“No, thanks.” I felt queasy with apprehension. I’d managed to down a sandwich earlier, but that was all. “You go ahead.”
She did, hurrying toward the lighted and decorated hot-cocoa hut like a glamorous grown-up five-year-old in a knit hat and fur-lined boots. I watched her go with pure uneasiness.
Why hadn’t Travis tried harder to help me dissuade Albany from coming here? If things went as planned, the repercussions would be difficult for her—for all the Sullivans.
I looked around for Cashel and saw him waving to me from across the park. He was volunteering at the event and had agreed to meet me there. The eldest Sullivan sibling didn’t know his role in bringing down his dad, of course. I wasn’t that dopey—I’d disguised my interest in meeting Cashel as simple curiosity about Sproutes’s pj’s-and-hot-cocoa Santa’s locomotive ride.
It had been a long few hours since that initial phone call, though. Now it was already dusk. It was getting darker fast.
All the Christmas lights were on, flashing merrily, as I went to meet Cashel. I weaved my way through throngs of children and their paper-cup-wielding parents. It was cold outside. Like Albany, everyone wanted hot cocoa or coffee to stay warm.
Holiday music burst from nearby loudspeakers. The children shrieked happily, too busy playing to notice the frigid weather.
“Hi!” I was finally close enough to speak with Cashel. I wanted to chat with him quickly, before Albany saw us together. “Thanks for meeting me. I didn’t know you volunteered here.”
“I’m taking Donna’s place today.” Cashel’s gaze grew somber. His eyes filled with distant memories. “She used to volunteer here every Christmas. Someone had to do it this year.”
I couldn’t help noticing that Cashel seemed absolutely wrecked. His beard stubble was overgrown; his face was pale; his hands were tremulous. I thought I knew the reason for that, too.
I also thought his subbing for Donna was only appropriate.
“It’s pretty crazy, isn’t it?” I indicated the boisterous crowd around us. “Is there someplace quieter we can talk?”
Cashel looked surprised—almost pleased by my suggestion. Under other circumstances, I would have thought he wanted to be alone with me for romantic reasons. As it was . . . I didn’t.
He conferred with another volunteer, then returned to me. Gently, he touched my shoulder. “Okay, I’m all set. Let’s go.”
“Over there?” I pointed to a small equipment shed.
“I have access to the whole park,” Cashel bragged, leading the way there. He glanced over his shoulder, nervously checking in with someone. He saw me watching him and frowned. “Come on.”
Cashel grabbed my arm, no longer seeming like a man who hoped for a romantic rendezvous. He hustled us both across the snow at a pace much too forceful to be considered friendly. I glanced backward as we moved through the snow, looking for . . .
Joe Sullivan. Bingo. I spied the chief of police at the edge of the locomotive entrance, watching me and Cashel. His face was hard; his demeanor even harder. He knew. I could tell.
He knew what I was there for, and he didn’t like it.
I swallowed hard and let Cashel haul me closer to that shed. I was counting on him doing exactly that, in fact. I couldn’t risk having this face-off with him near all those children. I didn’t want another ghastly scene in Sproutes.
I remembered finding Melissa. Later, finding Donna. Those memories would haunt me forever. I needed this to end today.
It was going to, if I had anything to say about it. As we reached the shed, I put up just enough resistance to convince Cashel that he had the upper hand.
He didn’t, though. Because Joe Sullivan wasn’t the only one whom I intended to bring down that day. Cashel was guilty, too.
If I’d had any doubts, the aroma that hit me as Cashel grabbed me would have dispelled them. I inhaled a lungful of the smell that had nagged at me for a while now—the same smell that had jogged my memory at the diner while I was talking with Ophelia.
The rank odor of old chocolate and sour milk was hard to overlook, a remnant of the hot chocolate I’d accidentally spilled on Cashel’s puffer coat during our photo shoot with Ophelia.
That telltale smell was what I’d noticed right before being bashed in the skull with that Santa gnome. Preceding it had been the swishing sound of Cashel’s ever-present puffer coat as he moved to hit me. I’d finally recognized both for what they were.
“You never had a chance to have your coat cleaned, huh?” I nodded at it. That chocolaty stain had basically fermented. “Sorry again about that. I would have paid for dry cleaning.”
He glanced down at the mess, eyes narrowed. “Sure. I’d be happy for you to pay, Hayden,” Cashel said in a bizarre voice.
I detected liquor on his breath. My instincts were correct.
Cashel Sullivan was an addict. He was using again, too. Even if I hadn’t been able to smell alcohol, I’d have noticed his unsteady steps and vaguely slurred words. I’d already observed his trembling hands. Cashel had been drinking heavily.
“How about if we make a deal?” I asked while he fumbled with the door of the equipment shed. I looked around and saw Albany watching us curiously, hot cocoa in hand. Uh-oh.
“A deal?” Cashel peered over his shoulder at his dad again.
I didn’t want too much of that going on. Not yet, anyway.
“Yes!” I turned the doorknob and gave the door a shove. I stepped inside the shed. Cashel followed me. “I’ll pay for your dry-cleaning bill, and you’ll confess to killing Donna.”
Silence. Inside, the shed was gloomy, lit by a pair of windows that showed the Christmas lights, and filled with lawn mowers and rakes, fertilizer bags and shovels. I turned around.
Cashel was staring at me in disbelief. He glanced over his shoulder, mouth agape, then made an uncertain motion. He wanted to leave. To check with his dad about this. I couldn’t let him.
Instead, I slammed shut the door. “Donna was always there for you, wasn’t she? All those A.A. meetings.” I angled my head and adopted an inquisitive tone. “I’m guessing it must have been weird to run into your former teacher at a meeting, huh?”
That got to him. A hesitant smile cracked his mouth. He messed up his hair, then shook his head. “She didn’t recognize me. That’s how far gone I was then. But when she did . . .” Cashel’s face looked wistful. “Donna didn’t care. She knew what it was like, trying to stay clean. She knew how hard it was. How everyone is watching. How no one thinks you can do it.”
“Is that why Donna offered to be your sponsor?”
Cashel gave a guilty nod. “We went to meetings together whenever I was in town. It wasn’t often, believe me.” His voice took on a sarcastic bent. “Addicts are supposed to avoid drama.”
“There’s nothing more dramatic than a family visit.”
“You’re not kidding.” My commiseration loosened him up. “I thought I could handle it this time. I knew I had to be here, on account of Albany’s stupid memoir, but—” He swore harshly. In a broken voice, Cashel added, “I wish I’d never come back.”
“I’ll bet it’s been a complicated visit,” I agreed. “Coming all the way from California, too. It’s so cold here. Brr!”
We laughed together. It was odd. But for the moment, he seemed willing to listen to me. I had the feeling that, without his father to pull the strings and cover his tracks, Cashel would have gotten better eventually. He would have done better.
Regrettably, he hadn’t had that chance.
As though realizing that, Cashel shivered. “I’d rather be in L.A. right now, that’s for sure. But this is the way things went, so . . .” He looked around. Saw a rake. Moved toward it.
I didn’t think he’d bludgeon me with it, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I glimpsed movement under the shed’s closed door—just a pair of shadows crossing the threshold—and inhaled.
I had to be brave enough to finish this. So I kept on talking. “L.A. wasn’t th
at great for you, either, though, was it? Not after you met Melissa at the rehab facility in Malibu.”
Cashel stopped to frown at me. “You know about that?”
I raised my palms. “Hey, I’m on your side! That was a terrible thing to do, pumping you for info about Albany.”
His mouth twisted. “All I said was that my sister had this wacky book she was shopping around. It was fiction then. I’ve never been any good at artistic stuff, but I like talking.”
That was fortunate for me. I’d noted that about Cashel during our photo shoot and surmised he might help me now.
“Group therapy is like that. You find yourself spilling stuff you never intended to,” he explained. “I didn’t think much about it at the time. And Melisa could be really nice! You wouldn’t think so, to see her in full-throttle mode. But sometimes . . .” He sighed. “When you had her attention, you really had it. You were the only person who mattered. That was me as soon as I opened my big, fat mouth about Albany and her memoir.”
“Group therapy isn’t supposed to be about other people.”
“You’re telling me!” Cashel gave me an aggrieved look.
“For Melissa to use you that way . . . It was wrong.”
I held my breath, hoping for an outright confession. But it wasn’t going to be that easy. Cashel paced around the shed.
I tried another tactic. “But you’re probably used to that, right? I mean, all these years, you should have been getting the credit for your mom’s cookie-Bake-Off trophies at the newspaper.” I watched as his shoulders stiffened. “You’re very talented. Those cookies you made for your mom were really delicious.”
Josh had told me that his editor’s son was “handy with a mixing bowl.” From there, I’d put two and two together . . . and come up with a whole lot of questions. Starting with, if Cashel hadn’t arrived in town until after the Sproutes Sentinel cookie swap—which was when I’d first met him at Zach’s B and B—then how had he baked his mother’s prizewinning cookies for her?
The answer had to be that he’d been in Sproutes all along, possibly hiding out with his parents, avoiding any questions.
Questions like, where were you the night Melissa died?
“Yeah, well . . .” Cashel ducked his head bashfully, wordlessly acknowledging his contribution to Linda’s cookie victory. “I’m not a screwup at everything. Even my mom has to admit that.”
“The truth is the truth,” I said. “It always comes out.”
His eyes narrowed again. “Not this time.” He hauled in a breath. “I’m sorry, Hayden. You seem like a nice person.” Cashel scrounged in his pockets and came up with some capsules. Pills? I guessed they were Linda’s prescription pain medication. “Unfortunately, like I told my volunteer buddy back there, you showed up here all upset today. Suicidal, even.” He shrugged. “I’m not going to be able to stop you from taking all these.”
He grabbed my hand, preparing to force those pills into my grasp. I twisted away, suddenly scared. His grip was painful.
“Cashel, stop!” I kicked his leg. My heel connected with his shinbone. He let me go. I wheeled around, arms out to ward him off. His eyes were crazy; his hands even more tremulous. “You don’t have to do any of this. I can help you, I promise.”
He gave a bitter laugh. “Nobody ever helps me.”
“Donna did.”
“Yeah, and look what she got for her trouble.”
Her horrible death hung between us, all too tragic. For the moment, Cashel seemed broken up about that. His shoulders fell.
I wondered if her death had caused him to start drinking again. He definitely seemed remorseful about Donna in a way he hadn’t been about Melissa. Today he seemed absolutely ruined.
“That was an accident,” I reminded him. “Donna slipped off her roof, that’s all. It was a terrible, awful accident.”
“She fell because of me!” Cashel yelled, finally confirming my suspicions that he’d been there that day. He pounded his chest with his fistful of pills. “Me! She fell because I messed up at the Santa pub crawl. We were arguing about it while she was on her roof.” He frowned. “I went to her place to apologize that morning. Donna wouldn’t let me off the hook, though.”
I frowned. “She must have really cared about you.”
His eyes filled with tears. He nodded. For a minute, Cashel seemed unable to speak. Then, “She followed me to the pub crawl. She tried to talk me out of staying. It was bad for my recovery, being there, even though I wasn’t drinking that night. But I got mad and I stormed out and I took her SUV. I’d lifted the keys from her purse. I’m pretty good at that. She didn’t like that.”
“You didn’t just take Donna’s SUV,” I theorized. “You drove it onto the sidewalk.” I kept my voice calm, hoping to calm Cashel, too. That was the way I’d imagined things had happened. Albany had confirmed seeing Donna at one of the pubs, wearing a Santa costume and holding a club soda, but she hadn’t thought it was important to say so. I looked steadily at Cashel. “It’s a good thing you weren’t caught driving without a license.”
He looked abashed. “You guessed mine was revoked? You’ve thought of everything.” He gave me a rueful headshake. “I remember you asking about that at the photo shoot with Ophelia.”
I had. We’d joked about the Sullivans having an unlikely “no driver’s license” policy. I hadn’t realized then that Cashel had a record of disorderly conduct and driving under the influence. Those were just a few of the things Travis had been referring to when he’d warned me Cashel Sullivan was bad news.
“Yes, I did,” I agreed. As a chocolate expert, I was nothing if not meticulous about details. “I also noticed you telling Zach that you’d driven ‘for hours’ that day you tried to check into the B and B. You made such a fuss about him not having a room available, I forgot to wonder until later why you hadn’t taken a flight all the way across the country from California.”
“Hey, I’ve never been a good liar,” Cashel admitted blithely. “All I needed was to make a scene. That’s what I did.”
“That’s what your dad told you to do? To cover your tracks, so no one would guess you’d already been in Sproutes for days?”
Cashel turned jittery. He stepped away, then back again.
He glared at me. “You don’t know what I’ve been through!” he yelled. “Everything I touch falls apart! No matter what I do, it’s not good enough.” He gave a wild wave. “Albany betrays the whole family, makes us look like losers, and gets applauded. I go into rehab a couple of times, and suddenly, I’m the bad guy forever. I can’t win, ever. End of story. Bad, bad Cashel.”
He swore, looking infuriated. I wanted to run for the exit, but I stayed in that shed, sticking to the plan I’d devised.
I figured he might keep talking as long as he thought I was going to die before I could tell anyone what he’d said.
Besides, didn’t everyone say I was really easy to talk to?
I gulped. “You’re not a bad guy,” I soothed, trying not to let the quaver in my voice seem too apparent. “Just because bad things happen to you, that doesn’t make you a bad person.”
Cashel closed his eyes. I thought I saw him flinch.
“You don’t know anything,” he said in a low voice. “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. Melissa was supposed to go away, and the show was supposed to go away, and I was supposed to be the hero—the one who shut down the whole thing.”
I blinked. So that really was what this was all about. It all boiled down to Christmas in Crazytown—and Cashel’s desperate need to stop it from happening. I guessed Linda Sullivan hadn’t been as tolerant of Albany’s writing as she’d pretended to be.
She’d probably been ranting to her family for months, upset that the whole town—the whole world—was gossiping about them.
“The hero who shut down the whole thing?” I asked.
“That show made my family miserable!” Cashel seethed. “Not Albany, but the rest of us. My mom’s migraines got rea
lly bad. My dad started ‘working’ more. Ophelia went way off the rails, ditching her college plans and taking up pro selfies instead.”
Outside, I heard children whooping. I heard Santa’s locomotive start puffing along its tracks. Had I really been in that shed with Cashel for only a few minutes? It felt like days. Whatever else happened, though, I had to keep going.
“You felt responsible?” I asked him carefully.
“Responsible?” Cashel scoffed. “None of it would have happened without me. None of it!” He shook his head. “Believe me, nobody let me forget it, either. Albany was off the hook—I guess because she’s ‘talented’—but not me. My dad was pissed.”
Any second now, I expected Joe Sullivan himself to crash into that shed, guns blazing—or, you know, whatever the small-town Sproutes equivalent was. I had to move things along.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you meant it,” I said. “With Melissa or with Donna. I don’t think you meant it.”
Cashel stared at me.
Say it, I silently begged him. Say it.
Say you killed Melissa Balthasar that night, Cashel.
We were staying there in the gloominess until he did. There was no way I was quitting. Not when I’d come this far already.
Maybe I could goose him along somehow?
“You should have drawn the line at delivering those candy boxes for your dad, though,” I went on, picturing those gaudily wrapped police department gifts with their velvet bows. “He was taking advantage of you with that one. Tansy is pretty sick.”
Cashel looked gutted about that. He hung his head. “Yeah, my buddy told me that seemed fishy when we were driving around, doing it. Why would my dad trust me to do that? Nobody even thought I could pick up my mom’s medication.” He swore again.
I couldn’t wrap my head around his mood swings. So I decided to go for broke, before he made another threatening move. “The toxin that was in that chocolate came from the police evidence room,” I told Cashel. “It was part of a criminally negligent recall effort involving a local manufacturing plant.”
The Peppermint Mocha Murder Page 27
