Mrs. Fix It Mysteries (5 Cozy Mystery Books Collection)

by Belle Knudson

  “Yes,” she said.

  Scott let out a sigh of relief. “Let me walk you to your truck.”

  They started off across the parking lot.

  “How’d it go with Arthur?” he asked.

  “Good,” she said. “He seems knowledgeable. We’re getting the ball rolling and should be able to file with the court in about three weeks.”

  Scott smiled, all anxiety about Kate’s meddling gone from his face. “You’ll be a free woman in a month,” he mused.

  She’d been a free woman for a good long while now, but she agreed. “Officially, yes.”

  She unlocked her truck, and Scott opened the driver’s side door for her. It suddenly struck her what her divorce really meant. Not only would she be officially on the market again, but things with Scott could get very serious very quickly. What if he wanted to marry her? They weren’t young anymore. What if he felt like there was no time to waste? She’d worked too hard to master her independence. She felt a sudden urge to pump the breaks.

  Scott closed the door for her after she settled behind the wheel, and she immediately rolled her window down.

  “Dinner tonight?” she asked.

  “What time should I be at your place?”

  She grinned. “Let’s say seven.”

  When he walked off to his pickup truck, she backed out of her spot and got an idea.

  Kate hadn’t been to the campsite out east in perhaps a decade. Thinking back, it felt like a lifetime ago. When she and Greg had been embarking on their eighth year of marriage and the twins were seven, her father, who now lived in Florida, inspired Kate to take the boys camping. Greg had seemed squeamish at the idea but hid it well enough from Jason and Jared. He’d been reluctant to go with Kate to the sporting goods store that sold camping equipment. When they got to the campsite, he’d insisted they pitch their tents near the communal bathrooms and not deep in the woods. And it had been because of Greg that they didn’t make it through the entire weekend, even though the boys were having a blast, but still they packed up the very next morning and drove home.

  During that trip, they’d still managed to have fun. Greg had enjoyed a few laughs, and Kate did a decent job of keeping him loose and relaxed with a beer or two. But ultimately their time there had showed Kate that Greg wasn’t at all made for the woods.

  But recalling his attitude was impossible to reconcile when she considered the fact he’d bought a lot of high tech camping equipment on his secret MasterCard.

  Jessica’s son, Bradley, had disappeared. Greg had been helping her, unbeknownst to Kate, with locating her son.

  Maybe Greg hadn’t been intimidated by camping in general, but was expressing real fears about what might happen to them at the campsite for other reasons. Had he been on edge because he suspected their sons, Jason and Jared, could fall prey to the same fate as Bradley if they went camping there? Had that been the real source of his trepidation?

  She wondered, and doing so made her both angry and scared. Had Greg been a stranger even back then and she hadn’t even known it? How could she have been so blind?

  If Mike Waters had checked out all the same books as Greg and was also on the land deed of the campsite, then she would have to look around the campsite and see what she might be able to find out.

  As she drove deeper into the woods, the asphalt road turned bumpy with potholes and old frost heaves from winters past. She squeezed the brakes until she was rolling along at less than thirty miles per hour. The last thing she needed was to cause any more wear and tear on her truck. She’d been lucky she hadn’t needed to take it into Bob’s Garage these past few weeks. The old thing seemed to be holding up and she’d like to keep it that way.

  Soon the road narrowed, and the double yellow line up its middle disappeared. The thick forest on either side of the road thinned out, and her truck began climbing a steady incline until the road came to a rickety wooden gate. The gate was open. Brush had grown up around it in tangles, and because of it, she almost didn’t see an old weathered sign that said Rock Ridge Campsite. Above it, however, there was a pristine sign for Tully Construction.

  She kept her truck creeping along into the campsite. It wasn’t four hundred yards before she noticed the gravely path she drove along was flanked by dozens of tents. Beyond them was a set of mobile trailers, which also said Tully Construction. And in the far distance she spied two bulldozers and tall stacks of building materials, though she didn’t see any construction workers. She checked her rearview and side mirrors and caught a little movement around the tents, campers on foot lazing about. Most of them looked like young adults, slightly homeless, as though they’d run away five years ago and hadn’t had the means to buy new clothes or take care of themselves like real adults.

  Kate rolled her truck to a stop a good thirty yards shy of the trailers then climbed out. A few of the campers had taken notice of her, but didn’t necessarily seem alarmed or curious. Maybe they figured she was with the construction team since her truck had Mrs. Fix It printed on the side.

  Glancing around, she realized more and more campers were in the surrounding woods. When they turned their backs to her incidentally here and there, she noticed they each had the anarchist symbol, a red circle with a haphazard A-triangle slashed through it, on their backs. It reminded her of the years Jared and Jason had perched close to the TV and watched Sons of Anarchy. They’d been immune to the over-the-top violence of the show, like most boys their age, but Kate couldn’t look at the screen for very long. She hoped the campers here were nothing like those characters.

  Cautiously, she started for the first trailer. She kept her wits about her, looked over her shoulder, noted where the campers were huddled or crossing through to the tents. As she neared the trailer, she heard voices within, speaking low. She couldn’t place how many people were inside or what they were saying, but she got a better sense when she approached the stairs that ran up to its door.

  If she wasn’t mistaken, one of the voices was Clem’s, but that was no shocker. He was overseeing the construction development. She imagined he’d have to spend a lot of time here. What didn’t make sense was why there were no construction workers here. No one was actually building, yet it wasn’t yet five and there was a good two hours worth of light left in the day.

  She felt uncomfortable and conspicuous. Her luck that they hadn’t paid any attention to her could soon run out, so she rounded the back of the trailer, where she was less likely to be seen, and pressed her ear to the side of the trailer.

  Muffled though they were, she could now hear Clem speaking to one other man. If there were more inside, they weren’t talking.

  “I don’t see why you’re worried,” said Clem, who sounded strained in his assurances. “Look, we can’t rush this. Constructing the center is going to take years. It’s a slow process. This isn’t a renovation. It’s a full build.”

  His tone reminded her of his earlier phone call when she’d installed a shelving unit in his office at Tully Construction. That call had sounded entirely focused on Walter Miller’s murder. Was he talking to the same person now?

  “Cut it down to months,” the other man demanded. “I don’t care what it takes, and I don’t care what it costs.”

  “You’re costs are finite,” Clem countered. “The funds you raised are the funds you raised, and I formulated my budget accordingly.”

  “I’ll get more money,” he countered.

  There was a pause, and Kate imagined Clem’s skepticism.

  Clem finally spoke. “Look, these are union guys. They work union hours. If you want them working around the clock on this, it’s going to triple your cost. Trust me you don’t want that. And quite frankly, even if you did, the guys wouldn’t go for it.”

  “Get more guys.”

  “How big do you think this town is?”

  “The investors are flying in next month,” he said urgently. “I can’t show them a vacant lot and two bulldozers. I need to show them we’re erecting a st
ructure.”

  “In a month we’ll barely have the foundation set in the earth. You’re being unreasonable.”

  Kate heard footsteps, as though the man talking to Clem was stalking towards him. It made her stomach clench with nerves.

  “Do I have to remind you who these people are?” he asked.

  Clem didn’t respond, probably too scared to.

  “Do I have to remind you of the big picture? Do I have to remind you what happened to the last person who tried to slow this project down?”

  Clem’s response came on a trembling and quiet voice, “I’m not trying to slow this project down. I’m trying to manage expectations and be realistic about the timeline.”

  Kate suddenly felt eager to get out of there. Their tones and the severity behind their statements gave her a very bad feeling. She turned for her truck and startled to find a young man standing in front of her.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, though it sounded like a threat.

  He couldn’t have been older than twenty-four or twenty-five, but his skin looked weathered, perhaps from years of smoking cigarettes and suffering harsh winters at the campsite. His clothes were tattered, and yet somehow oddly stylish, like a rock-and-roll star from the seventies. And he wore a handkerchief bandana around his head that pushed his long, messy brown hair into strange angles.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said finally.

  “Then why are you here?”

  Thinking fast on her feet she said, “I do odd fix-it jobs for Clem Tully sometimes.”

  “So he asked you to come here?” he said, skeptically.

  She didn’t want to be seen here if Clem and whoever he was talking to came out of the trailer, and her heart was pounding too hard to think straight.

  “Not exactly,” she managed to say. Mike Waters’ name surged to the forefront of her mind. If she’d come here for anything, she’d come to get information on him. “Do you know a man named Mike Waters?”

  He snorted a laugh, as though it should’ve been obvious to her that he did. “He owns this place.”

  She knew that thanks to Jimmy in the town clerk’s office.

  “He may have known my husband, Greg Flaherty.”

  “Okay,” he said, not quite following.

  “Did Walter Miller ever come here?” she asked, changing the subject.

  The kid narrowed his eyes at her then banged hard on the side of the trailer and called out Mike’s name. “There’s a lady here to talk to you!” Bang, bang. “Mike!”

  She shouldn’t have mention Walter Miller, and yet the fact that she did, and the way in which the kid was responding, made her feel certain Mike Waters must have killed him.

  Mike stomped down the trailer steps, followed by Clem, who was instantly shocked and seemed somewhat worried to find Kate standing with the kid.

  “What’s this about?” Mike asked impatiently.

  Far from his anarchist residents, who were crawling all over the campsite, Mike Waters looked more like a movie actor. He appeared to be in his mid or late forties, but his strong jawline and clear blue eyes implied he was one of those men who got better looking with age. His salt-and-pepper hair was trimmed neatly, and he wore slacks and a warm sweater that looked nice enough to be a big name designer.

  “She asked about you,” said the kid when Kate didn’t introduce herself. “And she asked about Walter. Oh, yeah and some guy named Greg.”

  With each name the kid stated, Mike’s eyes grew darker and darker until he seemed to be scowling at her.

  “Kate,” said Clem with a nervous sigh. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Kate?”

  “Flaherty,” she supplied. “Wife of Greg.” She wasn’t feeling nearly as bold as she had with the kid, so she stopped at that.

  “Walter was my attorney,” she went on. “Or he would’ve been if he wasn’t killed.”

  Clem got Mike up to speed, but wasn’t very nice about it. “She’s a bit of a busybody,” he told Mike then directed the next statement to Kate, “and she shouldn’t be here. This is private property, you know.”

  Asserting her right to be here, she said, “Walter was an investor on this project—”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Mike corrected her.

  “He almost was,” she pointed out.

  “What are you trying to say?” he asked.

  But Clem took her by the arm. “I’m sure she was just leaving.”

  Kate didn’t like being handled, but she let Clem lead her towards her truck a number of paces before she yanked her arm free.

  “Kate, really, you shouldn’t have come here.”

  “I helped you,” she said with conviction and turned on her heel to face him and stare him down. “When Meghan was murdered and people thought you did it. I helped you.”

  Clem sighed.

  “I overheard your phone call,” she pressed, playing on the guilt she’d stirred up in him. “You were telling someone not to worry, that Justina had been arrested, that everything would be fine, that Ken Johnson had assured you. Were you talking to Mike Waters?”

  He clenched his jaw.

  “Look, this is one area you don’t want to get involved in. Trust me.”

  “Did Mike Waters kill Walter because he pulled his investment out?”

  Clem’s eyes widened, as though he were taken aback she knew as much.

  She had to find his tipping point, the magic words that would get him to tell her what he knew.

  “I don’t think you killed Walter,” she said in an even tone. “But covering up for someone who did is a very serious crime.”

  He turned to stone and said nothing.

  “Did Mike sneak into Justina’s house and steal her gun? Clem, just tell me where the gun is, and we can get Mike Waters arrested within the hour.”

  Clem opened her truck door for her and said, “Leave it alone, Kate.”

  Reluctantly, she climbed behind the wheel, and Clem closed her door. When she turned the engine, Clem began walking back towards the trailer.

  Dusk had fallen quickly, and the sky was darkening by the second, so she flipped her headlights on, swung a U-turn, and crawled through the campsite until she reached the bumpy road.

  As she accelerated to a reasonable speed, she felt her cell phone vibrate in her overalls. She was excited that Clem may have changed his mind and called her to spill, so she answered it without checking the screen.

  “Kate? It’s Hazel.”

  She could hear Mitsy yelping excitedly in the background, as she pulled her truck to a stop on the grassy shoulder of the road.

  “Hey Hazel, what’s up?”

  “It’s one of the drawers in my kitchen,” she explained. “I hate to bother you so close to dinner time, but I can’t open my utensil drawer. It’s stuck shut.”

  Kate smiled. “It’s no problem. I’ll be right there.”

  “Oh thank you. I’ll brew a fresh pot.”

  After hanging up and returning her cell to her overalls, she checked the time. She’d told Scott she’d be home by seven for dinner, which left her more than enough time to swing by Hazel’s. Tomorrow wouldn’t be pleasant. She hadn’t done the greatest job of tending to Justina’s list, but she vowed to catch up tomorrow—even if it meant working late into the evening.

  “Oh shoot,” she said out loud, remembering that Carly’s birthday party was tomorrow night.

  As she drove into town, she reasoned she could wake up a few hours earlier tomorrow morning to fit all her work in.

  By the time she pulled into Hazel’s driveway, all she could think about was a strong cup of coffee. Night had fallen, and the moon was out. She glanced at it, as she walked with her toolbox in hand to Hazel’s front door.

  She knocked on the door, which sent Mitsy into a yippy fit of barking, but when Hazel let her in the dog quieted, waged its tail, and ran circles around her feet.

  “Thanks so much for coming,” said Hazel. “I didn’t want to eat a casserole with my hands.�
��

  “My pleasure,” said Kate and followed her into the kitchen where the aroma of fresh dark roast filled the air.

  Kate set her toolbox on the kitchen table and started for the coffee maker, remarking, “First things first.”

  Hazel chuckled, as Kate helped herself to a cup and leaned her back to the counter to take the first few sips.

  “I’ve been accidentally cutting back on coffee,” she explained between sips. “Not a good thing.”

  “Well, if you’re ever on the block, you’re welcome to drop in for a cup,” said Hazel. She’d settled into a chair at the table and lifted Mitsy into her lap. “I heard Mrs. Briar tried to have you arrested.”

  “Is that what that was?” Kate said softly before taking another sip. “She’s all bark and no bite.”

  “She’s got a screw or two loose, is her problem. The library is like a second home for most people. Word around town is that people don’t enjoy going there anymore. I hate to badmouth anyone in town, but I’ve been considering bringing it up at the next town meeting if not privately. I’m not saying I want to get her fired, but she certainly shouldn’t be running things.”

  Hazel shook her head and grimaced.

  “I used to love going to the library, and I can already tell that when I’m fit to drive I’m going to hesitate before I set foot in it.”

  “Would you ever want to work there?” Kate asked, setting her mug on the counter and taking a look at the drawer in question.

  “You know, it’s crossed my mind,” said Hazel.

  Before her retirement, Hazel used to work as a kindergarten teacher. She’d loved reading to the youngsters and encouraging their curiosities. It seemed that working in the library would be a good fit for her.

  “Would I have it in me to keep Mrs. Briar in line is the real question,” she mused.

  “At the very least, you could split the hours with her. Then people would have the option of coming to the library during hours they’d know they wouldn’t get harassed.”

  “Good point.”

  Kate discovered the obstruction inside the drawer. A card-stock menu for the local deli had gotten wedged under the lip of the drawer. She used her screwdriver to dislodge it then eased the drawer open. Then she set the menu aside, removed the utensil tin, and emptied the drawer.