Menace in Christmas River (Christmas River 8)

by Meg Muldoon

  “Well, you said she had her hair up in a ponytail and that she was wearing tennis shoes and faded jeans,” Kara said. “What else am I supposed to think?”

  I couldn’t argue with Kara – she hadn’t even seen Samantha Garner, but she had somehow described her better than I’d been able to.

  “I suppose she could have slipped out,” I said, with a sigh. “Maybe she was one of the ones who left shortly after Barney and Libby McBride.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Kara said. “Though I still don’t know why you’re so fixed on finding this woman. I know you said you thought she should have won the championship today, but I don’t understand what that has to do with Cliff Copperstone.”

  “It’s got everything to do with him, Kara,” I said.

  She scanned my face, still not understanding. Though I didn’t blame her. It’d taken me all this time to realize the truth.

  “You see, that soccer mom? She was—”

  I stopped speaking abruptly as it suddenly dawned on me where Samantha Garner was.

  I stared off for a long moment, then looked back at Kara.

  Samantha hadn’t left.

  She was still right here in the building.

  “C’mon,” I said. “I know where we can find her.”

  Chapter 35

  “Samantha?” I said quietly, rapping on the silver stall door. “Samantha, are you in there?”

  There was no response. The only sound was a faucet dripping water.

  After a long moment, I tried again.

  “Samantha, it’s Cinnamon Peters,” I said in a reassuring voice. “I’m one of the Championship judges?”

  Still, nothing.

  I cleared my throat, looking at Kara.

  “Samantha, I—”

  “Yes, I remember you.”

  A small, wavering voice sounded from behind the partition.

  “I… I just wanted to make sure that you’re doing all right,” I said. “I thought I heard someone crying.”

  “I’m fine,” she squeaked out. “Just a little worried about getting home to my husband and kids any time before May. That’s all.”

  I hesitated, considering how to bring up the subject I needed to talk to her about.

  I didn’t know Samantha at all.

  For all I knew, she was there in the stall, a hammer in her hands, Cliff Copperstone’s blood all over her.

  For all I knew, she was like a scared animal who, when cornered, would lash out. And would lash out hard.

  If Daniel had been here, he would have told me to wait. To not confront her. To let it go until the risk could be minimized.

  But Daniel wasn’t here.

  It was just Kara and me.

  And I couldn’t just let it go.

  I took in a big breath.

  “I know about you and Cliff Copperstone.”

  There was a sudden, icy silence from behind the stall, and I swear, the entire atmosphere of the small little room changed.

  I heard her clear her throat.

  “I, uh, I don’t understand what that means,” she said, sniveling some.

  I fished around in my jean pocket, retrieving the old, weathered photo. The one with Cliff’s blood on it.

  Then I slid it through the crack in the door.

  After a moment, I felt her take the picture from me.

  That was followed by a profound silence.

  Kara looked at me, brow furrowed, eyes still not understanding.

  She would soon enough.

  “Where’d you find this?” Samantha asked, her voice stretched as thin as overworked pie dough.

  “Where do you think?” I said.

  There was silence again.

  And then, the door slowly opened.

  Chapter 36

  Samantha Garner wasn’t holding a hammer when she came out.

  Nor did she have so much as a drop of blood on her. At least from what I could see.

  What she did have were swollen, bloodshot eyes and a crumpled Kleenex clutched between her hands. She held onto it for dear life as she spoke, wringing it nervously.

  And she also had one other thing:

  A look of unmistakable remorse etched across her face.

  “This wasn’t supposed to be how things went,” she said, biting her upper lip. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all.”

  She stared vacantly out the hallway window. The sun had gone down, but the ice storm still raged on outside.

  Her red and haunted eyes gazed into nothingness.

  She didn’t look much like the young woman in the photograph. Her hair was no longer blond. Her face was wider somehow, and fine lines adorned the skin around her eyes. And she didn’t seem capable of that same carefree smile these days.

  But none of that changed the fact that she was the woman in the picture.

  I swallowed hard, studying the effect that the last fifteen years had had on her.

  Even without the obvious hammer in hand and bloodstains, it became apparent to me that Samantha most likely had tried to bludgeon Cliff Copperstone to death.

  But saying that outright wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  Her eyes turned glassy as she looked at me. She knew I was waiting to hear her side of the story.

  “I loved him,” she finally said. “I still… I still do, in a way. But I couldn’t… he never understood.”

  She took in a deep breath.

  Her hands were shaking now.

  “For the most part, I’ve lived my life as a decent person,” she said, looking from me to Kara. “I’ve tried to do good by God, by others, and by my own conscience, too. Ninety-nine percent of my life, I’ve lived correctly, without any mistakes.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Kara steal a glance in my direction.

  I knew we were both wondering the same thing:

  Just what did that one-percent represent?

  I had a feeling we were about to find out.

  “I met him the first week at the Portland Culinary Institute,” she said. “You see, I always wanted to run my own cake baking business. That was my big dream. But I thought it would be important to get proper training to distinguish myself from the competition. And even though my parents didn’t want me to, I enrolled at the school.

  “I met Cliff during our first knife skills class. You see, I was having trouble getting the julienne cut right, and he came over, all macho and full of himself, and showed me a trick to make it go faster.”

  She smiled.

  “I thought he was really pretentious for doing that. I mean, I would have figured it out on my own soon enough. But he came over, thinking I was some damsel in distress who was going to flunk the class if he didn’t help me.”

  The smile faded.

  “But the funny thing was, even after he embarrassed me like that, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I mean, I was convinced he was the most annoying, arrogant man I had ever met. He always raised his hand in class and acted like he knew all the answers. And then there was that horribly obnoxious knife tattoo he had on his neck… I really thought he was… well, a tool.

  “Then one day he came up to me after class, and he was all nervous. I thought he was having a heart attack or something, but turns out, he just wanted to ask me to dinner. And I was completely stunned. So stunned, that I said yes. And it wasn’t long after that that I realized I didn’t hate Cliff. I didn’t hate him one bit, in fact. In fact, I really liked him. I was just too blind to see it.

  “It was just one of those things that felt so right, you know? I felt like he was the man I’d been dreaming of since I was a little girl… He was a knight in shining armor come to life for me. He was…”

  She inhaled sharply and grimaced, as though it pained her.

  “He was my Westley.”

  I watched as she wiped at her nose some with the Kleenex, and I couldn’t help but wonder if we were talking about the same man.

  It was hard for me to imagine Cliff Copperstone as t
he Prince Charming type.

  “He was so good,” she said. “Once you got past the rough exterior and saw the real Cliff, he was a really, really good man. Genuine and thoughtful and charming as can be. He wasn’t Mormon like I was, but he was going to convert for me. And that was all I wanted. It was enough.”

  She sniveled, looking away with waterlogged eyes.

  “But it wasn’t enough for the rest of my family.

  “He proposed to me our last year of culinary school. By then, he’d gotten a job as a line cook at this really trendy restaurant in Portland. The owner just thought the world of Cliff, too. She gave him every opportunity. You see, even at that young age, Cliff was going places. He had this light around him whenever he was in the kitchen. It wasn’t just somebody enjoying their work, either. He… I can’t explain. I just knew that he was destined for something big, something great. He would start every other sentence by saying ‘One day, when I’m a successful chef and we have lots of money…’ And I never ever doubted that he would be and that we would.”

  She bit her lip.

  “One night, the night after we got our engagement photos taken – one of which you have there – I woke up from a bad dream in a cold sweat. I just stared up at the ceiling for the rest of the night, these thoughts swirling around in my head: I’m going to drag him down. He’s going places, and I’m going to be the one to keep him from getting there. And aside from that, he’s never going to be home. He’s never going to see our children grow up. He’s never going to be able to be there. He’s going to be working all the time, and I’ll be at home alone with six children to raise on my own. My parents are right: if I marry him, I’ll be signing up for a life of loneliness. I won’t ever be happy…”

  A silent tear ran down her cheek.

  “The next day, he came to my place, and I could tell something big had just happened,” she said. “He had gotten this big internship in New York. And he was so excited. He picked me up and twirled me around, and told me it was the best day of his life – so far anyway. He said our wedding day would be the best day of his life.”

  She wrung the Kleenex between her hands nervously.

  “I smiled that day and acted happy. But inside… inside I was dying. Because I knew that it… us… would never work. We both wanted different things. He needed to focus on his career because he had something going. And meanwhile, I realized that there was nothing I wanted more than a big family. And we couldn’t have it both ways. Not if I was going to be happy. Not if he was going to be happy, either.

  “I should have told him the next day that it was never going to work. But the problem was… I still loved him. Some selfish part of me wanted to hold on. I loved him so much, and I never wanted to hurt him. I knew too that if I tried to tell him about it, he’d just talk me out of it. And he would have. He could always do that.”

  She swallowed hard.

  “But as the wedding drew closer and closer, I couldn’t stop thinking about what a mistake it would be. It wasn’t just cold feet, either. Because I saw that no matter how much we loved each other, we just were two different people.

  “With my parents’ help, I finally found the courage to leave. I left him a note the night before our wedding, and I took off to Salt Lake to work with the church there and to eventually do missionary work. To reassess my life and try to come to terms with what I had just done.”

  Kara made a muffled noise.

  I knew it was killing her not to say something judgmental. Something like you must have been out of your mind for leaving him like that.

  And while I did a better job of hiding my own thoughts, I couldn’t help but feel the same way.

  It seemed like such a cruel thing to do – to leave a man practically at the altar like that. To just leave a note and take off. To not even give him a chance to hear the words from your own mouth.

  I tried to imagine the crushing shame and embarrassment and sadness that something like that would cause.

  And in a small way, I found that I was beginning to understand why Cliff was how he was.

  I closed my eyes for a second.

  She ruined me…

  He had to have been talking about Samantha. For goodness sakes, he still carried around the engagement photo of her in his wallet.

  Like a breaker wave, an immense feeling of sorrow rushed over me.

  It wasn’t an excuse necessarily. But I could now see that Cliff’s behavior was the product of a broken heart that had festered for far, far too long.

  “I know how horrible it sounds,” Samantha continued, as if she knew what we were both thinking. “But in my heart, I felt it was the right thing to do. I knew that I couldn’t weigh him down like that.”

  She took in a deep breath.

  “But I’m not proud of how I did it. I made it worse by waiting until the night before the wedding to tell him. I know that the way I did that nearly killed him. I got married a year later to a man who went to the same Latter-day Saints church in Lake Oswego that I grew up going to, and I know the news got back to him. I’m sure Cliff thought that I’d been seeing Trevor on the side while we were together.

  “I heard Cliff was different after all of it. People said he turned mean. That he’d become ruthless and cruel to those around him. That he mistreated his business partner – the same woman who first hired him as a line cook and really believed in his talent. I heard that he became… he became….”

  Her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling and she sucked in a deep breath.

  “He became a very bad person. And over the years, I’ve been haunted by the knowledge that I’m responsible for that,” she said. “And that even though I did the right thing for the both of us – something he wouldn’t have ever been able to do – I killed him in the process. I killed that good man, same as if I’d stabbed him in the heart.”

  I felt a chill pass through me when she said that.

  Her eyes filled with tears again, and she seemed to be stuck on that one thought for a while.

  The wind screamed outside and filled the empty pause with an emptiness of its own.

  “Was today the first time you’d seen him since then?” I finally asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “When I entered the competition, I had no idea that he was judging it. I didn’t know until I read the local paper a couple of days ago. I thought about pulling out when I saw that he was set to judge, but then I thought maybe the Lord orchestrated this. Maybe it was finally my chance to apologize to him. To make things right. After all these years.

  “And when I thought about it that way, I realized that the Chocolate Championship itself didn’t matter one bit. That this was a chance for me to fix the mistake I’d made. To tell him that I never wanted to hurt him. That I had always loved him, and that I always will. I just couldn’t be an excuse for him not to follow his dreams. And he couldn’t be an excuse for me not to follow mine.

  “I came here today with only the best intentions, Ms. Peters. But when he saw me… when I tried to talk to him this morning, he was completely stunned. And then repulsed. He wouldn’t speak to me or hear me out. He just walked away, like I was nothing. Like we had never…”

  She bit her lip, and I thought about what Kara had told me. About how she’d seen Cliff crying earlier that day.

  It must have been shortly after he’d seen Samantha for the first time.

  What a shock that must have been to him.

  “I deserved nothing less,” she said. “I know that. But it devastated me. I should have just left the show, but stupidly, I stuck around thinking I could try and talk to him after. I couldn’t go home on that note.

  “Then, this afternoon…” she trailed off.

  A couple of big fat tears let loose across her red cheeks.

  “I…”

  But she couldn’t seem to speak.

  I glanced sharply at Kara.

  She looked nervous.

  I could read her thoughts easy enough.

  She did it. Sh
e tried to kill him. She took that hammer and—

  “Samantha, you can tell us what happened,” I said. “We won’t judge you. I’m sure it was just an accident. They happen, you know. Just tell us what went wrong.”

  Samantha suddenly eyed me, a strange expression on her face.

  “I did just tell you what happened,” she said. “I tried to see him this morning, and he wouldn’t talk to me. During the break this afternoon, I wanted to find him again, but then there was the blackout, and later I heard that scream.”

  She shuddered visibly.

  “I know I’m responsible for what happened to him today, too,” she said. “Cliff must have been so distraught by seeing me, that he went out there into the snow and ice, and he slipped and fell.”

  She drew in a ragged breath.

  “I can’t believe the good Lord would let something so horrific happen.”

  I cleared my throat and furrowed my brow.

  “So… so you didn’t see Cliff during the break? You didn’t talk to him at all?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I was in the auditorium the whole time,” she said. “That young guy with the chocolate fairytale castle came up to me and had some questions about my technique. I was trying to leave him politely to find Cliff when the lights went out.”

  I studied Samantha, wondering if she really was telling the truth.

  If she hadn’t hurt Cliff, then who had? Who else at the event would have had a motive to do such a thing?

  I knew that criminals could be experts at hiding who they really were. I knew that it was possible that Samantha was one of those types and that she was lying through her teeth to us. Laying on the religious, devout, wholesome angle hard so that we wouldn’t suspect anything.

  But Daniel was a big believer in hunches, and so was I.

  And right now, I had a hunch that Samantha Garner was telling the truth.

  She hadn’t hurt Cliff.

  In fact, she’d been trying to do the opposite today – somehow, undo the hurt that she had done to him in the past.

  As I looked over at Kara, I realized that we seemed to be on the same page.

  Samantha caught the look, and suddenly appeared confused.