3 Madness in Christmas River (18 page)

Sometimes late at night, right after the divorce, I thought back to that weekend in the woods. Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t gone. If I’d been sick, or if I had gone with Kara to Portland for the weekend like I was supposed to, or if I just decided I wasn’t ready for a trip like that.

Sometimes I wondered whether or not the relationship would have just fizzled out.

I hadn’t recognized the old structure earlier that morning. At least not right away. I had never seen it in the winter, covered in snow.  

It made sense that that was where Evan was living now. His old cabin, the place he spent summers growing up.

But what still didn’t make sense, even after I saw it with my own eyes, even after I thought all morning about it, was what he was doing with a pink ornament stashed beneath the snow in his backyard.

And why that ornament was filled with thousands of dollars-worth of diamond jewelry.

The sound of sirens suddenly erupted from somewhere down Main Street, the ear-shattering noise jarring me from my thoughts.

I put down my cup of coffee and went to the window at the front of the house.

Chapter 50

I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing what was coming next.

I didn’t want to face it.

Daniel’s hand gripped mine firmly. He didn’t say a word, knowing that there wasn’t a thing he could say at this moment that would help.

The only thing left to do was to look, to face it.

To deal with it.

I took a deep breath, opening my eyes.  

Pain ripped at my heart, like the sharp claws of the wolf in my nightmares.

I reached out, my hands running over the soft, cascading satin. Over the rhinestone-studded bodice. Over the lace train.  

All cut to pieces.

All ripped to shreds.

A lump the size of Texas nestled at the back of my throat.  

All this time, I had thought the dress was so over-the-top, so extravagant, so needlessly decadent. So not
me
.

But now that it lay there, in shreds, ripped and ruined, I felt nothing but devastation.

I had loved the dress. More than I actually let myself believe.

It had represented something. A person that I had actually believed I could be. Someone sophisticated and beautiful and chic.

But now, all of that was gone.  

I was never going to be that person. Not on my wedding day. Not on any day.

The dream was ruined.

And as I looked at the destruction lying on the floor of Bethany’s dress shop, I realized that other brides’ dreams had been ruined as well as mine.  

A chilly blast of cold air shot through the broken front window of the shop.

Somebody had broken in and done this, in the darkness of early morning. Someone with no heart, no soul, and no concept of the pain his actions would cause.  

“I’m so sorry, Cin,” Daniel said, squeezing my hand.

I squeezed his hand back.

“They’re going to pay for this,” he said. “That’s a promise to you. They’re not getting away with it. And that’s not me talking to you as Sheriff. That’s me talking to you as your husband. All of this is going to stop. You have my word.”

I wiped my nose with a Kleenex that Deputy Billy Jasper handed to me.

“Do you think it’s the same person doing all of this?” I asked.

“It’s not all a coincidence,” he said. “Somebody’s trying to say something.”

He pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket, and held its contents up for me to see.

I quickly realized what it was.

“Another one?” I asked.

He nodded, placing the faded photo of Anthony Matthews away in his pocket.  

“They left it on the front door after breaking the window,” he said.

“What in the hell is going on?” I asked.

“I’m going to find out,” he said. “You can put money on that.”

I looked back at the wedding dress draped over the chaise lounge chair. Shredded and frayed, and now no better than a pile of dish rags.

Two and a half weeks.

My wedding was in two and a half weeks.

And I would have nothing to wear to it.

Chapter 51

I ripped open the bag of cranberries, and emptied them into a sauce pan on the stove. A few lost their way and bounced out onto the kitchen floor. I let out a frustrated sigh, picked up the fallen soldiers, and angrily threw them into the garbage can.

I went back to the stove, turned up the heat and waited for the cranberries to start popping. 

I had picked the most time-consuming pie on my menu to make with the hopes that between rolling out the dough, making the cranberry filling, and making the lime white chocolate key lime custard, I would forget all about my ruined wedding dress.

But, as I realized, that was just wishful thinking.

There wasn’t any forgetting.

I added sugar, cinnamon, cloves and a hint of ginger to the sauce pan, and stirred it. I brought the custard ingredients out from the fridge, and tried to drown my anger in a sweet and sour mess of lime, cranberry and white chocolate.

I soon found that my face was moist, a few angry tears running down my cheeks.

I felt myself starting to slip into self-pity.

I stirred the cranberry mixture rapidly, turning all of my anger inwards.

This was always my reaction. Anytime anything bad happened to me, I just folded up on myself and crumpled like ash. When my dad left, when my mom died, when I found out Evan was cheating on me.

When my wedding dress was ripped apart.

I’d just break, snapping inward, hurting myself even more. I’d overeat, overdrink, stay up late at night wondering what was wrong with me and why these things happened to me, and why I had such a difficult time dealing with them. Why I was always the victim.

Then I’d stuff the hurt and pain away, deep inside, until something else bad happened, and everything would be dragged back to the surface again.

That was the way it always happened, that was my pattern.

And I was suddenly very sick of my pattern.

I couldn’t do it anymore.

Not when there were things I could do to help the situation.

I turned the burners off and got a roll of aluminum foil from the pantry. I covered all the pie filling ingredients with the foil, and threw the bowls into the fridge.  

I brushed away the tears and grabbed my jacket off the coat stand, sliding my arms into it and zipping it up.

There was more I could do than cry and bake pie.

Chapter 52

I looked up at the battered and bruised Christmas tree, leaning in the middle of the plaza.

It was a sad sight to see.

City workers had hoisted it back to its rightful place and had tried to cover up the scars of what had happened with more ornaments, tinsel and colorful strands of lights. But it was hard to disguise the tree’s broken branches and damaged sections.

The tree just wasn’t ever going to be the same. Not after what had been done to it.

I leaned against the railing, letting out a long, nervous sigh that came out in the form of a small puff of fog. I dug my gloved hands into the pockets of my down jacket, trying to get some feeling back in them.

It was mid-afternoon, but the sun was already sitting low in the sky. Long, wintry shadows spread out over the snowy plaza as the temperature started dipping into the mid-teens.

I had been out here 15 minutes already, and was beginning to have serious doubts about whether or not he was going to show.

But just as I was about to give up, I saw a figure walking briskly across Main Street toward me.

I knew that arrogant gait all too well.

I sucked in cold air as I watched him, and then let it out slowly.

Seeing him still made my skin crawl. But I would have to keep that feeling down as long as possible, because giving it a voice wasn’t going to help with anything.

He approached me, smiling.  

“I knew you’d come to your senses,” he said.

He leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

I wanted to vomit.

“Uh, thanks for meeting me,” I forced out.

“No problemo,” Evan said. “But is everything all right? You’re looking a little under the weather.”

“It’s just the cold,” I said. 

“You look like you’ve been crying. Is everything okay between you and the sheriff?”

He faked a concerned expression, like he really cared.

I swallowed back bile.

“Listen, I wanted to talk to you about something,” I said.

“I figured that much from your phone call,” he said. “Want to walk? It’s colder than a witch’s—”

He stopped himself before finishing the sentence.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to be better.”

We started walking.

“So, Cin, have you had some time to think on what we talked about?” he asked.

I glanced back behind us, seeing if anybody else was around.

I took a deep breath.

“To tell you the truth, there’s something else that’s been on my mind,” I said.

“Oh?” he asked, raising his eyebrows in surprise.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about that weekend. You know the one.”

Something in his face changed. A smug look of triumph spread across it, and he broke out into a smile.

“Here you are about to be a married to good old Sheriff Brightman, and you’re thinking of  the time you spent with another man,” he said. “I think most of the folks in this town would consider that scandalous.”

I bit my lip from saying something unpleasant.

We walked a little further until we made it to the footbridge. The bridge that I used to come to sometimes to think about things. Mostly about what Evan was getting from my friend that he hadn’t been getting from me. About why he would have done something to hurt me so bad.

It had been a while since I’d been on the bridge.

I stopped at the middle, looking down at the slower-than-molasses trickle of the Christmas River. Most of it had frozen into a sheet of ice.

“There’s no need to go all quiet, Cin,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you too.”

He leaned in close, and I could feel his hot breath on the back of my bare neck. I shivered.

“You know, I wish sometimes that I could go back and change where we went wrong,” he said. “I wish you’d believe that I’ve changed. That I’ve really changed.”

“Have you?”

He sighed.

“I’m sorry, Cin. How many times do I have to say it before you believe that I mean it?”

I didn’t know the answer to that.

I didn’t think that he would ever be able to say it enough for me to believe him.

“Now there’s been something I’ve been dying to ask you,” he said. “Are you really going to marry him? Because if you’re not sure about it, if there’s even so much as a sliver of doubt in your mind, then we could—”

“We could
what
?” I said.

He shrugged.

“We could give it another shot.”

Unbelievable.

Absolutely unbelievable.

I tried to keep the disgusted expression off my face and focus on why I was there.

“You know,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “I can’t stop thinking about that weekend at the cabin.”

“Yeah?” he said, putting a hand on the small of my back.

“Yeah,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I was trying to remember whether or not you had a stash of diamonds buried in the backyard when we were dating then. For the life of me, I can’t remember.”

His hand dropped from my back, and that smug, self-satisfied expression fell off of his face quicker than a lump of coal could fall down a chimney stack.

Chapter 53

“You need to lower your voice, Cinnamon,” he said sternly, looking around. “You don’t understand the first thing about what’s going on,” he said

I could tell that he was worried.

“I know that it’s you,” I said. “I’m good at seeing through all your lies now. I’ve had plenty of practice over the years.”

He dug his hands into his pockets, and started backing away from me.

“I should have known better,” he said. “I should have known you were a cold, unforgiving bitch.”

“Where’s Marie?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just smirked.

“Come to think of it, you don’t know the first thing about your cousin either,” he said.

My heart raced.

“Tell me why you’ve done all of this,” I said.  

“You sure this is the way you want to play it?” he said. “You could have shared it all with me. Now you’ll just always be a sad pie baker in a sad, small town.”

“It’s better than anything you could offer,” I said.

“Bad play, Cin,” he said. “Bad play. Well, have a nice downsized life, hon. I’ll be living my days out like a king down in Mexico. Maybe if I’m feeling generous, I’ll send you a postcard from time to time.”

He gave me one last smug look that said it all, and turned around, walking quickly down the bridge.

I shook my head in disgust and leaned forward looking down at the sheet of ice below.

I didn’t have to watch him leave to know that he wasn’t going to get very far.

The bridge quivered as he jumped back.

The way was suddenly blocked. And he wasn’t going to be making it to Mexico anytime soon.

A moment later, I saw Owen taking Evan by the scruff of his jacket, and pulling him toward his patrol car.

“Hey, I’ve got my rights!” Evan shouted as he was pushed into the backseat.

He closed the door on my past.

I caught Owen’s eye, and he nodded at me.

I smiled back gratefully.

Chapter 54

I felt an overwhelming sense of relief as I walked away from the bridge back to the pie shop.

The sun had just slipped beneath the horizon, its dying rays causing the sky to turn a soft shade of grapefruit pink.

It looked like hope to me.

It seemed that over the last week, all hell had broken loose. Marie had gone missing, I had been victimized, and Huckleberry had been hurt.