3 Madness in Christmas River (16 page)

“It’s a valid question, Mom,” Haley said, looking at me with a sour face. “You’re too old for him.”  

I wiped my sweaty hands on my apron, trying to come up with something to say, but nothing came out.

“I…” I started, struggling for words. “Nothing hap…”

My heart started racing. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, waiting for my answer, knowing full well that my response was going to be all over town by dinner time.

And, as I stood there, facing the Haley inquisition, I knew there was nothing I could say that would absolve me of what they thought I did.

Nobody would believe the truth. Not when the gossip was this juicy.

Cinnamon Peters, once the victim of adultery, now the perpetrator of it, just as she’s about to be married to the town sheriff. 

The gossips of Christmas River wouldn’t let something like that ever die.

No matter the fact that there was no truth to it.

Haley put her hands on her hips and looked at me with a bitter, ugly, hateful expression.

I just shook my head, and took off my apron.  

I took a deep breath and glanced around the room.

“Nothing hap—” I started saying.

“You’re way out of line, Haley,” Chrissy said, standing next to me and coming to my defense. “If you were an adult, I would say something worse. But you’re not an adult. You’re a nasty little girl. Which just about everyone in town knows. Including Deputy McHale.”

Haley’s expression turned from one full of hate, to one of shock.

Her mom didn’t say a thing.

I glanced over at Chrissy, and nodded appreciatively.

I didn’t care if Haley was a young, immature girl in love. She couldn’t come into my pie shop and do this.

And I was glad to have Chrissy to say just the right thing at just the right time.

Haley and her mom placed their plates back on the counter, and left the shop in a huff. After a moment of shocked silence, loud chatting resumed in the dining room.

I knew everybody was talking about the scene that had just played out in front of them.

And I knew that even though I might have won that battle, I still had lost the war.

Everyone thought I had cheated on Daniel with Deputy McHale.  

I went into the kitchen, grabbed my coat off the coat rack, and zipped it up. I picked Huckleberry up, and left through the back door.

I got into the car and drove away. I held the tears back until I had passed through downtown.

Chapter 43

“I hadn’t ever seen such a beautiful bride,” Warren said, looking over my shoulder at the old photo album. “And I’m not just saying that because she was my daughter. I’m not the sentimental type. But that day, your mom looked like… like an angel.”

After my showdown with Haley, I’d driven home and changed into a comfortable pair of fleece penguin-dotted PJ’s and a bathrobe. I had brought back the old photo album from Daniel’s attic, placing it on the bookshelf next to all of our other albums, and I quickly found myself pulling out my mother’s old, weathered ones.

I just needed a distraction, and burying myself in a stack of old photos and memories seemed like a good enough one.

After he had gotten up from his nap, Warren had found me sitting cross-legged on the floor, flipping through the cellophane pages. It wasn’t long before he joined me in a trip down memory lane.

“I don’t ever remember her smiling like this,” I said, pointing to a photograph of my mom posing with Marie, who had been her maid of honor at the wedding.

My mom wasn’t exactly an unhappy person when I knew her, but even as a child, I knew that she was troubled. When my father was around, the two of them fought all the time, and I remember her crying a lot. When he left us, the crying spells didn’t stop. If anything, there were more of them.

During her last years, before the accident, she’d become a little happier. But I never knew the youthful, radiant bride in the photograph staring up at me.

That woman was long gone by the time I came around.

Warren stroked his beard, looking at the old picture.  

“Sometimes life is unkind,” he said. “It was unkind to your mom. But it wasn’t all bad. She got a few joyful moments in there. Like her wedding day and the day you were born. A couple of nice trips she took with her girlfriends. Sometimes, a few good moments is all we can ask for in life.”

I nodded as a hollow sadness settled in my chest.

It made me sad that her life had been that way. That those good moments were so few and far between.

She was a good person. She should have had a good life too.

But sometimes, most of the time in fact, how good you were didn’t matter. Sometimes, you just had bad luck.

Warren put a hand on my shoulder.

“You’re not anything like your mom, Cin,” he said. “I mean, you’re smart and pretty like she was. But your life isn’t going to be like hers. You’ve got more luck than she ever did. Yours is going to be overflowing with good moments.”

I patted the top of his aging, freckled hand.

“It already has been,” I said, glancing back at him.

His eyes went a little glassy. He looked away, before getting up and going to the kitchen.  

I looked back down at the book and flipped toward the back. There were some photos of my mom and Marie that were taken a few years after she was married. Marie had taken my mom to Hawaii for her 30
^th
birthday, and the photos showed the two of them sitting on a boat, the ocean shining brilliantly behind them.   

My mom was smiling, but already you could tell that things were starting to go wrong in her life. That smile wasn’t nearly as bright as it had been in the photos at the front of the album.

“She always talked about the fun she had on that trip,” Warren said, sitting back down and pushing a pint of pumpkin beer across the coffee table to me. “She hadn’t ever been outside of Oregon before that, you know.”

“Must have been a shock,” I said, thinking about how I felt the first time I went to Maui—how humid and foreign it felt compared to the dry, arid forests of our home.

“She said that she never sweated so much in all her life,” he said, smiling. “But I think she liked it there. I don’t think she wanted to come back.”

I didn’t blame her, knowing what was back here waiting for her. A marriage that was falling apart and the responsibility of raising a young child while working full-time.

I glanced at the last photo from the trip, one of her and Marie at the beach, wearing bathing suits and sitting beneath a palm tree. You could tell that it was toward the end of their trip—both of them were deeply tanned.

I started flipping to the next page in the book, which showed pictures of me as a child, when I suddenly stop.

Something in the beach photo suddenly caught my eye.

I flipped back, and studied the picture again.

A pendant.

A silver pendant attached to a necklace that hung around Marie’s neck. 

A necklace that hadn’t been visible in any of the other photos.

My stomach dropped when I saw it, though it took a few moments for my mind to catch up.

I quickly shut the photo album and jumped to my feet, making the connection.

It was the same necklace. I was sure of it.

“What’s wrong, Cinny Bee?” Warren asked after me, watching me hurry up the stairs.

“I have to go to the station,” I said.

Chapter 44

He leaned back in the chair, stared out the window at the driving snow, and didn’t say anything for a while.

I sat at the edge of his desk, my hair dripping with melted snow, waiting for him to say something about the open photo album lying next to the two photos of Anthony Matthews

But he didn’t speak.

I finally couldn’t take it anymore.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

He grabbed his cowboy hat off the desk and started plucking at the leather belt.

“It’s probably just a coincidence,” he said. “They’re both wearing St. Francis medals. There probably weren’t that many places to get a St. Francis medal in Christmas River back then. Not too many Catholics in this town. They probably just got them from the same store.”

I shook my head.

“It’s the same one,” I said. “You know that it is. Marie is wearing the same St. Francis medal that Anthony Matthews is wearing in these photos. And this one of her was taken several years after he disappeared.”

He leaned forward and studied the images a little longer, then looked back up at me.  

“Well, say you’re right,” he said. “What do you suppose it means?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But it makes me think Marie might have known him. They would have been about the same age.”

Daniel didn’t say anything. He laced his fingers together, resting them on his stomach, and looked back out the window.

“What if she knows something about what happened to him?” I asked. “The photo was on the porch the morning that she disappeared. And then here they are wearing the same medal. There has to be a connection.”

“Maybe,” he said, glancing at me for a second, and then back out the window.

I suddenly realized that something was different about him.

I had thought he was just tired and quiet from his long drive here.

But now I realized that there was something more.  

Someone had told him.

He’d caught a whiff of the rumors spreading around this town like the plague.

Rumors about me and one of his deputies.

I bit my lip, a feeling of regret settling at the base of my stomach.

I should have told him earlier. This morning, when I had a chance.

I got off the desk and started pacing, running my hands through my wet hair.

“You know what this town’s like,” I said. “They’ve got nothing better to do than to make things up about people.”

I looked at him, afraid of the judgment I’d see in his face.

But there was none.

Just a blank expression that scared me even more.

“I stopped at home earlier to drop my bag off,” he said. “I saw that you’d been there.”

I waited nervously for what came next.  

“It kind of made me feel all warm inside,” he continued “Seeing the bed made and the smell of the fire from the wood stove. Made me think that you missed me.”

“Of course I missed you,” I said.

“Made me think that maybe you were thinking about moving in with me after the wedding.”

I plopped down in the seat across from him, my legs feeling shaky.

I started saying something.

“I—”

“Then I saw the empty bottle of wine in the recycling,” he said. “And the almost empty bottle of Jim Beam. I didn’t think too much of it until Norma at reception mentioned something she’d heard. Some town gossip about you and Haley Drutman getting into an argument at the shop. About…”

He trailed off.  

I bit my lip and stared hard into his face.

Town gossip was one thing.

But believing it was another.

Daniel had to be smarter than to believe the mutterings of a few old ladies.

“It’s true that Owen was over at your house,” I said. “I was talking to him about the case. He drank too much, and couldn’t drive himself home. That accounts for the rumors.”

I got up and walked around the desk, leaning over him.

“But, Daniel, you have to know that I would never…”

I looked deep into his eyes, letting him know I meant it. Letting him know that doing something like that to him was unfathomable.

“How could you think I would do that to you?” I said, in case he needed to hear it out loud.

He broke my stare, and sighed.

“I know you wouldn’t,” he finally said. “But I just didn’t like that he was over there with you. At my house like that. Drinking with you there.”

He stroked the stubble on his chin.

“Maybe I’m taking the low road here, but I don’t know of too many guys who would like their wife in that situation, with them being hundreds of miles away.”

He looked back out the window. And I could tell that it really did bother him.

And I felt stupid and bad all at the same time. Stupid for giving the gossips in this town ammo to hurt him with. Bad for being so thoughtless.

But I had goose bumps on my arms.

It hadn’t been lost on me that Daniel had just called me his wife. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing his shoulder. “I had just run into Evan earlier while walking over to your house, and I was feeling kind of, well… it was nice to have somebody around in case he came back.”

Daniel looked up suddenly at me, deep angry creases settling between his eyebrows.

“I told that son of a bitch Evan to stay away from you,” he said.

I sighed.

“Guess he didn’t get the message.”

Daniel shook his head and went quiet again.

“It’s not an excuse though,” I said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I guess I forgot what this town is like, the way they talk.”

“I don’t care what they’re saying,” he said. “I just care about the truth.”

He stroked my hand, and then pulled me into the chair with him.

“Nothing happened?” he asked.

“No,” I said, resting my arms on his shoulders.

I stared deep into his green eyes again, and then ran my hands through his hair. His expression lightened.

“I wouldn’t do such a thing,” I said. “Not when I’m just a few weeks away from getting all of your money.”

That got him. He smiled, and I knew that we were okay. 

I kissed his neck, breathing him in deeply.

“I’m so glad you’re back,” I said, resting my head on his shoulder. “I’ve been losing my mind without you here.”

“What? The invincible Cinnamon Peters, losing her mind? Now that, you can’t sell me on. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“Well, planning a wedding will bring even the most invincible girl to her knees,” I said.

“Wanna get eloped?” he asked, for what seemed like the tenth time. “Leave all this behind and take off on our honeymoon early?”

“Hmm,” I said. “Tempting, Mr. Brightman. Very tempting. But I think we’re in too deep now. I’m pretty sure Warren would kill us if he didn’t get to see us wed.”