Death by Chocolate

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

After the cops left, towing Lester's old car away for evidence, Paula and I walked over to Fred's house to retrieve Zach. Paula didn't say much and that worried me, so of course I babbled. I kept trying to assure her that everything was going to turn out okay, and she kept ignoring me. I didn't blame her. Even I didn't believe me.

Fred answered the door with two hairs out of place and a wild expression in his eyes. Zach toddled up behind him with a piece of ivy hanging over his shoulder, a silver candlestick in one hand and a white, partially gnawed candle in the other.

"Zach!" Paula exclaimed, stooping to take the items away from her son. "What have you been doing? Oh, Fred, I'm sorry!"

She handed everything back to Fred and scooped Zach up. "You've been a bad boy! What did you do to Uncle Fred's house? Is anything broken?"

"It's okay," Fred said in a squeaky voice. He stared dismally at the tooth marks on the candle.

"Get over it," I snapped, in no mood for trivialities when Paula was about to be charged with murder. "It's only a candle."

"Fred, if he destroyed anything, let me know and I'll replace it," Paula offered.

"No." Fred kept looking at that candle. "He didn't destroy anything."

"Are you going to let us come in?" I asked. "Or would you like to come to my house where the main concern is fending off giant dust bunnies, not obsessing over a stupid candle?" He looked at me blankly. Even taking his OCD personality into consideration, I was surprised he got so upset over such a minor incident. "We need to talk," I said firmly. "Something else has happened."

He stepped back, permitting us entrance. "Come in." It was the most half-hearted invitation I'd ever heard. Zach must have done more than eat the candle and ravage the ivy. Surely Fred couldn't be this disconcerted over a piece of wax and a messy plant. The house was still standing and so was Fred. I couldn't begin to imagine what had happened.

"Lindsay, you can fill him in on the latest," Paula said wearily. "I'll take Zach home before he does something else he shouldn't."

I entered Fred's house cautiously, but everything looked pretty much the same as before Hurricane Zach. A sauce pan sat on the middle cushion of his forest green sofa and a couple of lids dotted the hardwood floor, but no real harm that I could see.

"I can't believe you got all bent out of shape over one little candle," I chided him.

Fred ran a hand through his hair. "It's not the candle. I don't care if he eats the candle. It's my computer."

"Your computer? He ate your computer?"

Fred scowled and for a second he looked like the old Fred. "Of course not. It's-" He cleared his throat and straightened as if preparing to face a firing squad. "It's got problems. It crashed."

He seemed to be in pain. I certainly was. I realized suddenly how much I'd been counting on Fred to pull a metaphorical rabbit out of cyberspace, and that might prove difficult with no computer.

"Your computer crashed?" I repeated, hoping he'd correct me, tell me I misunderstood.

He nodded.

"You mean it doesn't work anymore? It has to work!" I told him about Lester's car and the blood in the trunk and Trent's admonition to Paula that she shouldn't leave town. "We need you to get on that computer and find out about the skeletons in Lester's closet fast! What happened? Can you fix it?"

"I don't know what happened!" He actually raised his voice, then immediately regained control. "I don't think I've actually lost the hard drive. I think the problem lies in the-" And I can't repeat what he said then because it was in a foreign language...computer language. "Zach was sitting on the floor in my office, pretending that candlestick was a car while I worked," he continued in a quiet, dead voice. "I got up to get another DVD, and when I turned back to the computer, Zach was hitting the keyboard with the candlestick. The whole system was going crazy. I have all my programs and data files backed up, of course, so it's not the end of the world as we know it. I'm running diagnostics. I'll have it up and running again. But it's going to be a little while longer before we can find out anything about Paula's father-in-law."