A Festival of Murder (28 page)

Gasps
rippled through the small crowd of strangers and neighbors. Phoebe was frowning
furiously, looking as though she were trying to give him the benefit of the
doubt and finding it difficult to do so, while beside her Kevin, Charles, and
the twins gaped at him as if he’d lost his mind for good.

“The
aliens,” he said loudly and clearly and with an authority no one could
challenge, “are here. Look to the skies, everyone. You don’t want to miss a
thing.”

Immediately,
the entire group risked whiplash as heads snapped back to stare up at the sky
visible between the tree limbs. After ensuring that everyone was focused on
their task—Detective Canberry excepted, who glared at him with obvious
annoyance—Nicholas quickly pulled out a lighter and dropped to one knee to
lower the flame to the snow. He saw the spark and heard the small sizzle, but
he doubted anyone else noticed. He couldn’t blame them; the aliens were finally
making their appearance.

A
low, bubbling smoke that could have been mistaken for fog—except the billowing
clouds were tinted green—began to seep out from between the trees and creep
across the snow toward the murmuring onlookers.

A
whirring noise filled the silence, building in volume. The sound zipped from
one side of the forest to the other, startling some of the younger tourists.
Detective Canberry and nearly all of the tourists took a quick step backward
when a sleek silver object the size and shape of a surfboard whizzed between
the limbs of the trees above their heads.

“A
UFO!” someone shouted.

A
tree erupted in yellow light as if striped with electricity. A bolt of
lightning jumped to the next tree where something high and out of sight rattled
the tree’s limbs, causing snow and pine needles to rain down. Nicholas thought
he saw something scurry up the trunk. When the tree beside it suddenly shivered
and more lightning jumped within its limbs, he heard someone cry out a warning
that the alien was moving.

Another
silver disk spun through the air above their heads, disappearing behind foliage
and snow, trailed by dozens of pointing fingers. A series of clicks rattled
from the right. They were echoed by a second set of clicks that seemed to come
from the left side of the forest. After a pause, the right side clicks rattled
again.

“They’re
communicating!” Charles cried out.

“It’s
real,” Kevin, gasped. His face was pale. “This is really real.”

Nicholas
stared resolutely out at the forest, trying to spot movement amid the rising
smoke.

A
strobe light began to flash from behind the trees. Each burst was bright like
the blinking of the sun. The great light clicked on, casting the trees in
bright relief, highlighting curls of aspen bark, before it blinked out, making
the snow look suddenly gray. The light clicked on again and the crowd screamed
as the flash illuminated the black silhouette of a figure.

It
wasn’t human. Its head was ovoid and twice the size of an adult man’s, yet its
body was small and emaciated, like a malnourished child’s. Large, three-fingered
hands hung near its knobby knees.

The
light blinked out, erasing the unnatural silhouette from view, but not from
memory.

“Aliens!”
roared Emma in a voice that could have steered off the Titanic. She threw an
arm around Bea’s shoulders, who was too stunned to raise her opened flask to
her gaping mouth. “I knew the dang things existed! I just knew it!”

The
crowd of tourists was abuzz with excitement. Nicholas could all but sense their
collective thought:
we were right all along
.

Nicholas
spun as something raced past him into the trees. It wasn’t an alien, but a man.
The burly beard, the stained coveralls . . . He knew that
man.

“Captain
Sam!” he yelled out. “Come back!”

The
other man forged ahead through the snow, leaving Nicholas no choice. He shook
off Canberry’s restraining hold and bolted between the trees in pursuit. He was
in mildly better shape than the sedentary Captain Sam, but only just. After
fifteen paces, he managed to fling his arms out and snag the back shoulder
straps of Captain Sam’s coveralls. Nicholas didn’t pull back so much as he used
his weight to drag them both down into the snow in a heap.

“Trilby,
what’re you doin’, you idiot?” Captain Sam yelled as he writhed like a walrus
in the snow. “I’ve gotta stop ’im!”

Nicholas
was not built for tackling people. He groaned as muscles in his back seized up,
but he remained sprawled over the other man. “You don’t need to stop anything.
They aren’t real.”

“Not
trying to catch aliens.” Captain Sam struggled up onto his arms and jutted out
his bearded chin. “Trying to catch
him
!”

Ahead,
another man ran between the trees, dodging sparks of blue and green light,
melting into the tinted smoke and reappearing feet away, pulling ropes of fire
from the trees. Nicholas’s breath caught at the dramatic sight.

Captain
Sam whipped his head back to glare at Nicholas. “I know what’s goin’ on,” he
snarled.

Before
Nicholas could reply, a gloved hand gripped his shoulder from behind, pulling
him partly off Captain Sam. It was Detective Canberry, wearing a sweat
mustache. “Trilby, what is going on here?!”

Nicholas
couldn’t smile. Not about this. But a certain satisfaction tinged his voice as
he replied, “I’m delivering your killer to you, Detective. He’s right there.”

~~~~~

“Are
you crazy? I hadn’t set it up properly yet. You could’ve killed them all!”

“On
the contrary, Mr. Grant,” Detective Canberry said with a thoughtful look at
Nicholas. “I’d say everything was set up perfectly.”

They
stood in the living room of Nicholas’s cabin. Outside, commotion reigned over
the site of the Great Greeting where tourists still milled about, dazed and
excited as if they’d just attended an exuberant rock concert that had exceeded
their wildest expectations. The majority of them seemed convinced that they’d
just experienced an alien visitation. Nicholas saw no point in putting forth
the effort to set them straight.

Especially
since he was in the middle of something major. He, Detective Canberry, and
Horace Grant faced off near the fireplace inside Nicholas’s home, though
Nicholas stood on the side of the detective who, he hoped, was armed. Horace
looked mad enough to try tearing down the log cabin around their heads.
Understandable, Nicholas supposed, when one was just accused of committing a murder.

“What’s
all this about?” Horace demanded. His fists were mallets of meat by his hips
and the skin above his beard was red. Snow had melted off his boots and was
creating a puddle in the middle of Nicholas’s rug, but he chose to let the
transgression slide. “I just saved people from incurring some serious burns and
you’ve got the balls to claim I killed Rocky Johnson?”

“You
saved people from a danger that you yourself created,” Nicholas said as he
massaged his lower back with his fingertips. He yearned to crawl into a hot
bath with a cup of tea and recuperate from his ill-advised acrobatics, but that
would have to come later. “Seen in that light, your actions are hardly heroic.”

“How
do you know he was responsible for that show out there?” Canberry asked him. Nicholas
pulled from his pocket the cord that he’d clipped from the yard. “When Phoebe
and I discovered lengths of this out in the trees behind the Gingerbear, we
didn’t know what it was. But it was familiar to me. I was certain I’d seen it
somewhere before. I found it again behind my cabin and that’s when I remembered
where I’d seen it.” He held it up in Horace Grant’s direction. “You have boxes
of this in your storeroom. This is fuse, isn’t it? For fireworks, or maybe
smoke effects. And I also found this.” He reached into his pocket again and
pulled out what he had earlier taken to be a wrapper for alien candy that he’d
found on the tree. The letters FUS now obviously spelled part of the word “fuse.”

Horace
said nothing. He reminded Nicholas, quite alarmingly, of a bull about to
charge.

“Horace
received a large shipment of this on Thursday, as well as other items whose
purpose I didn’t understand at the time. I’ve since done some research.”
Pretending he wasn’t intimidated by the man, Nicholas addressed Horace. “You
haven’t been making bombs. You’ve been making fireworks.”

“That’s
illegal,” Canberry declared.

“I
never received anything I wasn’t allowed to possess,” Horace finally growled. “All
of my shipments are legal to own in the state of Colorado.”

Canberry
gave Nicholas an impatient look. “How does that make him guilty of murder?”

Nicholas’s
lips twitched. “Because he was staging an invasion.”

That
fell onto the rug with all the subtlety of a dropped corpse.

“I
wasn’t doing anything of the sort!” Horace blurted. “I never intended for
anyone to believe those fireworks were aliens. The shows were meant to spice
things up, give everyone a good time to make up for any disappointment they
might’ve had for not finding real aliens up here.”

“Shows,”
Canberry repeated. “You had more than one planned?”

When
Horace fell mute, Nicholas again picked up the slack. “I’m guessing the first
show is the one that caused all the problems. It was meant to be set off behind
the Gingerbear either during or after the first night party.”

Canberry
arched a brow.

Nicholas
took a deep breath. “I’m guessing Rocky Johnson wandered outside the inn that
night and stumbled upon Horace setting up the fireworks. Considering the theme
of the show we just saw here, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rocky assumed that
Horace was planning a hoax.”

“Is
that true?” Canberry asked Horace. “Did Rocky Johnson catch you in the act?”

“The
act of doing what?” Horace challenged, taking a half step forward.

Canberry,
though not nearly as large as the General Store owner, stood his ground. He was
definitely armed, Nicholas decided. Though the thought now didn’t offer much
relief when he envisioned wild shooting within his cabin.

“Were
you planting fireworks outside the Gingerbear the night of Rocky’s murder?”
Canberry clarified.

“I
had plans for entertainment,” was all that Horace admitted.

Nicholas
pointed to his own temple. “Rocky sustained an injury to head. It left a black
mark, just here.”

“The
medical examiner thinks it’s a burn mark,” Canberry said, continuing to eye
Horace warily.

“That’s
right. Rocky was struck by something that had been burning. Something similar
to whatever left the scorch marks on the trees around the Gingerbear and on my
property.”

“I
saw those,” Canberry said, breaking his stare down of Horace to glance at
Nicholas. “A woman tried to convince me they had been caused by the exhaust
tubes of a UFO.” His expression screwed up with distaste.

“Not
a UFO,” Nicholas said. “Some type of lit firework. A missile or a rocket.”

Horace
muttered something beneath his breath.

“What
was that?” Canberry pressed.

“I
said it wasn’t a rocket. Or a missile.”

Detective
Canberry went very, very still. In contrast, a tremor ripped through Nicholas’s
knees. He felt ready to sit down.

“He
interrupted what you were doing, didn’t he?” Nicholas said quietly, trying his
best to weave a spell. “He accused you of perpetrating a hoax.”

“He
didn’t know what he was talking about,” Horace snarled. An unexpected hatred
scarred his face. “He said he followed me out of the Gingerbear because he knew
I was up to no good.”

“Because
he knew your past,” Nicholas prompted. He couldn’t help flinching when Horace
turned furious eyes upon him, but he forced himself to explain to Detective
Canberry. “After my abduction, an investigative reporter named Jeremiah Wilcox
wrote an article about me. I didn’t know who he was back then, and I wouldn’t
have cared when Phoebe found his article today except that the name stuck out.
Horace told me his father had been sent to prison for insurance fraud because
of an expose written about him by a reporter named Jeremiah Wilcox. This same
Jeremiah Wilcox worked with Rocky at the
Roswell Explorer
.”

“You
think they shared notes,” Canberry said.

Nicholas
nodded. “It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that Wilcox had told
Rocky Johnson about the insurance fraud case at some point, which Rocky
remembered when he encountered Horace in Hightop.”

“I
bet that was upsetting,” Canberry said as he studied Horace. “You thought you’d
run away from your past but Rocky Johnson knew all about your father’s dirty
deed. He probably assumed the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.”

“He
accused me of something I didn’t do. Just like Wilcox did with my father!”
Horace punched one hand into the other but his eyes were distant, his anger
focused elsewhere. “I wasn’t out to scam anyone. I was doing my part to make
the festival a success, but Johnson told me he was going to tell the whole
world that I was just like my father, a fraud.”