“No one born past nineteen ninety has heard of EZ Reader. Morgan Freeman as God or Morgan Freeman in the Bucket List would put our suspect at Millennial or Gen Z, but EZ Reader, total Boomer.”
Scott’s mouth dropped open as he looked at his wife.
Gilly shrugged. “Gen X, once again, the forgotten generation.”
Scott’s voice lowered as he announced, “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
I choked on a laugh. “Even our parents forgot about us.”
Ari arched a brow at the three of us. “Old people are weird.”
“Word,” I said, and Gilly and I bumped knuckles before we both started laughing again.
Ari raised her hands. “Can we just agree that the suspect is probably over forty?”
I nodded. “You’re probably right. The Electric Company ended in the late seventies.”
“But they were still playing reruns in the early eighties,” Gilly said defensively. “I would catch an episode occasionally.”
Ari gave her mom an incredulous look.
“What?” Gilly shrugged. “We didn’t have a gazillion channels, smartphones, computers, tablets, and so forth. We had four stinkin’ channels. PBS had Sesame Street, Zoom, and reruns of The Electric Company, and I was too old for Sesame Street.” She sounded exasperated.
Scott rubbed Gilly’s arm and finished with a comforting pat on the shoulder. “You’ve been holding that one in for a little while, haven’t you, Babe?”
She snickered and shook her head. “I’m just saying.”
“You’re not wrong,” I said in solidarity. “Reading the back of cereal boxes was how we spent our screen time.”
“Not you, too, Aunt Nora.” Ari grinned as she slid a hair tie over her wrist, ran her fingers through her hair, and then slid the tie over the gathered length to make a ponytail. “That doesn’t change the age bracket. I stand by the assumption that he’s older.” She gave me a quizzical look. “Do we know it’s a he?”
“No. But Ezra says it’s statistically more likely to be a man.”
Ari jotted down,Age – 40+, gender – male?“What about race?”
Good. A question I could answer with one hundred percent certainty. “I only saw his hand briefly, but his skin was light.”
The corner of her mouth quirked up. “So old white dude, huh?”
“Hey,” Scott said with mock offense. “I resemble that remark.”
We laughed again. It felt good to be working the case with my friends, even if the crumbs led us nowhere. And they were making sure I knew that I wasn’t alone. That felt even better.
Ari tapped her phone. “Give all the voices again.”
“Christopher Walken, Dolly Parton, Morgan Freeman, and Ian McKellan. I think you were definitely right about the voice changer app. That’s how I saw the skin on his hand. He had to remove his glove to change voices on his phone.” I dabbed a pepper dot on the center island top with my index finger and flicked it away. “And this person had to have known about me and my scent ability before the letter came out in the Gazette this morning.” The fact that he’d ordered the floral delivery a week earlier was definitive proof. “So it has to be someone connected to the police force or one of the cases I worked on.” I didn’t mention my friends because I refused to believe any of them would casually gossip about my psychic smeller.
“Okay, so let’s list the arrests made with your help,” Gilly said. “Let’s see, there was Carl Grigsby, Lucy Jameson, which also included Big Don Portman, Phil Williams, and Burt Adler.”
“You were the one who took down the self-proclaimed Garden Cove Elite?” Scott asked. “I had no idea.”
That’s what I meant about friends not gossiping. Gilly hadn’t even told the love of her life about my past cases.
“Who else?” Ari asked.
“There was that guy Aaron from the convention,” Gilly added.
I waved him off as a suspect. “I think we can assume the culprit is tied to me locally.”
