I blinked at him. “Can you fit a television that big in there?”
He held his hands about six inches apart and made a shoving gesture with them. “Wedges in perfectly next to the fireplace. I factored that in when drawing up the blueprints.”
“Do you have any place to eat?” Sugar teased.
“Sure do.” He rotated his hands to his left. “TV tray next to the recliner.”
“I checked the dictionary for the definition of bachelor,” I told them. “It just says ‘Martin Reed.’”
Reed grinned as Honey directed us to two boxes on her small square dining table with two chairs pulled up to it. I tugged on a pair of latex gloves, and Reed took the station’s digital camera from the bag to document everything.
“Did you touch either doll?” I asked.
“I pulled mine out of the box,” Honey admitted and wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“I only uncovered mine,” Sugar said. “When we saw it was the same weird thing, we figured we’d better give you a call.” She paused and added, “This is Donovan, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “We think so.”
The box addressed to Sugar was closest. Reed took a picture of Sugar’s name on the label and then of the doll lying inside once I removed the tissue paper. As with the other dolls, this one was easily identifiable as Sugar. The hair was straight, long, gray blonde, and held back with a barrette. The body rounded as Sugar’s was from a lifetime of being around sweets. I didn’t have to search long to find the proposed murder method. The top left quadrant of the doll’s head was caved in as though having suffered a severe blow. When I picked the thing up to examine the back, a small rolling pin lay beneath it.
“How poetic,” Sugar grumbled with equal parts anger and fear. Her left hand absently raised to her left temple as though checking to make sure her head was still as it should be. “A baker dies from a whack to the head with a rolling pin.”
“We’re not going to let that happen,” I promised.
I put the first box into an evidence bag and moved on to the second. Reed, again, snapped pictures. Honey’s doll was similar, but the hair was reddish blonde and twisted up in a messy bun. The body wasn’t quite as plump as the Sugar doll. The skin had a blue tint.
“What are those little things?” Honey pointed at, but didn’t touch, tiny little items dangling from the hair and nose.
I leaned in closer. “They look like icicles.”
When I picked this doll up, I uncovered a small ice cream scoop and double-scoop ice cream cone. While Sugar took care of all the baked goods for the sweet shop, Honey made the ice cream. Donovan intended to kill her via exposure.
“I keep telling you we need to fix the handle on the walk-in freezer.” Honey paled and seemed completely serious as she glanced at her sister.
Sugar’s mouth dropped open, and then the two burst out laughing.
“I’m not sure,” I began, “if that hysterical laughter means you trust us to catch Donovan before he causes any real harm or that you’ve both completely lost it.”
Honey turned serious. “When our number is called, there’s not a lot we can do about it.”
“That said,” Sugar added, “we do trust you.”
“Do you need me for anything more, Sheriff?” Reed asked. “If not, I’m going to take all these creepy little things over to the station and put them in the evidence locker.”
“You’re going to lock up the dolls?” This started Honey giggling again. She held up her hands as though holding on to the bars of a jail cell. “Let me out. I swear it wasn’t me. It was my next-door neighbor.”
This set Sugar off.
I rolled my eyes and turned to Reed. “You can go. You’ll start documenting everything?”
“I’ll type up what I know,” he confirmed, “and you can fill in what I missed.”
“Perfect.” As he shoved his feet into his boots at the door, I added. “Make sure you keep the station doors locked. I know how focused you get on paperwork. With Donovan presumably wandering the village, let’s err on the side of caution.”
He gave a nervous-sounding chuckle. “You trying to scare me, boss?”
I lifted a shoulder. “If it keeps you safe, sure. I’ll be over there in a bit.”
Reed left with the camera bag over his shoulder and the bagged boxes under an arm.
Sugar pulled an extra dining chair from a corner up to the table. “Before you leave, why don’t you sit and have a chat with us.”
Honey stepped into the kitchen and returned seconds later with a tray holding a carafe of hot chocolate, three mugs, and a fruitcake. It must have been already prepared, as though they’d planned this before I arrived.
“What exactly is going on?” Sugar asked while her sister filled the mugs.
I knew she didn’t only mean the harlequins. Everything for Sugar had a bigger, more Universal attachment to it.
I accepted the cocoa but declined the fruitcake. I’d never been a fan. “I’m not sure, but if I had to guess, I’d say the events that started forty years ago are coming to a head.”
“Donovan’s taking revenge,” Sugar clarified.
“I think so.” I explained about the dolls Dad and the others had received.
“Why us?” Honey demanded. “None of us did anything. There’s only one person who should be on his list.”
Honey and Sugar knew Flavia had arranged the meeting of the Pack that night four decades earlier. I’d never told them my suspicion that Flavia and Donovan had paired up for Gran’s death.
“Flavia has probably locked herself in her cottage,” Honey grumbled while slicing a generous piece of cake for herself. “I can see her in her altar room, preparing some sort of banishing charm to keep Donovan from coming within twenty yards of her.”
I debated telling them about Flavia and Donovan’s possible pairing but decided to deal with one issue at a time. “Let’s hope we catch him, before any of these threats are acted upon. You two will stay together until I find him, right? Pick one of your cottages or come stay at Pine Time. We’ve got room.” I swallowed a mouthful of really good hot cocoa. Almost better than Morgan’s. “This is fantastic. What did you do to it?”
Honey shrugged. “Infused it with a simple protection charm. It will keep you safe so you can keep the rest of us safe.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. She meant well, but to me this was akin to slipping roofies into someone’s drink. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from drinking more of the cocoa. “Back to my previous point. I want you two under the same roof. Don’t be alone.”
“See?” Honey flung her hands at my mug. “The charm is working already.”
Sugar shook her head. “Yes, we’ll stay right here.”
“Here?” Honey choked on a bite of fruit cake. “You’ll mess it up. We’ll stay at your place.”
“It’s dusty,” Sugar warned.
“I’ll wear a mask and help you clean.”
“Whatever works,” I said, “as long as you’re together.”
“Even in the bathroom?” Honey started giggling again, feeling the effects of the fruitcake if the potent aroma of alcohol was an indication of the ingredient list.
I took that as my cue to leave. As I put my boots on, I told Sugar, “Keep your wits about you.”
“You mean stay away from the fruitcake?”
“Definitely. Call me or Reed if you see, hear, or even sense anything suspicious. To my knowledge, all the dolls to be delivered have been. That may mean he’s ready to act.”
Chapter 25
From Sugar’s and Honey’s cottages, Meeka and I went directly to the station. Reed and I needed to brainstorm and come up with a solid plan. He was finishing up whatever he was working on when I got there, so I went to my office to wait for him.
“Seriously?” I stepped back out into the main room, my coat halfway off.
My deputy looked up at me with a too innocent expression.
I pointed toward the evidence locker. �
�Suppose you think that’s funny.”
He had taken all of the harlequins out of their boxes and positioned them so when I sat at my desk on the other side of the room, they were staring at me.
He snickered. “I tried, really I did, but I couldn’t stop myself. I’ll put them back in their boxes.”
“Creepy as hell,” I muttered as he followed me. Meeka, sitting on her cushion, stared at me and then turned in a circle and lay down. Her little body appeared to quiver. Was she laughing at me? To Reed, I said, “And make sure you lock the door.”
“They’re little. They can squeeze through the fencing.”
I jabbed a finger at him. “I’m blaming you if I have nightmares tonight.”
Once he was done returning the things to their coffin-like boxes, we took our positions at the whiteboard to talk this through.
“I printed out pictures of each doll.” He fanned out the seven copies. “Can we put them on the board, or will that be too scary?”
“I never knew you were such a brat. Yes, the pictures are fine.”
After precisely lining them up in the order they were delivered, Reed wrote the name of each recipient and manner of proposed death beneath each picture. How I was to die was an unknown, so he put question marks beneath my name.
“What do we know?” I mused.
“We know Donovan is likely seeking revenge for his mother’s death. He holds the members of the Pack responsible since they were all there that night.”
“Laurel and your aunt weren’t there, though,” I reminded him. “Neither were Sugar and Honey. He wants revenge and is holding all of them responsible.”
“In his eyes,” Reed concluded, “they all should’ve done something to stop Priscilla’s death.”
I nodded and sat on the edge of my desk. “Laurel left the group. Or at least stopped hanging around them so often. That was the beginning of the group’s break up.”
“Didn’t Aunt Reeva leave first?”
“Yes, but she left for noble reasons, not because she was tired of the group. She wanted your mother to have her own thing without her big sister tagging along. There was, what, a hundred people living here then? Hard to have your own space when everyone knows everyone.”
“Mother tried to find her own thing.” He looked almost sad. “She told me about how she immersed herself in Wicca. She tried a little of everything, even kitchen witchery until she figured out she’d never best Reeva at that.”
And Flavia Reed couldn’t just do something, she had to be the best at it.
Rosalyn and I never competed with each other. Well, except for Dad’s attention. That might be because our mother, questionable parent that she was at times, wouldn’t let us do the same activities. I took school seriously and studied like crazy even though my grades didn’t reflect that. Things came a little more easily to Rosalyn in that respect. She was a social butterfly who loved going out with her friends as often as possible. I had friends at school but didn’t go out much until college.
“Sheriff?”
I blinked to find an expectant Reed staring at me.
“Where’d you go?”
“Little trip to the past. Sorry.” I took a few steps closer to the board. “What we know for sure is that my father, your aunt, Briar, Laurel, Honey, and Sugar each received a seemingly threatening harlequin figurine. The threat to me is more obscure. We’re only guessing, although it’s a safe guess, that Donovan Page sent them.” I glanced over to Reed standing at my side. “Anything else we know for sure?”
“Just that we need to find whoever is delivering these things before they escalate.”
No argument there. “How do we do that?”
We stared silently at the board. After a minute, Reed exhaled, a sound more like a groan than a sigh. “My mother hasn’t gotten a doll. As far as we know. I can’t imagine she’d stay quiet about someone basically sending her a death threat.”
The fact he was bringing her up this way told me he wasn’t as in the dark about Flavia’s partnering with Donovan as I thought.
“I heard Donovan’s statement,” Reed continued, almost casually, “when you interviewed him in July.”
Donovan being my half-brother meant I shouldn’t have conducted the interview. Reed was too new then, though, so I did it anyway. I wanted a witness in addition to the proof my voice recorder would offer, so had Reed listen.
“Which part of the interview are you referring to?”
“The part where he admitted that he was there when your grandmother slipped and hit her head against the bathtub.” At my wince, he added, “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Go on.”
“He told you she died in her bed and that ‘we’ should have left her there but decided to make it look like she slipped, fell into the tub, and drowned.” He waited, obviously debating with himself, before asking, “He didn’t admit it, but by ‘we’ he meant my mother. He claimed she drew that mark on people. She was there when your grandmother died, wasn’t she?”
“You’ve been holding on to this for a while.”
He shrugged. “Who wants to admit their mother is a killer?”
“I honestly don’t know for a fact that she was there. If she was, I don’t think she was directly responsible for Gran’s accident. If that helps.”
“If she was there, she saw it happen or helped cover it up afterward. Whether she did anything directly or not isn’t really relevant.” He remained quiet for a minute. Then, “I’m going over to her cottage.”
“Your mother’s? Why?”
“To see if she’s harboring a fugitive.”
I inhaled sharply, unsure about this plan. “I don’t think you should go alone.”
“Do you really think my own mother would let him do something to me?”
That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? How dark was Flavia?
Before I could respond, he reasoned, “I won’t learn anything if you go with me. I’ll be fine.” He patted his Glock. “I’ll wear it under my shirt.”
I couldn’t think of a single other place Donovan could be. Reed was right, though. He knew Flavia better than anyone in this village. He’d be able to tell if she was hiding anything.
Finally, reluctantly, I agreed. “Bring your walkie talkie too. Call me the second you’re out of that house. I’ll keep my unit on me. Press the talk button and say . . . anything if things go wrong. I’m going to wait in my car near the bridge that crosses the creek. I’ll be ten seconds away.”
We reviewed the plan once more. Then Reed called, putting his mother on speakerphone so I could hear. He asked if it was okay for him to stop by. Flavia, desperate to get her son away from Reeva, couldn’t say yes fast enough. She’d make a pot roast in the pressure cooker. It would be ready in half an hour.
Reed looked agonized by guilt when he hung up. “I’m setting up my mother.”
“Only if she’s doing something wrong. She sounds eager for you to come over. That tells me he’s probably not there.”
Reed changed out of his uniform shirt and into a loose-fitting sweatshirt he had in the station van. Next, he switched the walkie talkie over to a secure channel only he and I would use and transferred it and his gun to his waist. I waited until he was in the house and distracting her before positioning the Cherokee a block away by the creek.
Half an hour passed. Then an hour. After turning on the engine to let the SUV warm up for the fifth time, my nerves were on edge. Finally, I saw him exit the house and go over to the van.
“I told her I had to get something from the van,” he said into his walkie talkie while leaning in the driver’s door. “Donovan isn’t in there. Over.”
“You’re positive?”
“I’m doing chores for her. I told her I was worried about her staying warm during this cold snap and wanted to check that her windows weren’t drafty. Over.”
I had to grin at the quick thinking on Deputy Reed’s part.
“I checked under every bed, in every clo
set, and behind every door. Unless she’s got a secret hidey-hole that I don’t know about, he’s not in this house. Go on home. I’ll call again when I leave for the night. Over.”
“All right. Stay alert. Over and out.”
On the one hand, I was glad for Reed’s sake that Donovan wasn’t in his mother’s house. On the other hand, where the hell was he?
Chapter 26
I was hit with the smell of something warm and inviting the instant Meeka and I walked into Pine Time. After taking Meeka’s booties off her, I kicked off my own boots and draped my jacket over the banister, making a mental note to run it upstairs soon. Tripp hated when I left it there.
I found him in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on something in a baking dish, and dropped onto a bar stool. “What are you making?”
“Pork roast with cut up potatoes, sweet potatoes, and apples is in the top oven.” He nodded at the dish in front of him. “This is apple crisp. I was about to put it in the bottom oven.”
Simple and soothing. And surely delicious. Exactly what I needed tonight. “That explains why I smell cinnamon.”
“How did it go with Honey and Sugar?”
“They both received harlequins. Both equally creepy. I have to—” My voice broke, catching the words in my throat. I put my hands over my face.
“Babe? What’s wrong?” Tripp was at my side in a heartbeat. “Did something happen?”
I looked through my fingers at him. “Other than there’s a madman stalking the villagers?” I told him how I sat in my vehicle while Reed searched his mother’s house. “He’s positive Donovan’s not there.” I took a shallow, shaky breath. “My dad, Briar, and the others could be in serious danger, and I don’t have a clue what to do about it or where to look next.”
Tripp wrapped his arms around me and held me close. “Relax, Jayne.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. Focus on me. Match my breathing.”
He took fast, deep breaths at first and then slower and deeper. In and out. In, hold, and out. With each inhalation, I calmed a little. With each exhalation, stress left my body.
Whispering Pines Mysteries Box Set 3 Page 45