Cranberry Crimes

by Jessica Beck

  “I am. I should be there in half an hour if I don’t run into any traffic,” he said when he answered his phone. “Where are you?”

  “I just made my donut delivery to the Finney estate, and I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly safe and sound.”

  “That’s good news. Are you on your way back to the cottage?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I’m standing here leaning against the front of my Jeep chatting with you. I need you to call Chief Grant and ask him something for me. Could you do that?”

  “Sure. What do you need to know?”

  I told him, and to my husband’s credit, he didn’t ask any follow-up questions.

  At least not yet.

  “I’ll get right back to you,” Jake said.

  “I’ll be here,” I replied.

  “Suzanne, why don’t you get in and start driving while I make this call? It won’t matter in the end where you are when you get your answer, will it?”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stay right where I am,” I said.

  “Okay. I know better than to waste my breath arguing with you. At least get in and sit in the front seat while you’re waiting.”

  “Jake, the ragtop wouldn’t stop a butter knife if someone were after me, and you know it,” I protested. It was a beautiful day, and I didn’t want to sit inside my vehicle if I didn’t have to.

  “Just indulge me, okay?” he asked.

  “Fine, but I’m leaving my door open,” I answered in protest as I did as he’d requested.

  Jake hung up instead of answering, which was probably a favor to me. I knew I could vex my husband and try his patience at times, but I was equally sure that he wouldn’t want me to be mousy and subservient, not that that was ever going to happen.

  I heard back from him sooner than I had expected to. It only took him ninety seconds to get me an answer, and I had to wonder how long it would have taken me on my own.

  “You were right,” Jake said.

  “So, Jasper didn’t have a key on him when they searched the body, and the chief didn’t find one there at the scene, either,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Jake said. “Suzanne, what’s going on?”

  “I was looking at some of the photos I took earlier on my phone, and there was one image taken facing the hallway that caught my eye,” I admitted.

  “What did you see? Are you talking about the garish carpet or the overcrowded furniture?”

  “The carpet, or more precisely, what was on it,” I said. “Something registered in my subconscious mind, but I didn’t even realize what I was seeing until I added it to what I just found. Jake, I know who killed Jasper Finney!”

  Chapter 17

  “Well, don’t keep me hanging. Who did it, Suzanne?” Jake was nearly breathless waiting for my reply.

  “The thing is that I know who, but I still don’t know why,” I said.

  “We can figure out the motive once I know who you suspect. It’s Ethan, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “I thought so too for the longest time, but no, it wasn’t him.”

  “Who was it, then?” Jake asked, the impatience growing thick in his voice as he asked.

  “Bethesda Long killed Jasper,” I said.

  “Bethesda? Why would she kill him?” Jake asked me. It was to his credit that he hadn’t called me crazy, since I still hadn’t told him my rationale.

  “Let me back up. Do you remember that just after we found Jasper’s body, Bethesda came into the hallway?”

  “I wasn’t there when it happened, but I remember you told me that you saw her,” Jake said. “I was still inside with the body, remember?”

  “That’s right. Anyway, when she came to where I was standing, I told her the news, and she nearly fainted. In fact, she went so far as to put both hands on the floor to keep from toppling over, or so it seemed to me at the time.”

  “But that wasn’t what she was doing, was it?” Jake asked, his voice now deadly serious.

  “No, she was retrieving the only key to the study that she knew about. It was the one she took off Jasper’s body after he was dead,” I said. “I saw something shiny on the carpet in the photo, but I couldn’t quite make it out. By the time Chief Grant’s team got there, it was already gone. That’s because Bethesda picked it up from where she first dropped it.”

  “Okay, but that’s a little flimsy, isn’t it?”

  “Wait, there’s more. The only thing I can figure out is that she must have had a hole in her pocket or something, because it fell out again in the kitchen. A little after the police arrived, I found her in there, obviously searching for something.”

  “How can you be sure it was the same key?” he asked me.

  “Because I found it before she could. Right now, it’s sitting in my pocket, safely wrapped in a tissue to protect the fingerprints.”

  “Suzanne, you need to get out of there right now,” Jake ordered.

  “You’re right. I’m on my way. I’ll talk to you soon,” I said as I hung up and started to reach for my keys.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t get to them in time.

  Bethesda Long quickly settled into the passenger seat after throwing open the door and climbing in beside me.

  There was a long kitchen knife in her hand, and to make matters worse, it was pointed straight at my throat.

  Chapter 18

  “My, my, aren’t you a clever girl,” Bethesda said to me as she settled in.

  “Not really. I don’t know anything about anything,” I replied, trying to keep my voice calm. I knew that one wrong move, and I was likely dead.

  “You’re too modest,” the murderess said. “You were going to start the car and drive off. I suggest you do exactly that,” she said.

  “Listen, that was my husband on the phone. He’ll be here in two minutes, Bethesda.”

  She took the blade and jabbed my sleeve with it, ripping the material and nicking my skin in the process.

  “Oh!”

  “Unless you want that to happen again, I suggest you get busy driving right now.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked her as I took my keys out and started the engine. The crazy woman didn’t need to prod me more than once.

  “I don’t know. I feel like taking a drive, don’t you?”

  “What would you say if I gave you my keys and just got out of the Jeep?” I asked.

  Bethesda jabbed me again, this time even harder than the last. The pain was sudden and intense, and as the blood ran down my arm, I protested, “If you don’t quit stabbing me, I won’t be able to drive.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a way somehow,” she said. Her voice had taken on an eerie calm, and I had to wonder about her sanity.

  It was certainly no time to challenge her, though.

  I started to drive, wondering how I could leave Jake a sign that I had just been abducted by a stone-cold killer.

  Nothing came to me, though, so I did as I was ordered.

  For the moment, it was the only thing that I could do, the only thing that was keeping me alive.

  I tried to make my driving seem random to her, but I was edging my way back toward April Springs, albeit via back roads. Hopefully, by the time she realized what I was doing, it would be too late. As an automatic gesture, I buckled my seatbelt, and then I glanced over at her. “You really should fasten your seatbelt, Bethesda.”

  “I believe if I’m apprehended, that will be the least of my worries,” she said. “Make a right at the next stop sign.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go left?” I suggested, since that was the way back to town.

  I was rewarded with another stab wound, this one to my leg.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Sto
p that!”

  “Then stop disobeying me,” she scolded me as though I were an errant pupil of hers.

  I wasn’t about to go against her wishes any more. I did as I was told, trying to think of something I could do that would hurt her and not me. The fact that she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt could work in my favor if I played it right, but I needed a decent-sized tree in the right position before I tried to ram it. It was drastic, but that was what I was down to. Even if I perished in the crash as well, at least I’d go of my own volition, trying to free myself from my captor, not some kind of compliant victim just waiting to die.

  Bethesda must have sensed what I was up to. The knife was now suddenly pressed against my neck, and I knew that one false move on my part would end in tragedy for me.

  That managed to tame my rebellious streak rather quickly.

  “Why did you kill him?” I asked as I continued to follow her random directions. She wasn’t exactly making suggestions now. They were orders, and the next one I disobeyed might very well be my last. “I know how you did it, but I can’t figure out why.”

  “It’s simple enough. Jasper Finney killed my father.”

  “He what?” I asked, barely able to keep the Jeep’s front tires on the narrow road. We were following a course I didn’t recognize, I was hopelessly lost, and as the road grew tighter and tighter, my opportunity to successfully wreck us was fading fast.

  “Oh, he didn’t do it personally, but it was his equipment that killed my sweet old dad, so the blood was still on his hands. Dad didn’t want to go to work that day. He knew what Jasper was making him do was too dangerous, but he had a family to support, and Jasper was insistent that it was safe. Only it wasn’t.”

  “You said that Jasper took care of you and your family after your father died,” I reminded her. “Surely that wasn’t an act of a guilty man.”

  “To the contrary. He knew that he’d been responsible! The only reason he helped us was because he felt guilty.”

  “Did he know how you felt about him, even after all those years?” I asked. There was a tree ahead that might do if I could manage to accelerate enough into it to do some real damage. I hated hurting my precious Jeep, but I despised the prospect of dying even more.

  “No, I hid it well, but when he invited me to plan his party, I knew that it was his way of telling me that he knew I held him culpable in my father’s death. That’s what this event was all about; making up for past wrongs. You see, I knew something that no one else knew, not even his family.”

  It was clear that she was dying to tell someone how clever she was. “What was that?”

  “Jasper was dying. That’s why he suddenly wanted to make amends all the way around. He didn’t want to go to his grave with a guilty conscience about anything, but I robbed him of it. In the end, I won and he lost.”

  “How do you know he was dying?” I asked her, forgetting my plan for the moment.

  “My mother had to go back to work after my father died,” she said. “Guess where she still works to this day.”

  “The hospital,” I said dully. It was all coming together, albeit a little too late to do me any good.

  “Bingo. When she told me that he was dying, I knew that I had to act fast.”

  “I have a silly question. Why not just let him die of natural causes?” I asked as I got closer and closer to the tree. I tried to accelerate slightly so she wouldn’t notice but still get up enough speed to hit it with some kind of impact.

  “Then he would win!” she shouted. For a single instant, she let the knife drop, and I knew it was time to act.

  One way or the other, this was going to be over, and soon.

  Chapter 19

  Fighting every instinct I had in my body, I jammed the accelerator down and jerked the wheel of my Jeep straight into the tall oak.

  And for a moment, the world faded to black.

  No matter what the outcome ended up being, it was out of my hands now.

  Chapter 20

  Thankfully, I wasn’t out long. When I came to, I could hear Bethesda moaning in the seat beside me. Without a seatbelt to restrain her from the impact, she’d been thrown partially into the windshield.

  There was a great deal of blood on her face as well as her blouse, and I wondered how long she had to live.

  I was in agony, both from the knife wounds and the wreck itself, but I somehow managed to undo my seatbelt and crawl out of the Jeep despite the pain. At least it was an older model without airbags. I wasn’t sure how that might have changed things, but I hadn’t had time to worry about it before I’d hit the tree.

  Instead of calling Jake, I hit the emergency button on my phone.

  It directed me straight to 9-1-1.

  “There’s been an accident,” I said as a heavy fog seemed to cloud my mind.

  “Suzanne? Is that you?”

  “Yes, this is Suzanne, Suzanne Hart,” I said, not knowing who was on the other end of the phone or even caring at that point. “I don’t know where I am, but I was just in a car wreck.”

  “Describe your location to me,” the disembodied voice on the other end of the line asked.

  “Can’t you just trace the call?” I asked. Why were they pushing me when all I wanted to do was drop down to the ground and rest? “There are trees, and a small path that’s barely a road. Trace the call! Please!” I was on the verge of losing it, and I knew it.

  “That will take too long. Come on, you can do it.”

  In a haze, I did the best I could to describe the twists and turns I’d taken, but I wasn’t at all sure that I’d done a very good job of it.

  If a twig behind me hadn’t snapped at precisely the right moment, I would have been dead soon after.

  But I wasn’t.

  At least not yet.

  I looked up to see a bloody nightmare approaching me. Bethesda’s face was wrecked, and so were her clothes. There was an amazing amount of blood on her, and yet she still managed to move toward me with crazy speed and a look of sheer determination on her face that I prayed I never saw again in my life, no matter how long that happened to be.

  I did all I could do.

  I threw my phone at her, and then I started to run away.

  This woman wasn’t human.

  By all rights she should have died on impact, but she was clearly in better shape right now than I was.

  As I ran away—stumbled, more like it—I could hear her behind me, getting closer and closer with every step I took.

  My cut leg was aching, and so was my arm.

  I’d also bruised my rib cage against the seatbelt in the wreck.

  At the moment, my top speed wouldn’t have beaten a lazy turtle.

  I knew that if I stayed my course, I wasn’t going to last much longer, so I did my best to change directions and start off into the woods.

  Bethesda followed, but I could hear her slowing a little.

  It wasn’t much, but I’d take whatever I could get.

  Was that the sound of road noise ahead of me? It could have just been the blood rushing in my ears, but then again, what did I have to lose? I headed toward it, somehow finding new energy in a final attempt to save my own life.

  It was a road after all, and what was more, there were even a few cars on it.

  I didn’t even hesitate.

  I jumped in front of the closest car, waving my hands frantically for the driver to stop.

  He wasn’t able to, though.

  In an effort to avoid running me over, he jerked the steering wheel to the right, and I heard a sickening crumpling sound just behind me.

  Evidently he’d missed me.

  Bethesda hadn’t been so lucky.

  Chapter 21

  When I woke up, I was in the hospital.

 
I tried to look around, but my ribs as well as my other wounds were killing me, and I winced in pain at the discovery that I was still alive.

  I really didn’t mind the agony.

  After all, it proved that I’d somehow managed to survive a killer one more time.

  I was not surprised to find that Jake was holding my hand the entire time, and he squeezed it tightly as I turned my head gently. “There you are,” he said as he kissed my brow. “You’ve had yourself quite the day, haven’t you?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said as my words came out in sobs.

  “Hey. It’s okay. You’re alive, Suzanne. That’s all that matters.”

  “I shouldn’t have gone out there without you,” I said. “It almost cost me my life.”

  “Stop beating yourself up about it,” he said softly. “You’re okay.”

  “How’s Bethesda?” I asked him, reliving the sight of her crumpled body lying on the ground.

  Jake just shook his head. “She didn’t make it.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m sorry. She tried to kill me,” I said, falling back into my own thoughts. “How about my Jeep?”

  My husband frowned again. “You’re going to need a new one. You bent the frame on it, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. Don’t worry about the cost, though. Ethan, Phyllis, and Bobby are going to all chip in and buy you a new one.”

  “Okay. That’s nice,” I said, feeling dull and listless. Would Bethesda be dead without my interference? Probably not. Would she ever kill again if I hadn’t unmasked her? Who could say? But she couldn’t get away with murder, even if Jasper hadn’t had that long to live anyway. It was a consequence of my actions that had led to her demise, but I felt as though I’d done a service for my friend, and that was really all that mattered at the moment.