Bucket List: Maple Syrup Mysteries

by Emily James

I had to get out. Maybe I could sneak past Darlene.

  I tiptoed to the door and strained to hear. Her footsteps were coming toward me. The whapping noise sounded like she’d exchanged her shoes for heel-less slippers.

  There’d be no way I could explain snooping around her bedroom in the dark. She’d know I was looking for something I didn’t want to tell her about, and if she had hurt Clement, she’d make sure any evidence of it was gone. Tipping off a person you were investigating was one of the worst things that could happen.

  I could make a break for it, and hope she didn’t recognize me, but that seemed unlikely. She’d probably turned on at least one light in the main part of the house. Besides, she’d call the police to report a break in and my fingerprints were all over the place. I could argue to the police that I’d been in the house previously, but Darlene would still guess I might have been the one. That brought me right back to tipping if off if she was the guilty party.

  The only other door in the room led into the bathroom. Hiding in the bathroom wouldn’t work either. With my luck, she was heading this way to get ready for bed.

  Bed! Could I fit under the bed?

  It was a canopy style, so it didn’t rest flat on the ground. Assuming Darlene and Clement hadn’t stored too much stuff under there, I might be able to wiggle in.

  I dropped to my belly and slid in sideways, my head at the head of the bed and my feet at the feet. The lights flared on. I froze. My body was completely underneath the bed, but I’d planned to move farther back from the edge. Right now, if I moved too much, she’d likely be able to spot the motion.

  I wished she’d left the lights off for another reason too. They illuminated everything else that was under the bed with me, including a balled-up sock, some rumpled tissues, and a lot of dust and cobwebs. At least it was good to know I wasn’t the only person who regularly forgot to clean under the bed.

  Darlene’s slipper-covered feet—they were blue and looked a bit like she was wearing an 80s shag carpet—moved past the bed and toward the bathroom. Seemed like I’d made the right call not to hide in there. If she filled the tub, I might be able to escape while she was bathing.

  The sound of water running started, but it was too small for the tub, more like the sink tap.

  A tingle tickled my nose.

  Do not sneeze, I mentally chanted to myself. Don’t do it.

  I’d heard somewhere that if you pressed a finger to the pressure point under your nose it would stop a sneeze. I’d never tried it before, but I wasn’t going to be able to hold it in much longer without some sort of help. I eased my hand up from my side.

  My fingers brushed a cylindrical shape. It rolled away from me with a rattle, and my body forgot that it wanted to sneeze and give away my hiding place. That felt like another pill container. One with an actual pill in it.

  I stretched my arm back and out until my shoulder screamed at me. I had to reach it. Quietly. The running water from the tap had hopefully covered the sound it made, but it wouldn’t cover the noise of me whacking a body part off the underside of the bed trying to reach it.

  My fingers connected a second time. I strained an extra half an inch and closed my pointer and middle finger around the bottle like pinchers. I brought it up to my face. It was a pill bottle, and it looked like at least one pill was still inside, maybe two.

  Clement must have dropped it accidentally and hadn’t been able to find it again. Being that close to the end of the bottle, he’d likely simply called in a refill rather than bothering to waste too much time hunting for it.

  Now all I had to do was get it, and myself, out of here.

  The tap in the bathroom stopped running, and Darlene’s footfalls approached the bed.

  My body felt like it was trembling from the inside out, all my organs processing too fast, like I’d had twice the amount of coffee I normally drink. She couldn’t possibly know I was here, right?

  Her footsteps turned into shuffles. The bed above me squeaked and her feet disappeared.

  Not good. Almost worse than her finding me here. She was crawling into bed, presumably to read since she hadn’t turned off the lights.

  I couldn’t lay here all night. I couldn’t even lay here for another hour. My body would cramp up, forcing me to move—which she’d hear—or I’d sneeze from the dust—which she’d most definitely hear. And I’d stupidly turned my phone off. There was no way to turn it back on and text Mark for help without her hearing me.

  This is why lawyers don’t break into houses and hide under beds, Nicole, I could almost hear my mom saying.

  If I was in a movie, I’d throw something across the room and the bad guy would fall for it and think someone was where my item hit. Sadly, I doubted that would work in real life. I might be trapped here a very long time.

  I tracked the minutes ticking by on my watch. A half hour passed, and the cramp in my lower back felt like I’d been run over by a lawnmower. Mark had undoubtedly tried to call me by now, and was probably panicking over the fact that my phone would be going straight to voicemail.

  Maybe if I moved quietly and stayed low to the ground, I could crawl out of the room without her noticing me. She might have already drifted off or be so engrossed in what she was reading that she wouldn’t catch the motion out of the corner of her eye.

  I inched closer to the edge of the bed. I shifted my leg out first, and then reached out with my arm.

  The doorbell rang, and I wedged myself backward as fast as I could.

  Darlene got up off the bed. I wasn’t fast enough. As she came around the end, my shoe still stuck out. I laid as still as possible, even holding my breath.

  She didn’t look to the side or down. Thank you, Lord.

  This was my chance. I didn’t know where the door on the other side of the hall led, but it had to be better than staying under the bed. Worst case, it went into another bedroom, and I’d be trapped there until Darlene fell soundly asleep.

  I wriggled out as quickly as I could without making too much noise and picked my way across the floor to the bedroom door. I’d wait until she actually answered the door before I made my break for it. That way I could be certain of where she was.

  It felt like it took her twice the normal time to cross the house. Or maybe she’d been at the door for a while and was checking the peephole before opening it. For a moment, I wondered if she locked the door while she was home alone even though she didn’t lock it when she was away.

  “Can I help you?” Darlene’s voice carried from a distance.

  “I’m the county medical examiner.”

  My feet stopped working for a second. What was Mark doing here? He seemed to be speaking at twice his normal volume.

  Then my brain caught up. He was here because he was worried about me. If Darlene had me tied up somewhere, he wanted me to hear him and make noise to let him know where I was.

  I wouldn’t be doing that. Thankfully, his arrival gave me the distraction I needed.

  I scurried across the hall while Mark was telling Darlene he needed to confirm what temperature they kept the house at because it influenced time of death. And could she tell him where the heat sources were?

  The source of the heat didn’t matter, but Darlene wouldn’t know that, and the longer Mark kept her talking, the better.

  I eased open the door across the hall, silently praying it wasn’t a windowless storage room.

  On the other side was their garage, and in it sat the car I’d seen before. No wonder Mark hadn’t called to warn me. I hadn’t realized the Dodds had two cars.

  Before Mark ran out of things to say, I slipped through the door and closed it behind me. Then I ran to the door that led outside.

  My car was parked in such a way that I couldn’t climb into the passenger seat. I’d have to crawl into the back on the driver’s side.

  I did a hunch run along the edge of the garage and sprinted the two steps through the open space between it and my car. As soon as I hit the back bumper, I squat
ted down and frog walked to where I could reach the door handle. Thank goodness no one was around to see this.

  I opened the door just wide enough for me to crawl into the back, onto the floor. The overhead light blinked on, but there was nothing I could do about that. Hopefully Darlene was distracted enough by Mark’s questions that she didn’t notice.

  Having to keep hidden meant I couldn’t watch for Mark to return. I’d only been in the car for around thirty seconds when the driver’s side door opened and Mark slid in.

  He hit his fist into the steering wheel and pulled out his phone, presumably to call me.

  “Don’t turn around,” I whispered.

  He cursed softly. “I was worried she’d chopped you up with one of the museum axes and hid your body parts in buckets in the basement.”

  “I think that only happens in horror movies.” I shifted around, but couldn’t get comfortable. Whoever designed cars with that weird bump in the middle of the backseat floor clearly hadn’t considered how it would feel if someone needed to lay on it. “Besides, they don’t have a basement as far as I could see.”

  Mark put the car into drive. “You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are,” he said, but he couldn’t completely hide the smile in his voice. “How did you get into the car?”

  As he drove us to the nearest safe place to stop outside of Darlene’s view, I told him exactly what had happened.

  By the time he stopped and I swapped positions into the front passenger’s seat, he was laughing outright. “I might not believe that story unless I saw the cobweb in your hair.”

  “What?” I swiped a hand over my hair and it really did come away with sticky web tendrils on it. I shuddered. “At least I got the pill bottle, and I managed to find one with a couple pills left in it.”

  “Did you check the date? We don’t know how long ago he lost them under the bed.”

  Arg. He was right. I turned my cell phone light back on and shone it on the bottle. The date on the one I’d found under the bed said it was two months old, so it was well within the range of time when Clement had been suffering from what the doctors thought was fatal insomnia.

  Tomorrow I’d work on figuring out what the pills were. Tonight, all I was going to do was get a shower to make sure there weren’t any spiders nesting in my hair.

  20

  For the rest of the night, even after my shower, I kept jumping, feeling like something was crawling on me. I slept terribly because I had two separate nightmares about spiders coming up from under my bed to crawl on me. When I woke up from the second nightmare, I dragged the vacuum up the stairs and cleaned underneath my bed.

  By the time I finished, I couldn’t fall back asleep. The clock told me it was 6:30 am. Even though I wouldn’t have dropped in on anyone else that early, Russ would have been up for at least half an hour already.

  I didn’t want to take the pills to anyone for analysis until I’d confirmed that they weren’t the medication they were supposed to be. Clement’s next court date was rapidly approaching. If the pill in the bottle was exactly what it was supposed to be, I didn’t want to waste time chasing mirages under the assumption they were going to give us something we could use. Since Russ took the same medication, I could compare what I’d found to his.

  Velma and Toby’s tails rattled their crates when they heard my footsteps on the stairs. I fed them, suited them up in the extra-large winter doggie coats I’d bought them, and took them with me. Russ always enjoyed a visit from the dogs so they might as well come along.

  The ground outside was covered in one of the extra-thick frost layers that I hadn’t known existed until I moved to Michigan. Looking out the window and seeing it covering the leaves and barren tree branches, it looked almost like a light dusting of snow, but it wasn’t. By the time the sun came up, it would vanish except for in the shadows, and by noon it’d be completely gone. As they sniffed along the path on our walk, Velma and Toby’s breath came out white, like they had fires lit in their bellies.

  Russ answered the door already dressed in the jeans and flannel shirt that seemed to be his uniform as soon as the weather turned. The house smelled like eggs and bacon and wood smoke. My mouth watered, but it wasn’t the best breakfast for someone trying to look good in her wedding dress…or someone who was already on high cholesterol and high blood pressure meds.

  “Come on in.” His smile lacked the Santa Clause sparkle I’d come to expect. “Word of advice. Don’t read the obituaries over breakfast. It’s depressing when you see so many people who’ve died who are your age and younger.”

  Maybe I could make this trip serve a dual purpose and take my turn speaking to Russ about my fears for his health.

  I let the dogs loose once we were inside the door. “Anyone you know?”

  “Two people I went to school with. Victor Kristoffersen and Edna Orr. Edna was two years younger. Always fit. She even used to be on the girls’ swim team. She went of a heart attack, and Victor died of a stroke.” He sank into his chair and looked up at me. “You wouldn’t know Edna. She moved a couple towns over after she got married, but Victor owned the pharmacy. I should go to both their funerals and pay my respects to the families.”

  I knew the name sounded familiar. That was from where. So even if Victor had kept his word to Saul, Saul wouldn’t have gotten the chance to purchase the business from Victor, though maybe whoever inherited it from Victor might have still given him a fair deal. It was a moot point now. The pharmacy was sold before Victor’s death.

  Russ’ plate still had two pieces of buttered toast and a slice of bacon on it. He shoved the bacon into his mouth and chewed, but it was almost like he wasn’t paying attention. “Makes you think.”

  I dragged a chair close to his and put a hand on his shoulder. “Makes me think about how I don’t want to lose you early too.”

  Russ wagged a piece of toast at me. “I’ll tell you what I told Stacey when she made a fuss about a tiny bit of tightness in my chest—I’m fine.”

  How did you convince someone who didn’t see the way they were sabotaging themselves? Everyone around Russ could see how he was hurting himself and where he’d be headed if he didn’t start taking better care of his health. He didn’t.

  I wasn’t sure how to convince him—how any of us, together or separately, would be able to convince him. Everything I could think to say was a regurgitation of conversations we’d had before.

  I pulled the pill bottle from my purse instead. “I’m working a case where we think a medication might have been swapped out. I need a bit of help.”

  Russ set aside his toast. “You’re not getting yourself involved in something dangerous again, are you? I’ve also been thinking I was wrong to encourage you to go back to being a lawyer. Working at Sugarwood is safer.”

  If I wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t let me see his pills at all. From my very first investigation into Uncle Stan’s death, Russ hadn’t liked me poking around in what he considered private business and drawing attention to myself from dangerous people.

  He shoved back his chair and waddled to the counter. He poured another cup of coffee, and added milk and sugar to it. It had to be for me. He took his black.

  He dropped it down in front of me, and the coffee splashed out onto his table. “You can’t just think about yourself anymore either. Think about Mark.”

  This conversation was not supposed to be about me or about me and Mark. It was supposed to be about Russ’ health and Clement’s pills. Somehow I’d lost control of it.

  Russ added another swipe of butter to his cold toast. The knife hopped across the surface of the bread instead of drawing across smoothly like he was taking his frustration at me out on the poor toast slice.

  And then I understood. What he said was think about Mark. What he meant was I can’t stand to lose anyone else.

  Maybe Russ knew on some level what he was doing to his health, but he didn’t care because eating made him feel better for a little while. Eating was a class
ic way to try to deal with emotional pain. I knew it because I was a stress and emotional eater. That wasn’t a healthy way to deal with stress and grief and disappointment, but it was the easiest one, especially if you weren’t sure what else to do.

  Russ had lost so many people, both in the past and more recently. I understood what that did to you. I was afraid of losing him too.

  Maybe we’d been approaching his health from the wrong direction. If his physical health reflected his mental health, then maybe that was where we needed to start.

  Problem was, I didn’t know how to get there. Russ came from an era that didn’t understand mental health and felt needing to see a therapist was a weakness.

  But he was worried about me. Maybe that could be our first step. He might be more open to the idea if I made it about me and Stacey needing help. She’d asked me last week about whether I found my counseling sessions helpful. She’d been considering seeing someone.

  “Mark and I have talked about my safety a lot.” We’d actually talked about it months ago, and we’d come to a workable agreement for both of us. Russ didn’t need to know that. He also didn’t need to know that I hadn’t been taking risks intentionally, consciously or otherwise. “I’ve always found it easier to deal with grief by acting, and so that might have made me take more risks than I should have. I don’t want anyone to wonder what really happened to their loved one. Stacey does it too, working even when she should be resting because that’s how she’s been dealing with Noah’s death. Maybe we both need a little more support, like a grief group or something.”

  Russ was nodding along with me.

  “Would you…” I dropped my gaze to the coffee cup as if it were hard for me to ask. I hated to trick him the way I did suspects, but it was better than him dying within the next few years. “Would you come with us?”

  Keeping my gaze down was more challenging than not asking what is it? when someone says I have a secret. But I wasn’t used to exercising my interviewing skills on a friend. If I didn’t continue to stare at my mug of coffee, my expression might give something away.