3 Madness in Christmas River Read online

  I took my eyes off the dark road for a moment and glanced over at him.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. You had a job to do.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I said I would be there and I wasn’t. And I know that it meant something to you.”

  I looked back at the road, so lonely and desolate at this early hour of the morning.

  With a heavy heart, I was taking Daniel to the Redmond Airport, a 45-minute drive from Christmas River.

  “Yeah, but it’s more important that you kept Craig Canby from driving home drunk and smashing into some poor soul,” I said.

  “I’m still sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “It’s okay. I know very well who I’m marrying.”

  He reached over, taking my hand and squeezing it.

  “I’m sorry too about leaving like this,” he said, sighing. “It’s not the way I would have wanted it.”

  “You’re just full of apologies this morning,” I said.

  “Well, I feel bad about leaving you alone here,” he said.

  “C’mon,” I said. “I’m not that selfish to deprive the people of Fresno County their best lieutenant.”

  “Honestly, I could care less about the people of Fresno County,” he said. “All I care about right now is you. You sure you’re okay with this? Because if you’re not, just say the word, and we’ll turn this car around.”

  I sighed, wishing that that was actually an option.

  I shook my head.

  “Like I said, I know full well who I’m marrying,” I said. “You have to go. There’s no two ways about it. All I want is for you to solve that murder and to come back. Can you make sure and do that?”

  He took my hand and kissed it.

  “Of course.”

  The highway was covered in a fine layer of snow that glittered in the headlights. I pulled off at the airport exit and drove a little ways, turning into the small airport which was mostly deserted at this early hour, save for a few cars lined up in front of the rotating doors.

  I put the car in park and we got out. Even though there was no wind, the high desert air had a brutally cold and dry quality to it that cut me right down to my bones.

  I shivered, and went around to open the trunk. Daniel slung his duffle bag over his back, and I handed him his suitcase.

  “Don’t forget about the meal I packed for you,” I said.

  “Believe me, my stomach’s been thinking about it since I woke up.”

  I tried to smile, and jammed my hands into my pockets.

  “I guess you should get going,” I said quietly.

  He put the suitcase down and hugged me.

  “Listen, Cin, I wasn’t late because of Craig Canby,” he said.

  “What?” I said, looking up at him.

  “I mean, that did happen, only it happened earlier in the evening.”

  “Then how come you were late?”

  “Well, when you were getting that pretzel, I saw that, um, he was there talking to you,” he said, a serious expression coming across his face. “I didn’t want to make a big deal of it there, but… jeez, that son of a bitch really got under my skin.”

  “You didn’t have to—”

  “I know. But he needs to stay away from you, and he needed to hear me say it.”

  “So that’s why you didn’t make it?” I said. “You were talking to Evan?”

  “I saw an opportunity, and I took it. And I’m sorry that I didn’t time it better.”

  I pulled away.

  “You know you didn’t have to do that,” I said again. “I can take care of myself. Especially when it comes to that loser.”

  “I know that,” he said. “But you’ve got me on your side now. That’s what I’m here for.”

  He gave me a reassuring smile.

  “Oh, all right. If you put it that way.” I said.

  He hugged me again.

  “You be careful here, okay? Don’t work too hard on all this wedding stuff. We can always elope, you know. As long as I have you, I don’t care how we get married.”

  He leaned in and kissed me as passionately as someone could at 3:30 a.m. on a cold winter’s morning.

  “Love you, Cin,” he said.

  “Love you, too,” I said, my voice trembling just a little.

  I watched as he walked slowly through the revolving door and into the small airport, and then until he disappeared beyond the security checkpoint.

  A bitter gust blew across the curb, kicking light snow up into my face.

  I got into the car, turned up the heater to full blast, and pulled away.

  I shivered most of the way home.

  Chapter 9

  The white dress dragged behind me, heavy as wet cement.

  I sucked in cold air, pushing my legs to move faster. I ran past the trees, ghostlike in the darkness. I sank into thickets of deep snow, stumbling.

  A fierce wind whipped my bare arms, turning them a raw pink. Fat flakes fell from the black sky, gathering in my hair and on my dress, weighing me down even more.

  But I knew I had to keep running.

  I let out ragged, heavy breaths. There didn’t seem to be enough air in the entire woods to fill my heaving lungs.

  The dress’ train caught on something sharp. I pulled at it, ripping it and leaving behind a wide swath of the white satin on the gnarly branches of a bush.

  I kept going, my heart pounding hard with a mad fear.

  I could hear its paws crunching in the snow behind me, growing louder with each step. Gaining on me.

  Then, it was on me.

  The wolf’s teeth ripped into my leg.

  I screamed.

  ***

  When I opened my eyes, the first rays of sharp winter sunshine were stealing across my bedroom floor. The smell of freshly brewed coffee was in the air.

  I sat up in bed, rubbed my eyes, and glanced at the alarm clock.

  It was blinking a default 12:00 red.

  The alarm hadn’t gone off. The power must have gone out at some point in the night.

  I glanced at my phone. It was just after 8 a.m.

  I had planned on getting to the pie shop right about now. Chrissy was working the early morning shift, but I wanted to get there early to get a head start on what promised to be another very busy day. If this last week had been any indication of the season up ahead, it meant that things were going to be pretty hectic around the shop.

  I lay back down and threw the comforter over my head, groaning at the soreness in my muscles.

  Chrissy could hold the fort down until I got there later that morning, I decided. I was tired. Tired to my very bones. And what was the point of owning your own business if you couldn’t sleep in every now and again?

  It had felt like a long, lonely drive back home from the airport earlier that morning. When I’d gotten home, I was so deeply chilled that I had to take a hot shower to warm up. Then I threw myself under the thick folds of my comforter, and fell back asleep.

  But it hadn’t been a restful sleep by any means.

  It was the same recurring dream I’d been having for weeks now. In it, I was always running through a patch of dark, unfamiliar forest in my wedding dress. There was a wolf chasing me. A wolf that always got me at the end of the dream.

  I was always too slow.

  I knew that the recurring dreams were just a case of pre-wedding jitters, and that they were nothing to worry about.

  But still, I disliked the heavy, unsettled feeling they left me with.

  These dreams always made me feel that something bad might happen. Like something was waiting for us, just up around the bend.

  Or maybe it was just a simple nightmare that meant nothing at all.

  I sat up in bed.

  The light streaming through the glass was hitting my partially-open closet, illuminating the crystal details on my mother’s old wedding dress, wrapped up in plastic.

  I would have been perfectly hap
py wearing that dress. But when I had told Warren about my plans, he wasn’t going to hear any of it.

  He wanted to buy me a new dress. A special, fancy, rhinestone-encrusted one from Bethany’s Bridal downtown. I let him do it, even though I told him I didn’t want him to. But he gave me that old pish-posh line, and told me that he wouldn’t see his granddaughter walk down the aisle in a dress that had almost four decades on it.

  I, myself, wouldn’t have minded. At least with my mother’s wedding gown, I wouldn’t have had to go on a 500-calorie diet that made me cranky and ravenous.

  Just then, my phone buzzed. I reached for it and glanced down at the text message from Daniel.

  Just got to town.Will call this afternoon. Don’t work too hard today. Miss you already.

  I wrote him back and then lay back down in bed.

  I inhaled deeply, the scent of his aftershave still on my pillow.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I whispered out loud. “It’s only a week.”

  Outside, a cloud passed over the sun, dimming the light in the room. The wedding dress fell back into the shadows of the closet.

  I was tired, but any chance of getting back to sleep had passed me by.

  I got up and threw on a robe before heading downstairs.

  Chapter 10

  “You look like hell, Cin,” Warren said, handing me a steaming cup of coffee.

  Not exactly what a lady wants to hear first thing in the morning, but I knew Warren didn’t mean anything by it.

  I took a sip, the warm liquid reviving me as it traveled down my throat.

  “It felt like a long drive back from the airport this morning,” I said. “And I didn’t sleep all that good when I got back. I had another nightmare.”

  Warren poured a cup for himself and joined me at the table.

  “I’ve been there,” he said. “The weeks before I married your grandmother were particularly hard on my dream state, I tell you what.”

  “You had cold feet?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “No. I knew from the moment I met your grandmother that I really lucked out,” he said. “But I was nervous as hell before the wedding. I guess I was afraid I’d fail her somehow. Or maybe I was afraid that I’d do something really stupid to mess it all up. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I never regretted marrying your grandmother. Even when she was a real pain in the you-know-what.”

  He put a little more creamer in his coffee and took a sip. He stared out the window a second, a faraway look in his eyes.

  I had barely known Grandma Mae. She died before I even learned to walk.

  Sometimes it was easy to forget just how much tragedy Warren had endured in his life. He never felt sorry for himself and always had such a glass-half-full attitude, it was easy to forget that he’d lost his wife and his daughter, both before their time.

  I didn’t see him do it often, but occasionally he’d gaze at an old photo of my grandmother, a distant look on his face. It was an old photo taken during their honeymoon to Scotland, so many, many years ago. Back when they were both young, with not a wrinkle on either of their faces.

  Warren took another sip of his coffee, then cleared his throat.

  “Maybe you oughta take the day off,” he said. “You have those two youngsters to run things at the shop today, don’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “Yeah, but I should really be there. It’s a busy time.”

  “Only as busy as you want to make it.”

  “There’s too much to do.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “But you should give yourself a break every now and then. It’s important.”

  “Take your own advice, brewmaster,” I said, smiling. “You’re slaving away in that garage day and night.”

  “It keeps me young,” he said, winking.

  He glanced back toward the stairs.

  “I swear, that Marie sleeps in later than a teenage boy,” he said, shaking his head disapprovingly. “Do you think she’ll be up before the sun goes down today?”

  “Aw, c’mon, that’s just her way,” I said. “She’s always been like that.”

  “Between her sleep schedule and mine, I’ve only seen her a few hours this whole trip.”

  “Well, lucky for us, she’s sticking around a while,” I said, finishing the last of my coffee. “Hey, where’s your newspaper, old man?”

  “There’s a wicked wind out there this morning and I couldn’t risk it blowing my hair out of place.”

  I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, got up, and rubbed his balding head on my way over to the door.

  I opened it up, a burst of that wicked wind blowing past me and into the house. I looked up at the sky, the blue quickly disappearing under a high film of steely-looking grey clouds.

  I stepped out.

  My slipper suddenly hit something round and light. It rolled across the deck, hitting one of the side railings, and bounced back my way, slamming against the house and cracking into dozens of sharp and shiny shards.

  I glanced around, looking up and down the street. Looking for whoever might have left a glittery Christmas tree ornament on my porch.

  But the street was practically deserted. The only sign of life was the smoke billowing from the chimney across the way.

  I knelt down, taking a closer look at the shattered ornament, compelled by something that appeared to have been inside of it.

  I brushed away the sharp pieces of glass with the sleeve of my robe and picked up a weathered, rolled-up piece of paper. I flattened it out, realizing that it was an old photo.

  The picture was of a young guy who couldn’t have been more than 20. He was wearing a black leather jacket, and he had a smattering of acne across his face. A silver pendant hung from his neck. He was puffing out his chest and staring at the camera with a deadpan expression, trying to act serious. But the beginnings of a smile were starting to form at the edges of his mouth. And I knew that if the camera had been a video camera instead, the next still would have shown him laughing.

  There was a big blurry spot at the bottom of the camera that was clearly the finger of the photographer, inadvertently getting in the way of the shot.

  I didn’t know what to make of it.

  What was this old photo doing rolled up in a Christmas ornament?

  And what was that Christmas ornament doing on my porch?

  I heard the sound of snow tires cracking against concrete in the street.

  I looked up.

  A sheriff’s patrol car was sitting at the curb.

  Chapter 11

  I stuffed the photo deep into my pocket and started scraping together the broken shards of the ornament with my slippers into a little pile off to the side of the porch. I pushed the mess behind our small dog sculpture that said “Welcome.”

  There was no reason for me to hide the photo. But I didn’t know what to make of it, and it seemed better to keep it to myself until I did.

  Right away, I recognized Deputy Owen McHale sitting in the front seat of the patrol car.

  Deputy McHale was one of the young cops that Daniel had invited to our Thanksgiving celebration. I didn’t know him all that well. He was a quiet, pensive type who had hardly spoken two sentences to me since arriving in Christmas River. Daniel seemed to like him a lot, though, so whenever I saw him, I always went overboard in being nice.

  But if I were being honest, Deputy McHale hadn’t won me over yet. He didn’t say a word about the meal I’d made at Thanksgiving, and in my book, that was plain rude.

  Deputy McHale got out of the car and walked slowly and deliberately over the snow heap piled high along the curb—remnants of our first snow storm of the season a week earlier.

  I wrapped my fleece robe tighter around my waist. Huckleberry started barking at the screen door when Deputy McHale was about halfway up the driveway.

  I glanced over, letting Huckleberry know it was okay.

  He stopped barking, just like the well-train
ed pooch that he was.

  I placed my hands in the pockets of my robe and watched the deputy as he walked up.

  “Hi,” I said as he ascended the steps. “Back for some leftovers?”

  I flashed him an easygoing smile.

  Owen McHale had come to Christmas River from Philadelphia, or maybe it was Pittsburg, about six months earlier. He was in his mid-twenties, kept his blonde hair closely cropped, buttoned his uniform up all the way, and hardly ever spoke.

  But most of the time, the deficiencies in his manners were forgiven by the folks of Christmas River simply because Owen McHale was good-looking. Very good looking. When he first arrived in town, it was all any of the women could talk about here. From schools teachers, to stay-at-home moms, to baristas at the local Safeway Starbucks—I’d heard all of them talking about the new deputy at one time or another. But as far as anyone knew, Owen McHale didn’t date, at least not any of the girls around here, much to their disappointment. There were rumors that he had a girlfriend back East, but all anyone could do was speculate.

  I, myself, never saw in him what they did. He just seemed like a cold fish to me. A cold, arrogant fish.

  “I was hoping you could help me with something,” he said in a humorless voice as he stepped up to the porch.

  I gripped the collar of my robe and held it over my neck as a sharp wind scraped frost down from the roof.

  “Why don’t you come in for a cup of coffee?” I asked.

  “No thanks,” he said coldly.

  It was easy for him to say. He wasn’t standing outside in pajamas and a robe.

  “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “I was wondering what time you dropped Sheriff Brightman off at the airport this morning,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

  “Well, we got there about 3:30 or so,” I said. “His flight left at 5.”

  “So that means you drove back through town about 4:15, is that right?”

  A car sped down the street behind him.

  “I suppose,” I said. “Is there a reason why that matters?”

  “Did you drive through downtown on your way back?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I don’t understand why that—”