FOOD TRUCK MYSTERIES: The Complete Series (14 Books)

by Chloe Kendrick

“I’m sure, so we’re kind of stuck, then,” I said, feeling somewhat let down by the information.

  “Not necessarily,” Land continued. “You keep forgetting that we’re old school this time around. You don’t have the phones or the Internet, but you have the ability to ask people direct questions. Danvers has been officially deemed the police, so people will not feel as comfortable talking to him or Sabine. You and I are free to chat with whomever we want in the meantime.”

  I took his hand and gave it a squeeze. Only my husband correctly used “whomever” in a sentence. “So where do we go first?” I asked. . Perhaps we could find some of the staff and see if any of them had connections to Danny Gardner, the escape, or the money.

  I saw no signs of Angela, who I definitely wanted to talk to again. However, Jonathan Wayne stepped out from behind the counter to chat with us. “I wanted to thank you again for the brunch this morning. It was wonderful.”

  I was sure that he’d enjoyed it. They’d provided a wealth of food and charged it all to one customer. It had to improve the bottom line, considering that no one could fulfill their reservations at the moment. They were stuck with the current guests, and I knew that two rooms would not be paid for.

  I didn’t mention any of this to him. Instead, I gave him a big smile and said, “Of course. Are you from Capital City? If so, you should definitely come down and have lunch at food trucks down by the square. We own four of them now.”

  The conversation veered off into the various types of restaurants including my food trucks and the obstacles to making each one work. Wayne had operated a small restaurant before he’d come here. He’d worked at it for years, but never made a profit from the place. He’d finally closed the restaurant down when he’d received an offer to work at the resort.

  “It’s difficult to have a family and work away from them,” he said. “They’re still in Capital City. They come up here sometimes, and I go down there as often as I can.”

  My ears perked up at his mention of Capital City. I wondered if his wife’s maiden name might have been Gardner. A sister was unaccounted for at the moment, and I wondered where she could be. Could that sister have a link to the resort? It wasn’t inconceivable. Gardner had come to a resort for some unknown reason. It seemed an unlikely choice for a man on the run. I would think that he’d need to keep moving, but instead he’d come to a ski lodge and stayed for two days before he was murdered.

  “You mentioned that your wife comes up sometimes? Is she planning a trip soon?” I asked. I could tell from Land’s eyes that he knew why I was asking this.

  “Not until Christmas, and I’m going down there. She doesn’t usually come here when the weather might be bad. She can’t just up and take off from her job when she wants.”

  “What does she do?” I asked, trying to make this inquiry seem like banal chatter.

  “She works at the jail downtown. She might have actually eaten at your trucks before,” he replied.

  His answer was open, but at the same time, I was surprised. He had blithely put his wife in the running as a suspect in the murder of his guest. Land was right; it was easy to get people to talk. Perhaps in a short amount of time we would know more about the murder than Danvers.

  “Oh, wasn’t there something about a jailbreak there?” I asked, trying to make it sound like I had only heard of the matter in passing.

  “Yeah, fortunately it wasn’t her shift when the men escaped, but, of course, everyone gets painted with the same brush. She’s having to take some additional courses and precautions at the moment, which is one reason why she can’t come up now.”

  I shivered for effect. “That seems like such a scary job,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Guard duty is like any other job. You get used to the risks after a while. She only works in the office, so she has very little direct contact with the inmates.”

  The words made me doubt Mrs. Wayne’s participation in the escape. She was an office worker, and Wayne was being so open about the matter that he had to be innocent.

  “I still think the job would be dangerous.” I thought of how many people I’d put in jail over the years. It certainly would be dangerous to me. They’d all want to get some revenge if they saw me there.

  Wayne cleared his throat. “I need to get back to work. It was nice chatting. However, lunch looks like it will be light, so we’re going to have to figure out what foods can be repurposed for dinner and what will need to be dumped.”

  He hurried off into the vicinity of the kitchen and left us alone. I had spoken with Angela, and met with Yuri, but I hadn’t discussed anything with Lindsey yet. I wasn’t quite sure who I was looking for. After explaining the situation to Land, we decided to tour the resort. We knew about the other corridors, but hadn’t explored them at all.

  We walked up and down each of the eight hallways, looking for signs of a maid or other resort employee. We had finished all of them when I looked at Land. “Do you think that the maid, Carletta, could be involved with Gardner? I really hadn’t thought to ask her any questions about a connection. All my questions were about finding the body.”

  Land puzzled over this for a second and then shook his head. “I doubt it. Her scream was real, and her emotions weren’t staged—unless, of course, she is a much better actor than any of us.”

  I nodded agreement. “It just doesn’t seem likely that she could have faked that.”

  We walked back to the common area again. Yuri was cleaning something as we approached. He looked up at us, smiled, and then focused again on his work.

  I smiled at him and made a beeline for where he was standing. “Hi, Yuri. Have you seen Angela?” I asked, loud enough for anyone to overhear me. “I had some questions for her.”

  “Like what?” he asked, amiably. “Maybe I can help you.”

  I decided to give it a shot. If nothing else, Yuri would likely answer the same questions about himself as well.

  “Is Angela from Capital City?” I asked. “My husband and I are, and we thought she looked familiar. If she was, then that would explain a lot.”

  Yuri nodded. “Most all of us are from Capital City. It’s the only place close enough to make the commute reasonable. We couldn’t live more than two hours away and do this.”

  “Why not?” I asked. When I finished a shift, I just headed home by way of the secured lot and the bank. I realized that none of these people could afford to stay here on a regular basis.

  “The resort has 16 cabins. If the entire staff were to stay here in the rooms, there would be no place at all for the guests. There’s a smaller building to the back of the building. We stay there during our shifts, which are typically three days on, and then three off. Then we go home and come back again. If the trip was much longer than Capital City, then we’d be talking about tanks of gas to get here and back. It wouldn’t be feasible.”

  I made a mental note to check out the building Yuri had mentioned. Perhaps Lindsey was there.

  “Does Angela have family in Capital City?”

  He eyed me. “I’m not sure I should be answering all of these questions. It makes me nervous. I don’t see a reason to be talking about Angela like this.”

  “What about you?” I asked, switching gears so that he’d still talk to me.

  Yuri had not stopped cleaning what looked like a stain on the carpet. He put some more of the powdered cleaner on it. The odor made my stomach roil, but I decided to try to stay with it.

  “Yeah, I live in Capital City. I’m sure that it’s not the same part that you live in. My family lives near St. Pete’s.” St. Pete’s was a gathering place for the Russian families in our region. It had been dubbed that in honor of St. Petersburg, another city built by travelers. Many of the local businesses had beautiful signs in Cyrillic lettering which I couldn’t read.

  “I know it,” I said. “Is your family there? Do you have kids?” I pointed to my growing stomach. “This will be our first, and we’re very excited.”

  I had found
that few people wanted to deny anything to a pregnant woman, and Yuri was no exception. “I’m sure you are. Yes, we have three girls. They’re five, seven, and ten. We were never blessed with a boy.”

  I gave him a chance to brag about them while I tried to put the pieces together. If Yuri didn’t have a son, then he was a doubtful candidate for meeting Danny Gardner. Yuri would not be the mother or the sister, and his children were too young to have been involved with Gardner in any manner.

  As he wound down on his stories about the girls, I smiled at him again. “That’s wonderful.” I looked over his shoulder and waved at Land. “My husband is trying to get my attention. I have a tendency to ramble on, talking about children. I hope I get a chance to talk to Angela about them as well.”

  With Yuri’s mood considerably brightened, he told me, “Angela is in the building out back that I mentioned before. She loves her family very much. I’m sure she would talk to you about them.”

  I talked to Land as we headed back to the room. I wanted to be nice and toasty before we walked over to the employee building. I put on a large down jacket and wrapped myself in a scarf. Land just wore a knit cap and a warm coat. With all of our walking around the resort, we hadn’t seen a sign of Detective Danvers. That meant he’d probably spent the last hour on the phone with various police agencies. He’d have more information soon, but in the meantime, at least I was learning more about the people who worked here.

  Fortunately, someone had shoveled the sidewalk between structures. It was still cleared, though there were four-foot high drifts on either side of us. We trudged through the snow to the building and knocked on the door.

  A woman that I didn’t recognize answered the door. She was tall, probably five-nine or so, but she tried to mask it by slumping. She had dirty blonde hair that was pulled back in a ponytail. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and her skin was swallow. She looked unhealthy, but I suspected that she was distraught somehow. I wondered if she had known Danny Gardner and was being forced to work now instead of having time to grieve.

  I gave my best pregnant-mother smile. Even in the down coat, my bulge was visible. “Hi, you must be Lindsey,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Did you want something?” the woman asked, not rudely, but without any trace of warmth. Apparently maternal kindness didn’t appeal to her.

  “I was actually looking for Angela. Have you seen her?”

  The woman swiveled her body enough to glance behind her. I craned my neck and could see a family room of sorts done in earth tones of tan and green. Not much had been put into the furnishings. I suspected that the kitchen was attached to the family room since I could hear the noises of a kettle being put on to boil. I saw no signs of people.

  “She’s not here right now. She’s probably in the main building somewhere.” She shut the door in my face before I could ask any more questions.

  “That was rude,” I said turning to Land. Even with the additional layers of clothing, I was cold, and we started walking back to the main building.

  “You caught her in the middle of something,” Land said. “I wonder if she was mourning. I thought I saw the trails of tears on her face.”

  I had been standing close to her, but it had been Land who had noticed Lindsey’s tear tracks. Perhaps I was getting out of sorts with my pregnancy.

  Land suggested going back to the cabin when we stepped inside the main building. The heat was wonderful. I could have stood there in the doorway with the heat rushing over my body. The sensation was wonderful.

  We stepped into our cabin. I shucked off my outer layers so that I could take a nap. The worries of hosting the brunch, plus the work of walking around and looking for people, was more than I was used to.

  Chapter 7

  Land picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Tell Danvers that we’ve learned more than he has,” I said, feeling competitive. Even though I had no real reason to get involved here, the challenge to beat Danvers always welled up in me.

  Land asked for room service and ordered me a cup of herbal tea. He put the phone down, and I was overwhelmed with the kindness of the man I’d married. “Thank you,” I said, wanting to kiss him repeatedly, even though it would mean getting up off the bed.

  “I thought you would like something to warm you up—and it doesn’t hurt that it will likely be Angela who brings it to you.”

  I had to hand it to him. Land was on top of the game with this plan. Angela had brought me tea earlier, so it seemed quite likely that she would do it again.

  However, when the knock at the door came, it was Jonathan Wayne. I pretended to be startled. “Oh, sorry. I thought that Angela would have brought the tea. She has been bringing it here for me.”

  He looked down at the cup and then at me. “No one can find her at the moment. She was supposed to start her shift about ten minutes ago. She’s not in the employee building, and I can’t find her in the resort area either.”

  “Is there a public address system here?” I asked. I was now a bit nervous. Three murders had already occurred, and now someone was missing.

  “Normally, I would,” Wayne said. “But with all the commotion, I think that announcing a missing employee would likely only panic the rest of the guests.”

  “Then we should contact the police.”

  Before the manager could speak, Land picked up the phone and dialed another number. I could tell from his tone that Sabine had answered the phone. Land spoke a few words to her in the Basque language, a trick that the family employed when they didn’t want others to overhear a conversation. While I hadn’t told Land, I had picked up a few words of Basque since we’d met, and I could tell that he was informing Sabine about the missing employee.

  After a few seconds, Land started speaking English again, and I could tell that Danvers was now on the line. Land explained the situation in as few words as possible and hung up.

  “They’ll be here in a minute,” he said. We waited patiently in silence until the rap at the door came.

  Land answered the door and stood back for Danvers and Sabine to enter.

  Danvers didn’t even talk to us. He turned to the manager and said, “When’s the last time that anyone saw this server? Angela, was it?”

  Wayne went through the explanation again. Angela had worked at our brunch that morning. She said that she was going back to the employee building for a nap after the clean-up was complete. Two other employees could vouch for the fact that she arrived at the building, spoken to them, and went to her room.

  Since then, no one had been able to find her.

  I looked at Land, knowing that Lindsey had lied to us. Was she under instructions to tell us that Angela was still in the employee building, or had that been her own initiative? I wondered if we could have found her if we’d started sooner.

  Now I was even surer that Angela had a part in the murders. I didn’t think of her as a victim, but as someone who was on the run from the police. She had guilty knowledge that she didn’t want to share with anyone.

  I came back to the conversation to hear Danvers grilling the manager on what he’d done to try to find Angela. We heard again about the search, the frantic calls to her cell number, and the reluctance to use any sort of public announcement, based on his worries about upsetting the remaining guests.

  After all the routine questions were asked, the manager excused himself. He was down another person, so the schedules had to be reorganized before the evening meal.

  “I suppose you’re gloating,” Danvers said in his first comment to me. “You were curious about Angela, and now she’s gone.”

  “You don’t think she’s been killed?” Land asked. “There’s not a lot of places to go in the resort, and the roads are still blocked. So there’s nowhere to hide, from what I can see. It would be easier to hide a dead body than to hide a living one.”

  Land’s words set off a lightbulb in my head. My mind went to work. I had an idea, but I was hesitant to share m
y thoughts with Danvers. I wasn’t sure if he was ready for me to show him up again.

  My husband could read my mind, and he cleared his throat. “I think Maeve has an idea of where Angela might be,” he said quietly.

  Now I knew what Land’s opinion of the situation was. He wanted to share what I suspected with the police. I figured this would be Danvers’ early Christmas present.

  “Do you know something? What have you been hiding?” he said, his voice getting louder as he spoke.

  “I don’t know anything. I might have an idea where Angela might be, though.”

  “Out with it,” he said, forgetting the proper way to respond to a gift.

  “Well, if she is Danny Gardner’s mother and she wanted some time to herself to grieve, she would likely go to where Danny was laid out.” Land’s words about hiding dead bodies had made me think of the outbuildings.

  I checked out the window of the cabin, but the men carrying the bodies had made so many footprints that it was impossible to see which footprints had been recently made. The entire landscape was covered with the steps of six men.

  “So let’s go out there,” he said. “There’s an easy way to see if you’re right.”

  Land and I had the advantage, since we were discussing the matter in our cabin. We could throw on our coats and be ready in seconds, but Danvers made us promise to meet him by the doors leading to the outbuilding.

  He and Sabine arrived in a few minutes, and the four of us followed the footsteps to the building. The temperatures were warmer today, probably in the low 30s, which meant that the snow would begin to melt. The road crews would be able to get through within a matter of hours and the local police would be close behind. If Danvers was going to have a solution waiting for the police, he would need to solve the matter quickly.

  Danvers had us spread out so that we could watch all sides of the building. Given that he was a force of one for the moment, we needed to act as watch guards to ensure that, if Angela was truly in the building, she did not escape.

  Probably for my sake, the detective reiterated several times that we were not to engage her if she came out of the building. We were only to shout, and Danvers would do the rest. I knew, that in my current condition, Land was concerned that I would try to put myself in harm’s way. He was entirely in agreement with the policeman’s words.