She snorted. “That was easy. Told him I needed his opinion on the latest batch of hard cider. Doug was arrogant with an ego as big as the state. I told him I needed his expert help to make sure I was doing it right.” She laughed again. “As if! Me and my George had been making hard cider since before that boy was born, but he thought he was a genius and everyone else were the fools he had to suffer.”
“You drugged the cider?”
“I drugged it.” She nodded. “Wasn’t even a fight to hold his head under water after that. Was way easier than I thought it’d be.”
No remorse. None whatsoever.
My skin crawled with a cold chill.
Mama Hendrix opened and checked the contents of another drawer. She closed it again without pulling anything out. She looked absentmindedly around her.
I cast a longing eye toward the door leading to the great outdoors, that place where I’d left Zoey and Brad—and of course Sheriff Palke.
But the kitchen was huge. It’d be an outright sprint to reach that door. I was in better shape than Mama Hendrix, but there was no way I’d be able to outrun a bullet. She didn’t have a gun in her hand, but like I said, this was a big kitchen. I didn’t know what she had stashed where.
That all said, the door leading into the belly of the house was much, much closer. I could make a dash for it. There was a chance I could make it through even if Mama Hendrix had a gun.
“Thinking of running?” Mama Hendrix asked in a voice that held no emotion. Her question pulled my attention from the door and back to her.
“I was considering it,” I said, not bothering to lie.
“They won’t believe you,” she said. “Your word against mine.” Her gaze landed on something out of sight to me, something past the edge of the refrigerator.
My stomach growled, and it was all I could do not to clamp my hands over it and tell it to hush. I hated that the plate of pie topped with melting ice cream still called my name.
“Where are my manners?” Mama Hendrix said with a smile that was suddenly sweet and full of charm.
She picked up the dish with the yummy yummies she’d promised, but before heading my way, she reached a pudgy arm past the fridge and yanked something off the wall.
There was a scraping sound that accompanied the motion, but she moved so smoothly that she was two steps to me before I realized what she’d done and what she had.
A big, shiny meat cleaver was held firmly in her grip close to her thigh.
I stood up so fast that my chair tumbled over behind me, obstructing the path I would have taken to get to the closest kitchen door.
But now she was three steps closer instead of only two, and her knife-wielding hand was on its way to lifting high.
Her eyes were crazy. They were happy and eager. That was the most unnerving part of all, never mind the honed steel that was destined to slice me into bits.
I had two options. I could climb on top of the table and use it as a running lane to reach the far door. If the table collapsed and I fell, I’d be fighting her from the floor. It was a fight I was sure I’d lose. It wasn’t an option I liked.
But the second option of trying to escape out the kitchen’s inner door wasn’t much better. I’d have to turn my back on her and that huge, terrifying knife in an effort to fight past the tumbled chair. She could rush me. She could lunge. She could throw that cleaver right into my back.
While I struggled with my indecision, Mama Hendrix had taken yet another step closer. She was gaining speed, gaining momentum. My body’s instinct for survival took over, and it took a step back, right into the fallen chair.
The chair’s legs tangled with mine.
I lost my balance, flailing my arms wide.
I cried out as my torso toppled backward without my legs’ ability to move underneath to catch me.
The door leading into the rest of the house was right there—right there! So close!
“Wait!” I screamed, but Mama Hendrix had turned into a charging bull with a gleam in her eye.
That’s when it happened.
Gaunt-Faced Paul pushed the door open then froze.
Watching Mama Hendrix’s cleaver come down on his shoulder was like watching a slow-motion silent film, that is until Paul screamed, shrill and high. That was before the cleaver even reached him.
I screamed next when I heard the crunch of bone breaking. I screamed again when Paul pitched forward. I was still tangled up in the chair, and he fell over me with the cleaver wedged deep where his intact clavicle should have been.
That’s when Joel showed up, stepping into the doorway and filling the whole of the doorframe. Paul and I were a sprawled mess on the floor, and Mama Hendrix was an angry bull seeing red right in front of him.
“What the—” he began but was cut short by Mama Hendrix’s arching hand. She drove the bowl of ice cream-topped blueberry pie right into Joel’s face.
Joel’s arm struck out blind, lightning fast, hammering Mama Hendrix in the face.
Knock out.
Her body crumpled before collapsing forward. She fell right on top of the cleaver-riven Paul, who was strewn over me.
The bowl fell away from Joel’s face. Blueberry pie crusted his cheek while the melting pecan maple ice cream painted a path down his shirt.
“I punched a woman,” Joel said, beside himself with appalled shock. “Oh my God. I knocked her out. I didn’t mean to.”
“Joel… Joel!” I called, getting his attention. He looked at me lying on the floor partially covered in Paul’s blood.
“It’s okay,” I reassured him. “You did a good thing.”
Chapter 38
“So is this how it always works out for you?” Sheriff Palke asked. There was laughter in her eyes and a smile on her lips. “You look cute, by the way.”
I’d changed out of Joel’s jeans, showered, and was now wearing yet another one of his T-shirts as a mid-thigh tunic dress. I’d paired it with some stockings from Zoey—fishnets covered with moons and stars. The ensemble made me feel like a go-go dancer from the ‘60s. All I needed were the knee-high boots.
I evaded Sheriff Palke’s comment about my outfit. I couldn’t tell if she was poking fun at my expense or was being sincere, so I focused on her question. “By working out, do you mean someone ending up in a coma and another person ending up with a cleaver sticking out of his shoulder? No, not always.” Sometimes it was much worse.
She laughed. It was the tinkling sound fairies would make when they’re happy. Everything about her effortless beauty and humor was infectious, and I found myself smiling with her, which I didn’t like at all. This was the woman who’d tried to steal Brad away from me and keep Joel tied up with taking pictures at every turn of the head.
I was supposed to hate her. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“Do you know if Paul’s going to be okay?” I asked.
“Mmhmm, he’s in surgery but the doctors said things look good. Also, Rita woke up.”
“Really?” My heart jumped with hope for the girl.
Sheriff Palke nodded. “I stationed a deputy there, and he let me know.”
“Is she okay?”
“She seems to be doing well. I did a video call with her earlier.”
“Oh!” I said, surprised. “What’d she say?”
I forced myself not to hold my breath while waiting for the answer.
For some reason, I felt nervous about what Rita might have said. Things between Mama Hendrix and I were technically still a she-said, she-said situation. Her word against mine. She could claim that she was trying to defend herself—from me—when she accidentally hit Paul with that meat cleaver. I was the only one who heard her confession.
“Rita told a story that fits yours—that Mama Hendrix drowned Doug and that Rita fireman-carried his body to plant him in one of those holes.”
My brow creased with confusion.
“What?” Sheriff Palke asked.
“How’d she even know abo
ut the holes?”
“Ohhhh, said she didn’t. She fell in one of the holes while carrying Doug’s body back to the B&B. She’s got bruises on her ribs where she fell in.”
“If moving Doug there was just a… an accident, why did she bury him?”
“She said she’d originally just been moving Doug’s body to someplace safe. She was going to blackmail Mama Hendrix for what her and her dad needed to get their business operational again. But when she fell in that hole,” Sheriff Palke shrugged, “she took it as a sign.”
“It was fitting,” I had to admit.
Sheriff Palke nodded as her smile slowly grew.
“So you and the guys…” she said, leaving it as an open-ended statement. It was a very sudden topic change.
My face heated, and I was sure I’d turned bright red.
Me and the guys—the guys she’d done her best to keep away from me. The guys she’d distracted with every excuse. Okay, so there was a murder and therefore a murderer on the loose, but still.
They were my guys!
Not hers.
“Yes?” I gave her my best I-don’t-get-what-your-getting-at look.
She smiled bigger. “How long have you been a thruple?”
My mouth gaped. “A thruple?”
“You know… You and Brad. And you and Joel.”
“Oh! Oh…” I laughed. “No, no, no. Not a thruple. Just a…” My voice trailed off. What were me, Joel, and Brad? Was there a name for a girl kinda-sorta dating more than one guy, something that wasn’t unkind and misogynistic?
“We’re all just good friends,” I finally said.
“Just friends? You’re not dating?”
“Er—no. I’m not… not…”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t flat-out deny my relationship with them. “We’re all good friends,” I repeated.
“Mmmm,” she hummed, her lids dropping as her gaze turned sultry. “Well, let me know if you ever need anyone who’s more than a good friend.”
Before my brain even had time to register what was happening, she leaned in slow and cupped my cheek in her hand, tenderly running her fingers down my jawline and catching my chin between her thumb and index finger.
She had turned away and was barking an order at one of her deputies before I even found my wits.
What was it about people with jobs that brought them into contact with dead people?
Was I some grim reaper understudy, and everyone realized it but me? Was I a magnet to the gruesomely inclined?
Joel joined me at my side, our luggage in his hands. “Sheriff Palke is into me,” I told him in a whisper.
He laughed. Not the reaction I’d expected. “I’m not surprised. She was always asking questions about you.”
I could feel his gaze on me from the corner of his eye.
“What?” I asked.
“Feel silly for being jealous now?”
Boy, did I ever…
Walking back inside The Berry Home truly was coming home. There was nothing like being away to help you appreciate what you had—and what I had was a place of my own and a family who filled it.
“Sweetheart!” Agatha exclaimed, throwing her arms high in the air as soon as I trundled in through the front door. The octogenarian slid off her stool at the grill counter with the grace of a dancer. “Welcome home!”
She hugged me, and I hugged her back, followed by an equally warm hug from Jack. I looked up into his handsome-as-ever dark-skinned face and lustrous brown eyes—and saw worry.
I looked from Jack to Agatha and saw that same worry echoed in a glance she purposefully turned away.
Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. I could feel it in my bones.
Jonathan—my right-hand man—was behind the grill’s counter and looked as though he had something important to tell me.
My beautiful smoky tortoiseshell cat, Sage, had leaped onto a stool and was stretching a taloned paw into the air in an effort to snag me. A tired but self-satisfied-looking Brad was behind the grill’s counter helping himself to a cup of coffee. Joel was being engulfed by an onslaught of texts, presumably from whomever he’d left in charge of the newspaper.
And Zoey was hollering as she headed out the café’s front door, “Nobody call me for forty-eight hours. I’m going to sleep.”
There was a lot going on, but all of my attention was on Jack. I held onto his arms when he tried to pull away after our hug.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
I wasn’t going to let him slip into avoidance mode the way Agatha had.
Agatha was a little like Zoey with about sixty more years’ experience to make her really, really good at being her. There was no way I would be able to make Agatha tell me anything she wasn’t ready to tell me. But Jack… He didn’t have the same mental flexibility as Agatha. That is to say he lived in a world of numbers and facts. For Agatha, facts were more a suggestion on how the world operated. They weren’t an absolute.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Jack said, flashing me a smile that almost made me believe the words. Another glance at Agatha and her avoiding eyes, though, told me otherwise.
“No, something is wrong,” I said, “and I want to know what.”
“It’s nothing… really,” Jack reassured.
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m tired, Jack. I fell down a hill and found a guy planted in the dirt while on my romantic weekend away. I saw someone almost cleaved in two with an incredibly big knife. I spent almost no time with Joel—or Brad. I got lost in the woods and almost froze to death, and I was almost broiled alive. Jack, I’m not even wearing my own clothes. You gotta tell me what’s going on. Do that for me, Jack, so that I can know how long I’ll get to sleep before I need to start obsessing over what has you and Agatha upset.”
It was Jack’s turn to shoot Agatha a look. This time, she didn’t turn away.
There was an almost imperceptible nod between them, then Jack’s gaze was back on me. His lips were tight, and his expression was grim. “Death threats,” he said.
“Four of them,” Agatha added.
“Four of them? In three days?” My heart sank. “Serious threats?”
Maybe it was only a prank. Jack owned the local bank. Maybe somebody was sore about not getting approved for a loan.
“He sent his family to his mother’s last night,” Agatha said.
“Ohhh, Jack,” I said. Uprooting your wife and children away from their normal lives to send them somewhere safe ranked as pretty darn serious to me. “We’ll get this figured out, Jack, I swear. We’ll make this right and get your family back home to you.”
“I know,” he said.
It was more than just two words. I felt the faith he had in me when he said them. He truly believed that I would get his life set back to right again.
“But first you have to rest,” Agatha added. “You’re going to be no good to anyone until you get some rest. We need that mettlesome you in top form for this.”
She plopped an ecstatic Sage onto my shoulder and shooed me toward the café’s kitchen for emphasis. The stairwell leading to my upstairs apartment was tucked away within.
I grabbed my suitcase on the way, and gave a distracted Joel a kiss and Brad a hug, before disappearing inside the stainless-steel kitchen that was the beating heart of The Berry Home.
It wasn’t until I was on the stairs leading up to my apartment that the fatigue really started to set in, but it was washed away by a rush of adrenaline when I saw who was waiting for me on the landing outside my apartment door.
“Detective Gregson,” I said, “what are you doing here?”
He’d been pacing back and forth. Now he stopped to stare at me with the intensity of an angry stone statue, one of the scary kinds you find in hundred-year-old graveyards.
“Is it true?” His question was the sound of a voice being dragged over gravel.
I was on the final steps leading up to the landing, and he swallowed hard as I reached the top.
“Is
it true?” he asked again.
“I don’t know. What did you hear?”
I was equally bewildered and terrified at his presence. Our history had not always been a good one. He was still lost in the bitter pain that had consumed him after the savage murder of his wife. She’d been the meddling sort too, but that life path hadn’t ended well for her.
Gregson stepped uncomfortably close. His fingers slipped over mine as he slid them into my suitcase’s handle and lifted the bag away. When he spoke, I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face.
Sage jumped down then stretched and scratched at the door frame. It was her way of letting me know she was ready to go in. But I couldn’t do that for her, not right now. Not while Gregson was staring his way inside my soul.
“Did you nearly die—again?” he asked.
His voice was so thick and gravelly that I almost didn’t make out the words. When my brain managed to make sense of them, I bit my lip rather than reply.
He growled. “You damnable woman,” he swore. “I hate you. I loathe you.”
His eyes grew glossy as he spoke, shiny with unshed tears. “This wasn’t supposed to happen again.”
“What?” I breathed the question more than said it. I was nearly breathless with a heart that was threatening to beat its way out of my chest.
“I wasn’t supposed to care. Not again. Not about someone like you.”
“Like me?”
His jaw clenched as he struggled with whatever emotions were raging through him. His eyes burned with anger. When he spoke again, it seemed to cost him some piece of himself.
“Someone determined to die,” he finally said.
His voice carried a wall of emotion that made me gasp and take an involuntary step back—right off the top of the stairs into mid-air.
Gregson’s strong arm was around me in a flash. He saved me from falling. Instead of lying bruised and broken at the bottom of the stairs, I was pulled hard against him. His body was as unyielding as his will, and to my shock and horror, I realized I liked the feel of his chest beneath my hands.
A Berry Horrible Holiday Page 21