by H L Bur
I turned my focus to social media and searched Sofie Grant’s name. A couple Facebook profiles matched her name, but I could tell by the profile pictures that neither of the profiles was hers. Despite my strike out on Facebook, several Instagram accounts popped up with her name. I scanned through the profile pictures and found two that looked like they could be her. They both had long blonde hair and athletic physiques from what I could tell by the small thumbnail photos. I was sure Sofie would have looked somewhat different in life than compared to the image that kept popping into my head of her lying in the woods covered with blood and leaves on top of a tarp. I decided to ‘Follow’ them both and sent up a silent prayer that their profiles weren’t set to private.
Success! I was able to click on both of their profiles and skim their posted pictures. The first Sofie Grant profile I looked through looked somewhat similar to the girl I recalled, but I wasn’t convinced it was her. Her bio said she was a small business owner and what I knew of our Sofie Grant was that she was majoring in journalism. I went to the second Sofie Grant profile and immediately stilled at the sight of her latest post. It was of a bright, vibrant looking young woman. Her long blonde hair and blue eyes were immediately familiar to me. Her smile was full of life and energy and she exuded happiness. The picture was of her standing out on a pier with a great body of deep blue water behind her on a sunny day. I would recognize that pier anywhere. It was the pier at The Beacon, the old lighthouse turned restaurant that Fletcher and his grandfather had dined just the night before.
The date on the picture was exactly one week ago, just a few days before I discovered her body. I looked through her other recent posts. They were mostly scenery pictures. She must have been a good photographer. There was a picture of her and a friend out for drinks at a bar tagged in Grand Rapids. I scrolled further and stopped short when I saw another picture I recognized. There was a picture of the old sawmill. It was dated a couple of months back. The caption just said #upnorth #historicsawmill #journalism #truthseeker.
“Quinn, take a look at this!” I turned my laptop her way.
She looked up from her own search. “No way! Well, we know she had some tie to the sawmill then.”
“She could have just been walking the trails and came across it.”
“True. Maybe she came across something that somebody didn’t want her to. What’s her bio say?”
Her bio didn’t reveal much. She had written a cute crossword clue and answer in her bio: Clue - Truth seeker; Answer - Journalist and she had a link to the Grand Rapids Tribune. I clicked on the link but it just took me to the paper’s homepage. I felt a sudden kinship with her knowing she was a crossword fan.
“She liked crosswords.”
“Aww.” Quinn shared in my empathy.
“Have you found anything?” I asked her.
“The property records search page is acting screwy. It will let me search by address, but not by name, so unless we have a specific address to search we are out of luck.”
“Shoot.” I thought for a second. “Hey! Don’t you have a friend that works in the County Clerk’s office?”
“Who, Amy? I haven’t seen her in years, but I suppose it’s worth a shot,” she replied.
I nodded my head in agreement. “We just need to be careful. The last thing we need is to get word out to Rhodes that we are digging up information on him.”
“Yeah, we definitely haven’t done a great job of flying under the radar.”
“No kidding.” I shook my head. “Okay, so that will be on our agenda for tomorrow along with checking in with Chief Kowalski to see if they’ve received any forensic results back on Sofie.”
“Where did Rose say they were staying?” Quinn asked.
“Reflections, I think.”
“We could go ask the front desk clerk for any info on her and Dawn,” she suggested.
“Let’s go!” I popped up out of the chair and grabbed my keys off the coffee table.
We went out the back door and locked up, thankful for Autumn Fest or otherwise we never would have been able to do this during business hours. We parked on Main Street in front of Reflections Inn and made our way up the stone steps to the front door. A bell jingled merrily as I pressed the handle in and opened the door. We walked into an entryway with a large red and gold colored Victorian rug covering heavily lacquered wooden flooring. The room was quite large with a staircase that jutted upwards at the far end of the room leading to a balcony with access to several doors, presumably the guest rooms. The front desk clerk looked up as we entered the room. I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that the front desk clerk was Patrice, one of Sam’s soccer teammates.
“Good afternoon. How can I help you?” She spoke in a Valley Girl accent and I willed myself not to roll my eyes. I knew for a fact Patrice was born and raised in Riverton and did not in fact come from the land of the Valley Girls.
I forced my eyes to remain fixed. “Hi Patrice. We are actually hoping you could help us track down a couple tenants of the Inn.”
“Well,” she said hesitantly. “I’m like, really not supposed to give out any guest information.”
“I totally understand, and normally I would never ask you to, but we met a couple of young women who said they were staying here and we’re really concerned they might be in some sort of trouble.” I had thought about saying we found one of their scarves and wanted to return it, but I knew Patrice would offer to give it to them and we would lose out on our chance at inside information. I also didn’t want to start with ‘I think they are mixed up with a hardened criminal murderer and want to save them’.
Patrice’s eyes widened in surprise and I knew we had her.
“Oh no, that’s terrible. But, policy is policy,” she said as she rubbed her forefingers against her thumb as if gesturing for money.
My jaw dropped. What a little swindler!
Without missing a beat, Quinn, apparently more privy to blackmail than I, handed her a twenty. “Rose and Dawn. We don’t have their last names.”
“Give me a minute, let me check the roster.”
I looked at Quinn with disbelief. “Who are you?” I mouthed.
Quinn shrugged her shoulders.
Patrice flipped through her guest registry for several minutes. My stomach was in knots with angst. We really needed a break here.
“Okay, yeah! They checked in last week.” She paused. “It looks like they checked out this morning. Oh, I like, totally remember them now! The one with the dark hair was pretty but kinda nerdy and the blonde girl was so cool. She was such a bitch and had this awesome bomber jacket.” She smacked her gum together as she finished her sentence.
I was suddenly confused at what cool meant anymore. “Yup, sounds like them,” I replied, willing my facial expression to remain neutral.
Quinn piped in. “Do you know where they’re from or can you remember anything specific about them?”
“Hmm, not really, but I do remember her checking out this morning. The dark haired one wasn’t with her, the blonde one was by herself today.”
Quinn and I glanced at one another.
“Anything else you can think of? Did they ever have any visitors to their room or do you have a copy of their driver’s licenses?” I prompted.
“Nope sorry, when people check out we shred the copies of their licenses for security purposes. We do keep contact information on file in case we need to reach them for any reason.”
“Okay great, can we get the contact info?” I asked.
Patrice stood there for several moments before she arched her eyebrows and rubbed her forefingers and thumb together again.
“Seriously?” I gaped at Quinn.
“Your turn,” she answered.
I handed Patrice another twenty and she showed me the contact info.
I matched the phone number with the one that Rose had written on the raffle ticket and the address was a P.O. Box.
My shoulders slumped down in defeat.
&
nbsp; “There was one thing,” Patrice trailed off.
“What is it?” My head snapped back up at full attention. I tried to encourage her. “Any little thing you can remember might help.”
“Well, it’s probably nothing, but like, I was working the late shift last night and they came down from their room to leave and it, like, seemed like they were arguing. I couldn’t catch all that they were saying, but I did overhear the blonde one say something about ‘going like Sofie’. I think she said ‘If you don’t watch it you’re going to go like Sofie’.”
Quinn gasped and I shot her a ‘be quiet’ look.
“Patrice, thank you, you’ve been extremely, uh…” I paused, “helpful,” I settled on.
“Oh, and Patrice?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s probably best if we keep this between us.”
“Keep what between us?” She winked.
That girl was ruthless!
We climbed back into my SUV.
“Okay, this can’t be good.”
“Where do you think Rose was this morning?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like that her scarf showed up on the beach and I definitely don’t like that Sofie comment Dawn had made.”
“So we know there is a tie between Rose, Dawn, and Sofie, which almost certainly means there is a tie between Sofie and Mystery Man…and Brent,” she added with a heavy groan.
“Do you think Rose is dead?” I asked the question that we were both thinking.
“I sure hope not, Cade. I sure hope not. I can’t wrap my head around how Brent could be mixed up in all of this. I mean I’ve known him since Junior High. He’s not a bad person.” Her voice sounded pleading.
“I know, but sometimes when people get in over their heads they can surprise you at what lengths they’ll go to. Especially if the motive is right.”
“But that’s just it, what is the motive? What could possibly be going on around here?”
I sighed. “I’m not sure. But can we talk for a second about how scary Patrice is? I’m pretty sure if she’s not already, she is going to end up being some ringleader of a racketeering, money laundering, or prostitution ring.”
“Or all of the above.”
“I wonder if we should talk to her parents when all of this is over?”
“Eh, I’m sure it will be fine.”
I shook my head and pulled away from the inn.
On our way back to the bookstore we recapped what we had learned so far. It was now clear that Sofie, Rose, and Dawn all knew each other. We knew Rose and Dawn were tied to the Mystery Man because I saw them talking to him at the festival the previous day and we knew Mystery Man and Brent were up to something out at the old sawmill. What we didn’t know was what, why, or how.
I was going to visit Chief Kowalski the following morning to see if he had any forensic leads he was willing to share with me about Sofie and Quinn was going to visit her old friend Amy at the County Clerk’s office to try to find out what properties Elias Rhodes owned. We were also hoping to corner Gigi later on and somehow make her spill the beans about what she knew. Hoping being the key word.
I knew it wasn’t much, but I felt like we were finally making some progress.
“What are the chances that you would agree to tell Fletcher or the chief about everything we learned today?” Quinn asked me hesitantly.
“Probably slim to none,” I replied nonchalantly.
“I thought so.” She sighed. “I thought so.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ξ
After our - we’ll call it interesting - conversation with Patrice, we went back to our booth at Autumn Fest to help Sam finish up. We pulled our final winners from our raffle box and were surprised to see my mother’s name neatly written on one of the winning tickets.
“My mom was here?” I asked Sam.
“Oh yeah, she stopped by earlier today with Quinn’s mom. I told them you guys were at the bookstore, but they had plans and said they would catch up with you both later.”
I eyed Quinn. “Hmm, I guess that means your mom is doing better after her fall the other day.”
“Must be nice.” She nodded toward her own injured ankle.
“At least you can walk more than 10 feet today.”
“True, but I still blame both you and my mother for this in the first place,” she huffed as if just now remembering she was mad at us.
“Of course,” I murmured as I sat down on one of the stools behind our booth.
We phoned our prizewinners. Mrs. Elsie Turner was our grand prizewinner and was elated to hear that she had won. She was pushing ninety and was still very active in the community. She attended the yoga classes we held at the bookstore, so she was beyond ecstatic to receive the month of free yoga classes that were included with the grand prize. To be completely honest, her tree pose was better than mine could ever be. She and her husband, Robert, had spent their entire adult lives contributing to the local area. On any given day they could be seen ambling through town, exploring the different parks, or hiking on one of our hundreds of trails. Robert had been involved in our local political system for many years, and in my humble opinion, he had been one of the few honest politicians left. He truly cared about this area and the people who resided here. I was sad to hear when he passed a few years back.
Quinn and I kept busy until it was time to close down the booth. There were still fun and games to be had at the Town Center, which would end with another concert tonight in the park, but the booths were officially closed. Normally I would stick around and participate in all the festivities, but I was too distracted by everything going on and knew I wouldn’t be able to feign interest. We packed up and headed back to the bookstore.
It only took us a few minutes to trek the short couple of blocks. We unlocked the store and went in, quickly greeted by Henri meowing in chastisement. She must have been upset that we were M.I.A. this weekend.
“There’s my precious little booboo oojuuu. Ooh I just love you to pieces, my little baby waby.” I bent to scoop up Henri despite her protest.
“Oh my God, you’re ridiculous.” Quinn furrowed her brows and shook her head at me in mock disgust.
“Ahem,” a voice suddenly sounded from the doorway.
My head flew towards the open doorway to find Fletcher standing there observing my pathetic baby kitty voice. I could feel my face turn a violent shade of scarlet as I let Henri jump down to the floor and plod away, tail stuck straight up in the air, clearly affronted from my assault.
“Uh, hi…I wasn’t expecting you.” I tried to recover and then suddenly remembered that I was mad at him for his accusations this morning. The thought of him on my front porch this morning questioning me in detective mode quickly sobered me.
“Can I help you with something?” I asked curtly, walking behind the counter to put some space between us.
He glanced at Quinn, clearly wishing she would give us some privacy, but she stood her ground, arms crossed, facing him. “I just wanted to apologize for this morning. I didn’t mean to insinuate anything and I honestly didn’t know that was your house until you answered the door.” He rushed his apology as if he wanted to get it out as fast as he could.
I felt my guard lower. He seemed sincere and when I thought about it, maybe I had overreacted this morning. If he truly was just doing Chief Kowalski a favor, I could hardly hold it against him.
My shoulders relaxed. “It’s okay, I understand - and I’m sorry I reacted poorly to you.” It felt good to let the weight I’d been carrying around today go. Who was this person that was letting go of a grudge so quickly? It’s like I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.
Fletcher visibly relaxed as well. “I was hoping I could take you girls out for your birthday and have a drink.”
I couldn’t help but beam, especially since he knew well enough to include Quinn.
Before I could answer, Quinn piped in, “Yup, I’m in.”
I chuckled to myself, knowin
g her motives were more for the promise of a free meal and drinks than anything else.
We decided to walk to The Wishing Well again since it was so close and it happened to be one of my favorite places in town. We chose a table on the outside deck again under a heat lamp with views of the river below and ordered our drinks.
“How was your grandfather’s birthday dinner?” I asked.
“Oh, it was great. He got tanked and started dancing in turn with a group of little old ladies who tittered around him and flirted like a bunch of teenage girls.”
I laughed as I pictured his grandpa turning the finest restaurant in the area into a high school dance, the girls waiting in line to be asked to the dance floor one at a time. I caught Fletcher’s eye and noticed he was watching me with a look on his face I couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Before I could question him, the waitress came up to take our orders. We all ordered the special, which was a lightly battered fish and chips dinner. Conversation continued on smoothly and we all decided to have a second drink after dinner. I thanked the waitress when she brought our round of margaritas as Fletcher tipped her.
“So,” I broached the topic that had been occupying my thoughts on repeat, “have you gotten anything back from forensics?”
Fletcher stared at me while he took another sip of his drink. “You don’t give up, do you?” He smirked, shaking his head in disbelief.
“She really doesn’t, so you might as well fill her in,” Quinn explained, taking a long swig of her margarita.
“I don’t know which one of you is worse.” He sighed. “No, I don’t expect to hear anything back from them until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“Has there been an autopsy?” I continued with my barrage of questioning.
Fletcher pressed his lips together in mild annoyance. “It’s scheduled for tomorrow.”
“Hmm,” I pondered.