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“The Carlisles have a police scanner and a handy list of channels, so we can listen to the emergency channels and find out what the first responders are up to.”
“That is good news,” Sasha agreed.
Leo brought the gloom, “Which means there’s also bad news. Lay it on us.”
“The bad news is, judging by the transmissions I’ve heard, the roads are completely impassable, and the two closest cellular towers have both been knocked offline by the storm. So we can’t even get an emergency transmission out using one of the cell phones from the other party.”
“Okay, not great. Did you find any weapons?” Leo asked.
“No weapons. But more bad news. I discovered why the landline isn’t working. Someone cut the wires.”
Sasha’s throat constricted. Being cut off without the ability to communicate because of the weather was a nightmare. Being cut off because someone deliberately sabotaged the phone lines was more dangerous and anxiety-producing.
“Could we splice them back together?” Leo asked.
“I’ve never done it. Have you?”
“No, but it’s got to be doable,” Leo insisted.
“Everything’s doable. If we had internet access, we could search for a video of someone splicing a telephone line together and follow it step by step. But we don’t.”
“If we had internet access, we wouldn’t need to mess around with the landline,” Sasha pointed out.
Hank sighed. “True enough. Do you two have any glad tidings? How are the interviews going?”
“So far, we’ve established that Annette and Brian didn’t like Rex.” She glanced at Leo. “But I don’t think they were passionate enough about the issue to kill him. Connelly, do you agree?”
“Yeah, they found him insufferable. But if everyone knocked off every intolerable relative, Thanksgiving dinners would be considerably smaller. I’m with you—they didn’t kill him.”
“Anybody else a contender?” Hank asked.
“We’ve barely gotten started. Tessa had a motive but not an opportunity. It sounds like Paul might have had a motive, too. According to Tessa, he was spitting mad at Rex. And, by the way, Paul is the one who burned Hatty.”
“About that—have you considered whether that so-called accident could have been intentional?” Hank rumbled.
Leo blinked, taken aback, but Sasha nodded.
“I wondered. It was a convenient way to get John and Hatty off the property.”
“I don’t know,” Leo countered. “He’d be taking a gamble that the burn would be bad enough to merit medical attention—and that he wouldn’t be the one who ended up burned.”
“I guess,” Sasha allowed. “But the result of his mishap puts us in a real bind. With the Carlisles gone, we don’t know where anything is, what the emergency procedures are, or how to contact help.”
“Oh, I hear you. But, you know, sometimes bad luck is just bad luck.” Leo gave a philosophical half-shrug.
“Speaking of luck, Annette’s husband was able to make a brief phone call when they found Rex’s body,” Sasha began.
Hank’s eyes widened. “She said they couldn’t call out.”
“She doesn’t know he did it. Nobody does. And Brian asked us to keep it that way. But don’t get too excited. He said the emergency lines were jammed, so he got the number for the local PD and spoke to an Officer Duncan. He managed to tell Duncan there was a dead body, but that’s as far as he got before—”
“—before the cellular tower went down,” Hank guessed.
“Right.”
Leo asked, “Odds are a local station in a small town like this isn’t set up to record all incoming calls, right?”
“Yeah, I’d be surprised if they were,” Hank agreed.
