I fumbled the phone like it’d grown hedgehog spikes. “Mandy?”
19
“I need a lawyer,” Mandy said. “They’re accusing me of killing Bruce and trying to kill the biologist.”
No mention of trying to kill me along with Alice. Convenient, since she now wanted my help.
I pulled the phone away from my face and stared at it. Either I was asleep and dreaming all this or she was delusional. I wasn’t going to pinch myself. I’d had enough pain for one day. Since the world around me had color to it, I had to assume I wasn’t dreaming. I never dreamed in color.
“Nicole?” A shrunken version of Mandy’s voice carried out of the phone. “Nicole, are you there?”
Chief McTavish and my mom couldn’t know she intended to call me to represent her. They wouldn’t have allowed it.
I brought the phone back to my ear. “I can’t be your lawyer.” I spoke slowly to be sure she’d catch every word. This conversation needed to be over.
“I know you said something before about conflict of interest and working the case with the police, but I can’t go to prison. You have to help me.”
She legitimately sounded both frantic and confused.
This made no sense. I might have been wrong about Mandy’s ability to kill someone, but she wasn’t crazy. We’d spent hours discussing books and pastries. I’d have noticed if she were unbalanced. Nosy, yes. Unbalanced, no.
“I can’t be your lawyer because you tried to kill me.”
A choking sound filled the phone like she’d been drinking something and swallowed it down the wrong way. It slowed to a sputter. “I don’t understand.” She had a disoriented tone.
“I was in the car with Alice Benjamin.”
A sniffling noise. “They didn’t tell me. Who would do this?”
The next sound across the line came too close to someone trying to hold back sobs.
This isn’t right, a tiny voice said in the back of my head.
Mark climbed back into the truck. Your mom? he mouthed.
Mandy, I replied.
Red flushed his face, and he reached for the phone. I squiggled back in the seat. I couldn’t blame him for his reaction, but I also wasn’t going to relinquish the phone until I figured this out.
Mark clamped his hands around the steering wheel hard enough that his knuckles turned white.
“It wasn’t me,” Mandy said in a wet voice. “I tried to tell the police I couldn’t have taken my car out. It wasn’t working. It hasn’t been working reliably. It worked for Becky and Susan yesterday afternoon, but then yesterday night it didn’t. It’s done this before. I even called Quantum Mechanics about it, but then it started working again. Ask them. Ask Susan. Ask Becky. I couldn’t have done this because the car stopped working last night. I planned to call Quantum Mechanics today again because something’s clearly wrong, but then we got busy.”
She claimed her car wouldn’t start, and yet, based on an eyesight comparison, they believed the paint on her smashed-in front end matched that of Alice Benjamin’s car.
One part of her story would be easy enough to check. “Hang on.”
I lowered the phone. Mark was most certainly not going to like this. “I need you to go ask Tony if Mandy called him about her car not starting.”
He quirked an eyebrow in a way that clearly said do what now?
I wedged the phone between my shoulder and ear and pressed my hands together in a please gesture.
He sighed and climbed back out of the truck.
Becky’s words from earlier kept playing in my head. A duplicate car key would look identical but wouldn’t actually start the car because it didn’t have the special chip in it. I hadn’t known that. Mandy probably didn’t know it, either. If the key on her key ring looked like hers, she’d assume it was.
But it could have been a duplicate that someone swapped out for hers so that they could have access to her car without her realizing that her key was missing.
“When was the other time your car wouldn’t start? Was it the day before Bruce died?”
“How did you know?” I’d never noticed before how expressive a voice Mandy had, but this time her tone was like I was a magician who’d sawed someone in half right in front of her.
I knew because if someone wanted to be sure they had access to her car when they needed it, they’d swap out the keys beforehand.
The problem with that theory was that only one other person had the ability to both take Mandy’s keys and duplicate them—Becky. Dad’s Hardware was the only place in town to have keys made. Anyone who ran key machines would surely know trying to duplicate a modern car key was useless and wouldn’t have done it, and Mandy only loaned her keys to her employees.
But Becky had an alibi for Vilsack’s time of death and no motive.
Unless…
I stripped off my watch.
If we’d died on that rock, whatever medical examiner got my body could have easily thought what Mark did about Bruce Vilsack—that I’d died at the same time as my watch stopped. That wouldn’t have been true. My watch stopped two hours after I originally went into the water. It happened naturally to my watch, but if someone wanted to tamper with time of death, they could have kept Vilsack’s watch until a time they knew they had an alibi, broken it, and then put it back on his wrist. By hiding his body, they knew it’d be too late for anything more exact than a window of death. Destroying his watch would lead everyone to the wrong conclusion about his actual time of death.
My theory also explained why he’d been left to bleed all over the bathroom floor. The killer, or killers, had to wait to dispose of his body until they could put the watch back on him. It explained why they hadn’t hidden the body very well. They needed someone to find him so they’d find the watch.
If they waited until after the PTSD support group meeting to move his body, and then tried to come back to clean up, it could also explain why they hadn’t cleaned up fully. They’d run out of time. Or perhaps they left the blood on purpose, wanting someone to follow the trail to Vilsack’s body and his staged time of death. The towels in the wash could be ones they used to protect their own clothes while carrying him and to clean themselves up afterward.
