Murder Comes Calling

by Raven Snow

  Rowen considered that, weighing the risks. “I need to go out anyway.” Eric looked down at her. Before he could say anything, she continued. “We need to check on Chester.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.” Eric sighed anyway, like he knew going there was inevitable. Deep down, he must have been concerned as well. “I guess we’ll just drive really slow.”

  ***

  Rowen really should have done her best to sneak out with Eric right after deciding they would be headed back home. As it was, it took them nearly an hour to force their way out the door. Everyone was trying their best to talk them out of it. Aunt Lydia came close to tears, insisting that what they were doing was tantamount to suicide. Honestly, Rowen didn’t expect anything worse than maybe ending up in a ditch. Even then, she didn’t expect them to encounter issues at all if they drove slowly enough.

  They finally made it out the door and then home. The drive had been like Rowen expected. They had drifted on the ice some, but the few vehicles had already worn tracks in the ice and snow. Rowen wondered if they would plow and salt everything soon. She wondered if Lainswich even had a snow plow.

  The house was warm. The room Chester was in was the warmest of all. Rowen really needn’t have been worried, she realized. Chester had plenty of food and water. The old dog got up to greet them only briefly before going back to his dog bed near the heater and curling up on it.

  “Satisfied?” asked Eric, slipping off his outer layers behind her.

  “Don’t act like you wouldn’t rather be home than trapped with my family the whole day.”

  Eric inclined his head, like he had to give her that one. Rowen didn’t doubt that he loved them, but they could be a little much. As much as Rowen had enjoyed last night, experiencing her family all at once was best taken in small doses. God forbid they all get snowed in together. “Do you want me to brew some coffee?”

  “Yes, please.” Rowen slipped off her coat and shoes as well. She headed for the living room and switched on the television. The local news was covering the weather right now. Some reporter she didn’t recognize was shivering in a puffy coat and galoshes talking about how cold it was. No kidding.

  Rowen glanced to her laptop on the coffee table. She should probably get started on the article. She promised Rose she would write a cautionary article about home safety in weather like this. Not that Rowen was an expert on the subject. Fortunately, Rose had given her some talking points, like what to do if the power went out. Rowen was making a quick outline when the picture on the television changed.

  “Julia Martinez here, coming to you live from Abernathy Road—a place where last night’s storm hit perhaps the hardest.”

  Rowen looked up from her word processor. Lead news correspondent, co-news director, and manipulative fair weather friend of the Greensmiths was standing there with a microphone. She wasn’t bundled up like the weather girl. No, Julia was looking as professional and stylish as ever. Her wool coat was fitted and open to complement her ruffled red blouse underneath. Her dark hair lay in tousled ringlets on her shoulders. She wasn’t even shivering. There was probably a joke in there about her being so frigid she didn’t feel the cold. If this was playing back at the Greensmith household, no doubt a few people had made it already. To Julia, nothing stood between her and a good story. Channel 2 definitely packed more of a punch than the Lainswich Inquirer.

  “Last night, lifelong Lainswich resident, Bertha Trainer was taken from us all too soon. Behind me, you can see the home she lived in, a home that belong to her father and his father before him.” The footage changed to a few different angles while Julia spoke, showing the house. It was an old two-story house, pretty looking but undoubtedly old. Rowen wasn’t surprised a place like that hadn’t gotten warm enough last night. “Bertha is survived by her nephew and his lovely family,” Julia continued. “I spoke with them briefly this morning. I believe it’s important to mention that they checked in on her regularly. Viewers, I urge you to be careful.”

  “You’re not annoyed with this are you?” Eric held a coffee mug over the back of the sofa. Rowen accepted it without taking her eyes off the television. “It’s not like she’s exploiting the old lady’s death or anything. She’s just using it as a cautionary tale.”

  “I wonder if the family wanted to be a cautionary tale. I mean, this is kind of blaming them, isn’t it? If only they had taken better care of her, she might still be alive…”

  “You’re reading too much into it. Besides, you’re going to write some kind of cautionary tale yourself, aren’t you?”

  “I think Julia is looking for a story here, some kind of scandal. I mean, it’s not like this weather will be this bad that much longer. It’ll pass soon. All the weather sites say so.” Rowen stared at Julia as she continued speaking, trying to get a read on her. The longer she watched, the more certain she felt that Julia was planning something. “She’s going to pin them down and try to get an interview.”

  “Then you’re both reading too much into this.” Eric settled on the sofa next to his wife. He placed his mug on the coffee table and reached for the remote.

  “Not yet.” Rowen snatched up the remote before the channel could be changed. “Maybe she’s on to something here.”

  Eric groaned. No doubt, he could tell what she was getting at. “Can’t we just enjoy a few snow days? Spend some time together until all this passes us by?”

  “And ignore this?” Rowen shook her head. She was getting one of those gut feelings of hers, one of those feelings that told her something was amiss, that a crime was on the wind. “What if there was foul play? Who would know better than me?”

  “Ben?” Eric ventured.

  “Oh.” Rowen hadn’t thought of that yet. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Wait. I didn’t mean-” But it was too late. Rowen was already walking down the hallway for some privacy, cell phone in hand.

  Rowen dialed Ben. Hopefully he wasn’t busy driving or arresting people or whatever he did on a day like today. She was thankful when he answered after a couple of rings. That probably meant he wasn’t terribly bogged down.

  “This really isn’t a good time, Rowen.”

  So much for that idea. “Sorry. I just… I was watching the news about that poor woman who died last night, and I was wondering if—”

  “There was something else to it?” asked Ben in a weary tone.

  Either Ben knew his in-laws too well or Rowen was right. There was something going on. “Is there?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.” That must mean that Ben wasn’t alone. Normally, he would be more forthcoming with her. He knew that she wouldn’t write up anything in the Inquirer that might damage him in some way. “Well, Julia is reporting live from outside the woman’s home. I’m pretty sure she’s looking for a story there.”

  “I know.” Ben sighed, like he was exhausted with the conversation already. “I really need to—”

  “Why don’t you come over here for lunch?” Rowen asked. It was the only thing she could think of to add. Maybe she could get some information out of Ben that way.

  “If you haven’t noticed, the roads are a little icy.”

  “You’re driving around on them anyway, right? Why not just stop by here for your break?” Rowen knew that, if he was driving anywhere, he would likely rather spend his break with Rose. “Rose is still stuck at the Greensmith house, remember? It’s nice and quiet here. You can eat lunch and then borrow the guest room. You can take a nap!”

  When Ben didn’t answer at first, Rowen knew that she had said the right thing. “Fine,” he relented. “But I’m not sure what it is you want me to tell you.”

  ***

  True to his word, Ben stopped by Rowen and Eric’s house at about one in the afternoon. He was wearing a thick, dark blue police jacket. As the Chief of Police, Rowen was used to seeing him in plain clothes. Maybe this was because he had been out and about so much today. Wearing that, people could probably better recognize him or seek him out in
the event of an emergency. “Busy day?” asked Rowen, stepping aside so that he could enter.

  “Busy day,” he echoed shrugging his coat from his shoulders and hanging it on a nearby peg. “Busier night.”

  “Have you gotten any sleep at all?”

  “Some,” Ben said in a tone of voice that suggested, no, he hadn’t really.

  “Well, come on. We’ve got some leftover soup we’re about to eat. After that, the upstairs guest room is yours for as long as you need.”

  “You called me over for lunch so that we could eat leftover soup?” Ben raised an eyebrow.

  Rowen gave him a little shove that she instantly regretted. He had been shot in the leg a while back and still had a problem with balance because of it. She reached out to steady him as he staggered more than expected. He waved her hand away. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” Ben tried to suppress a yawn and failed. “Maybe I’m more tired than I thought.”

  ***

  “This is good,” said Ben after a few bites of his soup.

  “Thanks.” Eric was crumbling crackers into his own soup. “I had this German au pair for a while that used to make it whenever we got snowed in. I don’t make it as well as she did, obviously. Wasn’t the best at mastering recipes as a child well enough to retain them in adulthood.”

  “Well, it’s fantastic,” Ben assured him. “I wouldn’t mind the recipe myself, if you don’t mind.”

  “Eric is usually a pretty lousy cook,” Rowen said, earning herself a frown from her husband. “He never follows the recipe and, half the time, he ends up forgetting he’s even cooking and burns everything.”

  “Rude,” said Eric. “Not wrong, but… rude.”

  Rowen chuckled. “He’s great when he wants to cook something from memory, though. I swear, he’s some kind of savant with this stuff.” She slurped another spoonful of warm soup. Eric scowled cartoonishly at her. She winked back. “So.” Rowen turned her attention to Ben. “What’s all this business about the old lady?”

  Ben purposely kept eating for a few seconds, ignoring her completely until it became clear she wasn’t going to stop staring at him. He put his spoon down. “Why are you so interested in her?”

  That seemed like an odd question to Rowen. He must know why she was interested. “I have one of those feelings I get.”

  Ben looked down at his soup, stirring it idly. Rowen could tell that he was turning those words over and over in his head. He knew what it meant when Rowen got these feelings of hers. “Are you sure it’s about this woman and not something else that we haven’t found yet? We haven’t checked the cave system out behind Lichen Hallow yet. We know a few homeless people live out there.”

  Rowen shook her head. “I definitely hope no one died out there, but… no. Even if they did, I doubt it was murder.”

  “And you think an old lady dying in her own home is? Do you have anything to go on but a feeling?”

  “Not really. Not yet.” Rowen didn’t see any point in lying about it. “But I think even Julia Martinez senses something going on, and she’s not even a witch.”

  Ben rolled his eyes and went back to eating his soup. Eric looked up, deciding to play devil’s advocate all of a sudden. “What Julia senses is a sad story that will earn her ratings. Just because she’s reporting on it doesn’t mean the Lainswich Inquirer has to. You don’t have to stoop that low.”

  Ben nodded in Eric’s direction. “Listen to your husband. He’s right.”

  “I don’t want to write a story on it,” Rowen snapped back at the both of them. “Come on. Can you at least tell me what Julia knows? It’s about to be on the news anyway, right?”

  “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to know what Julia knows. She’s been speaking with the family personally. She knows what they’ve chosen to tell her.”

  “And you don’t suspect them of anything?”

  Ben shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “Great! So, just tell me the facts.” Rowen was eager for something to go on. “If the family is speaking with Julia, she has the facts. If there is something to this case, then I may be able to help a lot more than Julia ever could. Come on. Please. You know how this goes.”

  It was obvious that Ben was worn down. He made a point to finish his soup before he responded to Rowen again. “Right now, it all seems very open and shut. Bertha Trainer was eighty-seven. She was the only one of her siblings that never married. She remained at home and took care of her aging parents until their eventual deaths. They left her with the house, which she lived in alone.”

  “It looked like a big house for someone to live in alone,” Rowen said, thinking back to the news.

  “Not my business, though her family did say that they had wanted her to move out for a while.”

  “Her family?”

  “A nephew and his family. Shane and Lacie Trainer and their kids.”

  Rowen considered that for a moment. “Where did they want her to move?”

  “An assisted living facility, but she refused that. Mr. Trainer says he would have settled for her selling the house and finding a smaller place nearer to them.”

  “She refused that too, I take it?”

  Ben nodded. “He didn’t have power of attorney over her, and her neighbors all say that her mind was still very sharp. Shane and his family still went to check on her from time to time. Last night they checked on her before the storm got too bad. They helped her close off parts of the house and made sure it would be plenty warm on the ground level where she slept.”

  Rowen decided she had been right about the house’s poor insulation. “So, what happened?”

  “Well, the thermostat was found turned off. Right now, we can only speculate that it got too hot for her downstairs. She switched it off and went back to her chair to watch television. She must have fallen asleep there. It’s where the family found her before calling us.”

  “So, the house got cold around her while she was snoozing and, eventually, she froze to death.” Rowen said it all aloud as she gathered her thoughts. “Did her family seem like nice people?”

  “They were upset, but I try to go more on facts than emotions. It’s kind of my job.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Go on and get some sleep, unless you want seconds.”

  ***

  Ben set an alarm for himself. Rowen could hear him snoring before she even headed back downstairs. The poor guy definitely needed more sleep than he was going to get here. Rowen made a point to mention that to Rose later on. She would make sure he got enough rest. She was probably the only person who could.

  While Eric was in the kitchen trying to puzzle out how to put the recipe he used for the soup into words, Rowen settled on the sofa again. She didn’t turn on the news this time. Instead, she opened her laptop and pulled up Channel 2’s website. It was unlikely that there would be any sort of video interview with the family today. If there was any information on them at all, it would likely be in an article or the like.

  Sure enough, there it was on the front page. Rowen was met with a picture of the Trainer family from what looked like happier times. There was a lot of green, and the family was standing shoulder to shoulder in front of food-laden picnic tables. Rowen guessed that the picture was a cropped photo from some sort of family reunion or birthday or the like. Bertha was front and center but a little blurry, like the resolution wasn’t quite high enough for a proper close up.

  Bertha Trainer was a pleasant looking woman. She had short, curly white hair and a smile that looked easy for her. She wore a t-shirt and jeans and looked like the sort of woman you would see out walking or gardening. If the picture was recent, Rowen could certainly tell why neighbors had said that her mind was still sharp.

  Beside her stood a man with a hairline that wasn’t so much receding as it was migrating to other parts of his body. Rowen wondered if this was Shane. There was a woman beside him that might have been his wife, Lacie. She was tall and bony with a long, long face. Her black hair was tied back in
a braid. The picture cut off halfway through her and what looked like a kid.

  Rowen opened a new tab on her browser. She had names and locations. She looked the Trainers up on social media. They were easy enough to find. Bertha didn’t have her own page, but the rest of the family sure did.

  Rowen found Shane first. He was the easiest to find. His front page was so full of people offering their sympathies that Rowen didn’t even need to look at anything else to determine this was the right guy. She scrolled through the well-meaning words for a while, but there wasn’t a whole lot to see there. It was all pretty generic. She moved on to checking out his pictures instead. There was a lot more to see there.

  Shane was a family man. Rowen couldn’t quite tell what he did for a living. It looked like he worked in retail, but only in some sort of managerial or administrative capacity. Whatever he did, it clearly left him a lot of time for other activities. There were pictures of him fishing with a young, dark haired boy. There were pictures of him standing on the deck of a cruise ship with an arm around his tall wife. A picture from a theme park caught Rowen’s attention most of all. It appeared to have his entire immediate family in it. They had two kids, a boy and a girl. The boy was a little older in the picture as well. He looked about fourteen or fifteen maybe. The girl was tall and slim like her mother. It was hard to tell if she was older than her brother or if all the makeup on her face just made her look that way. Shane, Lacie, Kate, and Ty, said the caption below the picture. So, the boy was Ty and the daughter was Kate. Rowen had her mouse hovering over the links to other profiles in the caption when Eric interrupted her.

  “Don’t tell me you’re cyber stalking that poor family already.” Eric was leaning over the sofa from behind.

  Rowen jumped when she saw that Eric was reading her computer screen over her shoulder. “I’m not doing anything illegal,” she insisted. “It’s not even all that weird. Come on. You do it all the time for investigations.” Eric worked as a private investigator—not that he had a case at the moment or anything.

  “Not really.”