Menace in Christmas River (Christmas River 8)

by Meg Muldoon

  “I know,” I said. “Believe me, she’s not my favorite person in the world, either.”

  She let out a sigh up into the air.

  “Did I really blow it that bad, Cin?”

  I didn’t know yet. But I shook my head anyway.

  Chapter 43

  Libby McBride took a sip of hot cocoa, her hands still trembling slightly as she brought the paper cup up to her lips.

  “I thought… I thought maybe we wouldn’t make it,” she said after nodding at me gratefully for the hot drink. “It was so cold out there. So very, very cold.”

  She looked past me with the haunted eyes of someone who was still trying to come to terms with how close she’d come to the edge.

  After the Julie incident, I had spent some time helping Marty Higgins look for that missing hammer, while Kara was helping Eleanor assess the food situation in the culinary school. But after scouring the auditorium from top to bottom with the big man, the tool was still missing, with absolutely no trace as to its whereabouts.

  A sense of gloom had overtaken Marty after losing his grandfather’s hammer, and the normally jovial fellow was as devastated as I’d ever seen him.

  I began to worry that even if we did somehow find the hammer, Marty might not want it then. Not after the bloody part it had played in what might now be a possible homicide.

  If I had been Julie, I’d probably have hidden it somewhere, maybe in one of the culinary classrooms. That, or I’d have stashed it outside beneath one of the many snow drifts, where it would be safe until the thaw.

  Throughout the search, I’d found it hard to concentrate. It seemed as though every few seconds, I was checking my phone, looking for some sort of message from Daniel.

  But there was nothing.

  And that feeling of worry and not knowing if he was out there in that horror show of ice and snow was as stomach-turning as a broccoli tofu imitation-cheese casserole.

  I knew that the only way to keep from losing my mind completely with worry was to stay busy.

  That was how I had ended up back in the student lounge area with the McBrides, making up some Swiss Miss hot cocoa I’d found in one of the classrooms next to that box of orange licorice tea.

  Though they seemed to be physically okay for the most part, the emotional scars left over from the incident were still written all over their faces – especially Libby’s.

  I realized I wasn’t the only one needing a distraction.

  “I’m sorry we never got around to judging your chocolate sculpture,” I said, taking a seat next to her on the sofa, where she sat with her twisted ankle propped up on a stack of pillows.

  “Me too,” she said. “I spent every spare minute I had these last two months putting it together. I mean, I’m not a professional pastry chef or anything. I know I didn’t have a chance in heck at winning. But I figured since it was taking place in Christmas River this year, I might as well join in, you know? I always thought that if I didn’t have to tend bar at our place, then maybe I’d go to culinary school or something.”

  Her eyes drifted over to her husband, who was standing by the window, pressing a phone up to his ear in an attempt to get reception.

  “Now I wish I hadn’t entered in the competition in the first place,” she said, her voice quivering some. “If I had known all this was going to happen, then I wouldn’t have…”

  She trailed off.

  I tried to steer the conversation in a more cheerful direction.

  “Well, can you tell me about your entry?” I asked. “I’d really love to hear about it. Especially since I didn’t get a chance to see it for myself.”

  Hers had been part of the one-third that the judges hadn’t gotten around to.

  She forced a smile.

  “It was called “For the Love of Beer,’” she said. “It was a bottle of beer made out of chocolate with these two big red chocolate hearts floating off of it. I thought the theme was fitting since I’m a bartender.

  “The beer bottle came out a little lopsided, and one of the chocolate hearts fell off and broke on the ride over here… but it was still really nice. Probably the prettiest thing I ever made. I thought for sure that Cliff Copperstone would like it. On that TV competition he judges? He always likes dishes infused with beer. He always gives those a good score. I thought for sure he would like my…”

  She trailed off again.

  “It’s such a shame what happened to him,” she mumbled. “Poor, poor man.”

  No matter how I tried to steer the conversation, Mrs. McBride seemed to find her way back to gloomier topics.

  “Yeah, it is a shame—”

  “You know, during that break we took right before the power outage?” she said, cutting me off. “I went outside for a smoke and I saw him for a short moment. He was just standing out there, looking up at the sky. I was about to tell him how much I liked his show, but then somebody else came outside and started talking to him, and I chickened out.”

  I suddenly felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end.

  I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

  “How close was that to when the blackout happened?”

  She just shrugged, taking a sip of her cocoa.

  She didn’t seem to notice the desperation in my voice

  “Not a couple minutes before,” she said. “I was lucky – when the power went out, I had just about stepped into the auditorium, so I found my way out pretty quick—”

  “You’re saying somebody was outside with him at that time?”

  I felt my heart thudding hard in my chest.

  If Libby had seen Cliff Copperstone a few moments before the blackout, then that would have had to have been right around the time he was bludgeoned.

  Meaning that whoever was out there with him then might have…

  “Mrs. McBride,” I said, gripping her arm. “Who was it? Who was talking to him?”

  She furrowed her brow in bewilderment.

  “I don’t… I don’t know exactly,” she stuttered. “I don’t know her name.”

  “What did she look like?”

  I found that I had unconsciously started tightening my grip on her arm.

  “She looked official,” she said. “She was one of the gals organizing the show, I think.”

  I felt my nerves jump around inside of me like live power lines.

  Julie.

  Kara had been right.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  Julie had done it. In a jealous rage, she had stolen Marty’s hammer, found Cliff alone outside, and exacted her revenge. She had—

  “And she was short,” Libby said.

  Julie wasn’t exactly short. But she wasn’t tall either. Maybe next to Cliff, and from a distance, someone might have thought she was—

  “She was flittering around here a lot,” Libby continued. “She had a clipboard and this big purse. And I know maybe I ain’t one to speak, but I think the gal could stand to put on a few pounds. She’s so thin, you know? Like she might just blow away in the wind. She also…”

  I felt my ears suddenly ringing, and the rest of Libby’s description was lost on me.

  I didn’t need to hear anymore.

  I knew who she was talking about.

  I shot up from the chair.

  “I… I have to go,” I said.

  I ran out of the student lounge, feeling Mrs. McBride’s puzzled stare on me the entire way.

  Chapter 44

  She had lied.

  She hadn’t just stumbled across Cliff Copperstone’s body after coming out of the restrooms, the way she said.

  She’d been there, with him, right before it happened.

  Meaning that she…

  Even as I rushed down the hallway, I couldn’t believe it.

  The screaming.The crying. The horrified expression.

  The squeamishness she supposedly had with blood.

  Had it all been an act?

  Or had it been real? A real reaction that occur
red after she’d taken a hammer to Cliff Copperstone? Real horror at what she had just done?

  I didn’t know.

  All I knew was that I needed to find Kara. We’d been looking in the wrong direction all along– thinking Julie had done it when the true culprit was right under our…

  I stopped dead in my tracks as something out the window caught my eye.

  A clear, distinct glow burned brightly in the distance, cutting through the black, icy night like a laser.

  I felt my heart lunge forward with hope.

  “Daniel…” I whispered.

  But as I watched the light, I realized that it wasn’t coming toward the building, the way it would have been if it was the headlights of an approaching car.

  With each passing moment, it was becoming smaller and fainter.

  I felt a twinge in my gut and the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up again.

  I hardly thought it through. But I didn’t need to. Because I just knew. It was a gut feeling, a hunch… a moment of pure intuition.

  It wasn’t Daniel out in the storm.

  It was her.

  Trying to get away.

  Trying to get away with murder.

  Chapter 45

  “Holly!”

  The sharp, icy wind wrapped around my vocal chords and squeezed as I shouted her name again.

  The grey sweater I was wearing was no match for the hammering gusts and frozen sleet.

  The small shadowy figure up ahead didn’t respond when I yelled. It just kept going, slipping here and there on the ice, but walking with a marked determination.

  The flashlight the figure held danced in the darkness.

  “Stop, Holly!” I shouted again, nearly falling over myself as my snow boots hit a particularly slick patch.

  Whether or not she heard me over the gale, or whether she was ignoring me, I didn’t know.

  But the fourth time I yelled her name, she stopped dead in her tracks.

  For a long moment, she just stood still. Still as a statue. Almost like if she didn’t turn around, she wouldn’t have to face me.

  Or face what she had done.

  I stood back, waiting for her to do something, feeling the frigid air claw at my lungs with each breath.

  She slowly turned around.

  She wasn’t dressed for slogging through a wilderness of ice. She was wearing a skirt, fashionable boots, and a long wool jacket that was already completely covered in ice pellets.

  It was the kind of outfit that could mean death in this kind of weather.

  Holly Smith was dressed for the Valentine’s Day Chocolate Championship Showdown. Not for being a fugitive.

  Her big blue eyes locked on mine. They were wide and scared and full of raw emotion.

  “I just need to get something from my car,” she stammered.

  Her words came out weak and utterly unconvincing.

  “I know what happened, Holly,” I said, raising my voice.

  She furrowed her brow, pretending to be dumbstruck by what I was saying.

  But the game was up. I knew it. And so did she.

  “Why’d you do it?” I said. “Did he hurt you in some way? I mean, was it… was it self-defense or something? Was that it, Holly?”

  In the dimness of the flashlight, I could see a fat tear stream down one of her cheeks. It slid down her face slowly, freezing along the way.

  “There must have been a reason—”

  She made a sudden movement, and my breath suddenly caught in my throat.

  A moment later, she pulled something from that large purse of hers, holding it at her side with a trembling hand.

  The dull, stained metal caught the glow of the flashlight, and I shuddered.

  “You don’t know how long I’ve waited, Ms. Peters,” she said, a few more tears dropping from her eyes. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to hurt that man.”

  There was a kind of rage bubbling up in her words as she spoke.

  And I knew that there was a lot more to the story than I had bargained for.

  Chapter 46

  “My mother,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “My mother is a good person, Ms. Peters. Her heart’s so big and so generous... There’s nothing she wouldn’t do to help somebody if she could.”

  She paused as a gust blew into us, tossing ice pellets the size of deer flies into our faces.

  I shivered. My hands and arms were starting to go numb.

  “Years ago, my mother owned a restaurant called The Stone Wall in Portland. All that love and generosity she had? She put that into her food. And people could really tell – they absolutely loved it. The restaurant did well, and she made enough to support raising me and my sisters all on her own…”

  She looked away.

  “One summer, my mom hired this young culinary student as a line cook. This kid was really talented. And she… she just thought the world of him. I think she always wanted a son, and she treated this guy like the son she never had. You know? She took him under her wing and taught him everything she knew about the industry.

  “And then that… bastard…”

  She inhaled a ragged breath and her hands tightened around the hammer.

  “He took everything from my mom…Everything. After he graduated from culinary school and came back from this big internship in New York, my mom asked Cliff to be her business partner. And a few years after that, Cliff made my mom sign something. Something she thought was just run-of-the-mill paperwork. But it wasn’t. You see, he found a way to swindle the restaurant from her. He thought he could do a better job with it if he got her out of the way. He created this big franchise and he made a killing.

  “And it all… it all just broke her heart. It ruined her.”

  I felt a chill pass through me at the phrase.

  It echoed Cliff’s last words to me almost to a tee, though he had been talking about somebody else.

  Holly trailed off again, the wind taking her voice clear away into the icicle forest that surrounded us.

  I swallowed hard, and for a moment we just stared at each other.

  “Did you start working for Julie just to… just to do this?” I asked.

  She lowered the hammer even further, letting it drop to her side as if the weight was too heavy for her small arm.

  She closed her eyes for a long moment.

  “I applied for the job with Julie’s PR firm six months ago without knowing anything about the Chocolate Championship. But during the interview she told me that she’d been hired for this big event, which is why she would need an assistant. And that Cliff Copperstone himself was going to be judging it. And when I heard that… It just seemed like fate. He would never remember me. I was just a kid when he stole the restaurant from my mom. He’d have no idea that it was me…

  She tilted her head up, peering into the red night sky.

  “I wasn’t even sure until this afternoon if I would actually be able to go through with it,” she said. “It takes a lot of courage to do something like that. Last night, I was thinking ‘No. I can’t do it. It’s too risky.’ I left the meat tenderizer I was going to hit him with at the hotel this morning. It was from the restaurant, you see, and I had thought it would be fitting to do it with that. People would think one of the contestants from that stupid show he’s on had done it, trying to get revenge.”

  I swallowed hard.

  She had really planned it out.

  “But I saw that hammer today on the handyman’s tool belt,” she continued. “And I thought I’d take it just in case I changed my mind, I’d still have my chance. Then I saw Cliff standing outside by himself during that break this afternoon, and I went up to him, telling him that Julie needed to see him ASAP. And he was so rude… just so... He told me to get out of there and leave him alone.”

  She smirked slightly.

  “And then… then he kneeled down to tie the laces on one of his boots and…”

  Her eyes turned to steel.

  “And m
y mother always did say never to pass up an opportunity.”

  I shuddered as she said the same words she’d said to me when I first met her in my pie shop kitchen earlier in the week.

  Holly’s expression darkened.

  “You see, Cliff got everything. After she lost the restaurant, my mom started drinking and her life is just… she’s spiraled out of control. She lost her house and spends all day at the neighborhood bar. She’s a drunk and she doesn’t care about anything anymore. She doesn’t cook anymore – doesn’t do anything anymore but drink.”

  Holly let out a sharp sob, then as if to stop it, she bit her lip hard.

  “Cliff Copperstone deserved everything he got today.”

  But even as she said it, I could tell there was no conviction in her voice.

  She wasn’t as cold-blooded as she wanted to be.

  “He broke my mom’s spirit,” she said. “And I wanted to break his skull the same way.”

  I glanced down at the hammer in her hand.

  I swallowed hard again.

  “I’m sorry, Holly,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I’m sorry that this happened. I’m sorry that it came to this.”

  I felt my whole body shudder again.

  “But if you try to leave now, you’re going to die out here, Holly. Do you understand that? You won’t make it an hour out here.”

  She looked at me with cold, empty eyes.

  “I’ll make it,” she whispered.

  But I could tell that she didn’t believe it, either.

  “Think of your mom,” I said. “Think of what she would want.”

  She shook her head after a moment.

  “I can’t go back,” she said, looking past my shoulder in the direction of the building. “It’s over now, Ms. Peters. When your husband gets back, you’re going to tell him everything. And everyone will know. And I’ll be…”

  She swallowed hard.

  I grappled with how to respond.

  Because she was right: Everyone would know what she did.

  And she would be arrested, charged, and most likely convicted for attempted murder.