Missing in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 9)

by Meg Muldoon

  I spotted Daniel at the end of one of the hallways and picked up the pace, trying to shake off that old feeling of dread the hospital smell always incited in me. I was carrying a cooler with a couple of turkey sandwiches, iced coffees, and slices of apple pie – plenty of food for the long night I knew Daniel had ahead of him.

  Because I knew my husband well enough by now to know that he wouldn’t quit until he found his friend. Until he had exhausted every angle. Which meant he most likely wouldn’t be seeing his own bed for some time.

  As I walked, I noticed that Daniel was talking to someone – a woman with permed, greying hair who looked to be in her mid-60s. It was obvious that she was incredibly distressed.

  “If my girl comes out of this with anything permanent, then I’ll go out there and find that buffoon myself and make him face the consequences,” the older woman was saying in a strained voice. “He was supposed to look out for her. He was supposed to take care of her!”

  I stopped in my tracks, staying where I was.

  I didn’t have to be introduced to tell that the older woman was somehow related to Angie – they had the same deep-set blue eyes. And it was obvious that the man she was going to make pay was none other than Wes.

  “Ms. Bauer, when was the last time you heard from Angie?” Daniel asked, bypassing the threats.

  She rubbed her wrinkled forehead.

  “A couple of days ago,” she said, seeming to calm down a little bit. “She must have found some reception somewhere out there. She said… she said they were getting close to their turnaround point.”

  “And where exactly was that?” Daniel asked. “Did she tell you?”

  “She said they’d just passed Big Eddy Lake and were headed to the Mercy Face Rocks. She said they were going a little beyond that, but I didn’t think to ask where. When she called, I was on my way to work and I was late.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “Is there anything else she said? Anything that might be useful in finding Wes?”

  The woman grimaced slightly.

  “She just… she told me not to worry. That she’d be coming back home to Tacoma for a week after the trip to visit me, and that she couldn’t wait.”

  Her face scrunched up into a pained expression.

  “That Wes,” she said, a bitterness suddenly taking over her voice. “His head’s been up in the clouds for years with this treasure nonsense. And if you want to know what happens when your head’s up in the clouds – well, this is it. Your wife ends up in the hospital because you’re asleep at the wheel.”

  I swallowed hard.

  I didn’t know the history of their relationship – but it seemed to me that Wes’s mother-in-law was being rather harsh toward him.

  After all, it wasn’t like she knew what had happened to Angie. Or that Wes could have done anything to prevent it.

  “I should have told her to leave him when she was thinking about it last year,” she added, rubbing her face. “None of this would have ever happened, then. None of this…”

  She trailed off.

  I felt my eyebrows lift in surprise.

  Daniel glanced over the woman’s shoulder, catching sight of me standing in the hallway.

  “I’ll be back to check on your daughter later tonight, Ms. Bauer,” he said. “But just so you know, we’re doing everything we can to find Wes—”

  “You think I care about what’s happened to that fool when my daughter is laid up like this?” she said in an angry, desperate tone. “You think I care whether he lives or dies or…”

  Her voice broke.

  Daniel nodded compassionately.

  The woman clearly needed her space, and he was going to give it to her.

  “My cell number is on the card I gave you,” he said in a gentle, understanding voice. “Let me know if I can do anything to help, Ms. Bauer. I’m available 24/7, so don’t hesitate to call. I mean that.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  Daniel squeezed her shoulder, then walked past her, heading in my direction.

  It was obvious that he was relieved to see me.

  “How’s Angie?” I asked.

  He shook his head, glancing back at Ms. Bauer, who had collapsed into one of the chairs in the hallway, looking like an emotional wreck.

  “No improvement in her condition,” he said in a low voice, as if not wanting her to hear. “The doctors should know more soon, though. About potential brain damage, in particular.”

  I bit my lip.

  That didn’t sound good.

  I drew in a deep, ragged breath.

  I suddenly felt the urge to get out of that claustrophobic, sterilized hallway and away from its fluorescent lights. To get back outside, where the air was fresh and clean and free.

  “Looks like you could use a dinner break,” I said.

  “That I could,” he responded, his eyes lighting up slightly as he glanced at the cooler in my hand.

  He nodded toward the elevators. We started walking in that direction, heading away from Angie’s room. But then, I abruptly stopped.

  “Wait one sec,” I said.

  I placed the cooler on a nearby chair, opened it, and pulled out the extra aluminum foil-wrapped turkey sandwich, extra iced coffee, and extra plastic box that held the apple pie. I carried the armful down the hall, approaching Angie’s mom, who was looking down at the faded white floors of the hospital hallway with a dazed expression.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Bauer?”

  She looked up sharply. The expression on her face seemed like she was expecting to fight a nurse or something.

  “Who are you?” she said, that same bitterness in her voice.

  “A friend of Angie’s,” I said.

  I held out the food items and glass bottle of iced coffee.

  Her expression suddenly softened. She swallowed hard.

  “Call us if you need anything,” I said, nodding back at Daniel. “Angie’s as much of a friend to us as Wes is.”

  She bit her lip and nodded, taking the items from my hand.

  She didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw a silent ‘thank you’ in her eyes.

  Chapter 27

  We sat in the truck in the nearly-empty Sheriff’s Office parking lot while Daniel ate his dinner. After this, he’d be heading back inside to the office.

  “You wish you were out there looking for him, don’t you?”

  Daniel finished the last bite of his turkey sandwich – he’d eaten it in a minute flat – and gazed out the window of the truck. He looked at the bare, craggy protrusions of Mt. Charity in the distance, which wouldn’t be naked for much longer with October coming.

  “Yeah, of course I do,” he said. “But they needed me in court all day today for that domestic homicide case from January – they need me tomorrow, too. And being the Sheriff means that you can’t show your friends favoritism. No matter how much I might want to, we have to treat Wes like any other missing hiker.”

  He took a sip of the iced coffee I’d packed in the cooler.

  “What’s the latest news from Search & Rescue?” I asked.

  He rested his elbow on the car window ledge.

  “No sign of Wes,” he said, glumly. “We’ve got dogs out there and the Harney County Sheriff’s Search & Rescue is lending us their volunteers to increase our coverage area. Tomorrow we’ve got a plane doing flyovers of the forest.”

  “That sounds promising,” I said. “The more eyes out there, the better. Right?”

  Daniel didn’t say anything in response.

  He let out a long, unsteady sigh.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “It’s just… I keep thinking about the condition that we found Angie in. My best bet is that she fell off of a cliff or a ridge. And if that’s the case, then where’s Wes? I mean, what Deb said is true. There’s no way he’d just leave Angie like that. Which makes me think Wes is either somewhere out there, lost after trying to go for help. Or, he was in that fall, too.”


  He rubbed his face.

  “But you would have thought we’d have found him by now,” he said. “I just don’t understand any of it. I mean, the two of them are expert hikers. For something like this to happen to them is…”

  He trailed off.

  “But I guess even the most experienced hikers can still have accidents,” he muttered. “Mother Nature doesn’t make exceptions for anyone.”

  A cool, smoky breeze blew through the open windows of the car.

  I shivered.

  “Are they going to continue searching through the night?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “They’ll take a break and resume things in the morning,” he said. “Forecast says it’s going to be cloudy tonight. Without the moon, it’ll make it hard to see anything out there.”

  He drew in a deep breath of air.

  “I’ve just… I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this, Cin,” he said. “Like things are stacked up against us somehow.”

  I felt my stomach lurch when he said that.

  Daniel would talk about things like hunches from time to time, but he wasn’t someone who really believed in bad luck. So it was particularly strange to hear him say something like that out of the blue. Especially since Deb Dulany had said something so similar the night before.

  I guess like the flu, that bad feeling was going around.

  I reached over, grasping his free hand.

  “What can I do to help?” I said.

  “You’ve already done plenty, Cin,” he said, clutching my hand back. “And besides, that’s the frustrating thing. There’s not much any of us can do at this point. Except wait for the doctors to bring Angie out of her coma and hopefully learn about what happened. Search & Rescue’s doing everything they can right now. And with the help of Harney County, we’ll have plenty of volunteers combing the woods tomorrow.”

  I nodded.

  “So Wes didn’t tell you about exactly where they were going?” I asked.

  “He said they were headed for Big Eddy Lake. To this big rock formation out there called Mercy Face and somewhere else nearby. He didn’t really say much beyond that. Said he wanted to keep it quiet in case others were listening in.”

  “Others?” I asked.

  “He meant it in a joking way,” Daniel said. “He said the FBI would be all over him if he found the treasure. So he was keeping it quiet about where their final destination would be.”

  He let out a frustrated sigh.

  “But we’ve checked Big Eddy Lake and Mercy Face – there’s no sign of him. I thought maybe Angie’s mom might have been able to tell us something, but it seems like maybe Wes didn’t even tell his wife exactly where they were headed.”

  Daniel crushed the foil that had contained the turkey sandwich into an aluminum ball and reached back into the cooler. He pulled out the small plastic container with the slice of pie in it.

  I swallowed hard.

  “Were Wes and Angie having marital problems?” I asked.

  What Angie’s mom had said – about how she should have encouraged her daughter to leave Wes when she was thinking about it, had stayed with me. In fact, I hadn’t been able to shake it.

  It had made me wonder whether there were things we didn’t know about Wes and Angie. Things that might be important to what was going on right now.

  Daniel paused for a second.

  “If they were, I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. “To hear Wes tell it, the two of them are really happy. I mean, they’ve been married almost a decade. I suppose they’ve had problems like any married couple. But they seemed happy to me.”

  I nodded.

  Maybe Ms. Bauer was upset and just talking nonsense.

  “So what are you gonna do now?” I said, knowing that the answer wouldn’t be going home and watching Thursday Night Football.

  “Track down anyone else Wes might have talked to before he left or might have called from out there,” Daniel said. “And then see if there’s anything at his house that might give some indication of his plans. Hopefully, something will pan out.”

  He drummed his fingers nervously against the side of the car again.

  “It’s just the worst feeling,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Feeling powerless,” he said, looking over at me. “Feeling like he’s beyond help.”

  “We don’t know that, Daniel,” I said. “In fact, we don’t know anything right now.”

  He nodded solemnly.

  “Well, that’s not exactly true,” I said after a long moment of silence had passed. “We do know one thing.”

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “We know that if you don’t eat that slice of apple pie right now, then I’m going to steal it from you and eat it myself.”

  The corners of his mouth turned up slightly at my little joke.

  “Fat chance of that happening, Mrs. Brightman.”

  He opened the plastic container and the smell of sugar and caramel and gooey apples filled the car.

  I wasn’t sure if the pie helped him at all.

  But I liked to think so.

  Chapter 28

  I sat with Huckleberry and Chadwick out on the back deck of our house, wrapped up in a cozy fleece blanket, listening to the sound of the wind rustling the grasses of our backyard meadow.

  I took a sip of hot cider, feeling its sugary warmth slide down my throat.

  Then I let out an unsettled sigh as that feeling of powerlessness, the very one that Daniel had been talking about earlier, swept over me like a sudden and unexpected sneaker wave.

  I forced my eyes back to the book I was reading – the one with the cracked spine that I’d nabbed from Daniel’s nightstand.

  It struck me as foolish to read a book at a time like this. But flipping through the aged pages of an old history book, even if came to nothing, at least made me feel like maybe I was doing something to help find Wes. Though what exactly I expected to find between the many, many pages of “A Man Named Christmas: The True Story of Leonard Flynn and The 1930s Bank Robberies” was beyond me.

  I knew there most likely wouldn’t be any magic aha moment that told me where Wes Dulany might be in this book. And I also wasn’t fool enough to think that I’d be the one to crack that aha moment, given the fact that I didn’t know much about Christmas Flynn and the history behind the robberies and the treasure.

  But I had to believe that there was a chance I might find something useful. And I figured that the fact that this book had been borrowed from Wes in the first place couldn’t hurt in our search, either. Especially considering the fact that many of the sections had been highlighted with orange marker, and that there were various notes written in Wes’s jagged, nearly-illegible scrawl in various parts of the book.

  I flipped the page and began reading a section about the last bank robbery Leonard and his gang purportedly undertook – the one that many thought had eventually killed him. From my limited reading so far, one thing had become clear to me – the reason why Wes had become so obsessed with the legend in the first place. And why Daniel had become captivated by it as well.

  Leonard “Christmas” Flynn’s story was rich, colorful, and full of intrigue. And where the truth ended and the legend began was almost tantalizingly unclear.

  Leonard had been born at the turn of the last century and had grown up dirt poor right here in Central Oregon. The youngest of nine children, he’d come from nothing. After both of his parents died of influenza, he’d found his way into crime at an early age. At first, it was just petty offenses. Low-level thefts and the like. But soon, Leonard joined up with a crew of criminals and they headed east, robbing several banks in the Midwest. Leonard Flynn’s risky, yet calculated antics, made headlines, and it wasn’t long before he became one of the most famous criminals in the country. Which was saying something, considering that his contemporaries were legends like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. He was quick, stealthy, intelligent, and he s
tumped the FBI and law enforcement from Missouri to California.

  But it was what he did with the money he stole that really created the legend and transformed his image from run-of-the-mill criminal to folk hero.

  Legend had it that he gave away much of the money he stole to the poor. To farmers and farmworkers. To destitute widows. To young families headed west out of the dustbowl, which was just beginning to affect the country in the early 1930s. People said after Leonard robbed a bank, he’d hitch a ride with folks for a few days without them knowing his true identity. When he parted ways with them, they’d find stacks of money or jewelry in their belongings that hadn’t been there before.

  What money he did keep for himself, he supposedly never spent. Legend had it that he hid it somewhere. Some swore he had a cabin out in the woods in Central Oregon – a safe house where he kept the remainder of what he stole. The location of which nobody except him knew.

  When word of his Robin Hood-esque exploits got out, it created a sensation from one coast to another. There were songs about him. Editorials praising his mercy in the newspapers, giving him the nickname of “Christmas” – on account of the fact that he’d been born in Christmas River, and on account of his goodwill. He was lauded for his antics, and though the FBI, law enforcement agencies, and the folks who he was stealing from hated him with a burning passion, your average Joe at the time thought of Christmas Flynn as a man of the people.

  But then… it all came crashing down in the fall of 1933.

  Leonard Flynn robbed a bank right here in Central Oregon. Things went bad, however, and half the gang died in a shootout between the local law enforcement and the robbers. Meanwhile Leonard – believed to be badly injured by gunfire – escaped into the mountains of Central Oregon with the most sizeable chunk of the robbery fortune. People said he made away with a passel of vintage gold coins that had been kept at the bank by Paul Templeton – one of the richest men in the country. Templeton was also, by all accounts, one of the coldest and most arrogant men in all the country, too.

  Authorities tracked Leonard as far as Lava Ridge Lake, but lost him after that.