It was her highest hope, and while she tried desperately to latch on to it, dread was surfacing in her chest. What if the way in which this second abduction was connected to the first didn’t tie into the drug ring at all? What if it only supported Scott’s original theory that Jason and Becky had staged some kind of hoax to extort money from the Langleys?
She couldn’t think about that. Any scenario implicating her son was too much to bear. She could barely tolerate knowing that Jason was behind Donna Kramer’s murder. And adding to her rising stress was the Jenna Johansen angle. Who had killed her and why?
Scott’s truck veered off Main Street, turning left at the fork in the road that split onto Rock Ridge Boulevard. Traffic was moving at a steady flow. Kate gunned it, but an oncoming station wagon was driving too quickly. At the last second, she slammed on the brakes. She shrieked, as the station wagon swerved to avoid her front bumper, and let out an unsteady sigh of relief that they hadn’t collided.
Stepping on the gas, she made her left turn and caught up to Scott’s truck just as he turned right onto Pennsylvania Avenue, heading into a part of town that was nicer, and also happened to be in the same neighborhood as Jason’s house.
If history was repeating itself, she thought as she pulled along the curb directly behind Scott’s truck in front of a blue one-story house that was modest in size but clearly expensive, then the woman’s parents would soon receive a handwritten ransom note. There would be another opportunity to make an exchange—cash for the safe return of the woman. And with Tommy Barkow dead, no one would be around to set off an explosion.
This could be good. Or...it could be very bad.
Scott stepped out of his truck and glanced over his shoulder at her. She unfastened her seat belt, nervous for what they might discover, and climbed out of her truck, meeting him on the sidewalk in front of the house. A few police cruisers had arrived, one parked in the driveway and another along the curb.
“Kate,” said Scott in an apprehensive yet apologetic tone. “I told you, you can’t be here.”
It was true. He had.
“This is a family matter,” she objected.
“It’s a police matter—”
“But whatever you find is going to directly inform you about what happened to Jason and Becky.”
“We can’t get our hopes up on that.” He sighed, glancing over his shoulder at the police officers walking urgently in and out of the front door. One of them grabbed evidence bags out of the cruiser in the driveway then rushed back into the house. “Wait here,” he told her and started for the house.
Kate folded her arms, squinting through the sun’s glare at the windows lining the front of the house and then glanced up and down the street. The block was quiet. Few houses had cars in the driveway, which told her most everyone on this street had already left for work. It was so similar to Jason and Becky’s trauma that it gave her chills despite the rising temperature.
She didn’t like the coincidence of it all. Jason had just texted her last night that he had a lead on Becky, and the very next morning a second couple had a home invasion. Had Jason discovered something that put this second couple at risk?
She couldn’t wait on the sidewalk like this. It would only drive her crazy to guess what all of it meant.
Cautiously, she neared the walkway leading up to the house. When she reached it, she strained to hear the police officers inside, but they were speaking too quietly. She padded midway up the walk, hoping to close the gap enough to overhear them.
Straining to listen, she heard the rise and fall of a man’s voice, shaky and on the brink of tears.
“Who would’ve taken Ashley?” he said before his voice lowered to a murmur.
Ashley? The name rang a bell. Hadn’t she met an Ashley recently? She racked her brain, hunting through the faces of residents in her mind, and finally she remembered.
The receptionist she had seen at Over the Moon several times was named Ashley, but Kate couldn’t recall ever learning the young woman’s last name.
She crept closer to the front door, listening and peering into the shallow foyer just inside the house.
Suddenly, Officer Tolland entered through the doorway, startling her.
“Kate,” he said, surprised to see her. He stepped out, closing the door behind him. “What are you doing here?”
What could she say? If her husband, the police chief, didn’t want her here, there was nothing she could tell Tolland to justify her arrival. “I was concerned.”
“Understandably, but this is a crime scene. You shouldn’t even be on the walkway.”
“Could you just tell me if it was Ashley, the receptionist at Over the Moon, who was abducted?”
Officer Tolland let out a heavy sigh.
“You know Jason has been going through the same thing. Becky Langley is still missing,” she pressed.
“I’m very aware of that,” he offered. His eyes had rounded and she could tell he wanted to tell her something.
“What is this going to mean for Amelia?” she asked, suddenly realizing the peril her future in-laws would be facing. Amelia had only just been let off the hook for Tommy Barkow’s murder, and rightfully so. But crimes kept circling back to her and Lance.
Office Tolland stared at her for a long moment then said, “Yes, it was Ashley who works at Over the Moon. But that’s all I’ll say, and I shouldn’t even be telling you that much.”
Kate shot him a curt nod, her mouth pressing into a hard line. There was no sense hovering around if Scott was going to be a while. She would just have to find out what was going on later tonight. Hopefully by then she would have learned a lot from Dean Wentworth. Their meeting was to take place at ten o’clock tonight. She thanked Tolland and started off down the walkway.
After climbing into her truck, the urge to call Jason was overwhelming. She debated for a long moment. The decision hit her quickly. Of course she would call. She cued up his number and sent the call through, then pressed the phone to her ear.
It was ringing.
And the ringing went on for a very long time.
She cursed, ended the call, and dropped her cell back into the front pocket of her overalls. She wasn’t too far from Jason’s house, so she opted to drive a few blocks to see if he might be home.
When she reached his house, she didn’t see his car in the driveway. She pulled her truck in, killed the engine, and climbed out.
As she made her way up the walkway to the front door, her cell vibrated, startling her. She was quick to answer the call, hoping Jason was getting back to her after having seen a missed call from his mother. But when she pressed the phone to her ear and said hello, it was Hazel Millhouse’s voice that came through.
“Kate, I might need you at the library,” she said. “A number of shelves have gotten rickety and a few of the desks are in bad condition. All told, I’d say we need at least five small fixes.”
“Okay, that’s no problem. I can head over now, if you like.”
“That would be wonderful,” said Hazel. “We always get a flood of children around three thirty when the school lets out, so it would be great to get this done before it gets busy.”
“No problem. I’m on my way.”
After returning her cell to her overalls, Kate lifted onto her tiptoes, straining to see through the small window on the front door. From her vantage point, she could see little more than the ceiling. She grasped the doorknob, but soon discovered the door was locked. She knocked and then sent a text message to Jason, telling him she was outside and asking if he would please come to the door. She didn’t have high hopes for a response. After the longest thirty seconds of her life, she didn’t get one.
She backed away, telling herself that breaking into her own son’s home would be an act of insanity. Not to mention, he obviously wasn’t home. Realizing this, her gaze happened to lower to the welcome mat.
Poking out from beneath it, she saw the corner of an envelope. Curious, she knelt, peele
d the corner of the welcome mat up, and found that there was an envelope under the mat. There was something inside of it, she observed, picking up the envelope. When she looked inside of it, she saw a key—a common house key—as well as a folded piece of paper.
She felt terrified and thrilled while unfolding the paper to find a handwritten note. Before reading it, she glanced over her shoulder, sensing that whoever had left the note might not be far. But the street was empty.
Returning her eyes to the note, she began reading.
There were two addresses listed and she recognized both. The first was Drake’s Firing Line and the second was Donna Kramer’s house. The second was the address she had found printed on the boxes of drugs in the shed at Over the Moon.
There were no instructions, nothing to explain the key. Whoever had left this envelope for her son expected him to know exactly what to do with the key and the two addresses.
To cover her bases, she tried to fit the key into Jason’s front door, but as she had assumed, it was not his house key. Maybe it would unlock the front door of Drake’s Firing Line, or perhaps a room inside. Or maybe it was the front door key to Donna’s house. But why would someone drop this off for Jason?
She was starting to get a very bad feeling. According to Scott, Jason had been seen doing questionable things around town. And by Jason’s own admission, he was getting closer to finding out what happened to Becky. What if his strategy had gotten him so close to the kidnapper that he was now technically one of them, moving drugs from location to location and doing their dirty work? What if they had put him up to murdering Donna?
Kate returned the key to the envelope, but hesitated to place it under the mat. She wanted to take it, but didn’t want to jeopardize Jason’s safety. People who crossed the drug dealers didn’t stay alive for very long.
But maybe she could use the fact that she knew about this envelope, its implied instructions, to finally get her son to tell her everything.
Quickly, she dialed Jason again. This time when his outgoing voice message came on, she waited patiently for the beep.
“Jason, it’s Mom. I want you to call me when you get this. If you don’t, and you go home, you’ll soon see why you need to call me. My phone is on.”
She hung up, praying that this would do the trick, and started down the walkway towards her truck, with the envelope tucked safely inside her overalls.
After putting it in gear, she reversed down the driveway and pulled out into the street.
Driving to the center of Rock Ridge was a blur. Traffic flowed steadily with few cars on the road. Kate kept slipping into deep thought, coming back to reality only when she realized she had almost missed her turn, slamming on the brakes and cutting the wheel.
As she pulled into the library parking lot, it dawned on her that she hadn’t been there in ages. Back when she had been investigating her ex-husband’s mysterious disappearance, she had been going to the library regularly to hunt through books that Greg had checked out before he went missing. But in the past few years, other than checking out the occasional how-to book on staging houses, she had barely set foot inside the quaint brick structure. The last time she had been here was well over three months.
She climbed out of her truck and grabbed her tool kit from the truck bed. Hopefully, the small fixes Hazel had mentioned wouldn’t require anything more than the tools she already had. She made her way to the door and sighed with relief when the cool air conditioning hit her as she entered.
The library was quiet after the door closed behind her. A few patrons were scattered around the large, wooden table at the center of the library. Each was hunched over books or a laptop computer. She didn’t see any children except for a toddler in a stroller resting beside a woman who was perusing a bookshelf.
Kate ventured towards the front desk where Hazel Millhouse was scanning returned books into the computer system. Her eyes lifted when Kate reached the counter and she whispered, “Hello.”
Gesturing to her tool kit, she asked, “Where should I get started?”
Hazel set down the book she had been handling and walked out from behind the counter. “The little jobs are all over, but I can walk you through them,” she explained, leading Kate down one of the aisles dedicated to historical nonfiction. When they came to an empty shelf, its books stacked neatly on the floor near the wall, Hazel said, “This shelf came loose.”
“Okay,” she said, jiggling and eyeing the shelf. Similar to Dean’s office, the support screws had been stripped from the board.
“And right this way.” Hazel guided her back up the aisle where they turned to walk deeper into the library. As she went, she commented, “What do you make of what’s going on around town?”
“All I know is that Scott is on top of it,” she said, wincing only a little at the fib. She quickly added a point she knew was true. “He has caught every killer—”
“Except for two,” Hazel pointed out. “Donna Kramer and Jenna Johansen’s killers.”
“Or killer,” she countered. “It could be the same person.” Really, Kate hoped it wasn’t, because it would mean Jason had gone to the dark side. The key came to mind. For the millionth time that day, she said a silent prayer that whoever had killed Jenna would go down for Donna’s murder. “I’m sure Scott will get to the bottom of it.”
Hazel came to another shelf as wobbly as the last. “Well, I wonder about her camera guy.”
Kate cocked her head, interested.
“I’m very observant, you know. People don’t necessarily guess that when they look at me, but I have a keen attention to detail. Those reporters have been everywhere, and Jenna Johansen wasn’t the sort you’d forget. She was so beautiful and pushy.”
“She was.”
“So I took notice,” Hazel went on. “She always had the same camera guy. But now that she’s dead and the network replaced Jenna with a new, equally beautiful and even pushier reporter, there’s a new camera guy, as well.”
“You find that suspicious?”
“I do.”
“Not to be disagreeable, but Jenna’s camera guy might be in mourning. Maybe he needed to take some time off after her death.”
“Maybe,” Hazel allowed, though she looked skeptical. “But the microphone guy, you know the guy who holds that long pole with the fluffy end?”
“Yeah, I know,” said Kate with a smile. “The boom operator.”
“He’s the same,” she asserted. “He didn’t need to take any time off. And I had been noticing that whenever Jenna was setting up her shot—you know, directing her crew—the camera guy was very abrasive, adversarial.”
Kate knew enough about prosecuting murders to understand that just because people didn’t get along didn’t necessarily mean they were guilty.
“I found it curious,” Hazel concluded before turning to the shelf. “This one, as well.”
Kate followed Hazel around the library for another five minutes, looking over all the small repairs she would need to do. After showing her the very last one—the bathroom doorknob to the women’s room was loose—Hazel told her she would be at the front desk if Kate needed anything and left her to it.
Figuring that repairing the bathroom doorknob would be tricky once the kids got here after school, she decided to fix it first. She set her tool kit on the ground and found a flathead screwdriver and began tightening the knob in its socket.
As she worked, she considered Hazel’s point. Maybe it was curious that Jenna’s camera guy was no longer working. Maybe he killed her behind the news van that day. The fact of the matter was that with Jason causing her moment-to-moment grief and worry, she hadn’t thought much about Jenna Johansen’s murder beyond praying that her son had nothing to do with it. Kate reasoned it would be worth asking around about. She knew virtually nothing about Jenna, other than the fact she wasn’t from Rock Ridge.
If anyone might know about the reporter, it would be Eric Demblowski, who seemed to have his thumb on the pulse of all the
news outlets that had come to town. Being the head of the Rock Ridge Tribune put Eric at a strong advantage.
In a matter of minutes, she had repaired the doorknob. Working her way through the library, she fixed the two shelves Hazel had pointed out, rehung a painting that had fallen—its nail having popped out of the wall—worked some WD-40 into three draws that had swollen shut in the humidity, and secured a loose tile in the corner of the library that wasn’t floored with wood.
When she finally completed all the repairs, she met Hazel at the front desk and began writing up an invoice.
Hazel was firm, pointing out, “No discounts necessary. The library has a budget for repairs and you deserve the full price.”
Kate smiled and thanked her. She had done countless repairs at Hazel’s house over the years and always offered the elderly woman a decent discount. But she obliged, scrapping the first invoice and writing up a new one at full cost. Considering how small the repairs had been, however, the total was still fairly low.
Taking the invoice, Hazel told her to wait a moment and disappeared into the library office behind the counter.
As Kate waited, she glanced through the windows in the front door just as the national news van drove past. The library wasn’t far from the police precinct, and she figured that was where they were headed. Poor Scott, she thought. The reporters must be driving him crazy, and with Ashley having been abducted, Scott was likely facing another frustrating press conference.
Hazel returned and handed her a check.
After thanking her, Kate picked up her tool kit and left the library, stepping into the hot afternoon sun.
Mrs. Fix It Mysteries, Season 2 (5 Cozy Mystery Books Collection) Page 33