffling, like he was looking for something. Something maybe printed on photo paper.
“Lucy?”
“Yes?” I was surprisingly numb to what I knew was coming.
“Were you in my office today?”
“Might have been. I did drop off a story. You know, the one you asked me to write.”
“Lucy?”
I let out a breath. “Yes.”
“I was going to offer to send you something, but it seems to be missing. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Not a thing.”
“Hmmm.” I could hear his fingers or a pen or something tapping against his desk. “Well, as I said, I would like someone here to write your brother’s story.”
He was switching to reporter mode, trying to make it sound like whatever the News published would be Ben’s story, tell his side. I was impressed that Ted still had the talent.
“And I believe if you were here earlier, you probably saw what I have to offer.”
“In payment?”
He cleared his throat. “You know we don’t pay sources.”
Oh, no, of course not.
“So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to put Marcy on the phone, and she’ll take down everything you know.”
“And then you’ll destroy the picture? Erase it from your server?”
“We’ll talk.”
Behind me, Pauline snorted.
I agreed with her take. Ted would never give me that picture. Not until he was sure he had squeezed every bit of usefulness he could out of it. It was enough to make me want to email the photo to my mother myself.
Almost.
“Put Marcy on,” I muttered.
Marcy was her normal non-enthused self, at least where crime reporting came in.
“So they didn’t tell you why they were arresting him?”
“Not that I heard.” Although, of course, I knew the bigger murder why. What I didn’t know was the smaller motive-and-means why.
“You know, I was supposed to be covering this.” Until Ben became suspect number one that is. “I came by this afternoon and tried to get into Daniel’s files... He was too tired at the hospital to give me his password.... but I couldn’t. You haven’t come across anything that might point to Ben have you?”
For a moment, Marcy was silent. Then in a loud stage whisper, she said, “Daniel was obsessed with your brother, but all I’ve seen so far was a list of places HA! has protested in the last two years. I think he was looking for a connection between your brother and Tiffany, but I don’t know that he found one.”
Well, that was good, I guessed, although some kind of real information that I could have used to find the real killer would have been even better.
After exchanging little that was of use to either one of us, we hang up.
I let Kiska back into the house, fed him, Pauline, and myself, and went to bed.
I had an early crime-fighting morning ahead of me. I’d start with my coffee with Gary and then see what I could pry out of George. Hopefully, one or both of those conversations would point me in a Ben-vindicating direction. If not...
I fell back on the pillows and stared up at my ceiling. If not, I wouldn’t have to worry about who my mother knew from FriendTime, because she’d be here in my house, telling me everything I’d ever done wrong—including being the worst big sister ever.
Chapter 14
The next morning when I got to Cuppa Joe’s, Gary was waiting for me, and I was surprised to see that Marcy was with him.
I sat down with my latte, my mind whirling through the options for talking him into committing a small crime by destroying what was technically newspaper property—the image of me and Ben at the protest—but before I could settle on my first line of attack, he slid a flash drive acro
ss the table to me.
“For you,” he said. The skin around his eyes wrinkled.
I glanced at Marcy. She was beaming too. In fact she looked... proud.
I picked up the lipstick-sized piece of plastic. “Uh, thanks.”
“It’s the—” Marcy started, but Gary tapped her hand with one finger, cutting her off. She snapped her mouth shut and nodded her head.
“What Marcy wanted to tell you is that—”
This time Marcy broke in. “I stink at computers. Did you know that?”
I didn’t, but it wasn’t a shocking revelation either.
“And Ted never gives me the time I need. It’s no wonder I fumble around sometimes and things get messed up.”
“Messed up?” I asked, my fingers tightening over the drive.
She nodded. “Uh huh. Gary tried to recover everything, but there was just no saving it. I’d messed things up good.”
I looked, surprised, at the photographer. Marcy not knowing her way around a C drive I could believe, but Gary? That, I had a hard time digesting.
But then again, I didn’t know why this mattered, why they were telling me.
“Luckily,” Gary said, “We only lost a very few files, and nothing we’d planned on running in the newspaper anyway.” He looked at me. “At least nothing that we were planning to use as of yesterday.”
Then I got it: Ted, that sneak, had planned on running my picture after all.
“I told Ted if I’d known he wanted to use the pictures, I would have already had them moved out of the temporary file.”
Marcy placed her hands flat on the table in front of her. “And I had no idea Gary was logged on when I sat down.”
“Sat down?” I asked.
“On his keyboard.”
“You butt-deleted my pictures?” I laughed out loud. This was too good. I could just see Ted’s face when a stricken Marcy wandered into his office to tell him her behind had over-ridden his editorial demands.
