40b1ce81e27faee7f7dcd22da99b93e1

She blinked.“What’s going on?” she demanded. “Where is Natalie?” And then it hit her, and she clutched both hands to her face. “Oh, dear God, no. Not again! Did something happen to Natalie? Did she have an accident? Tell me it isn’t true!”

“Natalie is fine,” the Kingsley woman assured her. “We’re not here about her.”

“So what are you here for?” asked Melanie, confused. “I don’t understand.”

“I think you better take a seat, Mrs. Mitchell,” said Mrs. Kingsley. “In fact why don’t we all take a seat?”

Melanie plunked herself down on the couch, staring at the twosome.“What is this?” she asked. “What happened?”

“I’m afraid we’re both here in an official capacity, Mrs. Mitchell,” said the cop. “Odelia here is a police consultant, and I’m the detective in charge of the investigation into the murder of Michael Madison.”

“Again with this murder business? What’s that got to do with us?” She glanced to her eldest, but Tom seemed as stunned by this development as she was.

“Because at this stage of the proceedings,” said the detective, “I think we have a fairly accurate idea of what happened that night.”

“You see,” the Kingsley woman said, “all this time we were looking at people who held a grudge against Michael, but instead we should have been looking for the people who had something to gain from his death. So you might say we were looking in the wrong direction, which is exactly what the murderer wanted.”

“There were plenty of people who held a grudge against Madison,” Detective Kingsley continued. “But not that many who had anything to gain. In fact the only person who benefited from Michael Madison’s death was an investor.”

“An investor?” asked Melanie. “I don’t understand.”

“It took us a while to see the full picture ourselves,” said Mrs. Kingsley. “You see, every employee of the Advantage Publishing Company is given stock options when they sign their contract. It’s up to them if they choose to take advantage of those options, but most do. Of course you want the stock of the company to go up, in which case your options will increase in value. Not down, reducing the value.”

“Okay,” said Melanie, wondering what they were talking about.

“But there is a different kind of option,” said the detective. “It’s called a put option, and it speculates that the stock of a company will go down. In other words decrease in value. The more the stock drops, the bigger the gain. And since options work on the principle of leverage, the value increase of the put option is many times greater than the value decrease of the stock.”

“Typically when the CEO of a company dies, or as in this case seemingly commits suicide, it will send the stock plummeting,” Mrs. Kingsley continued the complicated tale. “And in the case of Advantage, that’s exactly what happened. The day after Madison’s apparent suicide, Advantage stockdropped twenty percent. Which isn’t so strange, since investors don’t like uncertainty. At the same time, though, the investor with the put options made a quite spectacular return.”

“Uh-huh,” said Melanie. It all sounded like Chinese to her. She turned to Harry. “Do you understand anything the detective just said, Harry?” She explained, “Harry is the brainy one. Always hacking things. Isn’t that right, Harry?”

“How many times do we have to tell you, Mom,” said Tom. “Harry isn’t a hacker. He’s an investor. He buys and sells stock on his… computer.” Suddenly Tom’s eyes widened, even as Harry’s eyes dipped to the carpet, and a blush suffused his face.

A pregnant pause fell, and all eyes turned to Harry.

“Harry?” said Melanie, as something tightened in her throat. “What is this?”

“Nothing, Mom,” Harry muttered, but she could see her youngest was lying.

“Harry! What did you do?!” she demanded.

But Harry only seemed to shrink more into himself.

“I’m afraid your son Harry has been speculating on a decrease of Advantage Publishing stock,” said Detective Kingsley. “The day before Michael Madison died, he invested all his previous winnings into put options, effectively betting that Advantage stock would drop. The day after Michael died, he executed those options, netting himself an impressive gain of one hundred thousand dollars.”

Melanie’s jaw dropped. “One hundred thousand!”

“The only reason he could have known that Michael would die, is if he had a hand in his death himself.”

“But he never left the house,” Melanie said. “None of my boys did.” She realized as she said it, how unconvincing her words sounded, even to her own ears.

“Are you sure about that, Melanie?” asked Odelia Kingsley gently.

Melanie swallowed, then said hesitantly,“Yes?”