Magic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 7)

by Meg Muldoon

  The Sheriff nodded.

  “Let’s search the area then, Owen.”

  Daniel looked down at me.

  “Cin, you ought to wait in the car,” he said. “Take the keys, lock the doors, and keep your phone handy, all right? If you see him, call me right away and don’t go near him. You understand?”

  I thought about protesting, to insist that I come along in the search. But sometimes, I forgot that I wasn’t a sheriff’s deputy. And that having me along on a search would only complicate things for the law enforcement officers – no matter how much I wanted to go.

  “Okay,” I said, grabbing the keys from his hands. “You be careful, all right? Don’t take any chances with him.”

  He nodded.

  “I won’t.”

  He squeezed my hand, then waited until I was safely in the truck with the doors locked. I watched him and Owen walk across the street and disappear into the woods.

  I’d only been in the truck for about ten minutes when it dawned on me.

  I knew where the Pastor was.

  Chapter 47

  I hurriedly walked across the length of Meadow Plaza, which was as abandoned and empty at this hour as the old overgrown Pioneer Cemetery on the south side of town.

  An owl hooted loudly in the distance, filling the night with its ghostly cries. A vicious, frosty wind kicked a pile of dead leaves into my path, their sharp edges clawing at the bottom of my jeans. I walked quickly through them, down the cobbled path that jutted away from the plaza.

  Down the path that led to the river.

  A few moments later, I saw a lone figure through the trees.

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  He was nothing more than a specter. A sad, hunched-over shadow sitting on the obsidian boulder that Hattie had told me about.

  The figure was still and unmoving in the eerie glow of the waning moon, and I found a strange emotion grip my heart at the sight of the old man. A feeling that pulled at me as I took in his frail shoulders and curved spine.

  Something like compassion.

  Something like empathy.

  But as I stepped closer to him, I pushed those feelings away. There was no room for them… not after what this man had done. And a moment of looking sad and forlorn wasn’t going to change that.

  My foot suddenly hit something, and a moment later, the crack of a twig snapping filled the silent night.

  The man sitting on the rock turned around to see where the noise had come from.

  His eyes fell on me, but showed no hint of being surprised or startled.

  “Ah,” he said, a sense of defeat in his voice. “So you’ve found me.”

  I knew I should have hung back, the way Daniel had told me to on the phone a few minutes earlier, waiting until he and Owen arrived before talking to the Pastor.

  But something in me felt compelled to keep going.

  To hear the full story of what really happened to Ralph Henry Baker.

  Finally.After all these years.

  Chapter 48

  “It should have been me she fell in love with,” he said, looking numbly at the swift river below.

  His shoulders were so hunched over, I thought that Frederick Morgan’s ribcage might cave in at any moment.

  “Ralph was my best friend and I loved him like a brother. But he didn’t understand Hannah. He didn’t know what a pure spirit she was. And he didn’t know what she needed.”

  He said the last part through gritted teeth.

  “And you did?” I said quietly.

  The old man slowly nodded.

  “She needed more love than Ralph was capable of giving her,” he said. “He took her for granted. But I held my tongue about it. For years, I kept my feelings to myself, knowing how dangerous they were. I knew that if I let them, they’d destroy all of us.”

  He stared out ahead with haunted eyes.

  “For six years I prayed over the matter, and God said nothing to me,” he continued. “I took it for an answer. That God believed my feelings were based in lust, instead of love. I planned to lock up those feelings and throw away the key forever.

  “After Hannah accepted Ralph’s proposal, I decided to take up the path of a missionary. I received a posting in Haiti. That was what I wanted to tell Hannah and Ralph at the Snowcap Diner that day.

  “But then… that day…”

  His voice cracked, and I could tell that this was hard for the normally reticent pastor to speak about.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Hannah told me how she really felt about me.”

  He looked down at the black obsidian boulder he was sitting on.

  “Right here,” he said, patting the smooth, shiny surface. “On this rock, I kissed her. And I felt… I thought…”

  He let out a heartbreaking breath.

  “I loved her more than I loved God,” he said. “I’m ashamed to say it, but to lie about it would be to spit in His face. I was a weak, wretched being. I would have done anything to have Hannah Templeton. Anything.”

  The word rang like the hollow echo of a church bell, and I felt a chill pass through my heart.

  Because when the pastor said anything, I knew that he really did and truly mean anything.

  The sad ghostly figure hung his head.

  “One night in December of that year, I was at home alone, praying to God about what to do,” he continued. “I knew it would rip Ralph apart if I told him how I felt about Hannah. He wouldn’t understand how much I loved her. Or that I still loved him like a brother, despite it.”

  He took in a sharp breath, saying the next words methodically.

  “I knew there was no way I was getting out of it with both of them. I had a choice to make: choose my best friend – meaning I had loyalty, a sense of duty, and honor. Or choose the only woman I would ever love – meaning I was a man without dignity or scruples.”

  He shook his head silently.

  “I suppose my prayers were answered that night,” he said. “Because a few minutes after I had knelt down to pray, Ralph broke down my door, and gave me this look. Just… full of hate and rage. I knew that he knew. And that my decision had already been made for me.”

  The Pastor stopped speaking. He watched the river in silence.

  I swallowed hard.

  “What happened?”

  He looked over at me, meeting my eyes for the first time.

  “My best friend gave me the beating that I deserved,” he said. “Cracked two of my ribs. But you know, it wasn’t the physical pain that hurt so much. It was the emotional pain. The knowledge that I had done this to my best friend. That I could have done something like this to him, and caused him to do such a thing to me.”

  He shook his head.

  “It was unbearable.”

  I swallowed back the pool of saliva that had settled at the side of my mouth, and rubbed my sweating palms off on my jeans.

  “Was it an accident?” I said. “Did you really mean to kill him? Or did it just… happen?”

  The Pastor gave me a sharp look at the question, and I felt myself instinctively step backwards.

  “The last time I saw my best friend, he was standing over me, looking like a man whose heart had just been ripped out of his chest,” the Pastor said. “He ran out the door of my house. I heard his truck start up, and the sound of the tires squealing on the dirt road, and that was it. I never saw Ralph ever again.”

  He stared deep into my eyes.

  They were more haunted than any man’s I’d ever seen.

  “You didn’t kill him?” I asked, my voice trembling.

  “I killed him, all right,” he said, looking away. “Just not in the way you think. I killed his spirit that night. Both Hannah and I did.

  “God gave me my answer: He didn’t want me to have either of them.”

  The Pastor closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Yet love, the bitter eternal thing, has no scruples,” he whispered. “It burns on. And on. Even across land mas
ses and oceans. I always thought of her. Throughout my missionary work. Throughout my whole life it’s always been… her.”

  His words were so pained, so sincere, so broken, that I found myself wanting to believe them.

  But there were still things that didn’t make sense about Frederick’s story.

  “What about Ralph’s class ring?” I said. “Why did you hide it in your father’s bakery if you didn’t kill him?”

  “Because I was a coward,” he said. “Ralph took his ring off before beating me and forgot to take it with him. But after he disappeared, I thought if I told police that I was the last to see Ralph, and that he’d beaten me up over Hannah, they’d think I killed him. I was young and stupid and scared. I knew the class ring was the only thing that would have tied Ralph to me that night. So I hid it behind an old loose brick at the bakery, thinking that would be the safest place for it. And that if Ralph ever returned, I could give it back to him.

  “I never thought that after all these years, it’d come back to haunt me.”

  He slowly looked over at me, his old eyes drowning in sadness.

  “Abigail Longmont, from the school library, is an old friend of mine,” he said. “She’s one of the few people around here who remembered Ralph and remembered what happened. She told me you had come to the library with a class ring, wanting to look at a yearbook from 1958. The old coward in me resurfaced when I heard that. I became afraid. I tried to scare you into leaving it be. But you were too headstrong. You wouldn’t listen.”

  He looked away.

  “I followed you after you and your husband came to see me at the church, where I lied to you, in front of my God. I saw you talk to Hannah. I couldn’t bear the thought of all these old wounds being ripped open for her. She always thought I was guilty of doing something bad to Ralph that night. She never believed me when I told her I didn’t know what happened to him.”

  He drew in a large breath.

  “Tonight, I went over there to tell her again. To tell her that I didn’t do it. That I still love her. That I’d still do anything for her. Anything, but what she thought I’d done.”

  He closed his eyes, tilting his head toward the sky.

  “The last time she spoke to me, fifty-five years ago, she told me she was a cursed woman.

  “But she’s never understood: she’s not the only one who’s cursed.”

  A moment later, there was the sound of twigs crackling in the woods behind us.

  I looked back to see Daniel standing there, his hands in his pockets in a relaxed stance. A stance that he wouldn’t have had if he thought Pastor Frederick Morgan was a murderer.

  I knew that he’d heard the whole story.

  “What do you think happened to Ralph Baker, Mr. Morgan?” he said in a gentle voice.

  The Pastor didn’t turn around to look at him.

  “I don’t know what happened to Ralph,” he said. “All I know is that whatever happened to him, it destroyed Hannah. And it destroyed me, too.”

  The old man’s shoulders drew together, and he leaned far over the rock, looking down at the rushing river.

  I understood now why the man looked so much older than Warren.

  Because his heart, whatever remained of it, had been through hell.

  I watched as Daniel took his jacket off. He draped the leather coat over the shoulders of the ancient man, who flinched at its weight.

  “Sir,” he said. “Come with us. You shouldn’t be out here in the cold any longer.”

  Daniel helped the Pastor to his feet, then guided him back along the footpath.

  Pastor Frederick Morgan was nothing but a shell of a man.

  Chapter 49

  “Do you really think that’s how it went?” I asked Daniel, reaching for the truck’s vent again and turning up the heat. “That the Pastor really had nothing to do with Ralph disappearing?”

  It was cold and late and there was a deep-seated exhaustion in my bones that aggravated both things. All I wanted to do was get home, light a fire in the fireplace, crawl into bed, and fall asleep.

  After dropping Pastor Frederick Morgan off at Abigail Longmont’s home so she could look after him, Daniel had driven us to the hospital at my request to check in on Hattie Blaylock. The old woman had been sleeping when we stopped in, and I didn’t want to wake her. But the doctor had said that all the tests checked out, and that they were only keeping her overnight for observation. She expected that Hattie would be released the following day.

  All of it had gone a long ways toward easing my mind. Knowing that Hattie was going to be okay, and also that the Pastor wasn’t the murderer we thought he was.

  But still… something was nagging at me.

  The realization that despite the slew of revelations today, there was still one question left unanswered.

  The most important one:

  What happened to Ralph Henry Baker?

  “I’ve been doing this a long time, Cin,” Daniel said. “I’ve heard my share of lies in this line of work and met my share of criminals. People who know how to con and lie and cheat their way into anything. I’ve seen the worst of them. And right now, my gut’s telling me that Frederick Morgan isn’t one of them. Now, he lied to the police back then. But I don’t think he’s lying now. I think he’s done some less-than admirable things. But that doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  I nodded, biting my lower lip.

  “What about you?” he said. “What do you think?”

  I let out a short sigh.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I agree. I just… I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was hoping it was him. You know? I was hoping we had solved Ralph’s murder.”

  The thought that we might not ever solve it left me feeling like a cheap chocolate Santa Claus – empty and hollow inside.

  “Me too,” Daniel said, making a right turn on Sugar Pine Road.

  He was quiet for a long moment, and I felt my spirits sink a little farther down with the silence.

  It was over.

  Whatever happened to Ralph Henry Baker was a secret that was lost to time.

  “Say,” Daniel said, glancing over at me. “Maybe it wasn’t as bad as we’re imagining it. I mean, what if Ralph just left town and started his life somewhere else? What if he just went and became somebody else? It happens, you know. People do that, especially when they don’t have much of a reason to stick around in a place.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess he could’ve moved to Hawaii or something. Maybe even left the country.”

  But as I said it, I knew that I’d never believe that.

  Sure, Ralph must have been hurt. But to leave his family and never speak to them ever again? I had never met Ralph, but that just didn’t seem to fit with his character.

  We pulled up into the driveway of our house, and Daniel killed the engine.

  “You know what I think, Cin?” he said.

  I stopped getting out of the truck, and looked back at him.

  “What?”

  “I think you’d make one hell of a Sheriff’s Deputy.”

  Usually, I would have thought of something smart to say there.

  But instead, I just accepted the compliment, smiling softly at him.

  He really meant it – and that meant a lot to me.

  “Thanks, Daniel,” I said.

  He smiled back, reaching for my hand and squeezing it.

  The sting of not being able to solve my great uncle’s disappearance would last a long time. But at least I had done everything I could to bring justice to him.

  “C’mon,” Daniel said. “Let’s put this day to bed.”

  I didn’t want to believe it. Hell, nobody did.

  But most of the time in this world, there was no closure. People could just disappear off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. Leaving their loved ones with nothing but questions and heartache and pain.

  It wasn’t fair.

  But that was the way of the world we lived in
. And there was nothing Daniel, or Frederick Morgan, or Hattie Blaylock, or I, could do about it.

  Chapter 50

  I woke up to a shadow moving across my face.

  I blinked my sleep-encrusted eyes, glancing over at the alarm clock on the nightstand.

  After a few moments, the strange red forms turned into numbers.

  It was a quarter to four.

  “What’s going on?” I mumbled, turning on my side, facing the window.

  He stood in front of the pane of glass, in the same place where I stood on nights I couldn’t sleep.

  Only it wasn’t often that Daniel had trouble sleeping.

  I sat up in bed, leaning forward.

  He looked back at me. In the darkness, I couldn’t make out his face.

  But I could hear him clear enough.

  “Cin,” he said in a bewildered tone. “I figured it out.”

  “What?” I said, rubbing my eyes again.

  He came over, sitting at the far edge of the bed next to a slumbering Huckleberry and Chadwick.

  “I know what happened, Cin,” he said. “I know what happened to Ralph Henry Baker.”

  I pinched myself, sure that I had to be dreaming.

  Chapter 51

  The day when we found out exactly what happened to Ralph Henry Baker was a crisp, clear autumn morning in the Cascade Mountain wilderness. It was just a few days before Halloween, and the trees in the forest near the Metolious River seemed to sparkle and dance in the orange glow of the ascending sun. The aspen trees that lined the roads were clinging onto the last of their fiery leaves, playing a doomed game of tug-of-war with the cool breezes blowing off the river.

  Daniel had told me that I shouldn’t have come with him – that it wasn’t something I should see. But I told him that I had to. I had to see it through. Even if it meant seeing something that would scar me for the rest of my life.