by H L Bur
Zoe nodded her head in agreement. She kept her steaming mug close to her, cupped between her hands as if being comforted by the warmth.
“You said you had heard something, do you remember what it sounded like?” Quinn urged as she took a sip of her drink.
“At first I thought it sounded like a bird screeching, but then I remember hearing an engine start up and it drowned out the sound. Do you think it could’ve been her screaming?” Zoe set her mug down and bent her head into her hands as she began to sob.
“I’m not sure, but there’s nothing you could’ve done and you don’t need to go beating yourself up over this. Sam, why don’t we call your dad and get you girls home. Wait, why aren’t you two in school today?”
“We had a half day today, the teachers had meetings. Quinn called my dad when you left, he should be here any minute.”
“I’m sure the police will want to ask you girls about what happened today.”
“Yeah, I figured.” She set her empty latte cup down on the mahogany tabletop and led Zoe over to the bay window to watch for her dad.
I set my own coffee mug down on the counter and followed the girls to the window.
“Sam, are you girls going to be okay?”
Sam glanced back at me and gave me a small smile that looked like it was more in sympathy than anything else. “Yeah, Cady, don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine.”
Her dad pulled up out front in his black Chevy Silverado and waved to us through the window. I was nervous he was going to blame me for this for some reason, but his wave seemed friendly enough.
“Sam.”
She turned back as she and Zoe were about to open the front door.
“I’m always here if you need me.”
“I know.” She smiled softly at me and headed out the door.
I watched as her dad jumped out of the truck and rushed up to her, pulling her in for a hug. He put his other arm around Zoe in a protective manner and piled them both into his truck. Instead of getting back into the driver’s seat, he surprised me and walked towards the front door of the shop. I made my way over to greet him, bracing for the berating as Quinn came over to join me.
“Kyle, I am so sorry about this!” I shook my head as tears stung at my eyes again.
“Cady. Quinn.” He nodded in greeting. “I’m just happy you two were around when they needed you. I’ve been wanting to thank you for always being there for Sam, and I just want you to know that we both really appreciate the two of you.” His gaze landed on Quinn.
I was stunned for a second. How could he be thanking me when I felt responsible for his daughter stumbling upon a dead body? I knew it wasn’t really my fault, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that if Sam wasn’t so close to us this would never have happened.
Quinn patted her hand on Kyle’s shoulder and replied, “Kyle, I don’t know what to say. To start, you don’t owe us any thanks. We care about Sam and are very protective of her. And you’ve done such an amazing job with her. She is the most well rounded person we know, and that includes adults.”
“She’s my whole world and I don’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to her. What in the hell do you think is going on around here?” He ran his hands through his hair in frustration.
“I don’t know, but I’m hopeful it will get straightened out soon.” I tried to reassure him.
He nodded his appreciation to each of us, placing his hand over Quinn’s and giving it a small squeeze. I noticed he met her gaze and lingered for a few seconds.
“I guess I better get these girls home and then call Chief Kowalski.” He turned to leave.
“Let us know if we can do anything to help,” Quinn hollered after him.
I turned to look at Quinn as she made her way back over to the café to clean up.
“What was that?” I asked, suspiciously.
“What was what?”
“You and Kyle just had a moment.”
“You’re kidding. I was just comforting him, he was obviously upset.”
“I don’t think so. I think he has a thing for you.”
“And you’re officially crazy.”
“I’m serious!”
“He’s Sam’s dad. He’s like forty.”
“He’s like thirty-five,” I corrected. “Molly and him had Sam when they were twenty.”
She thought about this for a second. “Nope, you’re still crazy.”
I raised my eyebrows, clearly not going to get anywhere else with her on this at the moment. “Whatever you say.”
I followed her over to the café to help her clean. When I looked up from wiping down the counter I gasped in shock and knocked over the rest of my coffee cup.
There was Gigi sitting in one of the lounge chairs of the café.
“What are you doing here?” I rolled my eyes, irritated that I had spilled my coffee, but thankful we didn’t have any customers right then.
Quinn looked up to see what I was talking about and let out a sigh.
“Watch your tone, Missy.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry Gigi, it’s just you’ve never visited us here before and you startled me,” I said as I went to get a cloth to clean up my mess.
“Don’t be a suck up.”
I threw my hands in the air, clearly not able to win any argument today.
“Fine, what do you want?”
“What? Can’t I just come to visit my two favorite grandkids at their place of business?” She sounded affronted.
“Uggghhh,” I growled. I hid my face in my hands, unable to deal with this right now.
Quinn walked over and sat on the lounge chair next to Gigi. “What’s up, Gram?”
“I wanted to see if you two were aware of the passing of another young woman today.” She sounded very professional.
“Yes, we are aware of this. May I ask how you are aware of this? You, being a ghost, who is supposed to be at home or maybe even heaven or maybe even he?”
“What Cady means to say,” Quinn hastily interrupted, “is how did you hear about this so quickly?”
“Says who?” She ignored Quinn and directed her spiteful glower toward me. “I am not a prisoner and I will kindly remind you that I am your elder and you are to respect me.”
“Ha!” I let out an incredulous laugh.
Gigi pursed her lips together and turned to Quinn. “Obviously, you are the more reasonable of the two of you.”
Quinn shot me a glare to silence me. I knew she was right. If we wanted any information out of her, we had to play nice. I let Quinn take the lead.
“Grandma, how do you know about Dawn?” she spoke softly as if not wanting to scare her away.
Gigi stared straight ahead, looking out the front window, her lips still pursed tightly.
Just when I thought she wasn’t going to say anymore, she began to speak.
“I can’t explain it. I get a feeling and I’m drawn to a certain area. When I get there, there is a dead body and a spirit.”
Okay, that was so not what I was expecting to hear.
“What happens then?” Quinn pressed on, still speaking softly and cutting me a warning look to not say anything.
I felt like we were dealing with a feral cat. At any moment she could decide she’d had enough and bolt out the back door, scratching us from head to toe on her way out.
“I?” She paused. “I help them cross over.”
Okay, now that was definitely a surprise.
“You help them cross over? How?” I asked. “How did you manage to get that job?”
“I’m not getting into that,” she spat at me.
“Okay, that’s fair. But, is there anything else you can tell us? Do they say anything? Did Sofie or Dawn say who their killer was?” I asked.
She turned to face Quinn to answer my questions. I rolled my eyes yet again reflexively. I didn’t know how I’d gotten on everyone’s bad sides these days, but it was really starting to irk me.
“The first girl just
kept repeating ‘I was so close, I was so close’. I couldn’t get anything else out of her, so I thought it was best just to help her pass on so she could be at peace. The one today was frantic. It was like she was trying to warn someone of something. She just kept calling out ‘Rose’.”
My heart sank, more positive than ever that Rose was in danger or worse.
A car door shut loudly and we all jumped and flung our heads in the direction of the large bay window, which gave us a view out onto Main Street. A white van with ‘Prescott’s Paint & Pane’ painted on the side was parked outside and the driver was walking toward the front door.
“This must be our window repairman,” I offered.
I glanced over and Gigi was gone. Quinn and I both looked around the store, but she was nowhere in sight. We would need to talk about the fact that our dead grandmother who happened to be pretty horrible to us was actually some sort of usher for the recently departed. I didn’t think I’d ever had a headache for this long in my life, but it was steadily growing.
I glanced at the clock. It read one fifteen and my stomach grumbled for lunch.
“I’ll grab us takeout if you want to stay here with the repairman.”
“Sounds good.” Quinn nodded in agreement.
We had four hours before we met with Amy. I crossed my fingers and hoped she would have a new lead for us.
I ran down to the corner deli and grabbed us some sandwiches and drinks. As I headed back by the movie theater I had a sudden impulse to sneak down the alley and see if the police were still at the little park. I paused, debating on what I should do, but the thought of running into Fletcher again deterred me enough that I continued on my way back to the bookstore.
The window didn’t take more than an hour to replace and we passed the rest of the day by organizing the bookstore’s upcoming schedule of activities for the rest of the year and watching the clock tick by slowly. The afternoon seemed to drag on endlessly. We had a few customers in and out, but not enough to make the time go faster.
Finally at five thirty the front door chime went off and in walked Amy. The anxiety built in my chest until I thought I was going to explode. Quinn was helping a customer check out and thankfully when they left, the store was empty again.
I offered her a cup of coffee, but she declined. Her face was creased with worry, so I pulled up a stool behind the counter for her and we all sat down.
“Did you find anything?” Quinn broached the topic.
“I don’t know for sure, but I’ll show you what I have.”
She pulled out some papers from her bag and spread them out on the countertop.
“Okay, so there are the properties that we expected: his family home, his lake house, and several rental properties. But, I decided to check out the rest of the family, too.” She hesitated and took a deep breath. “It looks like there was a purchase of a large state owned lot in Joy Rhodes’s name about two months ago. Now, the price of the property is way out of Joy’s price range, at least to my knowledge. It was purchased for 2.3 million dollars. And, there was no loan used for the purchase, which means one thing.”
“It was paid for in cash.” I guessed at what she was about to say.
Amy nodded, her eyebrows arching toward the ceiling.
Quinn let out a low whistle. “That’s a good chunk of change. I know Joy has a trust fund from her father, but I definitely don’t think she’s got that kind of money lying around.”
“What property was it?” I asked, already knowing what the answer would be.
“I remember overhearing my grandparents one time when I was little talking about this. I remember them saying how bad they felt for Daniel that he had to sell his land to the state. The property the Rhodes’ just bought was the same lot that the state purchased from the Roberson family back in 1974. The old sawmill property.”
Despite having already expected this, I couldn’t stop the slight gasp that escaped my lips.
Chapter Eighteen
Ξ
By the time Amy left it was well past closing time, so we locked up shop and made our way to our cars parked on the street. I felt sick to my stomach over the events surrounding the day and Quinn confirmed she felt the same way, so we decided to head straight home, neither of us up for takeout. We each settled for a bowl of cereal and a piece of leftover birthday cake as we claimed our respective sides of the long sectional in the living room. Gigi was nowhere in sight, but we turned on Jeopardy! for some background noise.
I plopped down onto the soft grey sofa cushion and rearranged the cream and purple flowered throw pillow behind my back for support. I rested my legs on the coffee table and spooned my first mouthful of sweet cereal into my mouth. Quinn and I decided to recap everything from the past few days to see if anything else popped out at us. It had become our strategy over the years when working crosswords or Sudoku puzzles that every time we got stuck we would start over from the beginning to see what we’d missed. This puzzle was a far cry from a crossword or a Sudoku, but we figured the same strategy could apply.
“Okay, so we know Sofie, Dawn, and Rose are all from Grand Rapids. We are highly suspicious that they all know each other, but we don’t know in what capacity.”
“No, but we could do another social media sweep to see if they followed each other,” Quinn suggested.
“Good idea, put it on the list,” I said, referring to our mentally tracked to-do list and not an actual written list. She nodded in agreement and waved her pointer finger into the air in the shape of a check mark as she mentally added it to our list. It was at times eerie how we essentially shared a brain.
“We also know for sure now that Elias Rhodes owns the sawmill property and for all intents and purposes we can assume he is in cahoots with Brent and Mystery Man. What we don’t know is what they are doing,” Quinn said as she shifted on her end of the sectional to face me, tying her wavy blonde hair up into a top bun.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I may have a theory about that,” I hinted as I sat up and turned towards her as well.
“Really? Well, I’ll take anything I can get right now. Let’s hear it.”
“Okay, so today after lunch I saw the copy of the sawmill manuscript on the counter at work and decided to scan through it again. I read that lumber mills used to be good ways to smuggle drugs across the Canadian border because of the easy access to the waterways.”
“Okay, I’m listening.” Quinn encouraged me to go on.
“If you remember from when you skimmed through it the other day, we learned that the undercurrents in the Straits of Mackinac region are the strongest of all the Great Lakes.”
“Right, but how does that tie in?”
“I honestly don’t know, but maybe the strong currents make it easier to transport drugs or other smuggled items out of the area.”
“Well, I admit it’s the best we have to go on, but we don’t really have any proof of that.”
“You’re right.” I sighed. “But, I might have a way to find out for sure!” My nervous energy level kicked up a notch at the thought.
Quinn cocked her head to the side in what I recognized as her attempt to figure out what I was thinking before I said it - kind of like when a dog tilts its head when you talk to it.
“I’ll say it again…I’m listening.” Her eyebrows arched up in anticipation.
“Well, I don’t know if you’re going to like it, but—”
“Spill it,” she cut me off.
I let out a long sigh. “What if we got together with Joy under the pretense of apologizing for the other day and see if we can press her for any info?”
“Oh no. Nope. Sorry, not happening. Next idea please.”
“Well do you have any better ideas?” I threw my hands up in the air, frustrated.
“Ugh. Let me think for a minute.”
I took a bite of my cake. Oh my God. Soooo good. I sank back into my seat and propped my legs back up. I threw a light blanket that had been hanging o
ver the arm of the sofa across my lap and thought about Dawn. Her pale blonde hair, slumped shoulders, and the mottled pallor that comes with death kept running through my head. I had a feeling I would be seeing her in my dreams sometime soon. Scratch that, my nightmares.
Henri jumped up and pawed at the blanket, wanting to get under it. I lifted up one corner and she wriggled underneath, taking a second to find the best spot before curling up next to me. My mind kept spinning. Finally, I broke the silence. “Do you wanna know what’s bothering me?”
“What?” She humored me as she took a large bite of her own slice of cake.
“Remember in the bookstore and at the booth Dawn was the shy, quiet one. Rose did all the talking and Dawn stayed in the background. But when we talked to Patrice, she made it sound like Dawn was the one in charge.”
“Yeah, that had crossed my mind, too. Unless Dawn just put on an act in front of strangers,” she suggested.
“Hmm.”
“You know what I was wondering about?” Quinn shifted on her side of the couch again.
“What?”
“We haven’t seen the Mystery Man or his black SUV in a couple days. At first, you were seeing him everywhere, but ever since we saw him out at the sawmill, he’s been M.I.A.”
“Good point. Maybe he got nervous we were getting on to him,” I suggested hopefully.
“I don’t know, he wasn’t too nervous to do a stakeout behind the bookstore,” she reminded me.
“Yeah, but maybe he was just trying to scare us off and when he realized it didn’t work, he got nervous.”
“Maybe, but isn’t it just as likely that he is laying low while he plans his revenge on us?”
“Why do you have to be so morbid?” I asked.
“Sorry, I think I get it from Gigi.”
“Yeah, you must have.”
“Oh please, don’t act like you’re perfect. You’re the one with the temper,” she snapped.
“Yeah, I get that from Gigi, too,” I admitted.
“It’s all Grandma’s fault,” we said in unison, then giggled at ourselves.
“How can we figure out who the Mystery Man is?” she asked.
