Page 25 of The Bad Weather Friend

“Whatever,” Benny said. “Whatever pronoun you want to use for the occupant is okay with me. He, she, they, it.”

Bob stared at him. Then he stared at Harper, who returned his stare. She didn’t shake her head, and neither did Bob. They didn’t need to.

Addressing Benny again, Bob said, “So how did this casket or something come to be in your garage?”

Benny recounted how Mayweather Universal Air Freight delivered a crate from Colonel Talmadge Clerkenwell in Boca Raton, Florida. How Benny had broken apart the crate. How he’d found a sleek stainless-steel container somewhat larger than the average casket. How the next time he’d seen it, the container was made of wood, elaborately ornamented with dimensional and vividly detailed scenes of terrified people in various ominous settings, people who were fleeing from some threat not depicted.

Hedidn’treveal how, when he looked closely at the amazing art, the scenes became animated, how he lost all awareness of his garage and fell away into those miniature dramas. Upon hearing such a revelation, the Bob who was a private investigator would morph into the Bob who was a concerned friend, and he would demand that Benny produce and destroy his stash of hallucinogenic drugs. Because no such cache existed, much time would be wasted when they should be focused on thephysically powerful, dangerously impulsive, unknown entity with an anger issue that was boxed in his garage!

Bob pulled out one of the stools that was tucked under the overhang of the kitchen island. He settled on it, encompassing the seat so entirely that he appeared to have six legs, four of them polished steel. With a lack of urgency, as if they had gathered here for no purpose other than to gossip, he said, “You didn’t know you had a great-uncle Talmadge?”

“No. I never heard of him. He came out of nowhere.”

“Brother to your mother’s mother.”

“Grandma Cosima Springbok.”

“Did you know your grandmother?”

“I was sent to live with her for a while.”

“And she never mentioned her brother?” Harper asked, commanding a stool of her own.

“She’s a narcissistic psychopath. She rarely talked about anyone but herself, never about my mother, only very little about her two husbands she killed.”

“Your grandmother killed two husbands?” Bob asked.

“She wasn’t convicted. She wasn’t even a suspect.”

Bob raised both eyebrows, an expression that was four times as charismatic and daunting as when he raised only one. “You never told me this.”

Benny didn’t grab a stool. He paced restlessly, hoping thereby to convey the urgency with which he felt that they should proceed. “Cosima is still alive. I don’t ever want her to think I’d rat her out. I don’t have any evidence. Only a few little things she said. Inferences I made. But she’d come after me anyway. She’d find me. And so I don’t speak about it.”

“You just spoke about it,” Bob noted.

“I didn’t mean to. I’m under tremendous stress.”

“Your mother never mentioned Talmadge Clerkenwell?”

“No. I think she’s afraid of Grandma. Sometimes I wonder if the guy who shot my father in the back had a connection with Cosima.”

“You never told me your father was murdered.”

Harper, hard-boiled PI in training, also had a tenderhearted feminine side. “Oh, Benny, all this is just awful. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. He was a violent drunk. He beat my mother. He was always getting into bar fights. He would have killed someone sooner or later. It wouldn’t surprise me if he already had killed someone before the back-shooter showed up while I was buildinga staircase to the moon with LEGOs. In fact, the back-shooter might have been another relative I didn’t know about. Of the few people I knew in my family, they were all murderers or murdered.”

“What about this Talmadge Clerkenwell?” Bob asked.

“On the video card, he seemed nice. A sweet old guy in a white suit. He seemed genuinely concerned about me. But you never know.”

“And your mother,” said Harper. “She’s not a murderer.”

“How do you know that?” Benny said. “You don’t know that. My mother is ... Let’s not go there. The past is past. The past wasn’t good to me. I don’t talk about the past.”

Bob said, “You’ve talked about it intensely for two minutes.”

“Stress,” Benny repeated. “I feel like I’ve fallen out of an airplane without a parachute. And everywhere I look below me, a fire is burning out of control.”

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