Death Comes to a Retreat (Book 4 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  We headed down the path without answering, but my thoughts were on Karen and Nathan. I was not going to desert them, even for a few minutes. Lauren, limping only slightly as she matched my pace, murmured, “Was Allison murdered?”

  My mind slogged through a morass of thoughts. Allison could have been a drug user or committed suicide, but that wouldn’t explain how she got into my car, especially since my keys had reappeared in my purse. “Probably. We’ve got to ignore Tommy’s instructions and go into the lodge, you know. We’re taking the children with us.”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  We reached the lodge. Lauren started Tommy’s car while I dashed inside to get the children. I tested the phone in the office. No dial tone.

  I took a deep breath of coffee-scented air to collect myself as I entered the dining room. Celia was sitting with Nathan and the girls at the nearest table. The four other women sat at an adjacent table near the window. All of the women greeted me, their attempts at conversation a jumble of words about Allison and when we might leave. The children, focused on their meals and not on me, had heaped their plates with pastries and bacon, with tiny dots of scrambled eggs just for color.

  Celia’s painted features smiled up at me. “At last. I’ve been keeping the little ones company while you were gone.”

  “Thanks. I’m here now.”

  Celia didn’t take the hint and stayed put. “Unlike last night’s dinner, the breakfast is really quite good. Aren’t you going to get anything to eat?”

  “No.”

  At the other table, Nancy rose, patted her lips with the napkin, and came over to me. She said quietly, “Allison isn’t here. The cook hasn’t seen her since last night.”

  “Really? I hope she’s all right.”

  She studied my face, my cheeks warming. How long could I keep up this act? For all I knew, Nancy could have killed my friend. One of these people had. I wanted to scream. One hateful, hideous person in this room had killed my friend!

  “Is everything all right?” She’d slipped into her therapeutic tones. “You seem quite shaken.”

  “Lauren reinjured her ankle.” I averted my eyes, afraid that with her professional expertise, she could read through my lie. “I’m taking her to a doctor.”

  “Oh, dear,” Celia said, finally rising.

  “What? What’s happened?” Julie asked, leaping to her feet. “Is it Allison?”

  “No,” Celia said irritably, “Molly’s friend went and hurt herself.”

  “Hey!” I snapped, in my raw state ready to pounce on Celia. “She didn’t do it on purpose!”

  Nancy and Lois, the only adults still seated, rotated in their chairs and stared at me. I turned my attention to the kids. They were watching me in total confusion.

  “Grab your plates. You can finish in the car.”

  Rachel looked especially upset I leaned down and said in a near whisper, “Don’t worry. Your mom’s fine.”

  Karen said, “I’m not hungry.”

  “Me neither,” Rachel said, pushing her plate away.

  Nathan, however, began shoveling food into his mouth as if this were bound to be his last meal. I grabbed his plate and his orange juice.

  “Molly,” Celia began, “I meant no offense. I merely—”

  “Please excuse us.” I waltzed out as fast as I could, Nathan’s plate and cup in hand. My eyes were stinging and I realized dully that tears were running down my cheeks.

  We reached the car. I set the plate down on the roof and opened the back door. Rachel slid into the middle seat and immediately asked her mother about her ankle. While Lauren spoke to her quietly, Karen had stopped in front of the car door and was looking up at me, her expression full of worry.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  As I met my daughter’s beautiful dark eyes, I felt a surge of both gratitude and fear for her very existence. Why were murderers living in the same world as my kindhearted, wonderful children? “My friend Allison Kenyon died in her sleep last night.”

  “You can die from sleeping?” Nathan asked, horrified. He stepped alongside his sister.

  “No, not from—She….Nobody dies in their sleep at your age,” I said, as the only reassuring thing I could think to say at the moment.

  “But they do at your age?” Karen asked as she got into her seat at the opposite side of the car.

  Nathan flopped down into his seat. “I’ll bet this means we don’t get to go to Elitches.”

  “Yes, it does.” I thrust his plate and cup into his hands. “I’m making up a new rule. Whenever a friend of mine dies, we don’t go rushing off to an amusement park. Okay?”

  Both Karen and Nathan shrank back, and I instantly regretted my harshness.

  “Sorry, Nathan. I’m upset about losing my friend.”

  I sat down, but rotated to peer between the seatbacks. “Nathan? Karen? Please understand that I’m going to be sad and maybe a little grouchy for a while. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you or that you’ve done anything wrong.”

  “That’s okay, Mom,” Karen said. “We don’t mind.” I winced, too emotionally drained to respond.

  We headed into the town of Evansville and found a fire station almost immediately; it was right on Main Street. The lone fireman in the office immediately radioed the information to the Boulder sheriff’s department. He knew where the Red Fox Resort was and said he’d follow me up there.

  Nathan had finished his breakfast by the time I got back to the car. We drove in silence, the fire truck right behind us. I shivered uncontrollably. When we reached the resort, Lauren drove us past the lodge and up the road toward the parking lot, until she spotted Tommy, who gestured for us to pull over. He jogged past us to speak to the fireman. Because the dirt road was too narrow to do anything else, the firefighter stopped his truck where it was, and we waited, engine idling. Tommy soon tapped on the window, which Lauren promptly rolled down.

  “Nearest sheriff’s units will be here shortly. Why don’t you all take the kids to—” He stopped and stared into the backseat, finally registering the children’s presence. “How did the kids get—” He let out a sigh. “Never mind. Go on up to one of the cabins and stay there.”

  We hustled the children up to our cabin, and Lauren took them into the bedroom and got them involved in a board game she’d brought with her. I sat on one of the rickety chairs in the kitchen. I could hear sirens nearing but had no vantage point of the parking lot and its activities.

  After shutting the bedroom door behind her, Lauren took the remaining chair beside me. She appraised my mood and said soothingly, “Tell me more about Allison. How did you meet her? Did she have children at the same school as Karen and Nathan?”

  I shook my head. “She didn’t have children. We met at a group golf lesson several years ago. She hit me with a three wood. Wild backswing. She felt so bad about it, I finally agreed to let her buy me lunch, and we got to be friends. Golfed together several times every summer since then until we moved away.”

  “Were you close?”

  “If you’d asked me that yesterday, I would have said yes. But that wouldn’t have been true. It was strange. There was something about her I found so appealing. Maybe just the way she laughed at my jokes, made me feel fun to be around. But you’d ask her about certain things, and this wall would go up. She made it clear that there were parts of her you would never be allowed to know. I hadn’t even known she and her husband were having marital problems till she told me in her last Christmas card that they were divorced.”

  I took a deep breath, battling a sense of total despair. “People die everywhere I go, Lauren. I’m the Lizzie Borden of the greeting card industry.”

  “You can’t blame yourself. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent what happened.”

  That was probably true, but my guilt at having been the reason she was here with these women was palpable.

  “Did you tell Tommy about the death threat you got yesterday?”

  I shook my
head. “Not yet. I’d better go down there and give it to the police.” I reached into my pocket. It was empty. I hopped up and checked all my pockets. Nothing. “The threat! It’s gone! These are the same jeans I wore yesterday. I remember putting it back in my pocket after showing it to you.”

  “Maybe it fell out when you took them off last night. I’ll go search our bedroom.”

  She rose as I continued, “The keys, the note, my shoes. Someone’s taking my stuff. Somebody is—”

  There was a firm rap on the door. I swung it open. A pretty, twentyish female officer, her dark hair fastened close to her scalp with half a dozen bobby pins, nodded at me in greeting. “Are you Molly Masters?” Her voice was surprisingly forceful for her size—she was only about five feet tall.

  “Yes.” As I answered I was aware of the sounds of the children running into the room behind me. “You found the body, right?”

  I nodded as she said, “I’ll need to talk to you privately.” She looked at Lauren. “You can stay here with the children. An officer will be up to speak with you shortly.” She gave me a rather cold smile, then said, “Want to come with me, please?”

  Before I could react, a child’s arms were wrapped tightly around my waist as Karen squeezed herself in front of me. “I’m coming with you, Mommy.”

  “Sweetpea? You need to stay here with Lauren. I’ll be fine.” I tried to give her a reassuring hug, but she gripped me even tighter, shaking her head against my stomach.

  “No!” she cried. “I’m not leaving you!”

  This was nothing like Karen, never prone to open defiance and not at all a clingy child. She was afraid for me, and I was slowly but surely filling with dread for myself as well. “I’ll be fine. Really.”

  The officer placed a hand on Karen’s back and said sweetly, “Your mommy’s going to be fine. Why don’t you wait here?”

  Karen dropped her arms but set her chin. She was determined not to let herself cry, and that sight alone broke my heart. “Sweetie, I’m not going to let anyone take me away from you. I just need to be alone with the police to answer questions in private for an hour or so.”

  My purse was still on the table and I grabbed it automatically. The officer immediately said, “I’ll take that.” As I started to hand it over, an unpleasant thought hit me as I recalled how my keys had mysteriously reappeared. I gave my purse a good shake. Sure enough, my efforts yielded a metallic jingle, but my keys were currently in my pocket.

  The officer eyed me strangely as she took the purse, and I said, “Could you do me a favor? Could you see if you can find a set of keys in my purse?”

  She nodded and fished through the main compartment, retrieving an enormous set of keys on a chain adorned by a pair of wooden dice. “These the ones you’re looking for?”

  They weren’t mine, but I knew immediately whose they were. “Yes. You can just put them back in my purse.”

  Someone was framing me for Allison’s murder.

  I walked beside the officer, feeling as though she were escorting me to a gas chamber. She instructed me to get into a cruiser—a white four-door with the yellow-and-blue official sheriff’s band around it. This car was parked at the end of a string of four police cars behind the fire truck and Tommy’s car.

  She closed the door behind me, told me she’d be with me in a couple of minutes, then tossed my purse into the trunk.

  Tommy was nearby, perhaps on his way back up to the cabin to check on Lauren. He changed directions and came over, crouching to eye level with the car window.

  “Why are they putting me in the patrol car, Tommy? What about all the other women? One of them killed her.”

  “They’ll probably bring everyone in. They’re gonna have to take everyone’s fingerprints.”

  Just then, a husky male voice called from above us, “I got the shoes that match those footprints by the car.” The officer was carrying what looked like a pair of filthy Reeboks. The female officer moved off to meet him partway up the path.

  I reached through the window to grab Tommy’s arm. “Tommy! Someone’s trying to frame me for this murder!”

  He furrowed his brow. “What makes you….Are those your shoes?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t mean nothin’. So long as you didn’t go leaving your fingerprints on any syringes last night.”

  I glared at him, irritated at how he’d slipped into his small-town-cop persona, complete with bad grammar. “I’m pretty sure my stash of syringes is still locked up tight.”

  “Good. So don’t worry.”

  Again with being told not to worry. “Someone stole my shoes from my bedroom last night and grabbed the note out of my jeans. Wearing my shoes, that person injected Allison with a lethal dose of poison, while she was behind the wheel of my car. Then the killer put my keys back in my purse, along with Celia’s keys. I don’t know about you, but I think a little worrying is entirely appropriate!”

  “Molly?” a voice trilled from below. I recognized Celia’s officious tones and braced myself. The five women were bunched together on the path, flanked by two middle-aged men in sheriff’s uniforms. “What’s going on? These policemen claim that Allison is dead!”

  One of the officers said, “We’re going to take you all to the Boulder County Justice Center, ladies.” He instructed Julie and Celia to get into the car with me. Celia, who sat beside me in the middle seat, looked more annoyed than anything else. Julie had been crying.

  The female officer got behind the wheel. “I’m going to have to ask you not to talk to one another.”

  We made our way down the steep, winding road through stratified layers of red-brown rock on either side. Deep, dark green pines above the rock rose in sharp contrast with the cloudless azure sky. The tranquility surrounding me just made my internal uproar all the worse to bear.

  Maybe Allison knew all along that someone was out to kill her and so had pocketed my keys, planning to leave. The washed-out road had interfered with that, but she’d figured she’d be safer driving off and waiting for the road to reopen than spending the night with the killer. Only she didn’t make it.

  We rode in silence for as long as I could bear. I didn’t have anything to hide, so there was no point in my keeping still. “You were sharing her room last night, right, Celia?” I asked.

  The muscles in the back of the officer’s neck seemed to tense, but she made no move to interrupt us.

  Celia shook her head. “I was supposed to, but there was a leak over my bed, So I slept on the living room floor.”

  “Three of you were in the living room, in front of the only door. You never heard her leave?”

  “No,” Celia said. “I remember when she returned from your cabin last night, though, because she tripped over me.”

  “I didn’t hear her leave, either,” Julie said. “She was definitely gone by the time I got back from my jog at seven. I peeked in the room to see if she wanted some coffee. The room was empty. I assumed she’d gone out sometime during my jog, but the window was wide open, so maybe she’d gone out the window.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Celia snapped. “Why would she climb out the window when there was a perfectly good door?”

  Julie turned her face and didn’t answer. I got the impression that the officer was making careful mental notes on all of this.

  “Julie, who else was in the living room?”

  “Nancy.”

  “Did the bedrooms have—”

  “Are we playing Twenty Questions here, Molly?” Celia interrupted. “Allison was my neighbor. I loved her dearly.” She dabbed at a nonexistent tear. “I don’t want to even think about this dreadful tragedy, let alone discuss it. Besides, the officer instructed us not to talk.”

  Not believing her show of grief for an instant, I clenched my teeth and said, “Sorry.” I stared out the window. A flash of color caught my eye and I recognized it as a mountain jay, with its regal black tufted feathers that suddenly merged with brilliant blue at the base of its neck. I
t was so peaceful here, no traffic, cabins set way back from the road, their dark brown tones blending into the woods. Ironically, these mountains were where I always used to go when I needed to relax and get my thoughts in order. There was no opportunity for that now.

  We reached the northern outskirts of Boulder half an hour later. The road was now less steep and the houses and traffic considerably denser. Our course took us down the west side of town to the Justice Center, an imposing, monolithic red stone structure incongruously set alongside the beautiful, meandering Boulder Creek.

  The officer pulled up in front of the building and opened my door first. We all got out as a second vehicle was pulling up with Nancy, Katherine, and Lois in the back. Though I felt foolish, I wanted my purse, needing to hang on to something familiar. It felt as though I were being led to slaughter and, by God, I wanted my blankee. As I’d suspected, the officer started to usher us toward the courthouse without getting my purse out of the trunk, so I asked her if I could have it.

  “I’ll be sure to give it to you before you leave,” she said in a tone of finality.

  “You can search it if you need to, but please, at least let me have my drawing pad and pencil. It’s got a really dull point, so it’s not dangerous.”

  “Why do you want it?”

  “I’m an artist, a cartoonist actually, and I’ve gotten so used to having a drawing pad and pencil that I feel naked without them.”

  “Sorry, you’ll just have to feel naked till we’re finished with the interview.”

  “Well, at least that will make the strip search go faster,” I grumbled.

  “Strip search?” Celia shrieked. “They’re going to strip search us?”

  The officer chuckled, and I felt enough of a kinship with her to make me all the more determined. “It might help me explain better if I can draw while I talk. How about one sheet of paper and a crayon?”