by Emily James
My door swung open, and Mark’s voice entered ahead of him. “I thought I was going to be late because I had to go in to work this morning, but—”
Velma’s self-control snapped, and she bounded toward him. Her cone clipped the end table by my couch, and the lamp and table both went over with a crash. Velma leaped backward, trampling on Toby. He lunged out of her way and took out the end table at the other end of the couch—the one where my still-full mug from this morning sat. It shattered on the floor in an explosion of ceramic and cold coffee.
If this morning signaled how the rest of the day was going to go, I had a better chance of feeling warm during a Michigan winter than I did of winning the approval of Mark’s parents.
5
“We’re only an hour late,” Mark said as we pulled into Grant and Megan’s driveway.
They were supposed to pick up Mark and Grant’s parents from the Grand Rapids airport that morning and bring them back here for a welcome-home luncheon with the family.
In my parents’ world, a minute late was an equal infraction to standing them up. If I’d ever arrived to anything an hour late…the consequences didn’t bear thinking about. I crossed my fingers that time ran slower up north. The pace of everything else certainly seemed to.
Mark took the container of butter tarts off my lap. At least my extra batches had come in handy. Even with what Drew’s mom—whose first name I never did get—ate, I had plenty left to bring with us.
I scrubbed at the dog slobber smear on my dark jeans with the corner of my coat sleeve. I’d chosen these pants specifically to go along with my flowy eggplant-colored blouse because they said I took care with my appearance without saying I’m overdressed and trying too hard. Or, at least, that’s what they said without doggie drool down the front. Now all they said was you should buy your son an eHarmony subscription.
The dried drool refused to budge. I sighed and slid out of the truck. Maybe they wouldn’t notice it right away. If Grant and Megan had a big dog too, Mark’s parents might even think it’d drooled on me. Please God, let them have a dog.
Mark met up with me on the front walk and took my hand. “I texted Grant to let him know we’d be late. I didn’t get a reply, but they’ll understand once I explain about your unexpected visitor and the dog hurricane that hit your house.”
I wasn’t sure how he expected to make this morning sound anything other than made up, but they were his parents, so I’d have to trust him.
Mark didn’t bother knocking. He just walked right in. Which made sense on one level, considering it was his brother’s house and the rest of the family should already be there, and on another level made me feel like I was barging in where I didn’t belong.
We dropped our shoes and coats by the front door, and before I could move farther into the house, a fluffy golden Chihuahua streaked across the floor, its barks more like yaps compared to Velma and Toby. It skidded to a stop two feet from me, its whole front end lifting from the floor with each bark.
When I’d prayed they had a dog, this wasn’t what I had in mind. The most the little guy was going to drool on was my sock.
Mark handed the butter tarts back to me, scooped the dog up with one hand, and tucked him under his arm. The dog stopped barking and started trying to lick Mark’s face instead. “Nikki, meet Chewbacca. Chewie, meet Nikki.”
I would have loved to have Mark’s ability to arc an eyebrow right about now. The dog couldn’t have weighed more than three or four pounds. He was smaller than Toby’s head. “Chewbacca?”
“Grant thought it was ironic.”
“You could say that.”
“They’re here,” Elise’s voice called from somewhere deeper in the house. She came through an open archway down the hall, pulling her dark hair into a bun as she walked. “We thought you might have decided not to come after Grant’s text.”
Mark still had Chewie tucked under one arm, and the dog seemed perfectly happy to stay there. “I didn’t get a text from Grant.”
“He tried to group text, so I’m not surprised. Your parents’ flight ended up cancelled last minute due to mechanical problems with the plane. They’re hoping to be able to get another one tomorrow, but no set plans yet. Grant wanted everyone to come anyway since they had all the food ready.”
The relief that flooded through me felt a lot like a sugar rush, a little too giddy to be healthy. I’d get a second chance after all to make a first impression—hopefully one that didn’t involve dog drool and acting like the batteries died in our watches.
Erik came through the same arched doorway behind Elise, and I nearly dropped my butter tarts. We’d all gone out together as friends regularly since Mark and I started dating, but as far as I knew, Elise and Erik weren’t a couple yet. And attendance at a family function definitely said we’re dating, though perhaps not in Cavanaugh language. This family ran on a very different system, sort of like trying to move to a Mac when you’d been running a PC your whole life.
Still, I squished up my lips and gave Elise an is-there-something-I-should-know look.
She leaned in like she wanted to see what was in my butter tart container. “It’s not what you think,” she said in a hissed whisper. “I thought he might like a nice meal on his day off.”
“Uh huh, and next you’ll be telling me that people mistake Chewbacca and Toby for twins.”
Erik stopped a respectful distance outside of Elise’s intimate relationship personal space bubble. I’d have to try not to tease Elise—much—but I finally understood why every woman in a happy relationship seemed to turn into a matchmaker. The desire to have your friends share that same kind of happiness was harder to resist than double-chocolate chunk cookies. Based on what she’d told me about her first husband, who’d abandoned her and the kids, Elise deserved some happiness, and Erik was as dependable as they came.
But I could also see why she’d be a bit gun shy, especially since they also worked together.
Erik pointed with a thumb back over his shoulder. “Megan’s putting together some sandwiches for us to take with us.”
Chewie finally started to wiggle in Mark’s grip, and Mark let him down. “You’re leaving already? We’re not that late. You’ve been later to church.”
“It’s not that.” Elise made a face at Mark like they were still children. “The Harris and Northgate homes were burglarized while they were gone this morning. The chief’s calling in all off-duty officers to help with the investigation given the connection between the murder yesterday and the two families.”
The butter tart container sagged in my grip, and I righted it just before all the contents crashed together at one end, turning them into butter crumble.
“Drew Harris’ mom was with me this morning,” I blurted. “Holly Northgate wouldn’t have broken in to her own house or Drew’s.”
I wasn’t supposed to even be flirting with the edges of this case, but unless Chief McTavish had developed ESP, he never needed to know about this conversation. And I wasn’t really inserting myself into the investigation. This was a simple conversation with friends.
Friends who shouldn’t be talking to you about it, my conscience said.
“Does this mean the chief will be considering other suspects?” I asked to drown it out.
Erik slid on his coat. “It doesn’t sound like it. The chief put me in charge of the situation because he’s interviewing a witness who claims to have seen Holly and Drew arguing a couple days before his murder. I suspect he’ll be issuing a warrant for Holly’s arrest soon.”
It’d bothered me that there wasn’t a motive or some sign that Holly and Drew hadn’t been getting along as well as it seemed. Now I had it. “Still, Chief McTavish must find the timeline of the two events suspicious.”
“Not necessarily.”
There was something in the way Erik said it, like a warning he didn’t want to have to directly speak. He knew. He knew I wasn’t supposed to be involving myself in this case.
He hand
ed Elise her coat, edged around us, and opened the front door in a clear conversation’s over gesture.
“The new chief’s a bit…crusty,” Elise said, picking up where Erik stopped and speaking over her shoulder as he ushered her for the door. It seemed like she didn’t recognize the look Erik gave me and didn’t know about the warning I’d received. “But he understands how bad press around a tourist town could destroy it. We’ve kept it out of the news, but there’ve been more break-ins than usual the past couple of months. The working theory is it’s high school kids looking for thrills or extra cash. Drew and Holly lived in the same neighborhood. The murder and the break-ins might not be related at all.”
She started to say something else, but Erik reached around her and closed the door.
I had the desire to pout even though I knew it was petty. It shouldn’t bother me to not be a part of another murder case.
But it did.
6
Over the next twenty-four hours, I must have thought about texting Elise to ask about the case at least twenty times. Managing to resist felt a little like I’d been able to stick my tongue out at Chief McTavish. I wasn’t inserting myself in where I didn’t belong. Though the knowledge that I was proud of myself for accomplishing something that shouldn’t have even been a struggle took a little bit of the poof out of my fluffed-up ego.
After church, before Mark and I took the dogs for a walk, I tried to call Nancy to thank her for the butter tart recipe and tell her that they were a success. She didn’t answer. Instead of leaving a message, I decided to wait for Monday and swing by our “bakery,” what we called the room in the sugar shack where Nancy turned our maple syrup into maple butter and maple sugar.
On Monday morning, I had an email from Stacey waiting for me, asking what I’d like to do about refunding the tour that got cut short, and a text from Russ, saying that Nancy had called in sick with a cold.
Do you know if she lives alone? I texted back.
Think so. Husband passed away about 5 years ago.
The few tasks I had to take care of around Sugarwood today, including meeting with Stacey, could wait. The best way I could think of to say thank you to Nancy was to pay it forward by making her sick day a little easier. Everyone deserved to have someone take care of them when they were sick.
I picked up a box of tissues and a package of throat lozenges from the pharmacy and a take-out container of chicken-and-rice soup from The Burnt Toast Café and drove to the address Russ had given me.
I rang the bell, but no one answered. Nancy didn’t strike me as the type to fake an illness to get a day off work, but she might have gone to the doctor’s office. If she didn’t answer, I’d be having soup for lunch.
I pushed the doorbell again.
This time, the lace curtain on the door shifted slightly.
I cringed. I hadn’t thought this through. I’d probably gotten her out of bed.
The door edged open halfway. Nancy had the red nose that I expected from someone fighting a cold, but instead of pajamas or a bathrobe, she had on a flour-covered apron. She’d pulled her silver hair back in a French braid like she wore when working in the bakery at Sugarwood, and an oven mitt dangled from her free hand.
Her mouth hung open a touch. “Nicole? Didn’t Russ tell you I wasn’t able to make it in today?”
I held up the drugstore package, then realized she couldn’t see through the white paper bag to know what was inside. The takeout soup container was equally unlabeled. “I brought you a few things to help you feel better.”
“To help me feel better?” she echoed in an are we talking about the same thing? tone.
Unless my sense of people had gone haywire, she wasn’t sick. “Russ said you had a cold.”
“No.” Nancy rubbed the space above her eyebrow. “I just wasn’t ready to come in today. Holly Northgate is my great niece.”
Whether she’d told Russ she had a cold to hide the real reason or he’d merely assumed didn’t much matter. I’d been in her place once. It was hard to face people when someone you cared about was accused of murder. The looks and the whispers made you wonder how you could have missed it. Did you miss it? Was there something you could have done to stop it?
“When I was back in Virginia, my boyfriend was accused of murder.” I decided to leave out the part that the murder he was accused of was his wife’s. Even though I didn’t know he was married, I’d rather the rumor didn’t get around Fair Haven that I was an adulteress. “Take whatever time you need.”
Something almost like hope flickered across Nancy’s face. “Would you come in for a few minutes?”
I’d come here to help her. Even though that help looked different from how I’d imagined, I still wanted to do whatever I could to make her feel better. If that meant sitting with her all day, I’d do it. I nodded and followed her inside.
Nancy’s house smelled like burnt cookie dough. A fluffy orange-and-white cat wound around my legs, and a tabby cat blinked at me from the back of the sofa as Nancy led me through her living room and into the kitchen.
Her kitchen looked like a classroom of kids had a food fight and refused to clean up afterward. A bag of flour lay knocked over on the counter, eggshells filled the drainage rack in the sink, and a baking pan of blackened muffins rested on top of the stove. The adorable round table in the breakfast nook practically groaned underneath the breads, cookies, and cupcakes.
To bake all of this, she couldn’t possibly have slept. Or maybe she hadn’t been able to sleep and this was how she coped with all the thoughts running through her head. I knew how that felt, too.
Nancy pulled out a chair and motioned me toward it. I obeyed. There wasn’t even room on the table for me to put the soup, so I balanced it on my lap and dropped the pharmacy bag on the floor.
“She couldn’t have done it,” Nancy said softly. “I know everyone must say that, but I know my Holly. She’s a little flighty, but she has a soft heart. She’s a vegetarian. There’s no way she could kill a person.”
Nancy must not watch the news very often. Plenty of people who wouldn’t hurt an animal had no qualms about taking a human life.
But she seemed to need someone to listen without judging, kind of like Drew’s mom.
Her oven timer dinged, and she pulled out two round cake pans. Chocolate cake, by the smell of it.
She must have realized that every surface in the kitchen was already full because she shoved them back in the oven, closed the door, and turned the oven off.
She peeled off the red-and-yellow checkered oven mitts that matched her apron. “Could you talk to someone? About Holly. Tell them that she couldn’t have done this.”
An image flashed across my mind of me barging into Chief McTavish’s office and demanding he investigate a different suspect. It wasn’t actually that hard to imagine given my track record, but Chief McTavish wasn’t former Chief Wilson, and he wasn’t Erik as interim chief. He’d specifically warned me to stay away from this case.
I rose to my feet and left the soup container where I’d been sitting. I took Nancy’s hand. “I don’t know if that would make a difference.”
“You’re practically a Cavanaugh. They’ll listen to you.”
Apparently, I was the only woman Mark had dated since the death of his wife. In a town like this, that meant we might as well have skipped the dating and eloped. I didn’t personally think dating Mark gave me any more clout than Nancy would have after living here her whole life, but Nancy was looking at me with an almost child-like faith.
I’d seen people look at my Uncle Stan that way for years, and somehow he managed to rarely let them down. I couldn’t promise her results, at least not Uncle Stan-level results, but I could at least try. “I can mention what you told me to Mark and Elise.”
The smile Nancy gave me made me think about the kind runners wore at the end of a marathon, hands braced on their knees, exhausted and relieved, and I had a suspicion she’d finally stop baking after I left and take a na
p.
“Could you call them now?” she asked. “Then I’ll at least have some hope to give to my niece when I talk to her again later.”
I took my phone out into her living room. I’d start with Mark.
“You have that I’m-going-to-make-a-request-you’re-not-going-to-like tone to your voice,” he said after I asked how his day was going. “Should I be worried?”
“I don’t think so.” I bit down on my bottom lip. “Maybe a little.” I told him about Nancy’s description of Holly and her character. “I know the chief seems to think all the evidence points to Holly, but could you ask Elise to double check that no one else had a motive? It’d mean a lot to Nancy and her niece.”
“Chief McTavish took Elise off the case.”
Only the knowledge that Nancy was one room away and I might give her a heart attack if I screeched what! helped me keep the exclamation in check. “But she was the responding officer, and this is the perfect case for an officer who needs more experience.”
Mark’s pause was much too long. “He would have taken Erik off the case, too, if Quincey wasn’t already investigating the hit-and-run of that biker last week. The chief overheard Elise and Erik talking on Saturday about how they’d come from Grant’s place, and he asked them outright if they’d discussed anything about the case with you.”
Oh. Crap. By-the-book Erik wouldn’t lie even if it cost him his career. My heart beat so hard in my chest it felt like it would bruise. “How much trouble are they in?”
“So far he just took Elise off the case and threatened to suspend them without pay if they shared case details with unauthorized persons again.”
Geez. If I’d had any doubts about Chief McTavish’s seriousness before, he’d just drawn and quartered them. And it was at least partly my fault that Elise and Erik were already blacklisted by their new boss. They’d catered to my curiosity about the case. “Should I call Elise and apologize?”
I could almost feel Mark shake his head even though I couldn’t see it. “She didn’t even want you to know. She knew you’d feel guilty.”