by Carol Miller
“Maybe.” Beulah grunted again. “It’s a good plan for someone who’s actually thinking. Except I’m not so sure these boys have their heads screwed on straight. They took cream cheese, remember? That’s probably what they dumped in the ponds.”
“And then hauled the crates to the nip joint?” Daisy retorted. “That doesn’t make much sense.”
“There’s no sense in any of it. Which proves my point. They don’t have their heads screwed on straight!”
Leaving the car at the end of the entrance road, Daisy and Beulah began to walk toward the center of the campground, where the cabins were clustered together like fallen pine cones collected around the base of a tree. They were the same faded shade of brown as old pine cones and just as weathered looking. It had been dark the last time that Daisy was there—the night of the geocacher party—so she hadn’t noticed it then, but seeing the cabins now in the daylight, she realized how similar they all were, nearly identical, in fact. The design was uniform. Three short steps up to a narrow deck, followed by a small square plywood hut with washed-out, graying stain, hence the resemblance to old pine cones.
“I can understand why Bobby got confused,” she mused.
“Confused about what?” Beulah asked.
“Apparently he got lost a couple of days ago trying to find Laurel’s cabin. Chris told me that he found him wandering in circles, talking about going into the wrong cabin while being positive that it was the right cabin, only it wasn’t.”
Beulah chuckled. “That sounds like Bobby. Lucky for him, these cabins aren’t the kind where somebody is apt to plink you for trespassing. I hope we have the same luck.”
They passed the hewn log bench that Daisy had shared with Chris during the party, where they had admired the night sky and each other. Daisy couldn’t help glancing at it with a touch of wistfulness.
“Speaking of Chris,” Beulah said, looking at the bench too, “are you going to take Laurel’s advice and give him another try?”
“I don’t know. Ignoring everything else, there’s the issue of geography. Sooner or later he’s going to have to go home and back to work, probably right after the wedding.”
“He can always visit,” Beulah countered. “That’s why we have cars and planes and phones. Laurel doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem.”
“But she’s naturally biased as his sister. She wants Chris to have an extra reason to come here. Otherwise she might not see him much,” Daisy reminded her. “And I have the feeling that she really enjoys being a matchmaker.”
“It doesn’t mean she’s not a good matchmaker.”
Daisy didn’t respond. They continued onward in silence until they reached the wood-chip path that branched off to the individual cabins.
“How do we do this?” Beulah dropped her voice. “Do we just go up and knock on the nearest door?”
Even with the low tone, her words seemed jarringly loud. There was no movement and no noise at Fuzzy Lake Campground. On the night of the party there had been nearly fifty people gathered around the blazing fire pit. Now there wasn’t a single one anywhere in sight. Although the entrance to the campground had been open, it seemed as though the place was already closed for the season. No vehicles were parked on the grass. No backpacks or fishing poles were lined up, waiting for action. There was no sign of human activity whatsoever.
“Maybe we don’t need to knock,” Beulah answered herself. “Maybe they’re all gone.”
“But if they’re all gone,” Daisy said, “who was at the bakery this morning?”
“So maybe they aren’t really gone. Maybe they’re only away for the day and coming back tonight like Laurel and Chris.”
“Then we better move fast, before somebody decides to return early.”
With quick steps, Daisy went up the short set of stairs onto the deck of the first cabin. The screen door was tattered. Its handle was tarnished almost to black. She hesitated for an instant, then knocked. There was no answer. She tried the handle and found it locked.
Beulah peered through the window. “It’s empty,” she reported.
“Well, a lot of the geocachers left as soon as Laurel called off the hunt. This cabin must have belonged to them.”
“I guess that means we’re going to have to try them all.”
Daisy nodded. “How about if I take this side of the path and you take the other? Splitting it up will get it done that much faster.”
Agreeing, Beulah headed toward her assigned group.
“Holler if you see anything interesting,” Daisy called after her.
“If I find something good, can I keep it?” she called back.
“Sure. But if it’s cash or booze, you’re going to have to share!”
There were twenty cabins, so Daisy’s allotment consisted of the ten on the left half of the wood-chip path. She proceeded to the next in line. It was like the first cabin, only with a slightly more tattered screen door. This one was locked too. Through the deck window she could see four bare mattresses on rusted metal bed frames lining the walls. Next to a tiny kitchenette in the corner, there was an empty table surrounded by four empty chairs. Two blue checkered sofas and a rocking chair with a matching blue cushion took up the center of the room. Aside from a faux fur throw rug, the floor was clear.
The third cabin was no different. Neither was the fourth or the fifth. The number of beds varied—as did the color of the checkered sofas—but none of the cabins was occupied. There wasn’t any debate about that. And all of them were clean, so they had been vacant for at least a day already.
By the sixth cabin Daisy no longer bothered with the door. She simply jogged up to the deck, glanced through the window, and jogged back to the path again. But at the eighth cabin she stopped in surprise. The shade on the window was drawn down from the inside. Did that mean this cabin was still in use? Tiptoeing to the door, Daisy gently rapped a knuckle on the frame. There was no response. She knocked again—harder this time—and listened. No voice, no footsteps. Her fingers went to the handle. It turned.
“I’ve got one!” she shouted across the path in Beulah’s general direction.
Feeling a twinge of scruple, Daisy wavered for a moment. Even unlocked, it didn’t seem right to walk into the cabin without permission. There were plenty of campers who never bothered to lock up while they were out during the day, mostly because there was so little point to it. They didn’t leave anything valuable behind, and it was just too easy to slice open the side of a tent or break into a cheap plywood hut. But somehow that made Daisy feel even worse about entering uninvited. Then she reminded herself why she was doing it, and she pulled open the door.
The ceiling light was switched on, as was the attached fan, which whirled around with a loud, rhythmic ticking that sounded like kernels of corn popping. The cabin was definitely occupied and, just as definitely, by only one person. There was a single bed made up with a pillow and set of sheets. A single water glass stood on the table by the kitchenette. And a single towel hung from the hook next to the bathroom cubicle.
Daisy surveyed the suitcase lying open on the floor with its contents scattered around it, the magazine and hairbrush sitting on the lemon yellow rocking chair cushion, and the clothes tossed on the bed. She recognized two of the shirts and a sweater.
“What is it!” Beulah’s shoes pounded up the steps to the deck. “What did you find?”
“Nothing,” Daisy answered with a sigh. “It’s Laurel’s cabin. She wore that striped pullover on the night of the party here.”
Glancing around the room, Beulah sighed too. “Boring.”
Turning on her heel, Daisy walked out. “That’s all I’ve come up with so far. How about you?”
“Empty, empty, and more empty. I’ve only got one left.”
“I’ve got two. Meet you at the end?”
With a nod, Beulah sauntered off again. Daisy shut the door behind them with an extra-firm push. She was extremely glad that she knew for certain Laurel was away collecting
the remaining caches. It would have been awfully embarrassing to have her suddenly appear and see them standing in the middle of her cabin.
She found the last pair of cabins vacant. Clearly, all the geocachers had departed. But that left the question of who was at the bakery that morning. It occurred to her that it still could have been one of the geocachers, even if they were no longer staying at the campground. They could have easily moved elsewhere—to a motel in the area, a concealed tent on the edge of the woods, or even just to a car for a few days. It was actually the smart thing to do. If you were going to steal cream cheese, break windows, and shoot people, you probably wanted to change your address, quickly and often.
“Daisy!”
Daisy spun toward the wood-chip path.
“Up here!”
Beulah’s hand waved from the deck of the last cabin on her side. Daisy promptly trotted over to it.
“Now you can answer all of your questions,” Beulah drawled.
Stepping through the open doorway, Daisy looked around eagerly. Clothing, books, a rumpled bed, dirty dishes stacked on the table, a wet towel mounded on the floor. It looked pretty much the same as Laurel’s cabin—only considerably messier—and the ceiling fan didn’t sound like popcorn.
“What questions am I answering with this?” Daisy said, frowning in disappointment.
“Whether you want to give Chris another chance.”
“This is Chris’s cabin?”
Beulah held up two heavy tomes that were lying on the red-checkered sofa. “They’re about the Confederacy and a thousand pages apiece. You think anybody but a college professor would bring these along for some light reading?”
That made Daisy smile.
Setting down the books, Beulah returned to the duffel bag that she had been rifling through when Daisy first entered. “I haven’t been able to find any evidence of a secret girlfriend.”
“You shouldn’t be going through his stuff,” Daisy chastised her.
“I’m not pocketing any of it,” Beulah retorted. “I’m just having a wee look-see.”
Although Daisy shook her head in further reproof, her smile slipped into a grin. “You are a bad seed, my dear.”
Grinning also, Beulah continued rifling. Daisy went back outside and sat in one of the plastic lounge chairs on the deck. After a few minutes, Beulah joined her.
“Boring,” she concluded. “Just like his sister.”
“After everything that’s gone on over the past week,” Daisy replied, “boring is mighty welcome to me.”
Beulah didn’t disagree. “So what now? Do you want to drive around the rest of the place and take a look at the tents?”
“No. What purpose would it serve? We’re not going to find the right tent, if there even is one. Whatever geocachers were involved, they aren’t here anymore, at least not at the campground.”
“So what now?” Beulah repeated.
“I don’t know. I’m fresh out of ideas and open to suggestions.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Beulah submitted. “Maybe everybody really is gone—gone from Pittsylvania County, gone for good.”
“And this morning?” Daisy rejoined.
“Maybe they came back to the bakery because they thought they had left something behind the last time and they didn’t want the law to find it.”
“But they didn’t take anything.”
“Maybe once they were inside they realized that they didn’t actually leave behind what they thought they had.”
“That’s a lot of ‘maybes,’” Daisy said dubiously.
Once again, Beulah didn’t disagree.
They remained on the deck for some time. Beulah picked at a chipped fingernail and mumbled intermittently about the salon—whether Duke and Connor would ever be able to fix the flooding and whether she would have any clients left by the time that they did. Daisy gazed out at the cabins. All empty but two, and those two were of absolutely no help. What a wasted trip. She would have been better off staying at Sweetie Pies, talking to Deputy Johnson and giving him the crates. And she still needed to get the banana pudding and bring it to the historical society for the fund-raiser that evening, after she dropped Beulah at the inn.
Leaning her head against the back of the chair, Daisy closed her eyes. She would rest for a minute first. She was tired, and it was so peaceful on the deck. No shattering glass, no ambulance sirens, no hint of hooligans or sundry late-blooming criminals. A momentary shadow passed across her vision. Then came another. She cracked an eye. Vultures. They were circling in the sky above her. One bird swooped down behind Chris’s cabin. A second did the same. More quickly followed.
Something was dead. Daisy’s eyes flew open, and her heart thudded in her chest. A dead deer was one thing. A dead person was quite another. She rose abruptly from her chair. Beulah looked at her.
“Are you okay? You’re kind of pale.”
“Vultures are landing behind the cabin,” Daisy informed her.
“And?” Beulah shrugged. “We see vultures all the time. We passed a bunch of them on the highway driving out here.”
“And on the highway they were eating roadkill, not geocacher.”
It was Beulah’s turn to pale. “You’re joking, right? Please tell me you’re only joking about the geocacher.”
Daisy sincerely wished that she were only joking. But vultures didn’t circle and land for no reason. Hopefully, her initial guess had been the correct one, and there was nothing more than deer bones behind the cabin.
With some trepidation, she walked down the stairs from the deck and around the side of the plywood hut. As she turned the corner toward the back, the startled vultures retreated to the neighboring trees.
“That sure is a relief,” Beulah exhaled, rounding the corner on Daisy’s heels.
There was no carcass—human or otherwise. The vultures had been attracted by two sizable heaps of garbage, both of which included an abundance of food scraps.
“I’ll say it again,” Beulah sucked on her teeth, “those boys don’t have their heads screwed on straight. Doesn’t everybody know you don’t leave food out when you’re camping? That’s how you wake up at dawn with a bear eating your face.”
“I wonder whether bears like cream cheese,” Daisy mused.
“If your cheese isn’t in the ponds by the bakery, then it’s probably in these piles.”
Although it was possible, Daisy thought it unlikely. The heaps were large, but not so large that ninety pounds of cream cheese wouldn’t have been visible in some way.
She scanned the trash. Beer cans, potato chip bags, mustard bottles, remnants of hot dog buns. It looked a lot like the leftovers from the party that she and Beulah had attended. There were also beer bottles, and they looked a lot like the pieces of the bottle that she had found on the storage room floor of Sweetie Pies that morning.
For a fleeting second, Daisy got excited. It was another clue. Then she stopped herself. Beer bottles were not exactly an endangered species. Plenty of beer bottles looked like plenty of other beer bottles. On closer inspection, she noted that the ones in the trash piles had all sorts of different labels. She couldn’t remember if there had even been a label on the pieces in the bakery. And she had no clue what the beer bottle that had been used to break the window at the historical society looked like.
Wings flapped from a nearby branch, and Daisy glanced over at them. The vultures were eyeing her with annoyance, waiting for her to vacate the premises so that they could return to their scavenging. She was about to oblige them when something in one of the heaps caught her attention.
Some of the garbage had been bagged, but many of the bags had been torn open, no doubt by hungry critters searching for a midnight snack. A sneaker was sticking out of one bag. It seemed very white against the black trash bag. That was what made Daisy notice it. Walking over for a better look, she saw the sneaker’s mate lying on the ground next to the bag. It had obviously tumbled out first. She reached down and picked it up.
“Do you really want another pair of sneakers that bad?” Beulah chortled. “Because those are about five sizes too big for you and have probably been chewed on by something with rabies.”
The shoe in Daisy’s hand hadn’t been chewed on. In fact, it appeared almost new. The tread on the bottom was barely worn.
“Why would somebody dump perfectly good sneakers?” Beulah said, leaning over Daisy’s shoulder.
Daisy pulled the other shoe from the trash bag and held the two next to each other. Although they were both white, the one that had still been in the bag was whiter somehow. Squinting at it, she realized that the whole shoe wasn’t actually so white. It was just the mesh in the front and on the sides. There was something on the mesh—and in the mesh too—that made it look whiter.
“It can’t be,” Daisy murmured.
“Can’t be what?” Beulah asked.
She didn’t answer, too focused on her discovery. She rubbed a finger into the mesh. A thin coating of white powder stuck to her skin.
Beulah’s brow furrowed. “What the heck is that?”
Still not answering, Daisy put the finger to her lips.
“Have you lost your mind?” Beulah exclaimed. “You can’t eat that! It might be rat poison! Do you know how sick you could get?”
Not heeding the warning, her tongue touched the white powder.
“You’re insane!” Beulah hollered at her. “What am I going to tell Rick when he wants to know how you ended up half dead in the hospital? The weasel will kill me!”
Daisy stared at the remaining powder on her finger for a long moment, then she raised her gaze to Beulah and calmly replied, “You don’t have to tell Rick anything. I’m not going to the hospital. If I get sick, it isn’t from this.”
Beulah opened her mouth, but no words came out.
“It’s not rat poison,” Daisy said. “It’s flour.”
CHAPTER
17
Flour was surely no more of an endangered species than beer bottles, but in this case Daisy was quite confident that the flour on the shoes at Fuzzy Lake Campground matched her flour at the bakery. Which meant that she could now answer Beulah’s question. Why would somebody dump perfectly good sneakers? Because they had worn them while stealing cream cheese, and they didn’t want to take the proof home.