Authors: Kelly Rey
"You want to go see Tippi McWirth?" I asked, my voice high with alarm.
She nodded. "And her husband. Might as well put a bow on both of them, right? And Artemis Angle, too. Maybe we can fool him into thinking we know more than we do."
I couldn't fool anyone into thinking that. Ever.
"We've got to goose someone into making a mistake," Maizy said. "If no one makes a move, you'll wind up in jail, and then I'll have to take my driver's test in the land yacht."
"Is that our chief concern here?" I asked her.
"I'm seventeen," she said. "I'm nothing without a driver's license." When I didn't say anything, she poked me in the ribs. "Hey, I'm here, aren't I?"
I nodded grudgingly.
"So we'll start at the bottom and work our way up," she said. "We'll be waiting when Harvey McWirth stops into Starbucks for his 2:15 iced cinnamon dolce latte. But leave the talking to me, okay? You're looking a little freaked out there."
Freaked out was putting it mildly. It was a wonder I was still inside of my skin. That photo in the morning paper had obliterated my hope that I'd wriggle out from this mess unscathed. What would everyone think of me when it was over? There'd probably be a lot of finger pointing and whispering, and that'd be just at the Winters Thanksgiving dinner. Who knew how the crew at Parker, Dennis might react. I might even have to find a new job. Maybe one where I could wear a disguise, like team mascot or Halloween store employee. Of course, that would be seasonal work, so I wouldn't be making very much, and I'd probably fall behind on my rent, and then Curt would have to evict me, and I'd wind up sleeping in the Escort, which wouldn't be easy what with the lack of modern plumbing and privacy shades.
"…since we have a few hours," Maizy was saying.
I blinked. "What?"
"I said," she repeated, "since we have some time to kill, we should probably stop by the supermarket for the turkey now."
"Oh. Right. The turkey."
"Are you alright, Jamie?"
I looked out the window. "Peachy."
"Hey." She put her hand on my arm. Just one, because the other one was holding her cell phone while she steered with her knee. I should probably say a little something about that. "We're going to figure this out," she told me. "Think of it as a puzzle. I'm good at puzzles. I can solve the Rubik's Cube in forty-five seconds flat."
"Solving a murder is a little different," I said gloomily. And it had been way over forty-five seconds since this nightmare began.
She shrugged. "Not so much. On TV, it always turns out to be the person you least suspect. So who do we least suspect?"
I rested my forehead on the window and let out a long, shuddering, hopeless sigh. Because the answer to that particular question was me.
An hour later, we were standing in the supermarket checkout lane behind a cart loaded with seeds, nuts, vegetables, fruits, and one ginormus frozen turkey. "I don't know," I said, staring down at it. "Are you sure I need something this big?"
"Not all at once," Maizy said. "All this tryptophan would knock Uncle Curt out for the weekend. That's not what we're going for here." She looked up at me. "Are we?"
"Of course not." I didn't want a houseguest for the whole weekend.
"You've got to string it out for days," Maizy said. "You know, turkey sandwiches and turkey soup and turkey tacos. My mother has a whole book about turkey leftovers. Unless my dad threw it out." She patted the turkey. "Sorry you had to be sacrificed for the cause, Elmer."
"Naming him—it—doesn't help," I told her. "And I don't think you can name something without a head, anyway."
"If it used to breathe," she said, "I can name it. It's a matter of respect. Hey, how did these Butterscotch Krimpets get in here?" She picked up the box and made a move to put it aside.
"Dessert." I snatched it from her and tossed it back in the cart. "Don't push it, Maizy. I'm only willing to go so far down this road with you."
The corner of her mouth twitched while she unloaded the cart onto the conveyor belt, but she knew better than to push her luck. We stepped up to the checker, and that's when I saw the newspaper sitting next to the cash drawer. I'd seen it hours earlier, of course, but it hadn't lost its shock value. I was still front and center, peering out of the doorway in the waning daylight that hadn't been there. Immediately my chest tightened up, and I looked away.
Maizy noticed my reaction. She glanced at the cashier, and then she had a reaction of her own. Sucking in a sharp breath, she whipped out her cell phone, scrabbled around on it a little, and held it up toward the cashier, comparing her screen to the real thing. But the real thing wasn't worth getting excited about. Everything about him was thin and gray and, if his pallor was any indication, unexposed to sunlight. He looked like a thousand other middle-aged, unmarried, underemployed men who lived with their mothers in the house they grew up in and bird watched or played Monopoly on the weekends. Alone.
Maizy rammed the cart into the back of my legs. "Look!"
I looked down at my leg. "What'd you do that for?"
"Look!" she whispered. "It's Roger Marrin!"
I scowled at her. "Who's Roger Marrin?"
"I am," the checker said. He glanced up from the scanner and did a double take. Even his eyes were pale, the color of a worn-out leather shoe. I could tell right away he recognized me.
And I suddenly recognized him. "Checkered Pants!" I blurted. The oddball with the fixation on Weaver Beeber.
Maizy buried her nose in her coat, giggling.
Roger Marrin's head canted slightly toward the newspaper, as if he wanted to confirm what he was seeing without being too obvious about it.
I sighed. "You've got it right. I'm public enemy number one."
"I don't know about that." He dragged Elmer across the scanner. "As far as I'm concerned, you did the world a favor."
"I didn't kill her," I said wearily.
"Of course you didn't." He grabbed the Tastykakes and tossed them in a plastic bag. "Oops. The scanner seems to have misread those as free." He leaned toward us. He smelled strange, like mothballs. I felt my nose wrinkling. "Consider it my thanks for ridding the world of a parasite."
Whoa. Strong words coming from a middle-aged guy wearing a bright blue Shop 'n Save vest.
"I remember you," Maizy told him. "You were at Dorcas Beeber's funeral."
Roger Marrin nodded. "I only went so I could tell her husband face-to-face what a louse he'd married. But I don't remember seeing you two there."
"We were around," I said vaguely. "We stayed in the background."
Maizy snorted into a broccoli crown.
Roger Marrin shrugged. "Me too. I probably shouldn't have even gone in the first place. I mean, I took the morning off to do it. I've got no business taking time off when I've got no retirement account left, and I'm working two jobs to make ends meet." His face hardened. "Because of
her
."
I tried to remember the line item for Roger Marrin on Dorcas's paperwork, but the name hadn't meant anything to me at the time. "How much did she get
you
for?" I asked, deliberate with the emphasis so that Roger might think we were two suckers of a kind.
"Almost forty-two thousand."
"Dollars?"
Maizy asked. "You must have seen her every day.
God."
"Three times a week. She said the more often I came, the more likely she'd be able to connect to Mama." He sighed heavily. "I'm sixty-one years old, and I'm working as a checker at Shop 'n Save in the daytime and as a janitor at an assisted living facility at night. You know what I do as a janitor at an assisted living facility?"
"Change light bulbs?" I said.
"Sweep floors?" Maizy said.
He touched his finger to his nose and pointed at Maizy. "Bingo. And do you know what's on the floors at an assisted living facility?"
"Creamed corn?" Maizy said.
"Eventually," he said.
Eww.
He slid a package of carrots across the scanner. "Does it get more humiliating than that?"
Probably not. Or more disgusting, either.
"Bet that makes you really mad, having to do that," Maizy suggested.
"You bet your—" He glanced at her and stopped short. "You better believe it," he amended. "She preyed on people. She preyed on
me.
And all because I just wanted to contact my mother. Mama died two years ago. Want to meet her?" He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a black and white 1950s image that I presumed was the dearly departed Mama Marrin. "Wasn't she a beauty?"
In a nerdy unibrow kind of way.
"I had to know if she was okay. You know, on the other side. I mean, I know she had Aunt Grace with her, but she never really liked Aunt Grace." He ran his fingers lightly across the photo. "And I wanted to touch base about everyday things, like if she approved of the paint I'd chosen for the house. Because I'd put the paneling back if she didn't."
Geez. This guy gave
mama's boy
a whole new meaning. It also confirmed my earlier suspicion, profile-wise. Good to know I still had it.
"You're not married, are you?" Maizy said.
I frowned at her.
Roger tucked the photo carefully back into his pocket, shaking his head. "No one could stack up to Mama. She told me so herself." He snatched up a bag of walnuts, crushing them so tightly in one hand that I might have heard the shells cracking. "That Dorcas was pretty clever about it," he said, almost talking to himself. "Right up to the day she died, she kept stringing me along.
The spirits have to feel safe before they'll come forward, Roger. The connection to the afterworld can be tricky, Roger.
All the while pocketing my life savings." He hurled the walnuts into a plastic bag. "Mama told me not to trust women. Liars, all of them."
Maizy and I exchanged glances. Roger Marrin might look like Chip and Dale, but he had a temper like the Tasmanian Devil. And he was seriously ticking me off with all this
Mama said
baloney.
Then the baloney registered. "What do you mean, right up to the day she died?" I asked him. "Did you have an appointment that day?"
A startled expression flitted across his face. "No, no appointment. But existing clients could just be walk-ins if they felt they needed special guidance. You paid a little more for the convenience, but—"
"What time did you walk in?" Maizy cut in.
He was starting to look like a cornered rat. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. I didn't like Roger Marrin much. "I don't see why it matters to you," he said. His weird, washed-out eyes flitted back and forth between us.
Maizy didn't miss a beat. "Because she bled my grandma dry, just like you. She got sixty thousand out of
her
over the years." She lowered her voice. "Between me and you, I think Dorcas charged on a sliding scale, depending on how much you made. Na-Na was on Social Security but she did inherit that country club from Grandpa Willy, after all. Not to insult what you make here. I'm sure it's perfectly—" She glanced at his blue vest. "—adequate."
"It's arcade tokens," he said flatly. "But at my age, who else is gonna hire me? It's not as if I went to Harvard."
Mama had probably put the kibosh on that idea.
He picked up one of our loaded shopping bags and dropped it into the cart. "If it really matters, I left work at 3:30. And I drove straight to Oak Grove. But if you're asking me did I kill her, the answer is no." He gave me a pointed look.
"Don't look at me," I told him. "I didn't kill her either." Oak Grove was about twenty minutes from the Shop 'n Save, which put him there at roughly ten to four. The window between Dorcas's murder and my arrival at the scene had just closed slightly. It suddenly occurred to me that I'd never seen an appointment book. Either Dorcas hadn't kept one, or her killer had taken it with him. Which would mean his name had been in there. Unless he'd been a walk-in.
My head was starting to hurt.
"So neither of you killed her," Maizy said impatiently. "Was she with someone when you got there, or did you see her right away?"
"I saw her right away," he said. "As soon as she finished her phone call."
"Do you happen to know who she was talking to?" I asked casually, while I loaded grocery bags into the cart and acted as if this wasn't my life and freedom we were dealing with.
Roger Marrin shrugged his bony shoulders.
"Did she seem mad or upset?" Maizy asked. I had to hand it to her. Her dad must have given her interrogation lessons along the way. She was really pretty good at it. "Oh, here." She dug into her pocket. "I have coupons." She handed them over. "So? Was she mad?"
"I don't think so. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Dorcas." He shrugged again while he sifted through the coupons.
I was beginning to wonder if this guy would notice if his nose fell off his face. "Did you notice anything unusual while you were there?" I asked. "Like, say, a black SUV parked on the street?"
"Would that be unusual?" he asked. "Where else would it be parked?"
Wise guy. "Try to remember," I urged him. "It's important."
Roger gave it some thought, or pretended to, while I pretended I didn't want to wrap my hands around his scrawny neck. He'd read the paper. He knew I was the primary suspect, and I needed answers. But it didn't seem to matter all that much to him. Ordinarily, I would get that. I wasn't overly sympathetic to murder suspects myself. But for Roger Marrin, it was convenient. He'd known Dorcas, had clearly loathed her at the end, and seemed awfully prone to mood swings and fits of rage. And the way he'd hoisted Elmer, he'd have had no problem picking up Dorcas's crystal ball.
Plus,
I
wasn't the one who'd handed over my life's savings to a fraud.
"No SUVs," he said finally. "Just a few cars up the street, at the massage parlor."
I nodded. "So what sort of special guidance did Dorcas give you that day?"
He drew back. "That's between me and Mama."
Sure, after spilling his guts about paint chips and paneling, all of a sudden it was between him and Mama.