Holly opened her mouth to offer up a room with her ex-husband—it wouldn’t be the first time that had happened, and Simon was always pleased to accommodate people in need—then she closed it again. Aidan had cast a look her way that plainly broadcast that he didn’t need any input right now.
“I’ll be happy to take you up to your Granny’s,” Holly said. “And if you want something to do tomorrow to take your mind off things, you’re welcome to come in and help out in the bakery. I’ll pay you for your time.”
Elvira stared down at the floor, lifting a hand up to catch her tears before they fell. “Sure,” she said, her voice flat. “Thank you.”
“Are you going to be okay?” Holly asked as Aidan turned back, signaling to the doctor. He didn’t answer except to shrug. “Let me know if you need anything.” Holly gave him a hug and then asked Alec if he needed a lift home.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I think I’ll stay here as long as they’ll have me.”
Holly nodded and led Elvira out the door to her car.
Elvira was quiet all the way home to her granny’s house. When Holly pulled up outside, she jumped out of the door so quickly that Holly didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.
Esmerelda was standing in the doorway and enveloped Elvira in a big hug. Holly waited until they’d both gone inside before turning the car around and heading back home.
As soon as she walked through the door, Holly fell straight into bed.
The next morning, she dropped by the surgery center to find that nothing had changed. The relatives who’d stayed the whole night appeared a bit more bedraggled, but the patients were all the same. Holly was allowed a few minutes by Crystal’s bedside before the nurse kicked her out again.
“Isn’t it a bad sign that she’s still asleep?” Holly asked the doctor in the waiting room. “I thought the longer that someone stayed unconscious, the more damage it did.”
“That’s not true at all. Your sister’s system has been dealt a great blow, and it’ll take time to recover. When she’s awake, her body has to use more resources, so it’s much better for her recovery that she continues to sleep.”
After that conversation, Holly had more of a spring in her step as she walked across the frozen streets to open up the bakery.
While crossing the road at the corner, Holly caught sight of a man staring at the area cordoned off by police. She immediately gave chase, forgetting her fear of ice in the sudden need to find out who he was.
Silly woman, Holly scolded herself as her balance shifted and she nearly fell on her face. She slowed down for a step or two, then increased her speed again as the man ran away from her pursuit.
You don’t even know that it’s the same man as last night or if he’s the one who upset Susan.
The loud thoughts did nothing to slow her down, however. If Holly couldn’t catch him, then she wouldn’t be any further ahead.
Because she’d got the jump on him, Holly was very close on the man’s tail. If she could just get a burst of speed, she might be able to snag the trailing end of his coat.
Summoning the ghost of every PE lesson in her youth, Holly instructed her legs to go faster. She stretched out her hand, felt her fingertips brush the fabric, then the man thrust an arm back. Her balance shifted again. This time, she was too late to catch herself and thumped down on the hard pavement.
Chapter Seven
It took a few seconds before the shock of her fall passed enough for Holly to pick herself up. A woman came running out of her gate, then picked a slower path, delicately stepping around the worst patches of ice.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked, helping Holly to her feet and standing by while she examined all her limbs to see they were still intact. “Did that man steal something from you?”
“What? No!” Holly shook her head. There was a long scrape up her right arm, which had taken the brunt of her fall, and pieces of gravel embedded in the palm of her left hand.
Holly plucked out the stones, wincing more at the cold touch and gritty feel than the pain. “I don’t know who he is,” she continued after a pause, then felt silly again. She’d given chase with no good reason, so she had none to offer this kind woman either. “I just wanted to see why he was staring at my shop.”
“Fair enough,” the woman said, although her face still crinkled in concern. “That’s Samuel Wrightson. I don’t know what he’s doing in town at this time of the morning, but you’re right to think that he’s probably up to no good.”
“You know him,” Holly said, surprised. “I don’t recognize him at all.”
“Well,” the woman said, “that’s because you’re new here. Once you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ll know everybody by sight.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know who you are, either, sorry.” Holly tucked her injured hands into her pockets for warmth. “But thanks for helping me.”
“My name’s Abigail, and I haven’t helped you yet. Come inside, and I’ll get some Dettol on those wounds.”
Although Holly thought she should probably turn down the offer and get to work, she instead followed Abigail inside her home. Her curiosity about the man had only been peaked by finding out that he was a local. Much to her internal shame, Holly wanted to find out more.
“How do you know Samuel, then?” she asked as Abigail brought out the bottle of antiseptic and liberally applied it to a ball of cotton wool. As Abigail dabbed it on her wounds, Holly had to clench her teeth to avoid a hiss of pain. That still felt just as bad as it had when she was a kid. After a while, she wouldn’t tell her mom and dad if she fell and grazed her knees. Their cure was so much worse than the original injury.
“He’s taken one of the abandoned logger cottages up in the valley,” Abigail said, eyes fixed on Holly’s wound. “Nobody minds since they don’t belong to anybody and would otherwise just fall down. He comes around town often enough that I’ve met him once or twice.”
“Does he have family around here?”
Abigail shook her head. “Not that I know of. Not with the same surname, at any rate. I think he might have had some problems at home, if you get what I mean. If he had a loving family back home, I don’t think he’d choose to live in an old shack with no power or water.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize,” Holly said. “Are the cottages fit for habitation, then?”
“Probably not, but neither are they about to fall down around his ears. They knew how to build things in the old days,” Abigail said with a tone suggesting it was a lost art.
After applying a few band-aids in a crisscross pattern, Abigail smiled down at her handiwork then packed away her first aid kit. “That’ll see you right,” she said. “Just remember to keep it clean.”
Holly nodded and laughed. “You sound just like my mother.”
“Well, she probably knew what she was doing, then,” Abigail said, tipping Holly a wink. “So you’d better listen to the both of us.”
After saying goodbye, Holly thought about the man as she picked her careful way back to the bakery and unlocked the door. Samuel Wrightson, she repeated under her breath while she laid out the ingredients for her first batch of baking. She didn’t know whether or not to tell the sergeant, given his rudeness to her the night before.
“I’ll tell him if he comes around asking for information,” Holly said to the empty room. “Otherwise, I just might follow up with him myself.”
It was with a smile of delight that Holly let Elvira in that afternoon. “I’m so glad that you dropped by. Are you ready to go to work?”
Remembering how Crystal had praised her decorating skills when Elvira had dropped by to help out once before, Holly put her on frosting duty.
“We don’t have a set pattern to the toppings,” she explained, laying out the selection of stiff royal icing that she and Crystal used. “As long as the frosting matches the cake, you can arrange these in any way that catches your fancy.”
It was nice having someone else in the bakery, asi
de from Crystal. Although the joy of working with her sister was one of the reasons that Holly had stayed in Hanmer Springs instead of making a fleeting visit.
Not that Elvira seemed happy. The concern about her mother was evident in every anxious twitch of her head, every jerk in her body when the phone rang, or the door opened. The poor kid would be an exhausted wreck by the end of the day, but Holly just placed more work in front of her. Distraction was the best she had to offer, aside from quiet company.
“Crystal was right,” Holly said as Elvira brought through another tray of cupcakes to load into the display case. “You really do have a knack for these. Do you like baking?”
At that, Elvira laughed. “This isn’t baking. It’s more like arts and crafts.”
Holly nodded. “I suppose that’s right. Baking is both of those things, and decorating is the skill that entices everyone to eat what you’ve worked so hard on.”
“The sparkle,” Elvira said with a flash of her usual spirit.
“Exactly.”
When Holly started to pack up for the day, Elvira agreed that she could come in again tomorrow for work.
“Don’t feel you need to if it’s too much,” Holly said. “But you’re welcome here whenever you want to work.”
“I want to work a lot at the moment,” Elvira said, sinking back into sadness. “Except for the weekend. I hope Aidan meant it when he said we could go up to Christchurch and visit Mom.”
“I’m sure he did. And if he changes his mind, you tell me, and I’ll argue it down to the wire with him. Okay?”
“It’s a deal.”
Crystal managed a sleepy hello when Holly dropped by the surgery center. The improvement must have been across the board because she found the waiting room populated only by Richard.
“Is Zach doing okay?” Holly asked on her way out. She couldn’t imagine sitting for so long for a work colleague.
“He’s doing much better today,” Richard insisted. “I heard your sister was on the mend, too.”
With nothing at home to look forward to, Holly gave Aidan a quick call. She’d rung him that morning, to tell him that Elvira got home to Esmerelda’s safely, but he hadn’t been in the mood to talk. After settling his cousin Tilly into the hospital, he’d made the drive back to Hanmer Springs in the wee hours of the morning.
Even now, he sounded like he could use another good nights’ sleep. Although he was perfectly pleasant while they chatted, Aidan didn’t offer to come around or invite her, and Holly didn’t feel right about asking for that herself.
If she went home now, she’d just sit and worry about everything. With Elvira helping out during the day, Holly didn’t even have a backlog of work-related chores to tackle.
One of the abandoned logger cottages up in the valley, Holly heard Abigail say in her mind. She checked her watch—it had only just gone past six-thirty. That was still a perfectly reasonable hour to pay someone a home visit.
The main road in and out of Hanmer Springs was a nice two-lane blacktop. Given the amount of traffic it received on a daily basis, the council always ensured that any potholes were repaired quickly before they could grow and do real damage.
As soon as Holly left it to pursue the sign pointing to the old logging cottages, she entered a different world. The tarmac was replaced with hardened clay and a sheet of gravel on the top. Instead of offering purchase, the wheels either picked up or skidded on the loose stones and the earth had softened during multiple rainstorms, then hardened again with embedded tire tracks that formed ruts on either side.
They would have been fine to travel down—just like a train track—except the vehicle that had made them was a completely different size to Holly’s car. As the car skidded up one side, it fell down on the other, jumping and jostling her until she began to feel seasick.
What with the mist coming in over the surrounding hills and the dark night sky—no hint of a moon to be seen—Holly felt like packing it all in and turning back. Only the lack of a nearby turning bay stopped her from doing exactly that.
But the last thing she wanted was for her car to skid off the road during a three-point turn and land her in the middle of nowhere for the rest of the night. Given how sketchy the mobile phone coverage was this far out, if her car got stuck, Holly might be in for a long walk if she ever wanted to get back to town.
Then she rounded the next corner and saw a loggers’ cabin, visible in the night due to the lights rigged up inside. They spilled out the windows and the cracks in the walls, highlighting a far worse insulation problem than her own home posed.
Holly stopped the car, leaving it in the middle of the road with the hazard lights on because she didn’t trust herself to steer it off-road. The vehicle was built for zipping around town, not going cross-country.
After slamming the door closed, Holly paused, peering in through the window to try to gauge the atmosphere. For the first time, it occurred to her that she was a woman alone with a strange man who might pose a danger, and nobody knew where she was.
Holly pulled out her phone, thinking she could remedy the last point with a quick email, but her earlier predictions about phone coverage turned out to be true. Her mobile didn’t beat around the bush with “poor coverage” and tease her with bars that disappeared and reappeared. It just came flat out and said “no service.”
The chill that ran up Holly’s back wasn’t just from the cold air.
You’re being stupid, she insisted. Just because someone’s staring in a shop window doesn’t mean they pose a danger.
Except that Susan clearly through he did. If it was the same man. If he’d really done the things that the realtor accused him of.
It was the thought of tracking back along that terrible road again that swayed her. Holly thought the chances were good that her car would get in trouble just trying to turn around on the rutted path. Then she’d have an immobile vehicle and would probably end up approaching Samuel for help. At least if she did it now, the option existed to jump into her vehicle and just keep driving up this empty road.
Holly stepped toward the door, hand raised to knock. Before she could strike her knuckles on the wood, it pulled open, and a young man glared out at her with furious dark-blue eyes.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
Chapter Eight
A moment passed in tense silence, then Samuel took a step back. He was still dressed in his hoodie and coat—probably because the cottage was so cold. Holly shook her head, wondering why she had bothered to come out here. Too late, now.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, retreating into crisp politeness as a form of armor against possible attack. “I wondered if you have a minute to help me with some questions?”
Samuel glanced over Holly’s shoulder, staring at the car in the center of the dirt road. “You can’t park there. What if someone comes along there? They’ll plow straight into the back of you.”
“That’s why I left my lights on,” Holly said. Being in the wrong left her feeling defensive, but she tried to bite that emotion off before it got started. “Sorry, I didn’t trust my abilities to turn the car around. The ruts on the side of the road are so deep, and the shoulder drops away—” she broke off and shrugged.
Samuel stepped outside and closed the door behind him, holding out his hand toward her. “Keys.”
Two thoughts immediately spoke up at competing volume. You’re not really going to hand this stranger your car keys, versus, What else are you going to do?
The what-else won.
“Here you go.” Holly passed them across, not bothering to hide her anxiety. “Please be careful. I need to drive back to town tonight. My sister’s sick in the hospital.”
The last statement came rushing out of her, a disclosure that Holly hadn’t expected to make. She stared down at the dirt beneath her feet, only glancing up in surprise when Samuel patted her on the shoulder.
“I heard about that. I hope that all of them make a full recovery.”
“Thank you,” she said with genuine gratitude when he finished and returned the keys to her with a flourish of his hand. “I wasn’t looking forward to that bit.”
“Why did you come out here?” Samuel asked, standing by his cottage door rather than opening it again. “What is it that you think I’ve done?”
“I don’t know.” The cold bit into Holly’s arms despite her warm clothing. She wished that she was back home, baking up a batch of cupcakes for the following day, and maybe stealing one for herself ‘to test.’ “Do you know Susan, the realtor?”
Samuel nodded, his eyes half-closing, so they appeared hooded. His voice was tight when he asked, “What about her?”
“She told me that you might have something to do with why the last tenant left the property we were looking at. Susan said that he abandoned the shop all of a sudden because you kept hanging around.”
Samuel stared at Holly without saying anything for a long moment. Just when she thought he was going to send her on her way, his shoulders slumped, and he turned to open the door. “I suppose you’d better come in.”
Samuel put a pot of coffee on the old pot-bellied stove to heat, while Holly slapped her arms and stamped her feet to try to generate some warmth.
“I’m sorry it’s so cold in here,” Samuel said, his face red from embarrassment as well as cold. “No matter what I do, it just gets in everywhere.”
“I don’t know how you stand it.” Holly took the seat that Samuel offered and hugged her arms close around her body. “I thought my house was cold, but this one feels like it doesn’t have walls at all.”
Samuel offered up a rueful smile. “It seemed great when I came here in the summer. Now?” He shrugged.
The Sweet Baked Mystery Series - Books 1-6 Page 48
