Death Comes to a Retreat (Book 4 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  Was? Uh-oh. I mustered a smile and a wave, then went inside my cabin. Celia, already seated on the dirty brown-and-gold plaid couch, immediately began, “I’ve already collected the money from Allison plus your new participants. Unfortunately, that only covered the meals and lodging, and not your fee. Before you ask, I paid the resort in full and it’s nonrefundable.”

  My mind raced through the arithmetic, and this was way out of whack. “But that—”

  “You only have to give back four of the hundred-dollar deposits to the original registrants who could no longer attend. I already reimbursed one of them for my slot.”

  My heart was starting to race as I struggled to check my temper. “Refund the…what are you talking about? Wasn’t their money already reimbursed by these friends of yours?”

  “On such short notice, I couldn’t very well expect them to pay full cost for the retreat, now could I?”

  “In other words, you screwed up the dates of the retreat, and now you expect me to take the financial loss? That is not going to happen!”

  She rose and wagged her finger and upper arm at me. “I resent your tone of voice! I’ve done my part. I got replacement attendees! If it weren’t for me, you’d be out a lot more than four hundred dollars!” She reached into her pocket. “But here. Here’s your check back for my services. I’ve decided not to accept payment because of our little misunderstanding. So we’re even-steven. Neither of us is making any money on this venture of yours.”

  “You call that even?” I said, accepting what was indeed my original check. “I’m paying four hundred dollars to work this weekend!”

  “And I paid for my food and lodging to attend a workshop in a subject I have no interest in! You and your friend get a cabin for free!”

  “But it’s not free! It’s costing me—”

  The door flew open and Karen rushed inside, closely followed by Rachel and Lauren. “Potty break,” Lauren explained unnecessarily as Karen continued past us into our bathroom/bedroom. “Uh, you may have to talk to Nathan. He’s sitting in the backseat and won’t say a word to me.”

  There was a rhythmic rap on the plywood door flap, then perky Julie poked her head in. “Okey-dokey. We’ve taken a vote, and we decided to give you a chance, Molly. We’re all ready to get those creative juices flowing.” She accentuated her last sentence with a peppy little fist pump.

  “Mom?” Karen called through the wall. “There’s something swimming in the toilet.”

  Probably my career, I thought. Though if that were the case, it would be drowning.

  “Come on, Molly,” Celia said as she waltzed out the door. “Mustn’t keep your students waiting.”

  Some ten minutes later, Nathan hated me but was with Lauren and the girls. My participants, who probably also hated me but were more discreet about it, were seated in a circle on the green shag carpet of their cabin. While dealing with Nathan, I had reminded myself that this retreat was an experiment for me and was not intended to turn a profit. I then vowed to resolve the financial ramifications with Celia later, ripped up her check, rapidly unpacked, and made the short walk to the other cabin to join the women’s circle.

  “Let’s begin by introducing ourselves. I’d—”

  “We’ve all known one another for years,” Celia interrupted, her painted features smiling, but all the while giving me an evil eye.

  “I’d especially like to know what you hope to gain from this workshop. I’m Molly Masters. I worked for a greeting card company in Boulder for five years before my husband’s job brought us to New York three years ago. That’s when I started Molly’s eCards, my one-person company, which specializes in humorous, custom-made eCard greetings.”

  To my left sat a woman of about my medium height with freckles, her straight auburn hair in an efficient bob. In a fiat, emotionless voice, she said, “My name is Katherine Lindstrom. I’m an English lit professor at C.U. I have no interest in greeting cards per se. I don’t send them. I don’t receive them. However, I am doing a unit on popular literature next semester. Studying greeting cards allows me to start with the most banal form of the written word.”

  I studied her for a moment, but she seemed oblivious to the fact that she’d just insulted me. Making fun of my job, as if she were blazing new trails by being a literary snob in academia. Talk about “banal.” Plus she dragged out the last syllable of that word in an annoying affectation. Nobody refers to the waterway in New York as the Erie Can-ahlllll, after allllll.

  Forcing myself to stay pleasant, I said, “Maybe once we get into this class, you won’t find greeting cards quite so banal.”

  After a pause, the pretty, fortyish woman beside her said, “I just wanted to spend a weekend in the mountains.” She had an olive complexion and white, shoulder-length hair. She wore a denim jumper and sandals. “My name is Nancy Thornton, and I’m a therapist.”

  “A physical therapist?” I asked.

  She held my gaze an instant longer than I was comfortable with, then said, “No, I’m a psychologist. Greeting cards is one way people express emotions with low risk. It is so much easier and less revealing to purchase a prewritten card than to write your own letter.”

  “A thought just occurred to me, Nancy,” Celia said out of turn. “Did you ever notice how the word ‘therapist’ spells ‘the rapist’ if you put a space between the ‘e’ and the ‘r’?”

  A conversation stopper if there ever was one. Nancy glared at Celia and said nothing. As I scanned the circle, it struck me that all of them sat clutching their knees to their chests, as far away from the others as possible in the small room. In fact, the tension in the room hinted at mutual disdain.

  “Allison?” I prompted with a smile, glad to have one friend present. “What about you?”

  She combed her fingers through her dyed hair. “I’m still an electrician, Moll.” She frowned and made a slight gesture with one hand. “I used to know Molly when she lived in Boulder. I’m here because I wanted to spend this weekend with her.”

  “My name is Julie, as you all know,” our young happy person said next with no hesitation. “I’m a Zumba instructor, and I also breed dogs. Goldens and Cockers, although my husband has two Dobermans. We have quite the canine menagerie. Unlike Katherine, I absolutely love everything about greeting cards. Lois?”

  “I’m Lois,” she growled. Adding to her dark, sturdy appearance, she wore a plain black sweat suit She sounded so grim and hostile, she had to have been a no vote for staying. “My son has graduated and moved on. I used to be at IBM but got out of the rat race,”

  While she spoke, I scanned the faces and reflected upon what a challenge this would be for me. Professor Katherine, therapist Nancy, and now grouchy mother Lois gave me the impression they’d desert my class in a New York minute if I allowed their interest to wane.

  “Writing greeting cards sounded like a possible new career for me,” Lois continued. “How much money do you make?”

  “This really isn’t something I’d recommend people get into as a full-time career. It is fun, though, and you can make a little side income on it.” Parking meter change was more like it, but no sense being too honest. Lois’s eyes widened in alarm even so.

  “How do your potential customers find you?” Julie asked.

  I gave a brief explanation of my social-media tactics that allowed my webpage to be easily located, which had my current contact information. “I hadn’t realized we’d be in a dead zone for satellite coverage. I brought a portable scanner and fax machine with me, which uses my business line phone number. On the last day of our workshop, I was going to demonstrate how to display and advertise cards on your websites.”

  “First, we’ll have to see if the workshop endures beyond opening day,” Katherine said.

  “Let’s begin by brainstorming,” I said. “It’s June, so let’s come up with some card ideas for graduates. Ninety percent of all cards are purchased by women, so you might want to start by—”

  “I don’t want to writ
e graduation cards,” Lois interrupted, folding her arms.

  That surprised me, since she did have a son who just graduated from high school. “The topic was just a suggestion. Card companies actually buy six to nine months in advance. So you might want to think of ideas for Christmas cards. It’s easier to brainstorm when you narrow your scope, though, such as …Christmas cards with cats. Then you think of sayings about cats. ‘The cat’s meow,’ ‘the cat’s pajamas’…”

  “‘Curiosity killed the cat,’” Allison interjected wryly. “Or vice versa. And then there’s ‘cat burglar.’”

  “Well, that’s getting pretty far away from the Christmas theme,” I said, perplexed at Allison’s attitude.

  “I’m allergic to cats,” Lois grumbled, “and I’m Jewish.”

  “Hanukkah with hamsters, then.” I set a large salad bowl in the middle of our circle and handed out pens and stacks of small sheets of paper. “Toss captions for cards into the bowl as quickly as possible, without self-editing.”

  No one moved.

  “This first exercise will be kept completely anonymous. I won’t pay any attention to who wrote what, and until we’re comfortable, I won’t read anything out loud. There’s no pressure. Just pick up your pens, write a sentence or two on the paper, and toss it into the salad bowl. Even if your sentence is ‘I don’t know what to write.’ Eventually, your right brain will take over and you’ll start coming up with concepts for cards.”

  Celia, I noticed, was writing away furiously. Eventually, the others started writing as well. To keep this anonymous, I doodled instead of watching them. With the concept of writer’s block fresh in my mind, I sketched a dark, mustached man in old-fashioned clothes seated in front of a second man at a desk marked “Editor-in-Chief.” The mustached man is eyeing a caged bird that’s saying “Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore…” The other man says, “Mr. Poe, it’s a shame about your writer’s block. Let me get my blasted raven out of here so we can hear ourselves think.”

  Three slips of paper were in the bowl when I looked up. I snatched them and read:

  Molly, how dare you hold me responsible for what was obviously a simple matter of getting our wires crossed? I’m just as disappointed about our lodging as everyone else. It was misrepresented to me over the phone. That

  (over)

  hardly makes this my fault. You could be a little grateful for all my hard work! I would ask that you stop and think of where you’d be right now if I hadn’t gotten my friends to fill in!

  C. Wentworth

  I’d be running a retreat for a group of people who wanted to be doing this, located in a place where the building wasn’t about to collapse. I went on to the next one:

  Birds give me fits

  tho I kinda like ducks.

  This retreat is the pits.

  It really sucks.

  Meh. Everybody’s a critic. The handwriting, though, looked disturbingly like my friend Allison’s. My spirits sagging, I looked at the last slip:

  Christmas. Graduation. No ideas. Nothing.

  I don’t want to write cards. I’d rather be home. Scrubbing the toilet with my toothbrush.

  Better yet, with my husband’s toothbrush.

  I grinned, then scanned the room. The downturned faces before me were tense, as if the women were struggling to write Shakespearean prose. “The key to writing greeting cards is empathy. You put yourself in the sender’s place and sense what she thinks her receiver wants to hear. Just jot down anything, the faster the better. Let your subconscious do the work for you.”

  “Unconscious,” Nancy corrected.

  Dejectedly, I refined my sketch of Edgar Allan Poe. After a few more minutes, I snatched some papers out of the bowl. The first one contained a sketch of a mortarboard and read:

  Good luck, son.

  I promise not to turn your bedroom into that sewing room I always wanted.

  I chuckled and nearly broke my vow not to read aloud. That had some commercial potential, though “slam” cards were often a tough sell. The next two slips had incongruous phrases:

  Deck the halls Christmas balls Niagara Falls

  Wish someone would wash them walls.

  When’s dinner?

  Gad, this cabin stinks!

  I’ve smelled nicer locker rooms!

  This was encouraging. They were starting to get the idea of letting their thoughts flow. Maybe this weekend wasn’t going to be a total fiasco after all.

  I turned to the last piece of paper in my hand and read:

  VIOLETS ARE BLUE. ROSES ARE RED.

  ONE OF YOU BITCHES WILL SOON BE DEAD.

  Chapter 2

  Neither Sleet, nor Hail, nor Gloom of Night…

  Shocked by the threat, I felt my cheeks flush and my palms grow sweaty. I scanned my students’ faces for telltale clues that one of them was watching me—or deliberately not looking at me. They were all riveted to their task—writing cards, paying me no mind. If only I was still in Carlton, I could whisk the note off to Sergeant Tommy Newton for handwriting analysis. As it was, all I knew was that the block lettering looked nothing like any of the writing samples I’d seen so far.

  Damn it all! One of these women hated the others so badly that she wanted to make them fear for their very lives. Whoever did this was using me as a pawn—expecting me to read the threat aloud.

  Allison hadn’t written it. I had yet to discover why she now looked so downtrodden, but we were friends. She would never do something like this. I studied Celia’s lacquered face and hair. She could have set this whole retreat up just to anonymously threaten one of her “friends.” But would she be so brazen as to do so when I had a signed sample of her handwriting?

  Nancy absentmindedly twisted a lock of her prematurely white hair, a look of deep concentration on her pretty features. As a trained therapist, she should be in better control of herself than to write a death threat. Meanwhile, Professor Katherine had pulled her bulky tan sweater down over her knees and seemed to be trying to disappear into it, turtle-like. She was not as likable as I’d first hoped. Perhaps I’d been overly influenced by the friendly, girl-next-door appearance her freckles gave her. But as a self-avowed critic of the “banal,” she wouldn’t use that old roses-are-red saw. Likewise, Julie was so perky, she might never use the word “bitches.”

  Then there was Lois, who’d told Allison that middle-school children were “thugs and druggies.” Purely from a note-writing standpoint, she was my prime suspect.

  Nancy looked up at me, her eyes widening as she studied my expression. “Molly? Are you all right?”

  If I went ahead and read this sick joke out loud, I would create the very state of pandemonium that the threat’s writer had in mind. I needed to calmly call off the retreat and send everyone home, safe and sound. Not to be unduly self-centered, but if one of these women sincerely had murder on her mind, it was not going to happen with my children right next door.

  “This might be a good time for us to break for dinner,” I said, palming the threat and inconspicuously stashing it in a back pocket of my jeans.

  “Great,” Lois said. “I’m famished.”

  “It’s only six p.m.” Celia shook her head at me while she spoke, as if we’d been asking for her permission. “This is a full hour ahead of when you scheduled the dinner break on your program.”

  “I realize that, but…” Desperate for a plausible excuse, I peered out the small, dirty window above the couch and found a good one: Thick gray clouds had blotted all trace of blue from the sky. Yikes! There was a storm brewing. I’d forgotten how drastically the weather could change in Colorado. “Look how dark it’s getting outside. We might be in for some nasty weather.”

  “Nonsense,” Celia said. “We need to stick to our schedule.”

  “I follow a schedule five days a week when the university is in session,” Katherine said to Celia. “I refuse to do so during my luxurious weekend excursion.”

  I rose. “I’ll meet you at the lodge, all
right? I think I’ll just check on my kids for a few minutes first.” Then I’ll pack them and Lauren into the car, meet the others at the lodge; show them the note, and tell them I’m leaving and that they should, too. I headed toward the door, willing myself to go slowly and not break into a full sprint.

  “You’re not planning on running out on us, are you, Molly?” Celia asked.

  I whirled around again catching sight of the forced smile with livid lips beneath her narrowed eyes and well-preserved hair. How had she known my intentions? Everyone was staring at me, wearing expressions of surprise mixed with hostility. An irrational but powerful vision of them as a coven of witches, with Julie as their token Zumba instructor—swept over me. Maybe I was about to be force-fed raw liver, or whatever witches did during induction ceremonies.

  “Of course not,” I lied, my voice sounding false to my own ears. “Don’t be silly.” I didn’t want to reveal my cards too early, until my escape was firmly in place. Blast it! Why was I so frightened? This was just a sick joke!

  “You do seem to be acting a little strange, Molly,” Allison said slowly, peering at me from through her bleached-blond bangs.

  “Do I?”

  “Has something frightened you?” Nancy asked in therapeutic tones.

  I had a sudden desire to lay down on the couch and tell her my troubles. “Yes, actually. I had…a premonition that spooked me a little. I just need to check on the children and reassure myself.”

  “Do you get premonitions often?” Nancy asked, still in therapist mode.

  “See you at the lodge.” I bolted out of there and trotted down the slope to our cabin. My Reeboks occasionally slid on the loose, gravelly soil, but I grabbed on to branches to maintain my pace and balance. One of the women back there knew precisely why I was behaving this way. But why had she done it? If she really wanted to kill one of us, why sacrifice the element of surprise? This had to be simply a nasty practical joke. Nothing else made sense.