Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella Read online

  I met her look and waited for her to figure it out.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘What are you thinking? That Franny killed Michael Vaughn?’

  I offered half a shrug. ‘She gets Chandler – who, forgive me, is not the sharpest knife in the drawer – to hand in a story that essentially predicts his best friend’s murder. She, or someone helping her out, kills Michael, and Chandler takes the fall.’

  ‘Oh, this is … this is … unthinkable,’ Malcolm said.

  ‘It’s her way of getting even for what Chandler and Mike did to her brother,’ I said. ‘At the very least, it’s a working theory, and it makes more sense than anything else so far.’

  Chandler’s mouth hung open. I didn’t know whether he was dumbstruck, or impressed.

  I asked him, ‘Would Franny have known about your fight with Mike over that girl?’

  He appeared to be thinking, which I suspected was not easy for him. ‘She was there. I’m pretty sure she was there.’

  Lucy said, ‘It’s all set up in the story.’

  ‘But all Chandler has to say is what he just said now,’ Greta said. ‘That she wrote the story.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but there’s no proof. It’s her word against his. She could just say Chandler’s making this all up, as a way of getting back at Joel. Your son doesn’t have a whole lot of credibility. And it wasn’t until he started looking like a possible murder suspect that he came up with a new version of events, that he never wrote the story.’

  ‘I need a drink,’ Malcolm said.

  He excused himself and went into his study. I decided to follow him. On one of the bookshelves behind his desk was a bottle of Scotch, as well as a couple of small tumblers.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  ‘What a goddamn mess,’ he said. He poured Scotch into one of the glasses, then looked at me and raised the bottle. ‘I’ve got another glass here.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  He downed his drink, poured himself another. ‘What a goddamn mess,’ he said again.

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘But if your son’s story holds up, then he should be in the clear.’

  ‘I thought … I was starting to think maybe he’d actually done it. I didn’t want to let my thoughts go there, but you have to consider everything.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘But even if he had done it, there wasn’t enough evidence, right? Would they have had enough to convict?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘But right now, I think I need to go see Detective Duckworth. Tell him what I know. Let him take it from there.’

  ‘Sure, of course.’ He raised his glass. ‘Thank you for your help.’

  Maybe things were going to work out okay for the Carsons, but it was hard to find much to be thankful for. One young man was dead, and a family that had already gone through hell was about to go through it again.

  Eleven

  Detective Barry Duckworth invited me for a coffee and a slice of pie at Kelly’s a couple of days later. He recommended the blueberry, but I opted for a slice of cherry, with some whipped cream on top. The moment the waitress set the plate in front of me, I could see Barry looking at it, probably wondering whether he should have ordered the cherry instead.

  ‘I wanted to show my appreciation with the Michael Vaughn case,’ he said.

  ‘So helping you solve a homicide gets me a piece of pie,’ I said. ‘If I solved the Lindbergh kidnapping, would that warrant a sandwich and fries?’

  Duckworth thought about it. ‘Certainly a sandwich.’

  I used the edge of my fork to cut into the pie, took a bite. ‘Jesus,’ I said.

  ‘I know. Maureen has me on a bit of a diet, but the way I see it, it only extends to a half-mile radius around the house. So, anyway, we charged Franny Blakelock.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘At first she denied everything. Said Chandler was lying to save his ass. Like her brother, she said she’d never even talked to the asshole who tormented Joel by splashing his picture all over the Net.’

  ‘But she decided to change her story at some point?’ I said.

  He slid some pie into his mouth and nodded. ‘When we showed her the surveillance video from the school.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Schools have cameras all over the place. Promise Falls High is no different. Couple of those cameras are right there in the cafeteria.’

  I took another bite of my own pie. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yeah. The footage or data or whatever it is gets saved for two weeks. Franny’s sit-down with Chandler matched when he said it happened. You could see her there with her laptop, then fiddling around with his. We kind of had her then. Finding traces of the Vaughn kid’s blood on her shoes and in her parents’ car sealed the deal. It went together more or less the way you figured.’

  ‘She was getting even with them for what they did to Joel?’

  ‘Yeah. Best as we can tell, Joel didn’t know a thing about it. She wrote the story herself, gave it to Chandler. The next step was to kill Mike.’

  ‘How’d she pull that off?’

  ‘She played him a bit like she did Chandler. Came on to him, said she’d been pretty upset with him over what he did to her brother, but she thought that deep down he was still an okay guy. Suggested they hook up. Made him promise not to tell anybody, though, because her brother and her parents would be furious if they found out. Be like fraternizing with the enemy. Mike went along with it. She picked him up in her mom’s car and they drove down to Clampett Park, led him into the woods with the promise of a good time. She’d hidden the bat behind a tree earlier. When Mike looked down to undo his pants, she grabbed the bat and hit him good.’

  ‘Franny’s quite something.’

  ‘Yeah. She wasn’t sure how the dominoes would fall. She didn’t expect the story she wrote for Chandler would see him sent to the office to have his head read. She just figured that after Mike’s body was found, Chandler’s teacher would see the similarities. But it all worked out just the same.’

  ‘Except for the getting caught part.’

  ‘We weren’t exactly dealing with a master criminal here. It would have been smarter if she’d given the story to Michael. Like he was predicting what might happen to himself, that maybe Chandler’d threatened him. Once he was dead, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that the story came from someone else.’

  ‘My head hurts,’ I said.

  ‘No kidding,’ Duckworth said.

  ‘How’s the family handling it?’

  ‘The Blakelocks? Not good. Joel had no love for Chandler or Mike, but he sure didn’t want his sister to do something like this. Parents have got themselves a good lawyer. I think they’re going for the sympathy angle, playing on what Mike did to Joel, that Franny was just trying to make things right. She may be whacko, but she loves her brother very much, feels very protective of him. Maybe that’ll sway a jury.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ I said.

  ‘Who knows,’ he said. ‘How are the Vaughns?’

  ‘Beyond devastated,’ I said.

  He shook his head sadly. ‘What goes around comes around. I’m not saying the kid deserved to be killed for cyber-bullying, but if he and Chandler hadn’t put that photo online, he’d be alive. Did we or did we not order coffees?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Where are they? You can’t have pie without coffee.’ Barry waved to get the waitress’s attention. She was already on the way over with two mugs.

  ‘Calm your ponies,’ she told him. ‘You think I don’t know how to look after you?’

  ‘You had me worried for a second.’

  He took a sip, smiled. ‘Just a few more weeks till the long weekend in May,’ he said. ‘I think I might try to get away. You?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nope.’

  Duckworth went quiet for a moment. Finally he said, ‘This is going to make me sound like Columbo or something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘
There’s one thing that bothers me about all this.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Franny’s whole plan was to kill Michael and frame Chandler for it. It was pretty clumsily executed, but she did her best for a kid without a criminology degree. Her plan included stealing Chandler’s baseball bat when he left it by the school bleachers. She figured it would have his fingerprints all over it. So she wears some gloves, whacks Mike in the head with the bat, and supposedly the only prints we’re going to find are Chandler’s. Except we don’t find them.’

  ‘Franny stole Chandler’s bat,’ I said.

  “Yeah. So I thought, maybe between the time she stole the bat and when she used it on Mike, she accidentally rubbed the prints off. Even then, you’d still expect to get a few partials, something. But with one small exception, there are no prints on the bat at all. The whole thing got wiped down. Even though you can still see blood on the bat, it’s all smeared. So if our little friend Franny wants to see Chandler nailed for this, why does she wipe his prints off?’

  ‘What’s the small exception?’ I asked.

  Duckworth said, ‘There’s a partial print right on the very end of the bat. When it was wiped down, that got missed.’

  ‘Chandler’s.’

  ‘No. We took his fingerprints and there’s no match.’

  ‘Franny’s?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What about the deceased?’ I asked. I raised my arm in a mock-defensive gesture. ‘Maybe he was doing something like this and his hand touched the bat.’

  ‘Nope,’ Barry said. ‘Checked.’

  ‘And there’s no way it was the crime-scene techies?’

  Duckworth closed his mouth on a forkful of blueberry pie. He took a moment to savor it before saying, ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Where’s that leave you?’ I asked.

  ‘Puzzled,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a full confession from Franny, so I should be satisfied, but I’m not. Got any ideas?’

  I did.

  Twelve

  It might have been the first time I’d seen Greta Carson smile. When she opened the door and saw me, her face nearly shattered from happiness.

  ‘Mr Weaver, oh, what a pleasure to see you,’ she said. ‘Please come in.’

  Once I was inside, she said, ‘It occurred to me the other day that all the other times you were here I didn’t so much as offer you a cup of coffee. Can I get you something? If not coffee, some tea? I think I might even have a muffin or two.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’

  ‘Were you looking for Chandler? Because he’s not here. He’s in school!’ She said it as though it were some sort of miracle. ‘All the business about the story just went away, like it vanished into thin air. Given that he didn’t write it, they stopped thinking there was anything mentally wrong with him. Of course, they weren’t happy that he handed in work that was not his own, but they came to understand that he was manipulated by that awful girl.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Things turned out okay for Chandler.’

  ‘Are you sure you won’t have coffee? I was just going to pour myself some.’

  ‘You go ahead.’

  She asked me to follow her into the kitchen, which was a sprawling room with lots of light and shiny aluminum appliances. She filled a cup, added some skim milk from the fridge, and said, ‘So what can I do for you? I know the way things unfolded we never made any formal arrangement to hire you, but Malcolm and I talked about it, and we think you should submit a bill. God knows what might have happened if you hadn’t been asking questions.’

  ‘Lucy Brighton helped a lot,’ I said.

  ‘Well if she wants to submit a bill too, she’s welcome.’

  ‘I don’t think, as a school board employee, they’d let her do that. But don’t worry about my bill. That’s not why I’m here.’

  ‘Oh, okay. So what’s up?’

  ‘I was really hoping to talk to your husband.’

  ‘Well, you’re in luck. He’s not home right now, but I’m expecting to see him any moment now. He’s working out of the house today, but he just went to the bank. If you want to—’

  We heard the front door open.

  Greta smiled. ‘Speak of the devil. Malcolm, we’re in the kitchen!’

  Ten seconds later, he was there. He had a welcoming smile for me too, and a hand for me to shake.

  I obliged.

  ‘Good to see you,’ he said. ‘I guess you’ve heard that they charged that girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What a twisted little bitch she turned out to be,’ he said. Greta nodded her agreement.

  ‘Would you have a moment?’ I asked him. ‘Maybe we could talk in your study.’

  ‘Sure, of course.’ He looked awkwardly at his wife. ‘Just be a minute, love.’

  Between the kitchen and his study I asked him, ‘Could you grab Chandler’s bat for a second?’

  ‘His bat?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The one you showed me the other morning.’

  ‘Why do you want to see it?’

  ‘It’ll be easier to explain once you get it. I’ll wait in the study for you.’

  I didn’t bother to take a seat, and instead scanned the spines of the hundreds of books tucked into the shelves. There were plenty related to finance and economic theory, but also books about teaching the subject. And plenty of novels, too. The kind men read when they take their annual trip to the beach. Tom Clancy, Lee Child, David Baldacci.

  He came back into the room holding the bat crosswise, one hand gripped down by the knob, the other supporting the barrel, the thickest part.

  ‘For the life of me I don’t know why you want to see this. It’s not like it was used in the commission of a crime.’ He laughed nervously.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It certainly wasn’t.’ I reached out for it. ‘May I?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, handing it over.

  I ran my hands along it, from one end to the other. It was perfectly smooth, even at the thick end, which usually takes a beating from being tapped on home plate while the player waits for the pitch.

  ‘If I didn’t know better,’ I said, ‘I’d say this has never been used.’

  Malcolm took it back and made a show of studying it carefully. ‘Not very much, that’s true.’ He laughed. ‘I guess that means Chandler isn’t hitting the ball quite as often as he’d like to be.’

  ‘Franny told the police she stole Chandler’s bat,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm?’ Malcolm said, pretending not to take in the significance of what I was saying.

  ‘It was Chandler’s bat she took. From where your son said he’d lost it. She wanted it to have his fingerprints on it.’

  Malcolm feigned puzzlement. ‘I’m not following.’

  ‘Did you come home the morning I met you because you’d just bought a new baseball bat and wanted to tuck it into the garage? So if and when someone asked for it, you’d be able to produce it?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Patently ridiculous.’

  ‘I’ll bet you were smart enough to pay for it in cash. But how many places in Promise Falls sell baseball bats? Maybe half a dozen? You think if someone were to go to all those places with your picture, and ask if anyone remembered you buying a baseball bat in the last week, they’d get lucky?’

  Malcolm hesitated.

  ‘Buying a bat is not a crime,’ he said.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But it raises an interesting question. You’d have had to buy that bat before news got out that Mike Vaughn had been killed. You bought it to help Chandler before you could have reasonably known he needed the help.’

  ‘You’ve totally lost me,’ he said, holding the bat with one hand, tapping it in the palm of his other.

  ‘That’s probably why you wiped his real bat down too. To help him. To make sure none of his fingerprints were on it. And you accomplished that. None of Chandler’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon. But what’s funny
is, that’s the thing that incriminates you.’

  ‘You should leave,’ he said.

  ‘Franny wanted his fingerprints on that bat. So after she struck Mike, she would have just left the bat there. That’s where I have a hard time figuring out the rest of it. Let’s say it was you who wiped the bat clean. That means you were at the scene. But if you were at the scene, you’d have witnessed Franny hitting Mike. So why wipe down the bat?’

  ‘I did no such thing,’ he said.

  I took a close look at some of the books, the ones related to teaching. ‘Before you got into offering financial advice, you taught, didn’t you?’

  ‘What? In a community college, yes. Why the hell are you asking that?’

  ‘A lot of educational institutions in this state, as part of the background checks on their instructors, insist on having them fingerprinted. Have you ever been fingerprinted, Malcolm?’

  His eyes were wide. He muttered something.

  ‘What was that?’

  Quietly he said, ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Because while they didn’t find Chandler’s prints on the bat, and none for Franny, since she was at least smart enough to wear gloves, they did find one partial print that got missed when it was wiped down. They’re searching databases now to see if it shows up anywhere. What do you think the odds are that it’s yours?’

  Malcolm was starting to breathe heavily. There were droplets of sweat forming on his brow.

  Greta appeared in the doorway. ‘Did you want a coffee, Mal—’

  ‘Get out!’ he shouted.

  Stunned, she backed away. He strode over to the door and slammed it shut.

  I said calmly, ‘The only way I can figure it is you came onto the scene after Franny left. But how? How did you find Mike? How did you find him, and the bat? You want to tell me that?’

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t I just leave things as they were?’

  ‘What happened, Malcolm?’

  ‘I just wanted to protect my son. I just wanted to save him. I did what any father would have done.’

  He’d walked over behind his desk. The bat in his hands was shaking. He gripped it more tightly to try to make it stop.

  ‘How did you know he was there?’ I asked again. ‘How did you find Mike after Franny killed him?’