Sour Cherry Turnover

by P. D. Workman

  “Officer Piper,” Beaver greeted. “Fancy meeting you here. I would have thought that you had enough to investigate without stopping innocent people on the street. Don’t you have a murder to investigate? And somebody said something about some kind of drug war?”

  “What are you doing here?” Terry demanded. “You don’t live around here.”

  “There’s no law against me walking down the street, is there?”

  “I’d like to know what you’re up to. What are you doing lurking around Erin’s house? Do you want to be arrested for trespass or loitering?”

  “Nice try. You don’t have anything on me. You’d better get on with whatever you were doing. Chasing after me is only going to slow you down.”

  “It seems to me that you know a little too much, Miss Beaven. Maybe you can explain that to me. What are you doing skulking around Erin’s door?”

  “I just thought… I was thinking I might ring the bell and chat. Erin was nice to me when we met at the restaurant and I was feeling a little lonely.”

  Terry got closer to her. “If you have nothing to hide, how about letting me see if you’re carrying any weapons?”

  “Weapons? Why would I be carrying around any weapons?”

  “You want to prove that?”

  Beaver eyed Terry and K9 thoughtfully. Eventually, she lifted up the edge of her jacket to reveal a gun holstered at her waist.

  She continued to watch Terry with eyes narrowed like a cat’s. Erin felt the knot in her stomach tighten. Was this why Beaver had approached her and Vic at the restaurant? Had they given something away when they had talked to her? Something that had gotten Vic kidnapped?

  “Take it out and drop it on the ground,” Terry instructed. “Do you have anything else?”

  “I might have a throw-down in an ankle holster,” Beaver admitted. “Would you expect me to have anything less?”

  “What exactly does a treasure hunter need all of this weaponry for?”

  “You’d be surprised about how emotional people can become while treasure hunting.”

  Terry let out a bark of laughter. “Oh, you think so, do you? After you drop that gun, I want you to take out the one in the ankle holster. Slowly, letting me see your hands at all times.”

  They were all quiet while Beaver obeyed Terry’s instructions. Both guns were dropped on the pavement.

  “Kick them away,” Terry instructed.

  “Here I thought you were going to forget that part.”

  “Any other weapons on you?”

  Beaver lazily chewed on her gum, mouth wide and loose. “I guess that depends on what you’d call a weapon,” she said finally.

  “Any more guns?”

  “No. No guns.”

  “What else, then? Knife? Taser? Pepper spray?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which one?”

  “All of the above.”

  They all stared at her. She had a hunter’s jacket with all kinds of pockets on the outside, and probably the inside as well.

  “Take off your coat and put it down,” Terry instructed.

  Beaver rolled her eyes and followed his instruction, moving slowly and keeping her hands in view as much as possible. She held the jacket at arm’s length, then gave it a little toss to put some distance between it and her when it fell.

  The halter-top she wore under the jacket didn’t leave much to the imagination. Her body was lithe and tightly-muscled. Her movements were loose and fluid and had given the impression she was soft, but it was obvious just looking at her arms that there was nothing soft about her. Removing the jacket bared a sheath on her arm with the handle protruding. She had a tattoo on her arm, originally black, but old enough that it was starting to blue. Terry approached her, getting close enough to kick the laden jacket farther out of the way.

  “Hands up.”

  Beaver raised her arms obediently. Terry gave K9 a command to sit and guard, and he obeyed, nose and ears pointed intently at Beaver.

  Erin was anxious about the fact that Terry hadn’t asked Beaver to remove the knife from the sheath. How quickly would she be able to pull it out and attack Terry if the mood struck? He seemed to care more about the tattoo than about the threat.

  “You were Airborne?” he demanded.

  Beaver gave a little shrug, very casual, as if it were nothing.

  “Who are you with now?”

  She started to smile, as if she were trying to suppress it but couldn’t quite manage.

  “You’re investigating this? For what department?” Terry persisted.

  “I’m afraid I’m not authorized to tell you anything, Officer Piper.”

  “But you are investigating it.”

  She just raised her eyebrows.

  Terry looked at Beaver, considering. “What do you know about what has happened today? You know we had a kidnapping?”

  “Unfortunately, I was in the wrong place when that went down… close by, but not close enough to see or hear what was happening. I was checking out… another possibility.”

  “And do you know about the note Erin was sent tonight?”

  “Are you going to keep me standing here with my arms up all day?”

  “Uh, no. Go ahead and put them down.”

  Beaver put her arms back down to her side, and for a moment everybody just stood there, considering the situation.

  Despite Beaver not confirming that she was working for some federal department, Erin no longer felt threatened by her. While it was possible that someone ex-army would be involved in a drug war, she didn’t get that feeling from Beaver, and obviously Terry didn’t either.

  “So?” Terry prompted. “Did you know that Erin got a delivery tonight?”

  “I knew something was going on. But no, I don’t know any details. What was it? What did the note say?”

  Terry told her about the note. Beaver nodded, chewing her gum and considering the details thoughtfully.

  “Do you know who it is?” Terry asked. “I haven’t been able to track down Biggles tonight. It could be something to do with him.”

  “You’ve got people working on that? I can have mine look into it.”

  “Any help we can get at this point would be appreciated. I’m not getting anywhere very fast. We are a small-town police force and we haven’t had any response from the federal agencies we’ve reached out to.” Terry gave her a nod. “Except for you, I guess.”

  “I’ll see if I can find anything out. But I haven’t seen Biggles for a couple of days. I think he’s pulled out.”

  “Then who has been sent in his place? Because the Jacksons aren’t going to give in that easily. If they felt he was compromised and pulled him out, they would send someone else.”

  “That was my thought,” Beaver agreed, giving nothing away with her casual, lazy expression.

  “We were going to go back to the bakery. I don’t know if we can find any clues there. I don’t know how all of us could have missed anything, but we’ll check, just in case.”

  “It’s a good idea,” she agreed. “Mind if I tag along? Just as an interested civilian. I wouldn’t mind having a longer look around.”

  Terry looked at Beaver for a minute, weighing his answer, then nodded. “We’ll all go together. But I expect you to behave like a civilian, and that means you do what you’re told.”

  “Of course.” Beaver looked past him to Erin. “Just like Erin always does what she’s told.”

  Erin could feel Beaver laughing at her. Just how much did the woman know? Was she talking about the events that had occurred since Erin had moved back to Bald Eagle Falls, or did Beaver know even more than that, back into Erin’s history?

  Terry shook his head, obviously sensing that Beaver wasn’t going to be quite as cooperative as she suggested.

  “May I retrieve my gear?”

  Terry hesitated, looking at the discarded guns and equipment jacket. He hadn’t had Beaver’s identity verified. She could be anyone. She could belong to one of the clans. But T
erry had a pretty well-developed instinct.

  “Yeah, go ahead,” he agreed.

  Beaver made quick work of gathering up the tools of her trade and shrugging back into the jacket.

  At the bakery, Erin looked around, not sure what to expect. Everything looked just as she had left it, nothing out of place. It was just her bakery, feeling a little empty without Vic there to help her, even with Terry and K9, Adele, and Beaver there.

  “Vic was up here, cleaning up and getting things ready for tomorrow. I went downstairs to get a bag of flour and I heard something down there.”

  “Your visitor bumping into something,” Beaver said.

  Erin looked at her searchingly. Just how much did Beaver know about the visitor?

  “I told myself that it wasn’t really a noise downstairs, it was just Vic putting something down upstairs. I got the flour… didn’t see anyone down there and went back upstairs. Vic was gone. I looked around for her and thought she must have gone outside to the garbage bin. But she didn’t come back in, so I called Terry.”

  Terry nodded. “We conducted a scene survey. There was no sign of her. The front door was unlocked, giving the impression that someone had been downstairs who had gone out the front, but there had to have been someone else here too, because they wouldn’t have kidnapped Vic and taken her out the front door. There’s too much activity on Main Street. Someone would have seen them. But no one had; they must have gone out the back.”

  Beaver nodded her agreement. Adele looked around thoughtfully. She wasn’t familiar with the kitchen, so maybe she could spot something that Erin and Terry couldn’t. Beaver too, with her sharp hunter’s eyes, might see something.

  Beaver walked around the kitchen area, peering into the tiny office. She looked at the back door, the one they had come in.

  “No sign of forced entry.”

  “It would have been unlocked,” Erin said. “We never lock the door during the day. We are always in and out throughout the day.”

  “Even after your rolling pin was stolen, you didn’t start locking the back door?”

  Erin started to ask how Beaver knew about that, then stopped. Of course Beaver knew about the rolling pin. That was part of the murder case, and whoever had sent her in wouldn’t have done so without having first read all of the information they had about the murder. The point about the rolling pin having been stolen from Erin’s bakery had been left out of the newspaper, but Erin assumed that it had been passed on to the various federal agencies that Terry had asked for help.

  “I… yeah, I guess so. I just figured that Charley had taken it… She’s had a pretty hard time since the murder. I really didn’t think she’d be back for anything else.”

  Beaver’s eyes were intense, despite the impression of laziness she exuded. “How is Charley doing?”

  “Not good. She’s been pretty upset, drinking, thinking a lot about… problems that she had.”

  “With the Dyson clan?”

  “She was missing Bobby… but I think it was more that she was traumatized by everything than that she actually missed him personally. I know they were together as a couple, but… I think it was more about being kicked out of the clan than actually missing her old boyfriend.”

  “Do you think she was the one who killed Don Inglethorpe?”

  “No. I know it looks like it, on the surface… but if you look deeper… he was the one who changed his vote to allow her to open the bakery. So he was the one she should have been the most grateful about… I can’t see why she would have hurt him.”

  “Maybe he was threatening to change his vote again. Maybe he was blackmailing her, demanding she pay him or he would change his mind again, on the eve of the opening.”

  Erin shrugged. She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what happened.”

  “Let’s go downstairs,” Terry suggested. “I want to have another look at what’s down there that our visitor might have been messing around with.”

  “There isn’t anything down there,” Erin asserted. “Just storage and the loo.”

  “Let’s check it out anyway. I want everyone to stay together.”

  They all followed after Terry, in single file down the narrow, steep stairs. There wasn’t a lot of room at the bottom to mill around and take everything in. Erin moved into the storeroom where there was a little more space. She looked around. She drew in the smell of the place. Dust and concrete, just like she’d told Terry.

  Terry and Beaver looked around with professional eyes. K9 sniffed around curiously, but nothing appeared to grab his attention. Adele’s approach was different. Her eyes closed and she just stood in the middle of the room, listening or communing with the spirits or whatever it was she did. Maybe she was praying. Erin wouldn’t discount it. Finally, she opened her eyes again.

  “There’s something down here,” she said.

  Erin was surprised. “What? We already looked…”

  “It’s something you can’t see.” Adele walked a slow circle around the outside of the room. Erin tracked Adele with her eyes. Something they couldn’t see?

  “Charley said there were secret tunnels between some of the stores. But I couldn’t see anything down here. I kind of… looked earlier.”

  “Secret tunnels?” Terry asked. “Old wives’ tale.”

  “Maybe,” Beaver said, “maybe not.”

  They all turned and looked at her.

  “There is a rumor circulating that a tunnel under the bakery is being used to store drugs.”

  Erin’s stomach dropped. “Storing drugs? But there isn’t even a tunnel here, you can see that. If there used to be, it would have to be behind one of the bricked walls,” Erin motioned. “But I’ve already looked at them and they are solid. There’s no way to get into a tunnel, if there ever was one.”

  Everyone went to the brick wall, looking over it and feeling it for some kind of mechanism to open it up. Erin looked at the floor. If someone else were using it to store drugs, then it would have been opened and closed recently, but there was no sign of the concrete beneath the wall having been scuffed or disturbed. She shook her head.

  “There’s no way.”

  The others looked at her. Erin shook her head.

  “If someone had been using a tunnel down here for storage, I would know about it. You couldn’t have people coming in and out of here without me knowing about it. And there would be signs. Marks on the floor, streaks in the dust. If there is a tunnel down here, it hasn’t been accessed in years.”

  “People can get in and out of here without you knowing about it,” Beaver pointed out. “Your intruder earlier got in and out without you seeing. Charley stole your rolling pin. You leave this room accessible so that people can use the restroom.”

  “But if shady characters were in and out of here, I would notice.”

  “I don’t know if you would. And you’re not here at night when people could come and go and move product without you being any the wiser.”

  “We’re in pretty early in the morning. I’ve never seen any sign that anyone else has been in here while we’ve been gone. I don’t have a bunch of extra keys floating around. You couldn’t use a place this small without leaving some kind of sign of your coming and going.”

  Just as she said it, there was a noise over their heads. They all looked up automatically at the same time.

  Erin had hung back while the others looked at the wall, so she was the closest one to the door. In a split second, she was heading up the stairs, determined to see the intruder this time.

  She didn’t even think about what she was doing or what she would do when she got up the stairs and confronted the burglar face-to-face. She didn’t have a weapon or any kind of training.

  The trespasser obviously heard her coming. There was the sound of retreating footsteps as Erin barreled up the stairs, the others calling after her. Erin heard them and put on an extra burst of speed. She needed to see who it was. Who was it that was holding Vic? She needed to find her f
riend and to see that she was safe. As she got up the stairs, she saw a slim figure with shaggy, long blond hair.

  “Jeremy!”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  T

  he young man turned to look back at her, and she saw that she was mistaken. It wasn’t Jeremy, but an older man who looked quite similar to him. Her mind flashed through scenarios as she tried to find one that fit. It wasn’t Jeremy or Vic. It was someone who shared similar features, like she and Charley did. Daniel or Joseph.

  “What are you doing here?” Erin demanded. “If you’re trying to help, you need to stop!”

  But his look back had been fleeting and he wasn’t stopping to chat. Erin watched his retreat, unable to keep up with him. She eventually stopped in the parking lot outside the bakery as the figure disappeared into the darkness.

  The others caught up with Erin.

  “Did you see anyone?” Terry asked, reaching for his police radio.

  “I… I think one of the Jackson boys.”

  “One of the clan? Biggles?”

  “No… I mean… one of Vic’s brothers.”

  Terry raised his eyebrows. “Oh, is that so?”

  “Not Jeremy. It wasn’t Jeremy. One of the others….”

  “I’ll put out a bulletin. Can you describe him?”

  “Just like Jeremy,” Erin said. “But a bit older.”

  Terry called in to his dispatcher and gave them a description, as well as the possible identity of the burglar. They returned to the kitchen of Auntie Clem’s.

  “Did you know that any of the others were in town?” Terry demanded.

  “No. I swear, I didn’t. I just knew about Jeremy. I don’t know why any of the others would be here.”

  “Well, he was here for something.”

  “Maybe he’s just looking for Vic,” Adele suggested. “Word is bound to have spread about her being missing. There’s been enough time for someone to get here from Moose River.”

  “Then why didn’t he stop when I called to him?”

  “That part isn’t really surprising,” Terry said. “They’re up to their necks in clan activity. Whether they’re here on the clan’s instructions or on their own, they really wouldn’t want to have to stop and explain themselves.”