Final Fondue (A Five-Ingredient Mystery) (19 page)

Val snapped to attention. “Why was it lucky?”

“Fawn saw the whole thing and told the police what happened. They might not have believed Jennifer without a witness.”

“I hope no one was hurt badly,” Granddad said.

“The man on the bicycle died right there. Cracked his head open. No helmet. Jennifer had the right of way and wasn’t speeding or anything. The police tested her for drink and drugs, but she was clean, thank the Lord. Still, it was a mighty bad thing, right before graduation. Jennifer and Fawn were so sad about it. They didn’t even enjoy their graduation parties.”

Val glanced across the sitting room toward the study, wishing she were sitting there in front of her computer. That accident was worth researching. Mrs. Schrank had made her daughter into a heroine who’d vouched for her friend’s version of the accident, but something different might have happened. Maybe Fawn was driving, perhaps without a license, and prevailed on Jennifer to lie about who’d been behind the wheel.

Val tuned her mental dial back to the Mrs. Schrank station.

“Fawn and Jennifer lost track of each other for a long time. And now, after they just found each other and Fawn was going to be part of Jennifer’s wedding, another terrible thing happens.” Mrs. Schrank’s eyes glistened with tears. She rose abruptly from the table. “It’s time I got on the road. Thank you all for dinner.”

Granddad stood up. “You’re welcome to spend the night.”

“I couldn’t do that. Gerald wouldn’t like it if I didn’t come home tonight. Tell Jennifer I’m sorry I missed her.”

Val and her mother cleared the table while her grandfather saw Mrs. Schrank out.

Granddad joined them in the kitchen. “I feel sorry for that woman, losing her daughter and going home to Gerald, but I’m glad she’s not staying here. She would have kept us up half the night with her chatter.”

The three of them barely spoke as they cleaned up after the meal. Val appreciated the silence, still shell-shocked from Mrs. Schrank’s volley of words.

When Mom went upstairs to grade papers and Granddad took out the kitchen trash, Val went into the study. She fired up the computer, convinced that she could find details about the accident Fawn’s mother had mentioned. Long simmering anger over the accident might have led someone in the bicyclist’s family to go after Jennifer, or both Fawn and Jennifer, believing they’d lied about the accident.

Payton had said he met Jennifer ten years ago when she was still in high school. That would have been around the time of the accident. Val looked up Franklin, Virginia. The town near the North Carolina border had a population of less than a thousand, smaller even than Bayport. Val’s online search turned up nothing about the death of a bicyclist in the vicinity of Franklin, Virginia, ten years ago . . . or at any time.

A creaking noise from the floor above made her look at the ceiling. Jennifer’s room was above the study. Val listened intently. No other noise. The old house did give off random noises now and then. She continued her online search, expanding it to include adjacent counties and nearby cities—Petersburg, Richmond, and as far away as Charlottesville, where Payton and Noah had gone to law school. No results from that. Ten years ago, not every local newspaper posted every article online.

The floorboards above creaked again. Someone was definitely in Jennifer’s room.

Val left the study and crept up the creaky stairs. Someone could have slipped into the house, possibly while she was in the kitchen with Mom and Granddad, cleaning up after dinner. Maybe Jennifer had returned for an item she’d forgotten to pack.

Her bedroom door was ajar. Val pushed it open wider. Granddad, wearing rubber gloves, was rooting in the wastebasket. “Get out, Granddad. You can’t go poking around in a guest’s room. It’s an invasion of privacy.”

“Shh. Your mother will hear. I’m finished and I’m leaving.”

Val eyed his gloved left hand. He was clutching something small. “What are you taking?”

“I’ll show you. Come on downstairs.” He removed a key from his pocket and locked Jennifer’s door behind them as they left.

It was probably illegal for a property owner to unlock a room he’d rented and snoop in it. Though Val didn’t approve of what he’d done, she was curious about his find.

Once they were downstairs, she motioned him into the study and closed the pocket doors that shut it off from the sitting room. “I hope you haven’t found evidence related to the murder because it probably can’t be used in court now that you’ve removed it.”

“This isn’t evidence of murder, but you got to follow every lead. That’s what they teach in my investigator course.” He showed her two tags snipped from items bought at Bayport Outfitters on Main Street. “They used to carry only ladies clothes there, but now they sell other things too.”

“I’ve seen souvenirs, kid’s clothes, and small toys there. Let me see the tags.” She looked at them. “They have product codes on them, but I don’t know how to decipher them.”

“Can you take these tags to the shop tomorrow and find out what she bought? I’d do it, but you can come up with a better cover story for a shop like that. Dollars to doughnuts Jennifer bought clothes there.”

“That’s a safe bet.” It dawned on Val why he’d grabbed the garbage bag from her mother before dinner. “Did you find anything in the trash from the upstairs bathroom?”

“Sure did. Band-Aids with blood on them. I saved them.”

“Why? To prove that Jennifer or Sarina cut herself?”

“Or Noah. The hall bathroom isn’t locked. Maybe he couldn’t find a bandage in his bathroom, so he looked in the hall bath.”

“You have sales tags and Band-Aids, Granddad. That’s not much to show from pawing through trash.”

“I’m not finished yet. I still have to check the trash in Sarina’s and Noah’s rooms. I need you as a lookout. I figured I was safe in Jennifer’s room because she wasn’t coming back here after dinner, but the other two might. You just park yourself at the window seat upstairs and watch. If you see any of them, come and get me.”

That would make her an accessory to his snooping. “It’s not worth doing. You expect a murderer who left no traces at the crime scene to drop something incriminating in a wastebasket? Dream on.”

“Our murderer might get sloppy, figuring he or she got away with it. In the garbology unit of my course, we read about cases cracked because of things that turned up in the trash.”

If Val didn’t help him, he would snoop on his own without a lookout . . . and risk getting caught. She trudged upstairs after him and took up her post by the window seat. From there she had a good view of the street. No cars or pedestrians in sight.

Granddad waited at the top of the staircase, a key in his hand, until she gave him a nod. Then he hurried toward Sarina’s room.

Two minutes later, he joined Val by the window seat. “Nothing but used tissues in Sarina’s trash. Maybe I’ll have better luck in Noah’s room.”

A car slowed down in front of the house. Val couldn’t see who was driving, but the car looked like Noah’s sedan. “It’s too late, Granddad.”

They waited until they saw Sarina open the sedan’s passenger door.

Granddad pulled Val away from the window. “Let’s take the back staircase. They won’t even know we were up here.”

Once downstairs, she said goodnight to him and took the side door to the driveway, avoiding Noah and Sarina who were coming in the front door.

On the way to her cousin’s house, Val kept her eye on the rearview mirror, but saw no cars following her.

The house was dark except for a light in the hall. Val crept through the kitchen-family room and looked out the sliding door in case the prowler had returned. Everything outside was still. She went to bed.

* * *

Val woke up at the same time she had on the previous two mornings at her cousin’s house. Today, though, she didn’t have to fix breakfast for Granddad’s guests. He and Mom would take care of it. Val packed the small suitcase she’d brought on Friday night and stopped in the kitchen where Monique was pouring coffee. “Thanks for putting me up this weekend. Did you check the backyard this morning for signs of a prowler?”

“Yes, and I didn’t find anything.” Monique handed Val a mug of coffee. “I have some photos to show you on my big monitor.”

She took Val to a tiny room off the hall. A thirty-inch monitor dominated the space Monique used as an office.

Val perched on a stool next to her cousin’s desk chair. “Are these photos from the festival?”

“They’re from Friday evening when I walked around the historic district taking pictures of people shopping and eating. I’d like you to look at some pictures I took around six thirty.” Monique moved her mouse and clicked to open a photo of a man at a small outdoor table, wearing a crab hat. People were eating at similar tables around his, but none of them wore the souvenir hat. He sat alone, holding a phone, his thumbs in a position to punch buttons.

The crab hat and the angle of the man’s head made it hard for Val to see his features. “Who is he?”

“My face-recognition software says it’s this man.” Monique brought up a headshot of Noah. Then she zoomed in on the face of the man sitting alone at the table.

Val saw the resemblance. “Yes, that’s Noah. Based on this photo of him at the table, your software found his headshot among your photos?”

“The other way around. I started with the photos I took of the wedding group. The software derived the characteristics of each face and then looked for matching faces in the set of photos I took over the weekend. It didn’t find many matches, but I thought this shot from Friday evening would interest you.”

Val studied the objects on the table in front of Noah. “A glass of wine, utensils, no food. The table is set for one person. He’s waiting for dinner. What’s that small, rectangular thing near the folded napkin?”

Monique zoomed in on it. “It looks like a phone to me. He has one phone in his hand and another one on the table.”

“The one on the table could be the smart phone I’ve seen Noah using at the house. I can barely tell that the thing in his hand is a phone.”

Her cousin magnified Noah’s hand. “He’s cradling it. It’s not a fancy phone with a large display. Some people have one phone for business and one for personal use.”

“And some have phones that can’t be traced back to them.” Val remembered Sarina’s remark that Jennifer’s harassing message had probably come from a disposable phone. “The one he’s holding could be a burner phone, to use when he doesn’t want someone to know who’s calling or messaging. Where was he when you took this picture?”

“On the patio at the Bayport Bistro.”

Val hadn’t tried the recently opened bistro, though she’d walked past it. It was at the corner of Main Street and Locust Lane, with its patio facing the lane.
Aha
. “Right across from the Bugeye Tavern. Payton and Jennifer had dinner there on Friday night. Now I understand why Noah’s wearing a crab hat. He didn’t want them to see him there. If they were sitting in the glassed-in porch at the tavern, he could have watched them.”

“And I watched him. He finished thumbing his text message as his dinner arrived. He ignored his food and stared at the tavern’s enclosed porch. I wondered what interested him so much, so I snapped a picture of the people seated there.” Monique switched to displaying thumbnails of photos. She selected a photo showing tables near the floor-to-ceiling windows on the tavern’s porch.

Val scanned the women at the tables near the window. “I can’t see all the faces clearly, but no one there has hair like Jennifer’s. Maybe she and Payton ate in the tavern’s back room.”

Monique pointed at a man whose face was turned away from the window. “This guy was reaching into his pocket when I took this picture. He pulled out his phone and looked at it for a long time. I took pictures of him from a different angle and used my telephoto lens.” She brought up the next photo in the set.

Val recognized the profile. “That’s Payton. But where’s Jennifer?”

“You’ll see. These are the next few photos I snapped. I took the whole set within a minute.”

Val studied the series. Payton put his phone into his pocket. A smiling Jennifer approached the table. He sat back, his arms crossed. She leaned toward him, now down in the mouth. The couple huddled over the table, apparently in a serious discussion.

“I wish I could have heard their conversation,” Val said.

“Judging by the next picture I took, Noah wished the same thing.” Monique enlarged a thumbnail shot of Noah gazing across the street. “The timestamps on the photos indicate that two minutes have passed since the server delivered the food, and Noah still hasn’t touched it.”

“Maybe he wanted to see the effect of his text message.” Val could now understand why Noah had discouraged Fawn from joining him for dinner. He couldn’t have watched Jennifer and Payton so intently if Fawn had been there. “It’s possible Payton was reading a message from someone other than Noah.”

“Anything’s possible, but how likely is it that Payton got a text from someone else at that exact moment? Noah stopped thumbing and put his phone down only seconds before Payton took out his phone and studied the display.”

Val leaned toward the monitor to peer at the thumbnail images. “Did you take any other photos on Locust Lane?” When Monique enlarged the pictures, Val looked for anyone resembling Fawn, Sarina, Payton’s ex, or his mother. No luck. “Some people walking on the lane wore crab hats. Noah’s the only person wearing a crab hat at a restaurant. Eating with those claws hanging down wouldn’t be easy.”

“It’s creepy to think about the best man stalking the bride and groom. Is he jealous?”

“Probably. He was going out with Jennifer before Payton replaced him.” Val stared at the photo of Noah watching the engaged couple. If they’d looked out the window, they could have seen him, but not necessarily recognized him. “I just realized something that should have occurred to me earlier. All along, I’ve thought that the crab hat could have obscured the victim’s identity from the strangler. Now I know that a crab hat could also disguise a stalker . . . and even a murderer.”