Creepy Christmas Waffle: Book 7 in the Diner of the Dead Series

by Carolyn Q. Hunter

  The stone’s origins are still unknown. It is believed that it was forged in ancient times when elder gods and demons ruled the earth.

  The entry stopped there. “No,” she whispered. “No. There has got to be more. Tell me how to reverse the power.” Maddeningly, Sonja flipped through the pages of the book. “Something, give me something,” she shouted.

  “Sonja,” Belinda shouted, grabbed her friend’s hand. “Stop. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Glancing up at the librarian, Sonja felt only terror. “No. I won’t accept that. I need to find Sam’s nephew. Now!” Grabbing her coat off the chair, Sonja bolted up the stairs.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  Sonja raced well above the marked speed limit in the direction of the Hinkley farm. The snow had begun to fall again, making the drive slick and dangerous, but Sonja pushed on. “Please don’t be dead,” she whispered, the horrible vision she had received the night before playing over and over in her head. While Dillion was far from her favorite person in the world, no one deserved to be killed—and especially not because Sonja had somehow unwittingly willed it through the supernatural power of a cursed stone.

  When she arrived at the foot bridge that crossed the canal leading onto the Hinkley farm, she was forced to come to a stop. Since the bridge and the long driveway up to the farmhouse were private property, the city plows hadn’t come through. At least two feet of snow blocked the way.

  Jumping out, Sonja proceeded to wade through the snow as fast as she could toward the house. It was about halfway up the drive when she spotted Benjamin, shovel in his hand. Her mouth hung open in the surprise when she saw that the second half of the driveway and the path up to the house were all shoveled—a feat that most likely had taken the husky farmhand all morning to complete.

  “Sonja?” he called, raising one hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun. “Is that you?”

  Trudging the last few feet through the snow, Sonja struggled to catch her breath. “Where,” she gasped, “where is Dillion?”

  Benjamin’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “He’s inside. Why?”

  Sonja didn’t wait to explain and bolted for the front door.

  “The door’s locked.” He yelled after her.

  Running up the front steps she pulled on the screen, but it didn’t budge. “It won’t open.”

  Benjamin, somewhat casually, walked up to the porch. “I told you it was locked.”

  Banging on the door, Sonja began to yell. “Dillion. Dillion are you in there?”

  “What the heck is going on?”

  “Hurry up and open it,” Sonja cut in.

  Throwing up his hands, he didn’t argue and fished the keys out of his wool overcoat. “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  “Hurry,” she responded, not answering his question. The only thing on her mind was the image of Dillion hanging by the garland.

  Slipping the key into the lock, he unlatched the screen. Next, he inserted a different key into the farmhouse’s deadbolt. As soon as the locked clicked open, Sonja pushed past him and into the house.

  “Hey,” he exclaimed.

  “Dillion,” she screamed through the house. A lightbulb turned on in Sonja’s mind and she ran for the stairway, just as she had seen in her vision. Reaching the bottom step, she looked up and gasped.

  “What do you need Dillion so badly for, anyway?” Benjamin asked, right before looking up the stairs. He stopped dead when he realized what Sonja was staring at.

  Hanging from the rafter, at the very top of the stairway, was Dillion—a strand of rope, embellished with gold garland, around his neck.

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  When Sheriff Thompson arrived, the snowfall had become heavier again. Sonja was sitting on the front porch, blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a cup of steaming, untouched coffee in her hand.

  “Sonja,” Frank shouted as he made his way toward his girlfriend. “Where have you been all morning? I’ve been worried sick about you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered. She already felt horrible as it was. The last thing she needed was a scolding from the most important person in her life.

  If the stone inside her purse really was the Arwassa Stone, that meant both murders were her fault. Someone, she had unknowingly created marked two people for murder, and someone else as the murderer. What made it worse, Sonja knew she could never prove that she was responsible. A magical stone just wouldn’t hold up in court. This just meant that someone else, someone who was marked, was going to take the fall.

  “I’ve been driving around town all morning looking for you, only to have Benjamin call me and tell me you were here.”

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered.

  “On top of it all,” he sighed, “he tells me you found another dead body, making three total in the last twenty-four hours.”

  Sonja looked up at her boyfriend. “Three?” she exclaimed, the guilt washing over her more and more.

  Frank’s face turned a shade of red as he realized he said something he wasn’t supposed to. “I want you to head straight home,” he attempted to divert the conversation away from the third dead body. “You had a serious episode last night and you should be in bed.”

  “Go home?” she argued. “I can’t go home now.”

  “Sonja, please,” he insisted. “It isn’t safe for you to be involved.”

  “You mean because there are now three murders?” she pressed.

  “Yes,” he admitted in his frustration. “While I was out searching for you today behind your house, I found a homeless man in a cave. His throat had been cut.”

  Sonja jaw dropped open. “His throat had been cut?”

  Frank nodded.

  Sonja felt her heart drop into her stomach. The cave the cat had led her to the night before had a body in it? If Benjamin hadn’t been there to stop her, she might have very well found it.

  “I don’t know if all of this is connected, but for the time being, I want you to stay out of it,” he reiterated. “So, please, go home.”

  “But,” she protested.

  “No, Sonja,” he shouted.

  Sonja shrank back in shock. He had never yelled at her before, and it scared her a little.

  Sighing, his shoulders slumped in shame. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he apologized, regaining his usual gentle tone. Leaning down he embraced her in a tight hug. “Three people are dead. I don’t want you to be next.” Pulling back, he looked his girlfriend directly in the eye. “Go home. Enjoy Christmas Eve with your mother.”

  Sonja wanted to protest, to scream at him. On the one murder case where it mattered the most, where she knew she could very well be the one responsible for the murders, he was refusing to let her help.

  Benjamin opened the screen door. “Sheriff? The body is through here.”

  The second squad car pulled up the drive as they were speaking, and the two deputies got out. The whole crew headed inside to mark off the crime scene, while Benjamin took a seat next to Sonja on the porch.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Thanks.” He shifted, pulling the collar of his coat up around his neck to protect against the cold. “I must have the worst luck of anyone,” he commented.

  “How can you say that?” Sonja pressed. “None of this was your fault.” She refrained from mentioning how she herself felt responsible for everything that was happening, but her guilt was like a lump in her throat.

  “This is the second person who’s been murdered on the farm,” he noted, referring to a TV personality who had been found hanging from the rafters in the barn the previous summer.

  “Third, if you count the ghost,” Sonja pointed out. The farm was notoriously known to be haunted by a young man who had hung himself in the barn in the early 1900s.

  “And then Sam, the only man who I could have ever considered as real family was murdered last night.” Attempting to keep his masculine persona intact, Benjamin cl
early was working to fight back tears.

  Sonja honestly felt bad for him. Despite having her father run off when she was young, she had always still had her mother. On top of that, Alison and her parents were as much like family as anyone else. She even had Frank now, who cared so deeply for the small-town diner owner that it was a wonder he hadn’t said the words “I love you” yet.

  Sonja just couldn't imagine not having anyone in the world.

  “I seem to attract dead bodies,” he complained.

  At this comment, Sonja almost laughed—mostly out of nervousness—but stopped herself. If anyone attracted dead bodies, it was her. Multiple murder cases had piled up all around her ever since she had moved back to Haunted Falls. Now, more than ever, she realized how each crime seemed intimately enmeshed with supernatural forces on some level. She wondered if it were possible that she could be attracting these murders.

  For the first time since she had returned to her Colorado hometown, she seriously wondered if moving back had been a mistake.

  “It isn’t you,” she whispered, somewhat to herself more than to Benjamin. “Besides, even if you did attract dead bodies, I think I’ve got you beat.”

  Benjamin laughed painfully.

  Glancing over at the half-shoveled drive, she tilted her head to one side. “Isn’t it a lot of work to try and shovel all that on your own?”

  The man beside her didn’t reply right away but eventually shrugged his shoulders. “Honestly, I was just trying to take my mind off Sam’s murder. I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “He left me the farm,” he informed her.

  “I know,” Sonja replied. “Frank told me.”

  “I see. I’m sure someone was angry about me getting all the money. That’s why Sam ended up dead.”

  She scooted closer slightly to him, partially for warmth, partially as a comfort to him. “Is that why the door was locked? Because you thought someone was coming for you next?” Mr. Hinkley never locked the farmhouse, she remembered.

  Benjamin nodded. “To keep people out . . . and in, too.”

  “You mean Dillion?”

  “I was sure he was the one who did it.” Pulling out a handkerchief, he whipped his nose. “But, without having anything solid to accuse him with, I couldn’t very well just kick him out into the cold. I might hate him, but he was still Sam’s nephew. I owed him the courtesy of letting him stay through the holidays.”

  “But you still didn’t trust him?”

  “Nope. So, I locked all the doors and windows. That way, if he tried to come out after me he’d have to fiddle with a lock first. It would give me more time—more warning—to get away, and if he really wasn’t the murderer, no one would be able to get in either.”

  Sonja shifted, this new fact bouncing around in her mind. “Wait, so everything was locked?”

  “Yep. The whole house. No one could get in, and Dillion would have to work to get out.”

  “And you have the only set of keys?”

  He nodded, but the stopped when he realized the implication. “Y-you don’t think I did this?”

  Sonja hesitantly shook her head. “No,” she replied, unsure of what she had just said. It was getting harder to ignore the facts laid out before her. Benjamin had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to murder Sam. He was also the only one with keys to the farmhouse, and therefore the only one who could murder Dillion.

  “Y-you didn’t see anyone else out here today, did you?” she asked.

  “No, no one. But I was shoveling for probably the last three or four hours. Someone might have been able to sneak up to the farmhouse.”

  Sonja let the thoughts of the last two days spin in her mind, trying to make sense of it all. If Benjamin really was the murderer, then how did the stone play into all of this? Had she, as the caster, marked him as a murderer, or was it all just coincidence? Had the stone simply sent her a warning about both murders?

  None of this helped explain the third body, the one she had just learned about, the one in the cave behind her house.

  Sonja’s mouth went dry with fear. Glancing at Benjamin, she examined his face, trying to see if it was the face of a murderer. “What were you doing out near that cave last night?”

  “What cave?”

  “The one behind my house.”

  “Like I told you. I saw you walking out there, wondered if you needed help, and followed.”

  “And why were you late to the party?”

  “What are you getting at?” he snapped, his level of tension finally boiling over.

  “N-nothing,” she replied. “Nothing at all.” Jumping to her feet as quickly as she could, Sonja went inside the farmhouse.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  “Sonja,” Frank shouted upon spotting his girlfriend. “I thought I said to go home.”

  “I need to talk to you,” she stated matter-of-factly.

  “Sonja, I’m in the middle of a multiple homicide case.”

  “It’s about the case,” she admitted.

  Sighing, the uniformed officer walked over to the young redhead. “I don’t want you involved, do you hear? So, tell me what it is, and then go home.” As he said all of this, he led her into the back study of the house.

  Once they were safely behind closed doors, he turned to her and raised one eyebrow. “Okay, what’s this all about?”

  She instantly went into her explanation of everything she’d learned, that Benjamin had been mysteriously outside near the cave the night before, that the farmhouse had been completely locked up and Benjamin was the only one with a key, and that he was the only one who stood to really benefit from Sam’s death.

  “Are you sure about all this?” Frank asked.

  “Positive. I don’t want to think it’s Benjamin any more than you do, but after the way he snarled at me outside when I hinted that he might be suspected, I’m just not sure what else to think. The only other answer would be if someone broke in and killed Dillion.”

  “We can’t know for sure until we have solid evidence one way or the other.”

  “I’m hoping you do, soon.”

  “Still, I don’t want you to go near Ben until we’ve figured this whole thing out.”

  “K’,”

  “I want you to leave through the backdoor. I’m going to ask Benjamin to come in so I can interview him, see if he tells me the same story he told you.”

  Sonja nodded.

  “If I’m not swamped by all of this later tonight, then I’ll see you tonight for Christmas Eve dinner.”

  “Sounds good.” Kissing him on the cheek, she turned and headed out of the study and walked down the hallway toward the back door. Something made her stop in her tracks about halfway to the door.

  There seemed to be a brush of cold air on her cheek. Glancing in a circle, she tried to figure out where it was coming from. The cold breeze continued to brush against her, and she followed its trail until she reached a small window next to the back door. It seemed it was shut all the way.

  Examining it closer, it looked like the lock was faulty, like it most likely hadn’t latched closed properly in the first place.

  On top of it all, the window being slightly cracked open indicated that someone probably came in.

  Sonja’s jaw dropped. She realized she might know someone else who could be the murderer.

  * * *

  Sonja considered inviting Frank along for the ride, and telling him of her plans, but decided she didn’t have anything solid enough to back up her newest theory. While it didn’t rule out Benjamin yet, she wanted to make a brief social call first just to check in. She figured she was less likely to get in trouble if she was discreet.

  The stone still weighed heavily on her mind, and it frustrated her that she had no way of really proving its involvement in all this. In fact, she wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with the murders—besides foretelling that they would happen.

  Pul
ling up in front of a small suburban home, she got out of the van and walked up the front drive. Knocking on the door, she waited for someone to answer.

  Soon, Shauna, Dick’s daughter, answered the door. Despite the worried pallor, her face immediately brightened upon seeing the young woman standing outside. “Oh, Sonja. To what do I owe this visit?” Sonja had known her for as many years as she’d been alive. In fact, the night before was the only time she hadn’t seen her show up for the annual block party with Richard.

  “Actually,” she admitted, “I was just checking up on Dick. He looked pretty ill when he left our place this morning.”

  The worry instantly returned to Shauna’s face. “He left your house this morning?”

  The young sleuth nodded. “I saw him just before he left. I offered him a ride, but he refused.”

  “Oh, dear,” Shauna whispered. “You better come inside.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Please, just come in.”

  Without another argument, Sonja followed the short woman into the house.

  “Have a seat,” Shauna motioned to a yellow chair at the kitchen table.

  Sonja complied, sitting down.

  “Hot chocolate?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “The kids are all down for their afternoon naps. It’s a miracle any of them fell asleep, what with how their grandfather has been acting.” She turned on the stove and began stirring a pot full of hot chocolate, presumably intended for the party the night before.

  “How has he been acting?” Sonja pressed. She knew there was something odd about Richard’s behavior, but Shauna’s viewpoint on the situation would be valuable.

  “When he came home yesterday, he seemed bit snippy, like something was wrong. It didn’t matter what I tried to say to him, he just got madder and madder. Finally, when it came time to head out to the party, he refused to take us.”