Forest Outings (A Coffee and Crime Mystery Book 3)

by Nan Sampson

  “Ellie? Is Seth there?”

  She nodded. “Yes, Per. Thank you so much - and thanks for staying on the line.”

  “You call me when you get to The Birches. I’ll be waiting for your call.”

  “Will do.” She ended the call, relief flooding through her. She hadn’t even realized how scared she’d been until rescue was imminent.

  It seemed like an hour before Seth had cleared enough snow away to get the car door open. He poked his head in and grinned at them. “Well, now. You’ve got yourself in quite the pickle. Should’ve listened to Bella, stayed put.”

  “Don’t look at me. I was all for staying the night. It’s little miss control freak over there who just had to get home.”

  It was so good to hear the life back in Charlie’s voice that Ellie decided to let that one go. “Charlie banged his head on the window, Seth. Be careful when you help him out.”

  Exiting the car was an adventure Ellie hoped she’d never have to repeat. She banged her hip twice, hard, on the damned steering wheel as she attempted to climb out the driver’s door and then nearly face planted in the snow as she staggered out. Eventually, however, they all stood in the whirling blizzard at the bottom of the ravine.

  Charlie gazed at his car in dismay. Ellie wasn’t at all sure it was even salvageable. The entire front end was buried in snow, so there was no telling the damage, but it was no simple dent in the bumper. “Oh, man. Dan is going to be so pissed. He was just letting me borrow it until Kaela turned sixteen.” Kaela was Kate’s oldest and Charlie’s niece. “Son of a bitch.” He stamped his foot in the snow.

  Shaking his head, Seth made a tsking sound. “I’m thinking you’re going to need a new car now, son. Sorry.” He brushed snow off his gloved hands and shouldered his shovel. “Well, we best get moving. Too damned cold out here to be standing around jawing.”

  Ellie headed up the incline towards the road, looking for Seth’s old truck. “Where’d you park?”

  He chuckled and waved for her to follow him.

  The night was dark and the swirling snow made it even harder to see. Charlie grabbed Ellie’s hand and the two of them followed Seth up the road.

  Charlie leaned close to her. “Are we planning on walking all the way back?”

  “I hope not.” Because I don’t think you’d make it.

  Suddenly Seth came to a stop. “Here we are. Charlie, you know how to ride, don’t you?”

  “Ride?” Charlie put a hand up to shield his eyes, then gaped. “Horses?”

  Ellie followed his gaze. Sure enough, Seth stood next to three horses, no doubt from the stable of horses he kept on hand for the tourists to ride. Her stomach flip flopped. She and horses had never gotten along. Point in fact, she’d never even wanted to get along with them. First, they smelled. Second, they were stubborn and mean and third, well, third, that’s why man had invented cars — so they wouldn’t have to ride horses.

  “Yup. Best way to get back up the hill. Old Bess might have made it down, but no way she’d make it back up again. No point in both of us wrecking our cars.” He knelt next to one of the enormous beasts and gestured to Ellie. “Come on, now. I’ll help you up. Alley-oop.”

  Somehow, between Seth and Charlie, they managed to get Ellie up on the horse. She clung to the saddle horn for dear life while Charlie tried to get her to take the reins. Finally, laughing, he mounted his own horse, still holding them. “I’ll keep her reins, Seth. You lead the way.”

  Mounting up himself, Ellie could hear Seth laughing. “City girls. Charlie, you’re going to have to teach your young lady some things about living in the real world.”

  She closed her eyes and squeezed her legs together, trying to maintain her balance on the great, ungainly beast. When they began the trek up the hill, she prayed silently to the goddess that she could somehow manage to stay on until they got to the top.

  She only opened her eyes when the lights of The Birches bled through her eyelids. Still she found herself virtually frozen to the horse. She was surprised to see Charlie standing next to her horse, his mittened hand on hers.

  “Ellie, honey, let go. I can’t help you down unless you let go.”

  Embarrassed, she let him coach her into swinging her leg over, then slid down to the ground, landing in an ungraceful heap on the ground. It irked her further that Charlie couldn’t stop laughing at her.

  “See if I help you out the next time you wreck your stupid car.”

  Charlie sobered. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to poke fun at you… when you’re down.” He snickered again, trying to stifle his laughter, while he reached out a hand to help her up.

  With a shake of his head, Seth gathered up the reins of the three animals. “Stop fooling around and get inside, you two, before you catch your death of cold. Bella’s got cocoa waiting for you and then hot baths.”

  “Thank you, Seth. Thank you so much.”

  “S’what neighbors are for, Ellie. Now scoot.”

  Charlie gave the man a salute, then, still hanging on to Ellie’s gloved hand, he pulled her up the steps and into the lobby of the inn.

  An hour later, she and Charlie sat at a small, chintz covered breakfast table in the Schuler Room — each of the rooms were named after local families — snuggled into ultra-soft, ultra-thick terry robes and slippers. They’d both taken a soak in the claw foot tub, separately, although Charlie had argued for the other option, claiming they’d save water, and now they were savoring the last bites of Arabella’s fabulous cooking, while a fire crackled in the hand-tiled fireplace behind them.

  The snow was falling thickly beyond the lace curtains, and the wind howled around the eaves and rattled the window panes. While it was still technically early, barely nine o’clock, Ellie was ready to curl up in the big, king sized four poster bed and go to sleep. She ached from bumping around trying to get out of the car, and there was an enormous bruise forming across her shoulder and chest, where the seat belt had kept her from hitting the windshield.

  Charlie had similar bruises, plus the bump on the side of his head, although since his initial bout of complaining in the car, he hadn’t mentioned it. She almost wished he would. It would be easier by far to force him to sleep on the floor if he were being a whiner and she could be angry with him.

  As it was, she wasn’t sure what they were going to do.

  He was sipping at a cup of cocoa cradled in his long fingers, and watching her over the steam swirling from the delicate porcelain cup. She hated it when he stared at her like that. She felt as though he was reading her thoughts. On more than one occasion, he had to have been, the way he answered the questions in her head before she even asked them.

  This time was no exception. “It’s okay, Ellie. You know I don’t sleep much anyway, and you’ve got to work in the morning.” He chuckled and gestured at the window. “That is, if anyone is going anywhere tomorrow. We may be stuck here for a week.”

  “Well, you can’t just sit up in a chair all night.”

  He put the cup down gently in the saucer and stood. “Have you looked at the bookshelves? Chandler, Hammett, Parker, Sayers, Christie. It’s a mystery lover’s paradise. Add in this great, comfy chair right next to the fireplace and I can’t think of a better way to spend a snowbound night.”

  Ellie felt like a selfish rat. “Charlie, I can’t do this. I mean, it’s a big bed. You stay on your side, I’ll stay on mine.”

  He moved behind her and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. She could feel the heat through the thick terry, and she shivered unaccountably. “I don’t think I could do that, Ellie. Best if I just pick a good book to read.”

  Taking a step back, he let his hands fall to his sides with a sigh that simultaneously broke her heart and filled her with a sense of panic.

  She watched as he strode over to the bookcase and ran his fingers along the spines of the books, hunting for a title. What exactly was she afraid of? Per had basically asked her the same question yesterday in his non-confrontational style.<
br />
  Was she afraid of a long-term commitment? None of her relationships with men had ever lasted long, nor had she ever had the desire to make them. They were casual things, so casual, in fact, that it was hard to pin point when or why or even how each of them had ended. She would date a man for a few weeks, maybe months, and then, somehow, she would not be dating them. No fights, no blow outs, no teary goodbyes. The relationships just sort of faded.

  That had all been when she lived in Chicago, back when she was a drone in the corporate marketing machine. It seemed a lifetime ago, and in some sense, she supposed, it really was another lifetime. Things were so different now.

  Now she was doing something she loved. Living in a place she loved. Making connections with people in a way she hadn’t done since… since college. Back then it had only been Kate and Lacey. She’d kept herself closed off even then, except for those two.

  She stood up, feeling confused and exhausted, part of her wishing she’d never gone back to Chicago last fall, to try to help Lacey. Then she’d never have been reacquainted with Charlie, never have gotten involved in Lacey’s murder, and Charlie wouldn’t have broken his leg and spent the last three months getting under her skin.

  She took a deep breath walked over to the book case. “Look, Charlie, this is stupid. We are adults, not hormone-drunk teen-agers. You take the right side, I’ll take the left side. If it helps you, bring one of those stupid books to bed and read all night if you want, but I’m beat and I’m going to sleep.”

  He pulled a book from the shelf and turned to face her, with a peculiar look on his face. Tossing the book on the chair, he said, “Just one thing, before you do that.”

  He took her by the shoulders before she could even react, and kissed her.

  It was no peck on the cheek. By the time he allowed her to come up for air, her knees felt like jelly and her arms were around his neck.

  Those startlingly blue eyes were locked on hers, and she felt even more strongly than ever that he could hear her thoughts, see into her very soul. “I should have done that months ago,” he murmured.

  “Charlie, I can’t do this.” Yet she wasn’t pulling away, and she didn’t stop him when he began to nuzzle her neck.

  He broke away long enough to meet her eyes again. “Yes, Ellie. You can.” His hands grew light as feathers on her shoulders. “But we’ll stop it if that’s what you really want. I’d never force you to go somewhere you’re not willing to go.”

  She swallowed hard. She didn’t know what she wanted. No, that wasn’t true. She did know what she wanted. She wanted Charlie. What she didn’t know is where that would take her, and that was more frightening than the prospect of freezing to death in the snow – or riding a damn horse.

  His voice was soft. “It’s okay to be out of control once in a while, Gooden. Sometimes you just have to go with the river, see where it takes you.”

  “And if somebody gets hurt along the way?”

  Charlie smiled at her. “That’s life. But at least you enjoyed the ride.”

  She knew, in the part of her brain that could still be rational, that that wasn’t good enough, that she’d had enough of pain and loss and hurt and that she didn’t want to put herself in a position to either be the giver or the receiver of it.

  At the moment, however, that part of her was possessed of a dim and fading voice. She pressed closer to him, felt the strength in his arms as they went around her, the gentleness of his hands as they pulled away the robe and settled against her bare skin. “I don’t like rides, Charlie,” she breathed as his lips caressed her shoulder.

  “You’ll like this one,” he promised. “Scout’s honor.”

  Chapter Five

  The fire had burned down to glowing embers and the room was dark when she awakened hours later. She lay on her side, facing the window, Charlie nestled behind her. His breath was slow and even and she did her best not to wake him as she slipped out of bed.

  The tea was stone cold, but she was thirsty and she didn’t want to turn on the faucet in the bathroom for fear of waking not only Charlie but everyone else in the inn when the water pipes groaned.

  Voices drifted to her through the darkness, so faint that at first she thought she might be imagining them. She cocked her head, then realized the voices were coming through the wall from the room next door. Lincoln Fairweather’s room.

  She took a few steps closer to the wall, even as the voices grew louder.

  “…not going to do it anymore!” someone shouted. A man’s voice, she thought, but it didn’t sound like Fairweather’s drawl. More like… more like Josh’s voice, she thought.

  Someone else responded, speaking more quietly, more calmly. Link, she thought. Placating him. It was about what that she was dying to know.

  With a twinge of guilt, she pressed her ear to the wall to hear better.

  “No!” Josh shouted. “I won’t be party to it. It’s not fair to Sierra, and it sure as hell isn’t fair to me.”

  She could finally make out Link’s voice, as it grew louder. “Fuck you, you little shit. I thought you cared about the cause.”

  “Oh, don’t throw that shit in my face. I’m just about the only one around here that does care. Matt’s only here because he thinks he can get into bed with you, Sierra’s only here because she’s trying to piss off daddy. As for you – hell, I don’t have a clue why you’re here. If they fucking paved over the whole of Alaska tomorrow, you’d probably find a way to make a buck off it.”

  There was silence, and Ellie wondered if Link were speaking so low again, she couldn’t hear him. But no. When Link spoke next it was loud and menacing. “You stupid cow-fucker. I’m here because I can make a difference. I can be somebody. There was a time when I was here because of you.”

  “Bullshit!” Josh was fairly screaming now. “You never gave a damn about me. I was a means to an end, a foot in the door. Hell, I was the fucking door.” She could hear movement now, as though Josh were pacing. “You forget who was with you in that shack. I was there too, although all anybody remembers is you. While I starved, you gorged yourself on gourmet foods you stashed underneath the floorboards between visits from the idiot press. I watched while you juggled your fucking stock portfolio on your laptop while those poor misguided college students stood out in the rain, hoping to get a glimpse of the great, self-sacrificing Lincoln Fairweather.”

  “We got what you wanted, didn’t we? We saved the fucking trees. I don’t know what the hell you’re complaining about. You wouldn’t have succeeded without me, it was my plan.”

  “Ploy. Your ploy. It was all a carefully managed media event. There were no explosives. You didn’t go on a hunger strike. It was all a fraud, a lie, and now I have to live that lie every day.”

  “So how much different would it be to marry Sierra? Just think about this. Not only would it protect your reputation, but you’d have more money than God, thanks to her father – which means you could bail out that ridiculous business your hippie parents are running into the ground.”

  “God damn you, don’t you dare talk about my folks. I don’t fucking give a damn about my reputation. This has nothing to do with me. It’s all about you Link. It always is. How ‘bout I go to the press with that, huh? How about I tell them about you and Matt?”

  “You do that, and your career is over, Mough. I’ve got the power to do that now, and I’ll make sure no one believes your little tales. I can do that too.” She heard something scrape across the floor, possibly a chair. She could picture Link jumping up, scooting the chair backwards with the force of the motion. “Is that what you want? To tank your future? Huh? Cause I can make that happen for you.”

  It got very quiet, and for so long, Ellie wondered what on earth was going on.

  Then she heard Link again. “So just do what you’re told. The Society thinks it would be a good idea for you to marry Sierra. It’ll be a story book eco-soldier wedding. We can have the damn ceremony on the fucking Rainbow Warrior III. I’ll be your best
man. The media will eat it up, and we’ll triple our fundraising in a year and all that money can then be used to save your precious trees.”

  Link’s voice got quieter, but Ellie could still make out what he said next. “Now come over here on the bed with me. I’ve got a bottle of champagne, although lord knows, you’ve had enough to drink tonight as it is. We can have a glass of bubbly and a little fun – just like old times.”

  Josh’s voice was quiet too, but she could hear the rage nonetheless. “Get your filthy hands off me. I wouldn’t fuck you again if you were the last man on earth.”

  “Then go spend the night with your bride to be. If you don’t, you won’t be the only one out of a job. If you think your folks are having trouble now, just wait till I have a conversation with the Organic Dairy police or whoever the hell monitors that shit, about those two sick cows.”

  She heard a crash on the other side of the wall, right across from her head, then a tinkle of glass. “You do that and you’re a dead man, Link. Remember, shit rolls downhill, and from where I stand, right now you’re at the bottom of a big one.”

  There was the sound of a door being flung open, and then a slam so hard, the pictures on the wall in her room actually rattled.

  Charlie stirred, reached out a hand, then sat up. “Ellie?”

  She scurried back to the bed. She didn’t want Link to hear him, and know that anyone was awake to eavesdrop. “Shhh. I’m right here.”

  “What was that noise? Sounded like a sonic boom.”

  “That was the sound of someone’s world imploding.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I’ll explain in the morning.”

  She climbed into bed next to him, glad for the warmth of his body.

  He sucked in a breath. “Jeez you’re cold, Glenda. You been out for a jog in the snow?”

  “No, just got out of bed for a drink.”

  “Mmm. Well, let me warm you up, then.”

  When his hands slid across her hip and up her torso, she gasped, but didn’t pull away. There would be no pulling away anymore. Besides, she needed to be distracted from poor Josh and his problems. There would be time enough to worry about how to fix things in the morning.