Manic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 6)

by Meg Muldoon

  Tobias might have slipped.

  His leg kept shaking.

  “This is just… this is just so hard to say,” he said.

  I went over and took a seat next to him on the bench.

  “It’s okay, Tobias,” I said. “I’m your friend. You say anything you need to.”

  “I know you are, miss,” he said. “You might just be about the best friend I ever had. I was out there on the street and nobody in this town cared. Nobody ‘cept you, miss.”

  I smiled warmly.

  “Then knowing that, Tobias, tell me what’s troubling you.”

  Tobias was a good man. But even good men slipped up every once and a while.

  “Well, I go out in the woods, on Yurt’s Trail. You know that one?”

  I nodded – the trail cut right through town and followed the Christmas River for a ways.

  “Well, I’m on the trail, thinking my thoughts, and I see something in the distance,” he said. “And I stop before I happen upon it, because I got this feeling that it’s something I shouldn’t be seeing.”

  Tobias sure had a roundabout way of saying things.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “Well, I see this young man up ahead. And he’s talking to this other man. And their words are pretty terse, miss. So terse, I wouldn’t venture to repeat the things being said on account of a lady being in my presence.”

  I smiled at the idea of being called a lady.

  But it still wasn’t clear to me what he was talking about.

  “Well, what was the gist of the conversation?”

  “The young fella was telling the older one that he wasn’t going to hurt anybody anymore,” he said. “He was saying to the older one that he could take his money and stuff it… well… where the sun don’t shine. And then the older one, he was plumb mad. Plumb mad by that. He started threatening the younger man that if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, then… then something bad would happen. Something real bad.”

  Tobias fell silent for a spell.

  I studied him a while, trying to understand why he thought he had to tell all this to me.

  Not that I didn’t enjoy hearing Tobias talk, but this retelling didn’t shed much light on anything, and didn’t account for why he seemed to be so jittery and on edge.

  I cleared my throat, noticing that Tiana was standing close to the window inside. It was an old trick I’d played many a time myself: she was trying to eavesdrop. No doubt worried about the way Tobias was acting.

  “Well, that’s a mighty odd conversation you stumbled onto,” I finally said. “I wonder what it was all about.”

  Tobias ran a hand nervously through his hair.

  “See, I was wondering that myself, miss,” he said. “And at the time, I couldn’t figure it out.”

  “But you can now?” I said.

  “Uh, no miss. No. The situation’s only become more bewildering.”

  His leg started shaking harder.

  “How’s that, Tobias?”

  “Well,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning in closer to me. “Ya see, the older fella?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was the fella that got himself murdered the other night at your grandfather’s brewery. That tall elf guy.”

  My mouth fell open slightly. I started saying something, but then stopped, trying to find the right words.

  I searched Tobias’s face.

  He looked as though he felt bad. As if he was being forced to tattle to the teacher about a fellow classmate.

  “You’re… you’re saying you saw Rip Lawrence arguing with somebody in the woods the day he was killed?”

  He nodded vigorously.

  Could this be the break we were looking for? The one that would put Warren in the clear?

  Tobias took a deep breath in.

  “And that young fella he was having the dispute with?”

  “You know him too?” I said, my heart beating hard in my chest.

  He nodded, looking away.

  “Well, that was the Scottish fella. The one you’ve got working here, right in your pie shop, miss.”

  I nearly gasped.

  Chapter 37

  I grabbed my purse and keys from the coat rack in the kitchen, then peeked my head through to the empty dining room.

  Just as they had done since that magazine article came out, folks were milling around outside on the sidewalk, waiting like hungry zombies for our doors to open.

  Which was supposed to happen in T-minus 10 minutes.

  But I had bigger things to worry about at the moment than how many people would storm through those doors once the hands of the clock reached 8.

  Like how Ian even knew Rip Lawrence in the first place.

  And why he’d been talking to him in the woods the day he was murdered.

  And what they’d been arguing about.

  I felt a tightening in my stomach, like somebody was squeezing hard on my insides.

  The conversation we’d had the day before on the footbridge echoed in my head.

  Ian had wanted to know if I believed in forgiveness.

  If I believed in whether a person should be forgiven if they sincerely asked for it. Even if what they did was really bad.

  I had thought he was talking about that girl back in Scotland.

  But now I was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t talking about something else.

  Ian didn’t seem like a violent person to me. But then there was that other thing he’d dropped, the thing about him beating up the owner of the bakery he worked at back in Scotland.

  That wasn’t something a normal 19-year-old kid did.

  And though I couldn’t fathom why Ian would want to hurt Rip Lawrence, I also couldn’t fathom how he’d come to know him in the first place.

  But there was one thing I knew.

  I needed to find out.

  I decided leaving through the back door would be the sensible move given the crowd amassing out front.

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” I said, breezing past Tiana and Tobias, opening the kitchen door.

  To my utter shock, I came centimeters away from running smack dab into Meredith Drutman.

  Chapter 38

  She was the last person in the world I expected to see in my pie shop.

  The last person in the world I wanted to see in my pie shop, at that.

  Meredith Drutman wore a sleeveless Jackie-O dress and high, narrow heels – a look that fit with the dozens of relator signs around town featuring her smug and haughty face. As usual, her makeup was heavy, settling into her wrinkles and giving her an all-around ghoulish look. Her lips were stained a shade of Bing cherry red that looked all wrong in the July heat, and on her cheeks sat a layer of blush that Marie Antoinette would have been proud of.

  But there was something new about Meredith Drutman now as she sat here in my pie shop kitchen, not drinking coffee from the mug I had graciously placed in front of her.

  There was an expression, a look on her face that seemed entirely foreign. Like a frown on the Cheshire Cat, the look of regret Meredith Drutman had just seemed all wrong.

  I leaned back in my chair, trying not to explode with anger while I waited for her to say something. But it seemed as though she was about to choke on the words stuck in her throat. She looked around the pie shop kitchen awkwardly, as if she’d never seen saucepans or cookbooks or ovens before.

  I didn’t say anything, enjoying seeing her sweat.

  She did deserve my coldness and hatred, didn’t she? Hadn’t her daughter called me names and threatened me just the other day? Hadn’t Meredith tried to sabotage my business last Christmas by having all her friends post those nasty reviews on Yelp and Google about my pie shop? Hadn’t her husband totaled Daniel’s truck and nearly killed me in the process? Wasn’t the bastard now suing the Sheriff’s Office?

  If she was looking for someone to make things easier on her, she was looking in the wrong direction.

  I crossed my arms and
gazed at the aging beauty queen with a cold and unfeeling stare.

  She looked like a deer in the headlights under my hard gaze, and a vindictive part of me felt pleased.

  Very pleased.

  She finally let out a beleaguered sigh.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m not going to sit here and pretend that we’re on good terms, Cinnamon.”

  “Neither am I,” I snapped.

  She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, looking around the kitchen some more.

  “I don’t even know how or why we got off on the wrong foot in the first place,” she continued. “I guess sometimes two people just don’t get along.”

  “I can tell you exactly how we got off on the wrong foot, Meredith,” I said. “I can take you through every incident, from you disrespecting me and my pie shop, to insulting Tobias, to calling an innocent 11-year-old boy white trash. And that’s not even going into this most recent business.”

  She looked away sharply, as if me bringing up all her nasty behavior from the last few months injured her somehow.

  She bit her lower lip.

  “I’m not proud, Cinnamon,” she said. “I know I have a lot of work to do on myself. I know that I’m not always…”

  She trailed off and I was surprised to see a solitary tear slide down her powdered cheek.

  “I’ve made mistakes. And I know I come off as abrasive and rude sometimes, but it’s only because things haven’t been easy for me in my life. You know, not too many people know this, but my father left my family when I was just 8 years old. And I know it sounds like a BS excuse, and it most certainly doesn’t pardon my actions, but that’s had a big impact on me. I never felt loved or wanted. It’s led me to do a lot of things, to say a lot of things that I…”

  She swallowed back tears.

  I continued to look at her hard, but the vengeful side of me was shrinking with every passing second.

  She was right. It was a BS excuse. Meredith, after all, was a woman in her mid-forties. She should have known better by now.

  But a small part of me was beginning to feel a flicker of compassion. Compassion, because given my own past, I understood what she had been through.

  She dabbed at her eyes dramatically with a Kleenex she pulled from her purse.

  “Listen, Cinnamon. I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to apologize. For not only my behavior, but my husband’s as well”

  I furrowed my brow.

  “You mean the husband who’s suing Daniel and the Sheriff’s Department?” I said. “The one who destroyed my husband’s truck and almost killed me, and then has the gall to say Daniel caused him injury? You’re apologizing for him?”

  She puckered her lips together and looked away.

  “George has problems of his own,” she said. “That doesn’t excuse what he did. To you, or to the Sheriff. But he’s been under a lot of stress lately. Things are—”

  “Stress like his Bentley’s in the shop and he has to use the Jaguar instead? That kind of stress?”

  Meredith let out a strange little noise when I said that, and I immediately felt like a horrible classist for letting the words slip out of my mouth.

  I may not have liked the Drutmans, but it wasn’t because they were wealthy.

  I didn’t like to judge people on the basis of whether they had or didn’t have money.

  She dabbed at her eyes some more.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, letting out a long breath. “That was… out of line.”

  She looked back at me.

  “He’s dropping the lawsuit, you know,” she said. “He’s not going to sue Daniel or the Sheriff’s Office. We don’t want any more trouble, Cinnamon. George is going to take full responsibility for his actions this time.”

  I started to say something, but stopped, surprised.

  I studied her a long while.

  Now just what was her angle?

  “We’ve talked it through,” she said. “He’s willing to own up to what he did. And if the Sheriff did indeed punch him, well, I wouldn’t hold it against him. George was acting poorly and he needed to be reigned in.”

  Acting poorly was one way of putting it. ‘Reckless’ and ‘Out of His Mind’ were other descriptors I might use for George Drutman’s behavior that night.

  “So he sent you to do his apologizing for him?” I said. “That’s real classy.”

  She sighed heavily, as if the dinner guests had arrived late and the soufflé had collapsed in the meantime.

  “As a representative of all the Drutmans, Cinnamon, I want you to know how sorry we all are.”

  She bit her lower lip.

  “George has always liked to drink,” she said, twisting her wedding ring nervously. “We did meet at a bar, after all. But it’s gotten out of hand lately. Very out of hand. And I’m afraid…”

  Her voice trembled. The tone of it affected me, melting a small corner of my cold heart.

  I may not have liked Meredith. Hell, I may have detested her and everything she stood for.

  But I wasn’t the sort to turn my back on someone if they were in need. No matter what they did to me.

  Well, in most cases, anyway.

  “Has he… has he hurt you, Meredith?”

  She picked up on the truthful concern in my voice and looked up, meeting my eyes.

  “No,” she said. “We’ve just been through some trouble lately, that’s all. But that’s marriage, isn’t it? A lot of trouble?”

  Her voice did that tremor thing again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t your concern. I just came here because I wanted to sincerely apologize for how my family has treated you over the years. It’s been wholly uncalled for. And I hope that we can be on better terms in the future.”

  She stood up abruptly.

  “Meredith, if you need help or need to talk to somebody about this, then—”

  “No,” she said. “We’re just fine. Just fine. We’re Christmas River folk, Cinnamon. We see our shares of ups and downs, but we always come out all right. Don’t we?”

  She said the words, but she didn’t sound altogether convinced.

  She sidestepped the kitchen island and headed for the backdoor.

  “Please pass along my apologies to the Sheriff, as well,” she said. “We’ll pay for a new truck.”

  “Meredith—”

  But she was out the door before I could say anything more.

  In the past, whenever Meredith Drutman had left my presence, I’d felt a great sense of relief.

  But now, all I felt was a deep-seated feeling of unease.

  Chapter 39

  I placed the last dirty coffee mug in the top of the dishwasher, hit the start button, and untied my apron strings.

  Then I took in a deep breath and turned around to look at him.

  He stood over the kitchen island, pushing the lattice cutter back and forth over a piece of freshly-rolled dough. His wiry shoulders were hunched over as he worked with a degree of speed that I hadn’t seen in the pie shop before. After a few, violently-swift slices, he already had enough lattice strips for several pies.

  I watched as Ian worked, my mouth drier than the lava fields that populated the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains.

  The words that I’d been rehearsing in my head all day had up and vanished on me.

  I’d been waiting for this moment, when it would be just the two of us here, to ask him. Though honestly, I had been considering calling Daniel instead and telling him that Tobias had seen him and Rip Lawrence arguing out in the woods the day the latter was murdered.

  But in the end, I decided against calling my husband. Ian deserved a chance to explain himself, I figured. He deserved at least tha—

  “Can I help you with something, Mrs. Brightman?”

  Ian had caught me staring at him. He gazed back at me with a troubled expression.

  I lowered my eyes, feeling the sting of embarrassment.

  “Uh, sorry,” I said, clearing some nervo
us phlegm out of my throat. “I was, uh, just spacing out there.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I know it’s been a long week.”

  He went back to hacking at the dough. My heart hammered away in my chest.

  Though he seemed like a nice kid, the truth of the matter, when you looked at it objectively, was that I hardly knew Ian.

  Yes, he was my cousin now. But that didn’t mean anything. Not really.

  Ian could have been anybody.

  And he could have done anything.

  Anything.

  Like kill Rip Law—

  “I, uh, I just wanted to thank you again, Ian, for all the good work you’ve been doing here,” I muttered.

  It wasn’t what I really wanted to say, but it was a start.

  He looked up again.

  “You don’t have to keep thanking me,” he said. “I like the work. It’s the only way I’m going to become a world-famous chef, right? By working hard?”

  He smiled a lopsided smile.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s right. But I just want to make sure you understand how much I appreciate all your help.”

  “I do.”

  “Good.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the words weren’t there.

  Dammit, Cinnamon, I thought. Just say what’s on your mind.

  I swallowed hard.

  “Is everything okay?” he said, dusting his hands off. “You don’t look well.”

  “I’m not, Ian.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I swallowed again.

  Here went nothing.

  “You didn’t tell me you knew Rip,” I said.

  The lattice cutter dropped out of his hand, hitting the floor with a goose bump-inducing metallic clang.

  Chapter 40

  “You mean Rip Lawrence? Who says I knew him?”

  Ian leaned on his back heels defensively, making no motion to pick up the lattice cutter off the floor.

  “It doesn’t matter where I heard it from,” I said. “You knew Rip and you had an argument with him the day he was murdered.”

  He looked around suddenly, as if he was afraid somebody had heard what I had just said.