Ring In the Year with Murder--An Otter Lake Mystery

by Auralee Wallace

  Freddie walked toward me. I held up a finger for him to wait. “What was the next best thing to stopping Candace from drinking, Rhonda?”

  “Well, I’ve been getting all of her drinks for her and then taste-testing them for poison just to be sure. You know like how they did it in medieval times.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temple with my free hand. “That … wasn’t what we had in mind.” Rhonda had brilliant and equally less brilliant ideas in about equal measure.

  “Hey, sometimes you have to improvise. But where are you guys? I need help finding her outside. And I can’t find my shoes.”

  I frowned. “You mean your boots?”

  “No, I mean my shoes. One minute I was wearing shoes … then poof! I’m barefoot.”

  I took a deep breath. New Year’s was supposed to be fun, right? “Okay, you know what? You just stay inside. Freddie and I will find Candace. We’re already out here anyway.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Rhonda?”

  “Why are you guys outside?”

  “Oh, we’re just trying to find the glass Candace dropped.”

  “So you’re evidence gathering? Without me?” Rhonda asked. “You leave me babysitting Candace, so you can go out and collect evidence?”

  “Not as fun as it sounds. Especially without shoes.”

  “You guys suck.” And with that she ended the call.

  “What’s going on?” Freddie asked.

  “We gotta find Candace. She’s roaming around out here, drunk, and apparently headed for the lake.”

  “Oh, wow, okay,” Freddie said, changing course toward the shoveled path that led down to the water. “So she’s doing the killer’s job for him. Or her.” He stepped over an ice patch. “Candace is always so thoughtful.”

  I didn’t answer. I was too busy trying to walk downhill on an icy path in strappy heels. Seriously, I’d put the difficulty level of that maneuver right up there with brain surgery.

  “Okay, but be honest though,” Freddie called out with a bit of chuckle. “Tell me that there isn’t just a teeny, tiny part of you that has dreamed of a scenario like this.”

  I held my hands out to my sides as I slid unexpectedly a couple of inches. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, the competition for Grady just tragically slipping into a frozen lake? Through no fault of your own?”

  “No, I can honestly say I have never dreamed of that.”

  “Never?” Freddie needled.

  “No!”

  Just then a woman screamed.

  Freddie’s widened eyes met mine. “It looks like you got your wish after all.” He then took off in the direction it had come from.

  “How many times do I have to say it? I don’t want—” I cut myself off when I realized Freddie wasn’t listening and hurried after him. “Never mind.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  “Oh, this is sad,” Freddie said.

  I nodded. “It really is.”

  “One of us should go down there.”

  “One of us should.”

  “It’s funny,” Freddie said. “I wouldn’t have taken Candace for a drunk-crier. But then again maybe that’s why she doesn’t drink.”

  Candace, by the looks of it, had been heading toward the lake, but somewhere along the path, she’d lost her way, and had rolled about halfway down the hill that led to frozen water. Now she was sitting cross-legged in the snow. Weeping. At least she had a warm coat by the looks of it and maybe a blanket?

  “I’ll go,” I muttered. “But give me your galoshes. I can’t walk in these heels anymore.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to do it?” Freddie asked, unzipping one of the rubber covers and handing it to me. “My poor shoes,” he muttered before finishing with, “I don’t think Candace really likes you, and she likes everyone.”

  “Yeah,” I said, grabbing his shoulder for balance as I pried off my heel, “but I think she might have some things she needs to say to me.” My feet were so going to freeze.

  “I don’t know if they’re going to be nice things.”

  I inhaled deeply and nodded.

  “Okay, well, I’ll go get some blankets or something while you two talk.”

  “Get my socks and boots from the snowmobile too,” I said, slipping the other cover over my foot and zipping it up. It was not a good fit. I would probably end up rolling down the hill too. “And maybe ask Sean if they have any hot chocolate in the kitchen?”

  “Oh my God! What is the matter with you?” He turned and took a backward step toward the house. “Let it go. Bean is not happening.”

  “Methinks the Freddie doth protest too m—”

  “Shut up!” he shouted over his shoulder. “We are so on a break!”

  I smiled, but it faded quickly. I looked back to the figure plopped in the snow. This was one conversation I did not want to have, but Candace’s weeping wasn’t getting any quieter. I sighed then flopped my way, as carefully as I could, down the path that led to the lake. It wasn’t too slippery. Someone had thrown some loose pebbled gravel over the snow. Or maybe it was cat litter? The historical society really had thought of everything—except for maybe security to watch for any drunk partygoers who might wander outside. Oh wait, that was us.

  “Hey!” I called out to the blubbering wreck that was Candace. We were parallel on the hill. I really didn’t want to step off the cleared path. “You okay over there?”

  Candace looked over and when she saw who it was calling her, her crying got even louder. She may have even shouted a little as she let her hands drop to her sides.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” I muttered under my breath.

  I hiked up my dress again and took a big step toward her into the calf-deep snow. Yeah, Freddie’s galoshes were doing pretty much nothing. They were too big, so all of the snow was falling down into them, and I had to flex my foot in weird angles to make sure I didn’t lose them in the drift. I couldn’t help but wonder if Jessica, vet extraordinaire, knew how to treat frostbite. Probably. She looked like a know-it-all.

  “Hey,” I said again more quietly once I had reached Candace. “What do you say we get you back inside where it’s warm?”

  She didn’t say anything, but her crying quieted a little.

  “Or do you want me to text Grady?” I offered, reaching for my phone. “Ask him to come get you?”

  “No! Please! Don’t do that,” she said, turning her mascara-smeared eyes up to mine.

  “Okay,” I said, putting my empty hands up. “No problem. We can’t stay out here though.”

  “I just need a minute,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  I pinched my lips together and nodded. “Do you want me to wait with you, or…” I jabbed a thumb back toward the path.

  “You can stay, but I do not want to talk about Grady.” She looked out toward the lake. “Not with you.”

  I inhaled deeply. “I get that. I really do. But before we don’t talk about Grady, I think you should know there are some rumors going around that—”

  “What’s happened to me?” Candace asked, looking around bewildered. “I don’t drink. Not since college. And definitely not at work parties.” She turned her too wide eyes back to me. “Who am I, Erica?”

  I nodded. Alcohol always brings out the really deep questions. I desperately wanted to get back to the whole Grady misunderstanding, but I was thinking I needed to tread carefully.

  “Erica?”

  “Oh,” I said, bringing a hand to my chest. “I thought that question was rhetorical.”

  She squinted at me then picked up a champagne bottle I hadn’t seen half buried in the snow. “Can I ask you something?”

  This couldn’t be headed anywhere good. “Um … sure?”

  She studied me in that overly intense way drunk people do. “Why didn’t you just hook up with Matthew? I mean, would you look at this place?” She threw her free hand back toward the house. “He likes you.
You know that, right?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…”

  “He does,” she said, looking out at the trees. She tipped the bottle toward her mouth. “But you’re still hung up on Grady.” She took a hard gulp.

  And here I thought we weren’t talking about Grady. I cleared my throat. “About him—”

  “You’re not right for one another,” she said, swinging the bottle around. It then slipped from her hand and landed upright in the snow, sending a good splash onto my dress. She didn’t notice though. “You know that, right? You’re terrible together.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear her say that. And not just because of the whole love-triangle thing we had going on. A lot of people wondered what it was that had me so hung up on Grady. See, I was the type of person to play my cards close to my chest, so, as a result, people had only seen the bad parts of our relationship. The aftermath. Nobody knew what it was like when Grady and I were alone … away from everything that came with Otter Lake. Like they had never seen the way Grady had rubbed my feet when we watched movies in my apartment back in Chicago … or the face he had made when I forced him to try sushi for the first time. That had been pretty funny. They hadn’t seen us skate across the rink at Millennium Park like it was a skate to the death. I’d won. But I think he’d let me. And they definitely hadn’t got to listen in on all of our late-night phone conversations we’d had about the future … or how I had told Grady that I wanted to have a whole bunch of kids but was scared I wouldn’t know how to be a mother … or make a family … and how he had said that any kid would be lucky to have me as his or her mom because I cared so deeply about the people I loved … and how he or she would never be bullied at school because everyone would know that that kid had a crazy uncle Freddie who would take care of business if they did. They also couldn’t know that every time I had ever gone to sleep in Grady’s arms, I had had a smile on my face, feeling as safe and happy as anyone ever could … or that I woke up feeling the exact same way.

  I also kind of doubted Candace would want to hear about any of those things right now.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t—”

  “Who am I kidding?” she asked, dropping her hand back into the snow. “You’d never listen to me. You hate me. Everybody hates me.”

  “Candace, I don’t hate you. I never hated—”

  “Yes you do,” she said. “It’s okay. You can be honest. You are like that super-cool chick who solves murders and flashes people at town events.”

  “I don’t flash people at town events!” Often. And certainly not on purpose. “And I don’t really solve murders eith—”

  “And I’m just boring old Candace. Who does charity work in her free time, but it doesn’t make anybody like her any more. No, it does not.”

  “Everyone loves you.”

  “Ha!” she said, slapping the snow. “People tolerate me. My own sister can barely stand being around me. Not that I can blame her. Not after all those times … when our parents were all like…” She made a gesture with her hands like I’d know what she was talking about, but I had no idea. “But I wanted to show her this visit that I’d changed. That I was a big sister she could look up to.” She shook her head with disgust then let out a small hiccup. “Now look at me.”

  “Candace—”

  “No, Erica, it’s okay. I know I make people uncomfortable because I don’t drink, and I don’t swear, and I go to church on Sundays. Everybody thinks I’m judging them, but I’m not.”

  Wow, she was really on a roll. “Nobody thinks—”

  “Then there’s you!” She gestured wildly toward me. “Everybody wants to be around you. But you and Freddie … you’re just too cool for school.”

  “Candace, we wanted to be friends with you. You blocked our numbers!”

  “Because you guys accused me of murder!”

  “Well … you started dating my ex!”

  “Who’s Daisy?”

  “Who’s Daisy?” I blinked. It was hard keeping up with this conversation. “What?”

  “You and Grady. Earlier. You were talking about Freddie and Daisy.” She bit her lip then added, “Everybody in Otter Lake knows about Daisy.” She flung her arms wide. I was a little worried she’d fall back. I almost grabbed her arm. But she righted herself. “But not Candace. Candace is the outsider.”

  I blew out some air. I guess I did owe her one for that. It’s no fun feeling left out. I knew that feeling well. That being said, talking about Freddie’s traumatic childhood experiences didn’t exactly seem like party fodder.

  “Daisy doesn’t have anything to do with Grady and me. I promise you.”

  “Then tell me!” Oh God, there were fresh tears in her eyes. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to fit into a town where everybody knows everything about everyone?”

  I sighed. “You really want to know?”

  She opened up the blanket she was sitting on to make a spot for me to sit beside her in the snow.

  Freddie was going to kill me. For so many reasons. Not the least of which was the fact that I was about to get his jacket wet.

  “Okay,” I said, hiking up my skirt once again and dropping myself down beside her. “I’ll tell you about Daisy, but I doubt it’s going to make you feel any better.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I was going to have to make this long story quick. The snow was actually kind of insulating, but it wouldn’t take long for the dampness to get through.

  “Okay, so how much do you know about how Freddie grew up?”

  Candace frowned. Wow, her face was close to mine. Champagne breath. “I know his parents traveled a lot. And that he had a whole bunch of nannies.”

  I nodded. Freddie’s parents were real estate speculators. They traveled the world checking out properties and developing them for resale. The rest of his family lived in Hong Kong. It wasn’t like they were gone all the time, but certainly more than people around here thought appropriate. And it wasn’t like Freddie didn’t love them, or like they didn’t love him—he was on the phone with his mother and his poppo all the time—but it was just a different kind of family relationship. I suspected Freddie harbored some resentment, but that made him feel guilty because he did love them. It was complicated. “Yeah, Freddie and I didn’t become best friends until high school. Before that we were both kind of on our own in the friend department. Freddie maybe a little more than me.” When Freddie’s family first bought the property and built their gorgeous lake home, they were the only visible minorities in town. So that was complicated too.

  “Poor Freddie,” Candace said.

  “Yeah, well, save your poor Freddies. You’re going to need them later on.” I looked up at the stars. “Anyway, Freddie wasn’t the personality he is now back then. He was pretty shy, so while the other kids didn’t exactly pick on him, nobody really included him either. Until Daisy.”

  Candace made an excited noise and clapped her hands.

  “I don’t know if it was Freddie’s parents’ idea to help keep him company when they were away, or the nanny’s—or maybe it was Freddie’s idea—but all of a sudden here was this shy little kid showing up all over town with the most adorable golden retriever puppy you have ever seen.”

  Candace’s head dropped on to my shoulder.

  “Um, are you going to sleep?”

  “No,” she said. “Just looking at the stars while you tell the story.” Her voice was slurry though.

  “So anyway because the dog was so adorable and friendly and lovable, everybody in town started talking to Freddie. Kids wanted to play with him at the park. Adults wanted to talk to him on the street. It was like in an instant Freddie had gone from being this strange little outsider kid to a full-on Otter Lake citizen.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It was nice.” I took a deep breath. “Then Daisy got sick. She was only two or three. Cancer, I think.”

  “Oh no.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, it was awful. For a while there everyone thoug
ht she’d make it. Rumor was Freddie’s family spent thousands and thousands trying to treat her. And Freddie would still take her for walks—pulling her in a wagon and then later on a sled. But in the end, all the attention and treatment couldn’t save her. She was suffering, and they had to put her down.”

  Heavy silence fell around us.

  Well, not exactly silence. Candace was sniffing back tears. Truth be told, I had to blink away a few of my own. “Freddie’s parents were away at the time, but his nanny put together a funeral—and a good part of the town came. They buried Daisy in a little patch in a far corner of his property.”

  “That is so sad,” Candace said, taking a shuddering breath.

  “Yeah.” I nodded, remembering how serious little kid Freddie had looked in the suit he wore to the funeral. “He refuses to talk about Daisy to this day.” I had the bruised foot to prove it.

  “Wow.”

  I caught Candace wiping a tear from her cheek.

  “Yeah.”

  “I can see why you and Grady didn’t think this was a party story.”

  “Yeah.”

  We sat in silence for a good long while just looking at the stars. Finally Candace said, “Thank you for telling me.”

  “We were being rude before.” I cringed. I shouldn’t have used the couple we.

  I felt her nod. “I wish we could have found a way to be friends.”

  I hugged my knees to my chest. “We’ve got a lot of strikes against us.”

  “Grady.”

  “Not just Grady. Your working for MRG does make things complicated.”

  “For us?” she asked, sounding confused. “I mean, I get that you’re a local—”

  “First generation,” I said, interrupting her. “So, yeah, I’m a local, but I’m not like all the way in.”

  “That’s what I mean. I didn’t think you’d be as bothered about all the changes MRG’s making.”

  “It’s still my town.” I was kind of annoyed, but I got where she was coming from. Not only was I first generation, but I had left Otter Lake for years—that was pretty unusual for people in this town. But that had more to do with trying to find my own identity separate from my mother. I was happy to be back. “I’m probably more okay with progress than a lot of other people here.” Although I had just said progress like it was a dirty word. “But there are some practical concerns too. It’s hard to bond with someone who can outbid you on every place you want to live in.”