by Kate Bell
“Ex-boyfriend and the girl that use to steal most girl’s boyfriends,” I said.
“Mom, she’s not even pretty,” she said.
Have I mentioned how much I love that girl?
“Thanks, honey, but she really is pretty. Just not nice,” I said.
“And how could you date that guy? You should be embarrassed,” she said, curling her lip up.
“Gee, thanks. Back then he was on the football team. It was a long time ago,” I said.
“So. Not cool, Mom,” she said.
Elmer made a beeline toward me. I debated whether I could run to the nearest bathroom fast enough, but he had a determined look on his face and I figured he’d probably wait outside the bathroom for me.
“Hey, Allie,” he said, looking at me and then at Jennifer. Somehow he forgot Alec was standing there.
“Me and Ann Marie are going to get married,” he said, grinning at me like a loon.
“Oh really?” I said. “Congratulations.” I tried to sound enthusiastic, but I probably didn’t.
“Hey, Allie, haven’t seen you around in a while,” Ann Marie said, catching up to Elmer. Her hair was teased like it was 1987 and she wore a skirt that was way too short for the weather.
“Hey, Ann Marie. I bet you’re excited about getting married,” I said, trying to be nice.
“Yes, I am. Maybe I’ll have you make my wedding cake. I know you bake a little,” she said. “Oh, a wedding cake won’t be too hard for you, will it?”
I could feel anger rising up on the inside of me. “I’m pretty sure I could handle a wedding cake,” I said, trying not to spit poison with my words.
“Who’s this pretty little lady?” Elmer asked, still looking at Jennifer.
“My daughter Jennifer,” I said, and introduced them.
“Well, she sure takes after her mama,” Elmer said, looking her up and down. I really wanted to punch him, and if he didn’t quit looking at Jennifer that way, it would happen.
“Thanks, we need to get going,” I said, and turned away, taking Alec’s hand.
“Hey, Elmer, John said you were getting some evidence processed for the Turner case. Where are you on that?” Alec asked.
I smiled. Alec had said it just because he knew it would irritate him, but I gave him a warning look, only because I felt like it was my obligation.
“I don’t see where that’s your business, seeing as how it isn’t your case,” he said.
“Now, you know John asked me to help out. There’s no need to get riled up. That’s a Southern word, isn’t it? Riled?” he asked, ignoring my warning look.
I wanted to reach over and pinch him, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. He was having fun and there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Elmer’s face went red. “I have already submitted the evidence for testing,” he said through gritted teeth. “Now I have things to do.” With that, he grabbed Ann Marie by the arm and pulled her back through the crowd.
That would teach him to come over and talk to me. I hoped. I would be happy if he never talked to me again.
“So, you’re making their wedding cake?” Alec asked with a grin.
“I don’t think so,” I said curtly. “I’d rather have honey poured over me and be staked to an ant hill.”
“He’s creepy,” Jennifer said and shuddered. “I can’t believe you dated him.”
“Me either.”
***
“Jennifer said there was a woman following her at the carnival,” I whispered to Alec as we stood on the front porch and gazed at the moon. It was cold out, but the moon was beautiful. I could stare at that moon all night, even if it meant freezing my nose off.
“Who?” he asked, looking down at me. He was a good ten inches taller than I was, and I had to look up at him.
I shrugged. “She doesn’t know anyone here. She just said she had a black trench coat on and had dark curly hair. She thought she was older, but she didn’t get that close to her. I don’t know why anyone would follow her.”
“I remember a woman with a black trench coat,” he said, still looking at me. “Why did she think she was following her?”
“I’m not sure. Jennifer can be very emotional, so I kind of thought she might be just a little paranoid is all. She said every time she turned around, the woman was there. I pointed out the woman could have just been following the crowd along, like everyone else, but she insisted she was following her. Did the woman you saw have dark curly hair?”
“I’m not sure. I just glanced at her. I remember the coat and not much else. I wasn’t really looking for anyone and the only reason she caught my attention was because of the coat. Something about it struck me as different. Or maybe it just seemed like an odd choice for outerwear, given the weather was dry and cold.”
“Well, I told her to stick with her brother and Sarah, or us. I never did see that woman. I kept looking for her after she told me about her.”
“Tell her not to go out alone, and if she sees her, she needs to call me,” he said.
“I will,” I said. “You think it was the killer?”
“I have no idea. But she trusted her instincts, and that’s good. It doesn’t hurt to be careful.”
“Okay,” I said, laying my head against his chest. As much as I loved getting to visit with my mama, I really wanted to go home. There had been entirely too much excitement since we had arrived and I was ready for some peace and quiet.
Tom Turner’s house stood dark in the moonlight and it made me sad. Christmas should be a happy time, not one of grieving. I worried about Leslie and thought I needed to visit her again. Maybe I would invite her to Christmas dinner if she was going to be spending it alone.
Chapter Sixteen
The weather stayed cold with a heavy frost covering the ground in the morning. Alec and I got up early to get a long run in before breakfast. My running pants felt snug, and I reminded myself to cut back on Mama’s buttermilk biscuits.
The ground was slippery as we headed for the woods, and I almost lost my footing. Alec reached out and grabbed my jacket sleeve to steady me.
“I got it,” I said. We were slowly jogging to warm up as the sun rose above the trees. It was a glorious sight with the bright, clear blue sky above us. “I love this place.”
“It is beautiful,” Alec agreed. “By the way, how is Lucy doing?”
“She’s good. Trying to figure this thing out from Maine, and Dixie the cat is doing fine,” I said between breaths.
He chuckled. “So glad to hear it.”
We ran in silence for a while, just enjoying the sights. The birds in the trees slowly woke up and began their songs and a rabbit popped its head out of its burrow. I wondered how people in big cities managed to survive in their concrete worlds, devoid of God’s creation.
“Faster?” Alec asked after we had been running for ten minutes.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding my head.
The cold bit at my cheeks as we picked up our pace. I glanced at the pace and heart rate monitor on my arm. We were making good time with an eight-minute mile, but I wanted to go faster. There was something freeing about being out here in the wild that made me want to run at my fastest pace.
As a girl, I had spent many afternoons and weekends exploring these woods and I had known them intimately. I explored mostly on my own, but sometimes with Jake or a friend. Jake had shown me how to catch frogs and fish in the pond on the other side of the woods, and we had grown close, with me looking up to my big brother.
“Over here,” I said to Alec, and I took him down a now overgrown path, deeper into the woods. Years ago the path had been clear, but in the years since then, it had grown over with weeds and grass. There were some bushes that I didn’t remember seeing back then and for a few minutes, I wondered if I had taken a wrong turn. But then I saw the old oak tree that had been split by lightning when I was ten. I was amazed that it still stood, still leeching out life where it could.
We increased our pace to a
seven and a half minute mile and the woods whipped by. My eyes watered in the cold and I brushed the moisture away with the back of my gloved hand. The trees were devoid of leaves, having dropped to the ground earlier. The carpet of leaves we ran through crunched under our feet, protesting our presence.
Alec pulled ahead of me by a few paces, and I increased my pace to match his. His longer legs had an unfair advantage over me. He glanced sideways at me and grinned.
“Ready to go harder?” he gasped out.
“Yeah, sure,” I breathed out. My breathing sounded like a freight train now, and my lungs burned with the cold, but I was always game to run harder, longer, or faster.
He turned on the speed and I pushed myself to keep up with him, my lungs protesting.
In a few moments, my body was airborne. I hit the ground with a dull thud, my head spinning, and the breath in my lungs gone. I lay in the leaves, trying to figure out what had happened and why I was on the cold hard ground.
“Allie! Are you okay?” Alec panted, kneeling beside me.
I stared at the small pile of leaves in front of me, confused.
“Allie?” Alec asked.
I could hear the panic in his voice, and I looked up at him. “Hey,” I whispered, trying to catch my breath.
“Are you okay?” he asked, breathing in hard.
“I, I think so,” I said, mentally assessing my body.
“Let me help you to a sitting position,” he said and reached his arms around me, turning me over. He gently helped me to a sitting position.
My head was still spinning and my right knee was throbbing.
“I must have tripped,” I said, looking in the direction we had come from.
He smiled. “Maybe running fast through leaves on unfamiliar ground wasn’t the brightest thing to do,” he said.
“Maybe not. I use to run through these woods all the time as a girl,” I said.
“I’m sure it’s overgrown since then, and become a running hazard, as we’ve seen,” he said with a chuckle.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” I said. “But my knee really hurts.”
“Let me see,” he said and gently pulled up the leg of my running pants to expose my knee. Blood trickled out of a deeply skinned patch the size of a grapefruit. “Ouch. That looks painful.”
“It’s going to hurt more when the adrenaline wears off,” I said.
“Let’s see if you can walk on it,” he said, putting his arm around my waist and helping me to my feet. “Is it bad?” he asked when I winced.
I took a couple of steps on it. “Not as bad as it could be. I think it’s mostly the scraped skin, and not anything deeper. At least I hope not.”
“Good. I’m sure it’ll bruise, but that’s easier to get over than damage done to the joint,” he said and he helped me hobble back in the direction we had come from.
“I guess that’s what I hit,” I said, pointing to an exposed tree root reaching across the path we had been running on. “It must have been covered by the leaves.”
“I guess that will teach us to run wild and free in the woods, eh?” he said.
I laughed. “That’ll do it. I’m getting too old to take a fall like that. I am going to hurt in the morning.”
We hobbled a few more steps, and I saw something glint in the morning sun. “Hey, what’s that?”
Alec went over and moved some more leaves and exposed what looked like a dagger lying there.
“Well,” Alec said, kneeling down. “It looks like we may have discovered the murder weapon.”
“Really?” I asked, hobbling over to him.
The handle on the dagger was bejeweled with red and green rhinestones and it had what looked to be an eight-inch blade, covered in dried blood.
“Wow. That looks nasty,” I said leaning closer.
“It sure does,” he said and took his phone out of his pocket and started taking pictures of where it was laying.
“Those red and green rhinestones don’t make me feel very jolly. Do you think Tom picked it out for its Christmas colors?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “You think of the oddest things sometimes.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “I’m not odd, I’m creative.”
“Maybe the victim bought himself a Christmas present,” he said. “I wish I had my notebook with me.”
I smirked. “I thought it was attached to you somewhere.”
He picked the dagger up with his gloved hand after taking pictures of the entire area, being careful to not disturb the blood on the blade.
“We’ll have to send that in to make sure it’s Tom’s blood, but I’d put money on it,” he said. “Come on, let’s get you home.”
I hobbled over to him and he put his arm around me to help me. The other hand held the dagger, and I couldn’t help but glance at it from time to time as we walked.
We had gone out over five miles and it was a long walk home. I wondered who could have wielded such a menacing weapon and plunged it into Tom’s chest. I shivered. I couldn’t imagine doing something like that and I couldn’t fathom what must have gone through the killer’s mind that allowed them to take a life.
“I’ll be glad when this whole thing is over,” I commented after we had walked in silence for a while.
“Me too,” he said. “When we get to the road, we can call someone to come get us if your knee is hurting badly enough.”
“I think it’s okay. It has kind of gone numb from the cold at this point,” I said. “The road isn’t far from Mama’s house, anyway.”
I hoped the dagger would yield the fingerprints of the killer so this could be put to rest, just as Tom had been put to rest a couple days earlier.
Chapter Seventeen
“Ow, ow, ow!” I said as Mama dabbed on the merthiolate. “Seriously, Mama? Have you had that same bottle since I was nine?”
“No, this is the one I had when Shelby was nine,” she said. She looked at Alec. “She was always a big baby.”
Alec chuckled. “I’m not sure that I blame her.”
I blew on my knee. A large dark bruise was spreading beneath the scrape and I knew I would be sore all over by tomorrow morning.
I ate a biscuit with butter and honey on it while Alec put the dagger in a two-gallon Ziploc bag.
“Good thing I buy those big ones,” Mama murmured, trying not to look at the dagger.
“Let’s go,” Alec said, grabbing a biscuit.
I hobbled out to the minivan and got in. I needed coffee, but it would have to wait.
***
Elmer was leaning on the reception desk at the sheriff’s office, flirting with the receptionist. The smile left his face when he saw Alec walk through the door. I glanced down at Alec’s hand and noted he had draped his jacket over the hand that carried the bag with the dagger in it.
“Good morning, Elmer,” Alec said brightly.
Elmer sneered at him, then grudgingly said, “Morning.”
“Is John around?” I asked.
Elmer looked at me, and didn’t answer for a moment, then changed his mind and said, “He’s in his office.”
“Great. Thanks. We’ll go on back and say hello to him,” I said, and we went on down the hall.
When we were out of Elmer’s sight, I looked back at Alec and gave him a big smile. “He doesn’t like you for some reason,” I whispered.
“I can’t imagine why,” he said innocently.
I giggled and knocked on John’s door when we got to it.
“Come in,” he called from the other side.
John’s desk was covered in file folders and papers. I wondered which one was Tom’s, but I wasn’t going to ask. I didn’t want to see any pictures.
“Hey, y’all,” he said. “What’s up?”
Alec held up the bag with the dagger. “Possible murder weapon.”
“Wow. Where’d you find that?” he said, wide-eyed.
Alec laid it on his desk and we took a seat. “Well, my graceful girlfriend
here took a spill during our morning run and she saw it when the sun shone on it.”
“Are you all right, Allie?” he asked, turning to me.
“Yes, just a scrape and a bruise or two,” I said. “It’s kind of weird. That thing just laying out there.”
“Where was it exactly?” John asked.
“About five miles out from the murder scene, deep in the woods. I think it must have been covered in the dead leaves, but Miss Graceful here might have uncovered it in her fall,” Alec said with a grin.
I gave him a look. If it wasn’t for all the leaves, I wouldn’t have fallen and he knew it.
“Wow, what a find,” John said, examining it through the bag. “I hope it yields some useable fingerprints.”
“Why would it just be laying out there? Wouldn’t you think the killer would have buried it?” I asked. “Or taken it with them?”
“You would think so. But they may have panicked. It’s hard to second guess a criminal. They don’t do things normal people do because their minds are always trying to figure out what might go wrong and cause them to be caught,” John said.
“I’m going to stick with it being a non-criminal. It’s less complicated,” I said. It still amazed me that anyone could do that to another human being. I had never been angry enough for it to cross my mind.
“I’ve got a number of pictures of the area where we found it,” Alec said. “I’ll send them to your phone. I can show you where I found it if you want to have a closer look at the area.”
“That’s a great help,” John said, nodding. “I’m glad it was you two that came across it. It’s odd, but the crime lab said the broken Christmas plate we found at the scene only had Tom Turner’s prints on it. You would have thought the person that made or brought the cookies would have left prints on it.”
“Do you think it was premeditated then?” I asked. “They knew they planned on killing him and wore gloves?”
“It’s a possibility,” John said. “I can see someone wearing gloves to bring the cookies to him, since it’s cold. But the baker wouldn’t have worn them, I wouldn’t think.”
