by Meg Muldoon
I shrugged, going for some items in the cupboard.
“Nothing you want to hear about,” I said.
She put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows.
“Try me,” she said.
I let out a sigh, coming back to the kitchen island with a sack of flour and several spice jars.
“It’s just… sometimes it seems like there’s not a lot of justice in the world,” I muttered. “It’s not like television or in the movies. Even though everyone does their best, most bad guys get away with it.”
She scrunched up her nose for a moment, as if in deep thought.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “But you know, once you start taking on the world’s problems, it gets to be a slippery slope. There’s always something to be down about if you look hard enough.”
I nodded.
She had a good point there.
“You want to tell me the details?” she said.
“Just this case Daniel’s working on,” I said. “There’s a man who’s done something, but he’s not going to pay for it because there’s no evidence to—”
I stopped midsentence as I felt a buzzing from my apron pocket.
Maybe it was Warren.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I should probably get this.”
Tiana nodded and smiled understandingly. She grabbed a pan of cooled pies from off the cold marble counter, and headed toward the front of the house with them.
I dusted off my flour-caked hands, and then pulled my phone from my pocket. I was about to answer it, but stopped completely when I saw the number show up on the screen.
Or, more like, the lack of a number.
Unknown.
I felt my blood run cold.
I stood there, each vibration from the plastic sending a little shock through me.
I thought about not answering it. Letting it go straight to voicemail, or answering and hanging up right away. Letting the caller know that I wasn’t interested in whatever threat he was trying to level at me.
But as I stood there, weighing my options, I realized that I had no choice.
We’d hit a dead end again.
And about the only thing that might keep the case going was this phone call from the mystery man who didn’t want me digging around in the Ralph Baker case.
I took in a deep breath, trying to prepare myself emotionally.
Then I answered.
Here went nothing.
Chapter 40
“I explicitly told you not to pick at the scabs of the past,” the gravelly voice said. “I told you that it would bring only pain and misery. But you did not listen. You’ve made some people very upset, Mrs. Brightman. Now you must suffer the consequences of your actions.”
I bit my lower lip, fear coursing through my body like a runaway train.
But deep down, I felt a spark of something. Something that couldn’t be silenced.
Courage.
And righteousness that comes with knowing the truth.
Something that the man on the other side of the line professed to know something about, but in reality, didn’t know at all.
“What about the consequences of your actions, Pastor?” I said in a powerful voice. “Or do you still think you can get away with murder?”
I couldn’t be certain that it was Pastor Frederick Morgan who was calling me.
But I took a wild shot in the dark – because there was no one else I could think of who would have wanted to see Ralph’s disappearance remain a cold case.
There was nothing but an icy silence on the other side of the line.
“I know you did it, Frederick,” I said. “I know you killed him. So does Hattie. And so does the Sheriff. You might have gotten away with it all these years, but we’re on to you, Frederick. We know that—”
I stopped speaking, realizing that the Pastor wasn’t there anymore.
He had hung up.
I let out a strained breath of air, staring up at the ceiling.
Feeling mad as hell at myself.
Not only had I scared the murderer off the phone, thereby missing out on any opportunity to get him to say something incriminating, but I had told him that we were on to him. Laying out our cards before I even knew what cards we actually held –like a fool who was still learning how to play poker.
I bit my lip, feeling my cheeks grow red.
I’d completely blown it.
Chapter 41
“Get in.”
I had only noticed the Sheriff’s truck sitting in front of the pie shop by happenstance. Tiana, Tobias, and Ian had all gone home for the evening, and I was the only one left in the shop. I had just finished baking the last batch of Whiskey Apple pies, and was doing some final cleaning in the dining room when I saw the truck parked there next to my black Escape.
I wondered how long he’d been there for.
After receiving the phone call from the mystery man, who I was now almost certain was Pastor Morgan, I had called Daniel and told him about it. He had taken the news rather calmly. He told me not to worry – and that he would handle it.
I now realized that part of that promise meant setting a watch on the pie shop to make sure that the Pastor didn’t come by and make me “suffer the consequences” of digging into the past.
When I saw Daniel sitting there in the truck, I had abandoned my cleaning efforts, going for my coat and my bag in the back. I turned off all the lights in the shop, double checked that the ovens were indeed off, and then I went through the front door. I locked it behind me, then checked twice that the lock was really working.
It was a bitterly chilly night. There was a dampness in the air that seeped right down into your bones. The kind of dampness that threatened frost and possibly ice later in the evening.
Daniel had a deathly serious look in his eyes when I climbed in the truck, and I immediately got the sense that we weren’t heading home.
“What’s going on?” I said, buckling my seatbelt.
“Pastor Morgan is missing,” he said. “He didn’t attend a church function yesterday. The volunteers over at the First Presbyterian haven’t seen him, and are getting worried. He hasn’t returned any of their calls.”
We pulled out onto Main Street, and the engine revved as Daniel pressed hard against the gas pedal.
“But I’m not going to sit back and wait to see where he reappears again, Cin,” he said. “This isn’t an old case anymore. At least, not to me.”
“No,” I said. “Not to me either.”
He shot a long sideways glance in my direction.
“Well, let’s see what we can do about it, then,” he said.
Daniel took a right onto the empty highway that led up toward the mountains, and we sped off into the cold, wicked night.
Chapter 42
The trees along the highway that led to Drablow Road swayed and twisted and creaked in the wind as we drove past them and headed even deeper into the inky night.
I pulled my down jacket tighter around my body, then reached for the truck’s vent, turning up the heat. Though I wasn’t sure if the chill I felt in my bones could be stamped out by anything other than a hot shower and a steaming cup of tea. And maybe not even then.
“Times have changed, Cin,” Daniel mumbled. “Back in the old days, if you killed somebody, you weren’t thinking about DNA. Not like if you killed somebody today. The Pastor might have left behind something at that old house of his, and not known it.”
I hoped Daniel was right – that in this case, maybe time really was on our side.
But deep down, I had my doubts.
We hooked a right and then traveled across a long bridge that straddled the dark waters of the Metolious River – a waterway that sluggishly paralleled the much smaller Christmas River for a ways, before flowing into the Columbia about 150 miles west. Then we turned left, following Drablow Road for several miles until the much-neglected pavement emptied out into dirt.
“Do you reall
y think we’ll find something, Daniel? After all these years, do you really think there’s still something there at his old house?”
He slowed the truck down as the road got bumpier.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But a lot of these places were abandoned in the late 70s – turns out this area nearly got burned up several times in a series of forest fires. Because of the way the houses are situated and the way the winds come down off the mountains, officials decided to permanently evacuate the homes. If the Pastor’s old house is still here, then maybe it’s like one of those ghost towns you see on television. If we’re lucky, maybe things were preserved as is.”
I took in the information in silence.
Daniel didn’t say anything else the rest of the way, his eyes fixed ahead on the road in front of us like the dirt might fall away at any moment.
I hoped luck was on our side this time.
Chapter 43
Thwacckk!!!
Daniel loosened the rusty lock, and with all his weight, pushed through the door of the old abandoned cabin.
The noise was followed by the mad-dash scurrying of small rodent feet against aged wood.
Daniel shone the flashlight inside, then glanced back at me.
“Be careful where you step,” he said. “And stay close. Okay?”
I nodded as he reached for my hand, taking it gently in his, leading the way.
It was obvious that nobody had legally lived in Frederick Morgan’s former house for a long, long time. There was, however, evidence of people having been there. Teenagers, or vagrants, maybe. The walls were covered with varying neon shades of graffiti saying things that made no sense to anybody other than who had put them there. A pile of rusted Budweiser beer cans sat on the floor beneath one of the broken windows.
The place somehow felt colder than it did outside. Which on a night like tonight, wasn’t easy to do.
I wasn’t sure how this place had looked in 1960. But today, it would have made the perfect place to kill somebody and hide any evidence related to the murder.
“Okay,” Daniel said, taking a look around the walls. “Let’s start in here, and make our way to the adjoining rooms.”
He gave me the flashlight to hold, and started putting on some latex gloves.
“Now, if we find anything, let’s not get our hopes up right away,” Daniel said. “It looks like a lot of people have been through here over the years. Anything we find might have nothing to do with Ralph Baker. And even if it does, identifying it as such is still gonna present us with some significant hurdles.”
I nodded, but Daniel’s practical points didn’t stop my heart from beating quickly with the thought that something in this room could help tell us what happened to Ralph.
I held the flashlight as steady as I could while Daniel pulled out the bottle of luminol, and began spraying down the floor and walls of the room.
Maybe it wasn’t such a long shot after all, I thought.
Maybe, just maybe, the answer to all our questions was right here in this very room.
Chapter 44
Daniel glanced up at me, shaking his head. Again.
I let out a disappointed sigh.
I wasn’t sure how long we’d been in the small cabin for, looking for evidence that Frederick Morgan had killed his best friend fifty-five years earlier. But what I did know was that I could no longer feel my fingers or my toes on account of the icy air, and that thus far, there was not a single drop of possible blood spatter, or any evidence, that we had found between the old walls of Pastor Frederick Morgan’s former residence.
And hope, whatever little there had been, was fading quickly.
Daniel got to his feet and stood up off the floor. I could see that hope was fading for him, too.
But being a naturally persistent person, especially when it came to rectifying injustices, Daniel wasn’t going to give up so easily.
“Okay,” he said. “So maybe it didn’t happen in here. Or maybe it was a clean, bloodless death. But we haven’t checked the surrounding property yet. Tomorrow, I’m going to call Sheriff Hines over in Crook County and see if we can’t borrow their cadaver dog to search this area. It could still be right here, under our noses, Cin. It could still—”
I felt the buzz of my phone in my jacket pocket.
I looked at Daniel, my mouth going bone dry.
I had become afraid to answer my own phone.
He looked back at me reassuringly.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to him. I’ll take over.”
I nodded slowly, then fumbled around in my jacket pocket until my numb fingers gripped the plastic square. I pulled it out, handing it to Daniel.
I couldn’t even look at the screen.
“You said that his calls came up as unknown?” he said after a moment.
I nodded.
“Well this isn’t unknown,” he said. “It’s a real number.”
He handed the phone back to me. The number had a local area code.
I felt a sense of relief course through my veins.
Daniel raised his eyebrows, as if to ask if I still wanted him to answer it.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I got it.”
I brought the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Peters,” the ancient voice rasped. “He’s here at the house, Ms. Peters. You have to come here. You have to come here now!”
Chapter 45
We roared down the dirt road, picking up speed as it turned to pavement. Daniel hooked a left onto the bridge that spanned the Metolius, and we fishtailed slightly as the truck hit a patch of frost.
Daniel slowed after that and didn’t pick up speed again until we hit the highway.
“Owen should be there any minute,” he said again, glancing over at me. “Did she sound like she could hold on?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She sounded really scared, Daniel – I mean, completely panicked. She kept saying that he was out on the street, that he was… that he was coming for her.”
My voice grew hoarse and cracked mid-sentence.
A single thought was replaying over and over in my head.
She was the thing in his way.
Without Hattie’s story, and without her testimony about what she saw at Orvil’s that night, there was nothing concrete to tie Frederick Morgan to Ralph’s disappearance.
And there she was now, alone in her old house, completely vulnerable and exposed – the killer onto her.
And I knew that I had played no small part in that. Frederick Morgan could have been following me. He could have seen me visit Hattie’s house. He could have put two and two together that she’d spilled the secret she’d been keeping for fifty-five years – about Frederick hiding the ring, thereby implicating him in Ralph’s murder.
I bit my lower lip hard.
After everything she’d been through, this couldn’t be the way that Hannah Templeton’s life ended.
It just couldn’t.
Chapter 46
“Oh, no,” I muttered quietly, feeling my eyes grow wide as we approached the flashing lights, cutting through the dark like blue and red lasers. “Oh, no.”
Daniel pulled up to the side of the street, parking the truck slowly, killing the engine and the headlights, almost as if he too was afraid of what we were about to find out.
That he had beaten us to her.
That we were too late.
That her blood was on our hands.
I unbuckled my seatbelt, but I couldn’t seem to get it off fast enough. I stepped out of the truck, my legs feeling like melting rubber.
He was right, I thought.
Pastor Frederick Morgan was right. I should have just let the past stay where it was – dead and buried.
Because even if the Pastor had killed Ralph Baker nearly six decades ago, was finding justice for Ralph more important than Hattie’s life?
The answer was, of course, no.
He wa
s right.
I watched, horrified, as two paramedics exited the front door of the house, carrying a gurney down the rickety old steps of the porch.
“Oh,” I gasped, losing the ability to talk, feeling hot tears flood my eyes.
I felt Daniel’s arm around my shoulders as he tried to comfort me.
But there was little comfort to be found on a night like tonight.
We were too late.
Frederick Morgan had done his work – again.
“She wasn’t hurt,” a voice suddenly said from behind us.
Deputy Owen McHale stood there in his uniform, having emerged from somewhere across the street.
“The Pastor knocked on the door, but she never answered it,” Owen said, taking off his hat. “Nothing happened. But when I got here, she was complaining of chest pains, and I thought given the scare she’d had and her age, it’d be best to get her to the hospital as soon as possible.”
I had never felt so happy to see Owen McHale in all my life.
Hattie was okay – Pastor Morgan hadn’t hurt her.
Her blood wasn’t on our hands.
We watched as the paramedics carried the old woman past us.
“It’s going to be okay, Hattie,” I said after her. “Don’t worry.”
She nodded, her hollow eyes locking with mine until the ambulance doors closed.
A moment later, they pulled away, the sirens echoing loudly down Santa’s Nightmare Lane.
“Good work, Owen,” Daniel said, nodding at the young deputy. “You could very well have just saved that woman’s life.”
The deputy smiled slightly, but the smile faded and the serious expression returned to his face a few moments later.
“The Pastor probably hasn’t gotten too far,” he said, shining his flashlight across the street, toward the path from where he’d come. “Mrs. Blaylock said he was on foot. I don’t suppose we can arrest him for knocking on her door, but we could question him. And if need be, tell him we’re recommending that Mrs. Blaylock file a restraining order against him.”
