“I will tell you everything, as I always do, just as soon as I can.” I pulled off my mittens and unbuttoned then shrugged off my coat and laid it on the stool behind the counter.
“What in the world did the mayor have to say in that drawn out meeting?” Pinky persisted.
“I can’t get into anything right now. Really, Pinky, I can’t. And hey, you’ve put in a very long day here. Emmy and I will finish up, and you and I will talk a little later tonight.”
She planted her hands on her hips and frowned. “Cami Brooks, you’re trying to get rid of me.”
Yes, I was, before I melted down in front of her. “You’ve had to stay late enough because of me.”
She bent her head down so her eyes were level with mine and stared. “You’ll tell me ASAP?”
“Yes, I will.” I nodded and our foreheads bumped.
Pinky stared for another few seconds, no doubt trying to wear me down, and then she finally broke her eye hold, much to my relief. “Okay. I told Erin I’d stop by so I’ll get going.” Erin made up the third point of our nearly lifelong friendship triangle. And she, too, would be blown away by Frosty’s death. His murder. Pinky gave a little wave and headed into Brew Ha-Ha to collect her things.
The look on Emmy’s face told me she was curious as all get-out, but much too polite to say anything. I put an arm on her back. “And, you, too, Emmy. I’ll tell you as soon as I can.”
She smiled. “I know you will, dearie.”
“It’s less than thirty minutes until closing time, so feel free to go home. It’s pretty dead in here.” I cringed at what I’d said before I even finished the sentence.
“That’d be fine. I’m looking forward to sitting in my chair and putting my feet up. I’m more tired than usual for some reason,” Emmy said, and then sighed.
“That sounds like a fine idea.” If she only knew.
Emmy got into her warm outerwear and made her way to the door. “See you tomorrow, Camryn.”
“Good night, Emmy, and thank you.”
It wasn’t five minutes later that Pinky called. “Cami, I drove by city hall and there are a bunch of police and county sheriff cars there. And the medical examiner’s van is there, too.” Pinky’d barely had time to warm up her car since she’d left.
“Pinky, you know I’m sworn to secrecy.”
“Somebody died when you were there. That’s why you looked so spooked.”
Actually, he was dead before I got there. “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
“Listen to you. You sound just like a politician already.”
She was right. “What else can I say?”
“I can’t go to Erin’s now, not with everything that’s happening with you. I’ll let her know I’m on my way back there.”
“Pinky, really, there’s no reason to come back here. It’ll probably be a while until we hear anything.”
“Somebody died at city hall. They can’t keep that a secret for long. Sandy Gibbons will be like a bloodhound following a scent in no time.”
And if no one told her I was the one who found Frosty’s body, I’d be off the track and not at the end of her trail. For the time being at least.
I had trouble focusing on anything besides the image of Frosty, as dead as dead can be, lying on the floor pointing at that snow globe. It was as though he wanted the police to know what had killed him. That wasn’t the difficult part to figure out. The key factor the police needed to know was who had used the snow globe to knock Frosty over the head.
The sound of a car bumping into the curb outside got my attention. Then a second car pulled to a stop behind it. Pinky and Erin. There were my dearest friends, and had been since childhood. But when I needed to keep a secret, they were the last people on earth I wanted to be around. And this wasn’t any old run-of-the-mill secret. Pinky came in first, effectively hiding small fry Erin, who came in behind her. Pinky stepped to the side the same moment Erin threw her hands up in the air, making it look like she had just jumped out of a cake.
Pinky closed the gap between us with her long strides before I had a chance to take a single step back. “Cami, this is serious. What’s going on? Mark’s police car is sitting in front of city hall, along with the county crime van and the medical examiner’s van. And Mark won’t answer his phone.”
Erin pinned me in on the other side and her dark eyebrows drew together. “You’d tell us if something bad had happened to Mark, right? Like if he’d died? He couldn’t have been the one to die.” Erin and Mark had been an item in high school, but things had never been the same between them after they’d gone off to separate colleges. They’d both eventually returned to Brooks Landing where Erin started her career as an elementary school teacher and Mark was hired as a Brooks Landing police officer. It was evident Mark’s feelings were stronger than Erin’s in the romantic department, but there was no question that she loved him dearly. We all did. But not in that way.
“I saw Mark at the city hall when I was there, and he was fine. If someone died at city hall, I can promise you that it wasn’t Mark.”
“Cami Brooks . . . oh, never mind.” Pinky dramatically whipped off her coat and cap and walked to the back seating area in her shop. Erin and I followed her. Erin slipped off her down-filled jacket then she and Pinky hung their coats on the backs of chairs. We sat down for a very uncomfortable, stretched-out moment of silence.
“Would you guys like something to drink? I’m buying,” I said and attempted a smile.
Erin reached over and took my hands in hers. “Cami, your hands are shaking.”
I looked down at them and she was right. “I guess I’m a little chilly.”
“Your hands don’t shake like that from being cold. That’s from being nervous, from adrenaline,” she said.
“How about I try calling Mark again, see if he answers,” Pinky said.
I pulled free of Erin’s hold and turned to Pinky. “Let’s give him some time. He’ll get back to you as soon as he can.”
Erin looked around. “Did you hear that?”
“What?” Pinky and I said together as we tried to hone in on the sound.
“It’s probably the old pipes in the ancient hot water heating system. You can hear them when it’s quiet in here,” I said after listening for a few seconds.
“It’s kind of spooky in here after dark when no one else is around,” Erin said.
“Stop trying to scare us, Erin. It’s hard enough not to feel creeped out knowing Molly’s ghost might be haunting the place,” Pinky said.
Here we go again. “I only saw her ghost in my dreams, and not in our shops, Pinky,” I said.
Pinky let go of a big breath. “But in those dreams, she was always in our shops.”
Erin looked at her watch then changed the subject. “It’s a little after six. Maybe we should go somewhere else to wait for whatever bad news it is we’re waiting for.”
“In any case, we can finish locking up.” I got up and headed into my shop to take care of that when Mark came through the door and startled the heck out of me. “Mark!”
“Cami, you’re looking a little peaked. With good reason, of course.”
Pinky and Erin heard Mark’s voice and came bounding out from the back. “Cami won’t tell us a thing, except that you aren’t dead,” Pinky spit out.
Mark’s eyebrows shot up toward the ceiling. “Now why would you think a thing like that?”
“Because we saw all the emergency vehicles at city hall, not to mention the medical examiner’s van. That’s a dead giveaway.” She frowned when she realized what she’d said.
Mark’s lips tugged upward. “Well said. Okay. Cami was ordered by our assistant police chief not to tell anyone what happened until we’d made notification and we were ready to release an official statement.”
Pinky and Erin moved in close on either side
of me and each locked an arm on my waist. “What is it?” Erin said.
“Mayor Frost died in his office.”
“You’re saying Frosty just up and died?” Pinky leaned toward him.
“A heart attack?” Erin said.
“More like a head attack. A blow-to-the-head attack.”
Erin and Pinky stepped in closer to Mark, taking me with them. “Somebody killed our mayor?” Erin said.
“With a snow globe blow to the head. And Cami was the unfortunate one to find him.” Mark shook his head back and forth like he didn’t believe it himself.
When Pinky and Erin turned in to face me they almost bumped into each other. “Cami, you poor thing,” Erin said.
“The way you keep ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time is just plain as unlucky as can be,” Pinky said.
I knew Pinky was referring to Washington, DC, where I was falsely accused of an indiscretion, and to what happened after I’d returned home to Brooks Landing. The first months were uneventful, but then the floodgates opened and I had happened upon the bodies of three victims in as many months. I nodded and felt tears pop out of my eyes and run down my cheeks.
“Now, now, let’s get you something calming to drink,” Erin said.
“You know we don’t have any alcohol here,” Pinky said.
“I was thinking along the chamomile-tea-with-honey lines,” Erin corrected her.
“Oh, right. That we’ve got.”
“Clint’s helping the county guys wrap things up, collecting evidence, then he’ll want to talk to you some more. Do an official interview, Cami,” Mark said.
I didn’t know if I could a face an official interview. The unofficial one was about as much as I could muster tonight. The three of them shuffled me over to Pinky’s serving counter. “We’ve got to lock up,” I said.
“Erin and I will do that. You sit, and Pinky will get your tea,” Mark said.
I watched the three of them work with my mind only half registering what they were doing. Who had killed Mayor Lewis Frost with a snow globe he’d bought only hours before? There was something about the globe and its scene that felt wrong to me. But never would I have imagined it’d be used as a weapon to hurt anyone.
I looked down at the counter and spotted a penny I could have sworn had not been there a second ago. Pinky thought I had extrasensory perception, which I did not. And I surely hoped it stayed that way. I did, however, have a propensity to spot pennies that I believed my mother was sending from heaven, sometimes to comfort me, sometimes to alert me. A young woman had described finding pennies as an alert, a heads-up. So I wasn’t the only one who believed it was possible.
When the shop doors were locked, the signs in the windows were turned to Closed, and the only light left on was the one above Pinky’s counter, the four of us gathered as we had hundreds of times over the years to talk about things. Fortunately, 99 percent of the time the topics were far more mundane than the one we had on the table tonight.
My friends made me go over the details of the day, starting with Frosty’s first contentious meeting, then the next, and the next. And his two subsequent visits to Curio Finds where he finally tracked me down. On the second visit, he’d purchased the fateful snow globe, and then he asked me to consider the open seat on the city council. Mark jotted down in his memo book the extra things I hadn’t mentioned at city hall.
“A thing of beauty was not a joy forever for Frosty,” Erin said.
“Or even for a whole day,” Pinky added.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that particular snow globe was a thing of beauty or a joy to look at. At all,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Mark said.
“It was strange. There were three bears that were closing in on a man who was standing outside a cabin. He was holding a gun, and he had what looked to me like a resigned, maybe even peaceful, look on his face. Like he knew the bears were going to get him and he didn’t care.”
“That sounds pretty bizarre,” Erin said.
“I’ll say. It seems strange Frosty picked that one out of the scores you have on the shelves over there,” Pinky added.
“I know. And it had just come in and didn’t even make it to a display shelf. Frosty saw it sitting on the counter, and spoke for it when we’d barely put the price tag on it.”
“Well, Mayor Frost did have three bears come after him today, according to what you said, Cami. And those are the ones we know about. Maybe he liked the fact the guy had a weapon he could use if he needed to. Not that Frosty would ever use that kind of weapon, but maybe he had some tactics up his sleeve he was planning to use to calm everybody down,” Mark said.
“And now he can’t.” Pinky sniffled. “I always liked him. He got coffee here almost every morning.”
“Did you get a hold of his son to let him know, Mark?” I said.
Mark raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Not the phone call you ever want to make. He was pretty shell-shocked, especially when Clint told him his father may have been the victim of a homicide. Jason said he’ll get here as soon as he can tomorrow.”
“Poor guy. Why is it that things like this always seem worse during the holidays?” Erin said.
“Because they are,” Pinky said.
“I thought Clint would have finished up by now. I better go see if there’s anything he needs.” Mark stood up.
“Mark, there are so many people that Frosty was having problems with. It’s going to take forever to talk to everyone,” I said.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said as his phone rang. He wrestled it out of its holder, glanced at the face, and pushed a button. “Yes, boss. . . . I’m still at Brew Ha-Ha with Cami and Pinky and Erin. . . . Right.” He hung up and pointed at me. “Clint will be right over to talk to you.”
It was one of those moments in life when the ability to disappear into thin air seemed like the most desirable gift on earth to possess.
5
Clint phoned Mark a short time later, letting him know he was standing outside Brew Ha-Ha. Pinky swooped her way over to the door, unlocked it, and pushed it open for our assistant police chief. The arctic air reached our seats in seconds. Clint walked toward our group with purpose in each step with his eyes trained on me in particular.
A range of emotions darted through me: sympathy that he had the murder of the city’s most prominent elected official to solve, dread that he was about to give me the third degree, and finally admiration of his “eye candy” good looks. I kicked myself for letting the last thing enter my mind, unbidden or not. As irritating as he was at times, he was very pleasing to look at.
Clint’s phone rang. “I may have to take this.” After a quick glance he shook his head. “I’ll talk to our illustrious reporter later. She’s already gotten the press release. Mark, I see you left your car on the next block over so people wouldn’t immediately track you down here. I did the same thing.”
Mark nodded. “It’ll make folks wonder what’s going on over there. Clint, do you have the list of the people you want me to talk to?”
Clint nodded, and the two of them walked over to the archway between the shops where Clint tore out a sheet from his memo book and handed it to Mark.
“I’ll get right on this,” he said.
They moved back to the counter then Clint said, “Camryn, I’d like to go over some things with you, either in your office or at one of Pinky’s tables.”
I picked up my mug. “Pinky’s.” Then I started off in that direction.
“We’ll wait for you,” Pinky offered.
“You know what, thanks, but I’m going to head home after this, so why don’t we all catch up tomorrow?” I said.
“If you’re sure,” Erin said.
“I’ll see that she gets home safe and sound,” Clint said.
The hopeful looks on both Pinky’s and
Erin’s faces told me they were reading more into his words than he’d intended.
Mark lifted a hand. “I’ll be in touch with what I find out, boss.”
The girls grabbed their coats and Mark herded them out the door as they called out their good-byes. The lock clicked shut then Clint turned to me. “Let’s sit down. I want you to take me through every encounter you had with Mayor Frost again, what you overheard. And if there is anything else you’ve remembered.”
“Okay.” I gave him the details once more, but there wasn’t much regarding the mayor to add to the account. I added a little side commentary about the odd snow globe, however. “It’s not one I’d want sitting in my house, yet there were two more people who were interested in buying it if Frosty didn’t.”
Clint shook his head. “When we cleaned up the pieces, it didn’t look overly special to me.”
“What made it different, what gave it a sort of ominous feeling was that the man was standing on his porch with his gun in one hand and his other arm up, like he accepted that the bears were going to get him.” I took the last sip of my tea.
“It seems to me you’re reading way more into it than there is.”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen more snow globes than I can count, and none have been that strange.”
Clint shrugged. “Different strokes for different folks.”
A yawn that felt like it started at the tips of my toes pushed out my diaphragm and forced my mouth open before I could stifle it. The unsettling and heartrending events of the day were hitting me full force. “Clint, if you don’t have any more questions I’d like to go home.”
He studied me a moment. “No, no more questions for now. I’ll follow you home; make sure you get there all right and safely inside.”
Clint was over the top when it came to safety. “You don’t have to do that.”
The look on my face must have prompted him to reconsider. “I’ll watch from my vehicle.”
“All right.”
“If you’ll give me your keys I’ll go start your car, warm it up.”
Frosty the Dead Man (A Snow Globe Shop Mystery) Page 5
