“Keep the cookies coming, and you all can stay—if you keep quiet,” Morse said.
Beth raised her hand; Morse nodded.
“Do you have any tea?”
The detective sighed. She opened the door and spoke to someone they couldn’t see. Moments later, a non-uniformed worker brought in a tray with tea, mugs, and a carafe of hot water.
Morse questioned Luke at one end of the large table while Beth distributed steaming mugs of tea. Harriet watched as Luke described the series of events and answered Morse’s questions. He didn’t seem to be as rattled as she was by what had happened, and she wasn’t sure if he was in denial or if his life before coming to her and James involved so much violence this was ordinary for him. She made a mental note to talk to James about it. She made eye contact with him and was pretty sure he was thinking the same thing.
“If you’re finished,” James said, addressing Morse when she closed her notebook and stood, “can I take Luke home?” He turned to Harriet. “Beth and Jorge will bring you home, if that’s okay.”
Clearly, they’d all talked about this beforehand
“Sounds good,” she told him. “You guys can feed the dogs, too.”
James smiled at her.
“Lauren is already at our house with the dogs. And Connie.”
Harriet shook her head.
“I guess that’s that, then. I’ll see you two at home.”
She was pretty sure James was giving Luke a chance to talk about what had happened without an audience. Just having him in the same room had calmed her nerves. Not for the first time, she thought about how much better her life worked with James in it.
Morse waited until they’d gone before starting to question Harriet. Harriet’s basic account matched Luke’s.
“There was something odd about the attacker,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on it. Something about the limp. And maybe the proportions of their body.”
Morse held her pen over her paper but didn’t write.
“Do you think they had a disease? Parkinson’s? Something like that?”
Harriet thought for a moment.
“It was more like there was something wrong with their hips, so they walked with a sort of rocking motion.”
Morse made a note.
“Can I ask a question?” Beth interrupted.
The detective smiled and shook her head. “Could I stop you?”
Beth ignored the comment and continued.
“Did you know Millie’s employee William was a convicted killer? And further, we think our local blackmailer was blackmailing Millie because of William.”
“Do I want to know how you know that?” Morse asked.
Harriet replied as her aunt was thinking of how to answer.
“This is a small town, and one of us was on jury duty at William’s trial. The blackmailing is a guess on our part. We’ve heard and seen a few things in our local shops that makes us think someone is harassing several of our local shopkeepers.”
Morse picked up her pen again.
“Care to tell me who?”
“Millie, obviously,” Beth said.
“Sunny,” Mavis said, speaking for the first time.
“We think Jade,” Robin told her.
“There could be more,” Jorge said. “These are only the people the ladies have observed.”
Morse made a note and set her pen down.
“I’ll definitely check this out. Anything else?”
Harriet thought.
“For what it’s worth, there were two large, mean-looking guys at Valery’s funeral. They seemed like bodyguards or something, and they were very protective of Valery’s son. I guess you probably know that. I assume some of the mourners were your people.”
“Was one of them your captor?” Morse asked, ignoring Harriet’s last comment.
“No, they were a lot heavier. Our person was thin. Which was why I thought it could be a woman.”
“Could you tell from the voice?”
Harriet shook her head.
“With that voice-distortion program they used, it was impossible to tell. And they didn’t say enough to pick out any sort of speech pattern.”
Morse scanned her notes.
“Other than tying you up, the person made no attempt to harm you or Luke or Millie?”
“No. And William was already on the floor when Luke and I joined the party.”
Morse closed her notebook and put it back in her pocket.
“If you think of anything else, let me know.” She looked around the room. “Thanks for the cookies. Don’t think you’re always going to be able to take over my interrogation room. Cookies or not.” She took another one from the bag. “You caught me at a weak moment.” She turned to go out the door.
“Merry Christmas, Detective,” Jorge said to her back.
She raised her hand in a wave and left the room.
Robin left the group in the police department parking lot.
“Don’t talk to these people again without me being there. I know Morse knows you didn’t do this, but you were at William’s crime scene, and you and Lauren found Daniel, and you and Luke found Valery, admittedly from afar, but still. Given no other leads, someone here…” She gestured back toward the police department. “…is going to decide you’re a common denominator they can’t ignore.”
Beth started to protest, but Robin held her hand up.
“We know Harriet didn’t have anything to do with these deaths or with the fire at Jade’s, but again, she’s been first at the scene in every case. They can’t ignore that.”
“Oh, great,” Harriet muttered.
Beth put her arm around Harriet’s shoulders. “We’ll be sure to call you, don’t worry,” she assured Robin.
Jorge shivered and took keys from his pocket.
“Let’s get out of here.”
James was stirring a pot of chili at the stove, Luke beside him at the counter grating a block of cheddar cheese into a bowl while Lauren placed napkins and silverware around the dining room table. Harriet came up behind James and wrapped her arms around him, resting her chin on his shoulder.
“When did you whip this all up?”
He set his spoon down and turned in her arms, hugging her.
“I’m sorry you and Luke had to go through what you did today. And to answer your question, I put chili, stew, and a few other easy meals in the chest freezer here. You never know when you’re going to need a quick meal. Especially around the holidays.”
“I wondered what those blue containers were,” she said.
Beth dug around in the cupboard and came out with deep soup bowls while Jorge popped a pan of cornbread he’d taken from the refrigerator in the oven.
“Did you whip that up from scratch?” Harriet asked Jorge. “And by the way, when did you have time to do that?’
He laughed. “How else do you make cornbread? And it only takes a couple minutes. I did it while you were upstairs freshening up.”
Harriet shook her head.
“Clearly, you all don’t need me taking up space in my kitchen. I’ll be in the dining room with Lauren.”
Mavis and Beth followed her. Lauren had her tablet on the table in front of her.
“DeAnn just sent me a message. She said she tracked down the church program Jade’s parents are working with and verified they are out of country but there’s no information on whether Jade has joined them. For what it’s worth, the program people sent a message asking if she’s there, but with the holidays, they don’t expect to get an answer until next week.”
Harriet sat down beside her and closed her eyes, rubbing her hands over them.
“I wish I had recognized something about the person who killed William today. Whoever it was, was built oddly. They were tall and slender, but somehow they weren’t built like most taller people, who tend to be all arms and legs. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”
Lauren opened a notepad app on her tablet. She typed the name of e
ach of the people who had been killed in a column, made a line and then added the names of the people they thought were being blackmailed, and then Jade’s name.
Opposite William’s name she typed convicted of manslaughter. Beside Daniel’s she wrote AIDS.
“What do we know about Valery?”
Beth opened Harriet’s hutch and took out a cut-crystal set of salt and pepper shakers and placed them in the center of the table before sitting down.
“Didn’t the jeweler say Valery told him he was being blackmailed?”
Lauren put that opposite Valery’s name.
“He did,” she said as she typed.
Next to Daniel’s name, she wrote knew Valery’s son — AIDS group.
Beside Jade, she put sold drugs.
Harriet looked over Lauren’s shoulder, reading what she typed.
“Remember how I told you the manager at the stables was telling me that Valery sold his horses when his daughter died?”
Lauren sat back in her chair.
“Yeah, vaguely.”
“She also said that Valery’s wife had left him with the kids and gone back to the old country. What if she came back and was mad at him because their daughter died kayaking and their son got AIDS. That would give her a reason to kill Val and possibly Daniel, if she thought he had something to do with her son’s disease.”
Mavis absently toyed with the edge of her napkin.
“That leaves a lot unexplained. What about William? And why blackmail the other shopkeepers?”
Harriet sighed.
“I didn’t say it was a perfect theory.”
“Do we know who William killed?” Beth asked.
Lauren started tapping on her pad.
“We don’t yet. Do we know his last name?”
“Crowe,” Beth answered. “Millie introduced him when Mavis and I went there to talk about the shop quilt.”
Lauren added that to her search.
“Nothing immediate comes up. There are a lot of people of note named William Crowe, it turns out. Including a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I’ll have to dig deeper, and that will be more easily done from my computer.”
Harriet thought for a moment.
“What do we know about the death of Valery’s daughter?”
Beth gestured toward Lauren.
“Look it up on your tablet. There was something about a wrongful-death suit.”
Lauren tapped on her screen and flipped through a rapid succession of screens before stopping and reading one.
“Well, well, well,” she said. “This is interesting. Anyone want to guess who the wrongful-death suit is against?”
“I’m going to make a wild guess here,” Harriet said. “His daughter was killed in a kayaking accident. Could she have purchased the kayak at the Foggy Point Outdoor Store?”
Lauren turned her pad around so the others could see the screen.
“We have a winner. Vern was exonerated, but this could explain why he’s being blackmailed, if he is.”
The conversation stopped while Luke and James came into the dining room with bowls of grated cheese, sour cream, and chopped green onions. Mavis arranged her napkin on her lap.
“Do we think Vern is in danger?”
Lauren slipped her tablet into her messenger bag.
“As I said, the lawsuit could explain it, but we don’t even know if Vern is being blackmailed, for one thing. For another, if he was exonerated at trial and the evidence clearly showed the kayak he sold them wasn’t faulty, that may have satisfied the family.”
Beth frowned. “Is anyone ever satisfied when their child has died?”
“Do we know what Mrs. Melnyk’s full name is?” Harriet asked.
Lauren held her hand up.
“Before you ask me to look anything else up. I don’t know her full name, but even if I did, I can’t tell you if she’s in Foggy Point, unless she’s committed a crime or done anything else to get herself in the paper or on social media. The airlines aren’t going to tell me or anyone else without a badge and a warrant whether she flew on a plane, even if we had any idea when she might have come, not to mention which airline she might have come on. And that wouldn’t even cover the possibility that she might have come by cruise ship.”
Beth cleared her throat.
“We haven’t even considered how Sunny might fit into all this. It’s pretty clear she’s being blackmailed about something.”
Jorge brought a basket of warm cornbread and a bowl of whipped honey into the dining room and set them on the table.
“You don’t know for sure the blackmail and the murders are connected, do you?” he asked.
Harriet got up and went to the kitchen, returning with a stack of bread plates and the butter dish.
“We connect the blackmail and murders because we don’t believe in coincidence.”
Jorge went to stand in the doorway.
“But you can’t rule out the possibility Daniel’s death was a hate crime, Valery’s was suicide, and William’s was revenge for his light sentence for his manslaughter conviction. A horse thief tried to steal Jade’s horse—arguably the most valuable animal lodged at the stable—and the blackmail is an anti-crime vigilante group.”
Beth took some of the plates from Harriet and helped distribute them around the table.
“I’m with Harriet. That’s a lot of coincidence.” She looked at Jorge with an affectionate smile. “But, you’re right, it’s possible.”
James handed Jorge two bowls of chili and returned to the kitchen for more. He carried them to the table, setting one in front of Beth and Mavis. Mavis sprinkled grated cheese on hers.
“This looks wonderful. Just the thing on a cold night like tonight.”
Luke sat down beside Harriet when the food had been distributed.
“I’ve never had chili that didn’t come from a can.”
Jorge laughed.
“Prepare to be amazed.”
“May I be excused?” Luke asked when he’d finished his second bowl of chili. “I need to call Emily and find out what time we should come to the barn.”
Harriet wiped her mouth on her napkin and set it on the table.
“Let me know when you find out. I need to drive over to the yarn store in Port Townsend, since I wasn’t able to get the yarn I’d planned on getting for James’s mom. I checked when we got home, and tomorrow being Christmas Eve, she’s only open until one o’clock.”
Luke looked at her expectantly.
“Oh, yes, you’re excused.”
“He’s sure polite,” Mavis commented when he was out of earshot.
“He’s new to family life,” Beth said. “Give him some time, and he’ll be like any other teenager.”
“I hope not,” Harriet said. “I’m liking this version.”
Jorge stood up, and James started to.
“You sit and enjoy the ladies,” Jorge ordered. “You did most of the meal prep. I’ll handle cleanup.”
CHAPTER 25
Luke was sitting at the kitchen table eating his second bowl of oatmeal when Harriet came downstairs the next morning. The dogs were at his feet in their normal begging positions, the cat curled in his lap.
Harriet refilled the water kettle and set it on the stove to boil.
“Since I’m going to the yarn store in Port Townsend I could get that yarn for Aunt Beth for you, if you want.”
“She’ll know I didn’t pick it out for her. Should I forget about the stable and go with you?” His face lost all expression while he waited for her answer.
“Aunt Beth will know that you tried to shop at Millie’s, but due to extenuating circumstances, you weren’t able to get her present. She’ll understand. And she knows you need to go check on Major.”
A grin lit up his face.
“You guys are the best.”
He gave the dogs each a crust from his toast and scooped a little dab of butter from the edge of his plate onto his finger for Fred to lick. When they
were all finished, he cleared his dishes and headed for the stairs.
“I’ll be ready in a flash.”
“Don’t be too flashy—I’ve got to eat something before we go. Don’t worry, I’ll be quick about it.”
Harriet was thankful her drive to Bazaar Girls Yarn Shop in Port Townsend was uneventful. She found a pale-blue fingering yarn for Kathy, James’s mother; it would match her eyes and make a lovely shawl. She bought a pattern the shopkeeper assured would be good for a beginner. She chose a hand-spun, hand-dyed, Blue-faced Leicester wool for her aunt. She was pretty sure it was something Beth didn’t already have in her stash.
James had just gotten home when she returned.
“Oh, good,” he said. “I was afraid you’d pick up Luke on your way home. Since the restaurant is closed for the rest of the day, I thought I’d go out to the stable with you then tag along when you drop off the presents at Luke’s…I’m not sure what to call his father’s baby momma and her children.”
Harriet slipped her arms around his waist.
“I’d call them his past. It’s sweet that he wants to share his newfound prosperity with his little brother. I hope the kid appreciates it.”
“I can’t help resenting the mother for not taking Luke when she took his brother.”
“So, you’re thinking if you go and see that it’s horrible, you’ll feel better about that?”
He pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair.
“That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”
Harriet smiled.
“No, it just sounds like you care a lot about Luke.”
She guided him over to the kitchen peninsula and a plate of tea sweets he’d likely set there when he came in. She took a tartlet and popped it into her mouth.
“Want one?” she asked as she chewed.
James stepped back.
“If I never see a tea cake or sandwich again, at least until next Christmas, it’ll be too soon.”
Harriet picked up a glazed miniature sausage roll.
“They’re so good, though.”
“How soon are we going to the stable?”
Harriet glanced at the kitchen clock.
“How’s thirty minutes?”
The 12 Quilts of Christmas Page 17