THANKSGIVING IN PARADISE

by Daley, Kathi

  “It does at that,” Roy agreed.

  “I think we need to talk to this woman,” Kyle said. “Do you have an address?”

  “I do. I’ll call her and see if she is willing to speak to us voluntarily. If not, I can go through legal channels. Once I get ahold of her, I’ll call you back.”

  After the Roy hung up, Jenna and I decided to go into town to order flowers for Thanksgiving, as well as linens that matched since we were going to need to utilize at least four large tables. We decided on tablecloths the color of dark sand and napkins in a chocolate brown. Rita had a good selection of flowers on order for holiday arrangements, so we ordered a fall bouquet for each table and arranged to pick them up on Wednesday. Once we had linens and flowers ordered, we headed to the holiday shop for other items to use as decorations for the house. Initially, I wasn’t going to fuss with all that, but Jenna’s enthusiasm was rubbing off on me. By the time we returned to Kyle’s from shopping, I was the most excited I’d been about hosting the holiday than I’d been so far.

  “Roy called shortly after you left,” Kyle said to Jenna and me after we walked in from the driveway.

  “Did he have news about Julie Matheson?” I asked.

  “Not about Julie Matheson, but I guess the crime scene guys were at the blast site this morning with high tech equipment they hoped would uncover clues they may have missed the first time around.”

  “And did they find something?”

  Kyle nodded. “A body.”

  I frowned. I glanced at Jenna. She was frowning as well. “A body?” I asked.

  “Buried in the concrete,” Kyle specified. “A tiny part of it was exposed by the blast, so they dug the rest of it up. It appears as if it has been there since the foundation was poured.”

  “You’re kidding?” I gasped.

  Kyle shook his head. “I’m afraid not. The skeleton is being processed, but quite coincidentally, they think it might be Robert Edmonton.”

  “We find a file relating to Edmonton’s disappearance eighteen years ago, and then a few hours later, his body is found? What are the odds?” Jenna asked.

  “Astronomically unlikely,” I answered. “Still, I suppose that finding Edmonton’s body fits with everything else we’ve uncovered.”

  “So Robert Edmonton did meet with foul play,” Jenna shook her head slightly as she set the bag she carried on the kitchen counter. “My dad never did believe that he stole money from his own bank and then took off after suffering some sort of midlife crisis.”

  “Were there any clues as to how Edmonton ended up in the concrete?” I asked.

  “The crime scene guys are still looking into things, but Roy did some checking, and the concrete that served as the foundation for the new town hall was poured two days after Edmonton was last seen.”

  “So someone knew the foundation was going to be poured and took advantage of it,” Jenna said.

  “We think there was more going on than that,” Kyle answered. “It turns out that the concrete for the town hall wasn’t due to be poured until the following week, but Mayor Wallaby arranged for the concrete to be poured early. The cost for this early pour was an additional twenty percent, which says to me that Wallaby was in on whatever occurred that led to the president of the local bank being killed and buried in the foundation of the town hall.”

  I am pretty sure my mouth was hanging open at this point, although I have no idea why I was so surprised. On more than one occasion, Wallaby had demonstrated that he was very willing to operate outside the confines of the law.

  “So Wallaby was in on the whole thing,” Jenna voiced the thought I’d been having.

  “It looks like Wallaby was involved in some manner,” Kyle confirmed. “As of the last time I spoke to Roy, he had not been able to get ahold of Julie Matheson, but he had been able to get ahold of her defense attorney. He told Roy that he had never believed Julie was guilty of the charges against her, and it was his conviction that she had been set up as she maintained all along. He told Roy that Julie had seen a man carrying what looked to be a dead body on the night Edmonton was last seen. It was dark, and she’d been unable to say with certainty who the man was, but she was fairly certain the man carrying the body was Deputy DuPont. She told Mayor Wallaby as much since she was afraid to go to anyone in law enforcement based on what she’d seen, and the next thing she knew, she was being arrested.”

  “Why would DuPont kill Edmonton?” Jenna asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But if DuPont did kill Edmonton, that would be huge news, even now, Harriet must have somehow found out what happened and planned to reveal the cover-up in her blog. She must have needed to confirm some details, so she asked Julie to lunch.” I paused to work through the logistics of the whole thing. “It really does make sense if you stop to think about it. If DuPont killed Edmonton for some reason and then enlisted Wallaby’s help in covering it up, Harriet might even have known the truth all this time. She was famous for listening in on Wallaby’s conversations, and even snooping through his files.”

  “If she knew all along, why wait so long to tell what she knew?” Kyle asked.

  “She just recently took on the role as gatekeeper for the truth,” Jenna pointed out. “Prior to Judge Harper dying and Harriet creating Sinful Secrets, she appeared to be the keeper of as many secrets as anyone, but she kept them to herself for the most part. Once she came to the conclusion that secrets were bad, she began to reveal confidences she had previously kept close to her chest.”

  “So how does Harriet deciding to rat out Deputy DuPont after all this time relate to the town hall being blown up?” I asked. “Are we thinking DuPont blew it up? Because that actually makes no sense. If he wanted Harriet dead, it seems that he would have killed her in a manner that wouldn’t have risked exposing the body he’d buried all those years ago.”

  No one spoke for a moment, and then Kyle jumped in. “Roy told me that Julie told her attorney that when she went to Wallaby with her assertion that there was a body buried in the foundation of the town hall, he pointed out that the only way to prove or disprove that assertion was to tear up the foundation, which he was unwilling to do. It makes sense that Julie might have blown up the building, or had the building blown up, in order to expose the body that she knew had been buried there eighteen years ago.”

  “Yeah,” I said, with doubt evident in my voice. “That could have been what happened, but I don’t think so. If Julie was going to blow up the building to prove that she had seen what she’d sworn she had, why wait so long? She has been out of prison for a while now.”

  “And if Julie was behind this whole thing, why trash Harriet’s home office?” Jenna added. “Harriet had lunch with Julie on the day of the explosion. If she had been planning to blow up the town hall, it seems as if Harriet had been willing to work with her.”

  “There is something that still isn’t fitting quite right,” Kyle admitted.

  “We don’t know exactly when Harriet’s home office was trashed,” I added. “It could have been a day or more after the explosion. Maybe after Harriet died, Julie went looking for the proof Harriet said she had, or maybe someone else, such as DuPont, wanted to suppress what Harriet knew.”

  “Hold on,” Jenna said. “Are we saying that either Julie or Harriet planted the bomb? Because that makes no sense. Not if they were working together in an effort to expose the fact that a body actually was buried in the foundation of the town hall, which I think is where this discussion is going. First of all, Harriet would never agree to blow up the town hall. It was like her second home. And even if Julie did convince her it was the only way, why would she agree to the emergency meeting? At the very least, you would think she would make up a reason for the meeting to be delayed until the following day. She could even have used the holiday as an excuse for the delay.”

  “Actually,” Kyle said, “if, as we suspe
ct, the meeting was called by Lloyd to inform the group of the lawsuit from James Kingston, it seems like Harriet would have scheduled the meeting for the next day anyway. It wasn’t like the potential of a lawsuit was so important as to disturb everyone’s Halloween.”

  “Had Harriet ever called a same day meeting before?” I asked.

  “Once,” Kyle answered. “But she sent out emails in the morning about a meeting to be held that evening. The emails were worded to give the recipient the option of attending or not. The text on Halloween had more urgency to it, and a lawsuit that hadn’t yet been filed would not, in my mind, constitute the sort of urgency indicated by the text. When I first saw the letter from Kingston, I was sure that the lawsuit was the reason the meeting was called, but at this point, I’m less certain.”

  “So if not the lawsuit, what?” I asked.

  Kyle slowly shook his head. “I don’t know. No one alive seems to know. I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever know.”

  “So, what now?” I asked.

  “I know we can’t figure out how the body in the foundation is related to the town hall being blown up, but it seems it has to be linked in some way,” Jenna pointed out. “It would just be too bizarre if it wasn’t. I will agree that there doesn’t seem to be a logical sequence of events that explains everything, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one we just haven’t stumbled across yet.”

  “I do feel like there are still pieces of information that need to be discovered if we are ever going to stitch the entire picture together,” I agreed.

  “It would help if we could definitively determine if the emergency meeting was intended to get the town council there for the purpose of blowing up the council along with the town hall, or if the explosion and the meeting were oddly unrelated,” Kyle pointed out.

  Chapter 25

  Tuesday, November 21

  Jenna and I decided to do all our Thanksgiving shopping on Tuesday in order to beat the Wednesday crowd. Of course, the store seemed almost as crowded today as it had last time when we’d shopped on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but we vowed to keep our wits in spite of the chaos and power through until we’d picked up every single item on the list.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Jenna.

  “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

  “You just look a little… I don’t know… something.”

  “I’m fine,” Jenna assured me. “I guess I didn’t sleep all that well, and I have a bit of a headache. I’m thinking I should up my pie count by a few,” Jenna said, heading toward the apples. “Several people have been added to the guest list since I did my original count.”

  “Do we have enough pumpkin?” I asked.

  Jenna nodded. “I think we are set for pumpkin. I remember someone liking cherry, so I might make one of those as well as an extra apple.”

  “Exactly how many pies are you making?”

  “A bunch,” Jenna answered. “With so many guests, I’m sure you’ll have a need for leftovers, and to be honest, now that I’ve sold the restaurant, I really miss cooking for a crowd.”

  Jenna paused when we reached the dairy aisle. She took her phone out of her pocket and looked at the display. “It’s Dennis. He is at the ice rink with Kari and Gracie. He wanted to let me know that Rosalie came by and picked up Ashley and Kristi. I guess she is taking them to Reno to get fabric for the jackets they are going to make this week.”

  “That’s nice of her. Ashley is really excited about the jacket she has planned to match the purse Rosalie helped the girls to make a couple weekends ago.”

  Jenna began loading whipping cream in the cart. “I’m impressed. You actually managed to say that without sounding annoyed or jealous.”

  I shrugged. “I think I’m over the queen bee thing we talked about. When I told Rosalie that Kyle and I were engaged, she was happy for me, but I could see that she was upset that the girls and I would be moving out. I guess in the back of my mind, I’d always assumed that she wouldn’t want us living at the resort once she moved in, which made me feel pushed out, but I can see that I was wrong. She has worked hard to make it work for all of us, and I am determined to do so as well.”

  “Good for you. Should we get ice cream for the fruit pies?”

  I picked up a dozen eggs. “Sure. I guess so. We’ll grab that last so that it doesn’t melt.” I looked toward the bakery aisle. “I was going to pick up some extra rolls for sandwiches and leftovers, but it looks like Armageddon over there.”

  “Rosalie is baking rolls. I suppose you can just ask her to make extra,” Jenna suggested.

  “I’ll do that. She seems anxious to be part of this, so I don’t think she’ll mind. Should we buy extra gravy for the leftovers?”

  Jenna hemmed and hawed, and offered several solutions.

  “So did you talk to Dennis about tree cutting on Saturday?” I asked Jenna after she’d put several cans of gravy in the cart.

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him. He’s been really busy. In fact, given our schedules, we haven’t had the chance to talk at all other than by text or phone messages. But I’m sure we’re in. He worked last night, but now he’ll be off until next Monday barring a real emergency.”

  “I’m glad he is off for the weekend. It seems like he has been working a lot of shifts.”

  “They’ve been shorthanded, so he has been covering his duties as Captain and covering part of the shift work.”

  The poor guy was going to work himself into an early grave if he wasn’t careful. “Did you talk to your mom about Saturday?”

  “Mom wants Dennis and me to pick up a tree for their place. She didn’t want Bookman to overdo, and it seems like tree cutting day is always a long and labor-intensive day no matter how simple we try to make it.”

  I followed Jenna as she headed toward the aisle with the olives and pickles. “Kyle and I discussed the fact that we were going to be low on muscle this year. My dad can’t help out, and Kyle isn’t supposed to lift anything over fifteen pounds. You and I and Dennis can cut and carry, and I suppose if Bree and Pastor Dan come, they can help as well. I thought I might try to grab a couple of staff members to come along this year if anyone is in town. The resort reopens the week following Thanksgiving weekend, so I imagine that Logan and Noah will have returned from their time off.”

  “We could just get the trees from a lot,” Jenna suggested.

  “We could. And we could just buy frozen pies.”

  The look of horror on Jenna’s face convinced me that she had gotten my point about the importance of the Jensen family tree cutting tradition.

  “Maybe we can cut the trees for all the residences, and you can ask Noah to oversee the trees for the resort,” Jenna suggested. “I’m afraid our tree cutting crew has suffered more than their share of casualties this year, and I’m not sure that cutting so many trees is realistic.”

  I hated to admit it, but I supposed Jenna was right. “I’ll call Dad and talk to him about it. I suppose he may already have made arrangements for the trees for the lodge, restaurant, and cabins. I assumed we’d go out as a family and get them like we usually do, but given his physical limitations, Dad may have made other plans.”

  After we completed our shopping, we stopped at Kyle’s to drop off the food that wasn’t related to the pies Jenna was planning to make. He was on the phone when we arrived, so I stuck my head in his office to let him know we were there, and then I joined Jenna in the kitchen to help put the food away. I supposed in some ways we may have gone completely overboard, but the last thing I wanted was to run out of some key ingredient on Thanksgiving Day with a houseful of friends and family.

  “So are you still planning to announce your engagement at Thanksgiving?” Jenna asked as she stacked canned goods in the pantry.

  “I’m not sure. The family knows, and that’s the most important thing. I don’t mind lettin
g everyone else know, but it has occurred to me that once the masses know, people will start asking about a date.”

  “And you aren’t ready to set a date?”

  “Not really. I promised Ashley and Gracie that we wouldn’t do anything until we worked everything out relating to the living arrangements. Kyle and I talked about it and came to the conclusion that we should wait and see how things naturally develop.”

  “Are you considering options other than you and the girls moving in here with Kyle?”

  I blew out a breath. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s complicated.”

  Jenna gave me a quick, hard hug. “Just take your time. As you said, the odds are that things will unfold naturally. I can’t see that anything will be gained in forcing things before you are ready. I know you have known Kyle for a long time, but you have only been a couple for five months. Less than five months actually.”

  That seemed like a switch from her previous advice to tell the girls how it was going to be and not let them sway me. I glanced at Jenna. She seemed different today. Almost more emotional. I wondered if she and Dennis were involved in another of their increasingly frequent spats. “I guess it is true that Kyle and I haven’t really been a couple all that long, and Kyle seems fine with taking things slow, so I guess, at this point, that is what we will do. I’m still thinking about a summer or fall wedding, but I guess we’ll see how it all comes together.”

  “I’m not sure we are going to have room in the freezer for all the ice cream we bought,” Jenna said.

  “Kyle has an extra freezer in the walk-in pantry.”

  Jenna opened the door and walked inside the pantry that was really the size of a room. “I never realized that was a freezer,” Jenna called out to me. “The way he has it built in, it looks like a cabinet. I have to say I am officially jealous.”

  “When Kyle remodeled the kitchen, he went all out to make sure everything was perfect,” I had to agree.

  I looked up as Kyle walked into the room from the main living area. He had a frown on his face. “Problem?” I asked.