Forest Outings (A Coffee and Crime Mystery Book 3)

by Nan Sampson

  Charlie chuckled. “I think he’s worried she’ll go out trolling tonight and find someone new.”

  “Not likely. I think Bill’s in for a stranger ride than he bargained for.” She glanced behind her, seeing headlights pulling up rapidly in her rearview mirror. “Anyway, I’m headed home now.” The truck, or whatever it was behind her, was now practically in her trunk. “Damn fool.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, just some idiot behind me, going way too fast.”

  “Then get off the phone and drive carefully. I’ll see you at home.”

  She ended the call and put both hands back on the wheel as the fool in the pick-up truck raced around her. Cursing at him the way she’d once cursed at her fellow idiot drivers on the Jane Adams heading into the city, she made her way slowly back home.

  Alphie Mueller’s death was more of a shock than Margaret Roesch’s had been, but no less the subject for rampant speculation. Everyone who came through the doors of her shop the next day had their own theory about the alleged suicide, and Ellie, not fond of gossip to begin with, nodded and smiled and let them all blather on about whatever their particular theory was, knowing all the while that Alphie’s death had most certainly not been suicide.

  Charlie had come home looking drained and shaky, although he said they’d only spent about an hour total at Alphie’s house.

  “The responding officer had virtually destroyed the crime scene,” he’d complained, then read her chapter and verse about what not to do if you’re a cop and trip over a dead body hanging from a basement bannister.

  She could understand why the woman might have been pushed to suicide. She was barely able o keep hearth and home together on her meager pension, had been shafted by Link out of what she thought would be her inheritance and had in all likelihood been the victim of sexual abuse by her father.

  The hell of it, at least for Ellie, was that her favorite suspect in Link’s and Margaret’s murder had just been killed. To make matters worse, if she hadn’t done it, she’d taken whatever she’d known and had been about to share with Ellie, to the grave with her.

  Charlie now took that cryptic phone call seriously. “She had to have been killed for that information. To keep her from telling anyone.”

  Ellie had refrained from saying, “Well, duh.”

  Laura Lincoln came in just before lunch, and while still subdued, at least seemed to have stopped crying over poor Alvin, the guinea pig.

  She took a seat at the counter near the register and pulled a piece of paper out of a little pocket sewn into one end of her red cashmere scarf. She consulted the list and said, “You ready for a six-drink order? I’ve got the Horizon Ladies Book Club at the shop today and apparently you need large doses of caffeine to discuss The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.”

  Ellie laughed and took the list from Laura’s hand, then stopped suddenly. She looked from the list, which had been folded in half, to the red scarf Laura wore. “You just took this out of your scarf.”

  Laura nodded. “Yeah. I love that little pocket. Keeps bits of paper from cluttering up my coat pockets.”

  She thought back to the brown cashmere scarf Margaret Roesch had worn, which was identical to Laura’s except in color. The brown scarf would have blended in against the bushes in the dark.

  “The medical report. It was in the pocket of the scarf.”

  Laura stared at her. “I beg your pardon?”

  Ellie grinned at her. “Laura, you’re a bloody genius. It’s so obvious. The medical records were in the scarf. That’s what he came back looking for. It wasn’t to do something dastardly to the body. He was trying to find the medical records.”

  “Am I missing something?”

  “Yes. But I’ll explain later.” She wanted to bolt from the shop and go find Charlie, but duty first. “You want some muffins or cookies to go with these – on the house?” She waved the list at her friend.

  Laura grinned. “Sure. My momma taught me never to look a gift horse in the mouth. That goes for muffins as well.” She waited while Ellie fixed the drinks and packaged up the muffins and cookies in a sack. “Call me later, huh? To explain?”

  “Absolutely. Have fun with the Sisterhood!”

  Ten minutes later, the crowd had cleared and she pulled out her cell phone and dialed Charlie’s number.

  She didn’t even say hello, just started right in with, “You’ll never guess what I just figured out.”

  “That you worship the ground I walk on and want to become my love slave?”

  “Smart ass. No. I just figured out why the killer came back. It wasn’t to do something to the body. It was to find the scarf.”

  “Why would he want the scarf?”

  “Because the scarf had photocopies of medical records in it.” She explained about Laura’s scarf and the little pocket on the ends. “That’s why the killer left it. It was because he couldn’t find it. But the wind must have worked it free.”

  Charlie thought for a moment, then said something to someone else. “That actually makes sense. Finally. It may also be the reason the killer took her clothes.”

  “Yes! So he could search them carefully, in private—”

  “—when the initial search, in the dark, came up empty. Which means he must have known she had it on her somewhere. So he must have seen her with it, close enough to the time of the crime that he didn’t think she’d stashed it somewhere.”

  “Or he was meeting her in order to get it. He just didn’t know where she had it stashed on her.”

  Charlie paused. “So what was in the medical records?

  “Something about a surgery John Mueller had.”

  “And that’s relevant how?”

  She thought. If the killer was trying to get them, if Margaret Roesch had gotten her hands on them, they had to be important. “I don’t know. It did have the Reverend Mueller’s blood type on them.”

  “What was it?”

  “AB Negative.”

  “That’s rare.” Charlie paused again and she could almost hear him thinking over the phone. “Why did Roesch and the killer want John Mueller’s blood type?”

  “I don’t know. I just know it’s important.”

  Ellie could hear a deep voice speaking in the background. “Right. Okay, we’ll figure it out. Make sure you give it to me when I see you. And nice work, Ellie.”

  “Where are you, anyway?”

  “I’m at the station. Bill and I—”

  “You know, if the two of you keep seeing so much of each other, people are going to start talking.”

  “Ah, life in a small town. Bill,” he said to his companion on the other end, “the engagement’s off. Ellie’s in a murderous jealous rage. You’ll just have to find someone else.”

  She heard Bill laugh. “Fine,” she heard him say, “then I’ll have to go back to my affair with Harvey Briggs.”

  Ellie shook her head. “Okay. Whatever. So what do we do from here?”

  “From here, you go back to tending your shop.”

  “What, and leave the dangerous police work to the men?”

  “Down, girl. That’s not what I meant. I meant that right now, there’s not a lot to do. Bill and I are waiting for the results of the analysis on the stains on Margaret’s clothes, but we both know how that’s going to come back. Beyond that…” Charlie sighed. “I’ve asked Bill if I can tag along when he canvasses Alphie’s neighbors this afternoon and he’s agreed. In fact, he’s actually suggested—”

  Charlie put his hand over the phone and said something to someone, and then she heard, “I gotta go, Ellie. I should be home later, but I’ll call you if I think I’m going to be late.”

  She hung up, wondering what Bill had suggested and also wondering what else she might be able to figure out if she had five minutes to just sit and think about it. A handful of regulars were heading towards her front door, but after that, she thought, there would be the lunch lull when everyone headed for places that served more substantia
l fare. Then she thought, she was going to sit down in her office, put herself into a light meditative state, and review everything she’d learned. Surely there was something she’d over looked that would help make sense of the seemingly random bits of information.

  At any rate, it couldn’t hurt to try, and it beat the heck out of heading into the stock room and making out next week’s supply list.

  The best laid plans of mice and men, she grumped to herself, when five hours later, the tourist bus that had rolled into town just before lunch time, finally rumbled out. Marg had just finished baking up the dinner rolls for The Birches and, having had no time to even run out for lunch for herself, Ellie snagged one off the cooling rack even as Marg was packaging them up.

  The other woman slapped playfully at Ellie’s hand as she reached for another one. “No. You’re eating all our profits.”

  “Oh, we made enough today to cover two rolls.”

  “That was quite a crowd. A good thing too, it’s been pretty slim pickings around here the last few weeks.”

  Sensing the underlying question Marg was too chicken to ask, Ellie tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry. We’ll get through this. And no, you’re not going to lose your job.”

  She looked relieved. “Not that I’d blame you if you had to let me go. I know how hard it is to make ends meet. If you need to cut back on your expenses…”

  “Marg, I couldn’t keep the doors open without you. It’s not the coffee that keeps them coming in, day after day. It’s your goodies there.” She gestured at the bakery case out in the shop. “That’s what they come for.”

  Marg blushed. “Oh. Well. Well, that’s very sweet of you to say.”

  “Now stop thinking I’m going to can you.”

  “Okay. So if I ask to take off after I get these packed up…”

  “I’ll say go, and drive careful.” She snagged one more roll. “Do you and Mr. Law and Order have a hot date tonight to make up for last night?”

  “Well, that’s the plan. But he’s already told me what it’s like dating a cop. He can never predict when he’s going to have an emergency.”

  “You’d think in a town this size, the emergency would be getting Mrs. Langmeier’s cat out of a tree.”

  Marg agreed, but Ellie could tell she was at least a little bit entertained by all the goings on lately. As were most of the townsfolk. In fact, up until the death of Alphie Mueller, the only people really hurt, other than Josh, were outsiders, so the impact on the community itself was almost insignificant. Outsiders murdered by other outsiders. That was the current line of thinking – because even though Josh had been raised here, he’d moved away, lived now in ‘the big city’, thereby making him an outsider now too.

  She hadn’t been able to ask Charlie about what the coroner had said about Alphie, but from what he’d said the night before, there was no doubt in either his or Bill’s mind that she had not died by her own hand.

  So now, whether the rest of the town knew it or not, it was no longer an ‘outsider’ crime. One of their own had died horribly. Died, Ellie thought, very likely knowing who it was that held her life in his hands.

  She closed up shop later than usual, as a spate of customers came in just as they got off work. It was dark, as usual, and though she knew spring and longer day light hours was were on the way, the long, dark and dreary days were starting to wear on her.

  She locked up, hopped in the van and started the engine, anticipating the lovely blast of hot air that would soon be pouring out of the heater vents, which reminded her of the loose air vent cover in Alphie Mueller’s house, the one just below the little secretary in the living room. There had been something hidden in there, and she wanted suddenly and very badly to know what was in it.

  She picked up her phone to call Charlie, then stopped herself. Charlie would just want to handle it himself. Stupid as it sounded, even to her, she wanted to be the one to find whatever it was in that vent.

  Knowing that Charlie would probably still not be home, as he’d called not twenty minutes before to say he was running late, she pointed her car in the direction of the highway, towards Alphie Mueller’s house.

  The drive took no time at all, but felt like hours in her state of anticipation. She pulled into the driveway just twenty-five minutes after leaving her shop, and the house was as quiet and dark and depressing as she remembered it to be.

  A quick rattle of the front door knob told her it was locked – which came as no surprise. She went round the side of the house, and then to the back, looking for accessible windows, trusty flashlight in hand. The sense of someone watching her was strong again, and she wondered how long she had before one of the neighbors called the cops on her.

  There were only two windows in the back, one that appeared to be a kitchen window and one which was composed of glass bricks, so had to be a bathroom window. There was, however, a back door. She tried it, and unsurprisingly, found it unlocked.

  She was just about to step inside when she heard a rustling in the bushes. She spun, heart thudding in her chest, expecting a neighbor with a baseball bat. Instead, an orange tabby cat streaked out from behind the bushes and scampered on dainty little cat feet across the frozen snow.

  Laughing at her jitters, she slipped inside Alphie Mueller’s dark kitchen and flicked on the flashlight.

  The disaster highlighted in the narrow yellow beam was monstrous, and she couldn’t believe the police had done this. Every drawer and cabinet was open, their contents strewn across the floor, which was covered in broken crockery. Someone had been here before her, clearly looking for something.

  She’d have to call the police about this – but not before she had a look in that air vent. She hoped whoever had done this hadn’t found that hidey-hole, but the thoroughness with which they’d searched everywhere else left her with dim hope.

  She left the kitchen and made her way around knocked-over furniture and broken lamps until she got to the little secretary against the wall. All the cubbies had been ransacked, and the drawers had been ripped from the desk and tossed onto the floor, after the contents had been dumped. Ellie got down on her hands and knees, taking care not to kneel in broken glass from the desk lamp’s milk glass shade, which lay shattered on the floor. She moved aside the discarded drawers, and the over turned waste basket, which concealed the little vent.

  “Hah!” She grinned as she saw that the vent cover was firmly in place. Perhaps Alphie had screwed it back in – but no, as she tugged on it experimentally, it came free in her hands.

  A quick scan with the flashlight told her that whatever she had seen in there the other day was still there – and no giant spiders or red-eyed rats awaited her either. She retrieved the object, which she perhaps only imagined was stuck further back into the air duct than she remembered, then climbed to her feet.

  It was indeed a photo album. Most of the pictures were dark, some so dark that in the dim light of the flashlight, she wasn’t able to make out too much. But those she could see, at least on the first couple of pages, were not the sort of subject matter she would have thought Alphie Mueller would have pictures of.

  Two young girls, looking enough alike to be sisters, were featured in the photos, which had been taken across a number of years from pre-teen in young adulthood. In all of pictures, the girls were nude, sitting or laying down on a large, four poster bed, in various sexually provocative poses. The pictures were black and white, the lighting stark and revealing, and almost artistic until she got to three on the last page. Each one of those last three photographs was from a different period in time, based on the girls’ ages. In each, they were both draped suggestively across a man, sitting on the bed. He had his arms around both girls, and was smiling at the camera. It was the man she had seen on the desk in the little photo paperweight, the Reverend John Mueller. Even in these photos, he wore the black suit and dog collar of a minister.

  And even though probably fifty years had passed, Ellie recognized Alphie Mueller as the olde
r of the two girls, which meant that the other girl had to be her sister Leonetta.

  She shuddered. The pictures themselves were shocking. Why would a father take pictures of his naked daughters, even have himself photographed with them? Was taking pictures all he did with them or had the abuse – for surely this was abuse, even if he didn’t touch them – gone even further? More shocking than the pictures, however, was the notion that ALphie had kept these pictures, even gone so far as to put them in an album. Why? Why would someone do that?

  Could this have been what the killer was looking for? If so, why? Who was left, other than Nettie Fairweather, who would either know or care about these pictures?

  After the photos with the Reverend Mueller, there was a blank page, but instead of it being the end of the album, she discovered there were newer pictures on the next page. The first set of photos were a collection of mostly blurry photos of two teenage boys swimming… and doing other things, on the bank of a pond. Those had to be of Link and Josh. Again, they were not images she wanted to stare at, and she was shocked not only that Alphie had them, but kept them. Finally, the last page contained a much more recent set of photos. These were of Link and Matt Pace also carnally engaged and if she had to guess from the watering trough and the fence line, they had been taken in the Mough’s north pasture.

  Sickened, but knowing this could be important evidence, she was about to tuck the album under her arm, in preparation for leaving, when something heavy slipped out of the back of the album.

  Ellie retrieved a large manila envelope from the floor and opened it, holding the flashlight with her teeth. Inside was a stack of 8x10 photographs. These too were dim, as though taken in poor light, the subjects in them little more than silhouettes against an only slightly lighter background although they were color photographs, and taken from a vantage point high above the subjects.

  But despite the lighting, the activity depicted came through clear enough. There was a man – at least it looked like a man – digging a hole in the snow. Next to him was another form, that of a woman, lying in the snow, legs and arms akimbo, and completely and utterly naked except for the shoe on her left foot.