Sour Cherry Turnover

by P. D. Workman

  Jeremy looked over at it, reading the screen. “Unknown caller.”

  “I hate those… I don’t answer them, but I always wonder. Late at night like this, no one should be calling. It has to be important, right? It’s not just a curious client hoping I’ll make cupcakes for a birthday party.”

  “You don’t need to answer it. If the person won’t let you see their caller ID, that’s their problem.”

  Erin pressed her lips together anxiously. She wanted to do the right thing, and she was too worried to let the call go to voicemail in case it was something important and she was really needed. If it was just a spam call, she could hang up.

  She took a breath and picked up the phone. She swiped it to answer the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Send your friend Jeremy out and no one will get hurt.”

  Erin stopped breathing. She looked at Jeremy. “What?” she squeaked.

  “You heard me. We want to see the traitor. Face-to-face. You shouldn’t be protecting him.”

  “I’m… I’m not doing anything wrong…”

  “Tell Jeremy we want to talk to him.”

  Erin shook her head emphatically. “No.”

  Jeremy was staring at her, his brows drawn down, unable to hear the voice on the other end.

  Erin tried to analyze the voice. Terry was going to ask her to describe it. But she knew by the robotic quality of the voice that it had been altered. It didn’t matter whether it sounded like a man or a woman, it could be totally different in real life.

  “Who is it?” Jeremy asked urgently.

  Erin pulled the phone away from her face and deliberately pressed her finger over the smooth glass of the screen, ending the call. If the caller thought that she was going to listen to them threaten Jeremy, they were wrong. He was her guest and she wasn’t turning him over to some psychopath to do whatever they wanted with him.

  “Erin. What was all that about?” Jeremy demanded.

  “Wrong number,” Erin said tersely. She tapped until she found Terry’s speed dial, and tapped it.

  “Wrong number? You don’t talk like that with someone who calls a wrong number.”

  “No,” Erin admitted, “you don’t.”

  “Then who…?”

  Terry answered his phone as soon as it rang on his end. “Erin? What’s wrong?”

  “I just got a threatening phone call. On my cell phone. Could somebody trace it? Could you come here? You’ll need backup. At least, I think you will. He said ‘we’ like there was more than one of them…”

  “More than one of who, Erin? What exactly was this call about? Was it something to do with Don Inglethorpe’s death?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. Can you come?”

  “I’m on my way. I’ll get the others dispatched. But you need to tell me what you can about what we’re walking into. Do you have some reason to believe that this person is going to hurt you? Did they utter threats? Do you know who it is?”

  He gave a quiet command to K9, and Erin heard him start the engine of his car. He called the dispatcher on his police radio. He’d stay on the phone all the way over to her house to make sure she stayed calm and was safe.

  “It’s… they’re threatening someone else. I’ll explain better to you when you get here. But they said they wanted me to send out… this other person and to turn him over to them. But I’m not going to do that.”

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t expect you to.”

  His engine raced in the background. Erin waited to hear the sound of his siren or engine approaching the house. She really wanted to know that he was there and would protect her. He and the others in the police department. She tried to shake loose any fear that they wouldn’t be able to handle it. Of course they could handle it. There probably wasn’t even more than one person involved. The caller was just saying ‘we’ to scare her. To make himself sound stronger and more threatening.

  “Who is there with you, Erin?” Terry asked quietly.

  “It’s… Jeremy, Vic’s brother.”

  “Jeremy?” Terry’s voice was surprised. “When did he get there?”

  Erin didn’t bother trying to answer that one. Jeremy was looking at her, shocked that she had revealed his identity to the police. Now what was going to happen to him? She didn’t know what kind of trouble he was in, but with murder and drug running and maybe all-out drug war going on, Erin wasn’t about to keep quiet. They needed to know everything in order to act. They had to know everything there was about the situation.

  Jeremy didn’t run away. Maybe he was worried about what was going to happen the minute he walked out the door. Maybe he wanted to stay and make sure that she was okay. Or maybe he just didn’t know what to do.

  “Sorry,” Erin breathed. She shook her head. “I really… don’t know what else to do.”

  “You’re doing the right thing,” Terry said firmly in her ear. He didn’t ask her what Jeremy was doing there. Would he assume that Jeremy had just gotten there? Or as soon as Erin had said it, did he understand that Jeremy had been there for several days and Erin had been lying about it or avoiding telling him what was going on?

  “Almost there, Erin,” Terry said calmly. “Can you tell me if the burglar alarm is set?”

  “Yes… I set it.”

  “So, no one is going to get into the house?”

  “No. I mean… I don’t think so, but last time they did. There’s no one inside yet.” She looked at Jeremy for confirmation. She needed to know that there was no one else there. That the two of them were alone.

  “No one,” Jeremy confirmed. He walked to the doorway of the bedroom and looked toward the living room. “We would know it if someone had broken in.”

  “Okay. No one else here,” Erin told Terry.

  She could hear his car then. No siren, but she could hear the roar of his engine and then he skidded to a stop outside the house. She waited. He said he would call the others as well. She didn’t want him to get hurt. He had been dead in her dream. Had she just put him in the crosshairs of someone who was willing to kill for what he wanted?

  “I’m here, Erin. I don’t see anyone. But I might have spooked them pulling up.”

  “Wait for backup. Don’t get out yet,” Erin begged him. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I won’t. It’s okay. There’s no immediate danger that I can see. As soon as it’s clear, I’ll come inside, and we’ll talk about what happened and how to protect you.”

  “I’m more worried about you.”

  Terry chuckled. “No need to worry about me. I’m just fine.”

  Erin looked at Jeremy. He knew about Erin’s dream. Was it a premonition? Precognition? Had she known what was going to happen before it did?

  But she tried not to read anything into it. After all, in her dream, the body had been in The Bake Shoppe’s kitchen, not in her bedroom or somewhere else in the house. And he’d been beaten with the rolling pin. While she did have a rolling pin in the house, it wasn’t a big heavy one like the marble rolling pin she had lost and that had been in the dream. Whoever wielded it as a weapon would need a lot of strength to do the kind of damage that Don Inglethorpe had suffered.

  “Here come the others,” Terry advised.

  It was a moment before Erin could hear the other vehicles, but then she heard them pull up to the house, one of them behind and another one in front. Terry coordinated the approach and they cleared the front and back yards and checked the doors to the garage and Vic’s apartment before Terry knocked on the front door. Vic hadn’t come out of her apartment, so Erin assumed that she had been told to wait there.

  Erin went to the door and opened it. She fell into Terry’s arms.

  “Thank you so much for coming. I was so scared.” She felt his arms go around her and hold her tight. Everything on his utility belt was jabbing into her stomach and body, but Erin didn’t care. For the first few minutes, she just wanted to be held and to know that he was safe and so was she.
>
  “I had a dream,” she murmured into his chest. “I dreamed that you were hurt…”

  “I’m fine, Erin. You didn’t call me because of a dream, did you? You said that someone was outside? Someone called you?”

  “I don’t know who it was. They used a voice changer. You can try to trace the caller, right? It said unknown, though, so it was blocked. I just don’t know if you’ll be able to find out who it was.”

  “Well, let’s get all of the facts established first. Can I come in?”

  Erin gave a little laugh and stepped back. “Yes, of course, come in.”

  They entered and sat down on the couch. Erin cuddled up to Terry’s warm, strong body, looking for comfort. Jeremy reluctantly joined them, ducking his head low at Terry’s questioning look. Terry looked at Erin, kissing the top of her head. “I suppose we should also get Vic in here? Does she know what’s going on?”

  “She doesn’t know what happened. I just called you.”

  “But she knows that Jeremy is here?”

  Erin swallowed and nodded.

  “Am I the only one who didn’t know about this?”

  “No,” Erin protested. “Vic and I are the only ones who know. Not anyone else.”

  “How long?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “He’s been staying with you since last Wednesday?”

  “Yes. Wednesday night.”

  Erin felt like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. And one that she knew very well she wasn’t supposed to be sticking her hand into. But she had gone and done it anyway.

  She had lied to him and hidden things from him. How would he be able to trust her again?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  T

  erry clicked his radio. “Bring Vic into the house.”

  There was a brief acknowledgment from Tom, and in a few minutes, he was leading Vic into the house in her nightgown and housecoat. Vic’s eyes were wide and worried. “What happened? Is everybody okay?” Her eyes went to Jeremy, but she didn’t know what to expect.

  “Everyone is okay,” Terry confirmed. “There was a threatening phone call, and Erin called me. Exactly what I would expect her to do. Unlike lying to me about Jeremy living at the house. How long did you think you were going to be able to keep that charade going?”

  “I’ve been looking for a place of my own,” Jeremy said. “I wasn’t planning on staying here forever. Just for a few days. The lies are my fault. I asked them to please not let anyone know that I was staying here. I was worried… I wanted to keep it a secret.”

  “They had their own free will. They didn’t have to agree to any terms or conditions they didn’t want to.”

  “I wouldn’t turn my own brother out,” Vic protested.

  “If he dictated terms that you were weren’t willing to comply with, you would not have let him stay.”

  Vic looked for a way around that argument, her face getting red. “It’s my fault too,” she told him. “Erin wouldn’t have agreed to keep it a secret if I hadn’t asked her to.”

  “I think Erin is fully capable of making her own choices,” Terry said slowly. “She’s a big girl. She has a mind of her own—as we all know.”

  Erin felt her own face getting hot. The way that he said it, it was hard not to automatically fight back. But he had every right to be bitter and disappointed in her. She had chosen someone else’s wishes over telling him the full truth.

  “So this is why…” Terry started out. He looked at Erin. She felt tears springing up to her eyes and wanted to tell him that what he was thinking was not true. She hadn’t just suggested that they go out to a movie and then to his house because she was trying to distract him and lead him away from Jeremy.

  “This is… why I didn’t want you staying over,” she admitted. “Why I said we should go to your place instead. Because I wanted privacy.”

  “Jeremy would have given us privacy,” Terry said. “It was more than that.”

  He was obviously hurt. Erin couldn’t think of what to say to make it better. Terry’s face was frozen like a mask. He looked at Jeremy. “I think you’re the one we need to hear from. You’re the one who knows what’s going on here. Why exactly did you want to stay here and why didn’t you want anyone to know about it?”

  “I’m trying to find my own way,” Jeremy said, sticking to the story he had told Vic and Erin. “I just needed somewhere to crash while I figured out what to do with my life. I need to get my own place… and a job… There’s a lot to do before you can really get established independently.”

  Terry rolled his eyes. “What a load of crap. No one has to hide out because they’re looking for a new job. Try again.”

  Erin had been feeling much the same way. She was pleased that she was finally going to hear the real story. She was proud of Terry for also recognizing that the story Jeremy was telling them didn’t make sense. There had to be more to it.

  Jeremy sat there, his hands folded, staring down at them.

  “I do want to get out. I do want to get out on my own and be my own person.”

  Terry nodded and waited. The silence grew out uncomfortably long. Vic did her best to coax Jeremy on. “Come on, Jer. We’re your friends. Tell us what’s going on.”

  “Things at home…” he darted a glance at Vic. “Things haven’t been good.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “It’s just that… now that we’re all getting older, we’re supposed to be getting more responsible… taking more on… being better contributors.”

  Erin nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “Only… that didn’t mean just taking on more chores at the farm. The farm hasn’t been operating at full potential for a long time.”

  “What?”

  “We still farm some,” Jeremy explained. “But the money that we make from the farm… That’s mostly just for show. You know: ‘This is how we make a living. Nothing suspicious about that, is there?’”

  “Who would you say that to? The police?”

  Jeremy hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. It was all for show… for the cops… any authorities who came around to make sure that everything was kosher. And Dad still loves the farm and likes taking care of the horses and other animals, and planting crops, and all of that stuff that…” Jeremy shrugged uncomfortably, “all the other stuff that we all really hate doing, because it’s so dang boring.”

  Vic nodded slowly. “I know it can be boring… but I thought you still did it. Daniel and Joseph… they aren’t running the farm? They aren’t taking over from Pa?”

  “They’ll take it over, but the farm isn’t ever going to be what it used to be. It’s just an excuse now. A front.”

  “A front for what?” Terry asked.

  “I guess you probably got that figured out already. A front for the Jackson clan.”

  “You’re going to have to be more clear about that,” Terry said slowly. “Tell me what kind of operations they’re running that your farm is covering for?”

  “The farm isn’t covering everything, It’s just a little part of the picture.”

  “Which is?”

  Jeremy swallowed and looked at Vic. “I’m not really ready to start talking about everything the clan is doing. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for that. Not unless I want to get myself killed.”

  “What were you expected to do? If you were not running the farm anymore, but were expected to take on more responsibility, then what are we talking about?”

  “Uh… whatever they asked… whatever they thought we could handle…” Jeremy gave an uncomfortable shrug. “I used to think that it was all a pretty good deal. We didn’t have to do anything much, but we got all of these perks from the clan. Money. Admiration. Whatever we wanted, really. We could go out and party and pretend for the girls that we were gangsters, and the clan would cover the drinks and the venue and whatever else… we could be the big fish. It was all a pretty good deal.”

  “Until they actually expected you to st
art paying dues. You were in debt to them and you had to do what they wanted.”

  “Yeah… pretty much.”

  “You were expected to do what you were told and not to argue about it.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Suddenly everything went from not doing anything, and getting whatever we wanted to… ‘you owe us big after all we’ve done for you.’ And without the farm to support us, how are we going to take care of Mom… what are they going to do to survive, now that all of that income from the farm has disappeared? If we even wanted to keep the farm, then we had to do some jobs… you need to hurt someone or make something right… take care of any little problems… and I don’t…” Jeremy’s voice choked up and he had difficulty going on. Erin felt tears in her own eyes. Jeremy was just a kid. Barely older than Vic. Barely an adult. But they had a tight grip on him, and they weren’t letting go.

  “So I thought… I’d come out here and stay with Vic. Make sure she was okay. She’s the only other family I’ve got… or the only family that I feel like I can trust who isn’t under the clan’s thumb… and so Vic and Erin said I could stay here in the house or with Vic. There was more space here, so that’s what I did. I didn’t think anyone would really care. No one would follow me.”

  “But it sounds like tonight, they did.” Terry looked down at Erin. “What did they say to you on the phone? Did they say it was about Jeremy? Did they threaten you or him?”

  “They said I should send him outside to talk to them. That he was a traitor and I should just send him out and they would take care of it.”

  “Did they threaten you?”

  “I…” Erin was having trouble recalling exactly what had been said. “I really don’t know. They wanted me to send Jeremy out. They knew him by name. They knew he was here.”

  “And you told them no? Did you ask them who they were? Why they wanted Jeremy?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’d just woken up from a nightmare and I was kind of freaked out. I was trying to calm myself down when the phone rang. I just didn’t know what to do, except to call you.”

  “It was the right thing to do,” Terry said. “I’m glad you didn’t hesitate to bring me into it once you knew there was danger.” His mouth was a long, thin line, completely serious with no hint of dimple or good humor. “I wish you had trusted me before this, but…”