Three Carols of Cozy Christmas Murder

by Carolyn L. Dean

  “I think Paige is a victim too.”

  “She’s strong enough to have climbed that trail,” Zee said. “I wouldn’t have thought she’d be faster than Mattie though.”

  I stared towards the boutique thinking and wondering. Just what had been happening over there? “Paige has arthritis. She told me around Thanksgiving. She has a lot of pain in her shoulders and wrists. I carried boxes for her.”

  “So?”

  “So you use your arms to chuck a brick through a window. I don’t think that Paige was the one who broke the window. I like her.”

  “Then why did she bring us that stuff? I liked Jenny, but I find I’m not surprised that she was involved.”

  I glanced at Zee and around the diner. The window was out, Simon hadn’t come back, the person who was going to board up the windows hadn’t shown up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave the diner unattended, but I wanted to talk to Paige.

  “That’s a good question,” I said. I closed the blinds, took the box of blackmailing proof, and walked to my office. I put the box in the closet, locked it, and then locked the office door as well. I walked back into the eating area, where Zee had stayed behind and said, “Well. Let’s find out.”

  Chapter 10

  “It’s amazing that you can open a door as if it’s a personal attack,” I hissed to Zee.

  Paige walked out from her back room at the sound of the bell, saw us, and paled. Her mouth gaped a moment, and then she stuttered out, “H-h-hello. You two Christmas shopping?”

  Her lips were trembling a little as were her hands. I glanced to the corner where the perfume bottles were set up and I said, “How did you end up with all of Donna’s blackmail evidence?”

  “I…don’t know what you mean,” Paige said lamely. She glanced frantically around the store.

  Zee snorted meanly and I smacked her lightly.

  “Paige,” I said gently, the good cop to Zee’s bad cop, “What’s going on?”

  A tear rolled down her cheek and she blustered, “I didn’t kill Donna.”

  “No one is saying you did,” I said as gently, crossing to her and wrapping my arm around her shoulder. “But you know something.”

  “I…I…don’t know who did it.” Her speech was both rushed and stuttering like a car that was attempting to rumble to a halt but couldn’t quite manage it.

  “You didn’t see who broke our window?” I crossed to the perfume bottles as Paige was stuttering over that question.

  She finally answered, “No…no…no. Of course, I didn’t. If I had, I’d have told you.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I figured that Simon would be by sooner or later. I didn’t think she’d done it, so I wasn’t going to push that when I had so many other things to push with her.

  I picked up a perfume bottle, showed it to Paige, and asked, “Did she just take them? Come in, pick one out, add it to her bag in front of you?”

  Paige gaped and then asked, “How did you know?”

  Got it in one guess, I thought, but it made me feel even worse. Poor Paige. She was a much easier victim than I’d expected. I didn’t see how she was able to run a business, but she didn’t seem to have staff, so I guessed that she only had to motivate herself.

  “Did you see who broke the window at the diner?” Zee demanded.

  Paige shook her head and finally admitted, “That’s why I decided to give you the box. I don’t want it…it’s poison! It’s…it’s…ruined so many lives.”

  “How did you get it?”

  Paige’s lips were trembling when she said, “Donna used my office. I have been using a card table for my work ever since…ever since that fiend started to…to…blackmail me! She did her business out of my shop! She…she…she made it seem like we were friends. She…made everyone hate me.”

  Paige stuttered to a stop and broke into tears. I kept her tucked against my side and jerked my head towards the front door. Zee crossed, flipped the closed sign again.

  I pulled Paige with me to the office and glanced through it.

  “I’ve been putting all of their poison into the box I left you. The rest was my stuff. My work computer. My desk. My office supplies.”

  I sort of nudged and pushed Paige into an office chair and asked, “Did you keep anything?”

  My voice was firm and strong like I’d used when I was working customer service or when I was trying (and failing) to get Zee to do anything.

  “No,” Paige said. She had dissolved into tears and I glanced around until I found a tissue box and shoved one at her.

  “How can we believe you?” Zee demanded as I held Paige’s hand. I shook my head at Zee and she shot me a disgusted look. Perhaps I was too soft, I didn’t care. I’d rather be kind—at least to those who I didn’t think were killers.

  “I…I…don’t know.” Paige looked around her office helplessly and then said with a distinct passion, “Those people deserve their stuff back. You two…you’re like…the people who will give it back. You won’t blackmail them. But…but…I don’t want to be involved.”

  “Well yeah,” Zee muttered, “Since one of them is a killer.”

  Paige flinched at that and I had to hide my own reaction. She should know that in giving us their stuff to return—she was putting us at risk. Perhaps she didn’t, but for the love of goodness, I wasn’t sure I could believe that and I wanted to slap her sideways for pretending like she didn’t know.

  As if the thought had just occurred to her, Paige glanced around passionately and then said, “Where is the stuff? Your diner can’t be locked. You can’t just leave that laying around. Those are people’s lives.”

  “If Paige didn’t kill Donna…” Zee started and then said in an aside, “And who would blame her?”

  “Then who did?” I finished. But I agreed with Zee. Donna hadn’t just taken things and money from Paige, Donna made herself comfortable in Paige’s business and made it a little center of hatred.

  “Where is the box?” Paige demanded, ignoring the insinuation that she was a murderer.

  “It’s safe,” I said. “We’re not playing with lives like that.”

  “It could be any of them,” Paige dropped her elbow onto the desk and leaned into her hand as if her body were too heavy to carry anymore. “Any of them could have killed Donna. You know she deserved it. I wish…I wish I did it.”

  Zee glanced at Paige with disgust and then over to me, but I shook my head, hoping to silence Zee from whatever mean thing she was going to say. I knew her well enough to know she was not irritated by the wish to have been the one who killed Donna but by the tears. Either way, Zee clamped her mouth shut, glancing around the office and then Zee said—but not meanly, “There is nothing to see here. Paige, go home. Take a day off. It’s over.”

  Paige looked up at Zee as if she were some sort of savior and then said, “Ok. Ok.”

  In a near daze, she wrapped a scarf around her neck, threw on her coat, and dropped her bag on her shoulder.

  “I…I will.” Paige sniffed and said it like she was being rebellious in closing a slow shop on a slow day.

  Zee shook her head, and the two of us left Paige locking up her boutique. We waited until she was in her car before we headed back into the diner.

  Simon watched us from across the street where he and a man I didn’t know were working on the window. Simon was holding the wood while the man was screwing the wood into place.

  I stared at my broken window, frustrated again, and then went to thank them for their help. Even with driving to Portland or Salem to get glass, it was going to take a couple of days before we’d be able to open. Given that we were closed on Sundays and Mondays, it looked like we’d be having a long weekend.

  “You gonna say anything?” Zee hissed when I came inside.

  “Shhh,” I said nudging Zee when Simon came inside the diner. Zee snapped her mouth shut, cleared her throat, and grabbed a washcloth from our bucket of bleach water and sort of ham-handedly started wiping a counter that d
idn’t need it.

  “Hey,” I said to him, “Did you find out who broke my window? Did anyone see anything?”

  His gaze moved suspiciously from me to Zee and back again. He shook his head once, but I didn’t believe for a second that he bought our innocent act any more than I bought his.

  “Nothing?” I tried again.

  “Nothing,” he said, and I was almost positive he was lying. “Any chance Jeb and I could get some coffee?”

  Smooth, I thought. Very, very smooth. A reason to stand around and then sit and linger.

  “Sure,” Zee said brightly in a voice that no one who knew her would believe, “What can I get ya?”

  Simon’s gaze sharpened even more.

  I cut in casually, “Did you want cake?”

  He nodded. I mouthed ‘to-go’ at Zee and then walked into the kitchen to cut a few more slices of cake, put them in a bag, added plastic silverware and said, “I have paperwork to do, does he need anything else from me or am I good to put together my orders?”

  I wasn’t sure that Simon believed me, and I was very sure that he didn’t want to let us out of his sight, but he couldn’t stick around forever. What I said was plausible. I always did have a running list of orders.

  His gaze examined mine, and I reached up on my toes to kiss his cheek. I said, “Thank you for taking care of the window. I wouldn’t have known who to call.”

  “I would have,” Zee scoffed.

  There we go, I thought, back to normal. For Zee, being too nice was worse than being mean for suspicious.

  She handed Simon the drinks in a carrier and said, “But I suppose you’re not totally useless.”

  I laughed at that one and said, “Do we need anything extra, you think? Because of the mess?”

  “I do have work to do,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at where Jeb was standing in the door. “I’ll call you, Rose.”

  He nodded to Zee and left before Zee could totally give us away. I headed back to my office and said, “You playing nice is suspicious.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m always nice,” Zee said meanly.

  I grinned at her and then asked, “You can be trusted with people’s secrets right?”

  As soon as I’d asked it, I knew I’d hurt her feelings.

  “I’ve been keeping Jane’s secrets all this time,” Zee said, snapping her mouth shut.

  “I know,” I said. “It feels like a burden to carry. But we have to weed out those who aren’t the murderer and give back their secrets.”

  “Starting with Jane,” Zee said. “Call her.”

  Zee said it in a way that was weighted. She wanted something from that phone call that I didn’t understand.

  “What are you looking for from her?”

  “Just call her,” Zee said.

  “You suspect Jane?” I didn’t want Zee to say yes, but as I opened the office door, she followed me in. I could tell by her mannerisms that she did suspect Jane. “Jane’s a good person. She’s a doctor She’s…well…she wouldn't have.”

  Zee sat and this time she was the one who looked like her body was too heavy for her. I leaned down to let Daisy out of her dog crate, taking a moment to caress her and those long silky ears. Zee said, “I like Jane. I’ve known her since she was a kid and I’ve liked her as long.”

  “Then why?”

  Zee sounded sad when she said, “We can’t rule her out because she’s our friend. That was our mistake with Tara. We’d have figured Kyle’s murder out much sooner if we had decided to include our friends as suspects. Tara should have been our first guess.”

  I considered that and then the fact that Zee had been up and gathering cookies when the murder had started. Except that Donna was in her kitchen. What if she’d been trying to make the cookies early? And someone had tampered with the gas lines. It could have been anyone who’d gotten into the house. But this was Silver Falls…a lot of people didn’t lock their doors. Especially up on the bluff neighborhood where only locals were likely to show.

  “Are we suspects? Do you think? To Simon?”

  “You aren’t,” Zee told me. “He’s blinded by you in general. And why would you try to kill Donna? You’re too white bread to have anything to blackmail over. And the fact that you have principles too…something most of these people could learn from. For example, you’d do what Jane should have and told Hank from the beginning that you were pregnant by someone else. Except, you’d never have cheated.”

  Just the thought of cheating on someone made me sick. But that was in theory, not reality. The reality of being lonely and having someone come into your life…that wasn’t something I could relate to. I’d never been all that serious about someone before. That wasn’t something to envy, it was something to be regretted.

  With Zee’s eagle eye on me, I called Jane.

  “Hey,” she said breathlessly.

  “We have your stuff,” I told her.

  “Oh,” Jane said, and I could hear her breath catch. She gasped a little and then, with voice cracking, she said, “Really?”

  “Is she crying?” Zee asked.

  I nodded and told Jane, “Really. Right here in front of me.”

  “I…I have to…no…wait. Oh gosh,” she whimpered a little and said, “Excuse me.”

  I could hear her walking and then saying to someone else, “No, no. I’m fine. I’m fine. Thank you. Just um…just give me a minute.”

  , “I’m in my office. I…I…don’t know what to say. Thank you.”

  “It’s ok,” I told her.

  “I’m coming. I’m coming right now.” She was still crying, sniffling as she walked and telling her nurse she was fine. Jane finally seemed to lose patience and say, “It’s all right. An old friend passed. We knew it was coming.”

  I glanced at Zee and pressed my lips together. Jane did lie very well. That was entirely believable and an excellent reason to just disappear. I hung up a moment later and said to Zee, “Jane did cry. And she’s coming right now.”

  “She only cries when she’s at her end,” Zee said. “If she didn’t cry, I’d worry she was our killer. She could have done it, of course. Easier than anyone else. You saw how easy it was to cross from Jane’s house to Donna’s. And Jane is smart enough to figure out how to kill Donna however she was murdered.”

  “Do you think Jane did it?”

  Zee shrugged, and I felt sick. Had we been helping a murderer? But, why would Jane kill Donna and then search her house? No. I didn’t believe it. Jane was my friend. She was a doctor. She didn’t look for Donna to help her during the fire—and that was making Jane hate herself.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I told Zee. “Yeah, I’ve come back to Jane. But why would she involve us?”

  “She got you to promise not to tell Simon about her,” Zee said.

  She was making me doubt both Jane and myself. I didn’t want Jane to be the killer.

  That was true and then I realized, “She was at the clinic today. Surely you know someone who works there. Surely you can ask, without making it suspicious, if Jane was there all day?”

  “You think the killer is the person who broke the diner window?”

  “I know it doesn’t have to be,” I said, wanting the killer to not be Jane. “But it is most likely. Also, I think Simon might have an idea who broke the window. If he thought it was Jane, he wouldn’t have left without saying something.”

  “Now that I believe. Even when Simon is irritated with you, he’s protective. He looked downright scary when I came to the diner after the window was broken. I’m leaving before Jane gets here,” Zee said. “It just so happens I do have someone I can talk to at the clinic.”

  Zee left the office and called back, “But I’ll be back for wine and cake and whatever else those fools talk you into.”

  “I think we might go to the cottage,” I said mildly. “Jane has to do a school thing though.”

  “She’ll be back. Now that she has her stuff off her mind, she’s gonna want t
o know who the killer is.”

  Chapter 11

  Jane showed up with Mattie in tow, and we packed up wine and went back to my cottage. As soon as we walked inside, Jane started a fire and threw everything—except the picture of her and Jason—into the flames.

  “Why are you keeping that?” Mattie was placing an order for pizza online while Jane burned page after page.

  She glanced up and let her finger caress Jason’s face. She turned to face us both as I opened the wine bottle and said, “It might be the only picture J.J. will ever have with me and his dad together.”

  Mattie and I looked at each other and then back to Jane.

  “Are you going to tell him?” I asked, hoping the answer would be ‘yes.’

  “I’m…” Jane pressed her hands to her face and said, “I know you think I should.”

  Oh, I did. I really, really did. I fed Mama Dog, the puppies, and Daisy to avoid telling Jane what to do and to keep me from ruining our friendship over what I felt were the iffy choices she’d made.

  “I’m not sure Hank will ever forgive me,” Jane said, rubbing her brows and then scrubbing her hair back to clutch the back of her neck. “I don’t blame him.”

  Mattie looked at me, back to Jane, and then down at the laptop. Did that mean she agreed?

  “Where is Jason now?” I asked carefully.

  “New York,” Jane said. “He left before Hank got back. Jason wanted me to go too. Just pack up, bring Hank Junior, and leave Silver Falls. But…I couldn’t. I…I know it’s hard to believe that I loved Hank and cheated on him, but I did. I do. I…I…don’t know.”

  I set the wine aside to breathe and opened my fridge to pull out grapes and cheese. Given that my lunch had been destroyed, I was starving. I set the food on the table and went back for the wine glasses and the wine.

  Mattie was carefully avoiding saying anything to Jane about what she did as far as J.J. went. You could see the way Mattie was avoiding meeting Jane’s gaze or saying anything at all. I had to wonder if that was because Mattie didn’t want to frustrate Jane or perhaps Mattie was trying to avoid pushing Jane into anything. It was Jane’s life.