by Jacob Lee
Christmas Can Be Murder
A Chaplain Merriman Christian Cozy Mystery
Jacob Lee & Liz Dodwell
www.mix-booksonline.com
Christmas Can Be Murder: A Chaplain Merriman Christian Cozy Mystery
Copyright © 2015 by Mix Books, LLC
http://www.mix-booksonline.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Liz Dodwell
One
It's amazing to some people that it can be warm enough to ride a motorcycle in early December, but here in Alpena, Arkansas, it's not all that uncommon. Oh, the weather isn't perfect every day, of course, but it's pretty nice some of the time. It's one of the reasons Nervy and I decided to move here when it came time for me to retire.
Now don’t get me wrong, even though the days in December can be fairly warm, when it's dark and after ten p.m. it starts to get a bit chilly. When you ride a motorcycle in that kind of weather, you learn quickly that the only way to do so is fast, because you want to get quickly to wherever you're going, get off and get inside someplace warm. I was zipping along Old Cemetery Road at about forty miles an hour, about as fast as Clark Rodgers, our police chief, is gonna let me get away with, when I caught a glimpse of something coming out of the woods on the right.
At first, I thought it was a deer, but then I realized it was a person, so I slammed on the brakes and slid to a stop. I threw down the kickstand and jumped off as the figure collapsed onto the roadway, but I knew it was too late as soon as I got to her. It was a young mother I had seen around town and even invited to church, and she was slick with blood.
I whipped out my phone and called 911, but I knew that sound as the death rattle hit. She was gone, and as I told the emergency dispatcher where to find her body, I leapt to my feet and ran through the woods to where I knew she lived in a house near that spot. This woman had a three-year-old son, and I was terrified that something equally horrible may have happened to the child.
I found the kitchen door standing wide open and raced inside. There was blood everywhere, and I could see a trail of it where she had obviously staggered out the door. Inside, there was a pool of blood and signs of a struggle—the coffee pot was broken on the floor, a skillet was up under the table, chairs were overturned. I could tell that she had fought for her life, and it broke my heart that she had lost, but I was most concerned about her son. I searched hurriedly through the house and found the boy, thankfully sound asleep and unaware of what had happened. I called 911 again and told the dispatcher to let Clark Rodgers know where I was and why, then let my curiosity get the better of me and began to poke around.
Two
Perhaps I’d better back up a bit and introduce myself. I'm Dexter Merriman, but my friends call me Dex. A few people call me Chappy, which is a reference to the fact that I had been a Chaplain in the US Army, retired eighteen months ago as a Lieutenant Colonel. I had a little more than thirty years in, so with better than sixty thousand a year to live on, we figured it would be a great place to spend our twilight years together, a place for our son to bring his kids for visits, things like that.
My wife Nervy and I had bought the house in Alpena back in 2012, after passing through the town on a trip to Branson, Missouri with some friends who had retired a few years before. We'd fallen in love with the little town as we drove through it, and since we had a couple of extra days left on our leave, we'd decided to look it over before we went back. As we walked along the old streets, some of them actually with old brick showing through the pavement in places, there was such a sense of peace and hominess that we both felt drawn to settle there when I retired, so we stopped in at the town's only realtor's office.
“Hi,” said the thin man who sat behind the only desk in the one-room office. “I'm Max Woolcott, what can I do for you nice folks today?”
We told him we were just thinking about the town as a potential retirement location, and that was all it took. We heard all about what a wonderful community it was, with only four hundred-odd residents who lived there year round, a surrounding countryside that boasted numerous chicken and turkey farms and a delightful tourist trade because of so many craftspeople who lived there. The main street, as we'd already seen, was a line of craft and specialty shops, which was one of the very things we'd loved so much about it. Nervy and I were both inveterate bargain hunters and craft lovers, so we envisioned many years of browsing the shops and hanging out with the locals.
Max was so easy to talk to that, before we knew it, we were in his car and on our way to look at houses. We saw a couple of them that were small, but since we were anticipating many future visits from our grandchildren, we passed those up. We looked at a nice, modern ranch style house next, but Nervy thought it was too fancy for us, so we passed it up as well, and went on to the next, and that was the one we both knew was home.
It was a nice little three bedroom bungalow about two miles out on the south edge of town, with a garage out back that was attached to the house by a short, covered walkway, and some big, beautiful oak trees scattered around the yard. I had the instant thought that I could see myself building a hot rod in the garage, and pushing Ben in a swing that hung from one of the trees, and Nervy said the kitchen felt like it was made specifically for her. The house was empty and was part of an estate that had been inherited by a young couple off in California, so we got to really spend time looking it over. I went into the basement and inspected the foundation, then climbed up into the attic and looked for any signs of roof leaks. Max stood there and smiled as we did his job for him, and before we left there, we had made up our minds to make an offer on the place. I'd seen some work that it would need, so I offered a few thousand below what the sellers were asking, and we hadn't even made it back to Fort Benning before Max called to tell us it was accepted. We got our financing approved a few days later, and began making monthly payments on the home we would never get to live in together.
You see, life doesn't always go the way you expect it to go, and it doesn't even pay a lot of attention to the plans we make, for that matter. Nervy—her name was Minerva, but one of her friends had given her that nickname long before we met, and it fit her, so I got in the habit of using it, too—Nervy would have loved living in this little town, with all its quirky residents and quaint, historic buildings. Yes, she would have loved it. Unfortunately, she died just a few months before we had planned to make our break with the Army.
It was a freak accident, so freakish that for a while, there were a few people who thought I'd murdered my wife. Heck, even I thought so for a while but, there. You see, she got up early every morning to make me coffee and breakfast, that was just her way. That last morning, she'd gone into the kitchen to start the coffee, and I guess she reached into the dishwasher to get out a cup, but she left it open part way. I don't know what happened next, but I heard a crash and a scream, and I leapt out of bed and went running to the kitchen to find her laying on the floor, with one of our big butcher knives stuck in her side.<
br />
The knife had been in the rack on the door of the dishwasher; I know, because I'd put it there the night before, and I didn't even think about the fact that she was always telling me to make sure I always put them in blade down. For some idiotic reason, though, I always got it backwards and put them in blade up, and when she slipped or whatever that made her fall onto the door of the dishwasher, it had been sticking straight up and gone straight in.
I grabbed the phone and called the Post's emergency services while I tried to stop the bleeding, but the knife had pierced her heart. I held her while she died, and though she couldn't manage to speak, her eyes told me over and over again that she loved me, and that she'd be waiting for me. The paramedics and MP's arrived too late, and found me holding her and sobbing on my bloody kitchen floor, crying that I had accidentally killed my wife.
After a month long investigation and a coroner's inquest, I was cleared and her death was ruled an accident. She had slipped on a wet spot on the floor, probably from water she'd spilled out of the coffee pot, and fallen onto the flatware rack in the dishwasher door. That damned knife was pointed upward, and at just the right angle to slide between her ribs…
Our family and friends had come to comfort me in my time of grief, and Chance, our son, came and helped me get the arrangements made and such. I took an emergency leave and made it through the funeral somehow, but then, after everyone else had gone, I walked into my living room and stood there for a few minutes, just staring around me, and suddenly all of the emotions I'd been holding back flooded free.
“How dare You!” I screamed at God. “How dare You take her from me like this! How dare You leave me to face the rest of this life alone? What kind of God are You, that would reward my years of service to You this way?”
I fell to my knees, and it was at that point that I began to question my faith. If the God that I had served so long could treat me like this, after I'd done all I could to serve Him in the best way I knew how, then was He ever real at all? How could a God of Love allow such things to happen?
For the next two weeks, that was about all I could think of, and finally I decided that I could not continue to serve such a God. When the inquest finally cleared me of any wrongdoing, I filed for retirement, and when it was approved, I mustered out as quickly as I could and arrived in Alpena only three months after Nervy's death. It still hurt, every single day, and I had come to understand what people had meant all through the years, when they would tell me that it felt like the one they'd lost was still with them. I talked to Nervy as if she was still right there beside me, and sometimes I could even imagine her responses. It made her loss a little more bearable, and I was grateful for it.
We’d had a car, but when I retired and moved, I had decided to start over completely, so I sold everything we'd had except for a few things that were just too precious to give up. One of those was the old 1948 Harley Panhead that I'd found in a garage during a rummage sale, and painstakingly restored over eight years of Saturdays. I'd always had a motorcycle, and the Harley was one that both Nervy and I loved to ride, so much so that, once it was finished, I'd sold the Honda Goldwing we'd used for years. When everything else was sold or packed, I shipped all of what was left to Arkansas, but then I climbed onto that big hog and rode it every bumpy mile from Fort Benning to Alpena. There were moments on that ride when I would have sworn that Nervy was on the queen seat behind me, her hair blowing out from under her helmet, and a smile spread across her face.
Moving didn't help. The depression I'd fallen into followed me to Arkansas, and I found myself refusing to pray, refusing to do much of anything other than sit at home and mope around the house. Two months after I'd moved in, I was still living out of boxes and eating nothing that I couldn't heat up in the microwave, and Chance finally decided it was time for an Intervention. He and Lindsay and Ben showed up on a Friday night, and I managed to put on a smile until we got the boy to bed and fast asleep.
Then I poured out my heart. Chance had followed in his old man's footsteps, and gone to Seminary. He was the pastor of a small but exciting Baptist church in Olney, Illinois, only about a six-hour drive from Alpena, and he asked me to pray with him about what was happening with me.
“What?” I asked. “Can't a man question his own faith? Haven't you ever questioned your own?”
“Yeah, I have,” he admitted. “As I recall, it was a few times during school, and then more than once after I started preaching, and it was you who always reminded me that there was one thing we could be certain of, and that was the fact that no matter what else we might believe, there is still the one incontrovertible fact that can't be denied—and that is that when the sun rose on the third day after Jesus was crucified, the tomb was empty. If the God we serve can raise Jesus from the dead, then He's the God who can help us to overcome any crisis of faith.”
He sighed and put a hand on my shoulder, while Lindsay held onto my free hand. “Dad, I understand,” he said. “Remember, I lost my mother in this accident, too—but Jesus is still there, and He still loves us, and He is still waiting for us to pray so that He can move in our lives.”
I tried, I really did. I prayed, but it seemed that my prayers weren't going as high as the ceiling, and I didn't know how to make them reach any higher. On Saturday, I spent the day with all three of them, and they got me out of the house for a while in the afternoon. We went to a few of the craft shops, and then had lunch at a little place that was simply called “the Diner.” After that, I took Ben to the park for a bit, just the two of us, while Chance and Lindsay visited a shop that specialized in baby items.
My grandson didn't know what to think of how I was acting, but it was he who actually brought me out of it. I remember that I was on the See-Saw with him, carefully boosting him into the air, when he looked at me with that innocence that only a child can truly know and said, “Grandpa, it's okay. I know why God took Grandma home.”
I stopped the See-Saw with him up in the air, and felt something stir inside me, for I had just asked that question silently in my heart—Why, God, why did you take her home, and leave me here?
I smiled up at Ben. “Oh, you do, do you?” I asked, and I could hear the dryness in my voice, the fear of what he might say.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “God just needed another angel, and Grandma was the best one He could find, so He took her home to Heaven so He could give her her wings. She'll watch over all of us, now.”
But, as I said, that was almost a year and a half ago. Time had passed, and wounds had healed, and I was among the living once again. These days, I attended church at the local First Baptist, where Brother Freddy, who was seventy-five years old and whose very first words to me were, “I love you,” preached sermons that saw souls saved often, and where they had an average of six baptisms a month. If there was one thing that helped me recover my own faith, I'd have to say it was letting that old fellow stomp my toes, which he did every time he got to preaching on long hair (mine is down to below my shoulders, now).
I had also decided it was time to return to serving God, so I approached the Sheriff's Captain who ran the local county detention center about starting a jailhouse ministry. As a former military Chaplain, I was well versed in the practices of most Christian denominations, so he agreed, and I began holding a service there on Sunday afternoons, and coming in twice a week to speak to inmates who wanted some spiritual counseling. It kept me busy, and Chance and Lindsay were happy to see that I was able to smile and pray again.
Life was getting back to where it should be, and I was enjoying it again. I'd been the beneficiary on Nervy's life insurance, of course, and it was large enough that I paid off the house and put a hefty chunk into trust for Ben and his year-old sister, Marie. If there were more grandchildren, they'd be added as beneficiaries to the trust, as well, but Chance and Lindsay swore that two was more than enough. Heck, Chance had been such a little hellion that I was glad we only had one, so I could understand.
Things w
ere good. I'd been shanghaied by the town's Parade Committee into playing Santa this year, which is because I look a lot like him—long white hair and beard, and a belly that knows what it means to “jiggle with laughter,” so on that particular evening, I had ridden over to the dress shop, where Naoma Brodrick, the lady who heads the committee, had arranged for the Santa Suit to be fitted to me. I'd somehow made it through two hours of trying it on and taking it off, and was on my way home.
Three
OK, now where was I? Oh, yeah; in the dead woman’s house, making sure her little boy stayed safe, and nosing around a bit.
Chief of Police Clark Rodgers showed up about fifteen minutes later, and I knew he was mad the moment I saw him.
“Dex,” he said, “what do you think you're doing? You found the victim and called it in, and then left the scene, and now I find you here in the middle of a crime scene, contaminating the crap out of it! I would have thought you were smarter than that!” He stormed past me into the kitchen, and began ordering men with him to take pictures and check this and that and other police-type things that he probably understood no better than I did.
Don't look at me like that, he was chief of police in a town of four hundred people; do you really think they look for things like a degree in forensic technologies? Clark was elected to the job because half the town recalls his winning touchdowns when he was quarterback of the high school football team!
“I'm here,” I said calmly, “because I knew that poor woman was dead, and I recognized her as Brenda Hawley. Brenda's little boy has played with my grandson at the park a couple of times, so I instantly thought about him and ran here to make sure he was okay.”
“That's a job for the police, Chaplain,” he said, making my title seem like an insult at that moment.
