Murder in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery

by Muldoon, Meg

  My mouth suddenly went as dry as the high deserts of Eastern Oregon.

  I couldn’t say anything.

  All I could think was:

  Sheriff Trumbow, you son of a...

  “Cinnamon Peters, you’re under arrest for the murder of Mason Barstow.”

  I gripped the table, and looked around at all the eyes staring at me.

  None of it had seemed real until this moment. Mason’s death, the break-in, the knife on the porch.

  But now, now, it was more real than I could possibly have imagined.

  As real as the cold steel bars of a jail cell.

  Chapter 42

  The sheriff had grabbed my wrists and started placing metal cuffs on them when a scream ripped through the crowd.

  It was a scream of pain, of agony, of frantic hurt.

  “Get this goddamned animal off me!” a woman screamed. “Get it off me!”

  Sheriff Trumbow loosened his grip on my wrists. The news reporter and her camera man stood on their tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd of people.

  There were too many people in the crowd to see what was going on.

  Sheriff Trumbow looked at me sternly.

  “Don’t you go anywhere,” he said.

  He let go of my wrists and started pushing his way through the crowd, his big frame bumping people left and right.

  “Move it, folks,” he said. “Make way!”

  For the most part they didn’t listen to him, and he had to fight his way through.

  “Get Mason’s goddamn runt away from me!” the voice cried again.

  There was something familiar in the voice. But in the high-pitched shrieks, I had trouble placing it.

  I watched as the sheriff got knocked aside by a tourist who had accidently backed up into him. He was useless.

  I disobeyed the sheriff. I left where I was standing and went away from the crowd, sweeping around, threading through the masses until the cries became louder and louder. I pushed my way through, finally making it to the huddle of people surrounding whoever was being attacked.

  I saw the familiar cowboy hat, and squeezed through.

  Daniel was looking down at the woman on the ground.

  I followed his gaze.

  And my mouth fell open.

  Chapter 43

  Huckleberry had a hold of Gretchen O’Malley’s leg like it was a drumstick that someone had used to beat him with, and he was getting his revenge.

  He let out a low guttural growl and held his jaw firmly clamped on her calf. He shook it, and she screamed again, her cries echoing through the gymnasium.

  The strange thing was, though, that nobody was doing anything. It was as if we were stuck in a snow globe, watching the scene unfold in a glass orb of water.

  Daniel had the leash wrapped around his hand, but he wasn’t tightening it. He was just staring down at Gretchen, a look of perfect understanding on his face.

  “Will someone please help that woman!” Sheriff Trumbow shouted from somewhere back in the crowd.

  “Yes, please help!” she shouted.

  Huckleberry shook her leg again and she let out another cry.

  Daniel suddenly kneeled down beside her.

  “You killed him, didn’t you?” Daniel said. “You killed Mason Barstow.”

  “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she cried, her face red and puffy, her hair a tangled mess.

  “You do, I know you do. The dog knows you did it and so do I. Say it.”

  She tried to lash out at Huckleberry, but he came back at her tenfold.

  She screamed again. It was bordering on torture, now. I placed a hand on Daniel’s shoulder, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “She’s bleeding, Danie—”

  “Fine!” she cried. “I did it! But I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to do it. I swear!”

  Daniel pulled back on the leash, and Huckleberry was yanked backwards. He continued to growl though, a look of insane vengeance in his eyes.

  I knew at that moment, seeing the anger in little Huck’s eyes, that it was true.

  The dog didn’t lie.

  Gretchen had killed Mason. And Huckleberry had seen it happen.

  And now he was avenging his dead master.

  Gretchen moaned in pain, and finally Sheriff Trumbow appeared, red in the face and out of breath.

  “Someone call this woman an ambulance!” he cried out. “And you get that mutt out of here, Brightman!”

  Sheriff Trumbow saw me, and then pushed his way over to me.

  “Cinnamon Peters, you’re under arrest for the murder of—”

  “No,” Daniel said, standing up from his position kneeling over Gretchen. “This is who you want here, Sheriff.”

  He stood in front of me, protecting me, and then nodded to Gretchen, who was whimpering in a fetal position on the cold auditorium floor.

  “This is your killer,” he said, nodding to her.

  Chapter 44

  There was no trip to Hawaii for Kara or me.

  There was no trip to Hawaii for Gretchen either. Or Bailey for that matter.

  Nobody got the grand prize. Because after the freak show that had taken place at the competition, after Christmas River showed up on every news station radar for 500 miles around, the annual Gingerbread Junction Competition was cancelled for the first time since anyone could remember.

  The organizers came out with a statement saying they were wrong in letting it continue after Mason was found murdered under suspicious circumstances. They said their actions had been unbecoming of such a prestigious competition. One of the organizers stepped down, and there were promises of regulating next year’s competition so it wouldn’t ever get out of hand again.

  There was a lot of national media attention. A lot of stories about Gretchen and Mason, and how the murder unfolded. Some of them even mentioned me and how I found the body behind my shop, and that Gretchen had tried to frame me, her gingerbread junction archenemy.

  I couldn’t complain with the publicity, though. It brought a flood of tourists to my shop. Tourists who came in to get the gory details of the murder and left with a full stomach of homemade pie. Tourists who left behind generous tips.

  It wasn’t even Christmas yet, and I had already doubled my earnings from the December before.

  The details of the murder eventually came out, though I heard it mostly from second hand sources.

  Even after everything I had seen, I still had trouble believing it all.

  Nobody knew exactly how long the affair had gone on for. It could have been years, or just a few months. The first record of it was a credit card receipt from the High Springs Lodge four months earlier. Gretchen had bought dinner for two there. Mason, a room. Both were on the same night.

  It was hard for me to imagine… the two of them. They were both so old, so past the reasonable age to do something like that, if there ever was a reasonable age to do something like that.

  From there, though, it appeared that things went south. In a search of Gretchen’s house, they found a note stuffed inside the base of a lamp on her nightstand that was written by Mason.

  Promises had been made, and promises appeared to have been broken. Mason was going to tell Gretchen’s husband about the affair.

  Apparently, it never got to that point, though.

  One thing I wondered a lot after all the details came out was whether or not Gretchen had gone on a walk with him that day planning to kill him. She’d brought the knife along. That showed premeditation of some sort.

  But maybe she only wanted to threaten him, or get him to listen or get him to leave her alone.

  But either way, the story ended the same. With Mason dead in the woods, a knife wound in his chest, the snow around him red with his blood.

  But there was one thing Gretchen hadn’t counted on.

  She hadn’t counted on Huckleberry.

  She must have just expected him to run away, but he didn’t.

  He attacked her. P
olice found partially healed bite wounds on her calf, the same one he later grabbed a hold of at the competition.

  She broke free, though, made it out of the woods, and got in her car, leaving it all behind.

  But then she realized that in all the terror and excitement of the moment, she’d forgotten one thing.

  The knife.

  She’d left the knife behind. Without knowing if they’d be able to trace it back to her somehow.

  The police thought that she probably took some time to think about her next move, and finally settled on the wild notion of framing me for the murder. Our gingerbread rivalry was well-documented, and police believe she looked at it as killing two birds with one stone.

  At some point, she left the knife on my back porch, sometime after she got word that Mason’s body was found.

  The police said that she also broke into my shop to draw attention and move the process along a little bit, but they had no real proof on that end.

  And besides. I knew better on that one.

  That particular instance of breaking the law still had Bailey’s name written all over it.

  But since there was no evidence to support what I knew, there was no way I could press charges.

  And besides, even if there was, I didn’t know if I would have pressed them. I had already gotten back at Bailey. And my form of revenge had been way better than breaking a window and reducing a gingerbread house to a pile of rubble.

  Gretchen was now in police custody, charged with murder in the first degree pending an official trial date.

  When I thought about it, part of me couldn’t help but feel sorry for Gretchen O’Malley. I didn’t know why. She’d tried to frame me for murder, and if it hadn’t been for Huckleberry, I’d be the one sitting in that cold jail cell.

  But I thought back to that day she’d come into my shop, right before the competition. And looking back, I now realized what I saw was an unsure woman, not necessarily a malicious one. She’d done something bad, and she knew it. And she’d come into my shop that day with a guilty conscience.

  I’d disliked Gretchen since the very moment I’d met her nearly two decades ago. She represented the opposite of what I wanted to be. She was snobby, cold, and harsh.

  But she was human, too. Just like any of us, she’d gotten caught up in a web of love, lies, and deceit. It got to the point where she couldn’t see straight anymore, and she lost her way. The same as getting caught out in a blizzard. She’d lost all sense of direction.

  So much so that she felt she had to resort to murder to free herself from it.

  There were parts of her story I could relate to. Parts of it that I knew could have easily been me, in another lifetime.

  I felt sorry for her. And her story, her fall, had given me some much-needed perspective.

  Winning wasn’t everything. Trips to Hawaii were nice, but in the big scheme of things, Hawaii was just a place on the map.

  There were more important things.

  More important things I had to take care of.

  Chapter 45

  We met on the wooden footbridge to talk.

  I called him several times and sent text messages and even stopped by his house, but heard nothing for days.

  Then, out of the blue, he responded to one of my text messages. He wanted to meet.

  I couldn’t get out of the shop until late. The sun was on the horizon by the time we got to the footbridge, and the whole world seemed to turn an ominous shade of red as the day died.

  I was nervous. It felt like a handful of rocks were in my stomach, bumping into one another as I walked.

  I pulled my down jacket tighter around my body.

  I saw him from a distance. He was leaning over the wooden railing, looking down at the frozen river.

  “We used to fish off this bridge, my brother and me when we were kids,” he said as I came up to him. “We used to come home with a string full of trout.”

  “Listen, Daniel,” I said, my voice shaking. “Thanks for everything you did. For saving me. I’m pretty sure I’d be behind bars right now if it wasn’t for you.”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “They would of figured it out eventually,” he said. “But how long it would have taken, I don’t know. The sheriff’s not the brightest color in the crayon box.”

  I forced a smile.

  “No he isn’t.”

  “It sounds like this might ruin his chances for reelection,” Daniel said. “The whole country saw his IQ level with this case.”

  “Well, it’d be good to get some fresh blood around here,” I said, feeling more and more like we were just making meaningless small talk to replace the things that we really wanted to say. “It’s always good not to let things get too stale.”

  He nodded and didn’t say anything more.

  I took a deep breath and let out everything I’d wanted to say to him since that day at the Gingerbread Junction.

  “What you saw the other day, between me and Evan? It didn’t mean anything, Daniel. I don’t love Evan. I don’t even like him. He’s a bad person. It’s taken me all this time to realize it, but he’s a really bad person. I don’t want someone like that in my life. I want someone like…”

  I trailed off. I couldn’t finish the thought for some reason.

  There was an awkward silence where he left me hanging like I was one of those trout on his fishing line. We both looked out at the frozen river. A group of ducks were sliding across the ice.

  “Do you know why I came back home to Christmas River? Why I really came back home?” he asked.

  I looked over at him and shook my head.

  “Seventeen years ago I went to California to become a cop and look for my brother’s killer,” he said, leaning against the railing. “It was a convenience store robbery, and the guy who did it was never caught. Nobody cared about the case. Only I cared.”

  “Did you ever find him?” I asked.

  He nodded his head somberly.

  “It took a decade and a half, but I did it. I tracked the bastard down.”

  He stopped talking for a moment. The last of the blood-red color drained from the sky, giving way to a dead gray shade.

  “What hap—”

  “I always thought when the moment came, I’d know exactly what to do,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I thought I’d be able to control myself. But I was wrong.”

  I gripped the railing.

  This whole time, I’d sensed there was more to the reason why he was back in Christmas River, and now, it was beginning to make more sense.

  “Did you kill him?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “But I hurt him. I hurt him pretty bad. The department covered for me, even though they shouldn’t have. Anybody else would’ve gotten their badge taken away.”

  He sighed.

  “But I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t pretend to be a police officer, a protector, after what I did. And there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of what I did to that guy. The way he looked after I got through with him.”

  I looked over at him. His face was wracked with guilt.

  “I’m sure he deserved it,” I said. “He murdered your brother.”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “Before, I would have agreed with you,” he said. “But not anymore. I saw a part of myself… I can’t ever accept that part. It was evil. Just pure hate.”

  “We all have that in us. That doesn’t make you evil.”

  He put his hat back on.

  “That’s not an excuse,” he said. “I violated everything I believed in that day. I’m worthless now.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. “For whatever it’s worth.”

  “I thought it would help to come back home,” he said. “To get out in the woods and try and forget about it all. But nothing helps. I still wake up thinking about what I did.”

  He stuffed his hands in his po
ckets and started backing away from me.

  “I can’t stay here any longer,” he said. “It’s no good. Nowhere is.”

  “Wait,” I said, stepping forward, picking up the space he had created between us. “You can’t—”

  “Goodbye, Cinnamon,” he said. “I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you. See what I mean? See how I’m doing this to you all over again? I’m worthless.”

  He turned his back on me and walked away quickly. The bridge shook under his boots.

  “Wait,” I whispered.

  But he didn’t hear me. He disappeared into the trees as the footpath continued into the woods.

  He was walking out of my life, once again.

  Chapter 46

  I was working on a batch of cherry pies when I heard the front door jingle.

  I wiped my hands on my apron. I yelled that I would be right there as I shoved a pan full of filled pies into the oven.

  It had been a relatively quiet morning. A welcome relief after the flurry of tourists looking for macabre stories of the murder.

  I had even gotten to sit down with a cup of coffee at one point and read a baking magazine, something I hadn’t done in what seemed like weeks.

  But it was approaching Christmas, and the tourists were starting to return home for the holiday. There’d be another wave of them for New Year’s, but we were just beginning to settle into the eye of the hurricane.

  I wiped my face free of flour marks and emerged from the kitchen into the dining room.

  In the back of my mind, I secretly hoped it was him.

  I hoped, hope against hope, that he’d changed his mind. That Daniel would stay. That he wouldn’t leave me and Christmas River behind in his rearview mirror.

  But maybe it was for the best. Maybe when a moment passes, you can’t ever reclaim it. Maybe it’s best to leave that white hot love of youth behind in the dirt where you lost it, because nobody ever remains the same. Life changes us. And the two teenagers who kissed that moonlit night by the lake all those years ago were gone. They didn’t exist anymore. All that was left were two adults who brought with them endless amounts of baggage and hurts and pains.