End of the Line_Maple Syrup Mysteries

by Emily James

  “You’ll be in my thoughts,” Sheila said. Her voice went up on the end, as if she expected that to make her refusal easier to bear.

  Being in someone’s thoughts was about as useful as owning a pair of shoes you never wore.

  And then she hung up on me before I could pressure her. Which was probably a smart move on her part. Despite her plea for me to understand, I would have pushed her to give me some sort of direction at least.

  Now I was back to trying to find the phone numbers of the other three dispatchers on my own.

  Fair Haven still produced an old-fashioned physical phone book—I’d seen it back when I stayed at The Sunburnt Arms. Elise should have a copy. If she didn’t, I’d try searching online, but an online search could yield so many results that I’d have to make a lot of wrong number calls before actually finding the people I wanted.

  Her copy of the phone book turned out to be underneath the base for her house phone. It was also five years old, so she either threw the new one out by accident or Fair Haven changed so little they didn’t feel the need to produce a new phone book more than every five years. Given what I knew of the town, my guess was the latter.

  I took it with me to the kitchen table. Only two of the remaining dispatchers were listed. The first one I called wasn’t on duty the night Troy died. He had heard about Mark, though, and he made sure to tell me he didn’t believe he’d done it.

  It gave me a much-needed boost before I called the next dispatcher. Case Hammond was friends with Grady Scherwin. While Grady seemed to respect Mark, I’d stepped on his toes one time too many. I’d even gotten him replaced with Troy when my dogs were kidnapped because I didn’t trust him to do a thorough job investigating. Case had surely heard all about it, including some choice terms for me.

  I dialed his number anyway. I didn’t have a choice. Our only lead at present was whoever called in the false accident.

  A man answered without giving his name.

  Without asking, I could only assume I had the right person. I certainly wasn’t going to jump into my request without being sure.

  “Is this Case Hammond?”

  “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any.”

  The call dropped.

  He must have thought I was a telemarketer. I clearly needed to work on my professional phone voice if I sounded like a scam artist.

  I redialed. This time he didn’t answer. Lovely. He recognized my number from before and was taking the ignore-the-call tactic I often took when I got repeat calls from a number I knew was trying to sell me something or swindle me.

  I hung up and grabbed Elise’s house phone. I dialed again.

  “Hello,” the same male voice said.

  I was going to assume it was Case since he hadn’t said no when I asked for him before. Had it been the wrong number, he would have told me so rather than basically telling me to shove off.

  “This is…” Maybe I shouldn’t tell him my name. He might be more willing to help me if he thought I was working with Mark’s lawyer. It wasn’t a lie, either. Anderson and I were partners. “I’m with Anderson Taylor’s law office. We’re representing Mark Cavanaugh. I’m trying to reach the dispatcher who was on duty the night Troy Summoner was killed. Am I speaking to the right person?”

  There’d been music in the background before, like he’d been listening to the radio. The sound cut in half. “Sorry, say that again.”

  I repeated it, leaving out my name and praying that he wouldn’t notice.

  “I wasn’t on that night.”

  His tone suggested Mark didn’t have a chance if we were his lawyers and didn’t even know how to contact the right person.

  I grabbed up the phone book and ruffled the pages near the phone so it would sound like I was looking through papers. “Are you sure? The information we got from the police lists your name. Case Hammond.”

  “I was on the day shift.” Now he sounded a bit like he wasn’t sure whether he was the one I was looking for or not. “But I didn’t talk to Cavanaugh. I think he probably called 911, and that goes to a central county dispatch. I answer calls that come into the Fair Haven police station.”

  That was all information I already knew, except that Case had been working the day shift that day.

  But maybe I could get the other piece of information I needed. I hadn’t had much interaction with Case, but I had with Grady, and people tended to befriend others like themselves. Grady was hyper-macho, like he belonged in a past era. Maybe sounding a little flustered would trigger a rescue the damsel in distress feeling in Case. If he assumed the police gave me his name and number, he shouldn’t see anything wrong with giving me Henry McCloud’s number.

  “I’m so sorry. Your name and number were the ones I was given.” I added a little extra fluff to my voice, trying to imitate an airhead secretary from old black-and-white TV shows. “Do you know who was working that night? My boss is going to be angry if I don’t get the information he wanted.”

  By process of elimination, I already knew who was working. But what I didn’t have and couldn’t get without his help was the phone number.

  Be the hero, I silently urged him.

  The music in the background vanished. Case had either turned it off or left the room. “Everyone wants to see Cavanaugh found innocent of this, and it sounds like you made an innocent mistake. I was working the day they investigated the murder. Makes sense they gave you my name by accident. Let me get you the number for Henry. He’s the one I replaced when I came in.”

  I wrote down the number as he read it off, dutifully repeating it back. I wouldn’t get another chance if I wrote it down wrong.

  After he hung up, I set Elise’s phone down on the table and stared at it. Other than hanging up when he thought I was a telemarketer, Case had actually seemed nice. Whether he would have been as helpful had I been honest with him about my identity was up for debate, but he’d wanted to make sure Mark got the best chance at a good defense by helping his lawyer’s office with the right information.

  The man still had abysmal taste in friends, but no one was perfect.

  Now I had to pray that Henry would be less reticent to share information than Sheila had been. He didn’t have to tell me anything.

  My first interaction with Henry McCloud was when I’d called the station trying to reach Quincey Dornbush during my first month living in Fair Haven. Because Henry fondly remembered my Uncle Stan, he offered to get Quincey’s phone number for me. On the surface, that should make my chances good that Henry would help me.

  The only problem was he’d still followed protocol getting me Quincey’s number. He’d radioed Quincey first and asked permission. Whether or not he helped me now could depend on whether he felt I had a right to the information. That all hinged on whether he saw me first as Mark’s lawyer or first as his fiancée.

  Thankfully, Case hadn’t had the same concern over giving out Henry’s number or I would have had to devolve into hanging around in the police station parking lot, waiting for him to come into work.

  I dialed the number Case gave me. It rang for the third time. If he didn’t answer, should I leave a message? It seemed even less wise to leave one for him than for Sheila.

  “McCloud,” a man’s voice said.

  I jumped. I’d been so busy thinking about whether to leave a message that I’d stopped paying attention.

  “This is Nikki,” I blurted.

  That sounded too much like Mark’s fiancé and not enough like his lawyer.

  “Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes,” I said in my professional tone. It might need work, but it was all I had at present.

  “I thought you might be calling me.” There was a smile in his voice like he found my amendment of my name humorous. Like I hadn’t fooled him at all, and he guessed why I’d done it. “Are you officially Mark’s lawyer? You know I can’t discuss details of an active investigation with you if you’re not.”

  The way he said it made it hard for me to tell if he was gentl
y instructing me to lie to him. As long as I told him I was Mark’s lawyer—whether it was true or not—he’d talk to me.

  This time I couldn’t lie, though. Henry wouldn’t get in trouble for my lie—which might be why he nudged me in that direction—but I’d have crossed into something borderline illegal. That wasn’t a line I ever wanted to cross. Mark wouldn’t want me breaking the law for him.

  Thankfully, even though Anderson might be lead on the case, Anderson and I were partners. That did make me Mark’s lawyer in some capacity. I might be batting my eyelashes at the line of legality, but I wasn’t letting it take me home.

  “Mark is represented by my firm.”

  “What would you like to know?” Henry asked. His tone still carried that smile, as if he saw my choice of words for what they were as well.

  I could understand why that would strike him as funny him, but his amusement felt slightly inappropriate. Someone he’d worked with had died, the chief was missing, and Mark stood accused of murder. I’d always been described as cheerful, and I was struggling with smiling these days.

  But everyone dealt with stress and loss in different ways. If the past year had taught me anything, it was that.

  “I know you were the one working the night Troy died. What we need to know is who called in the fake accident Mark went to.”

  “It was Troy.” The humor was gone from Henry’s voice now. “Troy made the call.”

  9

  My chest went tight, like I’d fallen and knocked all the air from my lungs.

  If Troy made the phone call that drew Mark away from his house, we’d be back to having no leads.

  It was still an if though. I was going to run this case using everything my parents had taught me, and that meant no assumptions. Double-check everything. Leave no chances for the prosecution to disprove your arguments. “Are you sure it was Troy? Could it have been someone else using his name or badge number?”

  “It wasn’t just his name or badge number. It was his voice.”

  The desire to both throw something and cry built inside of me. I couldn’t do either. The first would be childish, and the second wouldn’t solve anything. Well, except for releasing some frustration. “Could it have been someone impersonating Troy’s voice?”

  “They’d have had to be world-class. I hear all the officers’ voices so often that they can’t fool me when they try.”

  On any other day, the idea of Fair Haven officers trying to play a practical joke on one of their dispatchers would have made me laugh. Now it simply mocked me and the fact that our best lead for proving Mark’s innocence had evaporated.

  The longing to cry pushed out the desire to destroy something. Elise and I hadn’t considered Troy might have made the call. It was the worst possible outcome. “After Troy called you, you called Mark?”

  “I did.”

  I guess at least we knew Troy was alive when Mark left home. How that might help us, I wasn’t sure, but I’d take whatever I could get. “Did you also call Chief McTavish?”

  Elise had mentioned that McTavish was gone when his wife woke up. Something must have happened to get him to leave his house. A phone call or a text like Troy received seemed the most likely. Elise hadn’t said there was a useful text found on Chief McTavish’s abandoned cell phone, so I was betting it’d been a phone call. If we could cross Dispatch off the list, that meant the last number who called his phone might be another lead.

  Henry coughed a few times. “Sorry, the cold I had a month ago won’t give up.” He cleared his throat a couple of times. “I called the chief. Before I called Mark, I think. Troy said the accident looked suspicious to him. With a fatality involved, I thought the chief would want to go.”

  I planted a hand over my mouth to keep from groaning out loud.

  That made it look like Mark had kidnapped or killed Chief McTavish as well as Troy. The prosecution would argue that Mark forced Troy to make that phone call to Dispatch. I could think of at least ten better ways to create an alibi for myself if I wanted to kill someone than faking an accident call, but my opinion didn’t matter. Once this went to court, only the jury members’ opinions mattered. All the prosecution had to do was say Mark was smart enough to figure out a way to both give himself an alibi and lure Chief McTavish out to the middle of nowhere.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” Henry said. “Mark’s a good guy, and it’s terrible this had to happen to him.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  I disconnected the call before I lost control of my tear ducts. I’d hung so much on being able to crack the story of the person who placed that call. Now I knew Troy had placed the call that sent Mark out that night, but not much more.

  I straightened in my chair. That wasn’t entirely true. I knew one other thing. Troy said the accident looked suspicious, which meant the medical examiner would need to be sent out. But he hadn’t asked for Chief McTavish to be sent as well. Henry did that on his own. It was possible McTavish was the collateral damage in all of this.

  The person who forced Troy to make the call had expected Mark. Maybe he’d planned to ambush him and kill both him and Troy. If McTavish arrived before Mark, the killer would have had to change his plans.

  I pressed my palm to my forehead and pushed my chair back from the table. Elise and I assumed this wasn’t about a case Mark worked with Chief McTavish and Troy because all the major cases McTavish had worked since coming to Fair Haven, I’d been involved with as well. I hadn’t been targeted.

  Taking McTavish out of the equation meant taking me out of it as well. There could have been a case that only Troy and Mark worked.

  I had to reach Mark. He could give us a list of cases that he’d worked with Troy. There couldn’t have been many that Troy played a major role in. He was a junior officer. Those might be able to be narrowed even further if Mark could remember anyone making a threat or reacting in anger.

  Hopefully Anderson was still with him at the station. I sent a text instead of calling. If the police were still questioning Mark, Anderson wouldn’t be able to answer a call.

  My phone rang a second later.

  “They charged him with Troy’s murder,” Anderson said in lieu of a hello. The additional static on the call told me he was already in his car. “Since it’s already Friday, the best we could do for a bail hearing was Monday morning.”

  Mark would stay in the Fair Haven holding cells until then rather than being moved to a regular jail somewhere, but that was a small comfort. He didn’t deserve to be locked up for even one night.

  It also introduced an additional problem. With Anderson gone, he couldn’t ask Mark my question. And I definitely didn’t want to put this investigation on hold over the weekend. The longer we waited, the easier it would be for the real killer to cover his tracks. The police wouldn’t be looking for anyone else anymore. They thought they had the killer. With most of the people close to Mark placed on leave, he wouldn’t even have anyone there advocating for them to consider other options.

  “How far away are you?” I asked.

  “I know I should have called you right away, but I’m going to be lucky not to be late for court as it is.”

  Not what I’d meant, but it answered my question none the less.

  “I did call your mom,” Anderson said. “I figured it was time to bring in the heavy hitters. We have a conference call with your parents scheduled for tomorrow to go over everything we know so far.”

  Perfect. That meant I’d be getting a call or text from my mom imminently asking why she had to hear about this from Anderson. I’d have to do damage control on that later.

  Right now, I’d have to go to the station myself and ask Mark. The trick would be convincing the officers there to let me see him.

  10

  The Fair Haven police station smelled like wet wool, and someone had turned up the heat higher than Chief McTavish ever allowed the thermostat to be set. It reminded me a bit of Isabel’s food truck. Whoever was in charg
e now had probably grown up in a more southern state.

  Sheila looked up from the front desk and hunched down as if she didn’t want me to see her. No doubt she thought I’d come to press her for more information.

  The vindictive part of me wanted to let her squirm for a bit because she’d been unwilling to help me, but that wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be.

  “I’m here to see Mark,” I said as soon as I got close enough for her to hear me.

  She planted her elbows on the desk, and her shoulders relaxed backward. “I’ll call someone for you.”

  I went over to what I called the Yearbook Wall. Each year, the Fair Haven police station took a photo with all the employees, framed it, and hung it on the wall in the lobby. It looked like they’d been doing it since the inception of the department, but I couldn’t tell for sure because the oldest photos hung far above my head. Only the ones from the past twenty years were at my eye level.

  I liked to study them when I came in. It was fun to see how long each person I knew had been here, to see the changes in hair styles, and even watch the long-standing members age.

  I’d been in this station more often than anyone but an employee should be. Not only when investigating cases, either. I’d come to drop something off to Elise, or to meet Erik for coffee, or to bring samples of some new maple syrup treat that Nancy, my employee who had a gift for baking and candy making, was experimenting with. It wasn’t only Mark who had friends here. They’d become my friends as well.

  It felt different today, almost like I’d come home to find someone had redecorated my house while I was at the grocery store. Sheila’s face was the only familiar one, and I still felt the distance her refusal to help me had created between us.

  I went over to the metal bench along the wall to wait instead and shifted my gaze to the floor. It was too unsettling to watch so many strangers milling about, none of whom had a space in the photos on the wall.

  “Are you the one who asked to visit Mark Cavanaugh?”