I put my hands on my hips. “And when exactly did you have the chance to kill me?”

Lionel grinned. “I spent some time outside your house a couple of days ago, looking in. Nice pajamas.”

“Yuck,” I said. So that’s who had been outside that night I’d been on the phone with my mom. Not the neighbors’ Weimaraner at all. I should have thought of Lionel as soon as Derek explained that the doohickey I’d found was something electricians use, but of course that was a clue that had gone right over my head.

Derek lowered his head and looked ready to charge, but Wayne moved an unobtrusive step left to stand between them.

“I should warn you,” he said, clearing his throat, “that you do have the right to remain silent and that anything you say can be used against you in a court of law…”

Lionel listened to the Miranda warning, then shrugged. “I don’t figure it matters much now,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

The three of us looked at each other. I don’t know about the others, but personally, I was too full of questions to have an easy time isolating just one.

“That a grave you’ve been digging?” Wayne said eventually, nodding to the dark rectangle in the ground a ways away. “What were you planning to do with it?”

Lionel didn’t respond. Since the answer was self-evident, Wayne continued, “Were you planning to bury Brandon alive? Or were you gonna kill him first?”

Lionel shrugged again. For indicating that he was willing to answer questions, he wasn’t being very forthcoming.

“Was Holly alive when you buried her, too?” I shot in. Lionel turned his attention on me, his eyes suddenly burning in his freckled face.

“I would never do that to Holly! I loved her!”

“Strange way of showing it,” Derek muttered.

I nodded. “Why did you kill her, then? If you loved her?”

“I didn’t mean to!” His voice rose to a register it probably hadn’t reached since before puberty. “She was leaving. Waterfield. Me. Everyone. She’d asked Brandon to go with her, but he’d said no. Didn’t want to leave his mommy.” He said it with a sneer, as if Brandon ’s decision to stay in Waterfield with his sick mother instead of going to law school somewhere else, somehow made him a mama’s boy rather than a devoted son. And this from a guy who was also still living with his own mother.

“So you offered to go instead?” Wayne asked, trying to inject some calm into the conversation. “To California? And Holly said no?”

“She laughed at me.” Lionel’s cheeks darkened with spots of color. “She said she was going to Hollywood to be a star, to be discovered, and she couldn’t have someone like me along, always watching what she did.”

“So you killed her.”

His voice rose. “I told you, it was an accident! I tried to make her change her mind. She turned to leave, and I grabbed her. All I wanted to do was make her stop and listen. But she wouldn’t. I had to make her.”

“So you hit her?” Wayne asked.

“I had to stop her,” Lionel repeated stubbornly. “I had to make her listen. We could have gone together. I wouldn’t have stood in her way. I could have helped her. I could have gotten a job and supported her. But she wouldn’t listen. She laughed at me, and then she tried to push me away. So I grabbed her throat, and when she kicked me, I hit her head against the corner of the stove.”

“What were you doing inside the Murphy house in the first place?” I asked. Lionel turned to me.

“It was private. And I had a key. From when the Murphys lived there. They had a key to our house, and we had one to theirs.”

“So you talked Holly into going to the Murphy house to talk,” Wayne said, “and then you offered to drive her to California, and when she tried to leave, you grabbed her, and she hit her head and died?”

Lionel nodded.

“And then you waited until it was late and came back and buried her under the house?”

Lionel nodded. “But she was dead, I swear. She wasn’t breathing at all. And there was a lot of blood.” He shuddered.

“Did you realize she’d lost an earring?” I wanted to know. Lionel shook his head.

“Not then. After I’d gotten her downstairs, I saw that one was missing. I went back, but I couldn’t find it.”

“It fell under the fridge,” I explained. “I found it a few days ago, when we took the fridge and stove out.”

“What happened to the other earring?” Derek wanted to know, his voice still muffled by the napkin. “It wasn’t buried with her.”

“I gave her those earrings,” Lionel said, face darkening. “For Christmas.”

“You took it?” Wayne guessed. Lionel shrugged as well as he could with his hands secured behind him.

“So you buried her in the crawlspace,” Wayne continued, “figuring that no one would find her, since Patrick Murphy owned the house, and he wasn’t around anymore?”

Lionel nodded. “But then you two showed up,” he scowled at Derek and me, “and said you were buying the house. I thought I’d get rid of you before you could find a reason to go into the crawlspace, so I tried to scare you away. When that didn’t work, I punctured the brake cables on the truck. You had told me where you lived; it wasn’t hard to find. But instead of an accident the next day, the brake cables held, and you had time to find the body.”

“By the time I drove off the road,” I said, “Venetia Rudolph was dead, too. How did that come about?”

“You said that Venetia had told you that she had seen everyone who came and went in the house for the past twenty years. I figured she’d seen me and Holly, so she had to go.”

“And that wasn’t an accident at all?” Wayne ’s question was just for form’s sake, since Lionel had clearly indicated that it wasn’t. “What about Brandon Thomas?”

Lionel bit off a couple of descriptive words about Brandon and what he thought of him. Chief among the complaints seemed to be that Brandon was everything Lionel wasn’t, and Lionel was jealous. Brandon had been good-looking, popular, and most likely to succeed, and he had also been Holly’s boyfriend. Lionel had been short and unpopular, and Holly had laughed at his no doubt heartfelt advances. When the opportunity had presented itself to shift the blame onto Brandon ’s broad shoulders, Lionel had grabbed it.

“You suspended him because he’d been dating Holly,” he said, “so it made sense to put the bag at his house. I couldn’t get inside with Brandon ’s mom there, but I knew about the shed. Brandon used to take Holly there sometimes.” His face darkened again.

“And then you called in an anonymous tip to make sure we found it.”

Lionel nodded. “I wasn’t planning to do anything to him, though. I figured he couldn’t prove that he didn’t kill anybody-he was home with his mom those nights, and everyone would expect her to lie-so I thought I’d just let him go down. Even if he didn’t get arrested, his life would be ruined.”

“What happened to change your mind?” Wayne put his hands behind his back and came to parade rest; I suspected it was because he wanted to allay the temptation to throttle Lionel.

Lionel looked disgusted. “There’d been people crawling all over the house for days. When I saw you two driving away,” he nodded to myself and Derek, “I figured I had an hour or so to get rid of those wires and microphones I’d used for the spooky sound effects. I didn’t expect anyone else to be there.”

“Where were the microphones and wires?” Derek wanted to know. “I looked.”

“In the walls,” Lionel said, with the barest hint of a smug smile. Derek looked chagrined; naturally he hadn’t thought to actually check the wiring itself. “Behind the outlets and switches. The footsteps are in the outlet in the hallway, opposite from the bathroom, and the screams were behind the switch plate next to the front door. I had to disable the porch light, because I needed the wire to trip when you opened the door that first time.”

“And that’s why the front porch light didn’t work,” I said, “even when we put in new lightbulbs.”