“It’s kind of nice to finally be able to tell someone about this,” she said, staring at her hands in her lap. “Savannah made me swear to secrecy, and when she died, I didn’t want to risk Benny finding out that I’d been involved.”
“Involved with what, exactly?” Amie asked gently.
Raina glanced at her, then back at her hands. “A woman came into the bookshop a couple months ago,” she said. “She had some photos on her phone she wanted printed. There were some other customers in line behind her, so I had her AirDrop them to my phone and told her to come back in an hour.
“Later, when I was printing the photos in the back room, Savannah came by and saw them. She said that the man in the photos was her landlord, but she’d seen his girlfriend before and didn’t think that was her. And these were, like, couple-y photos. They were kissing in one of them. Savannah was cackling to herself about how big of an idiot Benny was.”
Raina took another sip of water. “Once she knew that Benny was probably cheating on his girlfriend, she started talking about how she could use it against him.”
“Did that surprise you?” Amie asked. Savannah hadn’t been a very nice person, but she’d never struck Amie as the conniving type.
Raina pursed her lips, thinking. “A little, I guess,” she finally said. “But ever since the shop began really taking a nosedive into financial troubles, she started acting more and more out of character. Like when she ordered all those cookbooks and put them in the front window. Or like when she let go of everyone except me and Grayson. He’d been working there longer than the others, but he’sa terrible employee. I think Savannah just found it easier to keep him than try to determine which one of the other employees was worth keeping more.”
“She didn’t ask for your opinion?”
“No,” Raina replied, a small, wry smile tugging at her lips. “I was only the manager when Savannah needed me to be. Otherwise, she made all the decisions.”
“So what happened with the photos?” Ziya prodded.
“Oh, right. I had to go back to the register, so that was the last I heard about it that day. Then, about a week later, I noticed that Savannah’s personal email was open on the computer in the back room. That wasn’t unusual; she was always leaving her email up. But I saw that the email open on the screen was from Benny, and since he’d just come up in conversation the week before, I was curious. It said that due to a recent law that had been passed about apartment buildings without elevators, all tenants living on the third floor would be seeing a five-hundred-dollar decrease of their monthly rent.”
“What?” Amie cried with the indignance of a second-floor tenant.
“That law can’t be real,” Ziya said.
“It’s not,” Raina confirmed. “I looked it up. That’s when I realized that Savannah must have blackmailed Benny into lowering her rent. She probably included the whole third floor to try to keep him from knowing it was her.”
“Do you think he could’ve figured it out?” Amie asked. “The photos were printed at Savannah’s store.”
“That’s what I’ve been afraid of,” Raina said. “Even if he was as much of a moron as Savannah made him out to be—which didn’t mean much, since Savannah called almost everyone she knew a moron—it’d only take him confronting the woman in the photos for them to figure out that Savannah was the blackmailer. AndIwas the one who was given the photos. He could have easily found out I was involved.”
“But why then would Savannah bother including the entire third floor in her blackmail?” Amie wondered. “Since it was already so obvious that she was the blackmailer. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I can’t imagine it was out of the goodness of her heart,” Ziya said.
“My only guess is that she wanted to give herself as much distance from the blackmail as possible in case Benny brought it to the police,” Raina said. “There wasn’t any physical evidence that she’d ever come into contact with the photos.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Anyway, that’s the whole story.”
Amie’s mind had gone back to the torn-up letter she’d found in Benny’s bedroom. “Do you know why Savannah might’ve been planning on changing the terms of the blackmail?”
Raina frowned. “No. Why?”
“We saw one of the letters,” Amie explained. “It said …” She struggled to remember.
“It told Benny to keep an eye on his mailbox,” Ziya finished. “Because the terms might be changing soon.”
Amie flashed her a small smile in thanks. “Right. Do you think she might have been planning on asking for more money, or …?”
“It’s possible,” Raina said slowly. “She definitely needed the money. But I couldn’t say for sure what she meant by that.” She looked at Ziya. “Do you really think Benny killed her?”
“Doyouthink he could have killed her?” Amie asked.
“I’ve been trying not to consider it,” Raina said, wringing her hands anxiously. “I guess I thought that if he did it, that’d mean I helped cause her death, and that guilt … I, I …” She stammered for a moment, then fell silent.
“I understand,” Amie said. Her own guilt surrounding Savannah’s death churned sympathetically in her stomach.
“If he did it,” Raina said quietly, “I’m scared of what he might do if he thinks I know too much. Please don’t tell anyone about this.”
