Valentine's Blizzard Murder

by Linnea West

  "Tessa, I'm afraid I have one more thing to ask you," a voice came from beside me, startling me even though it was just barely above a whisper. I turned to see Anna standing there.

  "I need your help," Anna said. "I just remembered that yesterday before dinner I had asked Jake to hold onto my ring. He had given me a cocktail ring that I usually wore on my right hand, but it has always been a little big. I didn't want to lose it, so I gave it to him to hold onto last night. But then after everything happened I kind of forgot until now. I'd love if you helped me get it back so that I could wear it again."

  I hesitated for a moment. That would be tampering with the body and removing something that could possibly be evidence, at least in my mind. But the logical half was torn with the emotional half because I also understood clinging on to anything I could that would help me remember Peter. I actually sometimes still wore my wedding ring when I was alone in my room. I certainly still wore the other jewelry he had given me while we were together.

  "Sure, I can help you get that," I said. "But I would like to take pictures of exactly what you are taking and where it was on him. I don't want to be insensitive, but it could be evidence."

  Anna nodded and I stood up. Dawn came rushing over, almost falling over a pillow that someone had placed on the floor. Her face was distressed and I wondered if Anna knew about Dawn and her marriage to Jake yet.

  "Did I hear you are going to disturb that poor man's body?" Dawn hissed at us, looking around to see if anyone else heard her. "That is something the police should do, not Mrs. Pretend Private Eye."

  "This is not something to concern you," I said firmly. Anna looked liked she was about to cry and I couldn't blame her. It wasn't like she was going to desecrate a corpse; she simply wanted her ring back.

  "I don't think you should go onto that porch," Dawn said, moving between us and the doorway.

  She was speaking quietly and I'm sure no one could actually hear her, but everyone was still looking at her curiously. Her mousy hair was flying in every direction and her eyes were darting everywhere. After a moment, Clark walked over and gently took her arm, moving her away from us and back towards the chair she had been in.

  I gave him a thankful look and he smiled ever so slightly back at me. I filed away his facial expression in my memory to go over later. Despite how angry I had been with him, my heart still jumped when he smiled at me. Was he just being polite or was there still some hope for our relationship? I would have to think that over later. Right now, I was just trying to keep everything together despite all of the twists and turns in this investigation.

  Dawn on the other hand looked like she was seething with anger. Why didn't she want us to search Jake's body? Was she the killer perhaps? I ignored Candy's exaggerated scowl and grabbed my flashlight from the floor next to the chair.

  I held my hand out for Mandy's phone. She slid it into my hand, giving me a questioning look, obviously wondering if she should come along. I shook my head, just slightly. I think now that we were looking for more clues, I would need to make sure we split up more often to cover more ground here in the B&B, at least until the police come along.

  As we left the light of the living room, it felt like we were slowly sinking into darkness. The candles had been lit in the hallway again, but their glow gave off more familiarity than light. We only had the one flashlight to guide us down the hallway.

  The beam of light showed us only the next few steps as we trudged towards the porch. I was filled with unease, but this time I knew it wasn't just because of the dark. We were moving towards a dead body, someone who shouldn't have died. And I didn't know who did it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Once Anna and I reached the back porch, I handed my flashlight to her and instructed her to point it straight at the body while I took pictures. Slowly, I pulled the blanket off of Jake's body. It was so cold our here that he seemed almost perfectly preserved. I took a deep breath and started clicking the camera a few times, moving around the body to capture all angles.

  "Do you know where it was at?" I asked. I really didn't want to have to dig around in the pockets of a corpse longer than necessary.

  "I'm pretty sure he put it in the right chest pocket of his shirt," Anna said. "He dropped it in there and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have taken it out to switch it anywhere else."

  I knelt down and gently patted the pocket of his shirt. There was certainly something in the pocket, but it didn't feel like a ring. It felt flat and smooth instead of bumpy. This couldn't possibly be the ring, but what was it. I reached inside and pulled out a piece of paper. I threw a puzzled look to Anna, who looked just as confused as I felt. I unfolded the paper and read inside.

  You thought you were rid of me, but you weren't. Surprise! We aren't divorced yet. I'll sign the papers as soon as you give me more money. If you don't, I'll tell your wife that the two of you aren't actually married. Dawn.

  The large, loopy writing looked girlish and childlike. I looked from it to Anna, who stuck out her hand to read it. I handed it over, not knowing how much Anna already knew. Her eyes flicked over the paper a few times as she tried to take everything in.

  "You mean, he was married to Dawn?" she said. Her voice came out breathy and full of disbelief. "Jake told me he had been married before, but he didn't say it was to Dawn."

  "Well apparently he was still technically married to her," I said before realizing that I sounded like an absolute jerk.

  I took the note gently out of Anna's hands, realizing I should take a picture of it for posterity. As I documented it, I read it again. So Dawn had lowered herself to blackmail to pay off her shopping debts.

  "I can't believe it," Anna said. She knelt down and gently touched Jake's face. "Poor Jake, this was probably why he's been in such a bad mood while we've been here. I thought it was because of Lyle. But he was trying to figure out this divorce situation."

  Jake always seemed to be in a bad mood to me, but I just had to take Anna's word for it that he had been acting out of the ordinary this time. Not only had he been confronted on his honeymoon by his estranged father, but also by his ex-wife who was blackmailing him for more money. I had to admit that I was genuinely touched by Anna's affection for him. She was willing to look past so much and simply see Jake underneath it all.

  "Anna, the ring wasn't in that pocket," I said. "Is there anywhere else it could be?"

  For a moment, Anna continued to gaze at her dead husband's face. Then she looked up at me, a few tears threatening to spill over.

  "If it isn't there, I don't know where it is," she said. "Unless he switched it to a different pocket."

  I gently patted his other shirt pocket along with the pockets of his jeans, but they all appeared to be empty. The ring was nowhere to be found and I had to be the one to break the bad news to her.

  "I don't feel the ring anywhere," I said.

  Anna started to cry, tears dripping down her cheeks and onto Jake's cold, pale face. I could tell that if I wasn't there, she would be wailing. But she was pushing her grief into a private place and only letting the necessary tears flow. I wanted to reach out and tell her that it was alright, that she could let it out. But she didn't know me and I didn't want to tell her about Peter. This was her time to grieve, not my time to play Number One Widow.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I really did try to look. Maybe it was dropped in the dining room when he collapsed."

  "Yes maybe," Anna said, turning to face me. "Thank you Tessa, I know you were trying to find it."

  For a moment, we sat and looked at each other. I felt bad for judging her harshly before. I had assumed she was some dumb California girl riding an actor's coattails to success. But here she was, looking more sincere than ever. The shame rose up inside of me as I realized that sometimes it wasn't just my mouth that I couldn't control, but it was also my gut reactions.

  "I promise I will find that ring for you," I said. "Could you tell me what it looks like?"

  Anna described a ring
that sounded gorgeous. It had a beautiful, blue emerald in the middle with a few diamond chips around the outside.

  "It wasn't that big or that valuable," she said. "But it meant a lot to me. It was one of the first things Jake gave me."

  She giggled to herself as she reached out to grab Jake's cold hand.

  "I think it was a test," Anna said. "Jake gave it to me and he wanted to see what I did. I refused it, of course, because it was too big and too much money when we had only been seeing each other for a few months. But he forced me to take it. I think it pleased him that I thought it was beautiful and besides being concerned about how much money he was spending on me, I didn't focus on how much it was worth. To me, it was a symbol of his love and commitment. We got engaged shortly thereafter and he gave me a significantly sized engagement ring, but the cocktail ring was always my favorite."

  I glanced at her engagement ring, which was still prominently displayed on the thin ring finger on her left hand. She was right; it was what I would consider ginormous. The large diamond was surrounded by rings and rings of diamonds and I'm sure when the light hit it, it would shine like the sun.

  "It is preposterously large," Anna said with a smile when she noticed that I was looking at the ring. "But Jake said it was important to him to have it this large. He said that coming from a small town, keeping up appearances was important and was something he couldn't just stop doing. So I agreed to keep this ring, even though I would have preferred something much more streamlined."

  I had to chuckle a little bit. No one ever really leaves a small town, not really. You could travel the world and still have those nagging thoughts in the back of your head, especially now with social media. Even when I was living the high life in the big city, one titch of gossip on social media would send me scouring for more and chatting about it with my sisters and Mandy. Small town appearances and gossip are sticky traps that are hard to leave, no matter how much distance you put between you and the town.

  "I think that's a wonderful story," I said with a smile. Anna smiled back and I felt like it was the right time to tell her a little bit about myself. "You know, I lost my husband too. His name was Peter and he was killed in a car accident one morning on his way to work."

  The memories came flooding back and this time I let them. I had been pushing them back too long and it felt good to let someone else hear about Peter. I w anted to connect with Anna to let her know she wasn't all alone.

  "It's been a little over a year now, but it still seems fresh," I said. I let myself cry a little before I continued on. "I guess I just wanted to tell you that I get what you are going through and it is so hard and it doesn't go away, but it does get better. It gets easier. It won't seem like that now, but I can assure you it will. And if you ever need to talk to someone who understands, I would be happy to listen."

  Anna's eyes shone and she leaned forward to wrap me in a hug. It seemed like an eternity that she and I sat intertwined in a hug, two young widows, one with fresh grief and one with grief that was only slightly scabbed over. We both cried until finally it felt like we had both let out all of the tears we needed to.

  "Thank you, Tessa," Anna whispered. "Thank you for telling me about Peter. I appreciate everything you're doing right now for me."

  I nodded and stood up, offering Anna my hand to help her stand up as well. The blanket we had been using to cover Jake's body was next to me. I picked it up and offered it to Anna, but she shook her head. I gently covered him up, tucking him in like a child.

  Turning to Anna, I gave her a small smile.

  "Let's go find your ring," I said.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Once again I found myself in the kitchen. This time I was debriefing Mandy on my conversation with Anna. I was also trying really hard not to pour myself another cup of coffee because if I did, I was pretty sure my bloodstream would be mostly caffeine at that point.

  "How come you get to do all of the exciting stuff?" Mandy asked. "Nothing happened in the living room while you were gone. I mean, except for Candy trying so hard to sit on Clark's lap, but he kept pushing her away."

  "Mandy, you hate doing this stuff," I said. "You hate true crime and I was back with a dead body. Do you really think you wanted to switch spots with me?"

  "No," Mandy admitted after a moment. "I think I'm just getting bored."

  This did not come as a surprise to me as Mandy was the sort of woman who was always bustling about, working on something or other. She flitted around working on project after project, making me feel like an utter failure. But here in the B&B, she was mostly stuck. No Donut Hut to look after. No Trevor to clean up behind. Just a dead body and a best friend who was playing private investigator.

  The door between the living room and kitchen pushed open and Dawn came in, looking almost more irate as she had when I left to search for the ring in Jake's pocket. I still needed to search the dining room for the ring, but that would have to wait until I figured out what was going on with Dawn.

  "May we help you?" I asked, putting on my syrupy customer service voice to try and mask my annoyance. It must not have worked because Mandy shot me a glance, but Dawn didn't seem to notice.

  "Yes you may," Dawn said. "I think you need to be a little smarter during this entire investigation. You were just back there with his widow tampering with the body. How are we supposed to know that you didn't plant evidence or something?"

  As Dawn raged on about incompetent investigating, she started to pace up and down the kitchen, waving her hands around. A glimmer from one of her hands caught my eye, but I couldn't quite focus on it because she was moving around too much.

  "Calm down Dawn," I said. "Do you have any ideas?"

  The invitation for her to speculate about the case a little seemed to calm her down. Dawn slowed down her pacing and moved closer to Mandy and I.

  "Yes, in fact, I do," Dawn said. "Now I think Lyle is a strong suspect, but I think you are overlooking someone else who I strongly suspect was involved. Someone who has quite the sob story to cover for her now."

  I gasped involuntarily, aghast at the idea that she thought Anna would use grief to mask her guilt. But Dawn was totally serious about it. She stared into my eyes as she walked closer.

  "I think that you are letting your own circumstances cloud your judgment," she said. Dawn kept moving towards me, sticking out her pointer finger until it was poking me in the chest. "You are letting your own grief take over and she is going to get away with murder because of it."

  Anger was starting to fill me up. It felt like it was being sucked up through a straw, starting at my feet and moving slowly up. But before it could reach the top of my head, I looked down and realized that Dawn was wearing a blue emerald cocktail ring on the bony finger that was poking accusations into my chest.

  I looked from the ring back up into her eyes and as recognition flooded her brown eyes, I grabbed her hand before she could put it down. Immediately she realized her mistake and tried to pull her hand away, but I kept a firm grip on her hand.

  "Mandy, get Anna," I demanded. "Now!"

  Without stopping to ask what in the world had gotten me so riled up, she zipped into the living room and came back with a very confused Anna.

  "Anna, would this be the ring that we couldn't find on Jake's body?" I asked, shoving Dawn's hand towards her.

  Anna's eyes widened in shock before they narrowed again with suspicion and anger. Dawn violently shook me off of her hand and pulled it back, not attempting to hide it, but certainly trying to get it out of sight. She started pacing again and agitation was flowing off of her.

  "Why do you have my ring?" Anna asked, her voice quivering.

  "Your ring?" Dawn said, her mouth twirling into an evil sneer. "Ha! This was my ring first. And I hated it. Jake had so much money and he gave me that stupid thing? I would have preferred a diamond."

  "But it isn't yours anymore," Anna said. "Jake gave it to me and I loved it. Did you take it off of his dead body?"
>
  Dawn huffed a few times as she tried to figure out how to spin this story to her advantage. No matter how you look at it, she had gone through a dead man's pockets and she took something that didn't belong to her, even if it had once upon a time.

  "I need it more than you do even if it isn't worth that much.," Dawn said. "Besides, how do we know you weren't the one to kill him?"

  "How dare you accuse me of killing Jake," Anna said. Tears were welling up in her eyes, but she was clenching her fists in anger. "Especially after you were blackmailing him. We found your note in his pocket. You were trying to get more money from him and you were doing it by faking your divorce to him? How dare you ruin our marriage just because you thought you deserved more money. If there is anyone here who should be watching their back, it is you."

  I glanced at Mandy, who looked just as surprised as I was. I could understand the anger towards Dawn, but making threats against her probably wasn't the best recourse for Anna. Now I really wasn't sure what I thought.

  "Don't you threaten me," Dawn said. "Here, you can have your stupid ring. It isn't worth that much anyways."

  Dawn wrenched the cocktail ring off of her finger and threw it towards Anna, who easily caught it. I was a little bit impressed by her quick reflexes, but I tried not to let my face show it.

  "I'll be up in my room if you need me," Dawn said.

  She shoved her way through the door to the living room and stomped off. For a moment, none of us dared move or even breathe. The only sound was the wind outside, still gusting by. I finally broke the silence.

  "Anna, are you okay?" I asked.

  "I think so," she said. "I mean, I have the ring back. I'm not sure how I feel about everything else though."

  "Can I ask you a tough question Anna?" I asked.

  She nodded and I tried not to look at her sad face as I asked her my question. I knew it would hurt her and it was something that I don't think she had even thought about yet, but it was a realization that I had just had.