by Emily James
A heavy weight settled on my chest. Russ had a point. If I wasn’t subtle about this, I could leave a black spot on the reputation of someone who had nothing to do with Uncle Stan’s death. I didn’t want that.
But maybe I could use my outsider status to my advantage. I was Stan’s grieving niece. Wouldn’t people want to tell me all their stories, the same way Russ had wanted to share the goofy story about locking themselves in the sugar shack? And since I planned to move here, I had good reason to want to know more about the ins and outs of the town.
I couldn’t simply walk up to a stranger on the street and start quizzing them, though. I’d have to begin with the people I’d already met. Like Fay. It was time to take her up on that invitation to visit.
8
After finishing my tour of Sugarwood, I walked the twenty minutes from The Sunburnt Arms to Fay’s house, the jar of maple butter I’d selected from Sugarwood’s store as a gift tucked into my purse.
My car still wasn’t ready, and Quantum Mechanics was closed on Sunday, so I’d be carless for at least another day. Russ had offered to chauffeur me around, but I had to try to acclimate to the northern weather sooner or later. Instead, we had plans to have supper together tomorrow night.
I’d half expected things between us to be awkward after my attempt to pull information out of him, but the rest of my tour had been like being with an old friend. We’d swapped more stories about Uncle Stan, and I’d learned about making maple syrup candy. If my waistline could handle it, I suspected I’d spend most of my time dealing with the store and pancake house and leave the actual production elements to Russ and the other staff.
I checked the map I’d printed off one more time and turned down Orchard Street. The Wilsons’ house nestled at the end of a cul-de-sac with what must have been a beautiful view of the lake from a back balcony if they had one.
I knocked on the door and Fay answered immediately. She didn’t look any healthier than when I’d seen her at the funeral. If anything, more of the color was gone from her face.
She ushered me inside. “Carl’s at the office again today, so it’s lovely to have company. Since he insisted I quit working, it gets quite lonely at times.”
She led me into a sunny kitchen decorated in yellows and whites. She’d laid out the table with shortbread cookies and crackers next to a jar of maple syrup butter.
“I thought you’d like to try some of your Uncle Stan’s products,” Fay said. “Coffee or tea?”
I gave her the jar I’d brought, which we had a good laugh over, and settled in with a cup of coffee that was substantially better than the strong-enough-to-grow-chest-hair-on-a-woman brew served at The Sunburnt Arms. If I had a firstborn child, I might have traded them away for a grande non-fat mocha latte from Starbucks. I didn’t know all of Fair Haven, but I’d yet to see a Starbucks anywhere.
Fifteen minutes into our visit, Fay stopped mid-sentence and pressed a hand to her chest.
I jumped to my feet, but she waved me away.
“It’ll pass.” She leaned back in her chair and drew in a long breath. “That time it felt like butterflies were in my heart trying to break out.”
I eased back into my chair, but stayed on the edge. “And the doctors don’t know what’s wrong?”
Fay pushed her plate away from her, as if she’d lost interest in what was on it. “My doctor has no idea. Stan was looking through all my files and was trying to help solve the mystery. But then…” She shrugged. “I have more than one reason to miss him.”
Her doctor belonged on my list of suspects—a list of one so far. Maybe he’d made a mistake and didn’t want Stan to find out about it. A misdiagnosis could hurt a doctor’s career, couldn’t it? “Your doctor didn’t mind someone else stepping in?”
“Not that I know of. Once I told him who I wanted to bring in to consult, he called your uncle himself. He copied all my medical records and sent them to Stan without even charging me for it.”
That didn’t sound much like a man who had something big enough to hide that he’d kill over it. It sounded more like a doctor who truly cared about his patients.
More color had drained from Fay’s face, and dark circles ringed her eyes.
Tension spiraled through my shoulders. “Should I call someone for you?”
Fay shook her head. “But I think I might need to cut our visit short and ask if you’d help me to the couch.”
I packed away the treats where Fay told me and washed out our cups. We only touched on the topic I’d really wanted to talk to her about today, but I wasn’t about to put her health at risk. Uncle Stan was gone. A few more days one way or another wouldn’t matter to him now.
Fay had two inches or more in height on me, so I ducked under her arm and supported her to the couch. I jogged back to the kitchen and poured her a glass of water. I left it and her cell phone within easy reach.
Fay grabbed my hand. “Thank you for coming today. People around here…they mean well, but I think they only see my illness anymore. It was nice to be talked to like a person for a while rather than like a sick person.”
“It was my pleasure.”
And it was. The longer I spent in Fair Haven, the more I got to know the people, the more I liked it here. I could see why Uncle Stan loved this place.
It made it all the more disturbing that one of them had killed him.
I slung my purse over my shoulder. Before I left, I wanted to clear up one quick thing that had been niggling at me. “How did you know Uncle Stan used to be a cardiologist? It doesn’t seem like he told many people here about it.” Not even Mark, who was a doctor himself.
Red blotches bloomed in the middle of Fay’s pale cheeks, giving her the appearance of a clown in faded make-up. “I was out walking, on one of the trails at Sugarwood. I overheard Stan arguing with someone. I pieced together that it was the son of a former patient of his. I was curious, so I searched for his name on the computer when I got home.”
No one reached the heights in their medical career that Uncle Stan had without losing a few patients along the way. Especially since he’d built his reputation on taking high-risk and unusual cases.
The weight that had been crushing my shoulders eased. Maybe someone here hadn’t killed him. Maybe an angry family member of a former patient had tracked him down. I liked that theory much better. “How long ago was this?”
Fay shrugged. “A couple of weeks at most.” She rubbed at the spot above her heart again. “I truly am sorry we had to end our visit so soon. How about we plan for a raincheck? Once your car is running again, I could show you around town.” She rolled her eyes. “I’d drive myself, but my doctor pulled my license.”
I smiled at her, but it hurt something inside. There was a reason, beyond my parents and my tendency to faint at the sight of blood, that I’d chosen a legal career over a medical one. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing people. A doctor invested so much time into finding ways to keep their patients healthy. How did every death not feel like a soul-crushing failure?
Instead of saying any of that, I said, “It’s a date.”
I turned to go, but Fay took my hand again. “You don’t think the man I heard arguing with Stan killed him do you?” She pursed her lips. “Carl told me about the investigation being reopened.”
Since she already knew and she was the wife of the chief, I couldn’t think of any reason not to be honest with her. “I don’t know, but I’m going to dig around and hopefully find out.”
Fay tightened her hold. It seemed like a pattern with her, like it was how she sought connection. Thankfully this time I’d left my emerald ring behind.
“Be careful,” she said. “And let me know what you find out, will you?”
I nodded and slipped out the door. Russ’ poor reaction to my questions had left me without a confidante on my quest. As much as I wanted to share what I was doing with Mark—we’d started out on this quest together—he was a married man, and experience had taught me the danger
s lurking there.
Any married man who flirted with a woman who wasn’t his wife couldn’t be trusted. And I already had a town full of people I couldn’t trust.
9
After turning off of Fay’s street, I hurried back to my B&B. As I’d discovered during my attempt to book a room before driving up here, Fair Haven had only one place for travelers to stay during the off-season—The Sunburnt Arms. Since Uncle Stan’s angry visitor had been here not that long ago, they must have stayed at the same place I was.
Fay’s information couldn’t have come at a better time. Since Uncle Stan’s house was mine now, I had to get over my twitchiness about it being the spot where he died. Chief Wilson’s crime scene investigators had finished their second sweep of Uncle Stan’s house, and they’d released it for me to move in to, which I planned to do tomorrow. If I’d already left the B&B, it’d look suspicious for me to go back and poke around.
I jogged up the front steps of The Sunburnt Arms and slowed to a casual walk as I entered. Instead of heading for my room, I settled in to one of the cushy armchairs in the lobby and acted like I was checking messages on my phone.
Other than the amenities needed to attract guests, The Sunburnt Arms had tried to keep as much old-world charm as possible. The room key I’d been given was an actual key, not a key card. And even though they had a credit card machine for processing payments and a computer to track everything, they also had an old-fashioned guest book laid out on the check-in counter. When I’d first arrived, the desk clerk insisted I sign it.
So if I could get my hands on the guest book, I’d have some leads to follow up on as to who Uncle Stan’s unhappy visitor was—assuming he’d stayed overnight. I doubted anyone would drive roundtrip from Northern Virginia to Michigan and back without an overnight stay, but I suppose it was theoretically possible if one wanted to drink a lot of caffeine.
So how could I get possession of the guest book?
I glanced up from my phone. The guy behind the desk this afternoon wasn’t one of the regular weekday staff I’d chatted with before. It wasn’t like he was going to hand it over to me and let me take pictures of all the pages. That had to violate some privacy law or something, assuming the laws here were anything like the ones in Virginia. I might have had a chance anyway if the clerk on duty was Mandy. Mandy was in her sixties and seemed to have a new mystery novel in her hands every time I walked by. I might have been able to convince her to help me in my amateur sleuthing. But whoever he was, he certainly was no Mandy.
This guy was somewhere in his mid-twenties, with acne scars and too much gel in his hair. If I had any game, I might have tried flirting with him to sneak a peek at the book, but my attempts at flirting looked a little too much like an ostrich trying to learn to dance. I’d been told by friends back home that it was actually painful to watch.
That left me with the option of luring him away from the desk.
I left the lobby and went down the hallway until I reached the staircase. I needed to find a space to wait where I could see him go by, but I also needed to be close enough to run back to the desk before he returned.
There weren’t any guest rooms on the first floor, only the lobby out front and the dining room, kitchen, and laundry at the back. If I camped out in any of the rooms at the back, I wouldn’t know for sure when he passed, and I couldn’t call him for help from the lobby.
I turned in a slow circle. The hall didn’t even have a large potted plant to hide behind. It did have what was probably a janitor’s closet built in under the stairs.
I tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked.
There also wasn’t very much room. I wiggled in around a stack of buckets and straddled a vacuum. I eased the door shut.
My eyes adjusted slowly to the dark, giving me plenty of time to hear my mother’s voice in my head. This isn’t what we do, Nicole. Lawyers don’t hide in closets.
I told her to shut it—something I’d never dare to do in real life—and dialed the front desk.
“Sunburnt Arms. This is Tim. How can I help you today?”
I’d been so focused on finding a place to hide that I hadn’t planned out how, exactly, to convince him to leave the front desk.
“Uhhh, yes, this is Room 5. I think my…bathroom tap might be broken.”
I shifted around and something sharp poked me in the butt cheek. I yelped.
“Are you alright?” Tim’s voice asked.
Crap. “Yeah, I just turned the water on too hot.”
“I thought the tap was broken.”
I was apparently as bad a liar as I was a flirt. “It is. I mean the cold water isn’t working. When I turn it on, I get hot water.”
“Right.” His voice had that careful tone people tended to use with someone who was talking crazy. “I’ll call a plumber, and we’ll get it fixed for you as soon as possible.”
“No.” It was more a screech than anything. This was not going well. Next time I planned to lie, I was going to come up with something really good ahead of time and think through all the possible ways it could go wrong. “I was hoping you could just come up and check it for me…In case, I’m doing it wrong.”
I face-palmed. By tomorrow the whole town would have heard the story about Stan’s stupid niece who didn’t know how to turn on a tap. Perfect, Nikki. Just perfect.
“Okaaay.” He stretched the word out, giving it extra syllables, like he was thinking over whether or not I was crazy enough to be a threat to his safety. “Room 5, you said.”
“Yes. Room 5.”
“I’ll be right up.”
I slumped against the vacuum. It tipped forward and I slammed my forehead into a mop handle. I bit my cheek to keep from crying out and giving myself away.
Note to self: Clumsy people should never hide in broom closets. It had the same odds of turning out badly as handing a child a pair of scissors and asking them to run an obstacle course.
Clumping footsteps passed overhead. It had to be Tim heading up to my room.
I wouldn’t have long. He might only knock once or twice before giving up when I didn’t answer.
I burst out of the broom closet, half tripping over the bucket, skidded down the hallway, and stopped just shy of ramming into the front desk. I spun the guest book around and flipped the page over.
I hadn’t been paying attention when I signed in. This book was new. My signature was on the back of the first page. The dates on the front of the page were all too recent.
Where would they keep the older guest books? Would they keep them? I had to think that a place like this would hang on to the old books as a badge of honor or something like that. What other reason could there be for making people sign them?
I pivoted around. The books weren’t on the shelves behind me.
Tim would be back any second now. My heart pounded in my chest so hard it felt like it was going to burst out like the creature in Alien. Not that I’d ever seen that movie—I didn’t like anything that kept me awake at night—but I’d heard about it.
Focus, Nicole. I gave myself a mental shake. You’re panicking.
I opened the cupboard below the check-in desk. Jackpot. I pulled out the top book and quickly checked the dates. It was the one I needed, but I was out of time to take pictures on my phone of the right pages.
I’d have to take it with me. No one would know it was missing, and I could—somehow—return it later.
I straightened up and came face to face with Mark across the desk.
I gasped and dropped the guest book. It hit the floor with a bang.
“What are you doing?” Mark asked at the same time as Tim’s voice came from the hallway saying, “What’s going on out there?”
I snatched the book back up, skittered around the desk, and grabbed Mark’s hand, dragging him outside and down the porch steps. I pulled him around the corner and behind the juniper bushes.
The space between the building and the junipers was tighter than I’d expected. My back and o
ne leg ended up wedged against Mark. Warmth flooded my body and my stomach pitched sideways. Somehow I was still holding his hand. I dropped it.
The front door creaked open and Tim’s distinctive clumpy steps crossed the wooden porch.
Mark shifted behind me. “What the h—”
I twisted my arm backward and jammed my fingers across his lips. My mind might have been playing tricks on me, but I’d swear I felt him smile.
The heat in my stomach moved up into my face. This was going to be incredibly awkward to explain afterward.
With Mark’s chest pressed against my back, I could feel every breath he took. Tim couldn’t have taken more than ten or fifteen seconds before he went back inside, but it felt like a whole lot longer.
Finally the front door creaked again, and I exhaled the breath I’d been holding. I wormed my way out from behind the bush.
Mark picked a piece of juniper out of his collar. His mouth quirked a little, but I didn’t know him well enough to figure out whether he was amused or ready to haul me back inside to account for my crimes. “Want to tell me what that was about now?”
I instinctively clasped the guest book to my chest. “It’s a long story.”
He made a go-on gesture with his hand.
For the first time it hit me that what I’d done could be considered theft, even though when I’d taken the book I’d thought of it as borrowing. That didn’t make it much better, since joyriding was still a crime. All the heat drained from my body, and the words shot out of me. “I borrowed…stole a guest book. I’m not going to keep it. I just needed to look at the guests in it to figure out who visited Uncle Stan this month—”
Mark loosened my grip on the book and took my hand in his. “Slow down. Take a deep breath and start again.”
I did what he told me, though it was almost impossible to slow my heart rate down when he was holding my hand, and started over, this time from what Chief Wilson said about not having the manpower to chase after a case that would almost undoubtedly go cold. All the way up to nabbing the book.