Page 79 of The Dysfunctional Family's Guide to Murder
The mood in the room is restless and Bec stands up.
“Wait,” Dad says; then, to the rest of us: “This is not thefamily getaway any of us had imagined—the von Trapps had a better time en route to Switzerland—but the good news is, it’s nearly over. I realize I’ve said variations on thisonce or twicebefore, but we can probably all head back to Perth tomorrow—Nick’s health allowing—if we just pull together and agree what we’re going to tell the police. Let’s get our stories straight, give them the important facts, and leave them to it.”
“You’ve changed your tune, Poirot,” Bec says, but she sits back down.
“So, what, we don’t have to tell them everything?” Aunty Vinka sniffs.
“I guess we can decide that together,” Dad says.
“Guys?” Shippy says.
“Is that…legal?”
“Uh, guys?” Shippy says again.
“Vinx, why don’t you put on some tea—some proper tea with caffeine in it, please.”
“Guys!”Shippy finally gets our attention and we all look at him, then shift our gazes to what he’s seen through the living-room window that overlooks the garden: a white sedan coming up the driveway.
“Is that the police?”
“They’re early.”
“Are we sure it’s them?”
“Who else could it be?”
“I don’t know—we seem to have randoms rocking up every two minutes.”
“Shut up, everyone,” Dad says, raising one hand to waveat Detective Peterson, visible as she climbs out of the car. His party smile is in place, the one he and Mum used to put on when they’d just had a fight but still needed to be around other people. I haven’t seen that smile since they separated, and I can’t say I’ve missed it. When he speaks, it’s in his party voice too, the one that means there’s no point in arguing and the whole thing will just be done sooner if you roll over and submit. “The cops are here. That means we’ve got about ten seconds to figure out what we’re going to tell them.”
25
Let me be real fora moment. There’s a scene here, a whole bit that plays out when Detective Peterson comes to the house. I could tell you how Dylan and I eavesdrop from the bottom of the stairs, which we do (completely missing a clue right in front of our eyes), and how Dad catches us, which he does. I could tell you that nobody tells Detective Peterson about the whole Bec’s-a-liar thing, the existence of a whole other “Nicky” love child who is not Bec, or the Aunty-Vinka-and-the-drugs thing,andthat I don’t say a word about GG’s son being alive (is it just me or is this more missing mystery kids than one family deserves?), even though Laura reckons the cops already know all about it. But that’s less because we’re circling the family wagons to protect our many and varied secrets and more because it doesn’t come up: The cops are here to talk about Rob, not GG. Specifically, they’re having trouble tracking down his family, and also his phone, and want to know if we can help. We kind of can’t. (Actually, we could have if someone had donea better job of cleaning the kitchen, but now I’m just being a tease.)
I could write all this down here and let you sift through the clues and see what little tidbits everyone let slip and all that business, but here’s the thing: We’re approaching endgame here, and, with so few pages of the book left between your hand and the back cover, you just want to know who did it and how I find out. I get it, I do.
So, the only important thing you need to know from this whole drawn-outand another thingencounter with the cops is that Rob’s “accident” is being treated as an attempted homicide, thanks to some skid marks that make the cops think he was targeted. A big deal, yes, but aren’t you glad I just kept it tight? You’re welcome. Also, it might be relevant to note that there’s a very good reason the cops can’t find Rob’s phone, but you won’t find out why until a bit later—Idon’t even know about that yet.
Anyway, we’ve got bigger things to deal with in a sec.
26
Have you ever woken upfrom a really good sleep with the feeling that your brain has been working on your problems overnight? It doesn’t happen to me often (and never on the morning of a math exam, meaning I still don’t understand integration), but it does happen. One day last year, just for example, I spent all day trying to come up with an embarrassment-free plan to figure out if Jade at school liked Libby orlikedLibby, and I still had nothing by bedtime. The next morning I woke up with the perfect solution in my head, as though someone had whispered it into my ear as I slept. (Unfortunately for Libby, Jade turned out to be almost aggressively straight, but theplanwas flawless.)
It happens that night when I wake up, just after midnight, suddenly sure I know where GG’s missing box is. As with any satisfying mystery, the clues—three of them that I can count—have been in front of me, sometimes literally, but I haven’t seen them. I get out of bed, as wide awake as if it’s ninea.m. Icouldwait for ninea.m. That’s definitely the sensible thing todo, since it doesn’t involve thundering around a dark house recently linked to at least one murder. But if you think I can stay in bed without checking to see if I’m right, then I’ve completely failed to tell you anything about me at all.
The floorboards sag a little as I get out of bed, feeling for the slip-on woven flats I kicked under the bed last night. This house was built at a time when building standards weren’t what they are now, and I wonder if anyone would even get in trouble if the floorboards collapsed beneath me and I plunged all the way down to the ground-floor bathroom to be impaled by the shower fittings. Given that Grandad built most of it back in the day, and he’s dead, I’m guessing there’d be nobody left tosue.
The first flaw in my plan comes when I find my bedroom door locked. I never asked Dad if it was him who locked me in last time, and apparently, oh joy, tonight too, but it’s got to be. Nobody else would care this much. There’s a moment where I consider going out the window and shimmying down the drainpipe, except that seems like a not-so-fun way to break my legs. Also, there are two doors to my bedroom.
The door to Dad’s room opens silently and I step through as quietly as I can, ready with a cover story about the toilet. I don’t need it (the cover story, that is): He’s asleep, face slack. There’s another bad moment when I realize his door is also locked, but (of course) the key is in the lock.
At the bottom of the stairs, I stop. This bit is going to be tricky. It would be easier with Dylan here, for a couple of reasons, but I can’t get to his room without going through Bec and Shippy’s, and if there’s one room I definitely don’t fancymaking a nocturnal appearance in, it’s theirs. Shippy might use it as an opportunity to bludgeon me to death with his hiking boot first and blame it on thinking I was an intruder later.
The first thing I need to do, the hardest bit, is move the big standing lamp at the bottom of the stairs. When I noticed days ago that it had been moved from its usual corner position, I didn’t think too hard about why anyone might move a lamp just a meter or so. Nor did I consider the significance of it having moved only after GG died. That should have been clue one. I drag the lamp back into place. It’s not so heavy—the material covering all four sides of what’s basically just a big column, lit from within, must be IKEA’s lightweight best—but the metal feet it’s standing on scrape against the floorboards, letting out a horrendous wail, reminiscent of when Mike got hit in the balls during school soccer training. I freeze, imagining a door opening, a light clicking on, a silhouette in the doorway. But nothing happens and nobody arrives, so I drag it again, and this time the wail seems more restrained, like when Ali tried to kick her school locker closed and stubbed her toe on her laptop instead. (Her parents don’t really believe in technology, and as a result, her computer looks like something that might have been used to put man on the moon.)
When the lamp is out of the way, I can better see the patch of dust that sparked Dad’s (thankfully barely developed and clearly insane) theory about dust working differently in the country. This weirdly localized patch of dust, mostly (deliberately) concealed by the lamp, was clue number two, by the way, but it was wasted on me.
