Midnight in Christmas River Read online

  Which was why I took off my apron, weaved my way through the big crowd, and headed outside onto Main Street to follow her.

  Chapter 36

  “Mary Lou, right? Or is it Cordelia?”

  At the sound of her name, the short red-headed woman spun around, clutching the stack of papers she was carrying close to her chest. She studied me, evidently unable to place me or understand how I knew both her name and her pen name.

  But then, recognition drifted across her face and her purple-stained lips curled up into a smile.

  “Mary Lou. I’m still not used to being called Cordelia yet. You’re the pie lady from the writing workshop, right?”

  I nodded and stepped aside as a big pack of older gals with shopping bags emerged from the quilting store we were standing in front of and rustled down the sidewalk.

  “That’s me, all right,” I said. “The pie lady.”

  She nodded, lifting one of the sheets of paper in her hands and stapling it to a community bulletin board right next to the quilting shop.

  “I, uh, I saw you pass by and wanted to say hi,” I said. “How’s the writing going?”

  Truthfully, I wasn’t sure why I had run after her the way I had when I saw her stapling flyers across the street. But here I was now, and I figured I might as well make some small talk.

  “Oh, it’s going all right,” she said. “But I was really bummed about what happened to Ashcroft that night at the workshop. We all got a refund, so I guess I can’t complain. But I was so excited for the workshop. Do you know how he’s doing, by the way?”

  “He’s hanging in,” I said. “They released him from the hospital and he’s still at the cabin, so—”

  I stopped speaking as my eyes fell on the flyer Mary Lou had just stapled to the cork board.

  I reached forward, ripped it down, and peered hard at it.

  “Oh…” she mumbled, her tone making it clear that my sudden violent action startled her. “I, uh, I can just give you one, if you want. Actually, take a bunch and give them to your friends.”

  She handed me a small stack, but my eyes stayed fixed on the copy in my hands.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “I do PR for the local theater company — I think I told you. Anyway, Halloween night, this really cool acting troupe from Portland is performing Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. It’s this very talented group, and it was really hard to get them to come out here to do a Halloween performance. But luckily, one of the actors is from Christmas River originally and talked them all into it.”

  I was having trouble keeping my mouth closed as I gazed at the flyer — which showed a photo of the acting troupe in full Victorian garb.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off one of the actors, in particular.

  A woman — tall, slender, with sharp eyes, dark hair, and a grimace that was a little too familiar.

  I’d seen that grimace before.

  Out in the woods, a week earlier.

  Lorna.

  Lorna Larimer.

  It was her.

  I tapped the picture.

  “Do you know who this woman is?” I said in a quivering voice.

  Mary Lou’s eyebrows knit together as she studied the photo.

  “Oh — that’s her. The actor who’s from Christmas River.”

  My mouth went bone dry.

  “Do you… do you know her name?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s a real up-and-comer in the Portland scene. Her name’s Melinda. Melinda Needleman.”

  Chapter 37

  The door to the Holly Avenue Bookstore let out a gentle chime as Daniel and I stepped into the cramped, carpeted entrance. My eyes immediately zeroed in on the cash register.

  Mavis stood behind the counter, ringing up a customer. She smiled as she stuffed Ashcroft’s latest book into a bag and handed it to the elderly woman who looked like one of the quilting ladies I’d seen earlier.

  I overheard Mavis saying the same line she’d said to me at the book signing.

  “Trust me — this isn’t your typical horror novel. This series is all the rage right now. We actually just had the author speak here at the bookstore.”

  The older lady puckered her lips, impressed.

  “But a word of advice? If you read this before bed, just make sure to leave a nightlight on,” Mavis added with a wink.

  The customer giggled her way through an “oh, my” before buttoning her jacket and heading toward the shop’s front door.

  I glanced over at Daniel.

  Then I took in a deep breath, and we both headed over to the cash register.

  “Mavis?”

  She glanced up.

  “Oh, hello, Cinnamon,” she said, nodding. “And hello, Sheriff Brightman. Haven’t seen you in here for a long while now. Not since you needed that book about dog training for the police K-9 a couple years back. Don’t tell me you’ve been ordering your books through one of those soulless online retailers trying to take over the world.”

  “Uh, no, ma’am," Daniel said, clearing his throat uncomfortably. “Actually, we’re not here for—”

  “Oh, you really ought to make more time for reading, Sheriff," Mavis continued. “You know, I just got a shipment of these fantastic new detective novels I think you would love. Here, let me show you where they—”

  “Thanks, but we’re not here for any detective novels, Mavis.”

  Daniel pulled out the folded flyer from his pocket and flattened it down on the counter in front of her.

  He tapped on the photo of the woman with black hair.

  “We’re here to find her.”

  As if being preyed upon by an invisible vampire, all the color immediately drained from Mavis’s face.

  Chapter 38

  “You have to… you have to promise me you won’t involve my daughter in this,” Mavis said as she lifted a cigarette to her mouth. “Melinda… Melinda didn’t know what she was doing. She was only playing the role because I asked her to. I’m the one who drove her around. It was all my idea.”

  Mavis lit the cigarette and took a long drag off it. The frosty wind carried the smoke away into the pale blue sky.

  We were sitting outside at a small wrought-iron table in the back of the bookshop. Mavis had insisted coming out here, not wanting any of her customers to overhear the details of what would more than likely end up being a scandal for her.

  “I can’t make that promise,” Daniel said, bluntly. “Your daughter trespassed on private property. It’s not up to me to decide what happens to her.”

  Mavis’s hands shook visibly when he said that.

  “But the more you tell me, the better it’ll be for her, Mavis. It’s in everyone’s best interest that you tell the truth and not leave out any details.”

  Mavis sucked in some smoke, shaking her head.

  She closed her eyes.

  “I don’t expect either of you to understand,” she said quietly. “You’re not artists. You don’t know what it’s like to put your entire life into something. You don’t know what it’s like to bleed for something — to sacrifice everything you have for… an idea.”

  She fell silent.

  “I don’t follow,” Daniel finally said. “You’re going to have to give me a lot more than that.”

  The bookstore owner let out a deep sigh.

  “I met him my junior year at Hemmings College,” she said, staring off into the distance as she spoke. “Nearly thirty years ago. He was my professor, but there was this… this instant connection. We both felt it, and even though he knew it could cost him his job, we began seeing each other romantically.”

  She bit her lip, looking at us.

  “It sounds wrong. I know how it sounds. But he was only a little older than me and it was love. Pure and perfect love.”

  Daniel cleared his throat.

  “For the record, you’re talking about Grant Davis, correct?”

  She nodded, tapping some ashes from her cigarette into a ceramic ashtray.

 
; “Yes. Grant Davis. Professor Grant Davis.”

  She smiled an odd little smile, as if enjoying the way his name sounded.

  “We had to keep the relationship a secret for obvious reasons. And we had several happy years together before it ran its course. I moved away for grad school, and Grant stayed back east. But we remained friends over the years. Grant was the steadiest thing in my life. Through my own marriage and its disintegration and through his, we constantly wrote back and forth. I was the only one he ever shared his work with.”

  She lifted her face up to the sky and closed her eyes.

  “I believe Grant Davis was my soulmate. We weren’t able to make it work, but our spirits — that connection — that never died.”

  I felt goosebumps break out across my skin when she said that, though I couldn’t account for why.

  “Grant was a complicated man. That was part of the reason it didn’t work between us. He gave everything to his writing. He was a true artist. And sometimes, true artists give so much, they leave nothing for themselves. Grant was like that. His problems with pills took a severe turn right around the time he was nearly finished with the first draft of the Sheriff Lane Graves book. I told him many times he needed to get help, but he refused to listen. Right around the time that… that so-called friend of his stole his book, Grant’s drug-use had gotten so bad, he didn’t seem to care about anything anymore.”

  I shuddered when she said the word “friend.” There was so much venom in her tone.

  “Grant stopped writing. He shut himself off from the world. It took years for him to pass away, but in many ways, he died back then. The knowledge that he was in such pain all this time killed me. He was such a vibrant spirit. And to see him devolve like that into nothing left me in such a profound state of grief, I can’t find the words to describe it…”

  She looked away.

  “So you can imagine how I felt six years ago when the first Sheriff Lane Graves book came out — not under Grant’s name — its proper creator. But under the name of a man called Ashcroft Black. I tracked him down and discovered that he was Grant’s former student — the friend who stole his manuscript. It enraged me. I wrote a long letter to the publisher of the book, accusing him of plagiarism. But I never heard back from them, and I realized they would never admit such a thing. Not with the series being so successful. It would create a scandal.

  “I tried to let it go. But when I heard about Grant’s death this past summer, I knew I wouldn’t be able to. Ashcroft couldn’t get away with what he’d done. It just wasn’t right.”

  She stubbed her cigarette out angrily.

  “So I wrote Ashcroft. I didn’t tell him who I was. I just invited him to speak here at the bookstore. And I mentioned the Juniper Hollow Cabin as a place that might pique his interest considering the subject matter of his books. I didn’t expect him to stay here in Christmas River so long, but when he took up the lease for the autumn, I was glad of it. Glad to have the time to…”

  She trailed off.

  “To torture him,” I said quietly, finishing the sentence for her.

  She shot an angry glare in my direction.

  “Wrong, Cinnamon. Not torture. Give him a deserved taste of his own medicine. There’s a difference. Torture isn’t noble. Justice is.”

  “So you got your daughter to dress up like Lorna Larimer and follow him?” Daniel said.

  Mavis nodded.

  “Melinda enjoyed the opportunity to act and came back from Portland to do it. The character of Lorna was originally in the first book — the one that Grant wrote — the copy I read. She was his character. It seemed only fitting that it should be her to haunt the man who wronged her original creator.”

  Mavis cleared her throat, leaning forward toward us.

  “This is all my doing, and I take full responsibility for the consequences. I have no regrets for what I did. I confess to trying to scare Ashcroft. I also confess to burning books on his car. Do with me what you will, Sheriff. I’m proud of my actions and if I had the chance to do it all over again, I would. Because I did it out of respect for a man I deeply loved.”

  She turned her nose up, crossing her arms against her chest in defiance.

  “So just to be clear, Mavis: for the record, you’re telling me you’re proud of trying to kill a man?” Daniel said.

  The rebellious look on Mavis’s face faded a little.

  “Kill a man?” she said in a hoarse voice. “How can you possibly construe what I did as trying to kill someone?”

  Daniel looked over at me.

  I could see what he had just done — dropped that little bombshell to see whether Mavis knew the full scope of the matter.

  If her reaction was to be believed, she didn’t.

  “You don’t know about Ashcroft’s condition, do you?” I said.

  Mavis’s eyes grew wide.

  “What condition? What are you talking about? The man was hospitalized with the stomach flu. Nothing more.”

  Daniel stood up.

  “Your ignorance might just save you, Mavis. But I think you ought to come down to the station with me now and make a full statement.”

  I could see in her face that the severity of all of this was only now starting to sink in.

  She hadn’t expected to get caught.

  Mavis finally stood up and straightened out her book-print skirt.

  “I did nothing wrong…” she muttered. “He’s the one who should be giving a statement. He’s the thief. The liar. The fraud.”

  Daniel didn’t say anything to that.

  Maybe he couldn’t.

  Because like me, maybe he thought Mavis might have had a point.

  She had done something wrong — that was clear as day.

  But so had Ashcroft.

  Something he would probably never make right.

  Mavis followed Daniel, and we all walked through the bookstore and then out to the street.

  I watched as Daniel opened the door of the truck for Mavis and helped her inside. He went around and got into the driver’s seat, starting the engine up.

  Mavis gazed out the windshield at me with vacant eyes. I was about to walk back to the pie shop when something occurred to me.

  One final loose end.

  I went up to the passenger’s window and tapped on the glass. She unrolled the window with obvious reluctance.

  “Mavis — does the word Stacks mean anything to you?”

  The look on her face when I said that sent a surge of goosebumps across my skin.

  It was an unmistakable look of nostalgia.

  “Grant used to call me that," she whispered. “Because I loved reading so much, I always had stacks and stacks of books all around my apartment.”

  The haze of nostalgia on her face wore off and she glared at me.

  “But how could you possibly know that?”

  I looked over at Daniel then.

  In all the years I’d known him, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen my husband shocked.

  And that afternoon, out in front of the Holly Avenue Bookstore, was one.

  Chapter 39

  A few days later, I was working alone in the pie shop kitchen when I heard someone calling my name.

  Or more like something.

  I let out a sigh, gazing at the plate of Sour Cream Apple turnovers I’d baked and arranged nicely on a plate a few minutes earlier. I had plans on taking the pastries over to Josiah Davis’s barn as a thank you for his help with the investigation. And maybe as an apology, too, for thinking he might have been behind the haunting.

  But the turnovers were whispering sweet nothings to me while they cooled, and it wasn’t long before my stomach was plotting other plans for those tasty treats.

  I couldn’t even hold out for fifteen minutes.

  I glanced around behind me, making sure nobody was watching. Then I reached forward, grabbed the biggest one, and promptly stuffed it in my mouth.

  A moment later, I was in pure
bliss. A vanilla-floral hit of whiskey cut through the natural sourness of the apples, bringing out their deep caramelized flavor. The crust was flaky, buttery perfection. The flavors were so well balanced, so perfect, so utterly autumn, it wasn’t long before I finished that turnover and reached for another.

  I had just taken a mammoth bite of the second one when I heard a knock at the back door.

  I turned around to see a pair of steel-gray eyes peering in through the blinds.

  And that was about all I recognized in the face staring back at me.

  I paused a moment, trying to quickly chew and swallow enough to be able to talk. Then I went over to the back door and opened it.

  “I’m sorry — I hope I’m not—”

  I shook my head, chewing some more. Then I motioned him to come inside.

  I was happy to see that he wasn’t nearly as judgmental about my table manners this time.

  Chapter 40

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said, washing the rest of the turnover down with a swig of coffee.

  He rubbed his chin — the place where that thick, dark beard of his used to be — and smiled slightly, as if pleased.

  Without the beard, Ashcroft Black looked about ten years younger — closer to his actual age. He looked fresh — renewed somehow. Lighter.

  Hardly like the forlorn horror author I’d come to know these past few weeks.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee or something?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “No, I must be on my way shortly,” he said. “But thank you.”

  He still talked like Ashcroft, at least.

  I dug my hands in the pockets of my apron.

  Daniel had told me the day before that Ashcroft decided not to press any charges against Mavis Needleman or her daughter. He’d also convinced the owners of the Juniper Hollow Cabin to not press charges, either. He’d told them it had all been a practical joke that had been taken too far.