Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  I moved the laptop a little more in Mark’s direction. Sitting with him like this reminded me of the first case we’d worked together, trying to figure out who’d killed my Uncle Stan. “Do you recognize the location?”

  He zoomed one of the photos in slightly, then clicked to the next one and did the same. “I think it’s the empty lot next to the animal shelter.” He pointed to a building at the edge of the photo with wire fencing. “Doesn’t that look like the dog runs?”

  He was right. Fortunately or unfortunately, that was on the edge of town, and there weren’t any homes close enough to it that Drew could have caught a glimpse of the teenage thieves. None of the businesses in that area had been broken into. That, surely, would have made the rounds of the rumor mill. Not even Chief McTavish would have been able to keep it quiet.

  We flipped our way through all the pictures. Nothing jumped out as an ideal blackmail opportunity. I’d kind of hoped we’d find a picture of someone who wasn’t on our tour mugging an old granny or hiring a prostitute, but it was all pictures of Shawn with his clients or vehicles. Some of my desire to go to sleep rather than face these photos probably came from wanting everyone in my tour group to be innocent.

  We had to be looking for something connected to a member of the tour group. Drew could have been blackmailing any of the people buying from Shawn, but Holly said it’d been something else he’d seen. None of the buyers were on the tour except Amy, whose pictures were noticeably absent. Drew had probably deleted them. He definitely hadn’t been thinking of blackmailing her since the blackmail money was for her and her dad.

  It was possible Holly had been wrong or that the pictures Drew told her about were on a different memory card seized by the police or on the computer taken by the thief. The latter seemed the least likely. Drew wouldn’t have put something like that on the desktop his whole family had access to. But even the former didn’t make sense. The police would have noticed pictures that looked out of place.

  “Did Erik say anything about strange pictures on what they took from Drew’s house?” I asked.

  “Nope. All of them were from legit jobs Drew’d been hired for, mostly small stuff like family photos.”

  We had to narrow our search down. “Let’s focus on only the photos that don’t show Shawn.”

  Mark skimmed through them again. Drew had taken a couple close-ups of Shawn’s license plate—what little could be seen of the rest of the car matched Shawn’s vehicle—probably as additional proof that it was him.

  Two other Shawn-less images showed another car, stopped in the middle of the street with a person in front of it. The lighting was so low that it was impossible to make out details beyond that the person in front of it looked like a man and the person in the driver’s seat looked like a woman.

  The car was a lipstick-red four-door SUV. I didn’t know enough about cars to name the manufacturer or model, but it was one of those that I hated the appearance of because they reminded me of a hearse. You didn’t see many of them in Fair Haven, but I’d seen one.

  In the parking lot of The Sunburnt Arms, with an Ohio license plate.

  22

  I must have turned gray because Mark pressed a hand to my forehead, like concern for me made him forget he couldn’t accurately check for a fever that way.

  I pulled his hand off my forehead and held it clasped in both of mine. “I’m fine.”

  But I wasn’t. I just didn’t know yet how to explain all the emotions surging through me.

  The Marshalls were supposed to be here on a second honeymoon. Their chance to make up for all the past mistakes. Their chance to find happiness. Not so different from Mark and me, both of us finding a second chance at happiness in each other after the tragedies we’d been through.

  If the Marshalls turned out to be the ones who’d killed Drew, it’d be over when it’d barely had time to start.

  This case didn’t have a happy ending. It had endings where we caught the true killer and the innocent people went free, but no matter who went to prison for Drew’s murder, it’d leave carnage behind. Nancy and the Northgates losing a girl who, for all her selfish, silly ways brought joy into their lives. Shawn White’s children growing up without their dad. Amy separated from her dad. Or the Marshalls spending what should have been their love-filled retirement years in prison.

  The least-damaging scenario was that Shawn had killed Drew because he was going to prison for his crimes anyway, but try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to finagle him into the role of Drew’s killer.

  My hand shook so much that I practically poked my screen, trying to point to the car. “Zoom in. That car belongs to the Marshalls.”

  Mark squinted at the screen. “How can you be sure?” He zoomed in on the driver. “Even close up the faces are too shadowy to see, and you can’t see the license plate from this angle.”

  Neither of those were what I needed to see. I put my own hand on the trackpad and moved the center of the enlarged image toward the back window of the car. There it was. “I’m sure. Their car has the same decal in the same place.”

  “It’s the Cincinnati Bengals,” Mark said. “Is that where they’re from?”

  I nodded.

  “Even if we can figure out why this picture would motivate murder, I thought you’d already ruled the Marshalls out,” Mark said. “The handwriting didn’t match.”

  The shock was wearing off, and the pieces were trying to fall together in my brain almost faster than I could catch them.

  “I checked his handwriting, but not hers, because we were assuming it was a man. Even the fact that the note was handwritten fits. Mandy doesn’t have an office center with a printer for her guests, and they couldn’t very well ask her to print the note off for them. She would have read it. If we can figure out the why behind this, Chief McTavish can bring them back in for questioning and ask for a handwriting sample. They had to be in this together.” I rubbed at my ribs more out of habit than pain. “When was the picture taken?”

  Mark right-clicked on the image and opened the box that showed all the information the image was automatically tagged with, including the date and time. It’d been taken less than a week before Drew’s murder, but before his conversation with Amy. Based on what I knew of when the Marshalls came to town, the picture was likely taken the evening they arrived. That could be easily checked with Mandy if necessary.

  I was probably a fool, but I was still hoping it wasn’t necessary.

  I enlarged the image again, but it turned grainy. I’d zoomed in too far. I backed it out again.

  A thin bit of silver by the man in front of the car caught my eye. A black, ball-shaped object lay on the ground beside it.

  Dear God, it couldn’t be. It looked like a small part of a person and bicycle handlebars. Like they’d hit someone. “Do you remember what day that boy was injured by the hit-and-run driver a couple weeks ago?”

  Mark gave me a where-did-that-come-from look. I touched my finger to the screen beside where he should look. It wasn’t obvious. If we hadn’t been zoomed in so closely, I might not have noticed it.

  “I’m not sure,” Mark said. “He didn’t end up on my slab, but there was an article about it in the paper.”

  He typed the address of the Fair Haven Weekly into my Internet browser and clicked back two issues. Since that week’s issue came out before Drew’s murder, the hit-and-run accident made the featured story.

  Not only did the date match the one on Drew’s photo, but the estimated time fit with the time on the picture.

  Mark slumped back into the couch and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. If they’d called it in, they’d have been fine. The kid admitted to riding out into the street from the alleyway without looking. Now they’re facing jail time for this, even aside from Drew’s murder.”

  Mr. Marshall’s words came back to me as if he stood in the room. I’m not going to let anything take her away from me again.

  I moved the photo around to
show the driver again.

  The driver was a woman. Mrs. Marshall wasn’t allowed to drive. The doctor pulled her license because of her seizures. My throat spasmed shut. They couldn’t call the police and tell the truth. If they’d been thinking clearly, they might have been able to pretend Ted Marshall had been driving instead of Janet, but no one’s thinking clearly right after hitting someone with their car. I could vouch for that personally.

  I closed my laptop lid. I couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.

  Something else was also niggling at the back of my mind. Something Mr. Marshall said about a change in their plans. “What day is it?”

  “Thursday. Why?”

  “The Marshalls are about to leave the country.”

  23

  Mark dialed Chief McTavish for the second time. He wasn’t answering. He left a message and dialed again.

  “What time is check-out at The Sunburnt Arms?” he asked while listening to the call ring.

  “Eleven. If they planned to fly out of the Grand Rapids airport…”

  “…they could be gone already,” Mark finished for me.

  I typed non-extradition countries USA into my search bar and read the results. If they traveled to a non-extradition country, there’d be nothing anyone could do to bring them back to stand trial for Drew’s murder. “Crap. The Maldives don’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.”

  Mark tapped the cancel-call icon on his phone. “I’ll try Erik.” He dialed with his thumb. “Would they really leave everything behind? I’m assuming they have a house? Family?”

  They might have both those things, but Ted Marshall had made it clear where his priorities lay when I spoke with him shortly after Drew’s murder. He couldn’t let anything happen to Janet, and he couldn’t stand to lose her. If staying together meant leaving everything, I didn’t doubt he’d do it. “Family could visit them. The rest is only stuff.”

  Mark held up his pointer finger and said something into his phone. He must have gotten through to Erik.

  In my Internet search bar, I typed flights from Gerald R Ford Intl to Maldives. Each result said the same thing—no non-stop flights. I clicked through to one of the links that listed the actual possible flight times and routes. Bingo. “Tell Erik all the flights from Grand Rapids have a layover in Chicago. They might still be able to contact the authorities there and catch them if they’re on the plane already.”

  I woke up hours later with a kink in my neck, the movie Mark and I decided to watch since I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep playing on the TV, and Mark reaching across me.

  He snagged his phone from the end table and answered it. “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll put you on speaker. Nikki will want to hear this too.”

  He turned the TV off, tapped the phone’s screen, and rested the phone on his knee.

  “I’ll be a gentleman and not ask what you’re doing at Nicole’s house at two in the morning,” Erik’s voice said from the phone.

  “He’s sleeping on my couch until I’m well enough to be on my own.” I massaged the side of my neck, but the knot wouldn’t let go. Though if Erik was right about the time, it was no wonder. “Did you catch them?”

  “Not personally, but the Chicago PD has them in custody.”

  I didn’t know whether to roll my eyes at his precision or let loose a Velma-esque happy wiggle that they hadn’t escaped.

  “They faxed us a handwriting sample from Janet Marshall, and it matched,” Erik continued. “And we were able to get their car from where they abandoned it at the airport. There’s only a small ding in the front fender, but that’s consistent with the hit-and-run with the biker. Whoever hit him barely clipped his front tire, so we didn’t expect the vehicle to show much damage. Along with the pictures from Drew Harris and the handwriting match, though, it was enough. Janet Marshall confessed to hitting the kid, and Ted Marshall confessed to murdering Drew. They ransacked Drew and Holly’s homes together looking for the pictures Drew took.”

  I hadn’t expected them to cave so easily, but they weren’t hardened criminals. That’s part of what was so upsetting about it all. They were normal people who made some very bad choices—like allowing Janet to drive when she shouldn’t have. “Did they say how the hit-and-run happened?”

  “Yeah. Ted Marshall got tired on the drive up here and started to fall asleep at the wheel. Since they were so close and there wasn’t really anywhere they could stop to sleep until they reached Fair Haven, his wife offered to drive. They thought it wouldn’t matter that she didn’t have a license for a short stretch, and it’d be safer than Ted continuing on. When the kid rode right out in front of her and got hit, they panicked. The fall knocked the kid unconscious, but he was still breathing, so they figured he’d be okay and it wouldn’t hurt anyone for them to just leave.”

  Mark took over massaging my neck for me. His touch made concentrating on what Erik was saying difficult, but I didn’t want him to stop. He was succeeding at working out the tense muscle where I’d failed.

  “Except that Drew saw it happen,” Mark said.

  “And tried to blackmail them for it,” I added.

  Erik grunted an agreement. “Drew told them to take the tour that day and bring the money. Our best guess is he thought they must have a lot of money because they were tourists. He asked for an amount the Marshalls had no way of paying. They weren’t struggling anywhere like the Powerses or Drew and Holly’s families, but Janet’s medical expenses meant they didn’t have money to throw around, either.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. It felt like a bad joke. Drew had tried to extort money from the Marshalls to help with George Powers’ medical bills, but the Marshalls couldn’t pay him off because of Janet’s medical bills.

  That’s the part of it all that still didn’t make sense to me. “Did they tell Drew why they couldn’t pay? Surely he wouldn’t have still insisted on the payoff once he knew.”

  “They did, and he didn’t.” Erik sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. “But he made the mistake of telling them he’d have to take what he knew to the police instead.”

  The rest was easy enough to figure out. “I’m surprised the Marshalls stayed in town afterward. I would have thought they’d leave right away rather than sticking around.”

  “I wondered about that, too,” Erik said, “so I asked the Chicago PD to question them about it. Turns out they stayed after the hit-and-run because they wanted to be sure the kid was okay. Then after they killed Drew, they thought it’d be too suspicious if they left right away. When you didn’t believe Holly had done it and started asking questions, they decided to send you that note to try to stop you, and they booked plane tickets as a back-up plan. They didn’t want to leave behind their life here if they didn’t have to.”

  Mark stopped rubbing my neck, and I leaned into him. As much as I loved Mark, I couldn’t fathom allowing someone else to go to prison for something he’d done. It wasn’t right.

  My lawyer’s mind finally woke up enough to kick in. “All charges against Holly should be dropped, and she should be released.”

  “Chief McTavish is already working on it. She’ll be out first thing in the morning.”

  24

  The next morning, Nancy picked me up in her car and brought me along with her so I could be there when Holly was officially released.

  Holly practically threw herself at her parents, and the hugging spilled over to Nancy and myself.

  “I’m taking them all out to brunch to celebrate,” Nancy said to me when Holly let me go. “You’re more than welcome to join us. We have Holly back, thanks to you.”

  I glanced sidelong at where Holly and Daisy stood wrapped in each other’s arms again. “I appreciate it, but I think this should be a family—” I almost said celebration, but that didn’t seem right given that there’d be a lot of grieving Holly and her parents still needed to do over Drew in the coming days and months. “Family event. If you could drop me off at Cavanaugh Funeral Home on your way, I�
��d appreciate it.”

  Because the county had a small budget for their police departments, Mark’s office as medical examiner was an office at his family’s funeral home that the county rented. Now that Holly was free, I couldn’t put off meeting his parents and apologizing to his mom for the whole I-threw-up-on-you incident. The longer I waited, the more time my nerves would have to turn me into a neurotic woman who was sure to embarrass herself even more…assuming that was possible. I was hoping Mark would call them and ask them to go out to dinner with us tonight. That would give me time to prepare, and I should be able to show up looking presentable and without poison in my system.

  Nancy agreed to drop me off, and the Northgates thanked me one more time.

  “Could you guys pull up the cars?” Holly asked when they finished. “I want to talk to Nicole by myself.”

  The grown-ups left, and Holly turned her cell phone over and back again in her hands. “I need to ask your advice about something. You won’t tell my parents I asked, right? It’s still under the lawyer-client confidentiality thingy?”

  My stomach twisted. Surely she couldn’t have committed a different crime. This was starting to feel like the case that wouldn’t end. “You’re an adult. Whatever you tell me stays between us.”

  She glanced out the doorway as if making sure her parents weren’t coming up behind her. “Drew didn’t have a will or anything like that, but his mom wants me to take the money he’d been saving and use it for school. With what he’d saved so far, I’d be able to pay for my first couple years at least, and I could work during that time to pay for the rest.”