by Meg Muldoon
“How can I help?” he said.
“Just hold me tight.”
“I can do that,” he whispered, pulling me closer.
“And maybe give me a nice long foot massage later?”
He chuckled.
“I’m pretty sure I’m the man for that job, too.”
Just then, the sound of the music coming from the Christmas River Butte got louder.
“It’s time, everybody!” Warren shouted from inside.
A moment later, the swarm of folks in the pub flooded out the backdoor like a tidal wave, surrounding us as the first bursts of red and blue flames exploded across the night sky.
I settled back into Daniel’s arms and watched as the sky came to life with green and purple flowers, expanding halos of ember, and long tendrils of fading light.
After a little while, I got the sense that I was being stared at.
I glanced back, finding that instead of watching the show, he was watching me.
“What?” I said.
Daniel looked to be in some sort of happy daze, a peaceful expression on his tired face.
“Nothing,” he whispered. “Just… you look beautiful, Cin.”
I shooed him away.
“I do not,” I said. “It’s just the light.”
He shook his head.
“No, darlin.’It’s you.”
I smiled, feeling a warmth spread out across my chest like one of them fireworks up in the sky.
Even after all this time, Daniel Brightman could still tickle me silly.
Chapter 22
Folks at Geronimo Brewing Company only got thirstier after the fireworks show.
In fact, most of them were acting like they’d been wandering the Badlands for a week without a single drop of water to see them through.
I pulled on one of the taps, filling up yet another pint glass with the Sparks Lake Stout just as another sloppy tourist shouted at me for a refill of their Waldo Mountain Weiss.
I was close to hitting a wall. The hours of baking pies, working cash registers, and then playing barmaid were catching up with me. My muscles screamed with exhaustion, and my feet were heavier than a couple of monster kegs.
There was one thing keeping me going, and one thing only:
The look of pure, unabated joy lighting up my grandfather’s face.
The evening wasn’t over yet, but it was safe to say that Geronimo Brewing Company’s opening night was a rousing success. The turnout had exceeded even Warren’s wildest dreams.
I hadn’t ever really realized it until now, but Warren had never quite had his moment. In the 80-plus years he’d been walking this earth, he’d been many things. He’d been a mill worker, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a friend, a hero, an active citizen, a Good Samaritan, and an all-around admirable human being.
But through all of it, Warren had never quite found his passion in life. He had worked a blue collar job because his family had depended on him, not because he was any great lover of the mill. Like so many men with familial responsibilities in his day, he had worked paycheck to paycheck to keep food on the table.
But he’d never found his real calling.
Not until this very moment.
And it was that knowledge, the knowledge of just how happy this was making him, that gave me the stamina to push through the exhaustion and made waiting on the increasingly-rowdy crowd worth ever second.
Even when someone called me ‘Honeybuns.”
“There’s something wrong with my glass, honeybuns,” a man with a handlebar mustache in a white tank top said to me, leaning across the bar and tapping on his glass.
I might have been more offended if I hadn’t been so distracted by the shade of the man’s bald head.
I swear, it made Rudolph’s nose pale in comparison.
Apparently, the man had never heard of a thing called sunscreen.
“What’s wrong with your glass?” I said, still trying to fulfill the last order.
“It’s got no beer!”
The man and his buddies started busting up like it was the funniest joke in the world. One of them started wheezing so bad, I thought for a second we’d have a medical emergency on our hands.
“Let me fix that,” I said, shaking my head silently to myself and grabbing him a fresh pint glass.
“That’d be right nice of you,” he said in a fake country twang. “I’d surely appreciate it.”
He leaned farther across the bar.
“Say,” he said, stretching the word out like it was a piece of taffy.
The smell of his bad breath practically knocked me off of my feet.
“What are you doing after your shift, honeybuns?”
I finished filling up the pint, feeling his eyes walking all over me. I pushed the beer toward him on a coaster.
“Going to see the Sheriff,” I said.
“Gonna report me?” he said. “‘Cuz you should. I’m a wanted man, you know. Wanted for badassery.”
He grinned.
“Naw,” I said. “I think I’d rather tell him how you keep calling me honeybuns. I’m pretty sure, him being my husband and all, the Sheriff won’t take too kindly to that.”
The message had finally gotten through the man’s thick skull, and he turned a shade of white while his buddies started wheezing and laughing like it was the second funniest joke in the world.
I backed away from the bar, leaving the fools to it. I pulled my phone from my pocket and checked the time.
The pub was set to close in half an hour.
Only thirty more minutes, I told myself. Only thirty more.
It didn’t sound like much, but with the way my feet were aching, thirty minutes might as well have been eight more hours.
I hobbled back over to the bar. The man with the mustache leaned forward again toward me. I was thinking about getting Warren to kick the gentleman out, but then I realized he wasn’t trying to come onto me again.
“Uh, ma’am,” he said, the tone of his voice sounding serious. “I didn’t mean to offend, if that’s what I did.”
I wondered about all the women he had probably said inappropriate, demeaning things to who never did get an apology. I knew that I was only getting one now because of who my husband was and the possible threat that the man in the tank top thought he might pose.
“Well, maybe you should—”
But before I could finish the sentence, I found that he’d stopped listening.
In fact, nobody was listening to anything I had to say.
A scream worthy of a dropping missile erupted from behind the brew house door.
Chapter 23
“No, no, no, no…”
I looked around the room feverishly, my eyes passing over the stunned and shocked faces.
He wasn’t there.
“No, no, no, no…”
The thing I had feared, the thing that crept into my thoughts in the early hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep, the thing that scared the living daylights out of me…
The thing that I knew would be inevitable one day.
The dreaded, horrible, awful thing had finally arrived.
Warren…
He was…
I jumped over the bar and pushed my way through the crowd, wrestling past the stunned and unmoving mass to get to the brew house. I ripped through the plastic dividing door, a fear wilder than anything I’d ever known coursing through my body at the thought of what was waiting for me behind the door.
Warren’s lifeless body.
His heart, which had beaten so strongly in life, had finally given out.
“No, no, no, no,” I whispered again in a hoarse and fearful voice.
I ran into the brew house, terrified of what awaited me there.
And that’s when I saw the blood.
Chapter 24
I stared at the body, feeling absolutely nothing.
Every part of me was numb. As if I’d been bitten by a rattler. As if I’d just jumped into a fr
eezing river. As if my true love had just told me to leave forever.
He held out his hands.
Blood was all over them.
“Oh my…”
Warren just stared up at me with vacant, empty eyes.
“Somebody call 9-1-1!” a woman’s voice shouted.
But the voice sounded distant and faraway, like she was crying from the bottom of a lake, and the words only came out as bubbles breaking quietly atop placid waters.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.
He just kept staring at me.
“Cinnamon?”
The woman’s voice came through louder, now. Loud enough to get my attention.
I looked at Aileen and her scared eyes.
It snapped me out of my daze.
I reached inside my apron pocket and pulled out my phone, dialing the three numbers with trembling fingers.
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
“Someone’s… someone needs help at Geronimo Brewing Company,” I said, the words coming out slower than syrup.
“We’ll have someone right over, ma’am. Can you tell me what happened?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s just…”
I looked at Aileen.
“There’s blood everywhere.”
I felt my eyes grow damp.
“Who’s been hurt, ma’am?”
I swallowed hard, looking back at the dead elf lying on the cold concrete floor.
Then I looked at Warren’s bloody hands.
“His name is Rip,” I whispered. “Rip Lawrence. He’s… dead.”
Chapter 25
I pulled the aluminum blanket tighter around Warren’s frail body, wishing the hollow look in the old man’s eyes would leave.
I followed his empty gaze and watched as the paramedics carried the brewer’s lifeless body across the room and out the back door to the ambulance.
Nobody had declared anything official.
But it was obvious to all of us:
Rip Lawrence, Back Alley’s brewmaster and elf in this year’s annual Christmas River Fourth of July parade, was dead.
Warren stretched his hands out in front of him, looking at the dried blood.
“Cin, how could… how could…” he started saying, but then his frail voice gave out like a skinny old mule carrying a heavy load.
I put an arm around his shoulders, which felt small and bony.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”
The words came out as hardly above a whisper.
Because the truth of the matter was, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t okay.
How could it be with Rip’s blood all over his hands?
How could it be when the brew house smelled of gunpowder?
I glanced over at Daniel, who was talking to Aileen and writing something down on his official Sheriff’s Office notepad.
As far as I could piece together, Warren had been the one to find Rip Lawrence’s lifeless body here in the brew house. Aileen arrived shortly after, saw the body herself, and had let out the bloodcurdling scream that had stopped everybody dead in their tracks.
I had plenty of questions, but for the time being, I tried to focus on the good that I could find in the situation.
For one, Warren was alive.
He hadn’t had a heart attack or an accident, the way I had thought when I first ran in here like a bat out of hell.
He was here, his heart beating, breathing, if not completely coherent.
“I just… I walked in and he was just… on the floor…” Warren started saying again, his voice shaking. “And the blood.. and the way he looked just...”
He held his hands out again, staring at them like they were a thing apart from him.
“Maybe we should wash those,” I said, nodding toward the sink in the back. “How does that sound?”
He nodded solemnly, still staring at his hands like they belonged to somebody else.
I stood up, nudging him along.
But before we could get very far, we were stopped.
“Don’t be doing that, young lady,” he said, leaping out in front of us. “Don’t be touching a single thing in here.”
Chapter 26
Christmas River Police Department Captain Lou Ulrich took off his American flag baseball cap, and glared at Warren and me with a searing, righteous expression. An expression that sure as hell hadn’t been there when he’d ordered his third IPA in the pub only moments earlier.
“I’m only trying to—” I started.
“You were only trying to destroy crime scene evidence,” Lou said, interrupting me. “Now step away from him, Mrs. Brightman.”
“Don’t you talk to them that way,” Daniel said, putting his notepad down and getting between us and Lou.
The pudgy police captain held up his hands.
“Didn’t mean nothing personal by it,” he said. “But your wife was just trying to destroy critical evidence. I would think, you being a law man yourself, you’d understand how someone in my shoes might view that.”
Daniel stepped closer to him.
“No I don’t know. Enlighten me,” Daniel growled.
Lou shrugged.
“Someone like me who just happened upon you all might think you were trying to cover something up,” he said. “I mean, think about it, Brightman. You’re already in enough hot water as is. I wouldn’t think you’d want any more trouble.”
“This is all going to be handled above board, Lou,” Daniel said quickly. “But right now, I need you to leave. You’ve had several drinks, and you’re not in any condition to take over this investigation.”
Lou didn’t seem to hear Daniel. He pulled his phone out of the pocket of his pleated, khaki shorts.
Then he walked over to my grandfather and snapped a photo of his hands.
It took every ounce of self-restraint to keep from mauling the SOB.
“Just so there ain’t no misunderstandings about what we all saw here,” Lou said, backing away and taking more snapshots of the brewery and the blood-stained concrete. “We wouldn’t want any more of them misunderstandings, now would we?”
“Dammit, Lou, get the hell out of here,” Daniel said, brimstone and fire in each word.
Lou finally came to his senses. He walked out through the plastic curtain just as Sheriff’s Deputy Owen McHale walked in.
“I came as soon as I could, sir,” he said.
Daniel’s blood seemed to cool slightly at the sight of the young deputy.
“Owen, you’re taking lead on this.”
Owen’s face scrunched up in slight confusion as he noticed the blood on the concrete.
“But…”
“It’s a conflict of interest for me,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “I can’t.”
Then he came over to us.
“C’mon, Warren,” Daniel said gently, putting an arm around the old man’s shoulders. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Appreciation flooded Warren’s haunted eyes.
Chapter 27
If there was anything I knew after being on this earth for thirty-plus decades, it was that most problems in life could be solved, at least temporarily, by a steaming cup of coffee and a heaping slice of homemade pie.
But thus far, the portions of Whiskey Apple Pie and the mugs of Christmas River Mountain Roast I’d placed out on the diner table hadn’t solved a single thing.
“I know you’re tired, Warren,” Daniel said, leaning back in his chair. “I know you didn’t get much sleep last night. And I’m sorry to put you through this questioning again, but the more I know about what happened, the better I can make the situation. You understand?”
Warren nodded solemnly.
It was early morning, before the pie shop opened for the day. I was a walking corpse, kept upright only by several cups of strong black coffee and a couple of Advil. And I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling tired: Nobody had gotten much sleep after the night
we’d had.
While just about everyone else in Christmas River was sleeping off their hangovers from the wild Fourth, Daniel, my grandfather, Aileen, and I were trying to figure how Rip Lawrence ended up murdered in Geronimo Brewing Company’s brew house.
And maybe more importantly:
We were trying to figure out who would have wanted him dead.
Warren rubbed his wrinkled face and started retelling the story yet again.
“About an hour after the fireworks show, I saw that we were going to need another keg of the Sparks Lake Stout before the night was through.”
“And you keep the kegs in the brew house?” Daniel asked, already knowing the answer, but asking again anyway.
Warren nodded.
“To keep them temperature controlled,” he said. “So Aileen and I head in there. The lights were out, which now that I think about it, was unusual. I had kept them on last I was in there so I wouldn’t run into anything if I needed that extra keg.”
Daniel nodded, writing down something in his notebook.
“So I go over and turn on the light and then suddenly…”
He swallowed hard.
“Suddenly, it’s like I’m in a horror movie.”
The old man’s voice trembled slightly at the end. He reached for his cup of coffee and took a long sip.
“Cin, you got anything to take the edge off of this coffee here?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
I went back into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels, a key ingredient in the Apple Whiskey pies.
I poured a healthy dollop into his cup.
“Should have thought of it sooner,” I said, leaving the bottle on the table.
Warren nodded gratefully and then reached for the refreshed mug, taking another long drink.
“I tried to stop the bleeding,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his jacket sleeve. “That’s why my hands were the way they were when you saw me. He was bleeding from his chest, and I tried to stop it, but…”
Warren shook his head.
“I’ve seen men die before,” he said. “An accident in basic training in the army. And at the mill once. But you put things like that out of your mind. It’s the only thing you can do to cope with a thing like death. But then you forget just what it really feels like to see a man die.”