Rooted in Murder

by Emily James

  Besides, the money had cleared, and most of our trees were in.

  We’d pulled up next to our house. I motioned for Mark to wait. I didn’t want to risk moving and having the call drop. I wasn’t sure how sensitive this phone would be about cellular dead zones.

  “Everything okay?” I asked Russ.

  My voice actually sounded fairly calm. Maybe my brain realized that, compared to being buried alive, any problems with the property were small and manageable.

  Russ laughed his Santa Claus laugh, and I could imagine his body shaking. “Not this time. He wants to take us all out to dinner to celebrate the sale.”

  I put Russ on speaker so that Mark could hear, and we picked one of the days Mr. Huffman had suggested. Since Mark wasn’t even going to allow me to walk the dogs on my own until after my next scan, I might as well take every opportunity I could to get out of the house.

  We’d settled on A Salt & Battery for our celebration dinner. Mark and I rarely ate in the restaurant itself, so it was a nice change. The interior smelled amazing—like fried food and tartar sauce. The tables reminded me of polished driftwood, with enough dings and crags to give them character. In the middle of our table, they’d placed a basket of popcorn.

  Mark pulled my chair out for me as if I might break. If he was this careful with me now, I could only imagine what would happen if I were ever really injured.

  Actually, that wasn’t a bad thing. It was a good one. I’d never have to wonder if he’d take care of me if I couldn’t take care of myself. I knew he would. Not everyone had that kind of security in this world. Daphne’s past was a perfect example. Mark had even sat up with me last night when I’d had a nightmare and couldn’t sleep.

  Mrs. Huffman gave me a grandmotherly smile. “Such a gentleman.”

  I lifted a hand toward my head but stopped short of touching the injury. I’d ended up having to put my hair up in a ponytail to hide the stitches. “He’s babying me a bit right now.”

  I filled her in on what had happened, leaving out the details and only explaining it in broad strokes. I’d gone out into the bush and was hit in the head by a woman involved in the case I’d been investigating to build a defense for a client.

  The color faded from around her lips, leaving a stark white line that made her pink lipstick look the shade of cotton candy. Mr. Huffman laid a hand on her arm.

  “I didn’t mention it,” Russ said.

  He spoke the words almost under his breath, as if he couldn’t believe I’d bring up something like that at a celebration meal. Or at all. If Russ had his way, he’d pretend nothing bad ever happened.

  Hadn’t Mr. Huffman said she liked to watch crime shows? I was sure he had. Though watching a TV show you knew was make-believe and hearing about a true crime did tend to affect people differently. I shouldn’t have dropped it on her like that, assuming she’d be okay hearing it.

  The waiter came and took our order. I got onion rings on the side even though my order already came with French fries. Today I was going to eat whatever I wanted to celebrate the fact that I was still alive to eat. That, and I’d woken up this morning hungry enough to actually make pancakes for breakfast rather than grabbing an apple or a yogurt from the fridge. My body must be thinking that if I was going to be attacked, it needed to store up extra energy reserves.

  The Huffmans shared their plans. They were going to visit their son first in Grand Rapids. They wanted to look at some of the inclusive retirement villages there that provided weekly housekeeping to their tenants. They’d put their house on the market. The farm wasn’t the only thing they’d been struggling with lately. Even the upkeep of their home had become too much. Once they had a lease signed for a place to live, they were going to take their first-ever overseas vacation.

  “The honeymoon I always promised her,” Mr. Huffman said.

  Mrs. Huffman smiled at him, but it looked skin-deep to me. “It’s the right decision, but I’ll miss that house.”

  I could see grieving when the time came for Mark and me to finally leave our home. My eyes actually burned at the thought. Thank you, head wound. The last time I’d had a head injury, it’d made my moods swing. It seemed like this one was going to make me weepy.

  The pressure in my head from trying not to cry made the blood pulse in my wound. I fished around in my purse for the extra-strength ibuprofen my doctor prescribed. I pulled one out. It should be fine to take since it’d been six hours since my last dose, and I had a full stomach. The first one I took made me queasy, but Mark had said it was because I should be taking them with food.

  Mark watched my every move. “You feeling okay?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t seem to get the words out around that irrational lump in my throat.

  “Did they arrest the woman who hit you with the shovel?” Mr. Huffman asked.

  The pill slipped from my hand and rolled under the table. The urge to cry vanished and left a cold numbness in its place.

  When I’d told them the story, I hadn’t said I was hit with a shovel.

  24

  Not only had I not said I was hit with a shovel, I hadn’t said I was buried alive. There’d be no reason to assume the person who hit me used a shovel. I’d said I was out in the bush. The most obvious thing to assume was that I’d been hit with a tree branch. Even a baseball bat or a tire iron were more common bludgeoning tools than a shovel, statistically speaking.

  When the topic first came up, Russ said he hadn’t told them, so he didn’t include the detail about the shovel, either. In fact, Russ might not even know. I’d been under the impression from my talk with Chief McTavish that it was one of those details the police planned to withhold to better help them identify the real assailant. The only people who knew about the shovel as far as I knew were me, Mark, and the police.

  And the person who hit me.

  Mr. Huffman and Russ were both staring at me. Mark’s hand was on my knee. Had he caught it, too?

  I needed to answer Mr. Huffman, but the words wouldn’t form. My mind couldn’t seem to register the obvious reason why Mr. Huffman would have known I was hit with a shovel. But the only reason he would have had to try to kill me was if he thought I was out there searching for evidence and that I might find something to point to him.

  “Not yet,” Mark said, breaking the awkward silence. “They haven’t arrested her yet.”

  “I’m sorry. I dropped my medicine.” My voice sounded more upset than was rational even considering the situation. “It’s important. I need to find it.” I turned to Mark. “Help me?”

  I slid off my chair and bent my head under the table. My orange pill rested next to Russ’ boot, in plain sight.

  Mark knelt next to me and stuck his head under the table as well. Good thing it was a wide table or we’d have bumped into the Huffmans’ knees.

  Mark’s gaze slid to the bright orange pill. He didn’t reach for it. He knew I’d never take a pill I’d dropped on a public floor. He also knew that my pills weren’t something truly important like antibiotics or blood thinners. Losing one didn’t matter.

  So the fact that he’d come down without question meant he’d also caught Mr. Huffman’s slip.

  It all made sense. Mr. Huffman had been struggling financially. Lee had taken his combine for a joyride. A combine was a million-dollar piece of equipment even ten years ago. The repairs would have made his insurance premiums go up and could have cost him his harvest. He knew kids were driving through his fields, destroying his crops. If he’d found Lee there, he might have lost his temper. He’d told me he’d started driving around at night, trying to patrol. He’d even said something about Royce Allen having a good reason for hitting Lee. That if more people had stood up to Lee the way Royce did, maybe it wouldn’t have come to what it did.

  The problem now was what we could do about it. We had no proof that he was even in the area the night of Lee Mills’ death. Unless…it was a long shot, but he might have been the witness who saw Daphne walking away. I’d to
ld the police he used to drive around. I directed them to him as a witness. He’d have had to tell them something or it could have seemed suspicious that, with all the activity on his property, he knew nothing.

  Thanks to my head injury, I hadn’t been able to keep my cool. Mr. Huffman clearly wasn’t a stupid man. He might put the pieces together and take his wife out of the country on their “vacation” sooner than planned. It wouldn’t look suspicious, and it would prevent the police from questioning him. They wouldn’t have enough for an extradition if the Huffmans decided never to return.

  We needed the police to take him in for questioning now.

  But I had no way to call them that wouldn’t look strange and tip Mr. Huffman off further.

  “You two okay down there?” Russ asked. The tone of his voice said This is getting awkward.

  I moved my finger over to Mark’s hand and slowly wrote letters.

  Call McT witness.

  I slid out from under the table. Hopefully Mark would understand enough to know to ask Chief McTavish the name of the witness. If it was Mr. Huffman, Mark would have enough reasons to ask McTavish to bring him in.

  “Did you find it?” Russ asked.

  “It’s gone.”

  Mark came up beside me. “We’ll have to go to the pharmacy after, explain what happened, and see what the pharmacist suggests.”

  Russ and Mrs. Huffman nodded like that was the most reasonable thing in the world. Something about Mr. Huffman’s delayed response made me think he knew my dive under the table was about something more than a lost pill.

  Mark changed the subject to ask about whether they had any grandchildren. Partway through Mrs. Huffman’s answer, he reached a hand down toward his pocket.

  He gave an apologetic smile that even I almost believed. “I’m on call today. I have to take this.”

  His reason was brilliant. No one could even question it.

  I was definitely a bad influence on him.

  Mr. Huffman set his silverware across his plate. “We should be going anyway.”

  Mrs. Huffman gave him a startled look. Whether or not she knew about Lee Mills, she didn’t know about me. She clearly had no idea why her husband wanted to leave so abruptly.

  I had to stop them. “I was hoping we could hear the end of the story about your granddaughter. Mark shouldn’t be long.”

  “I’m sure he won’t be able to stay for that,” Mr. Huffman said. “He must have a crime scene to get to or they wouldn’t have called him.”

  He’d essentially called my bluff. Mark was either on the phone for a legitimate work call—and therefore would need to leave immediately—or he was calling the police for some other reason that we were trying not to admit to.

  Russ rose to his feet. “Well, thank you for the meal. Can’t help thinking we should have paid after all the trouble we caused.”

  Mr. Huffman waved his hand and headed for the till rather than waiting for our waiter to return and ask if we’d like the check.

  Russ moved around the table, as if to follow Mr. Huffman and argue more. My pill rolled out from under the table. Russ stopped next to it.

  “Oh.” Mrs. Huffman stooped and picked it up. She held it out to me. “Is this yours?”

  I started shaking my head before she asked. Because if I admitted it was mine, they were going to want me to swallow it down, and the mere thought made bile pool in my throat. “Mine was pink. And tiny.”

  It was the best explanation I could come up with for why we couldn’t easily locate it. The carpet was dark with colored speckles all over it. A tiny pink pill would blend right in.

  The waiter handed Mr. Huffman his receipt. Mark was off the phone and heading for him. He didn’t glance my way. I took it as a message to stall more.

  I blasted Mrs. Huffman with a smile so big it probably looked crazed. “Actually, would you help me look around for a minute and see if we can find it? My doctor was firm that I needed to take all of them, and I’m not sure the pharmacist will be able to replace one single pill.”

  “I’ll help too,” Russ said.

  His tone carried enough worry that I knew thoughts were flowing through his head about me contracting an incurable infection if we didn’t find that pill. I would owe him an apology later.

  They both got down on all fours.

  Nice, Nicole. You convinced two people in their sixties to kneel down on the floor to help you search for a pill that doesn’t exist.

  Even though it was for a noble reason, I felt selfish. I went down on my hands and knees with them.

  “Is something wrong?” the waiter’s voice asked from above my head.

  “She dropped an essential medication,” Mark’s voice this time. It was strangled as if he felt so guilty he could barely keep from blurting out the truth or he was trying not to laugh. Without seeing his face, I couldn’t tell which. “We’re all looking for it.”

  The next thing I knew both Mark and the waiter were searching the floor too. We wouldn’t be able to eat in here again. In fact, based on how many people were staring at us, I wouldn’t be able to show my face in town at all for a few weeks. It was a very good thing my parents lived over six hundred miles away.

  On the upside, Mr. Huffman couldn’t leave now. Not only was his wife invested in the search, but he’d look like a jerk. He might even feel like a jerk if there was any doubt in his mind about the pill. He’d seemed like a genuinely nice man—right up until he beaned me with a shovel, anyway.

  Hysterical laughter bubbled up into me, and I turned it into a coughing fit to keep it contained. My head throbbed. I’d known emotional swings could come with a head injury—it wasn’t my first one, after all—but I felt like a yo-yo.

  A cold rush of air hit the back of my neck. I glanced over my shoulder. Erik stood in the doorway. Whether Mark called him directly or Chief McTavish had sent him didn’t matter. The cavalry had arrived.

  Erik stared at us, a What the heck? expression on his face.

  I pinched my thumb and pointer finger together as if I’d trapped a miniscule pill between them and held up my hand. “Found it!”

  25

  Elise perched on her desk at the Fair Haven police station. She’d given her chair to me.

  “At least you didn’t pretend to drop a contact lens,” she said. “The Huffmans might have bought it, but Russ would have given the game away.”

  Mark had picked up on some of my tactics, but Russ never would. Not only would he not want to, but he was a terrible liar. When we’d first met, and he’d been suspected of murdering my Uncle Stan, I could tell when he was hiding elements of the truth from me.

  At least my ploy bought us enough time for Erik to reach us. Mark played a major role in that. He’d opened the conversation with Chief McTavish with, “The man who used to own the field where Lee Mills’ body was found knew Nicole was hit with a shovel.” McTavish dispatched Erik immediately.

  Once the Huffmans were on their way to the station, Mark had filled me in on the rest of the conversation.

  Chief McTavish had confirmed that Mr. Huffman was the witness who said he saw Daphne walking toward town that night. McTavish checked his witness statement. Mr. Huffman had described her as “that girl who was always with Lee Mills” and said that “he remembered her because he couldn’t understand why a nice girl like her put up with him.” That, coupled with his slip about the shovel, convinced McTavish that Mr. Huffman might have headed to his field after seeing Daphne, figuring that Lee was up to something destructive that she didn’t want to be a part of.

  The only reason he wouldn’t have come forward with that information sooner was if he didn’t want to be connected to the area at the time and give the police a reason to look at him. With his history with Lee, they would have. I’d accidentally forced his hand. He got away with it until today because the police were convinced that either Case Hammond, or more recently, Ashley Jenkins, killed Lee.

  Mark rested a hand on my back. “We might as well go home.
Someone will call us with an update if they get a confession from Huffman. And you know McTavish can’t let you sit in on any part of these interviews. Not even with Mrs. Huffman. You’re the victim.”

  It was scary sometimes how well he knew me. But wishing for a chance to be part of the questioning wasn’t the only reason I wanted to stay.

  After all I’d been through, it was hard not to always be afraid, and I didn’t want to live my life that way. I couldn’t keep doing what I loved if that happened. “If I stay here, it feels like I’m not just another victim. I don’t want to go home and be the victim.”

  Mark leaned in and kissed my forehead. “Then we stay for as long as you need.”

  Elise pulled another chair over and went back to her paperwork. Mark left me with her to go grab some work of his own from his office at Cavanaugh Funeral Home. I settled in to read a book on my phone. Anderson called once with a question about a different case.

  The second time my burner phone rang, I assumed it was him again.

  “We need you to come down to the station to identify your phone,” Chief McTavish said.

  I swiveled around in the chair. I couldn’t see him, so he must be calling from his office. “I’m still here.”

  “I should have known.”

  He ended the call and came through the door at the far end of the room. He had a clear evidence bag in his hand.

  He stopped in front of Elise’s desk. “Didn’t your shift end an hour ago, Officer Scott?”

  Elise held up her pen. “Paperwork.” Her voice inflected up at the end, making it more of a question than a statement.

  I hadn’t realized she was sticking around for curiosity’s sake and, probably, for my sake. I glanced at the papers in front of her. They were the same ones she’d been working on the last time I looked up. They’d been completed then.

  McTavish pulled over a chair. “This place has gone to the dogs now that none of you are afraid of me anymore.”

  “I’m still afraid of you, sir,” Elise said, but her lips pressed together as if she were trying not to smile.