Small Town Scary (Cozy Mystery Collection)

by Anisa Claire West

  “Not really. She came to my shop yesterday looking for a job. And I used to see her around when she worked at Amazing Crumbles.”

  “Oh!” I exhaled and my tense muscles relaxed. “I guess she really needs a job because she left her résumé with me too. Did you consider hiring her?”

  “No, I don’t have any openings at the shop right now. And even if I did, she didn’t seem very professional.”

  “That’s the vibe I got too! Like she was desperate. She came here last night at 10 when I was about to go home.”

  Chad frowned and demanded, “What were you doing here at 10? Doesn’t your bakery close around 6?”

  “It does. But…” I hesitated, contemplating whether I should tell him about how my assistant had gone missing. If Mikaila wasn’t found soon, then he would probably hear about her case in the media, so I figured I better be the one to tell him. “There was an issue I had to deal with last night. A legal issue.”

  “Oh really? What was that?” He asked, perplexed, as I unloaded the whole story in chronological order. Chad’s expression was grave as I wrapped up the tale, explaining how the police were going to search her apartment. “That doesn’t sound good. I hope she’s okay, but…” He stopped himself, observing the anxious fog in my eyes.

  “I know. It doesn’t look good. I’m still hopeful, but I know how these things usually turn out. With a body bag and a coroner’s report,” I said glumly, glancing out at the sunny spring day and wishing Mikaila would glide through the door and crack some silly joke to make us both laugh.

  “Is your role in the investigation over? Or do the police still want you to do more?”

  “I don’t know what the police want me to do. And I don’t care. I feel obligated to find out what happened to Mikaila. She was like a baby sister to me. She worked full-time here. I used to see her every day.” I suddenly realized that in the past year, I had seen Mikaila more than anyone else in my life. Single, living alone, not very close to my mother, not a lot of time to spend with friends…my life was centered around the bakery and Mikaila was like a pearl in that center.

  “I’m really sorry. I know this must be hard,” Chad extended his sympathies as he came closer to me, gazing at me with compassion.

  “It is,” I admitted. “I wonder if the police have even searched her apartment yet. They haven’t contacted me since last night…” I grabbed my cell phone and switched onto the internet, searching Mikaila’s name and seeing if anything had been published on her disappearance overnight. “There aren’t even any articles about her vanishing. The search hasn’t gone public yet.”

  “And it may not,” Chad said gently. “We’re not talking about a missing child here. Usually the police spend less time searching for missing adults because there’s always the possibility that they vanished on purpose. Hiding from debt or some enemy.”

  “But I don’t think that’s what happened.” I paused, considering how Mikaila had moved from Iowa to Wisconsin on her own. Was it possible that she was a drifter? Maybe she had already tired of Bluebird Landing and moved onto a new place. “I don’t know, actually. This is really confusing. But I want to drop by her apartment and see what I can find.” I grabbed my purse as Chad eyed me warily.

  “You could be walking straight into a crime scene, Cathleen. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “No, I’m not sure, but I can’t worry about that right now. I need to find out what happened to Mikaila.” Glancing at the time on my cell phone, I estimated, “I have an hour or so before I need to get back and open up. Her apartment is 5 minutes away in Eagle Ridge, so that will give me plenty of time to investigate.”

  “And the cheese shop doesn’t open until noon, so I have time too,” Chad announced, following me to the door.

  “You’re coming with me?”

  “Yes. I had hoped we could grab a cup of coffee this morning, but if investigating a missing person is the only way to spend time with you, then let’s do it!” His jocular tone produced a half-smile on my face. But the smile quickly faded as I reflected on the seriousness of the situation.

  “Okay, you can come. But we’re taking my car,” I informed, jingling my keys in his face.

  “You’re a little sparkplug, aren’t you?” He quipped, his strong shoulders shaking with mirth.

  “Am I?” I said doubtfully. Type A personality, yes. Overachiever, absolutely. But sparkplug? That seemed too sexy of a description for me.

  “You sure are,” he replied firmly, staring into my liquid green eyes until I reflexively blinked.

  “Okay, let’s go.” We hopped into my Volkswagen as I grabbed my copy of Mikaila’s address from my purse. “We need to drive to the edge of town and then pick up Broadway. Her apartment complex is called Fawns Crossing and it’s on Broadway.”

  “Fawns Crossing? That name sounds too pretty for such a shady part of town,” Chad remarked.

  “Yeah, Broadway is a little bit rough,” I agreed, suddenly wishing I had paid Mikaila more. I gave all my employees above minimum wage, but even so, the hourly rate wasn’t easy to live on.

  “So what are you going to do when we get there? Just knock on her door?”

  “I guess so. There’s really not much I can do,” I mused.

  “If the police have been there already, they might have broken down the door. Don’t be surprised if we find the cops there.” Chad rolled down the window as a refreshing breeze filtered through the car, clearing my head and lifting some of the haze from my thoughts.

  “Well, actually, I hope we do. The detectives should be there. It’s not like they have much else to investigate in Bluebird Landing. I bet some people still leave their doors unlocked around here.”

  “Around Bluebird Landing, yes. But not in Eagle Ridge. If it’s the Eagle Ridge Police Department that was asked to look in on her, then they might not get to it for a while.”

  As though to confirm Chad’s statement, sirens blared from the south as we crossed the border and whizzed by a chipped sign that read Leaving Bluebird Landing. I didn’t need a sign to tell me that. Houses were cramped next to each other with no yard space, and dilapidated apartment buildings stood gloomily in too-close proximity. No children played on the busy main street, and there were very few pedestrians. In Bluebird Landing, walking around was practically considered a sport. How sad that two towns could be so close to each other yet worlds apart.

  “Okay, I think this is it.” I pointed to the rusty red brick building on the left. “255 Broadway. And she lives in Apartment 5H. Looks like that’s the top floor.” I counted the number of windows to the top of the dingy structure.

  “I don’t think there’s any parking lot. You’re going to have to park on the street,” Chad commented, pointing towards a narrow space in between two cars. “You can parallel park, right?”

  “Yes, I can parallel park!” I clipped defensively. “You think because I’m a woman I can’t parallel park?”

  “Um, no, I didn’t say that, Cathleen. I happen to be awful at parallel parking, so I was just making sure you knew how to.” Chad fixed me with a lopsided grin as I gazed down at my feet, feeling stupid.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, squeezing my car into the tight space and avoiding the bumper of the car in front of me by about half a millimeter. My side tires roughly climbed the curb as I conceded, “I didn’t say I was good at parallel parking.”

  “No worries,” he said lightly, rolling the window back up. “Are you ready?”

  “Gouda and ready,” I joked lamely, feeling nervous again.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he said with a snicker at my half-baked joke.

  Fawns Crossing didn’t have any elevators, so Chad and I plodded up five grimy flights. Each stairwell became darker and more foreboding as we climbed higher. Cobwebs hung low and tickled our heads, and I could swear I saw a cockroach crawling in the corner as we reached the fifth floor. My heart ached to think of Mikaila spending her nights all alone in this forsaken dump. If I had known how s
he was living, I would have rented her a room in my house. At least then we both would have had some company.

  “This place is terrible,” I whispered. “I could easily see how a crime could take place here.”

  “Definitely,” Chad concurred. “Doesn’t seem like a safe place for a woman to live alone.”

  Shivering, I thought how my bakery seemed to be the least likely place for something to have happened to Mikaila. If anyone had harmed her, it had probably taken place at Fawns Crossing or somewhere else in the shanty town of Eagle Ridge. “That’s her apartment,” I pointed to the unwelcoming door that beheld nothing but a buzzer. No wreath on the door or welcome mat on the floor. Firmly, I knocked on the door. I held my breath, not really expecting anyone to answer. A moment later, cold shock pulsed through me as I heard the distant wails of human crying from behind the door.

  Chapter 5

  “Do you hear that?” I hissed, nudging Chad in the arm.

  “Yes, I do. Someone’s crying. But it doesn’t sound like a grown woman. It sounds like a child. Like a baby.” Chad pressed his ear against the door as the wailing continued.

  “You’re right. That’s definitely a baby. But Mikaila doesn’t have any children! At least none that she told me about.” I knocked insistently on the door, hammering my fists into the wood to rise above the din of the crying baby.

  A moment later, the door swung open and a frazzled looking woman in curlers answered the door. Carrying the screaming baby in her arms, she peered at us through blue eyes. “Oh, I thought it was my husband knocking because he forgot the key! He went out to get some more formula…” she trailed off, raking her eyes up and down our bodies from head to toe as though she was trying to discern if we were trustworthy. It was shocking that she had answered the door at all in such a sketchy neighborhood.

  “We’re looking for Mikaila Myers,” I mumbled, squinting at the address on the paper and then the one on the door. Bizarrely, the addresses matched. Did Eagle Ridge have a north and south Broadway that were different? Maybe so, but there couldn’t be more than one Fawns Crossing apartment complex. “Do you know Mikaila?” I ventured.

  “Who?” The young mother said blankly. “Mikaila? I don’t know anyone named Mikaila.”

  “But she lives here…doesn’t she?” I looked down at the sheet of paper one more time. “This is Apartment 5H, right?” I was starting to doubt my own sanity.

  “Yeah, but I live here with my husband and baby. Maybe you have the wrong building.” As the infant gurgled and became more upset, the woman slowly began to shut the door in our faces.

  “Okay, thank you,” I mumbled absently to the closed door. “Maybe I copied the address wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” Chad asked.

  “The detectives took Mikaila’s résumé from my files, but before they did, I made sure that I scribbled her address down on this paper. But maybe I wrote it wrong because I was rushing. That’s the only explanation,” I reasoned, although a clerical error on my part didn’t seem likely. As a rule, I did everything with precision and care. But maybe I had been so upset when the detectives were in my bakery that I copied the address down incorrectly.

  “That would make sense,” Chad mulled over the possibility. “What do you want to do now?”

  “Well, I guess I could knock on some other people’s doors on this floor. Maybe she lives across the hall in 5E or by the stairs in 5A…”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Cathleen. We don’t know who’s behind those doors. I think we got lucky just now having an innocent mother answer the door. Besides, that woman had no idea who Mikaila was.”

  “But that doesn’t mean anything,” I argued. “A lot of people don’t know their neighbors’ names. Do you know yours?” I challenged, already anticipating his answer.

  “No, but…”

  “But nothing. Mikaila has only lived here for a year. And who knows when that woman moved in with her husband and baby? Maybe they’ve only been here a few months.” I turned towards the stairwell, pondering my next move.

  “Maybe I don’t know you well enough yet to say this, but I think it would be a lot safer for you to just let the police do their work,” Chad advised as I wrinkled my nose. As an entrepreneur, I had learned that the only way to get something done was to do it myself.

  “You’re assuming that the police will do their job,” I protested. “So many missing persons cases have fallen by the wayside because of lax detective work. Cases go cold. People are never found. And that’s just tragic. I don’t want Mikaila to be one of those statistics,” I sighed as we hustled past an abandoned garage covered in spray paint graffiti.

  “Your shiny white Volkswagen looks very out of place in this town. I’m glad to see it’s still there,” Chad observed as I nodded.

  “Let’s get out of here. Thanks for coming with me.” I eagerly revved up the engine, feeling suffocated and needing to be back in the sanctuary of Bluebird Landing.

  A few minutes later, I swerved into the bakery parking lot, immediately spotting Byron and Jade inside. I smiled, grateful to see two familiar faces ready to work and help me get through the day.

  “Those are two kids that work for me.” I waved to the duo as Chad and I got out of the car. “They’re the ones who first noticed that Mikaila was missing.”

  Chad looked pensive. “I wonder if they had anything to do with Mikaila’s disappearance,” he said offhandedly as I flinched.

  “What? No! That’s ridiculous. They’re both sweethearts.” I spoke the words despite knowing that Chad’s suggestion wasn’t that far-fetched. Everyone is a suspect in an unsolved crime until proven otherwise. But Byron and Jade were two sweet kids and deep down I felt that they couldn’t have had anything to do with Mikaila’s vanishing. What would be their motive to hurt her anyway?

  “I don’t know. The one with the pink hair doesn’t look like a sweetheart.”

  “Chad, you can’t prejudge someone like that. She’s a college kid. She’s into 90’s grunge music. That’s all there is to it,” I defended Jade as Chad shrugged, unconvinced.

  “Just be careful, Cathleen. That’s all I’m saying.” He came around to the driver side and deposited a soft kiss on my cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow night for dinner. Should I pick you up here or at home?”

  “At home,” I replied without hesitation. For the sake of my mental well-being, I needed to get away from the bakery and spend some time in the haven I had worked so hard to create. “I’ll text you my address later.”

  “Great, how’s 7 sound for dinner?”

  “Perfect. See you then.” I squeezed his hand before he turned to get into his car and drive to work.

  Strolling into the bakery, I chimed, “Hey guys! Good morning!”

  “Hey Cathleen,” Jade greeted with a note of urgency. “Did the cops get in touch with you?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked as my heart stopped.

  “Two detective guys were here about a half hour ago. They were looking for you,” Jade said, nervously nipping her bottom lip.

  “And?!” I pressed, close to cardiac arrest.

  “And I told them they could probably reach you on your cell phone if it was really urgent but that you’d be at the bakery pretty soon.”

  Automatically, I checked my cell phone but didn’t find any missed calls or messages. Other than for Chad’s periodic flirty texts, my phone had been ominously silent in recent days. “They haven’t contacted me. Did they say what they wanted?”