“Where is my granddaughter?” a familiar voice rasped. “I demand to see my granddaughter!”
“In here, Gran!” she yelled.
Her grandmother came striding into the office. She was out of breath, and had twin circles of crimson dotting her cheeks. The elderly woman was wearing her large-framed glasses, had her hair done up in tiny white curls, and as usual looked the spitting image of a sweet old lady, ready to dole out candy to kids. In actual fact she was anything but sweet. Vesta Muffin could be pretty caustic if she wanted to be, and she often wanted to be.
“What’s all this nonsense about you going out on a case and not inviting me along?” she demanded, planting her fists on Odelia’s desk and leaning over so far her head was almost touching her granddaughter’s.
“I didn’t know you worked here,” Odelia quipped, but Gran wasn’t having any of it.
“You know as well as I do that a true flogger, in order to be successful, needs to upload fresh content all the time.” She tapped the desk impatiently. “I need you to let me in on this case, Odelia. I’ve lost so many followers over this Yellow Parka MacGyver Gang fiasco it’s not pretty. Ineed a big hit—pronto!”
“Don’t you mean vlogging?”
“That’s what I said. Flogging. I need this, Odelia. I need this bad.”
“You sound just like my boss,” said Odelia. But Gran was eyeing her so intently she quickly relented. “All right, all right, you can tag along. But there’s no case this time, Gran. Just a murder to cover for the paper.”
“What do you mean there’s no case? A woman was murdered, right?”
“Yes, she was, but Alec already caught the killer.”
“So fast? That’s impossible!”
“It was Jeb Pott. He was caught practically red-handed. Literally, actually.”
“Oh, darn it. I liked that kid.”
Odelia refrained from mentioning that that kid was a fifty-five-year-old man. Instead, she said,“So you see? There is no case. No murder to solve. No killer to catch.”
Gran plunked down on the chair opposite hers.“At least let me interview Jeb Pott. Big star like him—my follower count will shoot through the roof.”
“What do you care how many followers you have?” Odelia asked. She didn’t understand this obsession with followers. At all.
“I need to beat Scarlett Canyon,” Gran said, looking grim now. “That jerk has started flogging, too, and she’s got more followers in one week than me in a month.”
“She’s also fighting crime now?” asked Odelia, wondering when this enmity between her grandmother and Scarlett Canyon would finally be over. All of Hampton Cove would sleep more easily when it was.
“She’s giving beauty tips,” said Gran, frowning darkly. “Which in her case means sitting in front of a camera wriggling her cleavage and pretending to know something about cosmetics. Next thing I know she’ll be doing a striptease act. Anything to get more followers.” Catching Odelia’sinquisitive look, she added, “The more followers you have the more chances of landing one of those lucrative influencer deals. L’Or?al or Lanc?me will pay big bucks to push their products on the channels of people with lots and lots of followers.”
“They won’t be pushing L’Or?al on a YouTube channel about murder.”
“Of course not, silly. But then Scarlett isn’t on YouTube. She’s on Instagram. But it’s the thought that counts. I can’t let her best me, so I need more followers. Otherwise she’ll never let me live it down.”
Scarlett Canyon and Gran had been mortal enemies ever since Gran caught her doing the horizontal mambo on her kitchen table with Grandpa Jack. Things had gone from bad to worse ever since, especially since Scarlett had been Gran’s best friend before the incident.
“So are you going to let me interview Jeb Pott or not?” Gran insisted.
“I don’t even know ifI’ll be able to interview Jeb. Uncle Alec gives me a lot of leeway but he draws the line at actually jeopardizing a conviction. But I’ll see what I can do,” she added when Gran pulled one of her unhappy faces.
Gran got up and patted her cheek.“Good girl. And if you stumble across another dead body, this time let me know, all right? I need all the flogging I can get.”
And after uttering these immortal words, she strode back out of the office.
Chapter 10
Peace had finally returned to the office and only the sounds of fingers tapping keyboards could be heard as Odelia and Dan worked silently in adjacent offices, hard at work to put out a killer edition of the Gazette. When Odelia’s phone rang, she started and almost knocked over her cup of coffee.
“Yes, Uncle, what is it?” she asked when she saw it was him.
“I thought you’d want to know that Jeb denies the charges. Or rather, he’s denying being aware that he killed his ex-wife.”
“You mean he doesn’t remember?”
“He says he passed out and doesn’t remember a thing. He’s pretty sure he would never kill his wife, though. As if that means a thing in his current situation.”
“Is that even possible? To murder a person and not remember?”
“Judging from the copious amounts of narcotics and alcohol he had in his system that’s certainly a possibility, although the coroner reckons that it would have been pretty hard for him to murder anyone in his condition. Passed out sounds about right. In fact it’s a minor miracle he didn’t kill himself, instead of Camilla.”
“So what are you saying? That he didn’t kill her?”
“Well, Abe reckons that a man who’s been abusing intoxicants on such a scale could probably still function where others would have succumbed, so there’s that to consider.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, frowning as she took in this new information. “Okay. So this doesn’t change anything, right?”
“No, it doesn’t.” He noisily cleared his throat. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Camilla received a bunch of texts inviting her to Hampton Cove, right?”
“The texts that said he still loved her, wanted to reconcile, yadda yadda yadda.”
“Chase did a routine check of Jeb’s phone and didn’t find a trace of those texts.”
“Weird.”
“Not so weird. He could have used a second phone.”
“And did he?”
“Now this is where it does get weird. Those texts were sent from a burner phone.”
“Why would Jeb use a burner phone?”
“It gets weirder: there’s no trace of that phone. We searched his lodge top to bottom. Nothing.”
“Jeb could have sent those texts and then dumped the phone.”
“But why would he do that? And why not send his wife a text from his own phone?”
“Maybe…. he wanted to keep it a secret?”
“That doesn’t make sense. He had no way of knowing how she’d react. She could have shown his messages to her lawyers. She could have contacted a reporter, heck she could have told the whole world. So why a burner phone? And why hide it?”
“You said it yourself. To deny that he sent them in case she reacted badly?”
“Maybe.” He hesitated.
“Spill it. You know you want to tell me.”
“That guy who called 911?”
“What about him?”
“We tried to trace him through his cell phone.”
“And?”
“Dead end. Another burner phone. Now why would a neighbor walking his dog use a burner phone?”
That was a very good question, and one to which she didn’t have an answer.
“Anyway, just thought you’d like to know. In case, uh, you decided to investigate further, I mean.”
“Do you want me to investigate this further?”
“I’m not saying you should.”
“So what are you saying, exactly?”
He sighed, and she could just imagine him sitting behind his desk, looking at his wilted office plants, and patting his wilted hair.“What I’m saying is that if you do investigate, I’m not going to stop you.”