by Quinn, Lucy
I thanked Nadine for the tea and left. But when I turned onto the dark road again, I was completely and totally lost. The turns on my phone were gone, and I had no visual point of reference. I made a couple of turns, trying to backtrack, and ended up at the edge of the river, in what looked like a little turnout.
Frustrated, I pulled all the way into the flat graveled area, and made to turn around. I saw a flash of something behind me, and I turned off the Tank’s engine. Only a few seconds later, a single light flickered behind me, clearly on the front of a vehicle. This time I could make out the outline of a motorcycle, and my skin pebbled in fear.
What was Derek Hobson doing following me out to Nadine Winters’ house?
Or into a dark, secluded…
Crap on a communion wafer.
Chapter 25
Without cell service, I had no way of signaling anyone if anything went wrong, so I didn’t want to startle Derek by seeming suspicious. I smiled and rolled my window down, like I had expected to meet him here, like there was nothing peculiar about seeing him in the pitch-dark night in the middle of nowhere, but my right hand searched through my purse for something that could double as a weapon.
Nothing.
He stopped his bike beside my car. The fact that he wasn’t parking behind me, which would’ve trapped me in, gave me at least a little relief. Not much, but a little.
My heartbeat thudded out heavy beats. “What are you doing here?” My tone was a little too saccharine, but I couldn’t fix that. I was lucky the words had come out at all. He had my nerves good and jangled.
He took off his helmet. “I think the better question is, what are you doing out here?”
“I had to make a visit. I am her pastor, after all.”
“Oh.” Concern lined his features. “You mean you’re not out here about Henry’s case?”
“I’m not a private detective, Derek. I’m just doing my job.” My fingers finally closed around something cylindrical. Febreeze. My little travel-size scent neutralizer, for hiding the cooking smells when I need to go in public. If this turned out to be a shakedown, I could probably get close enough to spray him in the eyes.
“Okay, I answered you,” I pressed. “Now, why are you following me?”
“Because you seem to be able to talk to anyone in this town, which means you might be the only one who can get answers.” He spread his hands out, indicating his biker-y-ness. “You think they’re going to talk to me if I come to the door?”
I shrugged, relaxing my fingers from around the Febreeze bottle. “No. But you’re an asset if I ever need to B&E.”
In the glow of his lone headlight, I could just make out the outline of his face and his lips cracking a smile. “Yeah, I can do that.”
“I probably should have called you earlier,” I said, with a little shiver. The air was cold, and I was only wearing a light jacket. “I found someone, a delivery guy, who said he saw Henry drive away from the convenience store while Claire was still alive. So I called the police and told them.”
Derek’s brows pulled together. “So he really didn’t do it.”
“It doesn’t appear that way, no.”
“And Scarlet didn’t do it either.”
“You thought it might be Scarlet?” I snorted just a little, reaching down to start my vehicle. I turned the heat up to full blast and aimed it at my feet and body. The night was not getting any warmer, but I still wasn’t sure it was safe to invite Derek into my car.
“I don’t know who it was, Vangie. I suspect everyone.”
I nodded. I could understand that; I felt the same way.
I looked around the little clearing. We were right at the edge of the river, parked on a bank that sloped down to the water. There were little patches of snow at random intervals along the bank, but it had been warmer recently and there hadn’t been snow since January.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked.
“I think you took a wrong turn back there. This is the parking lot for the Running Elk trailhead. It’s a dead end.”
“I don’t like how dark it is.”
“I don’t like that you’re out here by yourself at this time of night.” There was an edge of protectiveness in his voice that made me relax even more. If his intent had been nefarious, he certainly could have lured me out of my car and boxed me in and killed me. He could have dumped my body in the river, and chances were, no one would ever have known. I’d seen enough Sherlock to know, it was always the body disposal that was the hardest part of murder.
That’s what had stumped me so much about Claire’s murder . She had been posed. Left out for someone to find. Left out for Henry to be framed. That box had been put in her hands—setting off a whole chain of events that had brought Malcolm to me.
If killing Claire had been premeditated, then why not dispose of the body?
“What’s going on in that head of yours right now?” Derek asked, leaning on the handlebars of his bike. “I can tell you’re thinking about something.”
“I have…” I stopped, not wanting to push him too hard. He’d just lost his wife. “I shouldn’t be bugging you about this stuff.”
“Hey, don’t worry about me,” he said, holding up his hands. “I have nothing to hide.”
“Well, when you talked to Malcolm, when he questioned you, did he ever consider you a suspect?”
“I think he assumed I was involved. I mean, cops always think guys like me are involved when there’s a crime involved.”
“Did he interrogate you?”
“Not hard-core, no. He asked about the bruising on her neck, which…” He stopped, his voice breaking. “I asked her about that myself, when I saw it.”
“What did she say?”
“She just brushed it off, like she brushed everything off. But that was why I wanted to talk to Nikki, instead of Claire going over there. I was worried someone was threatening her.”
“And you told the sheriff about this?” I asked.
“Yeah. I mean, he asked me about where I was, too. But I had an alibi for the time when they think she was… I was working on my bike at my house, and probably ten people saw me.”
“Then why give you the murder weapon?”
“It wouldn't have occurred to me it was the murder weapon if you hadn’t pointed out the similarities between the knife and the wounds. I never saw the…” He choked again.
“You didn’t identify Claire’s body?”
Derek shook his head and bowed it. I wanted to get out of my car and comfort him. It was a natural pastoral impulse. But I was trying this new thing where I didn’t put myself in danger. No matter how much I thought I trusted him, I was in a place with no escape, one where I didn’t know the terrain. If my instincts were even a little bit off, then I couldn’t put myself in that position with a strapping, muscular man who broke into people’s houses and rode a Harley.
Not wise.
“I wonder who identified it,” I said, gripping the steering wheel. “Even when they know the identity of the person, they usually bring someone in to confirm the identity. Maybe her fingerprints were in the system?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He shrugged, still bent over his bike. “They might have had Nikki do it.”
But that wasn’t possible. Nikki had been at the basketball game, and fought with Malcolm. Claire had already been identified at that point. But not before Malcolm paid me a visit at the bakery; he hadn’t used her name. Then again, maybe that had been intentional.
Maybe he had already known who she was and was testing me. Chilling thought.
“As far as I know, she’d never been arrested. But we spent a lot of time apart over the years, too. She had a thing about being tied down.” He finally looked at me. “I would go for months without seeing her. Sometimes she broke up with me first, said we were getting a divorce. Sometimes she didn’t. I just kept waiting for her to figure her life out. I guess I didn’t wait long enough.”
“You didn’t do anything
wrong, Derek.” I poured all the compassion I could muster into my words. “You were good to her.” From everything I’d seen and heard, it was true. Her family had abandoned her. He was the only one in her life who’d simply been there.
“I just wish I had been able to get her to see herself the way I saw her.” His voice cracked with emotion. “Maybe none of this would have happened.”
“Do you mind if I ask you one last question?” I said, trying to tread lightly. When he didn’t respond, I barreled forward. “If Scarlet and I hadn’t been there, what would you have done after Jenna brought you the bag?”
“Probably just left town.” He shook his head, leaning back on the seat of his bike. “I wanted to get out of here something bad. When I ran into Mike Van Andel, I was buying supplies to clean the house so I could check out with the rental company.”
“Where did that happen?”
“At the grocery store.”
“In the middle of the day?”
“Yeah.” He waved his hand like it was no big deal. “He’s a vet, so he was on his way back from a house call or something.”
“Did he suggest that you should leave town?” I ventured.
Derek’s features perked with interest and he leaned toward me like he was thinking of dismounting. “Why would he do that?”
“I just wondered if he said anything that seemed off to you.”
“Not really. He just said he was sorry about what happened to Claire and that Nikki had something for me. At first I thought it might be money, but he said it was a bag of Claire’s stuff. Y’know, I might not even have opened it before leaving.”
A flash of memory caught my attention. Derek and money. Mike Van Andel in Nikki’s kitchen, talking about Derek asking for money. I swallowed hard and took my life into my hands. I half-closed my eyes while I asked the question.
“Why would you assume it was money?”
“Because Nikki owed me.” His tone got suddenly hard. “Well, she owed Claire. There was some kind of inheritance or something, a bunch of money that Claire was owed by Frances and Nikki that she was supposed to come into. They were supposed to pay up. I came to Nikki’s house one night so Claire wouldn’t have to see her, and Mike Van Andel was there, and I told him they were either going to give us the money, or I was going to hire a lawyer. He said he’d make sure it got to me. Still hasn’t happened.”
I thought back to the conversation I’d had with Scarlet. The checks going to the Mockingbird Lane address, which was probably Frances’s house. Depending on how much money he sent every month, there had to be quite a bank account. But the checks were made out to Claire, so unless they had some kind of shared bank account, the money should have been Claire’s. And because Derek was her husband, they would become his.
That money was the bane of my existence. It was the thing that connected Claire to Henry and, by proxy, both of them to Austin. But if money had been the motive, then why not kill Claire and Derek instead of Claire and Henry? None of it added up.
“I lost you again,” Derek said, and when I looked up, he had swung one leg off his bike. He was leaning over his knees, staring at me intently. “What’re you thinking?”
I pressed my lips together. “Trying to figure out who could have killed Claire. None of the motives make sense to me.”
“Do you think the cops will start investigating again?”
“Now that we have eyewitness proof that she was alive when Henry left the gas station, I think those chances are good. Assuming her time of death was after that.”
He flexed his hands and dropped his elbows to his knees. “I just want to know what happened to her.”
“Me, too.”
“Then what do you think we should do?”
“What are you going to do with the knife?” I asked, swallowing a little.
He raised a brow. “Do you really want to know?”
“No, you’re right. It’s better if I don’t know.” I let out a long breath, very aware of how over-my-head I really was, in this case. But I couldn’t stop now. “I’d like to check in with Scarlet before she leaves town. And then I think we both need to get some rest. Maybe Malcolm will turn something up, when he re-opens the case.”
Derek agreed to lead me back to the main road and come to the B&B with me. When we came away from the mountains, and I could see bars reappear on the face of my phone, I breathed a little sigh of relief. I didn’t like being without a connection to the outside world.
The town was mostly dead. Almost all of the stores were closed by six o’clock, and most of the restaurants closed by eight. In an agricultural community, darkness meant rest and quiet. There were a few bars that would stay open, but that was about it.
When I drove down Mockingbird Lane, something tightened in my gut as we approached the B&B. A familiar truck was parked in front of it. It looked like the same blue truck that had been parked in Malcolm’s driveway. There was a good chance it belonged to Mike Van Andel, but I couldn’t be sure. It was too dark and I had only seen it a couple of times at the bakery.
I told Derek as much as we approached the door, and he immediately crouched over. There were no lights on in the ground floor of the B&B, except for a very dim lamp in the entryway.
Derek took a tool out of his pocket and picked the lock on the front door. When I punched his arm, he shrugged, like it was no big deal. I don’t know why I was surprised, given that this was his second B&E of the day.
He looked around and then motioned for me to follow him up the stairs. I could hear someone above us talking. Mumbled voices, like they were behind closed doors.
With a finger over his mouth, Derek drew me around to the side of the steps, where it looked like there was a small closet.
“You’re lighter on your feet than I am,” he whispered. “It would be easier for you to sneak up on them.” He pressed his foot down and the old floors creaked in answer. “This place is too old for me to sneak around.”
I blew out a long breath. If Mike Van Andel was up there, and he caught me spying, then I would be in so much trouble. I might lose Leo at the bakery. I would definitely lose my collar. But Derek was right. We had to find out why Mike was here. It didn’t make any sense for him to be talking with Scarlet. A lot of what he’d been doing around town these last few days didn’t make any sense.
Making a quick sign of the cross, I crept up the stairs, wincing every time I made the slightest noise. But the people who were talking upstairs were clearly inside a room, and they were arguing so loudly, it wasn’t unlikely they’d hear anything.
When I got to the landing, I made a quick survey of my surroundings. There were several closed doors along both sides—the guests’ rooms, no doubt—and two open doors. There was a light on under one of the closed doors, and I assumed that was Scarlet’s room. Just beside it was one of the open doors.
Bathroom?
I tiptoed to the open door, holding my breath as I passed the door I’d tentatively ID’ed as Scarlet’s. This was maybe the stupidest thing I’d done in…well, the last few days had been chock full of stupid things. When I came through the door, I pushed out a relieved breath at the sight of the toilet and pedestal sink. I closed the door but didn’t latch it. I could finally focus on the voices.
One wall seemed to adjoin with Scarlet’s room, but the only door was to the hallway. I pressed my ear against the plaster beside the mirror, squeezing between the sink and the toilet, trying not to disturb anything that wasn’t nailed down.
I could practically hear their words verbatim.
“I am not going to betray Henry’s memory like that,” Scarlet yelled. Someone must have shushed her, because she continued in a normal voice. “I don’t care what you say would come out about him. I already know the worst.”
“But the public doesn’t,” said a man’s voice. It sounded like Mike Van Andel. What the craic was he doing here talking to Scarlet?
“You don’t know very much about Hollywood,” she said loudly,
with a condescending laugh. “The public has a pretty high tolerance for scandal.”
“But assault? They’re going to forgive him for that?”
“Better that than murder.”
“I don’t think you want to test that theory.”
“I don’t think you know me very well, Mr. Van Andel.” Scarlet sounded unshakable, and I respected her for maybe the first time since we’d met.
“Then there’s nothing I can do to change your mind?”
“I don’t know how many times I can tell you this. I am not going to say that Henry took the car and went back to that stupid gas station.”
I swallowed. So, they’d already heard about the alibi witness? What kind of crazy Ocean’s Eleven conspiracy was going on here? Were they tapping my phone or something?
“No one would even know,” he said. “You said yourself, Mrs. Nelson didn’t see either one of you come in. It’s a harmless lie.”
There’s no such thing, I wanted to finish for her.
“But it’s not the truth, and Henry deserves the truth. If that sheriff gets off his lazy butt and investigates this like he should, he’ll find out who really killed that girl, and I want Henry to be exonerated.”
“Even if the truth comes out about what he really did?” Mike’s voice rose to such a fever pitch, my fists tightened in response, like I was in full-on fight-or-flight mode.
I took a couple of shallow breaths, trying to calm myself. I’m not in any danger, I kept repeating to myself, but it wasn’t working. My body felt like I was.
I thought I had enough information to get out of that bathroom. Get back to Derek. If I stayed, I risked getting trapped up there, never knowing if another guest might show up, or if Mike was waiting outside for me. Even though I hadn’t parked directly behind him, I didn’t have a forgettable car.
With careful steps, I hurried past Scarlet’s door, and down the stairs. It sounded like they’d stopped talking for a second, but I didn’t wait around to see why. I was too close to freedom.