A Berry Horrible Holiday

by A. R. Winters

  I sagged against Joel with a sigh. Maybe I was making a mistake.

  “Tired?” he asked.

  “Exhausted.”

  “Think Rita will try anything tonight?”

  I shook my head no. “I figure she’ll either run, maybe create a new identity the way Dougie Dan did, or she’ll come back and pretend that nothing’s wrong.” I was hoping for the latter.

  “So, we could potentially go to bed, have a great night’s sleep, and wake up to having one of Mama Hendrix’s famous breakfasts with Rita.”

  I smiled. “I like the way you think.”

  “Wanna head to bed?”

  “I do.” I was even too tired to fret over being tucked away in a romantic bedroom all night alone with Joel.

  We headed for the house walking hand in hand. There wasn’t a soul in sight. It lulled me into the peaceful thought that we had this tiny piece of paradise all to ourselves. Everything felt right.

  Upstairs, we settled into a quiet nightly routine we’d established the evening before. And when it was time to get in bed, I shocked Joel by sliding beneath the sheet next to him, leaving my own bed empty.

  He smiled down at me. “Hi,” he said, his voice soft and low.

  I could barely make out his face with the lights in the bedroom off. Night had long since fallen outside. There were only stars to illuminate the lands beneath.

  “Hi,” I whispered back.

  He leaned in and kissed me. I kissed him back. I stroked the steep angle of his cheek with my thumb and let my eyes travel the gentle glow of his very manly features.

  The left side of my brain gave the right side of my brain an elbow nudge.

  I ignored it.

  I kissed Joel again and basked in the glow of his loving care.

  Glow…

  More left-to-right-brain elbow nudging ensued.

  Joel’s face got even brighter.

  “Joel?”

  “Tell me you want to stay,” he whispered, burying his face in my neck.

  It was a move I would have normally enjoyed, but the fact that I could see all four corners of a previously very dark room had me distracted.

  “Joel,” I said more firmly.

  He groaned and rested his forehead on my shoulder. “You’re killing me, Kylie.”

  “Someone might just be killing someone.”

  “Huh?” he said, lifting his head.

  I tapped his shoulder and then extracted myself from his embrace. Getting up from the bed, I went straight to the window. What I saw made me gasp as my gaze traveled from the yard to out of sight beyond the top of the house.

  Flames! Taller than any tree I’d ever seen! The geek squad tent was outside below our room, and it was engulfed.

  “Fire!” I exclaimed as I grabbed my coat. I didn’t bother to dress. I just threw it on over my thigh long T-shirt nightgown and ran for the door. Joel’s bare feet slapped the hardwood floors right behind me.

  Outside, I did a flying leap off the porch without bothering to touch on even one of the stairs before hitting the ground below. As soon as my feet touched the ground, I was running.

  “Zoey!” I screamed. I had no idea where she was, but fear filled every part of me that she was inside that tent. “Zoey!” I screamed again, but this time the sound of my voice was absorbed and overcome by the deafening roar of the enormous fire.

  I was close enough that my skin prickled from the heat. The ends of my hair were lifting as if mad, crazy frizzy, except that instead of being wet, the strand tips were drawing up in a tight, dead curl from the intense heat.

  I sucked in sauna-like air to scream Zoey’s name again, but an arm clamped tight around my waist and my feet were lifted from the ground.

  Zoey was strong, but I didn’t think she was that strong. That meant that she wasn’t the one picking me up, so her whereabouts were still unaccounted for.

  “Zoey!” I screamed as my bare feet pedaled the air and my hands pushed at the muscular arm that ensnared me.

  “Take her!” Joel’s voice rang in my ear.

  Another pair of arms wrapped themselves around me, though my feet still didn’t touch the ground.

  “Got her!”

  I knew that voice. My attention broke away from the flaming tent to stare up into Brad’s face.

  “Let me go, Brad!” I yelled as he carried me across the yard, putting distance between me and the tent.

  We were far enough away from the tent that the night’s cool air was caressing my heat-seared skin by the time my feet were allowed to touch the ground again. But rather than simply let me go, Brad put me down and then captured my face in my hands.

  “Zoey’s not in there,” he said, his face inches from mine.

  “How do you know?” I challenged. I didn’t want mindless soothing and reassurance. I wanted Zoey to be okay. I needed her to be okay.

  “She’s not in there.”

  “How do you know?” I screamed, unwilling to accept the empty pat-on-the-head, don’t-worry answer he was trying to give me.

  As if on cue, the geek squad poured out of the B&B. There was much wailing and rending of shirts as a couple of them literally fell to their knees and cried to the heavens. The only thing that kept me from doing the same was the sight of Zoey at the rear of their group.

  “See, she’s right there,” Brad pointed, making damn sure I knew she was okay. “She’s not in the tent.”

  “Okay,” I nodded.

  “Say it, ‘She’s not in the tent.’”

  “She’s not in the tent,” I dutifully repeated. A flood of calm filled me the second time the words left my mouth. “She’s not in the tent,” I said again.

  Brad released a breath of relief. “Okay,” he said, releasing my face. “You stay here. I’m going to go help.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, then watched him trot away. It wasn’t until he was gone that a sense of ‘hey, wait a minute’ settled over me. Everyone else from the B&B had flown into high gear to fight the flames, but I was deliberately being sidelined. I was the one who’d spotted the fire before anyone else.

  The thought was enough to make me pout, which made me feel childish and silly. A huge tent with untold thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment was going up in flames. A gorgeous half-century old B&B was at risk of doing the same. But here I was, upset that I’d been absconded to a safe place.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said to me, myself, and the wind.

  A groan reached my ears. One that was soft and… fragile.

  I froze then carefully looked around me. “Hello?” I called.

  Nothing.

  “Hello?” I called again. This time I did a full circle, doing a slow twirl in place.

  There was nothing and no one. But then…

  “Ahhhh…”

  A part of me tried to convince myself that it was the wind, but another part of me knew better.

  This time, I didn’t call out. This time, I turned slowly in place, letting my eyes scan everywhere and everything, from near to far. The soft sound came again, less distinct this time, but it was enough to have me snapping my head back in a direction already passed.

  Then my eyes locked still. Staring. Doing their best to make sense out of the textures of grass, ground, and shadows.

  “Rita,” I breathed out, unbelieving my own eyes.

  I hurried to her side and knelt down. She moaned again, a tiny sound that barely reached my ears even now.

  I touched her matted hair. My fingers came away warm and sticky.

  “Oh, Rita…”

  There was no response. In fact, she looked to be barely breathing.

  “Hang in there, Rita. Hang in there.”

  I stood and waved a frantic arm over my head from side to side. John, one of the newlyweds, saw me, stopped his work fighting the flames, and waved back. But that’s all he did before jumping back into the fray.

  The entire house had made a human chain and were passing bowls of water, sopping wet towels and bed linens, and
waterlogged pillows. They were making a difference. The fire’s edge was being pushed away from the house, and the towering flames barely reached the roof’s height rather than cascading above it.

  I looked down at Rita again. Her chest wasn’t moving.

  I dropped to my knees, put my ear to her chest, and listened.

  Nothing.

  “Ohgod, ohgod, ohgod, ohgod,” I chanted, launching into chest compressions. “Rita, stay with me. Hang on. You’re going to be okay! Hang on. Ignore that beautiful light and stay with me!”

  I pushed on her chest and periodically stopped to cover her mouth with my own to give her brain a little oxygen to work with. Only seconds seemed to pass before my whole body was shaking with fatigue. My arms, back, and shoulders were cramping, and stars were dotting my vision as I grew increasingly lightheaded.

  “Help me!” I screamed into the night. I was facing the wrong way. The house, the flaming tent, and their first-responder water line was all at my back. “Help!” I screamed again, my voice breaking and breathy.

  I glanced behind me. No one was coming. This couldn’t be happening.

  “Rita, wake up,” I begged. My vision was getting worse and a world-tilting vertigo was creeping in.

  Woods, trees, and brush were at a distance in front of me. They moved, parted, and shifted, but the dancing stars before my eyes hid the reason why. I imagined a hungry wolf on its way to get a snack, but there was no way I could leave Rita’s side.

  Figuratively and literally.

  I was seconds away from passing out on top of her. No matter what was coming out of the tree line, I wasn’t going anywhere. And if I passed out, Rita was going to die.

  “Help!” I cried in a yell that was more air than sound.

  A creaking like the world was breaking in half started as a slow rumble before growing into an onslaught of sound that I could feel in my bones more than hear with my ears. The ground shook, and a wave of heat too hot to breathe replaced all of the night’s cool air. Twinkling, dying embers washed past, transforming the air into something terrifying and magnificent.

  I threw my body on top of Rita’s. I buried my face in her neck, and covered her face with my shoulder, arms, and hands.

  “Kylie!”

  I heard my name, but there was no way I could risk sucking in a breath of the furnace-hot air to call back. My lungs burned from lack of oxygen, and Rita’s deathly form beneath me lacked any spark of life at all.

  Something wet and heavy plastered me to the ground. When arms tried to scoop me and the soaking wet comforter back up, I wrapped my arms and legs around Rita and held on. On the brink of passing out, I finally dared to take a breath. The air was hot but breathable.

  I was yanked aloft, but I somehow managed to keep hold of Rita’s arm.

  Chapter 21

  As I was carried, Rita was dragged along with us. Finally, whoever had me realized there was extra cargo and stopped.

  “She was alive,” I yelled from beneath the covering. “I was doing CPR!”

  The ground came crashing up to greet me. When I fought my way clear of the wet comforter, I found Joel on his knees, giving Rita CPR.

  She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing.

  But I was sure she wasn’t dead.

  One glance at the tent told me what had happened. The whole front half had collapsed, sending a supercharged surge of burning air over to where Rita and I had been.

  My skin felt as though I’d fallen asleep at the beach for ten hours. As a natural redhead, that was saying something. I was crispy.

  Rita’s finger moved, then her body spasmed. Joel stopped doing CPR, and the young woman coughed. It was a glorious sound.

  I can’t say for sure how long it took the paramedics to arrive. The fire had mostly burned down. The back half of the tent still stood, but the front half was incinerated.

  “You saved her life,” Michael said, nearly in tears. He pulled me in for a hug that had me gritting my teeth because of my painful non-sun-inflicted sunburn.

  I awkwardly patted his back and waited him out. After letting me go, he climbed aboard the ambulance that now held his unresponsive daughter.

  Brad stood on one side of me and Joel on the other. Joel’s arm draped across my back with his hand hooked at my waist. Brad’s arm was draped low, with his hand resting on my hip.

  Sheriff Palke had arrived at about the same time as the ambulance. She approached me now, and she wore an expression I’d seen several times before—though this was the first time I’d seen it on her. But I’d seen it on Detective Gregson lots of times.

  Distrust.

  Disbelief.

  Unspoken accusation.

  They were all there in her eyes.

  Behind the litany of cop-minded thoughts, I saw something else. Her gaze flicked to Joel, and she looked him up and down. Then it went to Brad. She looked him up and down. Then it was back to me. Her perfect brow lifted.

  I didn’t see her lips move. It might have been that she’d thought about smiling and something about that thought translated itself unto her otherwise unaffected mouth.

  “I need to take your statement,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Did you see Ms. Sutton fall?”

  “Ms. Sutton?” I asked.

  “Rita,” Sheriff Palke clarified.

  “Oh, um, no. She was lying in the grass when I found her.”

  “Can you show me the spot?”

  Joel and Brad stayed near me as I made my way through the yard to where I thought I’d been. “I think it was here,” I said, pointing at the ground. Then I frowned, “Or… maybe here.” I just couldn’t be sure of the exact spot.

  Sheriff Palke took her time walking over the ground. She poked at a couple of spots with the toe of her boot. She eventually widened her search into a larger circular pattern. Finally, she asked, “Did you spot a rock?”

  A rock?

  “No,” I said.

  She nodded then made notes in a small notepad. I noticed that she was writing with a pen rather than a pencil. Detective Gregson always wrote with a pencil so that his notes wouldn’t be lost if the paper got wet. I considered making the suggestion but kept the thought to myself instead.

  Detective Gregson and I did not usually see eye to eye, especially when I was asking around about murders, and I didn’t want to think about the man any more than I needed to.

  “So you didn’t see her hit her head?” Sheriff Palke asked.

  “Her head? Oh, her head!” With all that had happened, I’d forgotten. I glanced at my hand, remembering the damp stickiness I’d felt when I’d first touched her. There were flecks of reddish-brown around my nails. Dried blood.

  Rita had been bleeding from a head wound. But if she didn’t fall down and hit her head, how did she get the head wound?

  A chill ran through me as I made connections I hadn’t made before. Rita had almost died. She was lying in the grass, bleeding from the head, and she had almost died. Well, she did die. She just didn’t stay that way. But that didn’t change the fact that her injury—her head wound—was bad enough to kill her.

  It was my turn to scan the ground, the relatively soft, flat ground. There wasn’t anything around that could have hurt Rita’s head. She couldn’t have done it to herself, either accidentally or on purpose. We’d be able to find what had hit her if she had.

  Rita’s injury hadn’t been an accident. It was on purpose. Someone had tried to kill her.

  A killer had tried to kill her.

  The odds that the B&B was hosting two different killers was slim. If there was only one killer and someone had tried to kill Rita, that meant Rita was not the killer.

  My heart sank. I’d been so wrong about her.

  I was an idiot.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I asked Sheriff Palke.

  “I guess that depends on if she wakes up. Brad, got a moment?”

  He looked down at me. “You gonna be okay?”

  I nodded.


  Sheriff Palke turned and walked away. Brad followed.

  “Kylie,” Joel said once the two were out of earshot, but whatever he was going to say was lost in the rush of Zoey’s arms. She’d managed to separate herself from her bereft geek squad and tackled me in a bear hug.

  “Ow, ow, ow, ow…” I said. My non-sun sunburned skin took issue with her enthusiasm.

  “You’re not allowed to get fried to a crisp,” she said.

  “Ditto,” I told her, remembering how I’d thought she might be inside the burning tent.

  Poor Joel was left on his own as Zoey hooked an arm in mine and started us walking. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  I brought Zoey up to speed on what had transpired on my end of tonight’s fiasco. I was still barefoot and in my nightshirt, but a glow of warmth still canvased the yard because of the now dying tent fire.

  “You think Rita’s innocent,” a fully dressed Zoey finished the tale for me.

  “I do.”

  “We need to question her.”

  “If she wakes up.”

  “She was that bad?”

  I nodded. “She died, and that was before the tent collapsed and sent all its heat our way. She’d… died.” I’d brought her back from death. Did that make me responsible for her now? “Think she’ll be okay at the hospital? Do you think we should camp out there and make sure no one takes a second go at her?”

  Zoey shook her head. “If she almost died, they’ll put her in ICU. Twenty-four-hour security. Locked-door wing. She’ll be okay.”

  That answer didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to be there to watch over Rita, but I needed to trust the others in her life to be there for her instead. Her father would be there. The nurses and doctors would be there. There was even a chance that Sheriff Palke would assign some deputies to be there.

  And the person not there was the murderer. The murderer was here, unless the murderer was her father.

  My gut clenched and my head ached. I needed to clone myself.

  “You think Michael clubbed her in order to get the suspicion off her?” Zoey asked.