“My mother likes to tell me that back in her day, they only got to watch Christmas movies during the Christmas season. And if you missed a favorite one, you were just out of luck. I told her it was like living in the dark ages.”
I laughed. “I’m sure she appreciated that,” I said and clicked on to the Peanuts special, A Charlie Brown Christmas. “My favorite!”
“Mine too,” he said and laid his head on my shoulder. “It’s like we were meant to be.”
I giggled. Yes, I giggled just like a schoolgirl. I couldn’t help myself. “You can say that again,” I agreed.
We watched in silence a while, just enjoying being together. Being with someone and not having to make conversation all the time was one of my favorite things.
Ethan’s phone buzzed, and he pulled it out of his pocket and looked at it, frowning.
“Who is it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’ll find out.” Ethan answered the phone and after a moment he said, “I’ll be right there. Don’t touch anything.” He had become serious and his brow furrowed.
“What is it?”
He stuffed his phone into his pocket and stood up, grabbing his coat off the back of the sofa. “It was Phil Peterson. He found Josh Tate dead, in the ballroom.”
Chapter Seventeen
The party house still hadn’t been decorated, and I wondered about it. I had expected that by now the inside would have been completely finished. Phil Peterson had said it was supposed to be done last Saturday. The outside of the house did have clear lights put up, and it really made the place beautiful, but the play was next weekend and there wasn’t much time left.
Phil met us at the front door. His eyes were wide. “I didn’t dial 911. Maybe I should have,” he said leading us through the foyer. “I just called you as soon as I found him. This doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what’s going on around here.” He was talking quickly but Ethan didn’t answer him. Josh Tate was lying at the foot of the stairs. It was like déjà vu. How had he fallen down those stairs just like Ellie had? Ethan went to where Josh lay and squatted down beside him. He reached out and put a hand on his neck, feeling for a pulse.
Josh lay silently, staring up at the ceiling. “Phil, did you check for a pulse when you first found him?” Ethan asked over his shoulder.
Phil’s eyes got big, and he shook his head. “No. I took one look at him and I just knew he had to be dead. He’s dead, isn’t he? Did I mess up? Should I have checked for a pulse?” He held a knit cap, kneading the fabric between both hands.
I thought Phil was going to lose it. Finding a dead body did that to a person.
“He’s gone,” Ethan said standing up. “Did you call me immediately when you found him?”
Phil nodded furiously. “Yes. The minute I saw him, I gave you a call. I just came to check on the place. After the door was left unlocked a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been coming down here nearly every night. I tell you, you don’t know what it’s like having someone die in your business. I couldn’t risk the door being left open and someone else dying. But look at what happened now.” He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know why this has to happen to me.”
I narrowed my eyes at Phil. He wasn’t dead, so he had nothing to complain about. I looked at Josh. He appeared to be in good health, and I couldn’t imagine him just falling down those stairs.
“Was the door unlocked?” Ethan asked.
He shook his head. “No, it was locked. But the lights were on.”
“There’s blood coming from the back of his head,” he said, looking at me.
I nodded. “Maybe he hit the edge of the stairs?”
“Maybe.”
Ethan made a call to the police department and asked for officers to assist him as well as for the coroner to come. When he got off the phone, he looked at Phil. “We’ll have to wait for the coroner to come. In the meantime, I’m going to have a look around the place.”
Phil nodded. “All right.”
Ethan looked at me. “Mia, can you stay here by the body and make sure no one touches anything if anyone besides the other officers show up? I’m just going to take a walk around the inside of the building, and I’ll be back.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll come with you,” Phil said and followed Ethan as he headed toward the kitchen.
I hated to look at Josh, but I took a few steps closer. His eyes were open. There was a small pool of blood trickling out beneath the back of his head. I knelt beside him to get a closer look.
Had Josh hit his head on one of the corners of the steps? Or had someone hit him from behind? I looked around the nearby area, but I didn’t see anything unusual. The ballroom was nearly empty. When people rented the house, they had a choice of two different styles of chairs that were kept in a storage shed out back. Much of the time the ballroom itself was empty until it was rented out.
After a couple of minutes, Ethan came out of the kitchen with Phil trailing behind him.
“There wasn’t any blood when Ellie died, right?” I asked Ethan.
He shook his head. “Not really. There was a small head wound the medical examiner discovered, but it didn’t bleed much.”
“I don’t know who would have done this,” Phil said, shaking his head. “First Ellie, and now Josh. And why in my party house? That’s what I don’t understand. Who would do this? Why did this have to happen to me?”
Phil was talking fast, and I considered pointing out that “this” had happened to Ellie and Josh and not him, but I decided against it. He was getting on my nerves and if he kept repeating himself, I was going to say something I’d regret. Ethan scowled at him and then looked at me. I thought Phil was probably getting on Ethan’s nerves, too.
“Phil, where were you before you came here to the party house this evening?” Ethan asked.
“I’ve been helping my wife run her business. She owns the children’s clothing shop now. I don’t know if you knew that or not.”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said. “When did she buy it?” The children’s shop was small, and it catered to a small range of sizes, mostly toddlers and up to pre-teens.
“About a month ago,” he said. “We intended to have a grand opening, but the Christmas season just kind of slipped up on us, and then there was this whole fiasco of finding Ellie dead in the ballroom. We’ve had other things on our minds, and I think we really blew it as far as Christmas sales are concerned. We should have had a grand opening, and we should have tried to get more people into the store.”
“So you were there all day?” Ethan asked him.
He nodded and then he stopped, looking at Ethan wide-eyed. “Wait. You don’t think that I had something to do with this, do you?”
Ethan shook his head. “No, I don’t think you had anything to do with this, but if I don’t check out every avenue, I’m not really doing my job, am I?”
“No, I guess not,” he said reluctantly and then glanced at me. I didn’t think Ethan suspected him of anything, but now he looked worried.
“Has anyone been authorized to be in this building today?” Ethan asked him.
“Actually, I hired Chris Adams to do some touch-up painting here in the ballroom. There are some places where some over-excited partygoers hit the walls, and the paint was either chipped or dirty and when it was cleaned, it left a mark. I’ve been putting off painting the entire room. I don’t know what Josh was doing here.”
“I thought Josh was your regular handyman?” Ethan asked.
“He is. But he told me his wife needed him at home. They had some relatives coming in early for the holidays. He said he would rather have worked, but his wife, being hormonal, insisted he stay home and he didn’t want to upset her. I called Chris to do the work.”
“Does it look like it was done?” Ethan asked, looking at the walls.
Phil went to the doorway and put a hand on a spot. He shook his head. “No, this area hasn’t been done. I see several places that were supposed t
o be painted.”
There was the faint smell of paint in the air, but I wasn’t sure if it was strong enough to have come from painting done today.
“How come the ballroom isn’t decorated for the play? I thought that was going to be done last Saturday?” I asked. Christmas would be here before we knew it and there wasn’t much time left.
“I was going to have a whole slew of volunteers in here, but after Ellie died, I thought I should give it an extra week. People get creeped out by that kind of thing; being in a building where someone was just murdered.”
He had a point. The last thing anyone wanted was for people to stand around pointing at the place where Ellie was found dead. It might not be a bad idea to move the play somewhere else.
It didn’t take long for the other police officers to show up. The coroner would be another thing. Ethan gave the other officers instructions for scouting out the other rooms and the outside of the building for clues the killer may have left behind.
“I’m going to take a look upstairs,” Ethan said to me.
“I’m coming with you,” I said.
He handed me a pair of rubber gloves while putting on his own pair. “Try not to disturb anything.”
We had to step around Josh’s body to get to the foot of the stairs and I tried not to look at him again. I had known the stairs were steep, but when you climbed them, it really gave you a feel for just how steep they were. Anyone not careful would be at risk for taking a tumble. I kept one gloved hand on the handrail as we climbed.
Ethan pushed open the attic door and flipped on the light switch, and we stepped into the prop room. The room covered the entire expanse of the house. Phil had done a good job of organizing it with large Halloween props gathered in one corner, smaller Halloween items on shelves that were built along one of the longer walls, costumes, Christmas decorations, and other assorted items.
“Any chance Josh took a wrong step and fell down the stairs?” I asked him. I knew the chances weren’t good that that was what had happened, but I wanted to know what he thought.
“I guess it’s possible, but I doubt it. It would be a heck of a coincidence,” he said, visually scanning the boxes on the shelves.
I sighed. I knew he was going to say that.
“He hasn’t been dead long. Rigor Mortis hasn’t set in,” he said.
“Too bad Phil didn’t stop in a little earlier then,” I said.
“It is too bad.”
“This room really holds a lot, doesn’t it?” I observed as we looked around.
“It does,” Ethan said absently. He kneeled near the entrance of the room, looking at something on the floor.
“Did you find something?” I came over to see what he was looking at.
“Shoeprint,” he said. He had some of those little plastic yellow markers and placed one next to it. “It could belong to anyone of course, but it might be something important.”
“That print looks kind of small to be Josh’s. And I bet it isn’t Phil’s, either,” I said, looking at it. “It looks like a woman’s print. Of course, it could belong to Angela Peterson or Ellie.”
He nodded. “The floors have been varnished, and it looks like a scuff from a rubber soled shoe. Ellie was wearing rubber-soled shoes, so it could be hers.”
I hoped it wasn’t Ellie’s. I hoped it was something that would lead us to the killer. But the shoe print wasn’t very large, and Josh had been a large man. Could someone kill him if they were much smaller than he was? I supposed if they came up behind him and gave him a shove down those stairs, it would certainly be possible. As steep as they were, it would be hard to stop yourself once you began falling. I shuddered at the thought. Losing your step at the top of the stairs would be a one-way ticket all the way to the bottom.
We walked around the rest of the room, but there wasn’t anything that looked out of order or suspicious. Some of the Christmas decorations had been gone through, with the tops of the cardboard boxes left open, but Ellie may have done that.
I went to the dormer style window and looked out. You could see most of the Pumpkin Hollow businesses from this vantage point. I could see the candy shop from where I was, and I thought if I were a killer, this would be a great place to hang out and plot someone’s death. And if the target was someone that lived or worked nearby, the killer would probably get to see them quite often throughout the day. It was a creepy thought, and I had to wonder if someone had done that.
“Are you going to dust for fingerprints?”
“I’ll have one of the other officers take care of it. When we dusted for prints when Ellie died, there were so many of them that it hadn’t done a lot of good. Maybe there will be some that weren’t here last time. Let’s go back downstairs,” he said after looking through the props and boxes and led the way.
Going down the stairs was even scarier than going up them. I held on tightly to the handrail, trying to keep my eyes off Josh’s body. I thought again about how easy it would be to fall, even if you were given just the slightest of pushes.
Chapter Eighteen
I had to leave the ballroom shortly after the other police officers showed up the previous evening. I had forgotten to turn the oven off before we left the house. By the time I got back home, the lasagna was already burned, and I had to toss it in the trash. I considered driving back up to the party house to keep Ethan company while he waited for the coroner, but he had insisted that I stay put. He hadn’t gotten home until sometime in the middle of the night, and as we now drove across town, I could tell he was fighting sleep.
“Where are we going?” I finally asked him.
“We’re going to have a chat with Chris Adams. He agreed to go in and do the touchup painting at the ballroom last night, and yet somehow Josh ended up dead there. I need to know what he has to say about it.”
I nodded. “I want to know what he has to say about it, too,” I said. It was 7:30 in the morning, and I was due at the candy store at 9:00 am. But the candy could wait, at least for a little while.
“You know you probably shouldn’t be coming with me,” he said.
“I know.”
We pulled up in front of Chris’ house and Ethan parked his truck. He hadn’t intended to bring me along, but when I spotted him getting in his truck, I ran across the street and told him I wanted to come along. I didn’t even know where he was going, but I knew it had something to do with the murder. He reluctantly agreed when I promised him that I wouldn’t follow him around all day.
We headed up the walkway and Ethan knocked on the door. Chris looked surprised to see us. He was dressed in jeans and a blue chambray work shirt and looked like he was getting ready to go to work.
“Well, Ethan. Mia. To what do I owe the pleasure?” He smiled uneasily.
“Chris, can we come in for a minute?” Ethan asked. His tone was serious, and I hoped Chris had a good explanation for not being at the ballroom the night before.
Chris considered his request a moment, then gave a short nod of his head. “Sure, come on in.”
We followed him into the living room, and he motioned for us to sit on the couch across from the overstuffed chair that he took. “What can I do for you two?”
Chris’s house was neatly kept and sparsely furnished. It looked like a home that belonged to a man that hadn’t taken a lot of time to think about what his house looked like. There was no Christmas tree or anything else that indicated it was nearly Christmas. It made me feel kind of sad.
“Did you hear that Josh Tate was murdered last night?” Ethan asked.
Chris’s eyes went wide. “No, I didn’t hear that. What happened?”
“He was murdered at the ballroom,” Ethan said. “Looks like he fell down the stairs.”
Chris looked at us, stunned. “Are you serious? He died the same way Ellie died?”
Ethan nodded. “He did. And Phil Peterson said you were supposed to be at the ballroom doing some touchup painting yesterday. Did you do any painting there last night
?”
Chris nodded slowly. He looked genuinely shocked to hear the news, or he was a very good actor.
“Phil called me yesterday afternoon at about two o’clock. I told him I would be there around six. I had another job to finish first. I was hanging a door for Mrs. Jackson. From the sound of what Phil needed done, I didn’t think it would take more than a couple of hours. I decided I had time to get it finished last night.” He looked at both of us, still looking stunned. “I just can’t believe Josh was murdered.”
“So why didn’t you do the work? We were called out at just after seven o’clock. Where were you?” Ethan asked again.
“I was there. I did some of the painting, but I ran out of the color I needed.”
“What time?” Ethan asked.
“The work I did for Mrs. Jackson didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I was finished hanging the door along with a couple of other small jobs by 3:30. I went straight over to the ballroom and what I got done only took me about an hour and a half. I was out of there by five o’clock.”
Ethan and I looked at one another. I thought I had smelled a little paint when we were there, but it wasn’t terribly strong for being fresh paint.
“You didn’t see anyone while you were there?” he asked.
He shook his head. “No one. To tell you the truth, there wasn’t a lot of work that needed to be done. There were a few places that were rubbed thin when the walls were cleaned, and I just painted over them real quick. I’ve got to go back there today after I buy more paint and finish it up. If I can get in there, that is.”
“It will have to wait a couple of days.” Ethan stared at him a moment. “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Josh Tate?” he asked.
He nodded. “I sure do. I think Laura did it,” he said looking at both of us. “Would either of you like some coffee? I just made a fresh pot.”
We both declined. I couldn’t imagine Laura being able to kill somebody like Josh Tate. He was so much younger and bigger, that I couldn’t imagine how she could get it done unless she snuck up behind him and shoved him down the stairs.
Confectionately Dead Page 10
