Thanksgiving Past

by Kathi Daley

  “That about sums it up,” I said.

  “And she wants us to help her find her family,” Parker confirmed.

  I nodded. “She mostly hopes to make a connection with Courtney, who I guess we’re referring to as Jen. She’d be eighteen by now, and Vanessa feels that, as she had, Jen will want her freedom. Vanessa said she wouldn’t be surprised to find that she’s already left the family and set out on her own.”

  “You mentioned when we spoke, that Jen might have wanted to maintain a connection with Gooseberry Bay as Vanessa had, so it’s Vanessa’s hope that we might be able to find Jen via the newspaper,” Parker said.

  “Exactly. I was thinking of something like an ad. Not a tiny classified ad, but maybe a quarter-page ad where the message has to do with something else like the upcoming Christmas Village, but there could be a hidden message letting Jen know to contact her sister, Nessa, at the phone number provided. Or maybe it would be better to use an email.”

  “What if we dress Vanessa up as an elf,” Josie said. “We can take a promo photo for the Christmas Village. The main part of the ad can have information about the upcoming event: where it will be held, hours of operation, that sort of thing. Then at the bottom, there could be a message that says something about Elf Nessa is hoping her sister elves will contact her about exciting elf opportunities. We can then provide a way to contact her. I do think an email would be best.”

  “It does seem that Jen would recognize Vanessa if she sees the ad,” I said. “And it sounds to me that the name Nessa was a family nickname that not everyone would know.”

  “This whole thing will only work if Jen actually does see the ad, and if she does, in fact, recognize Vanessa,” Parker pointed out. “We also have to assume that she wants to get ahold of her sister and that she’s in a situation where she can send an email. There are a lot of ifs, and I would say the likelihood of success is low, but providing a service announcement about the event is something the newspaper will do anyway, and as long as Vanessa is willing to pose for the photo, I don’t see the harm in including her in the promo.”

  “Do you think others from Gooseberry Bay will recognize her as well?” Jemma asked. “Would showing up alive after everyone assumes she’s probably dead bring more attention to her than she might want at this point?”

  “Maybe,” I agreed.

  “Seems like including an actual photo of Vanessa might be too much of a risk,” Jemma said.

  “We could do it with random elves of a similar age and hair color to the real sisters,” I said. “Maybe there could be four elves in the sleigh, and the text below the sleigh could say something about Gooseberry Bay’s Christmas Village being a family event, and Elf Nessa is hoping her sister elves, Jen, Caro, and Steph, will join her for the holiday festivities this year.”

  Everyone agreed that should work. Parker said she could run the promo in next week’s Thanksgiving issue, which would publish on Wednesday. We just needed to get Vanessa’s okay to use the family names. Parker decided to set the promo up either way. If Vanessa wasn’t on board with the idea, she’d run the promotion without the sentence having to do with the sister elves.

  Once we got that figured out, the conversation turned to our own Thanksgiving plans. Jemma and Josie were planning to host a dinner for everyone living on the peninsula. Parker and Jackson planned to attend, and I asked about Noah, who they were happy to include as well. Hope had mentioned that she would be dining at the inn with her guests. I wondered what sort of plans Archie and Adam had. Perhaps I should have asked him when I was at the house today. Eating a meal with just the two of them in such a huge house felt lonely to me, although if I had to guess, Ruth and Moses would be invited as well. It really did seem that the four residents of the Winchester Estate were as much a family as any family I’d ever met.

  Chapter 12

  Jemma had spent the previous day digging around into both the murder of the woman in Houston, which had been at the root of Vanessa’s family drama in the first place, and the events surrounding the subsequent arrest of the boyfriend, and the eventual arrest of the man who actually killed her. After a full day of digging on Friday, she felt she had a lot of information to offer Vanessa. Jemma was initially going to explain everything over the phone, but since the three of us were going to Seattle anyway, we decided to ask Vanessa if she would meet us for lunch. She agreed.

  “You said you have news,” Vanessa said after the four of us had settled at our table and ordered.

  “I do,” Jemma said. “It took a lot of digging, so bear with me while I try to organize my research into some sort of coherent explanation.”

  “However you want and need to tell it is fine with me.”

  I had to admit that the poor thing looked nervous. I guess I would be as well. The events that had unfolded a decade ago had altered the lives of her entire family.

  “The first thing I did was to identify the client your father had overheard speaking to the senior partner of the law firm. The client’s name is Douglas Fairchild. As you described, he was a very powerful businessman with political aspirations. He started off by running for several local boards, but when all of this got started, he’d just announced that he’d put his hat in the ring for state senator.” She looked directly at Vanessa. “As you indicated to Ainsley, Fairchild was an ambitious man with his eyes on the White House at some point down the road. He was married with three children when he found out that his much younger mistress was pregnant. When the woman was found dead, as you’d shared, her boyfriend was initially arrested. But, as you also shared, your father found a tape recording of the meeting he’d overheard, and he eventually sent that tape recording anonymously to a local reporter known for his hard-hitting exposés.”

  “Yes, that all sounds right,” she said. “But other than the name of the killer, I already knew all of this. You said you had news.”

  Jemma nodded her head slightly. “Hang on, I’m getting there. The first thing I wanted to check out was the current whereabouts of both Douglas Fairchild and the attorney who helped him cover up the murder.”

  “And?” she asked.

  “And both men are still in prison. Fairchild was charged with first-degree murder since it was determined that his shoving his mistress and her hitting her head wasn’t what killed her, but the strangulation that came after. When you add the fact that the woman was pregnant to the mix, it appears that Fairchild will most likely never see the light of day.”

  “So, he couldn’t be after my father.”

  Jemma shook her head. “He could not.”

  “And the attorney?” she asked.

  “An in-depth investigation was conducted after the tape was released, and it was determined that Fairchild wasn’t the only client this particular attorney had helped out in a less than legal manner. He was tried on multiple counts of wrong-doing, and while he may at some point get out of prison, he isn’t out at this point, and hasn’t been for the past ten years.”

  “So he isn’t after my father, either,” Vanessa said.

  “Not personally. After I identified the two men who’d been involved in the tape-recorded meeting, I looked into the activity of the man who broke the story, newspaper reporter Lance Chariton. During the investigation and trial ten years ago, Lance had been asked to reveal the name of his source several times. Lance, however, insisted from the beginning that the tape had come to him with a note from an anonymous source, and he had no way of knowing who that source might have been. He used the information provided in the tape recording as a jumping-off point to prove what had actually happened. I can’t find any mention of your dad at all. Not ever. Not in court records, arrest warrants, interview documents. Nowhere.”

  “But my dad was shot,” Vanessa pointed out. “Someone must have known what he’d done and decided to get revenge of some sort.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Jemma said. She took a sip of her water. “How long was it after your dad was shot that the family decided to pack up
and leave?”

  “Immediately after he got out of the hospital.” She frowned. “It seems like he was shot on a Friday while walking through a parking garage after his day job. I think he was in the hospital for a week.” She bit her lower lip. “It might have been less than a week. I really don’t remember exactly. My dad was shot in the back, but the bullet didn’t hit any organs, so once they patched him up, he was actually okay.”

  “And after he was released?” Jemma asked.

  “He’d already talked to my mother about running. She was frightened and agreed. She got everything packed up and ready to go while Dad was still at the hospital. The day he got out, we piled into the van and never looked back.”

  “So you were already gone by the time the trial actually took place,” Jemma confirmed.

  “Yes, I think so. The newspaper guy had run the story and provided his proof, and the local politician had been arrested, but there hadn’t been any sort of trial yet. I remember my mom telling me that we needed to hide Dad so that the bad man couldn’t get him. My dad wasn’t sure how anyone had been able to identify him, but the fact that he’d been shot proved that someone wanted him out of the way. I suppose the wannabe politician didn’t want to risk my dad being pulled in as a witness.”

  Jemma put her hand over Vanessa’s. She gave it a squeeze. “Here’s the thing. I looked into the event surrounding your father’s shooting and found that over the course of the next eight months, seven other people were shot in parking garages in the area as they walked to their vehicles after they got off work.”

  Vanessa frowned. “Seven others?”

  Jemma nodded. “Four men and three women. All shot in the back, all shot in parking garages in the same general neighborhood where your father was shot, all shot on a Friday around five-thirty.”

  “So, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that your father’s shooting was part of a spree that took place over eight months. It had nothing to do with whatever was going on with your dad’s boss or the client he’d tried to clean up for.”

  Her eyes went totally blank. “What? I don’t understand.”

  “Your dad was the first of eight victims. The man who shot him was eventually found and arrested. His name was Walter Palmer, and he killed himself in his jail cell after he was captured. Your dad may not have even known about the other victims or Palmer. It sounds like your family fled before the second of the eight shootings even occurred. Based on what you told Ainsley, your family moved around a lot during that first year. It seems unlikely that your dad would have been on a spree killer’s radar.”

  “So we ran for nothing? No one was ever after us? My dad being shot was just a random act by a random shooter?”

  Jemma nodded.

  “Oh, my God.” She paled. ‘I can’t believe this. How could my dad go ten years and never put all this together?”

  Jemma squeezed the hand she’d been holding. “I don’t know. He was scared. He thought he knew what happened. He thought he knew who tried to kill him. And he had good reason to feel that way. You all moved so many times and changed your names so often that there was no way for anyone to notify him to let him know about the other victims or the man who shot them.”

  Vanessa took a long drink of her water. She took several deep breaths as if trying to gather her emotions. “So no one is after my dad? No one is after any of us?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jemma said.

  Vanessa looked like she might faint, but after a minute, she smiled. “My family is safe. We can be together. I can introduce them to Arial.”

  “Keep in mind that it might take a while for your dad to come around to the truth,” I said. “He’s spent the past ten years believing in an enemy that never really existed. It’s not going to be easy to talk him out of that.”

  “No,” she agreed. “But I sure as heck intend to try.” She looked down at the proof of the ad Parker had given to us to show Vanessa. “Is it too late to change this?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jemma said. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I want to be in the photo. The elf in the back. I want my family to have no doubt in their minds that it really is me reaching out to them should they happen to see the ad, which I do understand, isn’t a given.”

  “I’ll call Parker,” I offered. “If the change can be made, I’m sure she’ll be willing to accommodate you.”

  Chapter 13

  Thanksgiving Day dawned bright and sunny. Jemma and Josie had invited the dogs and me to come over early. Josie was making cinnamon rolls, which we planned to eat while watching the parade. Tegan, Booker, Coop, and Noah were coming by later for dinner. Josie said something about eating around five-thirty since Noah had to work until five.

  Adam had called me yesterday and invited me to come back to his place to help him look through the piles of documents he’d sorted. He and Archie would be having dinner with Ruth and Moses today, so he suggested that I might want to come by tomorrow around lunchtime. He warned me that there was a lot to go through and that it would likely take several visits to weed through the documents in order to find something we both hoped might be important, but spending the day with Adam in his huge mausoleum of a house seemed to be the best way I could think of to pass the time.

  Parker had been able to make the change to the ad, so it featured Vanessa. The newspaper had published yesterday, and now all any of us could do was wait and see if Vanessa received an email from one or more members of her family.

  “I love all the decorations,” Josie said as we watched marching bands, floats, and giant balloons on the screen.

  “New York really is a magical place at Christmas,” I said. “Have you ever been?”

  “No,” Josie answered. “But I’d love to go someday. The store windows alone would be enough to justify the cost of a plane ticket.”

  “If you do go, you’ll have to be sure to see the Rockettes and visit Rockefeller Center,” I said. “There are actually a lot of really great things to experience any time of the year, but at Christmas, the place is truly magical.”

  “Did you go and look at the lights and windows when you lived there?” Jemma asked.

  I nodded. “I did. Keni and I made a real effort to take in as much of the holiday splendor as we could.”

  “Have you spoken to her recently?” Josie asked. “Your friend, Keni.”

  “I spoke to her a few days ago, but I plan to call her today.” I glanced at the clock. “I’m sure she’s planning to get together with some of the gang, so perhaps I should call her now.”

  “That might be a good idea,” Josie agreed.

  I got up and stepped out onto the deck. I pulled out my phone and was about to call Keni when I noticed I had an incoming call. “Vanessa?”

  “Yes, it’s me. I hope it isn’t too early.”

  “No. It’s fine. What’s going on?”

  “I just wanted to let you know that the ad worked. I got an email from Jen late last night.”

  I smiled. “That’s wonderful.”

  “She’s living in Akron, but she wants to come and visit as soon as she can work it out.”

  “Is she still with the rest of the family?” I wondered.

  “No, but she knows where they are and how to reach them. Once she grilled me a bit to make sure I really was Nessa and not just someone who looked like her older sister, Jen let me explain everything to her. Of course, she was as shocked as I was, but also very, very happy. She’s missed me as much as I’ve missed her and wants us to be a family again. She agreed with me that convincing Dad that he’d been running from windmills was going to be a tough sell, but she said that she’s pretty sure that Mom will be open to hearing what you all found. She told me that everyone is tired of running, and she thinks that Mom is ready for it to be over once and for all.”

  I smiled. “That’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you. For all of you.”

  “I’m so grateful to you. To all of you. To Jemma
for spending so much time looking into things and to Parker for her willingness to play down her story to protect me. I’m thankful for you and Josie for being there for me. For the first time since Arial was born, I actually feel hopeful that she will grow up knowing her aunts and grandparents.”

  The fact that Vanessa was so happy did my heart good. I couldn’t even imagine how the family was going to deal with the fact that they’d spent the past decade running from an enemy that never really existed. I supposed they’d find a way to deal with it. It certainly seemed that the family had been strong enough to deal with everything else that had been thrown in their direction.

  I still wanted to call Keni, but I really wanted to share my news with Jemma and Josie, so I headed back into the house to fill them in.

  By the time I’d gotten around to calling Keni, it was late in the evening, and the dogs and I had returned to our cottage. What a day it had been. Not only had we been able to resolve a really complicated mystery, but we’d been able to help reconnect a family as well. Once Tegan, Booker, and Coop arrived, we’d caught them up on everything that had happened. Everyone was in a wonderful mood and making plans to go to a tree farm on Saturday to pick out trees for the cottages before everything was picked over when Noah arrived. Noah had to work, but he hadn’t seemed interested in the outing anyway, but Tegan, Booker, Josie, Jemma, Coop, and I were all free that day. I’d never gotten a tree from a farm before. Josie shared that the one we were heading to was a cut your own sort of deal, which sounded like a lot of fun. I had my research session and dance lesson with Adam tomorrow. Depending on how that went, maybe I’d ask him if he wanted to come along.

  I was on my way to my bedroom to change into my pajamas before curling up with a book in front of the fire when I heard my phone ding indicating that I had a text. When I opened my message app, I found a text from an unlisted number. The text simply said: Ava is dead. It is best to let her stay that way.