by Carol Miller
“Good.”
“He’s going to marry her,” she reminded him gruffly. “Tomorrow afternoon at the inn.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
Her frustrated sigh from earlier repeated itself. “Does it have to be Laurel? Can’t you pick somebody else? You can have half the women in southwestern Virginia, for goodness’ sake.”
“Does that include you, darlin’?”
“Don’t be an ass, Rick.”
He laughed harder. Daisy bit the inside of her cheek in an effort to maintain some semblance of calm.
“Fine,” she growled after a moment. “Sleep with your brother’s fiancée. Don’t sleep with your brother’s fiancée. I don’t care either way. Just tell me if you’re with her—or know where she is—so I can quit driving around looking for her.”
“You’re looking for her?” The laughter instantly ceased. “Don’t do that, Daisy. Don’t—”
The connection got fuzzy.
“I’m starting to lose you, Rick.”
“Don’t—Laurel—I—campground—”
“I can’t understand you. Are you and Laurel together at the campground?”
His words had been replaced by choppy syllables. Rick was apparently somewhere with spotty reception.
“I can’t hear you, but if you can hear me,” Daisy said, “you better call Bobby and talk to him about it.”
There was no response, only silence.
“If you don’t,” she added unhappily, even though she knew that Rick was no longer listening to her, “I’m going to have to do it.”
Daisy set the phone down on the counter and glared at it. In her mind she was glaring at Rick, more than a little peeved that he had put her in such an awkward position. She didn’t want to talk to Bobby about his brother and Laurel, and now there was no way of getting around it. She wouldn’t go into any details. Mercifully, she didn’t know any details. But she couldn’t just pretend that Rick hadn’t called her or that he hadn’t made it amply evident that he was going to do whatever he could to keep Laurel and Bobby from getting married tomorrow.
As she went on glaring, Daisy wondered why Rick had called in the first place. He hadn’t actually said much of anything, except that was partly her fault. After her remark about him being in bed with Laurel, the conversation had naturally declined. But he must have had some reason for calling. Rick never picked up the phone for a quick chat about the weather, at least not with her. Just as Daisy was beginning to debate whether he would call back, her phone rang again. This time it was Bobby, and she winced.
Not sure how best to proceed, she hesitated before answering. Then Daisy decided that the wisest course would be to take her cue from him. There was no need to poke a sleeping bear if that bear was contentedly snoring.
“Hey, Bobby—” she started to say.
“Daisy!” he cut her off in a panic.
Daisy winced once more. Apparently the bear was wide awake and hadn’t yet found his honey pot.
“Laurel’s not at the bakery, is she?” Bobby exclaimed.
“No, I—”
“I think something’s happened to her, Daisy!”
The wince changed to a frown. “Something’s happened to her? What do you mean?”
“I’m at—I went—I found—”
The connection got fuzzy, the same as it had with Rick.
“You’re breaking up, Bobby. Where are you? What did you find?”
“I’m at the campground. You said she might be sitting here. I went—”
The sentence became static.
“Bobby?”
His voice abruptly returned. “Laurel’s cabin—”
Louder static.
“Can you hear me, Bobby? I can’t—”
“Oh my God, Daisy! Her bed—”
He disappeared again.
“Bobby, are you still there?”
“I don’t know if—why would she—then Rick—”
Daisy strained to follow the garbled phrases.
“I can’t—he isn’t—you need to come here, Daisy! You have to come and help—”
The call ended with a click.
She closed her eyes. This was not good. Bobby was at the campground. Rick was probably at the campground too. And Laurel might or might not be at the campground, but there was definitely something going on with her cabin and her bed.
Although Daisy waited for several long minutes, her phone remained resolutely quiet. Evidently Bobby’s reception was just as spotty as Rick’s. It didn’t necessarily prove that they were in the same place. Most of Pittsylvania County had spotty reception, depending on meteorological conditions, the time of day, and especially the closer you got to the mountains. But both of them had mentioned the campground, and both of them had mentioned it in connection with Laurel.
If only she had called Rick that morning as she had been tempted to do. Then she would have had one of his jelly jars in her hands, and she could have locked the bakery doors from the inside, put up her feet, and merrily sipped her way into oblivion, or at least until tomorrow when the wedding was over. Instead she was supposed to placate Aunt Emily in regard to the party, find the bride—who very possibly wasn’t missing or wasn’t interested in being found—and keep the Balsam boys from killing each other, if Bobby’s reference to Laurel’s bed was at all related to what most bed references were related to.
Daisy swiveled on her stool, pondering her options. She didn’t have to find the bride. She didn’t have to keep the Balsam boys from killing each other. She could simply go back to the inn, shrug her shoulders in apology to Aunt Emily, and let everything else take care of itself. Except Bobby had asked her to come to the campground. He had said that she needed to come to the campground. And he was at the campground himself because of what she had said—that Laurel might be sitting there. Daisy hadn’t meant it quite so literally, of course, but Bobby had obviously taken it that way. And now he was in all likelihood expecting that she would indeed come and help in some manner.
What was Rick expecting? Had he thought that his brother would go to the campground in search of Laurel? Maybe it wasn’t Laurel’s cabin that Bobby had gone into. According to Chris, he had had difficulty finding the right cabin previously. But based on what Daisy had seen when she and Beulah were last at the campground, there were only two cabins still occupied. As confused as Bobby could get with directions, not even he could mistake Laurel’s cabin and bed with Chris’s cabin and bed.
Rick surely wouldn’t have any trouble differentiating one bed from the other. He was far too clever—and too fond of women’s beds. Wasn’t he also too clever to get caught at the campground with Laurel? Daisy would have presumed so. After all, Rick had been the only one smart enough to realize following the cream cheese incident that she needed to improve her security at the bakery. She had argued so adamantly against it, but he had been right, both about getting the new locks and the security guard. And the gun.
Daisy stopped swiveling. She had completely forgotten about the gun. The brown paper bag that Rick had given her. There had been a revolver at the bottom—a snub-nose Smith & Wesson. Although she had tried several times to decline the gift, Rick had insisted on leaving it with her. What had she done with it? She had tucked it under the counter to keep it safely away from customers.
Sliding off her stool, she circled around to the other side of the counter. Daisy felt for the bag with her hand but couldn’t find it. Then she bent down and looked. Her eyes traveled the entire length beneath the counter—twice. There was an assortment of odd objects stashed below: a rusted watering can, mismatched knitting needles, and a pair of plastic hummingbird feeders. There was no brown paper sack.
Standing back up, Daisy drew a shaky breath. The bag had vanished, along with its contents. She realized almost instantly where they had gone. That was why the window to the storage room had been broken. That was what had been stolen from Sweetie Pies. The geocachers didn’t come back to retrieve somet
hing they thought they had left behind the last time. They didn’t just climb in the window and walk out the front door. They took a prize along the way. They took Rick’s gun, and they probably used it to kill Caesar.
But how did the geocachers—or anybody else, for that matter—know about the sack? It was possible that they simply stumbled across it while looking around inside the bakery. Except the place didn’t show any sign of having been rummaged through, which made it much more likely that the culprits were aware of the bag in advance. Daisy tried to think of everyone who had known about it. The list was short. Only Caesar had witnessed Rick giving her the revolver, and he certainly wasn’t talking. Then there was Bobby and Laurel. They had come in shortly afterward and seen the sack on the counter. They both could have told somebody else about it, especially Laurel. She knew all the geocachers. She could have easily mentioned the bag or the gun to one of them, without ever guessing what that person would then do with the information.
So where was the revolver now? At the bottom of a pond—under a pile of hiking boots and sweatshirts in a geocacher’s trunk—in the pocket of one of Jordan Snyder’s partners in crime as they searched for thirty-nine lost kegs of silver? They couldn’t be doing very much searching, not with the area around Fuzzy Lake closed. They could be waiting for it to reopen, however. Too bad they didn’t discuss their plans with Chris. He would have set them straight. Any history professor worth his salt who had studied the Confederacy could have told them that there was no treasure hidden in the mountains of southwestern Virginia.
What if they were still looking regardless? What if they didn’t care that the area was closed or what Chris said? What if they had returned to the campground to finish their search, and Laurel and Chris had somehow gotten in their way? They had already shot Caesar. Would they really hesitate to shoot again? Bobby had sounded awfully panicked on the phone. Daisy knew that he would never call the sheriff’s office. Neither would Rick. No matter the circumstances, even the most dire—the Balsam brothers always steered clear of the law. But both Rick and Bobby had called her, and Bobby had asked for her help.
With another shaky breath, Daisy hurried to the door. She had to get to the campground. Ironically enough, she suddenly found herself hoping that the only thing she would see there was Rick in bed with Laurel.
CHAPTER
20
Daisy almost returned to the inn first. Her Colt was there, and it would have provided a certain degree of security. As the old saying went, you didn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, or worse yet in Daisy’s case, no weapon at all. But the inn was in the complete opposite direction of the campground. It would have required doubling back and losing a good deal of time. If someone truly needed her help, she had to get to them sooner rather than later. She also wasn’t eager to go through a lengthy explanation with the group at the inn. And even without her own gun, there would still be firearms in her favor. Bobby could typically be counted on to have a rifle or two. Rick always carried his Ruger.
She drove hard and fast. Along the way she tried calling Laurel, and Chris, and Bobby, and Rick, but none of them answered. Daisy told herself that it didn’t necessarily mean something bad had happened. If they were all at the campground, then it only made sense that they all had similarly poor reception. She wished that she knew a bit more, though. She hated going in blind. It was like reaching into the center of a thick berry bush: you could come out with a handful of something tasty or a very nasty snakebite.
As it had been earlier that week when she had been there with Beulah, the entrance to the campground was open. The entrance road was just as quiet too. Daisy slowed as she approached the end of the road. There were no vehicles parked along the side, and she had no intention of parking there either—not all alone, with who-knows-who running around in possession of the revolver that had been stolen from the bakery. Pulling her car onto the grass, she crept toward the center of the campground.
The cabins looked dingy and forlorn. There was a gloominess about them that gave the isolation and stillness of the campground an eerie quality. It was the light, at least that was how Daisy explained it to herself. The October sun was weak, and the slinking shadows of the advancing afternoon were more gray than golden. She was grateful that Aunt Emily hadn’t scheduled Laurel’s party for later that evening. Now she could still see the wood-chip path and the plywood huts. In another hour it would be dusk. And in another hour after that, there would be darkness. Although Daisy’s sense of direction was far better than Bobby’s, she still wasn’t keen on driving—or wandering—around the countryside in the pitch black.
Heading down the line of cabins, she stopped as close as she could to Laurel’s. Daisy peered at the little building through her windshield. The deck was empty. The screen door was closed. If something had indeed happened to Laurel as Bobby had suggested on the phone—whether in relation to him, or Rick, or the geocachers—there was no sign of it. Oddly enough, there was no sign of anything. Neither Bobby nor Rick’s pickup. Not a jacket tossed over the back of a lounge chair or a pair of muddy boots kicked off next to the doorway. It seemed strange to her, and unsettling.
With increasing regret at her decision not to pick up the Colt from the inn, Daisy climbed out of the car, shutting the door noiselessly behind her. She walked on soft feet toward the cabin and up the short set of stairs to the deck. The shade on the window was drawn down from the inside, just as it had been on her first trip to Laurel’s cabin. Except this time she didn’t knock and wait for a response or hesitate to enter out of scruple. If there was bad news to be found, then she wanted to get it over with. The handle turned beneath her fingers. The door opened. Half squinting in case there was something going on in the direction of the bed that she really didn’t want to see, Daisy took a step forward. She immediately halted in surprise.
The ceiling light was switched on, the same as before. The attached fan was still whirling around with its rhythmic ticking that sounded like kernels of corn popping. But that was where the similarity between the two visits ended. Laurel’s cabin was in complete disarray. The sheets had been torn from the bed and the pillow ripped nearly in half. The towels from the bathroom cubicle were strewn on the floor, along with every article of clothing in the room. The lemon yellow cushions had been pulled from the rocking chair and sofas and slashed open. It was as though a tornado had blown through, only instead of shredding the cabin and its contents, it had searched the cabin and its contents.
The fact that the place had been searched instead of merely vandalized was most apparent to Daisy from the dishes that were stacked next to the sink in the kitchenette. Not a single one had been broken. If your primary goal was to cause damage, the first thing that you did was smash dishes. But even the water glass on the table was still standing upright, partially filled. Except that raised the question of why anybody would want to search the cabin. What could Laurel possibly have—or what did someone think that she had—which was worth such an effort?
Her suitcase was spread open on the floor in the middle of the room, so she hadn’t departed, at least not formally. That would make Bobby happy. There was also no evidence of any injury or a fight. That made Daisy happy. It was a fleeting happiness, however. The longer that she stared at the chaos, the more she began to worry that Bobby was right. Something had happened to Laurel. She understood now what he had been referring to on the phone. Bobby had gone to Laurel’s cabin, discovered it in its present state, and panicked. He had also mentioned Rick before the connection went dead. But Rick was nowhere to be found. And where on earth was Bobby? Surely he wouldn’t have left the campground before she arrived, not after asking her to come and help. Unless something had happened to him too.
Confused and troubled, Daisy walked back out onto the deck. She surveyed the cabins and the surrounding area. There had to be a clue somewhere. Bobby must have dropped a bread crumb, even inadvertently. Only there wasn’t one, not that she could see. What perplexed her the most was the lack
of vehicles. In addition to Bobby and Rick’s pickups, there should also have been Chris’s and Laurel’s cars. Had everybody driven away, and all separately? Could they be parked in some spot that wasn’t visible? It was an Appalachian campground. There weren’t any underground garages.
Finally she turned to Chris’s cabin. Although Daisy didn’t have much hope of finding anything more interesting there than she and Beulah had previously, it was the only possibility left to her. Crossing the wood-chip path, she headed to the last cabin in the row. She no longer bothered hushing her steps. There didn’t seem to be much of a need for it, considering that she had yet to encounter any creature larger than an industrious squirrel collecting acorns for the winter. But that changed the moment her foot came down on the first stair leading up to the deck. It creaked, and it was promptly matched by a creak from inside the cabin.
Daisy’s heart skipped a beat, and she instantly stopped moving. There was another creak. She listened. Someone had stood up, or at least that was what it sounded like. Either way it was enough to change her mind. She wasn’t going to the deck anymore. She was going to wait for the person—or persons—to identify themselves before she got any closer.
As lightly as she could, Daisy lifted her foot off the stair, hoping that it wouldn’t creak again. But it did, and it was followed by footsteps inside the cabin. They were coming toward the door. Hurrying to the side of the building to hide, Daisy cursed herself for not having the Colt. What was the point of owning the gun if she didn’t have it in a situation like this?
Hearing the screen door swing open, she peeked around the corner. Part of a leg came into view on the deck, then an arm and a hand. The hand was holding an extremely thick book. Daisy let out a relieved sigh. She had seen that book before. Beulah had pointed it out to her, along with its equally hefty companion. They were Chris’s history tomes.
“Oh, Chris,” she exhaled, reemerging into the open. “I’m so glad that it’s you. I was starting to get jumpy.”