A Festival of Murder (26 page)

Phoebe
sat back on her heels and gazed up at the trunk of the tree. “What do you think
that is?”

Confused,
since she wasn’t referring to the mysterious cord, he studied the tree. “What
are you—”

Then
he saw it: a dark mark no longer than six inches long, running vertically up
the trunk like a black shoot of grass. If he were standing, it would have been
at waist level. He scooted onto his knees and brushed his gloved fingers over
the mark. The tip of one finger came away black.

“Scorch
mark,” he murmured. His skin broke out in gooseflesh. “A tourist took Detective
Canberry to look at marks on a tree that were supposed to have been created by
a UFO. Maybe this is the same tree they looked at.”

Phoebe
sniffed the air. “This wasn’t caused by aliens. You can smell it, very faintly.”

His
nose was slightly damp from the cold, but he concentrated on the scent carried
by the air. Beneath the refreshing scent of crisp pines was another smell. The
acrid scent pricked his nostrils. “Gunpowder?”

A
memory tickled the back of his mind. He had smelled this before, but where? He
tried talking it out.

“There
was a mark similar to this on the side of Rocky’s head. I thought the murder
weapon could be that burned wood I showed you in Charles’s log pile. But this
mark doesn’t look like it was caused by someone swinging a stick.”

Phoebe
nodded. “Too straight and too low. The gunpowder we smell—could that be from a
gun?”

Nicholas
recalled hearing a gunshot while he’d been speaking to Captain Sam perched in
the tree, but he didn’t think the two events were connected. “The wood here isn’t
gouged and neither was Rocky’s head. This mark is superficial.”

The
mystery gnawed on Nicholas’s nerves. He hated the feeling that the answer was
obvious and yet he was too dimwitted to realize it.

He
pulled out his key ring and used the small folding knife on the ring to snip
off a length of the red and silver cord, which he pocketed. He didn’t know how
to preserve the black mark but he doubted anyone else would touch it. “I think
we’ve done all we can out here.”

“We’re
no closer to solving this than we were before,” Phoebe said, her tone morose.

“On
the contrary.” Nicholas hooked his arm in hers. “I think an epiphany is right
around the corner.”

When
she rested her head briefly on his shoulder, he felt his heart leap. Her next
words lured it somnambulant again.

“You
have been, and always will be, a terrible liar, Nicholas Trilby.”

The
news at home was not good. Snowmobile tracks bisected the driveway. The lack of
a visible note on the front door of Nicholas’s cabin didn’t provide any
comfort. Detective Canberry probably wanted to break the good news about
Nicholas’s promotion to Most Likely to Commit Murder status to him in person.

“Time
is running out,” Nicholas mumbled to himself but Phoebe apparently heard him,
shooting him a concerned look as they exited the Subaru and headed for the
front walkway. A good four inches of snow now covered it and Nicholas chose to
point it out. “I’m disappointed that your walkway-clearing service was a
one-time deal.”

She
laughed, a little nervously, he thought, and kicked through the snow with her
red boots. “I think we’ll have to see about that.”

The
enigmatic answer left him curious, but since he had promised to trust her to
reveal the reasons behind her shoveling, he let it be. Securing himself and
Phoebe inside his home allowed him to breathe easy for the first time since
waking up in Captain Sam’s trailer. His home wasn’t a fancy place or particularly
large, but he had done everything in his power to make it cozy. At least it
wasn’t a trash-strewn trailer.

He
hung back and watched Phoebe move with familiarity into the living room and
look around. At first he didn’t understand what she was doing; she’d been here
before and nothing was new. But then it struck him: she was looking for
evidence of tampering, of a break-in.

“Canberry
wouldn’t have,” he felt compelled to say.

“You’ve
had someone enter before, Nicholas. Twice. Who’s to say a third time isn’t
possible?”

“Because
it isn’t.”

“Oh?
Then what’s that?” She pointed to the polished cross section of a walnut tree
trunk that sat before the sofa and served as his coffee table. She didn’t look
at him as she added, “Knowing you as I do, I don’t think that’s something you
would leave lying about as a coffee table book.”

He
couldn’t prevent the gasp that escaped him when he spied his abduction album
lying opened on the wood. He hurried toward it but Phoebe beat him to it,
carefully picking up the album and cradling it in her arms as she studied the
articles pinned to the opened pages. He floundered beside her, wanting to
snatch back the album but telling himself if he did so he would lose his only
ally.

To
distract himself, he growled, “Dennis must have broken back in to return it. A
bigger fool was never born.”

“He
must have used the backdoor,” Phoebe murmured, sounding distracted as she
turned the page.

Unable
to bear watching her read through his past of idiocy and ignorance, Nicholas
hurried out of the room. He went to the back door and did, indeed, find it
unlocked. To his surprise, however, the key that had been used to open it
remained in the lock. The lock had been Kevin’s. Maybe Dennis had found the key
at Kevin’s place, used it, and decided to leave it in a conspicuous place to
assure Nicholas his privacy wouldn’t be violated again. With pursed lips, he
plucked the key out of the lock and pocketed it.

Back
in the living room, he found that Phoebe had turned on one of the lamps on a
side table and was standing beside it, the album tilted toward its golden glow.

“I’ve
never seen any of these,” she said, her voice soft.

He
swallowed hard. “If I’d had my way, none of them would have existed in the
first place.”

She
turned a page and carefully studied the next set of articles. “There are so
many. And the headlines on some of them . . . You certainly know
how to cause a ruckus, Mr. Trilby.”

“Unfortunately,
I don’t know how to end one. Suggestions are welcome.”

“Have
you ever considered that your elusiveness makes you more of a mystery to them?”

He
gazed helplessly at her.

“I
mean, what if you made yourself available to them? Then they’d see that you’re
an ordinary man going about his business and not regularly chatting with
extraterrestrials or using telepathy.”

“That
would require that I speak with them.”

She
smiled slightly. “That it would, Nicholas. It won’t kill you. It might not even
hurt.”

“I
wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he muttered.

He
was proud of himself for maintaining some control over himself. Before this,
the prospect of having Phoebe looking through his album would have sent him
into panic-induced convulsions. He was still mortified, still wished he could
fling the album into the fireplace and burn it to ash and, hopefully, with it
any memories of his abduction, but the urge wasn’t overwhelming, and he thought
he might be able to look Phoebe in the eye afterward. Possibly.

“The
first week would be tough, I admit,” she said as she turned another page.

Distracted,
he said, “What would?”

“Being
social. But as word spread that you’re not holding alien secrets and you can’t
speak alien languages the interest in you would fade. The key is to make
yourself as boring to them as possible.”

“I
thought I already did that.”

“You
can’t change what happened, but you can diffuse its impact.”

He
studied her bent profile. “So you believe me now.”

She
nodded. “I do. I’m sorry it happened to you.”

Tension
bled from him as if he’d been stabbed, but it was a good release. He hadn’t
realized until that moment that her disbelief had been a source of stress to
him. The last thing he wanted was for her to think him a liar or an attention
seeker.

“I
know you think the rest of us must be crazy for being so interested in your
story when you obviously hated what happened to you,” she went on, still not
looking at him. “But once upon a time, didn’t you wonder about aliens, too?
Didn’t you ask yourself what you would do if they turned out to be real? What
technology they would share with us, what secrets to life? It doesn’t matter to
us that you’ve met them and you wish you hadn’t. Until we can experience that
for ourselves, the wonder will always be there, the hope that someone or
something exists that will improve all of our lives.”

“You
don’t want—”

“Don’t
hate us for our curiosity.”

He
was stung. “I don’t hate you.”

“No,
that was wrong of me to say. I never thought you did. It’s yourself you’re
angry at, isn’t it? Because you can’t give us what we all want. You can’t give
us that happy ending.”

The
guilt that washed through him shook his knees. It reminded him of the feeling
Captain Sam’s questions had engendered in him.
“Did you, Trilby? Did you
understand their message?”
The failure here wasn’t Phoebe, it was him.

“Maybe
I’ve forgotten the good parts,” he said tiredly. “Maybe there is a happy
ending, but they didn’t mean for me to remember it. I’m meant to hope for it
the way everyone else does.”

“You
don’t believe in happy endings. I can tell.”

His
shoulders slumped. He felt grounded, as if he’d never been a dreamer and never
would be one. “I can only believe in what I see with my own eyes.”

“I
wish you had faith, Nicholas.” Her eyes slid toward him but didn’t quite touch
him. “The people of Hightop won’t reject you like your friends and family in
Tampa did. You won’t let us down the way Ben did.”

A
drop of melted snow dripped from his hair onto the side of his neck. He barely
felt it, so consumed was he by a powerful feeling of connection. Someone had
gotten what he hadn’t known about himself, and suddenly nothing mattered more
than that.

“Some
of these articles are quite serious,” she said as she bent over the album.

“Would
you care to have dinner with me once this is over?” He cleared his throat, felt
the heat in his face, but forged on. “Just you and me. No Kevin. No twins. A
date, Phoebe.”

“But
not this one. It was written for some kind of cheesy rag.” She frowned down at
the article. “The
Roswell Explorer?
Oh, no. Please tell me Rocky Johnson
didn’t—oh, thank goodness. It was written by Jeremiah Wilcox, whoever that is.”
She shivered. “If Detective Canberry had learned that Rocky had already written
a negative article about you—I don’t know if there would have been any defense
against that.”

“Phoebe!”
he said in exasperation. “I’m asking you on a date!”

She
lifted her head, blinking owlishly. “You are?”

“Yes,
I—” He froze, his own eyes rounding. “What did you just say?”

“Well,
I was about to say yes, but—”

“No,
about that article.” He rushed forward and tugged the album from her slack
hands. The article she had been reading had been clipped from a newspaper.

“‘A
Colorado man who claimed to have been abducted from his home by aliens earlier
this week, now no longer remembers the incident,’“ he read aloud. “‘In the days
following Nicholas Trilby’s claim, the forty-one-year-old man provided
interviews to dozens of major and minor news outlets around the country and to
countries as far away as Brazil and England. Trilby’s credibility took a hit on
Friday when Trilby cited sudden and complete amnesia of the incident. His
about-face has been seized by skeptics as evidence of fraud and has angered
some of Trilby’s supporters, raising the question of whether the cult of
celebrity can be rejected after it has been manufactured . . .”

“Guess
Rocky wanted to do a follow-up of this guy’s article and see if you’d changed
your mind, years later,” Phoebe said.

He
grimaced before looking at the article’s byline and noting the identity of the
writer.

“This
is important,” he said. He closed the album with authority. “Phoebe, you may
not be an artist but you’ve got an excellent knack for discovering clues.”

She
beamed. “I can handle being a female Holmes.”

“Our
challenge now is figuring out how this piece fits into the puzzle.”

“I
don’t see how an article that wasn’t written by Rocky could be related to his
murder.”

“The
article by itself isn’t, but what it implies . . .” Nicholas’s
thoughts were awhirl, trying to connect fragments of memories before they
deserted him for the alien netherworld that had swallowed his other memories.
He really should develop the habit of writing down his thoughts. His brain was
an entirely unreliable organ.

“Believe
it or not, maybe we should run this by the twins.” He shrugged when Phoebe
looked at him doubtfully. “They know more gossip than we do. They might be the
key.”