A Berry Horrible Holiday

by A. R. Winters

  He’d stopped atop a small rise. His shoulder was to me and his attention was angled down the slope. He took something out of one of his overall’s deep pockets. A bright beam of light cut through the darkness a moment later.

  A flashlight.

  Swear words jumbled together on the tip of my tongue. He’d had a flashlight this whole time, but he’d had us walking through the dark.

  I opened my mouth and took a breath to lay into him without a thought for my isolated predicament, but what he did next cut me short.

  He tossed the lit flashlight on the ground, turned, and began walking away.

  “Wait,” I said. “Where are we going now?”

  “Not we—me.” He continued to walk while my feet—having regained some sense of reality—refused to move too far from the tossed flashlight.

  “You said we were here. What were you going to show me?”

  “Use the flashlight. Don’t let me down.”

  Don’t let him down? Seriously?

  Lucas was getting further away with each step. The zig and zag of the land had him disappearing before my eyes. I didn’t know where I was in relation to the B&B. I didn’t know my way back, and now I was being abandoned.

  I bounced up and down from the cold and tried to refuse the frustration tears that wanted to fill my eyes.

  “You can’t leave me here!” I called into the now-empty forest with deafening silence as my reply. Lucas had completely gone from my sight.

  I scrambled to reach the flashlight, but when I grabbed it and shone its beam into the forest, it was with the same result. Lucas was gone.

  “Ahhh, come on,” I whined. All I wanted to do was catch a killer and destroy their world by getting them put behind bars for all the rest of their natural life. Who’d want to begrudge me that?

  I did a three-sixty with the light to take in my surroundings. Lucas had said we were here. If he didn’t mean the spot of my death, maybe there was something else to see. And then I froze, the flashlight’s beam fixed on one spot.

  “There you are,” I said to nobody else but me.

  I was shining the flashlight down the far slope of where I stood. There was a tall wooded hill across from me, and near its bottom was a craggy ravine. It was there that a stone structure seemed to grow right out of the hill. It wasn’t large, and the mossy stones looked as though they belonged here in the woods. The place looked as though the forest had made the structure itself without any aid from man, save for the old wooden door at its front.

  I slipped and stumbled my way down the hill. I lost a flip flop twice. Though despite how hard I’d had to work to get to the small structure’s door, I stood outside rather than going in.

  “Hello?” I called in a weak voice. I half expect Hagrid from Harry Potter to open the door and stick his giant head out. No one did though.

  “Hello?” I called again.

  I swept the stone hut’s exposed nearest wall with the flashlight’s bright beam. There were no windows.

  I gave the plank wood door a tiny rap with my knuckles.

  Nothing.

  I stepped past the precariously-footed front of the building to look at the far side. It was the same as the side I’d already seen except that there was a small brook trickling out from beneath the building’s foundation.

  I returned my attention to the door. I knocked again, this time a little harder. “Hello?” I called in a voice pocked by the chatter of my teeth.

  An old weathered chain hung from the door’s face near the center of the door. No other door handle was visible.

  I gave the chain a pull. The door didn’t budge at all. It wasn’t the kind of not budging you experienced when a lock was thrown. Usually a locked door at least had a little jiggle to it. This door had none.

  I gave a harder pull on the chain.

  Still nothing.

  I looked around. No one was in sight, of course. No one to see me get vandal-headed with the old door.

  I propped my flip flop clad foot against the stone to the side of the door, even with the height of the chain. I grabbed hold of the chain, then I pulled back with my hands while pushing with my foot.

  The old wood door creaked then screeched as it budged, moving for the first time. I gritted my teeth and pulled and pushed some more.

  The door broke free of its swollen, waterlogged moorings and flew open. I flew too, right down to the bottom of the little ravine.

  “Ohhh, that’s gonna leave a bruise,” I groaned. It was nice that I thought about bruises in the face of death by exposure, but who wants to be an ugly corpse?

  I climbed out of the little ravine back to the little structure’s now open door. I did it without the flashlight. I’d dropped it on the way down, but I retrieved it on the way up.

  Still on my hands and knees, I shone the flashlight’s beam inside the building. What I saw was a half-wall of more stone.

  I climbed to my feet and ventured inside the building for the first time. It was longer on the inside than on the outside by at least six feet. It did indeed sink into the body of the hill itself.

  The air was oddly fresh instead of stale, and it caressed my face with a warmth that left me baffled. Well, to say it was warm was a stretch. It was very cool, but it was not as cold as the naked air outside.

  I stopped two feet in.

  “Oh my God,” I said, staring at what was in front of me. The half-wall wasn’t a wall at all. Not really. It was a huge tub. A tub full of water.

  Dougie Dan had drowned in water.

  “Oh my God,” I said again.

  A tiny open trough angled out of the far wall. A steady stream of water trickled down it into the huge tub. The tub had an overflow notch on one side. Water flowed silently over its lowered edge, down the tube’s rock face, and created a stream that disappeared under the building’s outer wall. It was the same stream I’d seen coming out from under the building when I’d been outside.

  “It’s natural spring,” I realized. Someone had built this stone hut to capture the water at the spot where it made its way out of the ground.

  I dipped my fingers into the tub. The water was cold enough to make the skin of my fingers burn. Refrigerator cold. This place had once been someone’s icebox, I realized. Perishable foods could have been stored in the water to keep them fresh.

  And it was where Dougie Dan had been murdered. Drowned.

  There wasn’t any actual evidence of it, but I was sure I was right. Why else would Lucas have shown me this place? He must’ve also believed that this was where Dougie Dan was drowned.

  Or maybe he knew this was where Dougie Dan was drowned, because Lucas had done the deed himself.

  But why would the murderer show me the murder location? Some might do it in order to draw attention to their clever greatness. But Lucas didn’t strike me as the type of person who craved attention and recognition. Quite the opposite, in fact. He seemed like a man who had an intense need to be left alone.

  “Kind of like I’m alone,” I mumbled to myself, taking in my surroundings.

  I shone the flashlight back out into the night once more.

  To stay or to go? That was the question now.

  But I wasn’t sure either option would get me back to the B&B alive.

  Chapter 25

  “You were supposed to look after her!”

  “How? You want me to put a little bell around her neck? You want me to have her check in with me every minute of the day? She’d drop me like a hotcake! She’d drop you too.”

  I knew the voices of the two men arguing. They were my guys. While I wasn’t happy they were in so much distress, my heart was warmed to know how much they cared about me.

  I’d stayed at the tiny stone shack until the sky had turned from midnight blue to navy. It was now a soft baby blue. A fine mist was lifting from the ground as the sun’s early morning rays heated it.

  I’d at first tried to trace the path that Lucas and I had taken. That didn’t last long. I found mysel
f standing in front of an impassable bramble of weeds that the witch in Sleeping Beauty would have been proud of.

  I then turned back and tried to retrace my steps to the shack. That didn’t go very well either. Yet, I’d somehow found my way back.

  Actually, what I’d found was the spot where Dougie Dan had been buried head down. I never would have imagined I’d be so happy to see that place again.

  I crawled up the steep slope from Dougie Dan’s makeshift burial spot. My legs were too fatigued to march up it.

  Below, bright yellow crime scene tape still cordoned off the spot where Dougie Dan had been found plus the surrounding holes. I wish they’d put a strobe light on it, too. It would have saved me a lot of time finding my way back.

  “If anything’s happened to her, so help me God, I’ll—”

  “Hi, guys!” I called out while still only halfway up the steep slope. There was no way I’d wanted Brad to finish his statement. Some words were impossible to take back.

  Brad and Joel came into full sight when they stepped to the edge of the hill and looked down.

  “Berry!” Brad exclaimed before launching himself down the hill to get to me.

  As for Joel, he rubbed his face with his hands as he took a series of deep breaths.

  “I could kill you,” Brad growled when he reached me, but he followed the vow up by capturing my face in his hands and planting a huge kiss on my lips. He pulled away just as fast. “Are you hurt?” He looked me over from head to toe.

  I hated to think about what he was seeing. I had crawled over rocky ledges, fallen down slippery slopes, and had forced my way through thick vines and past thorny bushes. My muscles were sore. I was so cold my body ached at the bone. And I had not gotten the 3 a.m. snack I’d originally gone after.

  “I’m fine,” I told him.

  His expression turned grim. “Did somebody kidnap you?”

  I opened my mouth on a breath, ready to answer, then froze. A fly could’ve flown right in my mouth.

  “Berry? You can tell me. We can protect you from whoever tried to hurt you.”

  From who tried to hurt me…

  “Uh, no… No. I, uh…” What story would they believe? Lucas hadn’t taken me out to kill me. He’d taken me out to show me where Dougie Dan had been killed. And, he’d done it because I’d saved Rita’s life. He hadn’t been trying to hurt me, despite the fact that I could have died.

  “I found where Dougie Dan died,” I said, sidestepping Brad’s question.

  “What? Where? How?” Brad asked.

  “Uh…” Where. What an excellent question. “Uh,” I said again, “there’s a little rock shack tucked into the side of a hill. A natural spring feeds into it, and the shack has a… a… like a tub—a square rock tub—inside.”

  “A spring house?”

  “Yeah! The thing is old. Really old. It didn’t look like anyone had been there in ages, but since Dougie Dan was drowned—”

  “You figure it happened there,” Brad finished for me.

  “Yeah.”

  He helped me up the hill. Joel wrapped me in a big bear hug that lifted me off the ground when we reached the top. Over his shoulder, I could see Sheriff Palke heading our way. Two lumbering bloodhounds pulled at their leashes in front of her.

  “Where were you? What happened?” Joel asked when he’d put me down.

  Rather than answer him, I leaned to the side to see around him. Joel turned around when one of the dogs snuffled, announcing their arrival.

  “You’re here,” Sheriff Palke said to me. Then to Brad, she said, “I came as soon as I could get the troops together.”

  One of her troops sat, lifted his back leg, and chewed at the inside of his thigh. The other stretched his belly out on the ground and laid his head down on his outstretched legs with a heavy sigh. Their coats were black and tan, and their ears hung down lower than their long, droopy-eyed faces.

  “They’re so cute!” I exclaimed. “Can I pet them?”

  “Sure, knock yourself out,” she said. “That there’s Rubin. This other one is Beatrice.”

  I knelt on the mulch trail in front of them. I scrunched up their faces by holding their saggy cheeks in my hands and then flopped their long dangly ears from side to side.

  “We were just on our way to find you, but looks like that job’s been taken care of. What happened?”

  I swallowed. I didn’t want to out Lucas. It was obvious he was keeping himself on the down low. I didn’t know why he was avoiding attention, but I didn’t want to point all eyes in his direction after he’d helped me.

  “I—uh…” I tried to think of an excuse, a lie even, but my mind drew a blank.

  “Tell me this, is it anything I need to worry about?” she asked.

  The woman was smart. I’d avoided answering everyone else’s question about why I’d gone missing, but that question I could answer, and I could answer it honestly.

  “No,” I said, “nothing to worry about. Except, I found something.”

  One brow lifted inquisitively.

  “It’s a… I described it to Brad, and he called it a spring house.”

  Now both her brows were up. “A spring house, as in with a spring? Water?”

  I nodded. It was clear she’d made the connection.

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s, uh…” I stood and looked in one direction then another. “Um.” I pictured the B&B in my head. I envisioned the location of the spot where Lucas and I had entered the woods and the general direction we’d gone from there.

  Nervous that I was horribly wrong, I lifted a fatigue-shaky arm and pointed. “I think maybe in that direction.” I paused and thought some more. I shifted where I was pointing. “Or… maybe that way?”

  I looked at her apologetically.

  “It’s okay. That’s good. Gives us more to go on than we had before.” She gave my shoulder a squeeze then turned her attention to her troops. “Fellas, you ready to put your search noses on?” She looked at me and gave me a wink. “I’ll get them to follow your trail back to the spring house.”

  Sheriff Palke was being so amazingly nice to me. My chilly feelings about her started to thaw.

  Then she turned her attention to Brad.

  “You want in on this?” she asked.

  I could’ve growled, but no one was paying any further attention to me. No one would have even noticed.

  “Yeah, I want in,” Brad said.

  “And you, tall boy? I’ll need photographs.”

  “Yeah!” Joel exclaimed and then said, “Uh, honey, you gonna be okay without me?”

  Sheriff Palke had enlisted both my boyfriends to wander through the woods with her after I’d spent a night on my own full of the uncertainty of my continued survival.

  “Sure, sweetie. Go ahead.” Anyone in their right mind would have known I didn’t mean it, but Joel was a guy. A clueless Neanderthal of a guy.

  “I’ll go grab my equipment,” he said and took off at a loping jog for the B&B.

  Idiot.

  A caught Sheriff Palke grinning out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked at her straight on, the grin was gone.

  Chapter 26

  That beautiful harlot, I fumed as I stomped my way back to the B&B.

  Sheriff Palke wasn’t satisfied stealing only one of my boyfriends. Noooo, she had to have them both! And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it without looking either incredibly petty or weak. Oh, I could have played the damsel in distress and claimed that I wanted Joel by my side after my evening’s ordeal, but that meant having to admit that it had been an ordeal.

  I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction!

  I was still stomping mad when I reached the stairs leading up to the porch outside the kitchen. Zoey was pushing through the door with her ear to her phone.

  “Yes, three hundred. I didn’t stutter. I want three hundred camera-mounted drones and operators here in an hour. If you tell me it’s impossible one more time, so help me—” she spot
ted me “—Kylie!”

  I was only halfway up the stairs when she barreled down them and threw her arms around me. The impact had us staggering and twirling our way back down the stairs, yet somehow, we remained standing and still locked together.

  “I hate you!” Zoey said as she hugged me almost to the point of asphyxiation.

  “I love you, too,” I wheezed out on a forced breath. She took the hint and released me from her hold.

  “Cancel the drones,” Zoey said into the phone and then ended her call.

  “How did you even get a signal?”

  “Signal booster. Stolen tech. Never mind about that. Where have you been?”

  I blew out a long, tired breath and did my best to suppress a chill-driven shiver. When I opened my mouth to speak, Zoey cut me off.

  “No. Never mind. You need to take care of you. Just tell me, do I need to hurt someone?”

  I thought of Lucas then pressed my lips tightly together and shook my head no. My teeth started chattering from behind my lips.

  “Go,” Zoey ordered, and I went. She headed toward the now-defunct tech tent, and I headed into the kitchen.

  “Oh my word. Oh my word!” Mama Hendrix gushed the second she saw me. She made a quick beeline to me with her arms open wide, a spatula in one hand. She pulled me in for a pillowy bearhug, then pulled away to hold my chin her hand. “Where have you been? We’ve all be worried sick about you! Ah!” she gasped, “and you’re freezing!”

  “I, uh. Can we do this later?” My whole body was starting to shake. Stepping into the warmth made my body’s weary cold feel more extreme.

  She tsked. “Of course, child. I’m a terrible woman. I’ve been just awful to you, imposing left and right. Now I want you to rest. I don’t want you lifting another hand. You let me what you need, and I’ll take care of you. You’re my guest and that’s how it’s supposed to be.”

  “Coffee?”

  She leaned away with a twinkle in her eye. “Maybe with a splash of brandy?”

  Her twinkle was contagious, and I felt myself smile all the way up to my eyes. “Maybe two splashes?”

  “Coming right up.”