Have Yourself a Merry Little Witness

by Dakota Cassidy

  “Yeah, he was. But he does have an alibi we can check with Rhonda. So let’s go check it.”

  Hobbs held open the door of the bakery for me and motioned to go in ahead of him.

  When we entered, I stopped dead in my tracks, my stomach sinking to the floor.

  Mothereffer, Hessy Newman—my friendly neighborhood burn-her-at-the-stake fan—was the last person I needed in the mix today. But there was no hiding from her. She saw me the instant we walked out onto the floor of the bakery.

  “You!” she yelled, pointing an accusatory finger at me as she backed away, her aging face riddled with lines and creases. “You stay away from me! You’re the devil, Halliday Valentine—the devil! Your whole family’s wicked!”

  Hobbs stared at her for only a moment before he reacted, stepping beside me to put his arm around my waist. “Pardon me, ma’am, is there something we can help you with?”

  But I wasn’t going to be the shrinking violet here. Plastering a smile on my face, I waved. “Hello, Ms. Newman. What brings you to Rhonda’s today? It’s mighty cold out there. Are you grabbing a treat to take home to help you get through the next snowstorm?”

  “No, no!” she hissed, backing up farther, her deep-set gray eyes wide. She curled her hands into her pilling red poncho and lifted her chin as though she were facing off with the devil himself. “Don’t you come near me with your black magic and your devil’s deeds! You stay far away. Far away!”

  I take that back. I guess she really did believe I was the devil himself.

  What I really wanted to do, as petty as it sounds, was saunter up to her and yell “boo!” in her wrinkly old face, but I knew better. My mother and nana would label that childish. They’d expect me to keep her at arm’s length and behave with decorum.

  They fear what they don’t understand, Hallie-Oop. We have to first try and understand and sympathize with their fear of the unknown before we put up our dukes, I heard my mother’s melodic voice say in my head.

  But I didn’t have to say anything else. Rhonda rushed in and glared at Hessy. “Hessy Newman, you will not treat another customer in my store like that! That’s what you’re not gonna do. No, ma’am. I won’t have that nonsense circulating about my friend. Hal’s a good person. Now, choose what you’d like and get on out of here!” she hissed with a stern warning.

  But I patted her on the arm, turning my back to Hessy, who’d slunk off to the far corner of the bakery, properly chastised. “It’s okay, Rhonda, but thank you for being my friend. I appreciate you.”

  Rhonda gave me a sympathetic look. “She’s just old and a little too invested in all that supernatural TV she watches.”

  I dismissed it with a wave of my hand. “Forget it, Rhonda. She’s been saying that all my life. Why I’m here is more important, so can I ask a quick question before I go? Was Landry here last night around five or so?”

  “He sure was, honey. He was with me until eight.”

  Well, there went that suspect. “Thanks, Rhonda. Let’s catch up for lunch soon.”

  And that left us a big fat nowhere.

  Landry had all the right attributes, alleged former drug dealer and a smoker who could have possibly held a grudge against Gable. I was sure because the register was untouched and there was no merchandise missing, that Landry had a pretty strong motive to kill Gable if it was about drugs.

  Defeated, I dropped a kiss on Rhonda’s cheek and began to head toward the door, but she stopped me by holding up her finger. She ran to the far counter and grabbed a couple of rose-gold boxes.

  “For your uncle and this handsome Southern boy.”

  I gave Rhonda a hug and thanked her for the treats before we took our leave and headed back to Hobbs’s Jeep.

  No sooner were we in the car than he’d set the boxes on the dashboard and turned to look at me. “Wanna talk about what just happened in there?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. It’s a long story for another time. Can we unpack it later?”

  He stared at me, and if wheels in one’s mind existed, his were turning. But he simply smiled and popped open a rose-gold box and sighed with pleasure.

  He held up a pink and mint-green confection I didn’t know the name of, and smiled. “I like your connections, Lacey. You’re kooky cool.”

  Laughing out loud, I shook my head. “We have to go see Patricia Fowler. I’m not sure what good it will do, or if it’ll make any difference, but it’s been eight years. That’s a long time to keep the flame of anger alive.”

  “We do have to go see Patricia, and Westcott Morgan” he agreed around a mouthful of cakey goodness as crumbs fell to his jacket and stuck to his closely trimmed beard. “But before we do anything else, you have to try this. It’s incredible.” He held it up for me to take a bite, but I wrinkled my nose. “Oh, c’mon, just a little taste, Hal. Are you a calorie counter? I mean, it’s fine if you are, but you don’t need to be. Plus, it’s Christmas! What kind of joyless monster says no to treats on Christmas?”

  “No. I’m not a calorie counter, I’m—”

  He pressed it against my lips and smiled, making me take a bite. My eyes went wide as I cupped my hand under my chin to catch the excess crumbs.

  “Wow,” I murmured as the vanilla cake with just a hint of orange melted in my mouth.

  “See?”

  “Fine, fine. You’re right. That’s incredible. Now, meet up with Westcott then get back to the hospital so we can check on my uncles before we try to find Patricia Fowler, then see who else we can thoroughly offend with our kiddie investigation.”

  He closed the cardboard box, the treat still in his hand. “Okay, but one more bite, huh?” Hobbs pressed it against my lips again to tempt me with an impish grin. “C’mon. You know you want to.”

  Laughing, I opened my mouth wide and bit the whole thing, leaving nothing but some frosting dust on his fingertips.

  He gasped in mock horror. “Holy tipping cows, young lady. You ate the last bite. No fair!”

  I daintily dabbed at the corners of my mouth with my scarf. “All’s fair in cake and war.”

  We both laughed as he pulled out of the parking lot and we headed for our meeting with Westcott Morgan. That felt really good.

  Really good.

  Chapter 10

  God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

  Written by Unknown

  Just as we were about to enter the coffee shop, I got a notification on my phone from the local Facebook page, Marshmallow Hollow Chatter.

  My heart stopped in my chest as I read a comment from someone about the police finding Kerry Carver’s lipstick at Feeney’s.

  Hobbs looked down at me, his brow furrowed. “Everything okay?”

  “Well, all of Marshmallow Hollow knows about Kerry’s lipstick the police found at the scene of the crime. They’re all talking about it on the page as we speak.”

  “A leak in the department?” Hobbs wondered out loud, a look of surprise on his face.

  “Well, it wasn’t me. Was it you?”

  He looked me in the eye. “I’d have my skin peeled off at high noon first. So no. Is there an origin to the post? Some proof?”

  I didn’t believe Hobbs was capable of telling anyone. I mean, who would he tell anyway? He hardly knew anyone. “It says here they heard it on the afternoon news. A leak in the department sounds about right. I sure hope Stiles doesn’t think it was us.”

  “You know what this does, though?”

  “What?”

  “Gives us a reason to talk to Westcott Morgan.”

  I leaned back against the coffee shop’s brick wall and looked up at his handsome face. “I don’t get it.”

  “What was the reason we were going to give about why we wanted to talk to him about his article? Why would he give two strangers any secret information he might have about the missing girls? But now we can explain we wanted to talk to him about the connection between a missing Kerry, a murdered Gable Norton, and our concerns about the killer coming after Uncle Monty.”

/>   That hadn’t even occurred to me. That Westcott might want a reason we were so invested in the disappearance of the girls.

  I twirled the ends of my hair and batted my eyelashes. “You, Cowboy, have a pretty devious mind. It never occurred to me I’d need a reason to talk to him. I thought he’d just spill all his secrets to me because I’m so cute. What was your plan?”

  “You are very cute, and I was going to wing it. Maybe pretend I was writing a book on serial killers.”

  I poked him playfully in the chest. “You? Write a book? That’s funny, seeing as you’ve only read one book in your entire life.”

  “He doesn’t know that, silly. And that’s not entirely true. I’ve read other books, but I was forced to read them for school.”

  Flapping my hands, I rolled my eyes. “I, for one, am glad we don’t have to lie. I stink at it,” I said before I sneezed.

  Hobbs looked at me as though he were affronted at the notion and handed me a tissue. “We weren’t going to lie. Only pretend.”

  “I’m not a very good pretender. Either way, I’m glad we don’t have to. Now, are you ready to go find out if Westcott has anything that can help us?”

  Hobbs grinned. “Every day, all day.” He pulled the door open and motioned for me to go ahead.

  I made my way through the rows of tables and booths on either side of the shop, spotting the man who looked like the picture online.

  “Westcott Morgan?” I asked of the attractive-looking man, wearing casual jeans and a T-shirt that read, “All Dogs Go to Heaven.”

  He smiled warm and wide as he rose from the table at Heathrow’s Coffee Haus, our local spot for a caffeine fix. “’Tis I,” he said with grand flourish. “You’re Hal Valentine and Hobbs Dainty?”

  “That’s us,” I said with a return smile as he offered us a seat in the tan vinyl booth with a gesture of his hands.

  We slid in, sitting side by side as we looked at this nice-looking guy of about thirty or so with round, black-rimmed glasses, a thatch of curly dark hair, and a bright-white smile.

  “Can I get you anything, m’lady? Or you, sir?”

  Holding up my hand, I shook my head before pulling a tissue from my pocket to wipe my stuffy nose. I sure hoped I wasn’t getting a cold. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  Hobbs agreed. “Thanks, but I’m good, too.”

  “So what can I do for you?” he asked before he took a sip of his coffee from a big green mug with snowflakes painted on it.

  “We’re just curious about the opinion piece you wrote on the missing girls and the connections you made.”

  He winced. “Yeah, I really stirred up a hornet’s nest there, didn’t I?”

  With a wry smile, I agreed. “Yeah, you really stepped in it. Over fifteen hundred comments and counting.”

  Westcott gave me a sheepish glance. “Well, what is a journalist without adversary? It’s the nature of the beast.”

  “So what made you choose these cases and question whether the police were picking and choosing importance based on their backgrounds?” Hobbs asked.

  “Truthfully? It sort of just fell into my lap, and all I did was spin.”

  I put my elbow on the table and cupped my chin in my hand. “But tons of people go missing all the time and these girls hardly made a splash, their disappearances didn’t even make it to the local news as far as I know. The biggest deal made was on their Facebook pages, and that was from family and friends. What drew your attention to them? How did you find out about them?”

  Westcott looked at me thoughtfully for a moment before he answered. “I’m always looking for a scoop. I’m low man on the totem pole at this online only magazine I work for—”

  “You work for The Scene, right?” I asked.

  He smiled and leaned forward, cupping his chin. “Yeah. That’s it. And the answer’s simple, really. I usually get the fluff pieces. You know, local stuff here and in the surrounding areas like the Christmas tree lighting, the sled races, stuff like that. But I’m always looking to prove myself, move up the ladder, get stories with some meat and potatoes. Call me foolish, but that’s how you get ahead in this business. So I do a lot of looking at missing persons cases, murders, you name it, and like I said, this just sort of fell into my lap.”

  I understood what it was to have to prove your worth. I’d done it when I was an interior designer. I’d scoped out hotels and restaurants, looking for updated décor and presented them to my bosses with my ideas for renovations all the time. It wasn’t a bad trait to have, but I got the impression Westcott did it for less altruistic reasons than I had.

  Still, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  Smiling, I nodded, folding my hands in front of me. “I get where you’re coming from. I was once young and hungry myself.”

  He bobbed his head, pushing his glasses up along the bridge of his nose with slender fingers. “Anyway, when I came across the one missing girl, Lisa Simons, the one who’s been missing the longest, I didn’t think a lot about it other than she was a pretty girl with no leads on her disappearance…but then Jasmine Franks popped up, and man, did she look like Lisa. It made me start looking for more missing girls with similarities. I do a lot of Facebook searches, Twitter, all forms of social media, and that’s how I found Kerry Carver, and it blew me out of the water that no one had bothered to put this together. I tried talking to Lisa Simons family, but they wanted no part of me or the article.”

  “So next you went to Jasmine Franks’s mother to see why a bigger deal hadn’t been made of her disappearance and why the police weren’t doing more?”

  He looked at Hobbs, his eyes intense. “Yep, and you know the rest. The police said she’d probably run off with a boyfriend somewhere.”

  “But you don’t think she did?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said so cavalierly, it was like a kidney punch. “My gut says probably not, but my job isn’t to know or not to know. I’m just a lowly investigative journalist trying to get a leg up to bigger things.”

  So he wasn’t invested in their stories—not truly invested—he was only interested in stirring people up.

  “So you brought the story to your editor?” Hobbs asked as he unzipped his jacket.

  “Yep, and they finally gave me a shot, so I did an opinion piece because the cops didn’t seem to be taking their disappearances very seriously. As in, no one had even mentioned the fact that they all disappeared within a thirty- or forty-mile radius of each other, and of course they look a lot alike. I wondered why the police hadn’t put it together the way I had. I wondered why it wasn’t getting any attention. The economic-class supposition thing just emerged as I wrote it. I mean, were the police deciding one person’s life was less important than another’s?”

  My inner suspicion was this guy wanted to be noticed, and he didn’t care how he did it, and even though his questions were valid enough, I didn’t feel like he was fighting for truth, justice and the American way.

  He didn’t come off as totally sleazy, but he didn’t exactly come off as a guy who wanted these women found because he gave two hoots. It was just a story to suit his climb up the journalistic ladder and that wasn’t sitting well with me.

  After that revelation, I just wanted to be done with him. “A fair question indeed. But that’s not why we asked you to meet us, Westcott.”

  He hooked his finger in the handle of the mug, preparing to take another sip. “Why did you?”

  “My Uncle Monty,” I said, almost perversely enjoying the momentary confused look on his face.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Being the journalist you are, I’m sure you heard about the murder at the convenience store out on Snowy Road? Feeney’s Fuel and Gruel?”

  Then he nodded, pretending he had any sympathy. “I did. Shame. The kid was around my age. Left behind a wife and a baby. What about it?”

  “There was someone else involved in the shooting last night. It was my uncle. He had to have m
ajor surgery as a result of his involvement.”

  Now I had his attention. He leaned forward with obvious interest. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t know how I can help.”

  “Have you heard about the police finding Kerry Carver’s lipstick at the scene of the crime?”

  He blinked and then he swallowed, his throat working. “Holy Cow! I had no idea. How did you find that out?”

  “It was all over Facebook, and apparently on this afternoon’s news,” Hobbs explained.

  What kind of investigative journalist didn’t keep alerts on Google about the subjects of their stories?

  Drumming his long fingers on the table, he asked, “I still don’t know how you think I can help?”

  I’m not sure what it was about Westcott, but the longer I talked to him, the more I felt like he was no better than Abraham Weller—he just didn’t have a law degree. He was an ambulance chaser just like Weller.

  Hobbs spoke then, I think sensing my discomfort. “We were hoping you knew something about Kerry Carver’s disappearance that you didn’t disclose to the public. We realize we’re asking you to reveal something you might not yet be ready to reveal, but there’s a killer on the loose who needs to be identified. If you have any information that can help us, we’d appreciate it. You never know what might trigger something the police can look into.”

  “Doesn’t your uncle have the answer to that?” he asked, his eyes intense.

  He was looking for another story. I felt it. So I clammed up. “I’m not at liberty to discuss my uncle’s condition.”

  Westcott looked at Hobbs for a long moment before he shrugged and said, “Well, everything I put in the article is all I have. I have no idea how Kerry Carver’s lipstick is connected to the murder last night, or your uncle’s injury. I wish I could help you.”

  I can’t say exactly what it was about him that made my skin itch, but I felt as though someone had unleashed a thousand ants in my pants and I was ready to go.

  Westcott Morgan had been a complete waste of time.

  Putting my gloves on, I briefly smiled at him as I rose. “Well, thanks for your help. I hope your ploy to climb the ladder of journalistic success doesn’t backfire. Take care.”