“You know, you could always come out to my house and we could take a walk around the property there,” Moira said. “It’s beautiful with all the fall colors, and it’s cold enough out that there aren’t really any bugs.”
“Maybe I will sometime later this week. I’ve got a date with Dominic tomorrow evening, and I’m working late for a couple of nights after that, but I might be free Friday.”
“I’ll have to see which shift I’m working Friday, but if it’s the morning shift, then I would probably be free in the afternoon.”
“Okay. Diamond always loves going over there. Though I do always have to brush her out afterward. Her fur isn’t meant to be dragged through the forest.”
Moira looked down at the little black and white dog that was trotting along next to her friend and smiled. Keeva and Maverick both dwarfed the little mixed-breed that her friend had adopted the year before, but the dog didn’t seem to care. She tried her best to keep up with her longer-legged friends, and was a good sport whenever one of them bowled her over.
“So, how are you doing? I know you told me about what happened yesterday at the deli, but we didn’t really get much of a chance to talk about it over the phone.”
“I feel a lot better about it,” Moira said. “Both David and Detective Jefferson think that it was a Halloween prank. I’m mad at whoever did it, but it’s better than feeling guilty and sad about someone’s death. What’s really getting to me is the fact that Candice is gone – again. And this time, I think she’s going to be gone for quite a while.”
“I thought you said that she was coming back?”
“That was just for a visit,” Moira said. “She told me and David over dinner Saturday night that she and Eli are going to be looking for renters for the house.”
“Renters? How long is she planning on being gone for? Did something new come up with Eli?”
Moira told her friend about her daughter’s new plan. She tried to stay positive about it, but she could tell that Martha saw right through that.
“Wow, that’s such a big change in plans. Losing the candy shop must have really shaken her up.”
“I’m sure it did. It was frightening for all of us, especially when Eli was still in the hospital. I guess I always just thought that she would come back to town and start rebuilding things as soon as he was better. It never occurred to me that she would be ready for a change of scenery.”
“Well, I can see how the money would be a concern for her. Even if the insurance company pays up, it’s probably going to cost them quite a bit out of pocket for all of the repairs that the candy shop needs, not to mention Eli’s hospital bills. If it takes months for the candy shop to be rebuilt, that would be quite a lot of time for her to go without a job.”
“I know.” Moira sighed. It was all of the same stuff that Candice had said. She was glad that her daughter had found better employment than she might have found here in Maple Creek, but the thought of her being gone, not just for a few weeks, but for months, or even years was hard for her to wrap her head around.
“Hey, let’s cheer you up. We can head back to my place and leave the dogs there, then go into town and grab lunch somewhere. We could even see if Denise wants to join us.”
“I’m sure she won’t be able to,” Moira said. “She is pretty stressed out with everything that’s going on with Logan’s case. His hearing is next Wednesday, and it could determine his entire future. Besides, I need to get to the deli later. I’m not working today, but I need to talk to a couple of my employees about what we’re doing for the haunted house. I found a large event tent that I can rent, but I need to figure out how to section off the main area into different rooms. After that, I need to go shopping and –”
She broke off in the middle of her sentence, staring at a poster that had been stapled to a telephone pole.
“What’s wrong?” her friend asked.
The deli owner walked over to the pole, not answering Martha’s question. She asked Keeva and Maverick to sit, then squinted at the piece of paper. It couldn’t be… but in her gut, she knew that it was the same man that she had seen slouched against the deli’s side entrance the day before.
She read the poster, then took a photo of it with her phone. The man was missing, and had last been seen Saturday night. According to the poster, he lived only a few blocks from the deli, and his daughter was worried sick about him.
“Moira, what is it?”
“This is him,” she said. “The man I saw yesterday. Oh my goodness, Martha, it wasn’t someone playing a prank. This guy really was hurt. I need to call Detective Jefferson right away. Can we go back to your house? I may need to leave the dogs there if he wants to see me.”
“Of course. Let’s head back now. I’ll hold their leashes if you want to call him while we walk.”
Moira took her friend up on the offer. She dialed the detective’s number and told him what she had seen. She was surprised when he replied that he already knew.
“We got the call this morning. The poor woman – his daughter – is beside herself. There’s not much we can do since he is an adult and has been missing for less than forty-eight hours, so she took it upon herself to make the posters. You’re certain that he is the man that you saw?”
“Yes, I am,” she said firmly. She recognized the man’s balding head and white, wispy hair. He was wearing a different outfit in the photo that he had been the day before, but there was no mistaking that it was him.
“Okay. I should have made the connection, but it’s been busy around here. We will bump his case back up to priority and get people out there on foot looking for him again.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.
“Thank you for offering, but the best thing that you can do right now is just to sit tight. Considering the condition that he’s in… well, I think it’s best if one of my officers is one that finds him.”
Moira felt a sick sensation in her stomach. If the missing man —Maurice Brown, according to the poster — hadn’t found his way to a hospital by then, chances were that he wasn’t still alive. The detective was right. She didn’t want to be the one who found him.
“Should I call his family?” she asked.
“Leave that to me,” he said. “I’ll let them know that there was a sighting of him by the deli yesterday, but I don’t want to tell them too much until we know more. This is going to be hard for them, but I don’t want to give them the bad news until I confirm it.”
She nodded, understanding his desire to make things as easy for the family as possible. She couldn’t imagine what they were going through just then, and wondered if knowing would be easier than not knowing. If she was in their position, what would she want?
It was a tricky question, and one that she hoped that she would never have to answer. She would leave it to the expert – in this case, Detective Jefferson. He knew how to break difficult news to families. It wasn’t a job that she envied.
After she got off the phone with Detective Jefferson, she told Martha what he had said, then made a call to David to update him. She had preferred it when she thought that this whole thing had been a prank. She hated the thought of that poor man wandering off somewhere gravely injured, to spend his last moments alone and in pain.
As she took back the dogs’ leashes from Martha, a new thought occurred to her; Maurice hadn’t stabbed himself in the chest with a metal rod, which meant that his attacker was still out there.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
She was still distracted by her thoughts when she walked into the deli a couple of hours later. The past twenty-four hours had been a roller coaster of emotions. She still didn’t know quite what to believe about what happened. With any luck, Detective Jefferson would call soon to tell her that they had found the man – though, she didn’t know if that would really be a good thing. As long as he was still out there somewhere, she could pretend that there was some small chance that he would be discovered
alive. She didn’t even know the guy, but she felt the weight of responsibility for his fate. There were so many things that she could have done differently when she found him, and if she had done so, he might be in the hospital right now.
She wasn’t in any mood to talk to the volunteers about the haunted house, but there was no getting around it. She had promised her friend that she would figure it out, and she couldn’t go back on her promise to Denise, not when the other woman had so much going on. Darrin, Cameron, and Jenny all volunteered to help out with the haunted house. Allison had other commitments, but that was okay because Moira had found two other people to help. Chance, who had helped her the week before, and Joseph, a friend of his. Everyone was looking forward to it; they all seem to relish the thought of dressing up to scare their fellow citizens. In other circumstances, she might have been excited as well. Right now, however, the haunted house just felt like another chore to get through.
As requested, the five volunteers were waiting for her at the deli. It was a slow day, so she brought them all into the kitchen for the meeting. Once everyone had filed in, she cleared her throat and began.
“Well, I guess we should talk about logistics. I don’t want to close the deli two days in a row unless I have to. We’ll already be losing out on the revenue from Halloween, but it should even out when the cost of renting a building is considered. I’m thinking we can close at noon the thirtieth, which will give us six hours to set up for the haunted house. It will go a lot faster if we are all there to set up. Does everyone think they can make it?”
There were nods all around.
“Good,” she said. “The next thing I want to talk about is how we are going to split the main area of the deli into separate rooms. Honestly, I don’t have any ideas beyond hanging sheets from the ceiling. Does anyone have anything better?”
“I can’t think of anything,” Darrin said. “It would be nice to have something a little bit more solid, though.”
“I know someone that runs a hotel conference center,” Cameron said. “He’s actually my cousin. He has these portable room dividers that might work. He would probably let us use them, especially if we told him it was for charity. We may have to borrow a truck to get them here, though.”
“If he is willing to let us use them for those two days, I would be grateful,” Moira said. “If not, we can just hang sheets from the ceiling, I suppose.”
“What are we going to use for decorations?” Jenny asked. “We have to make at least make it sort of spooky, or people will feel cheated.”
“That shouldn’t be too much of a problem,” Moira said. “Denise had already made the arrangements for a bunch of Halloween supplies and props to be delivered to her house this weekend, before she decided that she couldn’t handle the stress of the fundraiser. We should be able to use those with no problem. What’s important is our costumes. We want scary, but not too scary. Kids will be going through this. Since this is happening in the deli, I also want to ask all of you to keep an eye out for people trying to go somewhere off-limits. We have to keep this restaurant ready to open again on the first.”
“So, we are kind of like the security team and the main attraction all tied into one?”
“Exactly,” Moira said with a smile. “I guess that’s about it. Does anyone have anything they want to say?”
No one had any questions. It was pretty straightforward, at least for them. Her employees got back to work – Jenny and Cameron were about to leave for a catering event – and the two young men went about their way. Moira sighed. Life for them seemed so simple, and so easy. None of them had to worry about a likely dead older man, or had to entertain thoughts about who had killed him.
She decided to stay a little bit longer and help Darrin out until Allison arrived to pick up the evening shift. It wasn’t busy, but the truth was she hadn’t spent any time in the deli since discovering the body the day before. She wanted some time to poke around outside and look for clues, but also to re-familiarize herself with the place. She didn’t like feeling uncomfortable as she walked through the doors, but knowing that someone had been attacked and possibly killed on the property made that difficult.
After working at the register for half an hour, she let Darrin take over again and went out back. She stared at the side door, where the day before a man had laid in the last minutes of his life. She felt her skin crawl. So many what ifs crowded her brain.
Crouching down, her gaze combed the grass. She knew that the police had already been here, but at the time they had been looking for footprints, or any hints that the man had actually been there. They hadn’t done the full sweep that they would at the scene of a murder. There was a chance that they had missed something, and if they had, she was determined to find it.
Something about all of this bothered her. The man had been stabbed through the chest with a metal rod. There had been blood on his shirt, but not much. She wasn’t a forensics expert by any means, but she had watched enough television shows and had been involved in enough crimes herself – always peripherally of course – that she knew that someone killed by a direct shot to the heart, where the heart would stop beating almost immediately, often didn’t lose that much blood. If the wound was a little bit off, giving the heart a chance to continue pumping blood until death, then there would be a lot more blood.
However, if the man had gotten up and walked away on his own, that meant that he had not been dead. Even somebody with as few scientific skills as she had would know that someone’s heart would need to continue beating for them to remain alive.
So why hadn’t there been more blood? It had been a major wound. Even if the metal rod in his chest had served as a sort of plug to the very hole it had caused, surely he would have bled more. It was a small but puzzling thing, and it bugged her even though she knew that there was likely a rational explanation for it.
Seeing nothing that might hint at what had happened in the area where the man had been, she moved her search further away from the door. Just as she was about to give up, she finally spotted something. It was a small, brown smear on the brick wall of the building across the alley from the deli. She had found a spot of blood, but did it belong to the man, or whoever had attacked him? That, she decided, was a question for the police.
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
“Do you want to do anything today?” David asked her as they sat down to breakfast Saturday morning.
“Maybe this evening,” she said. “I have to go to Denise’s in a little bit to pick up the supplies for the haunted house. After that, I have to drop everything off at the deli. What were you thinking?”
“We could see a movie, then get dinner at the Grill.”
“Sure. That sounds like a nice evening out. I could definitely use it. This hasn’t exactly been the most relaxing of weeks, and the next few days will be pretty busy as well.”
“Still no word from Jefferson?” he asked, taking a bite of his waffle.
“No,” she said with a sigh. “They haven’t found him, or any hints as to where he might be. I can’t even imagine what his family is going through right now. I might stop at their place later today with a gift basket. They came into the deli earlier this week when I wasn’t there to hang posters in the windows. At this point, I just wish somebody would find him so that they can have some closure.”
“Something about this case makes me uncomfortable,” David said. “I really don’t think that he could have gotten out of there on his own. Honestly, I don’t think that he could’ve even walked two steps on his own with an injury like the one you described. It doesn’t seem like he could disappear so easily. It’s a small town; there aren’t many places he could be.”
“Trust me, it’s all I’ve been thinking about. Nothing makes sense. Remember that little spot of blood I found earlier this week? Jefferson told me that it didn’t match the victim’s blood. It probably belongs to whoever attacked him, but for all I know it could just be from some random kid wh
o was taking a shortcut through the alley with a bloody nose. Either way, it’s a clue but not a helpful one. If they had a suspect, they might be able to use that to tie him to the scene of the crime, but they don’t have anyone. They don’t even have a body, and without that, there’s not much that they can do.”
“It’s just a matter of being patient,” her husband said. “I know it’s frustrating, but there’s nothing you or I can do. Detective Jefferson is working on this. I’ve seen police officers combing the town for the missing man. They will find them eventually.”
“Eventually’s not soon enough for his family,” Moira said. “Imagine if that was you out there? I would be beside myself with worry.”
“I know. If you want, you and I can go out and look for him ourselves tonight, instead of going out to dinner.”
“Maybe…” The deli owner sighed. The truth was, as much as she wanted the body to be found, she didn’t want to be the one that found it.
Peppered With Murder (The Darling Deli Series Book 26) Page 4