Gamma and I entered the armory in a rush, both excited. Me because I was close to solving the case, or rather, I was closer than I’d been a couple of hours ago. Her because she’d told me about Doctor Puddles and wouldn’t have to sneak around anymore.
“You know, I still can’t quite believe how relaxed I was,” Gamma said. “I should’ve noticed you following us.”
“Too busy flirting with your doctor boyfriend, eh?”
“Stop it, Charlotte, I’m serious.”
“Are you kidding me? After all the times you teased me about my love life?” I asked. “No shot am I letting you get away with this.”
Gamma flapped a hand at me then took her favorite spot in the armory, on her comfy leather stool in front of her touchscreen desk. She tapped away until she found the email in question then downloaded the video footage we’d taken from Grayson Tombs.
“He’s really not going to remember anything?” I asked.
“No,” Gamma said, confidently. “And a pity too because he’ll still treat me like an little old woman as he put it. The older I get, the more I realize that age is a mindset.”
“And that big mouths get people in trouble.”
“Precisely. Grayson Tombs has a mouth that could swallow a blue whale.”
I snorted a laugh.
Gamma gestured for me to bring a chair over, and I fetched it from further along the desk. It felt so good to be chatting and laughing again. My grandmother and I were on the same wavelength. I doubted I’d ever make a friend like her.
Yet you’re planning leaving the inn?
“All right,” Gamma said, trawling through the footage. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
We moved through the footage carefully over the next hour, searching for any sign of Donny on the way past the Hungry Steer. It was a long shot, but we had to take any lead we could get, and Josie had said that he’d gone in that direction.
Unless, of course, she’d been lying to mess with me. I wouldn’t put it past her, honestly.
“There,” Gamma said. “That’s Donny Braxton.” She pointed to a figure onscreen and slowed down the footage significantly. He was tall and handsome, with sandy brown hair. He held a box in his hand that had to be the shortcake.
“There he goes,” I said, and my heart sank. It wasn’t exactly groundbreaking footage. Sure the guy had walked past on the way to see his girlfriend, but it wasn’t like he’d gone past particularly late in the day.
The timestamp said that Donny had passed the Hungry Steer at around seven in the evening, which was probably right after the bakery had closed its doors. But that didn’t help us—
“Who’s that?” I pointed.
Across the street, another figure came into view. Someone tall, wearing a dark hoodie. They followed Donny down the street and they were…
“Limping,” I said. “He’s limping.”
“Goodness, Charlotte,” Gamma replied, “you can’t just assume that’s a man because the person is tall.”
“I’m not assuming. I know who that is.”
“Oh?”
I smiled at my grandmother, triumphantly. “That’s Donny’s brother, Noah. I met him earlier in the week, and he’s the only suspect who walks with a limp.”
“Interesting.”
“Now, we just have to figure out why he was following Donny,” I said. “He claimed that he was with Emmy at the time of the murder, but this footage doesn’t prove he was lying. It’s too early in the evening. And I can’t exactly reach out to Mr. Scott or Emmy and ask them. They’ll shut me out.”
“Then we know what we have to do,” Gamma said. “It’s time for that recon mission I missed out on earlier in the week.”
And just like that, I had my grandmother back.
The task now was to either prove or disprove the brother’s involvement. The trouble was, I had no idea why Noah would’ve wanted to get rid of his brother. It didn’t add up.
He didn’t need money, since he was a romance novelist and his parents had left him plenty of it, and not only that, he hadn’t inherited any of it from Donny, anyway. We had to be missing something, right?
Some crucial piece of evidence that would lead us to the real killer, but without a body, a murder weapon, and just witness testimony to go on, this was tough.
Even Mrs. Cruz had lied to me about her alibi, though it had been seriously risky to do so.
“We need direct physical evidence,” Gamma said. “Or proof that he was where he said he was. Are you reading me, Chaplin?”
“Loud and clear.” I whispered it, the flesh-colored microphone at my throat picking up the tiniest vibrations.
My grandmother was in the car, watching through the pinhole camera attached to my lapel. We had stopped down the street from Noah’s house, and I had gone on alone, wearing the black armor that my grandmother had specially ordered for me from one of her contacts.
“If necessary, I can send in the FlyBoy Drone with a teensy little bomb on it,” Gamma said.
“You’ve been feeling trigger happy of late, haven’t you?”
“I deny all allegations.”
I slinked past the pink flamingo out front and along the side of the house, breathing easily, aware that if anyone saw me, outfit complete with my balaclava, they would call the cops for sure. And I definitely wouldn’t have that.
The windows along the side of the house were open, the lights off inside, but there was someone awake in the house. Noah hummed inside, tapping away on an obnoxious-sounding mechanical keyboard.
I stopped beneath a window, listening.
There was no chance he would hear me break-in. I wouldn’t even need to break in, technically. The window was open wide. Sure, Christmas hadn’t been exactly cold, but it wasn’t like we were in the middle of a heat wave. What was with everyone leaving their doors or windows open in Gossip.
Not that I can complain.
“I’m going in,” I breathed.
“I’ll be watching, Chaplin.”
I hoisted myself through the window and into the room beyond. It was a darkened bedroom, carpeted, thankfully, and light spilled into it from the hallway beyond. I proceeded toward the door and peered out.
The hall ended in a study where Noah sat wearing headphones and typing away happily. Every so often he would stop and chuckle at something he’d written or mutter, “That’s great!”
At least he was confident. But was he a killer?
I shut the door, grateful for the night vision contact lenses that bathed the room in a green hue. The king-sized bed against the wall was neatly made, but the sheets themselves were fancy for a small home in a lower middle class area.
If Noah the novelist was so well-off, why was he living here?
The typing out there continued, and I moved to the bedside table and slid the drawer open. A diary lay within.
Bingo.
Or it had no information in it, and I was totally out of luck. I flipped the book open and… empty. Who kept an empty diary in their bedroom?
I shut it, frowning, and returned it to its hidey hole.
Think, Charlotte, think.
He hadn’t wanted money. He had been friends with Emmy. He… he had been friends with Emmy.
I blinked. There was something there. Romance novelist. Friends with Emmy. Jealousy? Shortcake for Emmy?
My mind whirred.
I was onto something, I could feel it.
I moved to the other side of the bed and slid that desk drawer open. A picture frame, lying upside down slid into view. I extracted it, pausing to listen for the sound of Noah’s keyboard, and turned it over.
The image in the frame was bathed in green light thanks to my contacts.
“Interesting,” Gamma said, in my ear. “That’s Emmy Scott, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
The words Mr. Scott had said to me when we’d first met, on the day when I’d waited for Emmy outside of the salon came back. “She doesn’t need another stalker freak following her around.”
He hadn’t meant her fiance.
The image was a picture of Emmy and Noah, the romance novelist, laughing hysterically at something. Donny hovered in the background, watching.
But it wasn’t Donny who was the stalker freak.
Was it that simple? Had Noah really murdered his own brother for love?
“Chaplin,” my grandmother said. “Are you reading me?”
“Loud and clear, Big G.”
“The cops are coming down the road.”
I heard the sirens seconds after she’d said it, and my heart leaped into my throat. Obviously, Goode had information I didn’t. The body, the evidence at the crime scene, leads I didn’t have access to. He’d figured out that it was, indeed, the brother who’d done it.
I could slink off now. Let him take credit. I could—
The typing in the kitchen stopped. A chair scraped and uneven footsteps thumped down the hall toward the bedroom door.
It was Noah, trying to make a hasty escape.
“Hurry,” Gamma said.
“You go,” I replied.
“Chaplin!”
“Go,” I breathed.
The door opened, and Noah stumbled into the room, clicked on the light and stopped dead, wide-eyed, staring at me. He was pale as a sheet.
“Hi,” I said, pleasantly, and then, with very little finesse by my grandmother’s standards. I punched him on the jaw so hard, he passed out on the spot with a thumping of legs and arms.
“Nice punch,” Gamma said. “Now get out of there.”
“No,” I said. “I want him to know I’m serious.”
“You’ll get in trouble.”
“For what?” I asked, stripping off my balaclava and shoving it into my back pocket. “I’ll say I heard a noise. A scream. That I came running and I found him trying to escape.”
“You’re wearing armor.”
“They don’t know that. It looks like plain black clothing,” I said.
Gamma sighed. “I don’t like this.”
But it was too late to turn back now.
The front door burst open. Thumping and shouts, the police announcing themselves came next.
“In here,” I shouted.
Detective Goode burst into the room, leading the other officers, and they all pulled up short.
I smiled at him, triumphantly. “It’s about time you got here.”