An uncomfortable expression flashed across his face, and he gave her a tight smile before hurrying away. She frowned after him for a moment, but shook off her doubts. She was too worried about Charlie to focus on whatever Chris was keeping from her. Feeling the need to be with her family, she went to the kitchen where her parents were cleaning up the dishes together.
“Ah, there you are, sweetie,” her father said, looking up from the sink. “I was just about to come looking for you. Do you feel up to going on our Christmas tree hunt now?”
Surprised, she blinked at him. “You still want to go get a Christmas tree this year?”
“We might as well. It shouldn't take us too long to find a nice one. We’ll be back in before it really starts to snow, and then we can set it up as a family. I'm going to go back out with the search team after the storm clears, so I might not have time to go out looking for a tree later this evening or tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Lacey said. “I'll go get my stuff on. Chris is upstairs doing something for work. Are you going to be okay alone here, Mom?”
“I'll be fine,” her mother said. “I still need to unpack all the boxes of decorations I have for the tree. I'll have everything ready for when you come back with it.”
Lacey smiled. Of course her mother would be excited about the tree. Decorating it together as a family was one of their oldest traditions. It would be a wonderful way to pass the storm, since they couldn’t do anything more proactive anyway.
Chapter Seven
Lacey's parents owned about a good forty acres of forest. Their land backed up into the state land that her father and his friends used for hunting and fishing. She had spent many long summers roaming the forest, and it always enjoyed the peace she felt when she was out in nature.
For every Christmas tree that her father cut down, he would go out the next spring and plant three saplings of the same species. Some of the trees they had cut down in more recent years were ones that he had planted himself in the past. It was a tradition that Lacey loved. She remembered leading him all over the property as a child until she found the perfect tree. They would drag it back home together and, along with help from her mom, they would wrestle it into the tree stand and set it up in living room. Then, the three of them would take turns decorating it before finishing off the evening with a plate of cookies and a Christmas movie.
She was glad that they hadn’t skipped the tradition this year. The two of them kicked their way through the knee-deep snow, heading through the backyard to the edge of the forest. There were a couple of main paths that her father used, but even so Lacey found herself tripping over logs and tangles of brush as she walked. It was easier just to follow in her father’s footsteps, so she fell back a little bit to walk behind him.
“Where should we look this year?” her father asked.
“Let's check out at the far western corner of the property. Remember that tree that we cut down when I was eighteen? The one that had the crooked trunk? There were a couple of smaller trees nearby that should be big enough by now.”
“Lead the way,” he said, smiling and gesturing with the blade of the saw he was carrying. Lacey had the rope that they would use to drag the tree back to the house. It was a lot of effort, but in the end, it was always worth it.
By the time they neared the corner of the property, Lacey’s legs were getting tired. Walking through deep snow was a good workout, and she felt even more empathy for the search and rescue team that had been out the day before. The clouds were gathering quickly in the sky above them, and she knew that by this time tomorrow, there would be even more snow for the next search team to deal with.
“What do you think of that one?” her father asked suddenly. She turned to see a pine tree a couple of inches taller than her father sitting off to their right. She walked up to it, looking it over with a critical eye. She walked around it slowly, then shook her head.
“It's too sparse. We can find something better.”
Chuckling, her father set off again. The wind was beginning to pick up, and Lacey glanced at the sky for a second time, realizing that they had better hurry. The blue of the sky had vanished, and everything was just as white above as it was below. It was somewhat disorienting. She pushed herself to walk faster, wanting to find a tree and get it cut down before the worst of the snowstorm began. She wasn't worried about getting lost on the property – both she and her father knew this land better than they knew their own hands, but dragging a tree back through a howling blizzard wouldn't be any fun.
“I like this one,” she said a few minutes later. They were near the westernmost corner of the property, and she just laid eyes on the perfect fir tree. She began walking around it, looking for any broken branches or bare spots that might pose a problem. She was just about to declare the tree perfect when she tripped over something buried in the snow and went sprawling.
Sputtering and cold, she pushed herself up and was about to complain when she saw what was sticking out of the snow.
A man's booted foot.
Chapter Eight
Feeling like a coward, Lacey huddled near the fir tree while her father did the dirty work of brushing the snow off the body. Neither of them held much doubt that it was Charlie, and when she saw her father go even more pale, she knew for sure that their worst fears had been realized.
“He must've been trying to get to our house,” her father muttered. “Look, he had been injured. There’s blood. It looks like something attacked him. “
Lacey closed her eyes. She very much did not want to look. Her thoughts flashed back to Michelle's worried but hopeful face the day before. This just wasn't fair. Michelle had already lost one parent. How could she lose another while she was still so young?
“We need to call the police,” her father said, still staring at the body in shock. “They need to get out here before the storm comes. One of us should stay here with him. Do you think you can make it back home alone?”
“I’ll be fine,” Lacey said. The last thing she wanted was to be left here alone with a dead body. “I’ll just follow our tracks back. It will be impossible to get lost.”
Her father nodded. “Thank you, sweetie. Take care of yourself, and watch where you're going. I’ll make sure we don’t lose Charlie if it starts storming before you get back.”
Lacey turned away from the gruesome scene to head toward home. She glanced back to see her father looking down at his friend. What on earth happened to him? she wondered. What reason could Charlie have had to wander from his home, alone and injured?
As she walked, she considered the idea of an animal attack. Her father had said that it looked like something had attacked him. For the life of her, she couldn’t think of what. The largest predators they had here were black bears, and they weren’t exactly known for their aggression. She supposed it was possible that some large animal had been injured or sick and had acted unexpectedly and attacked him, but it just seemed too unlikely.
Unless Charlie had caused the wounds himself, that left only one option. Another human must have attacked him. The thought made her shiver and she began to walk faster.
She was breathing heavily and was somehow simultaneously panting and shivering by the time she reached the house. The sight of the cheery Christmas lights seemed incongruous with the image of her father staring down at the neighbor’s body. She slammed the front door open and ran to the phone, ignoring the call of greeting from her mother in the kitchen. She had already pulled the landline off its cradle and was ringing 911 when her mother appeared in the hallway.
“Lacey? What’s wrong?”
Lacey held up a hand; the dispatcher had answered. “Hi, my name is Lacey Townsend. I'm calling in relation to a missing man – Charlie Walden. We… we found him. We found his body on our property. C-could you send someone out here?” Her voice was shaking. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself down. She felt her mother's arms wrap around her and took comfort from the other woman's hug. She gave the dis
patcher their address and explained what had happened all in a daze. By the time she got off the phone, Chris was there too, looking at her with concern. Her mother was still holding onto her, and she could only imagine what must be going through both of their minds.
“Dad's with him,” she said into the silence that followed when she hung up the phone. “We found him at the edge of the property. He must've been there for a day or two already. There was a lot of snow covering him.”
She heard a strangled sob come from her mother and managed to turn around to hug the other woman back. Her mom had known Charlie for as long as her father had, and had babysat Michelle herself a few times.
“That’s terrible,” Chris said, coming up close to her but not quite daring to interrupt the hug between mother and daughter. “I'm so sorry you had to see that. And your dad… is he okay? I know he knew Charlie pretty well. He told me a lot of stories about him while we were looking for him yesterday.”
“He’s in shock,” she said. “I hated leaving him out there all alone, but I have to wait here for the police. They may need me to guide them back to Charlie.”
It seemed to be an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes, before Lacey saw the flashing red and blue lights through the trees. The police vehicles and the coroner’s vehicle pulled up into the yard. The snow had already begun to fall, and she knew that within the hour, the sky would be filled with blowing snow and howling with winds. They had arrived just in time.
Two police officers and two men from the coroner’s office followed Lacey through the woods. Her mother and Chris came along, both of them keeping back and out of the way of the others. As they neared the area where Lacey had left her father, she called out to him.
“Over here!” he shouted back.
Their little group adjusted their course slightly and within moments Lacey saw her father through the snow. He was standing in much the same position that she had left him in. She had always thought of her father as a strong, robust man, but right now, huddled against the cold, he just looked frail.
A blur of questions followed. There were flashes of light as the police took photos of the scene. It all felt rushed to Lacey. The storm was picking up, and none of them wanted to get caught out in the worst of it. The police had to hurry to gather whatever evidence they could find, because come morning, anything they left behind would have been either buried or blown away.
Before she knew it, they were all trudging through the woods again, then Charlie’s body was being loaded up into the coroner’s van and her mother was inviting the two police officers inside.
The police questioned them separately, asking Lacey questions about how well she knew the neighbors, her father’s relationship with them, and everything that she remembered Michelle saying the day before. She was asked to recount how she had found the body, and found herself choking back tears as she tried to explain what seeing his boots sticking up out of the snow had felt like.
When the police left at last, Lacey felt drained and exhausted. She wanted nothing more than to collapse onto a bed or the couch and think about nothing until the sun rose.
“Your mom made this for you,” Chris said, coming up beside her and nudging her hand with a mug of hot chocolate. There was a mountain of whipped cream on top. “Let’s go to the living room. Your parents are going to bed, but I don’t think I can sleep just yet.”
Lacey had never been happier to follow her fiancé into the other room and simply cuddle with him on the couch. It had been a long, terrible evening, and there wasn’t much that either of them could say about it.
Chapter Nine
At first, Lacey didn’t understand why she felt so terrible when she woke up the next morning. She felt as though a truck had driven over her the night before. Then she opened her eyes and saw her favorite sweater and her jeans in a crumpled heap on the floor, and she remembered everything that had happened the day before. Charlie was dead, and she and her father had found his body.
She lay in bed for a moment longer, trying to come to terms with what had happened and wondering whether she would cry. After blinking away a couple of tears and realizing that the rest would wait to fall until later, she forced herself to get out of bed. She and Chris had stayed up late the night before, both of them too stunned to talk and to shattered to sleep. Without the simple comfort of being held by someone that she loved, Lacey wasn’t sure that she would have been able to get to sleep at all.
The house was strangely quiet. She walked downstairs and into the kitchen, where there was still some warm coffee in the coffee pot. She poured herself a mug and sipped it while peeking into the oven. There was a stack of pancakes on a plate, and she smiled. Leave it to her mother to make a nice breakfast even on a day like this.
She shut off the oven and took the pancakes out, drowning them in maple syrup and eating them quickly. The necessities taken care of, she set out in search of her family. The first place she went was back upstairs where she knocked on the door to the guest bedroom Chris was sleeping in. When there was no answer, she cracked it open. The bed was empty and made, and her fiancé was nowhere to be seen.
She frowned. Where on earth had everyone gone?
She went back downstairs and peeked out the window that overlooked the front yard and the driveway. Her car was gone. Chris must have taken it into town, though why, she couldn’t guess. Growing more and more puzzled by the moment, she started searching the lower floor of the house. She got as far as the living room before she found someone.
“Mom?”
Her mother looked up from the jumbled mess of the fake Christmas tree that was on the floor, startled. “Hey, Lacey. I didn't hear you get up.”
The radio was playing Christmas music, which probably explained why her mother hadn’t heard her on the stairs.
“I found the coffee and pancakes you left for me. Thanks for that. Do you know where Chris is? And where is Dad?”
“Your father went into town to see some of his and Charlie's mutual friends and break the news to them before they see it on the television. Chris brought the tree up from the basement for me, but then he got an email and said he had to run off to town. I didn't get any more information out of him than that.”
Lacey frowned. She had no idea what had gotten into Chris, or why he kept running off like that, but her annoyance with him would have to wait until later. She could tell by the sad look on her mother's face that the other woman needed her company right now.
“Can I help you with that?” She sat on the floor next to her mom and peered at the bits and pieces of the Christmas tree.
“If you want to. We only ever put it up the first year that we lived here. I’m trying to figure out how it goes together, but the instructions were lost a long time ago. I haven't set up a fake Christmas tree in decades. I just thought that this might be a better idea than you and your father going out and trying to find one, after everything that happened.”
Lacey had to agree with that. She didn't think anything in the world could convince her to go back out and look for another Christmas tree with her father just then. She wasn’t exactly in the mood to put up a fake tree either, but she knew how much her mother valued these traditions and understood that this was the other woman’s way of coping with what had happened.
“I think this is the base,” Lacey said, picking up one of the pieces. “And then this pole goes here…”
It took them the better part of an hour, but they managed to get the fake tree put together and set up in the corner. Lacey fluffed the branches and backed up to get a critical look at it. It wasn’t as nice as a live tree, but it would do for the holiday season. Once it was decorated, she was sure it would look a lot better.
“There we go,” her mother said. “We can decorate it this evening, when we’re all here. It wouldn’t be right to start without your father and Chris.”
“Of course,” Lacey said. “Did you have anything else that you wanted to do today?”
“I was going to go into the diner. I don't have a shift today, but I'd like to talk to Mrs. Fritz and some of the other employees. They are bound to hear what happened, and I don’t want them to worry. Do you want to come in with me?”
“Sure,” Lacey said. If the alternative was sitting at home alone, she would have followed her mother anywhere. “I’ll go get dressed for the day. I'm going to give Chris a call too, and see what he's doing. It’s strange of him to disappear like that.”
She was surprised when her mother didn’t comment on that, and looked over to see the other woman looking at the Christmas tree sadly, her lower lip quivering. Lacey reached over and gave her mother a hug. “I'll be right back down, okay? Then we'll head to the diner together.”
Chapter Ten
Lacey called Chris while her mother drove them into town. He answered immediately and sounded surprisingly cheerful.
“Hey,” she said. “I was just wondering where you went off to. You were gone when I woke up.”
“I had to go to town to do something for work,” he said. “Don't you remember? I stuck my head into your room to tell you I was leaving. You mumbled something about picking up donuts on my way home.”
Lacey wrinkled her nose. She definitely did not remember that. She had a bad habit of talking in her sleep, and never remembered it when she woke up.
“Sorry,” she said. “I must have been completely out of it. Is everything okay at work?”
“It's great,” he said, sounding better than he had for a while. “Are you still at home?”
“No, I'm heading into town with my mom. We're gonna spend a few hours at the diner.”
“Oh, all right,” he said. “I might stop by and say hi. I've got to find your dad first, though.”
A Merry Little Murder Page 3
