Null Pointer

Variations on a CWE28 Theme

The Murder Mystery

“Am I allowed to know where we’re going yet?” Trixie demanded when she got into Honey’s car.

“It’s a mystery,” Honey answered absently. It had taken Honey a while to come up with an idea for Trixie’s bachelorette party. Trixie wouldn’t appreciate pampering at a spa. Jim didn’t drink alcohol and they had none in the house. Honey had noticed that Trixie drank sparingly even when she was out without Jim, so Honey was certain Trixie’s ideal bachelorette party wasn’t getting wildly drunk. Then a stray advertisement in her social media feeds had pointed her in the right direction. When she’d spoken to each of the women who would be part of the group, they’d assured her it was perfectly perfect for Trixie.

“We’re doing one of those murder mystery dinners?” Trixie asked as Honey pulled into the parking lot.

“I told you it was a mystery,” Honey teased.

“Oh, Honey, this is going to be so much fun!” Trixie declared with enthusiasm.

Honey handed her reservation confirmation to the staff woman who greeted them. “Alright. You’re in the barn this evening. Is your whole group here or are we still waiting on anyone?”

Honey started to say they were missing a few when the doors opened. “Never mind; there they are. This is all of us.”

The woman launched into her spiel about their evening, what they could expect, and what the venue rules were. “If you’re ready, you’ll go out those doors and turn left. You should see a large barn ahead of you. You may enter the barn through any door to begin your evening.”

“Is there any strategy to which door we enter through, you think?” Di asked as they approached the barn.

“I mean those wide-open main doors are an invitation, so rule that out. Otherwise… Hon, did they say if one of us is going to end up the victim?”

Honey shook her head. “They provide the victim, witnesses, and suspects. We’re all investigators.”

“Good. Then there’s no horror movie considerations here. We could split up. If we each go in a different way, we’ll all have different first impressions when we meet back up.”

“Good plan. I just wonder…”

“Wonder what, Hallie?” Trixie asked.

“I do think we should split up and get all the impressions. I just wonder if someone should go in the main doors. That’s the impression they mean us to have. We could miss something if no one has that view.”

“Are you volunteering?”

“Sure.”

“Alright. Let’s do this.” Their group spread out. Trixie took in the building as she approached. There were four stalls on the long side of the barn facing her. Based on how the driveway pooled in front of the main door and then continued around the back, the feed and tack rooms were probably in the back. It did look like there was a bit of extra wall beyond the fourth stall. There’d be a door back there. Probably two stalls on the other side. There was definitely a hay loft. The stairs would leave a dark hidey hole below them that they’d have to keep in mind.

Trixie decided on the third stall as her entry point. The nameplate indicated it was Stargazer’s stall, but Trixie saw and heard no indication any live horses were on site. The stall appeared empty, but Trixie couldn’t see the ground in most of the stall, due to her height and the two panel type of door. She pushed up on her toes to confirm no one was immediately on the other side of the door before she undid the latch. She opened the door cautiously.

There was a crash, multiple thumps, and a number of shouts and screams from deep in the barn. The voices didn’t belong to any of her friends, so Trixie didn’t allow that to alter her strategy, or rush her. Stargazer’s stall looked like any other horse stall she’d ever been in. Nothing was out of place. The only thing missing was the horse and lead rein, exactly as she’d expect, if someone had taken the horse out. In truth, Trixie expected this scene was entirely staged and, if Stargazer had ever existed and ever lived in this stall, it was before the murder mystery business had purchased the property, but she appreciated that they’d gotten the details right.

She peeked out into the main aisle. It was as she expected. Four stalls on her side, two at the front on the other side, then the wash stall, stairs, and tack room, with doorways that likely went to feed and storage rooms beyond that. But the focus of their investigation was there at the base of the stairs.

As much as she had appreciated the realism in the stall, she was glad the crumpled body at the base of the stairs was visibly plastic. One of the haybales that had fallen on their murder victim had come apart all over the bottom third of the stairs. The other had stayed with the body as it tumbled, ending up tilted over the body’s hip and lower back.

If I didn’t know this was a murder mystery event, I would consider that this could have been an accident, Trixie thought, wondering if a place like this would think their clients would be disappointed if the murder turned out not to be a murder.

Accidents were harder to prove. Trixie wouldn’t mind, personally.

There were a number of people milling. Trixie frowned. The stable hands were all dressed in matching outfits, cowboy hats and bandanas obscuring facial features. Witness reports were going to say that they’d seen someone in a particular place, but there was going to be no certainty about who it had been. The murder victim was dressed similarly, identifying her as a stable employee.

Trixie reached through the bars to find the latch on the inner stable door so that she could slide it open and join her friends in the main aisle, still taking in every detail, and every snatch of conversation happening around her. “It happened just as I was coming up to the door,” Hallie reported. “You can see the lift up there.” She pointed to a bale lift on the railing of the loft. “There was someone up there, operating it. I’m not sure if he’s come down yet. And there was a guy near the door to the tack room. He's still there, with the wheelbarrow. They’d done a successful transfer as I was walking up, and then…. The bales just didn’t stay on the lift as it rotated over the stairs. There was a scream, and then the victim came tumbling into view.”

Like Trixie, most of the others had only heard the incident, not seen it. But Penny, who had come in from the back, had come in far enough unnoticed to see the victim on the stairs as the haybales hit her and sent her flying down the stairs. Trixie wondered how they’d gotten the non-human victim to stand up and fall in a convincing way, but that was beside the point. How they produced the scene wasn’t the mystery they were supposed to be solving.

“Honey, will you go up and talk to anyone in the loft and inspect the lift?” Trixie suggested, when it was clear their team expected her to lead. If it was a murder, not an accident, the murderer wouldn’t have stuck around up there, and Honey would be the most likely to spot tampering with the lift.

There were enough of them to question each of the stable hands. Trixie also passed on questioning the man at the wheelbarrow, leaving him to Hallie. She hung back, observing, before cornering the woman who was doing her best to drift out of the crowd and melt away.

“Excuse me. I just have a couple questions about what you saw,” Trixie began.

“I didn’t see anything. I was in the storage room,” the woman declared, too quickly.

“Okay. I still have questions. We’re just starting our investigation. What can you tell me about the victim?”

“Jane?” The woman shrugged. “Nothing to tell. She’s just one of the crew.”

A plain Jane? That’s really the best lie this woman’s got? Trixie thought to herself, half-convinced the woman was the murderer without talking to the others. Trixie knew she was jumping to conclusions, so she forced herself to ignore her suspicions and ask reasonable questions.

After twenty minutes more, Bethany – the woman who had greeted them in the main building – came to tell them the dinner part of their dinner and a mystery package was ready. They were led back to the original building and an elegant dining room.

As soon as they were all seated, they started comparing notes. Parker, the stable hand in the loft, had been distraught when Honey talked to him. Had no idea what had gone wrong with the lift to make it release its load prematurely. Hadn’t touched anything. Honey believed him, but her inspection of the lift showed it had been tampered with. Of course, anyone had access. It was a barn; there was no interior security or cameras.

The others confirmed what Trixie had been told. The victim was just an ordinary stable hand, nothing exciting, no conflicts with anyone. What Brittany – the stable hand Trixie questioned – hadn’t mentioned was the Brittany and Parker had a fling that had recently ended badly.

“So, what? She rigs the lift before he uses it to make him look bad at his job? What’s she get out of it? She couldn’t have known the bales would hit anyone when they dropped, could she?” Hallie asked.

“After dinner, I think we go back and try to piece together where she was every moment. She told me she was in the storage room when the lift failed, but I don’t know if I believe her. And, anyway, we don’t have to prove what she intended to have happen, only what did.”

“But why Jane?” Honey asked when they confronted Brittany about the murder.

“Why not Jane?” Brittany asked in return. “It didn’t matter who it was. Parker would be blamed, as the operator of the lift. The crew would never trust him fully again, and he needs to be adored. It would force him out, force him to quit, and then I wouldn’t have to work with him, see him, every single day.”

“You couldn’t just quit yourself, like a normal person?” Hallie demanded.

“Why should he get to win? I was here first, and he broke up with me.”

Once their guide came back, congratulating them on solving the venue’s hardest mystery, in record time, the staff dropped out of character. “But how do you come up with these characters and plots, and have such genuine reactions to all our questions?” Honey asked the crew. “I mean, I know it’s acting, but—”

“But what’s the source material? My grandmother was a court stenographer. She wrote a book after she retired about the wildest cases that went through her courtroom.”

“You mean this really happened?” Hallie asked, horrified. “The poor woman!”

The woman who played Brittany nodded. “I think about the real ‘Jane’ every time we run this mystery. How lucky she is that she got justice, because most who come through here, even knowing it’s a murder, can’t prove it was anything but an accident. I am shocked the police figured it out in the real-world scenario, where an accident would have been one of the ways to rule it.”

“That’s one of the reasons my grandmother wrote about this case. She said it felt like half of the prosecution’s witnesses thought it was an accident even as they testified. It was one young detective who didn’t think the wear on the lift matched natural wear patterns, and kept investigating, off hours, until he pieced together the rest of the story, and convinced the prosecutor’s office. But the jury wouldn’t have had enough to convict, until the prosecutor turned the heat up on cross and the real Brittany confessed on the stand.”

Trixie’s eyes were alight with passion. “What’s the name of your grandmother’s book?”

“Come on back with me. I’ve got some copies in the office, for our best customers.”

“Best bachelorette party ever,” Trixie told Honey seriously.

Honey laughed. “I expect you to share the book with me, once you finish reading it.”

Trixie nodded. “It can make the rounds of this whole group,” she promised.

Hallie looked speculatively at the book. “Are all the scenarios here based on cases in the book?” She asked Bethany, who nodded. “Do we want to read the book right away, then?” She asked the others. “Or should we come back and do the other scenarios first? Because this was fun, and I’d totally do it again.”

“You’d come all the way from Idaho just for this?”

Hallie shrugged. “Not just for this, but when I have a reason, like, I don’t know, my cousin’s wedding,” she teased.

“It’s a good point,” Trixie admitted slowly.

Hallie grinned knowingly. “But if you take that book home, your curiosity won’t let you not read it.”