Mistake in Christmas River

by Meg Muldoon

  “Hey – I didn’t see you at the bachelor auction,” I said, smiling at her, stroking Crabtree’s neck again.

  I’d extended an invitation to her earlier that week in case she’d wanted a night out. But it was mostly just a courtesy – I knew she wouldn’t come.

  “Aw, I just didn’t feel up to it,” she said. “Thanks for the invite, though. I suppose I missed out on a lot.”

  “Just some run-of-the-mill barnyard behavior,” I said. “Nothing you don’t see every day here on the ranch.”

  She let out a snort at that.

  “So who ended up getting Daniel?” she asked.

  “A second grade teacher at the elementary school.”

  “A school teacher?Sounds like he’ll be in good hands, then.”

  “I don’t think you’d be saying that if you’d seen this one at the auction,” I said. “We had to cut her off at the bar. And the way she was looking at Daniel was plain unbefitting for someone in her profession.”

  Elise let out another laugh.

  She leaned down, ripped open the bag of food with a box cutter, heaved it up, and began filling the trough attached to the fence with it.

  Crabtree, who had been reveling in my ear rubs, heard a higher calling and began walking over to the fresh food.

  “I guess I ought to get back to town, anyway,” I said, dusting my hands off. “I’ve got a lot of work to do with Valentine’s Day coming up.”

  “Well, Old Crabtree thanks you for your time and attention,” she said. “And he wants you to know he’ll be performing all day tomorrow and into the weekend, too.”

  I grinned. Then I waved goodbye and started heading down the path, back to the pie shop.

  I was still thinking of the man in the gray jacket as I ran.

  But the visit to the farm helped, the way it always did.

  Chapter 16

  I pulled out the pan of bubbling mountain cherry pies, setting them down on the wooden butcher block. I inspected them for a long moment in the warm lights of the bakery. The lattice tops were a shade of warm gold and the egg glaze I’d brushed on just before sticking the pies in the oven gave them a lovely glossy sheen. The filling bubbled crimson, and the aroma of warm, gooey cherries wafted through the bread bakery kitchen.

  It was almost a shame that I was the only one here to appreciate the magic of it all.

  But I supposed I wasn’t completely alone – Otis was here with me, keeping me company with his timeless crooning.

  I turned off the ovens and began cleaning down the countertops vigorously with a mixture of vinegar and water.

  I was tired and didn’t feel like making the place sparkle, but I wasn’t planning on getting on Frank Longworth’s bad side anytime soon, and that would take some work.

  I wondered if there was anybody who was actually on the man’s good side. And I also wondered how somebody so crabby and malcontent ended up making bread for a living. Much like baking pies, I imagined that successfully baking bread required a kind, generous spirit. I always believed that on a subconscious level people could tell when something was made with love, and when something wasn’t. Bakers couldn’t hide behind their creations, and oftentimes, it seemed that bakeries that didn’t do well fell short in the kind, generous spirit department.

  But The Harvest Bread Bakery had thrived here in Christmas River for the past 25 years, and was widely regarded as one of our small town’s best local businesses.

  I supposed that Frank Longworth might have been just a little rough around the edges, but that deep down, he was probably a decent person. The fact that he’d agreed to let me use his ovens this week was a sign of that – even if he seemed a little begrudging about the whole thing. He’d just about saved Valentine’s Day for my business, and I was grateful.

  I wiped down the last counter and did a thorough inspection of the entire kitchen, making sure nothing was out of place. Then, after the pies had cooled for a few minutes, I placed a sheet of aluminum foil over them, turned out all the lights, locked up, and brought the freshly-baked pies with me back to my own shop kitchen. After they had mostly cooled, I put all but one of the pastries in the refrigerator to stay fresh, and I locked up my own shop, walking south on Main Street through the fog, carrying an extra pie that was destined for a certain soon-to-be television star.

  My stomach let out a few angry grumbles and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten anything since this morning. And that didn’t really count because I’d left it on the trail at lunch time.

  I hurried along, picking up the pace, hoping that Warren might be in a generous mood tonight and share some of this pie with me.

  I got to the brewery and went around back to the side door entrance that led to the stairs. I climbed up and knocked twice on the door of Warren and Aileen’s condo.

  The lights were on in the living room and it spilled out onto the small patio. I could hear Old Blue Eyes coming from the kitchen – a sure sign of Warren being around.

  I waited, but there was no answer.

  I knocked again, louder this time.

  “Old man? You guys home?”

  A gentle gust of wind blew through the gnarled branches of the juniper above me, causing the big tree to sway gently in the fog.

  I fought off a round of shivers as I pulled out my phone and called Warren.

  There was no answer.

  I leaned over the wood railing, craning my neck to see around the building – Aileen’s car wasn’t in its usual parking space.

  I headed back downstairs, going over to the brewery’s side door entrance. I knelt down, uncovering a few rocks before finding the right one that hid the extra key to the pub. I unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and headed inside.

  Because of the filming schedule, Warren and Aileen had decided to close the brewery tonight – something they very rarely did. I was glad they had, though. The two of them deserved a night off between the intense filming schedule and the wild antics of the Puppy Love Auction the evening before.

  I set the pie down squarely in the middle of the smooth pine bar and reached across, grabbing a pad of paper that the bartenders used for drink orders. I wrote out a quick note of congratulations to the old man and Aileen, setting it down by the fresh cherry pie. Then I sent a quick text, telling Warren there was a treat waiting for him in the pub whenever he got back home.

  I started heading out the door I had come in, but I stopped suddenly when I heard a strange clicking sound.

  I turned around, studying the empty pub for a long moment, trying to figure out what had made the noise.

  That’s when I noticed the faint light coming from beneath the office door in the very back of the building.

  “Old man?You in here?”

  I paused, waiting for a response.

  Warren’s hearing wasn’t what it had once been, and I gathered that he was back there somewhere and hadn’t heard me come in.

  I headed for the office door – the room where Warren and Aileen kept all of their business ledgers and delivery schedules. I reached for the knob.

  “Old man – don’t you know there’s a freshly-baked cherry pie just sitting out here with your name on it? I would have thought you could have smelled it the second I—”

  “Don’t you touch a hair on her head, you bastard!”

  A moment later, I was flying backwards, hitting the cold pine floor with a hard, tail bone-crunching thud.

  Chapter 17

  I stood near the front of the pub, gazing numbly out the window at the blue and red lights flashing in the fog.

  I wasn’t exactly in shock. But I wasn’t exactly feeling altogether alert, either. I’d hit the ground pretty hard after the robber had run into me and sent me flying across the pub. And even though over an hour had passed since the Booze Bandit had made off with $2,000 of Warren and Aileen’s hard-earned money, I was still in a daze.

  The whole thing had left me shaken.

  “Cin – I really think we should take you in to
the doctor, all right? It’s important.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just a little sore. But nothing’s broken. I’ll be fine.”

  Daniel studied me as Deputy Billy Jasper walked past us, wearing latex gloves and carrying a small fingerprinting kit.

  There was a stoic, serious expression on his face.

  “It might seem like nothing,” Daniel said when Billy was out of earshot. “But it’s better to be safe than sorry. Especially if there’s any possibility that, you… you know, you could be…”

  He trailed off, but I finished the sentence for him silently.

  Pregnant.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m not.”

  He peered at me.

  “You’re certain about that?”

  I nodded.

  “Still, I think it’d be a good idea to take you in,” Daniel said. “I want to make sure that you’re really okay and—”

  “I’m okay,” I said, grabbing his hand. “But I’ll be even better when you catch the guy who did this.”

  I looked over at my grandfather as I spoke.

  He was sitting at one of the barstools next to the cherry pie, which remained untouched. He was talking to Vicky, recounting what had happened for at least the third time. Her hand was quickly flying across her notepad as he spoke, and I could see that she was listening intently to every word the old man was saying.

  Warren looked a little shaken, too. His frame seemed smaller, somehow, sitting there at the bar. There was a blank expression on his face, and he looked tired and sad.

  It just about killed me to see him that way.

  “I mean, just think, Daniel,” I said, my throat getting thick with emotion. “That bastard had a gun. Anything could have happened to Warren. It’s a miracle that…”

  I swallowed hard, the image of the man with the red T-shirt covering his face flashing into my mind again.

  The robber had broken in through a back window in the brew house. Warren had been in his office, working on some last minute business when the door had flown open and he’d come face to face with the barrel of a gun.

  My eyes grew damp, just thinking about the many possible outcomes.

  Noticing, Daniel put an arm around me.

  “He’s okay, Cin,” he whispered. “Your grandpa’s a tough old nut. As tough as they come. Nothing was going to happen to him. Hell, even if the gun had gone off, he probably would’ve talked the bullet out of hitting him. You know how he never shuts up.”

  I sniveled, feeling my lips turn up a little at that.

  “I’ll let you get away with that insult this time, Daniel Brightman,” I said in a weak voice. “But don’t you dare start a trend. You hear?”

  He smiled.

  I drew in a deep breath as the moment of levity faded.

  “Is it the same guy as the one who hit the bar in Redmond? The Booze Bandit?” I asked, already knowing the answer, but asking anyway.

  “I can’t be sure yet until we see the security footage, but based on your descriptions, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t him,” Daniel said.

  He let out an unsteady breath.

  “I am sure about one thing, though,” he said.

  He looked at me with serious, steadfast eyes.

  “He’ll be sitting in jail before next week. And we’ll get Warren’s money back to him. One way or another.”

  I nodded, biting my lip.

  A few seconds later, Warren got up off the barstool and walked over to us. Vicky had completed her questioning.

  The old man shook his head, peering at me.

  “I swear, Cinny Bee, when I saw you on the ground like that, I thought for a moment that…”

  His voice gave out and he trailed off, looking like somebody had just punched him hard in the ribcage.

  I knew something about how he was feeling.

  I reached out and hugged him hard.

  Just then, the back door that led to the brew house flew open. Aileen stood in the doorway with a bag of groceries at her hip. A look of pure panic warped her features so much, I wasn’t sure at first that it was actually her.

  She scanned the room of deputies.

  “Oh, dear heaven! Where’s my Warren? What’s happened? What—”

  Warren waved his hands to get Aileen’s attention.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. Everything’s okay. We’ve just had ourselves a little robbery, but everybody’s all right. We’re just—”

  A moment later, the bag of groceries hit the floor and she was running across the room. Aileen embraced Warren with all the strength of a category four hurricane.

  “I saw the police lights down the road and I thought… I thought…” she stuttered.

  She hugged him and kissed him like they were long lost lovers.

  The old man flushed red at the overt display of affection in front of so many people.

  But he was smiling a little too.

  “I’m all right, woman,” he said in between her kisses. “I didn’t drop dead of a heart attack or nothin.’”

  “Don’t joke like that!” she mumbled.

  She brushed away a couple of tears from her cheeks and smiled at him through bleary eyes.

  I squeezed Daniel’s hand, feeling my own eyes grow damp again.

  Chapter 18

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about Vicky’s sister?”

  I was stretched out next to Daniel on the wood steps of our backyard deck, trying to avoid sitting directly on my sore tailbone.

  It was cold, but not like the kind of frigid cold that was typical for Christmas River this time of year. The mist kept it from getting too chilly at night, and it felt good to be out in the fresh air. We watched Huckleberry and Chadwick trot through the dead grass of the meadow in the red evening fog, sipping from our hot mugs of Sleepytime tea.

  When we’d gotten home from the brewery that night, I’d been so exhausted, I felt like I’d be able to sleep for a week. But at some point, my eyes had flipped open and I couldn’t fall back asleep.

  It didn’t matter how comfy and cozy you made your bedroom: At 3 a.m. in the morning with the worries of the world weighing heavily on your mind, the walls always felt like they were closer together than they really were.

  My mind had been racing hard. Going from thoughts of the robbery, to thoughts of what had happened back in January. Eventually, I’d settled on something that had been picking at my brain for the majority of the afternoon – my conversation with Vicky and the photo she’d accidently left at my pie shop. The one of the young woman.

  Amelia.

  When Vicky left my shop, memories of the news reports from 1993 had started coming back to me.

  And I’d remembered the missing girl’s last name.

  It was Amelia Delgado.

  Everything became a lot clearer once I realized that.

  “Vicky doesn’t talk too much about it,” Daniel said, gazing out across the foggy meadow. “My sense is that the pain is still pretty raw for her.”

  “It must be why she chose to come here to Christmas River,” I mumbled. “Why she took the job with the Sheriff’s Office in the first place. This was the last place her sister was seen alive.”

  “Yeah, I always figured that was her motive,” he said. “Her references at Portland PD were sterling. Everyone I talked to said she was on track there for becoming captain one day. Taking a lieutenant job with a small Sheriff’s department in Central Oregon wouldn’t have exactly been the next rung up on the ladder for someone like her.”

  I took a sip of my tea, thinking about Vicky’s sister and what I remembered from the news reports at the time.

  I remembered Amelia’s mother appearing on a live broadcast once, holding up a photo of her daughter. I remembered news footage of the truck stop diner where the bus had stopped here in Christmas River – the last place Amelia was seen alive. I remembered that when the news stories had died out and the police had no leads, all had gone quiet until a year later wh
en a second woman went missing at the same bus stop. A young mother, also from Portland.

  The media had had a field day when the second woman went missing.

  Part of it was because it made two possible victims.

  And now, on hindsight, I could also see that there may have been another reason the second woman received more attention and her story made national headlines.

  She had blonde hair, pale skin, and had come from a more affluent part of Portland than Amelia.

  I closed my eyes for a long moment, thinking about Vicky.

  It must have been hell to go through something like that.

  Vicky had a tough, no-nonsense facade that had put me on my back heels when she’d first been hired by the Sheriff’s Department.

  But I knew from experience that sometimes the people who had the hardest, toughest exteriors were often that way for a reason.

  Vicky had mentioned Amelia had been on her way to Boise when she disappeared.

  I remembered her telling me at the Sheriff’s Office Christmas party that she’d attended Boise State for her undergrad.

  It wasn’t a stretch to think that Amelia had been on her way to see her when she disappeared.

  I shivered.

  “So nobody ever came close to finding out what happened to Vicky’s sister?” I asked.

  Daniel shook his head sadly.

  “I’ve looked at the case file a dozen times since I started working there – or what’s left of it. It’s one of the biggest unsolved cases in the county and—”

  “What’s left of it?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  Daniel set his mug of tea down on the deck.

  “Back in the late nineties, there was a fire at the Sheriff’s Office. Somebody was smoking indoors when they shouldn’t have been. The filing room went up in flames. Almost took the whole station with it.”