Mistake in Christmas River

by Meg Muldoon

  “I was so scared, Cin. When Billy called and told me that there’d been an accident, I...”

  He trailed off, his voice growing shaky.

  “I should have been there with you today. If I had, then maybe this wouldn’t have—”

  I shook my head.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. You couldn’t have stopped it.”

  I gazed up into his eyes as another tremor worked its way through my body.

  “Daniel?”

  He looked down at me.

  “We have to find out who hurt those girls.”

  Chapter 47

  I kept the shop closed the next day.

  All morning, my phone had been ringing. Everyone had heard about the accident and was worried sick about me. Warren and Aileen had been over at the house first thing in the morning, along with Kara and Laila. Tiana and Tobias had stopped by, too, bringing pastries and coffee.

  It was a nice feeling knowing that I had so many people who cared about me. But I couldn’t help think about Vicky, lying in that hospital bed – no real family to speak of to worry about her.

  Her only family was the Sheriff’s Department – and Daniel, Billy, Owen, and Trumbow had taken shifts staying at the hospital with her, despite the fact that she wasn’t awake to know. The doctors had put her into a coma in an attempt to offset any brain swelling that might occur.

  In the dim light of yet another foggy day, it was hard to believe that any of it was real – that last night had actually happened.

  That somebody had actually followed us and run our car off the road.

  But when I looked in the mirror that morning, the proof that it had happened was written on my right arm and leg in the form of purple and blue welts.

  I stayed in the bathroom that morning for a long time, staring at those bruises and thinking.

  Something had come to me last night.

  We’d been run off the road – targeted – for a reason.

  We had to be close to finding something important out in the missing women’s case.

  And what was more – it proved something else.

  The person who knew what happened to those two women 25 years ago was still here in Central Oregon.

  Still doing damage.

  Still hurting people.

  That was why instead of staying home that day and resting the way I should have, I bundled up and headed over to the repair shop with Daniel to follow the only lead we had.

  Chapter 48

  “Geez, Cin! You okay, honey? I just heard about the accident. I can’t believe you’re here talking to me now.”

  Marty Higgins leaned over the counter of Higgins Repair, smiling his big, generous trademark smile at me.

  Meanwhile, I felt like I’d just eaten a bag of rocks.

  Marty didn’t seem to notice the seriousness in my face.

  “And what about that lady lieutenant?” he said, a deep line of concern running between his brows. “I heard she was in the hospital. Is she going to be okay?”

  I’d known Marty Higgins for so long now. He was the kind of man who could light up a room with one of his smiles. The kind of man you felt safe around.

  A genuinely good man.

  Or so I had thought.

  When I didn’t answer right away, Marty turned his attention to Daniel standing next to me.

  “Cin must have given you quite the scare, huh, Sheriff? I tell you, this freezing fog makes driving hell sometimes. Once, about ten years ago, I was driving that same stretch of highway. An elderly fella out in Pine Grove needed his heater repaired. I was on my way back home in the dark when that freezing fog came rolling in out of nowhere. Before I knew it, my truck was fishtailing all over the road like—”

  “It wasn’t any freezing fog, Marty,” I said in a choked voice. “What happened wasn’t an accident.”

  I studied Marty’s face for a reaction to that.

  He peered back at me, looking a little puzzled by the sharpness in my tone.

  “Oh…” he mumbled. “But if it wasn’t an accident, Cin, then what—”

  Daniel cleared his throat loudly.

  “We need to talk to you, Marty. And we need to take a look at your car.”

  Marty looked shell-shocked.

  Like somebody had just sucker punched him.

  “Aw, geez, Sheriff… What’s this all about?”

  “Amelia Delgado,” I said. “And Laura Baynes.”

  Something flashed in Marty’s eyes at the mention of their names.

  And I suddenly knew that Sully hadn’t made a mistake.

  Chapter 49

  “Look, I told Sheriff Coe back then, and I’m telling you now – I did nothing to those girls. And I didn’t do anything wrong. All I did was show up for work those days. Is that a crime?”

  We were sitting in the office of Marty Higgins’ small repair shop. Marty leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his graying hair.

  He looked nervous.

  I couldn’t remember ever seeing him look like this. Not even during the big storm that hit Christmas River during the Chocolate Championship Showdown a year earlier, when we were all trapped in the auditorium together.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to them,” he continued. “I was then, and I still am today. But I didn’t have any part in it.”

  “What do you think happened to them?” Daniel asked.

  Marty fell silent, not looking at either one of us.

  “Something bad,” he finally said. “That’s what usually happens to people who disappear, isn’t it?”

  Marty furrowed his brow, looking over at me.

  “Look, Cin. You’ve known me for decades now. Do you really think I’d be capable of doing something like that?”

  I swallowed hard.

  This wasn’t easy. I’d considered Marty to be a good friend for a long time.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t. But we have to ask, Marty. We have to make sure.”

  He let out a long, slow breath, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Tell us everything from that day in February of 1993, Marty,” Daniel said, taking off his hat. “Everything you can remember the day Amelia Delgado went missing.”

  The big man paused again.

  “I don’t have to do this,” he finally said. “I don’t have to answer any of your questions. And I don’t have to let you look at my car without a warrant.”

  “You’re right,” Daniel said. “You can call a lawyer, and if you want my advice, that’d be the smart thing to do. But then this questioning would have to be done at the station, and it might cause more problems for you, Marty.”

  The handyman rubbed his face. He gazed at a small, framed photo on his desk of his wife, Iggy.

  Then he let out a long sigh.

  “After I graduated high school, I worked as a gas attendant at the Chevron station right across the street from The Marionberry Truck Stop Diner. I’m the first to admit that I wasn’t any boy scout in those days. I was going through a tough time – I was all set to go to college, but then my ma had a stroke. I did what a good son should do and stayed home to take care of her and support the family. Never got to that college and I guess you could say I acted out about it all sometimes. Drinking too much. Raising hell in my off hours… But I never did anything that bad. Just stupid stuff mostly.”

  He stared out the window.

  “The local law enforcement and I weren’t exactly simpatico on account of my behavior. Sheriff Sullivan Coe was a hard lined son of a gun, and I guess I rubbed him the wrong way. There was a string of shoplifting crimes at some of the local businesses that year, and Sully picked me up, kept me in lock-up, and interrogated me for a full 48 hours about it just for kicks. And when they arrested the real shoplifter, I didn’t even get so much as an apology from that bastard.”

  Marty drew in a deep breath.

  “The day Ms. Delgado went missing, I was working at the gas station as usual. Pumping gas, going about my day.
It was about 11 in the morning when that Greyhound bus pulled up into the diner parking lot. Those buses came through three times a day, and there wasn’t anything unusual about that. But I noticed this girl get off and go over to a picnic table in the woods behind the restaurant.”

  Marty wasn’t looking at us as he spoke, his eyes now glued to the photo of his wife on his desk.

  “She was pretty. And even though I was across the street, I could see that there was something about her that was sort of… I don’t know… sad.

  “I went over there because I wanted to talk to her. I was a 19-year-old kid seeing a pretty girl. I wasn’t some psychopath wanting to hurt her, the way Sully tried to make me out to be. I knew she’d probably be back on the bus in a few minutes anyway. I just… I wanted to talk to her.

  “So I went over and I saw that she had a cigarette and was looking for a light. I had one. We shared a cigarette. She told me she was headed to Boise. I told her she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She laughed about that.”

  Marty paused, his lips turning up a little bit at the memory.

  “She told me she had to get back on the bus. I had to get back to work, anyway. So I said so long and that I hoped to see her when she passed through Christmas River again.”

  Marty gazed up at us suddenly.

  “And that was it. That was all there was to it. A young, dumb kid going over to see a pretty girl. A few weeks later, Sheriff Sully Coe picks me up. I thought it was for another shoplifting thing. But it wasn’t. It was about the girl. And before I know it, I’m being made out to be some kind of sadistic psycho killer.”

  “What about when the other woman went missing – Laura Baynes. Where were you a year later on the day she disappeared?” Daniel asked.

  Marty shook his head emphatically.

  “Just pumping gas like usual. I didn’t even see her get off the bus. My co-workers vouched that I’d been working a long shift that morning and I didn’t once leave for even a break. Some of ‘em are still around Christmas River if you want to confirm that, Sheriff.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “We talked to Sully in prison yesterday,” I said.

  Marty leaned back in his chair, shaking his head.

  “Right where he belongs, too,” he said bitterly. “You know, he had the whole town fooled for years. But I always knew. I always knew he wasn’t a good guy. He would have tried to pin this whole thing on me if he could have made it stick.”

  “He said that you were hiding something when they questioned you,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “He said you knew more than you told him.”

  Marty scoffed.

  “You’re really going to believe him, Cin? After your history? You should know better than anybody else what he’s made of.”

  Marty gave me a hard gaze when I didn’t answer.

  Then he shook his head.

  “Jeez. I guess you really can’t tell who your friends are these days.”

  The words cut deep, even though I knew he might have been justified in saying them.

  I wasn’t being much of a friend here.

  But if there was one thing I’d learned over the years, it was that you could never know someone completely. You might be friends with them, think you know everything there is to know about them, but they could easily be hiding a whole host of dark secrets.

  I hoped Marty didn’t have any of those and that he really was telling the truth – that it was just an innocent moment shared between two strangers that day.

  But I couldn’t be sure.

  “So that’s all there is to the story?” Daniel asked. “There’s nothing more?”

  “I told Sully, just like I’m telling you. I didn’t do anything wrong that day. I was just a stupid redneck kid trying to talk to a pretty girl. That was all.”

  Daniel stared at Marty for a long, long moment. One of those razor sharp gazes of his that made plenty of criminals shudder in his time.

  “Why do you think Sully thought you were hiding something?” he asked.

  Marty lifted his hands up in the air.

  “Hell, I told you. That bastard had it out for me. I was an easy target and he was looking for an open and shut case.”

  Daniel looked out the small office window for a second, deep in thought.

  “All right, Marty. With your permission, I’d like to have my deputies check your car now to rule you out as a suspect in the hit and run yesterday.”

  Marty’s eyes widened for a split second. Then, in one angry motion, he opened up the drawer of his desk and fished out his car keys. He tossed them at Daniel.

  “Go ahead. My truck’s the red one out front three cars from the left. And if you’re wondering – which I’m sure that you are – I was out in Redmond the whole day yesterday fixing Mrs. Ruth Toffler’s water heater.”

  Marty looked at me, his eyes filled with hurt.

  “I’d never harm you, Cin. How could you ever think that?”

  I bit my lip, feeling a wave of guilt rush over me.

  I felt like a bona-fide backstabber.

  And more than that, I couldn’t see how our friendship would be able to weather this storm.

  Daniel stood up, taking the keys.

  He appeared stoic and unmoved by anything that Marty was trying to lay at our feet.

  “Do you know who that lieutenant who got hurt yesterday is?” he asked.

  Marty furrowed his brow.

  “She’s Amelia Delgado’s sister,” Daniel said after a long pause. “Her name’s Vicky. And she’s been trying to find out what happened to her sister for quite some time now.”

  And that’s when I saw it.

  It was for just a split second. A fleeting split second that I might have easily missed if I’d blinked.

  But I didn’t blink, and I didn’t miss it.

  A look of guilt flashed across Marty’s eyes.

  Then receded into nothing.

  “Well, I hope she finds out what happened to her,” Marty said, clearing his throat. “Truly, I do. But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Daniel placed his hat back on his head, and I took it as a cue that the interview was over.

  I stood up.

  “Thanks for your time, Marty, and for your cooperation,” Daniel said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Marty Higgins didn’t say anything as we left his shop.

  Chapter 50

  I sat at the window of Daniel’s office, sipping hot coffee from a paper cup, watching delicate flakes of snow drift down from the sky.

  On the way back from visiting Vicky in the hospital – she was still unconscious – we’d had the local news radio on. Rex’s voice came in over the speaker, telling us that Christmas River could expect a few light flurries this afternoon and into the evening. He predicted the roads might get slick, but that the accumulation would be minimal.

  Normally, I liked watching this kind of snow coming down from the skies. I always thought of it as snow globe flurries. Delicate and well-meaning. But today, I was having a hard time enjoying much of anything.

  Talking to Marty Higgins hadn’t helped us get anywhere and had possibly ruined my friendship with him – something that wasn’t sitting too well with me. I had hoped he would have seen the necessity of the situation, but I didn’t think he had. He was obviously very hurt by our questioning. And I had a feeling that when it came to Marty, I’d burned a bridge that couldn’t be repaired.

  I felt bad about it all.

  Really bad.

  But maybe I would have felt even worse if I didn’t believe that he was indeed hiding something.

  I’d seen guilt in Marty’s eyes when Daniel mentioned Vicky being Amelia’s sister.

  Guilt that had no business being there if Marty was innocent the way he said he was.

  He might not have been the one who ran us off the road the day before, but Sully had been right – there was something Marty wasn’t saying.

  Something important.

  “Found hi
m,” Daniel said, looking up from his computer, jarring me from my thoughts. “Benjamin Smith. Eugene, Oregon.”

  I sat up in my chair.

  After coming back from the hospital, Daniel had been poring over the first victim’s case file – Laura Baynes. Though Sully had suggested the two cases might not actually be related, the way he had once thought, the Baynes file was more complete and Daniel still thought one could help with the other. Additionally, Vicky had been doing some investigating of her own of Laura’s disappearance, and had left a detailed overview of her findings. She’d visited Laura’s husband – Philip Smith – several times to see if he could add anything to the narrative all these years later. The man, however, refused to talk to her. He told her he’d remarried and moved on with his life, and wasn’t interested in pursuing his first wife’s case any further.

  In Vicky’s notes, she said she’d been trying to track down Laura’s son, who had been seven years old at the time of his mom’s disappearance. Though he’d been young, Daniel agreed that talking to him might yield something the initial investigators missed.

  There were hundreds of Ben Smiths out there, so it had been a process of finding the right one to talk to.

  “He’s got a pretty clean record,” Daniel said, staring at his computer screen. “A couple parking tickets, nothing major.”

  A couple moments passed by while Daniel studied something on his screen.

  “He’s a middle school teacher.”

  Daniel glanced at his watch.

  “School should be just about out now.”

  He picked the phone up off his desk and began hitting some of the number pads.

  “Are you calling him now?” I asked.

  “I don’t think we have any time to lose. Don’t you think?”

  I nodded, standing up and dragging the chair over to his desk.

  ***

  “Look, my dad talked to that lady cop already,” the man’s voice cracked over the speaker. “He didn’t have anything to say and neither do I. And you have no right calling me here at my place of work.”