by Meg Muldoon
Warren had had the spot scrubbed as much as it could be, but there was still a faint red tinge to the concrete that made my stomach turn.
Maybe, once the brewery reopened, Warren would get the concrete redone. Heaven knows, he didn’t need any reminder of the murder that took place in his brewery. Nobody did, for that matter.
The door to the office was closed, but a faint light spilled from beneath the door crack. I could hear the sound of papers being shuffled and a long sigh that sounded to me like Warren was doing some heavy checkbook balancing.
I placed my hand on the doorknob and pushed.
He was sitting at the desk, writing something.
“Don’t you know that I’ve got a freshly-baked Blueberry Peach Pie waiting on the table at home? What in the heck is keeping you, old man?”
“Cinny, I—”
“Everybody is waiting for the man of the hour to arrive. And you’ve made me come all the way down here to pull you from your beer making and—
“Cinny!”
I noticed too late that the old man’s face was a shade paler than usual.
I noticed too late that there was a panic running through his voice.
I noticed too late that his hands were trembling.
And I noticed too late the woman with the gun standing behind me.
Chapter 52
“Damn you, Cinnamon. Damn you. This was just going to be a suicide. Do you know how hard that in and of itself was going to be to stage? Now I’m going to have to stage a murder-suicide, you interfering fool.”
She pushed the .44 toward my midsection and I let out a short gasp.
“You wench!” Warren said, his voice shaking like the branches of a tree in a windstorm. “It’s over. Can’t you see that? You’re not gonna be able to pull this off. You haven’t got the brass or the brains. Don’t you know my son-in-law’s the sheriff? Don’t you know that he’s gonna find you out?”
She brandished the gun so that the metal was almost touching my shirt. Another shiver, this one like a rolling train, ran through me.
“I’ll cross that bridge when I get there,” she said. “But for now, you keep writing that note, old timer. After you confess to Rip Lawrence’s murder, say that you’re taking Cinnamon with you because you can’t stand the thought of leaving this world without your granddaughter.”
I inhaled sharply.
There was a kind of cool, calculated madness in her eyes. Something that had never been in them in all the times she’d come into my pie shop. Not even when I’d kicked her out and told her never to come back.
I had always known Meredith Drutman was mean-spirited. Mean and demanding and unkind.
But a killer?
A cold-blooded murderess?
I was seeing her hold the gun that killed Rip Lawrence with my own two eyes, and I still couldn’t believe it.
She studied me for a long moment, as if she knew what I was thinking.
“Not that I have to explain myself to you, Cinnamon, but I didn’t intend to kill anyone,” she said. “I only wanted to threaten him that night. Let him know I meant business. That he couldn’t push me around. It was a pure accident. It’s this damn hair-trigger gun. George never took care of this gun the way he should have. My finger slipped and before I knew it, Splat! Rip just dropped.”
She casually handled the gun to emphasize the “splat” part, and my breath caught in my throat.
So George hadn’t been the murderer after all.
It was his wife who had done the dirty deed. George must have only confessed to save her.
“Rip really ought to have known who he was dealing with in the first place,” Meredith continued. “Threatening me and my family like that… he should have known better. I’m a Drutman. I don’t get pushed around. I do the pushing.”
“You… you killed him because he was seeing Haley?” I said, my voice cracking.
Meredith’s face went white as a ghost’s suddenly at the mention of Haley.
But then she smiled.
“You don’t have the slightest clue about what’s going on here, do you?” she said. “But you know what? I think this is one mystery you’ll never get to understand, Cinnamon. You and your grandfather are going to go to your graves without ever knowing why.”
Her eyes narrowed cruelly.
I knew Meredith wasn’t a good person.
But I hadn’t known she was this bad.
Nobody had.
“Now, soon as old gramps gets done writing that suicide note, I’m going to ask you to stand over there, Cinnamon,” she said, nodding to the corner. “I’m going to make it like you just walked in here while he was writing his farewell to the world. You see, poor Warren here just couldn’t live with himself, knowing that another man was going to prison for a crime he committed.”
“A crime you committed, you old hag,” Warren said, his voice full of fury.
“Now, there’s no reason to get nasty, gramps, just because a business rivalry got out of hand,” Meredith said, looking over at him and sticking out her bottom lip in a pout. “I mean, everybody knows Rip had it coming. You did us all a service, in fact, by killing him. It’s just your own damn conscious that couldn’t live it down.”
My mind raced, trying to come up with something. A way to get us out of here, away from this lunatic.
“See, Warren. You stole the gun, the one I’m holding right now, out of my husband’s truck one night. Then you shot Rip in a dispute over territory. You didn’t mean to, but the gun just went off. You are frail and feeble, after all.”
“You’re out of your mind, woman,” Warren said. “I will not write that. I will not write anything. You’ll just have to kill me.”
Meredith nudged the gun closer to me.
“Or I could just kill your granddaughter here first,” Meredith said, staring him down. “The choice is yours.”
Warren glanced over at me, looking helpless.
“Get writing, you old geezer.”
He slowly picked up the pen and continued the note.
My heart hammered hard in my chest.
I had to stall somehow. I had to distract her. I had to buy us more time.
“Just tell me why, Meredith,” I said. “I’ll give up easy. All I want to know is why you’re doing all this.”
“That story’s much too complicated for the little time you have,” she said, looking at me with mock sadness.
“If you weren’t trying to protect Haley, then why kill him? What could you possibly gain from it?”
“I told you it was an accident,” she said. “I told you, it’s this damn hair-trigger pull, that’s all—”
“No it wasn’t,” a strong, high-pitched voice suddenly sounded from behind us. “It wasn’t any accident, and you know it, you liar!”
Meredith jumped high in the air, and for a second, the gun wobbled in her hands like a three-legged table.
I shut my eyes tightly, afraid of being the victim of another one of her “accidents.”
Chapter 53
“Sweetie, how…?” Meredith started saying to the young redheaded woman who looked as enraged as a disturbed anthill.
For once, she was without that little white scrappy dog she carried with her everywhere.
“I followed you today,” Haley said, her eyes bloodshot. “Because I knew it couldn’t have been Dad. I knew he couldn’t have done something like this. He doesn’t have it in him. But you do, mom. You do.”
“Honey, why don’t you just go back outside and wait in your car?” Meredith said in a soft voice.
That only seemed to incense Haley more.
Her freckled face turned red, and I thought she was going to blow her top at any moment.
“How could you, Mom?” she said. “How could you kill him?!”
“Sweetie, you don’t know the whole story,” she said. “We can discuss it more on the way home, if you like. But for now, get your skinny little ass back in the car. I’m trying to save the family here
.”
Haley shook her head.
“You killed him in cold blood. You killed…”
A couple of fat tears popped over the rims of her eyes, sliding down her face.
“You killed my… my father.”
It came out in just above a whisper. As if Haley herself couldn’t quite believe what she was saying.
I heard someone gasp. It took me a few moments to realize that the gasp had come from me.
Meredith’s eyes grew wide. She lowered the gun slightly, as if the metal was too heavy for her shaking hands.
“He told me, Mom. He told me that day. About the two of you, back when you and dad were going through a tough time. How you guys… how you had an affair with Rip. But how you never told him… never told him that… that I was his.”
Meredith’s hands were Jell-O.
“No,” Meredith said. “No. He was lying, honey. Rip was a liar.”
But Meredith’s voice held no conviction.
“And when he was murdered that night, I just… I just knew it had to do with what he told me. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence.”
“No,” Meredith kept saying, shaking her head. “He’d always been a good-for-nothing liar. He’d always been…”
“He was threatening to tell dad too, wasn’t he?” Haley continued. “He probably threatened to tell the entire town. And you were afraid. That’s why you killed him. Afraid that if he found out, then—”
“Rip wasn’t supposed to tell you!” Meredith said, her eyes filled with rage. “I paid him not to tell you! Thousands and thousands of dollars. But it was never enough. He always wanted more. More, more, more!—”
Crack!
A sound louder than any firework erupted, and the room was suddenly illuminated with a searing flash of light.
All of us screamed for our lives.
Chapter 54
“You hag psycho nut!” Warren cried.
Before I even understood what happened, the old man had jumped across the desk. He lunged for the smoking .44, yanking it from Meredith’s hands with a strength I didn’t know he still had. Meredith struggled to hold onto the gun, but was too surprised by Warren’s sudden movement to put up much of a fight. A second later, Warren had the weapon.
He landed a swift blow across the side of Meredith’s face.
The woman screeched like the hag Warren had accused her of being and clawed at my grandfather, not giving up on getting the gun back. Without realizing it, I reached over and grabbed a clump of her stringy hair, pulling it hard. She yelled again, clawing at Warren some more. The old man landed another blow on her with the back of the gun.
A split second later Meredith Drutman, and all her insanity, crumpled to the floor like a rag doll.
Warren leaned over, breathing hard. He glanced in Haley’s direction. She was leaning against the wall, sobbing, her hands over her face.
Satisfied that the daughter wasn’t going to be a threat, he turned his attention toward me.
“You okay, Cinny Bee?”
I nodded as I heard the sound of car brakes outside and a door slam.
“Cin?”
I let out a sigh of relief at hearing his voice.
I had had the feeling he might come.
“In here, Daniel!”
Warren had a small streak of blood running down his cheek from where Meredith had scratched him.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I’m gonna be just fine, Cinny Bee,” he said. “Just fine.”
He looked back down at Meredith. She was groaning softly in pain.
“That’s what you get for calling me a geezer, you old wench.”
Maybe it was inappropriate.
But I couldn’t help but smile a little bit when he said that.
Chapter 55
I stood by the kitchen window, nursing a strong cup of hazelnut coffee while watching the new day come to life.
Even though I awoke before dawn every day, it felt like it had been a long while since I’d really paid attention to a sunrise. So often, I was busy rolling out crusts or mixing up fillings, or writing notes to myself about new flavor combinations. So often the sunrise, in all its magisterial beauty, slipped right past me. One moment it was dark. And the next time I looked out the window, the sun would already be high in the sky.
But as I watched it this morning, as I watched the world emerge, the pine needles sparkle, the aspen leaves shimmer, the puffy white clouds on the horizon turn shades of crimson and coral, I never wanted to miss another sunrise again so long as I lived.
I never wanted to be so caught up in my life and business that I took such things like sunrises or a delicious cup of coffee or a mischievous grin from a certain precious old man, or a loving look from Daniel for granted ever again.
It had been a week since Meredith Drutman had cornered Warren at his brewery and tried to pin Rip Lawrence’s murder on him. A week since she tried to cover up her dirty deeds. And now, everyone in Christmas River knew exactly what she’d done… and why.
A few years into Meredith’s marriage, and about the time Kara had had that wild crush on Rip Lawrence, Meredith had started a lengthy affair with Rip Lawrence. But, having married the heir to the Drutman fortune, and having entered into a prenuptial agreement that gave her diddly-squat should she want a divorce, Meredith was reluctant to leave her husband for Rip. She kept the affair – and the fact that Haley was really Rip’s daughter and not George’s – a secret from everyone. Except that at some point, years later, Rip put two and two together. Finding himself in dire need of money to keep his brewery afloat, he decided to blackmail Meredith, threatening to tell Haley and George the secret she had so desperately tried to cover up. The blackmail payments went on for a few years. Only, Rip always came back for more. On the evening of July Fourth, Meredith went to Geronimo Brewing Co. to tell Rip she wasn’t going to stand for it anymore. She claimed she brought the gun – George’s gun – just to scare Rip off. She claimed it went off accidently, the same way it went off accidently in Warren’s office later that week.
Daniel didn’t exactly buy into her claims. He thought she deliberately lured Rip Lawrence into the brewery and shot him just at the height of the Fourth of July fireworks show so that nobody would hear the gunfire, thereby giving herself enough time to escape before anybody noticed that a man had been murdered.
I tended to agree with Daniel on that score, being that the woman shot at me when I surprised her at Back Alley Brewing. Though she didn’t admit being there and firing the gun that night, Daniel figured she was most likely at Back Alley to make sure Rip hadn’t left behind any evidence of the blackmail transactions.
Later, when the police arrested George, Meredith saw that the only way to get the entire family out of the mess she created was to tie it back to Warren and make him the fall guy.
Meredith denied the entirety of what happened in Warren’s office that day. She told the cops that Warren had beat her with a gun until she confessed. Which, as her own daughter knew, was a complete lie.
Meredith wasn’t just a liar – she was a cold-blooded killer. She’d left behind a trail of dead and wounded in her wake, including her own daughter. And while there was no love lost between me and Haley Drutman, I did feel sorry for the girl. Her entire notion of family had been wrecked in a matter of a few days.
Whatever Meredith Drutman had coming to her now – the trials, the prison sentence, the orange jumpsuits… it was no less than she deserved.
Rip Lawrence wasn’t a good guy. But even he was worthy of some kind of justice.
I took a sip of my coffee, glancing down at the letter on the kitchen counter.
The letter Rip Lawrence had left in one of my old cookbooks the day that he’d shown up in my pie shop kitchen without warning.
I hadn’t thought to check the cookbook. Not until this morning, when I suddenly flashed on him here in the kitchen the day he was murdered, wanting to talk to me.
; Now I understood why.
The letter he had left was a two-part note. One page had been addressed to me, asking me to deliver the second part to his daughter: Haley Ann Drutman.
Maybe I shouldn’t have read the second letter. But I did, anyway. It was an apology of sorts to Haley. For not figuring out that she was his daughter sooner. For missing seeing her grow up. For not being there for her, even though he only recently realized that she was his daughter. All he wanted now, the letter had read, was to make sure she knew that he was there to help her if she needed it. To make up for lost time.
Rip must have felt like something bad was going to happen to him that night. And while giving the letter to me was as much a way to expose Meredith’s secret to one of her arch-enemies as anything else, the portion he’d written to Haley left me close to tears.
It reminded me of something, something that was easy to forget. Most good people weren’t all good, and most bad people weren’t all bad, either. We were all a work in progress. We all had our good moments and our bad moments.
Rip had more bad moments than good, but the letter he left Haley was one of the good ones.
I planned to deliver it to her just as soon as I could.
“How are ya this fine morning, miss?”
Tobias came walking into the back, taking off his weathered sheepskin coat and placing it on the coat rack. He pulled his apron from off the wall, and wrapped it around his waist.
“I’m just fine, Tobias,” I said. “And yourself?”
“Just fine,” he said, smiling a sad little smile.
I hadn’t had much of a chance to talk to Tobias since he’d told me about seeing Ian and Rip arguing that day.
“You got anything in particular I should be working on this morning?” he said.
“Not anything outside the usual.”
He nodded, and was about to head out into the dining room to mop the floors when I stopped him.
“Uh, Tobias?”
“Yes, miss?” he said, turning around to look at me.