Inn Danger

by Dixie Davis

  But she waited in silence, Mitch still staring at the body.

  Lori knew how to handle this, too — it was time to call the police. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and dialed 9-1-1. Once the dispatch had her connected to the right city, Lori reported, “We’ve found a dead body, in the waterway.”

  Mitch finally tore his gaze from the body. “Oh no, that’s not a good idea.”

  Lori raised an eyebrow — but she couldn’t just end the call after making that kind of statement. They’d at least call her back. Lori described their location to Doris, the dispatcher, and she sent the police their way.

  “What’s wrong with calling the police?” Lori asked as soon as she could.

  Mitch drew in a big breath and blew it all out, slumping forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Because,” he said softly. “That’s Debra.”

  He stared at the floor of the boat as he added, “My wife.”

  By the time the police had arrived and fished their canoe and their unwanted catch out of the river, it was fully dark. Lori stood on the riverbank, wrapped in a blanket, watching as the cops set up lights and placed the body into a black body bag.

  Not just the body. Debra Watson Griffin. Mitch’s wife.

  Lori understood now why he’d immediately said this wasn’t possible.

  Mitch’s wife had died ten years ago. Hadn’t she?

  That body had definitely not been in the water ten years. It didn’t even look like it’d been in the water a day.

  Could she have driven off the end of the road here, plunged into the water, floated free from her car?

  Mitch stood five feet away, watching as well. Lori didn’t know what to say to him.

  This whole time they’d been not really dating and then really dating, he was married. His wife was alive.

  Lori shivered. She should have felt cold, she knew, but she just felt numb. As numb as Mitch looked. Was that why he wasn’t nearly surprised enough at finding his wife freshly dead?

  Two officers kept watch over Lori and Mitch. Perhaps they were there to make sure Lori and Mitch weren’t colluding on their story, making sure they covered for one another.

  That wasn’t a problem. Mitch hadn’t said one word to her since he’d said the two that mattered most: “my wife.”

  He couldn’t have done this. Could he?

  Two or three other cops worked on securing the scene, keeping the path back to the road clear, and the logistics of hauling the body back up the nearest boat ramp. Another half dozen, some of whom Lori didn’t recognize, were in the shallow water, clad in waders, working on sliding the body bag into a litter. Lori had to assume the extra officers were from Caswell Beach or another city on the island across the waterway from Miller’s Point. She knew all the Dusky Cove Police.

  In fact, the only police officer from Dusky Cove that she didn’t see was Chief Chip Branson himself.

  The officers in the water struggled with the basket but managed to carry the body out of the water, gruesome pall bearers working in reverse, bringing a stranger out of her burial place to try to bring her justice.

  Everything about this was backwards. Wrong. Evil.

  Even Lori herself couldn’t escape that label. She had been dating a married man. Unknowingly, sure, but she couldn’t shake the guilt overwhelming her reasoning.

  Could Debra have come back to town to reunite with her parents and gone out for a walk first and fallen from the bridge?

  Water streamed out of the litter, off the police officers, down the dirt and gravel ramp to the water’s edge.

  Unlikely.

  No matter which way Lori tried to look at it, this looked less and less like an accident.

  Finally, the officers bearing the basket reached the relatively level ground of the road, where the medical examiner’s van waited, its doors open. The reverse-pallbearers loaded the cage onto the van.

  Before they could push the gurney into the van, a gold sedan pulled up flashing police lights. Chief Branson.

  Normally, Lori wasn’t the happiest person to see him, even more so when she was with Mitch. Chief Branson still had yet to let go of their petty high school rivalry.

  A rivalry over a girl.

  Lori looked at the body bag on the gurney. Mitch had married his high school sweetheart, beating out Chip Branson for her hand.

  The hand that had just floated to the surface of the Intracoastal Waterway — ten years after she was supposedly murdered.

  The chief strode over to the officers by the medical examiner’s van. “All right,” he said, loudly enough for Lori to hear ten feet away. “What have we got?”

  The Dusky Cove cops suddenly avoided his gaze, but one of the officers whom Lori didn’t recognize stepped up. “Drowning, sir. Victim is a white female around fifty years of age. These two —” He nodded in Lori and Mitch’s direction, and the chief spared them a glance before the officer continued. “ — found her under the bridge while crabbing. Said their lines got tangled and dragged her up.”

  Chief Branson looked back at them again, his eyebrows knit together. “Likely story,” he called. His words didn’t have the usual venom he directed at Mitch, though.

  “Chip,” Mitch called. “Don’t.”

  Now one of his eyebrows crept higher. Lori couldn’t help but echo his skepticism. After how many decades of grief from the man, now Mitch would stand up to him?

  “Don’t look,” Mitch clarified.

  Lori thought she caught the chief rolling his eyes. Obviously he dealt with worse things than they did on a daily basis — well, relatively speaking. This was Dusky Cove, after all. Lori had personally seen all of the people who’d been killed here over the last two years, too, so she really didn’t think Chief Branson’s sarcasm was necessary. Before that, they’d gone eight years without a single murder.

  Maybe more than eight years. The last victim was supposedly Debra Griffin.

  And her death had made Mitch and Chip’s feud even more bitter.

  “They say the victim’s name —”

  Ken, one of Lori’s favorite officers, stepped up. “Chief, it’s probably best if you take a step back right now.”

  Now his expression turned back to confusion. He turned to the officer who’d given him the run down thus far. “This making any sense to you?”

  “No, sir. The decedent is —”

  “Really,” Lori called to Chief Branson, cutting off the other cop. “Don’t do this.”

  Ken reached for his boss’s arm to guide him away, but the chief pulled out of his range. “What are you people talking about?”

  Ken shot the helpful loaner officer a look that would have silenced anyone else.

  It didn’t work on this guy. “It’s Debra Griffin.”

  Chief Branson stared at him as if the name hadn’t registered at all. “What did you say?” he finally asked, slowly, carefully, deliberately.

  “They say her name is Debra Griffin.”

  “As in Debbie Watson?”

  Finally, the cop cued into the not-even-slightly subtle clues everyone else had been sending, though most likely it was the chief’s measured tone — and the fact that he knew her nickname and maiden name — that finally got through to him.

  “I’m . . . not sure?” he finished, belatedly tacking on a “sir?”

  Chief Branson whirled on the gurney. Ken, Mitch, Lori and a few other officers shouted for him to stop, but the chief didn’t listen. He tore open the body bag. From where Lori stood, it seemed like the zipper pull went flying.

  For a long, silent moment, the chief stared down into the face of the woman he’d also loved. A woman who he’d lost now for the third time. A woman who clearly hadn’t spent the last ten years in the water.

  Everything hung still in the air as if suspended in time.

  Then Chief Branson turned on his heel, wheeling away from the body. He took in the people around him, the officers, the cars, the lights.
Then he marched directly up to Mitch.

  Mitch squared his shoulders, ready for the chief’s attack. Of course he was. He’d put up with the chief’s prejudice for the last decade, and probably much longer, even before Debra had gone missing.

  Before Mitch could say anything, the chief pulled back and walloped him.

  Lori gasped and automatically lunged for Mitch, but the officer behind her caught hold of her arm before she reached him.

  Mitch held his jaw, his wary eyes fixed on Chief Branson. He slowly straightened.

  Lori whirled on Chip. “What are you thinking? You can’t do that to people! You’re the police — the chief of police!”

  “It’s all right,” Mitch said, his voice low. He wiped a thumb across his lower lip. “He’s not the chief right now.”

  Lori looked back and forth between the two of them. Chief Branson was breathing hard, still staring daggers at Mitch. She suddenly got the sense that his badge was the only thing keeping him from trying to beat the tar out of Mitch right this minute.

  Mitch, for his part, wouldn’t look at the chief. In the past, she’d seen the tension between them, but it was always Mitch who worked to dispel it, to turn the other cheek, to be the bigger person, even if his patience with the other man wore a little thin at times. Today, though, he wasn’t being the reasonable one.

  He stared at the gravel beneath their feet, looking for all the world one hundred percent guilty.

  Mitch couldn’t have done this. He couldn’t have had anything to do with this. Right?

  Lori couldn’t answer her own question, and she didn’t dare put it to Mitch.

  She’d thought she knew this man. She’d thought she wanted to marry him. She’d thought he was a good man, someone she could love, someone she could be safe with, someone she could trust.

  Could she really have been this wrong about him?

  Lori realized that Mitch wasn’t just avoiding Chief Branson’s gaze. He was avoiding hers, too.

  She turned away. Chief Branson crossed the gravel again to where the gurney waited. Very carefully, he laid the open flaps of the body bag closed over her face again. Then he gripped the sides of the litter cage.

  And the chief of the Dusky Cove Police Department bawled like a baby.

  By the time Lori made it home that night, it was after ten o’clock. Her guests’ rooms had lights on, which she hoped meant they were home safe. The last thing she needed to do right now was face strangers and pretend like her world wasn’t falling apart.

  The man she loved was married. Or he had been until his wife had shown up dead that night.

  The parlor was, thankfully, empty. Lori trudged over to the blue couch and sank into the cushions.

  How would she ever come back from this?

  Mitch had been married the whole time they’d dated.

  Was this why he’d broken up with her last year? What had changed that he felt like they could date now?

  Lori rubbed her temples, but it was her heart that ached.

  A knock on the door jolted her from her wallowing. Really, she shouldn’t answer. She didn’t have to face anyone, and she didn’t have the strength to do it either. She drew in a deep breath and prepared herself to not respond.

  What if it were the police? She’d already given her statement, and they all knew she didn’t know anything.

  Of course, the first time she’d found a dead body with Mitch, she hadn’t known anything, and the police had arrested her.

  She certainly had motive this time around. As Mitch’s girlfriend, why wouldn’t she want her rival, his wife, out of the way?

  If it was the police, they’d catch up with her whether she answered tonight or not. She had to be sure.

  After the third set of knocks — why didn’t they just go away? — Lori hauled herself off the couch. She could at least check to see who it was.

  She peered through the peephole. Val Cromley stood on her front porch. As if she knew Lori was looking now, Val held up the tray in her hands: one of her famous dark chocolate brownies — a jumbo-sized one from the looks of it.

  Lori swallowed a groan. Could she resist the best chocolate dessert in the county at a time like this? No one was that strong.

  She opened the door, trying to compose her expression into something neutral and calm.

  “Oh, honey,” Val greeted her.

  That was all it took to break the dam, and Lori burst into tears. Val handed over the brownie and bustled her way inside, closing the door behind her. Val walked her back to the couch and sank down with her.

  Lori still wasn’t sure she really wanted company — or an audience for her breakdown — but she couldn’t send Val away yet. She sniffled, pulling herself together. “I guess you’ve heard?”

  “Yeah.” Val squeezed her knee. “I can’t believe this.”

  Lori didn’t bother echoing the sentiment. Val must have known Debbie, and she must remember what happened ten years ago, when everyone else in town thought Debbie had been murdered.

  Everyone, it seemed, except Mitch, who wasn’t all that surprised to see her newly dead.

  Before Lori could ask about that time, another knock sounded at her door.

  “It’s Kim,” Val said. Val owned the bakery between the Mayweather House and Kim’s Mimosa Café, so it made sense that the gossip train was making its way down Front Street. Once Kim Yates knew, the whole town would know.

  Val patted Lori’s shoulder, signaling her to stay seated, and Val walked over to answer the door. As she’d predicted, Kim stood on the front porch, a Styrofoam container of soup in her hands.

  Kim stepped in without a word and set her Styrofoam on the coffee table, joining Val and Lori on the couch.

  Even without them saying anything, Lori felt the strength of having her friends there to support her and sit with her during this time.

  “Were you there?” Val asked in a hushed tone.

  Lori nodded, picking up the brownie from where she’d left it on the coffee table. Much as she loved Kim’s soup, some situations definitely called for chocolate.

  And what a chocolate this was. Deep, complex flavor and perfect fudgy texture. Almost enough to make her forget everything that had happened tonight.

  But that was only the tip of the iceberg here.

  “You know,” Lori said, “I’ve really tried to avoid the rumors and the stories — to the point where I don’t even know what happened ten years ago.”

  Val leaned forward a little to make eye contact with Kim, who returned her grim look. A should-we-tell-her? look.

  “At this point, nothing you say could be worse than reality,” Lori pointed out.

  Kim had to agree with that. “Well, ten years ago, Debbie just disappeared.”

  Val took a turn when Kim paused. “The last time anyone other than Mitch saw her, the two of them were headed off to the canoe trails together.”

  The canoe trails? That was where they’d been tonight. Lori tried to suppress a shudder.

  “Did everyone think that Mitch killed her?”

  Kim fidgeted with the hem of her royal blue blouse. “At first people said it must have been an accident.”

  “But then, if they’d had an accident while they were canoeing, why wouldn’t Mitch have admitted that?” Val shook her head. “Three witnesses saw him coming back from the trails without her.”

  “Chief Branson was beyond livid.”

  Val snorted at that. “Understatement of the decade. Rumor has it he spent his life savings funding the divers in the Intracoastal Waterway looking for her body.”

  “And they never came up with anything?” Lori asked, then popped the last bite of the brownie in her mouth.

  Val and Kim both glanced at her, the three of them exchanging a silent obviously.

  “Does everyone still think Mitch did it?”

  “Not now,” Val muttered. “But I think a lot of people did. Chip, for sure.”

&nb
sp; Lori pursed her lips. She’d seen his prejudice against Mitch too many times.

  “Ray and Katie didn’t,” Kim added, her voice soft.

  How had Lori forgotten her neighbor? Sure, she was in a lot of pain — a lot — but this was Ray and Katie’s daughter, murdered all over again.

  “I tried to stop by,” Kim added, “but the lights were off.”

  Lori hoped they already knew the news — and hoped they would never find out. How much heartbreak could one family endure?

  As soon as she was ready, Lori vowed she’d check up on Ray and Katie — and often.

  “So that’s the whole rumor?” Lori asked. “The big secret? They supposedly went canoeing and Debbie didn’t come back?”

  Kim kept her gaze on the Styrofoam container she’d brought and shrugged; Val held out empty hands as if to say she’d given all the information she had.

  “Then what did Mitch say? How did he explain coming home alone?”

  “He said he’d dropped her off at a friend’s house in Caswell Beach. The friend said she went to have her nails done.”

  Lori shook her head. It certainly looked bad for Mitch ten years ago. “I’m surprised they didn’t arrest him.”

  “Oh?” Val raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think they didn’t?”

  Lori startled a little. “Mitch never told me he’d been arrested.” She would have thought he’d have mentioned it when Chief Branson arrested her for a murder she didn’t commit.

  Then again, she was dating someone else at the time. Maybe that wasn’t something you mentioned to someone who’d hired you to fix a couple things around her inn.

  “They couldn’t make it stick,” Val said. “No evidence, not even circumstantial.”

  “That was before Chip was even chief,” Kim murmured. “Remember who was?”

  “Ugh,” Val said instantly, “don’t even get me started on that man.” She shook her head vehemently. “I wish Old Man Branson hadn’t retired so early and we could just forget we ever had Chief Lehanneur.”

  “Where is Chief Lehanneur now?” Lori asked. She’d certainly never met him. Maybe he had a different perspective on the case.