Flipped Out (28 page)

“Hey,” I called out to Derek through the window; this realization happened to strike during a lull in the drilling, so he could hear me. “Josh told me yesterday that Fae’s a college student. This is just a summer job. And guess what? She’s studying at Kansas City University.”

“Missouri or Kansas?” Derek called back.

I made a face. Of course he’d catch that immediately, when I hadn’t. “Missouri.”

“That’s interesting.” He leaned down so he could look through the window and see the computer screen.

“I thought so. But that’s about the only interesting piece of information I’ve managed to find. Adam’s struck out repeatedly in pretty much every career direction he’s tried. Theatre, TV, movies. Nina has won a few awards, and I discovered that she moved to
Flipped Out!
from another series at the same network, which was cancelled. It was called
Burb Appeal
.”

“As in ‘suburb’ appeal?”

“I guess so.”

“No wonder it was cancelled,” Derek said. “What about the old host? Grant? And Stuart, the guy in the hospital?”

It hadn’t crossed my mind to search Stuart, but now I did. And found very little. He’d been a rank nobody when he landed the gig as the host of
Flipped Out!
—a charming, aw-shucks young man from somewhere in Oklahoma who’d sent an audition tape to the network. He didn’t get picked then, but a year later, when Grant had failed out, he was offered the job. I read that in a press release the network had published to explain the changeover. It also gave Grant’s last name—Cummings—and said he’d left due to “creative differences.”

Stuart’s accident last month got a mention on the
Flipped Out!
blog, followed by a few hundred comments, most of them from women offering wishes for a rapid recovery and a few other things I won’t mention, and they probably shouldn’t have, either. There was no mention of foul play.

Grant Cummings was all over the Internet. He had a Facebook page, a MySpace page, a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter handle, a website, and a fan page, and after checking all of them, I could say with a lot of certainty that I was pretty sure he hadn’t had anything to do with Stuart’s accident or anything that had happened here in Waterfield. Unlike Adam, he really had gone on to bigger and better. After hacking around Hollywood for a year or so, doing very little—or very little I could find—he had landed a small, recurring role on a soap opera and had managed to translate it into a two-year run. His Facebook page said his contract had just been renewed for the new season. So he clearly had no time and less reason to want to sabotage the show that had dropped him.

“Bummer,” Derek said.

“It was just a thought. I suspected all along this had something to do with Nina and Tony and Missouri, not Grant. But it’s good to be able to eliminate him.”

“Come have a look at your chair. How many holes do you want?”

“Enough to look like Swiss cheese,” I said, but I got up and padded outside. My feet felt a little better after the bath and the bandaging, and with the soft, fluffy socks. The chair didn’t look so hot right now, old and covered with dirty paint, but I could picture the finished product in my head, and it would look awesome. “How come the wood didn’t split or crack when you drilled this?” I ran my finger around the inside of a hole that overlapped two boards.

“You need a guide board,” Derek said, holding one up. It was a thin piece of plywood with a hole drilled into the middle. “You just clamp it to the front of the chair and drill through it. It’s easier to get the hole started that way. It helps with the biggest holes and the ones that are between two boards.”

“Maybe a couple more? And a few on the armrests?”

“I don’t wanna put too many on the seat,” Derek said, “since it might compromise the structure. But I can add a few to the backrest and the arms.”

“I’m gonna go look up Missouri.”

He nodded. “I’ll be in when I’m done with this and I’ve cleaned up.”

I padded back inside and sat down at the computer again. Mischa had entered the parlor now, too, and had jumped up on the windowsill, where he sat and stared out at Derek, tail twitching.

18

Nina’s resume on LinkedIn told me where she’d started her career and gave me the call letters of the television station in Missouri where it had all begun. I even knew the time she’d worked there: six or seven months twenty-one years ago. I started there.

And unfortunately, came up pretty empty. Neither Nina nor Tony were mentioned anywhere on the station website. And no wonder, considering how many years it had been since they worked there and that neither of them had stayed very long. There were no mentions of previous employees at all, unless something bad had happened to them. Like one young woman, Aurora Jamison, who must have died suddenly, and who had gotten a road named after her. Aurora Lane, the road heading up the hill to the transmitting tower. But since both Nina and Tony had been alive and kicking when they left Kansas City, there was no mention of either of them.

I’ve had occasion, in the past, to look into Waterfield history, and I usually start with the historical society and the local newspapers, the
Waterfield Weekly
and the daily
Clarion
. Kansas City probably had a historical society, but this wasn’t something they’d be able to help me with, being fairly recent in historical terms. The newspapers, on the other hand . . .

The big newspaper in those parts seemed to be the
Kansas City Star
. Its news archives didn’t go back twenty years, but some of its content did. When I googled Tony Micelli + Nina Andrews + KRBQ, the call letters for the station, I lucked out and found myself staring at an obituary. For none other than Aurora Jamison, who had given her name to the TV-station road.

There was a picture at the top of the obit, showing me that Aurora had been a beautiful girl in her early twenties. From the name, I had expected a blonde—Sleeping Beauty’s name was Aurora, maybe that’s what threw me—but this Aurora was a brunette. Curly hair, big eyes, sweet smile. Something about her was familiar, although I couldn’t put my finger on what.

She had started at KRBQ less than two years before she died, but the hometown girl had quickly become a viewer favorite, as well as a favorite with the powers that be at the station. There were plans for making her the host of a new midday show they were putting together. That news hadn’t been made public yet, and several of the other young reporters associated with the station were in contention for the spot, as well. But at the time she died, Aurora was the front-runner.

And then she had been in a car accident on her way to work in the super-early hours of the morning. Nobody was around to see what happened, but the postmortem showed that she was DUI, and she ran off the road and crashed the car. By the time paramedics got to her, it was too late.

That information wasn’t in the obituary, of course. I found that by googling Aurora’s name. And where the
Star
didn’t have their news archives online for twenty years back, one of the smaller Kansas City newspapers did. They quoted Nina, another of the TV station’s up-and-coming young reporters, who had been called in to work to replace Aurora in that morning’s broadcasts, as saying that everyone was in shock and nobody could believe it had happened. There was no mention of Tony except for his name in the obituary with her other colleagues. I scanned the list, just in case there was a Rory or Corey or Laurie on it, or even a Roderick or a Lauren, but no such luck. The closest I came was Frederick, but it was difficult to imagine how Grant could have turned that into Rory.

“Find anything?” Derek asked, coming into the parlor to lean over my shoulder. He dropped a kiss on the top of my head on his way down, and then swore as Mischa launched himself at him. I let Derek unhook the kitten from his jeans on his own this time as I focused on the computer.

“Check out this article about a woman named Aurora Jamison, who worked at the same TV station as Nina and Tony. She died while they were in Kansas City.”

“Rory,” Derek said, putting Mischa back on the windowsill. “Damn cat.”

“Excuse me?”

“I hate this cat. He’s always getting on me. Oh. Rory. Short for Aurora.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that.”

“I knew a Rory once whose name was Aurora.” When I slanted a look at him, he was smiling.

“Old girlfriend?”

“Summer fling. I was sixteen. So what happened to this Aurora?”

“Car accident. Late at night. DUI and probably hurrying to get to work on time.”

“Hard to imagine how that could be anyone else’s fault,” Derek said.

“I know. If she and Nina were close friends, I suppose Nina might have felt bad about it afterward. But bad enough to leave a good job at a TV station? The article said she ended up taking over Aurora’s job on the early news.”

“Maybe she felt guilty. If she’d wished Aurora out of the way, and then Aurora died.”

“Someone sent the letters, though. And it wasn’t Nina.”

“You don’t know that,” Derek said, “but no, it probably wasn’t. Did Aurora have any family?”

“If she did, they’re not mentioned here. I can keep digging. There’s probably a regular obituary somewhere, too. A personal one. Not this fancy one from the TV station.”

“Tomorrow,” Derek said. “It’s time for bed. You need to rest your feet.”

“You’re kidding, right?” They were scratches. And not even deep scratches.

“Are you questioning my medical expertise?” He picked me up bodily, straight out of the chair.

“But Kate hasn’t even called yet. Don’t you want to wait to hear from the hospital?”

“Bring the phone upstairs. We’ve got another early morning and another long day tomorrow. We both need sleep.”

And that was it. He didn’t even give me time to shut down the computer, although I did reach out and flick off the light on my way out the door.

Kate didn’t call until the next morning at the ungodly early hour of 5:45. We were up by then, dressed and downstairs in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee to brew. My feet felt better, but I was still wearing fluffy socks and comfy sneakers, in spite of the hot weather. And I was tired. So was Derek, his eyes dull as he watched the coffeemaker go through the motions. Kate sounded tired as well, even if the relief in her voice was palpable.

“She’s awake. She woke up for just a minute last night, and then went to sleep. But it was after midnight, so I didn’t call.”

“She’s all right?” Derek asked. I’d put the cell on speaker so we both could hear and talk to her.

“She’s fine. She’s got a concussion, like you said, but she can remember everything up until running off the road. The last minute or two of heading down toward the water are gone, but the doctor says it’s no big deal; people with concussions often have minor memory loss of things that happened right before they hit their heads. And besides, we know what happened.”

Derek nodded.

“She’s going to stay in the hospital until tomorrow. Josh will be released today, but I don’t think he’ll be able to come help you guys. His foot is bandaged.”

“Twisted?”

“Broken. Some little bone near his ankle. He’ll be fine, too, but the ER doctor said to stay off it as much as possible for a few days.”

“What about you?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, I’m fine. I’m on my way home to take care of the crew before they head out to work. After that, I think I’ll take a nap. I didn’t get much sleep overnight.”

“Look at their reactions when you tell them what happened,” Derek instructed. “Just in case one of them says or does something suspicious.”

“Wayne told me the same thing. He’ll be there, too.”

“Tell him to give us a call later. There’s something I need to tell him. And let us know how it goes.”

She promised she would, and we hung up.

“That’s most of our work crew gone,” Derek said.

I nodded. “You don’t think that’s the reason for the accident, do you? Someone trying to sabotage our project?”

“Who’d care that much about a TV show?” Derek answered. “And killing Tony is taking things pretty far, wouldn’t you say? If someone truly hated us that much, wouldn’t they just try to kill one of us? It’d be simpler.”

“Don’t say that!”

He shrugged. “We’ve never done anything to anyone to deserve that. And besides, if someone disliked either one of us enough to go to such lengths to ruin our first TV appearance, don’t you think we’d know who it is? That kind of crazy is hard to hide.”

He had a point. The only people I could imagine might dislike either of us enough to kill were the folks we’d helped put in jail, and they were all where they were supposed to be, as far as I knew. In lockup.

“And,” Derek added another qualifier, “that doesn’t explain the accident in Kentucky that put Stuart in the hospital. Or the poison-pen letters.”

“So we’re back to someone who’s trying to ruin the show itself. Or trying to ruin Nina.”