by Blair Merrin
Despite the chair, she actually does relax a little, holding her head in her hands and sighing heavily. “This has been just the worst week.”
“Hey, at least Applebee’s leaving.”
“True,” Bonnie admits. “He made sure to leave me with a final offer. Almost double his original. I told him where he could firmly stick his money. He can go back to his hotels, and restaurants…”
“…And condominium complexes,” I mimic, doing my best impression of Henry Applegate’s boisterous voice. “And amusement park in California.”
Our stark gazes meet and I can tell instantly that we have the same thought in mind.
“No…”
“You think…?”
Have you ever gone fishing in a big lake, catch-and-release style, and ended up catching the same fish twice? It happens. Well, that’s what this felt like. Unfortunately, at the exact same time, two other things happened. Dash finally came out of the back room, frowning and shaking his head. And behind the desk, Deputy Sharon’s phone rang.
“Dash…” I start to say, but then Sharon interrupts.
“Dash? It’s for you.” She passes the receiver over to the very confused Dash. “Yeah? What? Okay. Be right there.” He hangs up. “That was Penny. I gotta get back to the motel right now.”
“But Dash—” I protest.
“Cassie, are you coming or not?” He’s already halfway to the door.
Bonnie and I exchange a glance. “Are you gonna…?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell him,” I say. “Stay here and see Garrett.”
The El Dorado’s engine is already running when I get in the car. As Dash speeds out of the lot, I ask him anxiously, “What happened? Did he confess?”
“Far from it.” Dash takes a deep breath, like he’s about to launch into one heck of a story, but I cut him off.
“Listen a second. When Applegate was in the shop before, he told me that he owned an amusement park in California. And Pietro used to be a groundskeeper out west…”
“…So?”
“So, you dolt, what if Pietro used to work for Applegate?”
Dash mulls it over, his head moving back and forth like a bobble-head doll. “That’s pretty big speculation.”
“But…?”
“But… if that’s the case, then maybe Pietro knew something that Applegate didn’t want getting out.” He snaps his fingers. “That’s a motive.”
“And Applegate could be halfway to the airport by now.”
When we arrive at the motel, Penny is waiting for us in the parking lot. She looks white as a sheet. “Come,” is all she says, and she briskly escorts us around to the rear of the motel. “I didn’t touch it,” she tells us nervously. “Not like I’d want to.”
“Penny, what did you find?” Dash asks, moving quick to keep up with her.
“See for yourself.”
Behind the motel is a wide expanse of grass, and about a quarter mile beyond that is open farmland. She points in the grassy area at something that looks like a lump of cloth. Upon closer inspection, it’s a man’s shirt. Dash and I crowd over it, Penny keeping her distance behind us. We both bend at the waist to inspect it. It’s filthy, as if it was buried in the dirt, and…
“Is that… blood?” I ask.
“Pretty sure,” Dash answers. “Penny, where did you find this?”
“I didn’t. Duke did. I was cleaning one of the rooms while he was running around outside. I saw through the window that he was digging in the dirt. I came out to scold him, and he came out with… that.”
Dash takes the pen from his pocket and uses it to lift the shirt, angling it this way and that to get a good look at it. “That’s definitely blood.”
“Looks like it was buried,” I add. “Just like…”
“The knife,” Dash finishes.
“And look there,” I point. “It’s missing one black button.”
“I’m calling Phil now,” Dash says, his phone already to his ear.
“Oh. My. God,” Penny says, her face contorted in disgust. “That creep wanted me to come with him. Ugh.” She shudders and paces behind us. A half-second later, she shouts, “There! There he is!”
We both turn just in time to see the BMW’s taillights disappear around the bend, heading toward the highway. Dash shouts at Phil into the phone. “I see him! Heading north toward the on-ramp!”
“Let’s go after him!” I exclaim.
“No way,” Dash says.
“But… car chase,” I whine.
“Seriously, no.” Less than a minute later two police cruisers, their sirens screaming, jet past the motel.
CHAPTER 16
With the help of some state troopers, Henry Applegate was caught before he could reach the airport. Apparently, he put up a real big fuss as he was being arrested, something about how we’re all going to pay for it, we have no idea how influential he is, blah, blah, blah.
Thanks to the shirt that Duke found, the police were able to detain him long enough for the DNA results to come back. Sure enough, it was Pietro’s blood on the blade, and Henry Applegate’s fingerprints were all over the handle. There was also some of my blood on the blade, and some of Dash’s prints on the handle, which caused a little bit of confusion, but luckily didn’t muck anything up in the investigation. The shirt also came back positive for Pietro’s blood, and it had hair follicles on it that belonged to—you guessed it—one Mr. Henry Applegate.
I wasn’t in the room when they presented all of this to him, but from what I heard he broke down sobbing and admitted to the whole thing.
It turns out that Pietro did indeed work for Applegate once upon a time in his California amusement park. In fact, this was right around the time that it opened, so Pietro knew that Applegate had closed the deal on the land with the promise to the sellers of it becoming a nature preserve, and he then reneged on the deal and turned it into a theme park. When Applegate continued to insist on buying Bonnie’s property, he apparently assured her that it would remain a ranch. Pietro knew this sleazebag’s MO and confronted him alone in the barn. Further testing was done with luminol, and blood stains popped up all over the barn, just where Applegate said they’d be. He’d used some empty grain sacks to clean up the mess, and had thrown dirt and straw over what he couldn’t sop up.
The dirty developer had offered Pietro a lot of money to keep his mouth shut and let things happen, but being a decent human being, Pietro refused. Applegate got confused (because after all, “Everyone can be bought,” right?) and flew into a rage. He stabbed Pietro three times. After realizing what he’d done, he stashed the body beneath the floorboards, and stupidly buried his stained shirt behind the motel.
The murder weapon was a souvenir that Applegate had picked up in Nashville, along with the big silver bronco belt buckle, because he thought it was fitting for a cowboy-type, and maybe he didn’t want to wait for a six-shooter, I guess.
Initially, he had buried the knife near the motel, but when he saw Duke sniffing around the area, he dug it up in a hurry. When he came into my shop the first time, pretending to be interested in Xander’s statue, he stashed the knife inside it, and then offered to buy it so that he could safely discard both without anyone being the wiser.
Of course, now he’s going to be tried, undoubtedly convicted in the face of overwhelming evidence, and hopefully go to prison for a long, long time. I know all this because Dash told me, the day after the fact, over dinner.
“What about Garrett Fitzwilliams?” I asked him. “You never told me what that was all about.”
“Right. Well, according to Garrett, Pietro tried to communicate with him first. They were good friends, and apparently Pietro thought that Garrett would get his messages. But it only freaked Garrett out; he didn’t know that Pietro was dead yet. He thought he was being haunted by an angry spirit, so he took off. He’d had enough of Bandit Hills.”
“When it was really just a frustrated one.” I grinned. “I guess that explains why he felt the need
to trash my store. He just wanted someone to hear him out, in a manner of speaking.”
Today, now two days after Applegate’s arrest, the news is out and tourists are trickling back into the store. Which means that I’ll have to finish marking my merchandise, but hey, I could use a little bit of monotony.
By the way, I totally solved this murder. I mean, if you think about it, all this probably would have happened without my help, but I was the one that realized that Pietro was Applegate’s employee and therefore had a motive, wasn’t I? So I’m going to chalk this one up as a win for Cassie, and pat myself on the back, even if no one else will.
Copyright Summer Prescott Books 2016
All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 17
Close to closing time, Xerxes starts mewling like a kitten and pawing at the front window. A short while later, when the bells chime, I don’t even need to look up to know that Xander Cruz has come into my store. Of course, I do anyway. He carries with him a cardboard box under one arm, much larger than the last one he brought into my shop.
Xerxes crashes into his legs, almost knocking him off balance, and purrs fiercely. After giving the cat some attention, Xander sets the box on the counter and opens it wordlessly. The first thing he takes out is the horse statue.
“Oh, hey,” I say, “you got it back.”
“Yes. And I’d still like to try to sell it here… if you want to.”
“Of course,” I tell him. “I’ll make sure it goes to the highest bidder.”
He smiles and says, “For all the trouble it’s brought, the lowest bidder would be fine with me.” He reaches into the box again. “And this one is for you. A gift.”
He removes a second statue, slightly smaller, made from layer upon layer of aluminum cans turned inside it, so that the whole thing is shiny silver. It looks just like Xerxes—right down to the size, even.
“Wow,” I murmur. “Xander, thank you. You didn’t have to do that for me.”
“I felt I did.”
“Why?”
“Cassie,” he says somberly, “I know that you never suspected me. I know that you tried to dissuade Dash that it could have been me. And I know that you were the first to figure out that Applegate was to blame.”
“Let me guess: a little birdie told you?”
He only smiles cryptically. Then he does something completely unexpected; he takes a step closer to me and cups my chin gently with one hand, gazing directly into my eyes. If this was a cartoon, this would be where I melt into a big Cassie-puddle.
“I haven’t always had a lot of faith in people,” he tells me. “But I’m coming around, thanks to the ones like you. Knowing that I have someone I can trust means more to me than you can know.”
And maybe my depth perception is a bit off, but I swear he’s about to lean in, and my heart leaps into my throat. At the same time, the door bells chime and we both hear a loud, “Ahem!”
Dash stands in the doorway. He looks from me to Xander and back to me. “Am I, uh, interrupting something?”
I wince; Xander’s hand is still on my face. He very slowly pulls it away.
“Dash, hey,” I say, probably too cheerfully. “Just give us one minute?”
He purses his lips, but nods and leaves again, standing just outside the shop.
“I should go,” Xander says.
“Probably. Hey, wait a second.”
“Yes?”
“There’s just one thing I need to know,” I say. “You told me you wouldn’t do a DNA test. Why? What if it turned out to be the only thing that could prove your innocence?”
Xander sighs deeply and stares at the floor. “It’s… a secret.” Then he looks up at me, right in the eye. “But I do trust you. I don’t believe you’d tell anyone.”
“Of course not.”
It takes him a while to speak again. “My real name isn’t Xander, and I didn’t choose Bandit Hills; I was sent here. Don’t get me wrong; this is a wonderful town, but I wasn’t given an option.”
Gears are churning in my head, and finally something clicks into place. “Are you talking about…” I lower my voice to a whisper. “Witness protection?”
He nods gravely. “If they had run my DNA through a database, they may have discovered who I once was. And let’s just say that I probably wouldn’t be as welcome here anymore.”
“But people love you. Animals love you. Whatever it was couldn’t be that bad.”
He looks at me doubtfully. “I haven’t always used my prowess to help people. But this is our secret, right?”
I hold up my pinky. He grins and locks his with mine in that most solemn of vows, the pinky swear. “It’s safe with me,” I assure him.
Through the storefront windows, Dash watches us and does a really bad job of pretending that he’s not. Xander leans in and gives me a hug. “Until next time, Cassie.”
He nods to me and leaves the store. Outside, I see him and Dash exchanging a few words. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but Dash stares at the sidewalk, and nods, and then Xander nods, and then he mounts his horse and trots away.
When Dash comes into the store, I brace myself, expecting him to be furious about walking in on me and Xander in what I assume looked like a scene out of a romance movie.
But instead he casually leans against the counter and says, “Hey.”
“That was nothing,” I blurt out. “We were just talking.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to be jealous of him.”
“Yeah, he said the same thing.” He rolls his eyes. “Cassie, you can say that all you want, but it doesn’t change anything. I’m going to be jealous of guys like Xander. Heck, I’m probably going to be jealous of any guy that looks at you and smiles.”
“Then what’s with the snail act?”
“We’ve been friends a long time. Since we were teenagers. I don’t want to hurry into a relationship and then see all that fall apart.”
“It won’t,” I tell him. “We’d stay friends.”
“People say that,” he replies. “But do they? I mean, I could’ve asked you out in high school, and maybe we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”
High school? What? “Dash,” I ask carefully, “are you trying to say you’ve been holding a candle for me for… fifteen years?”
He inspects the tiled floor and shrugs one shoulder. “Trying to, but it’s not really coming out right.”
“So that’s what all this was about? This whole ‘let’s not put labels on this’ charade was because you were the insecure one? You’ve… like me for all this time, and you’re afraid of ruining it?”
He nods. I blush. He stares at the floor. We may as well be a couple of teenagers all over again. Screw it, right? Embrace it.
I take his hand. “Look, I can handle ghosts, and witches, and murders… but this? It’s scary for me too. I don’t know how this story ends. But I know that we’ll never know if we don’t give it at try. So… Dash, do you want to be my boyfriend?”
He finally looks up at me and grins. “I mean, I guess. I’m not really doing anything else…”
“You’re such a dork.”
“I know.” He pulls me closer to him and leans in, and…
Well, I don’t have to give you every little detail. Use your imagination.