Holly and Homicide (9 page)

Steve gave my hand a squeeze at Audrey’s last remark, and I laced my fingers between his. “Had both of them eaten dinner here, do you know?” I asked.

Audrey shook her head. “Mikara was putting away dishes when I arrived. She asked Henry if he’d eaten, and he said something like: ‘I’m fine.’” She sighed again. “Wendell called my cell a couple of hours ago. He’d heard about Angie through the grapevine and told me he’d been home alone all evening. I haven’t seen or heard a thing about anyone else connected with the inn—Ben Orlin or Chiffon Walters.”

The next morning when Steve and I came downstairs
, Henry was setting his cereal bowl in the sink and not in the dishwasher—the typical male morning ritual. I still felt run ragged by last night’s events, and my head was pounding from lack of sleep. We greeted him, and Steve poured us both coffee.

“Mikara still hasn’t emerged from her bedroom,” Henry told us. “Last night she said she was taking a sleeping pill and knocking herself out for the next twenty-four hours. Or for as long as she could manage.” He stared straight into my eyes as he spoke. “I’ve never seen her so upset. Both her parents have passed away. I’m not sure she
can take losing her sister. It’s been nearly twelve hours. I’m worried.”

“Do you want me to check on her?” I asked.

“Could you?” Henry replied. “I’d do it myself, but … the thing is, we have a history. She might resent my knocking on her bedroom door, let alone entering, if she’s unable to answer. Something like eight or nine years ago, we got engaged. And I broke it off. Word around town was she took it pretty hard. Obviously, she got over it a long time ago, but still, it’s best if I keep my distance now. I don’t want to dredge up old feelings in either of us. I’m just …not the marrying type. You know?”

Now he looked solely at Steve, which, frankly, I resented. Steve didn’t move a muscle, except to shift his vision to me. I think he felt trapped by Henry’s question. I deserted my steaming cup on the counter and left to check on Mikara. The swinging doors into the kitchen weren’t soundproof, and I heard Steve mutter something to Henry, who responded, “No kidding.” That froze me in my tracks for a moment, as my mind raced to figure out what Steve might have said. Unfortunately, Henry’s voice had been so flat that it was impossible to tell if he’d meant:
No kidding?! You’re proposing to Erin tomorrow?!
Or:
No kidding; we truly are better off as bachelors for all eternity
.

I hesitated at Mikara’s door, listening for snores or footfalls. Even so, my thoughts wandered. My Christmas present to Steve would be vastly different if only I knew for sure what he’d said just now; if he felt as strongly about me as I did about him, I’d like to upgrade his skis, or maybe
get him the ‘his’ half of his-and-her mountain bikes. But if he’d denigrated marriage the very moment I wasn’t there to overhear him, a half dozen cereal bowls and a Scrubby would suffice.

Mikara’s room was completely silent, and things snapped into perspective for me. Here I was at the door of a woman whose sibling had been brutally murdered, and all I could think about was whether or not my boyfriend intended to propose. How self-centered could I get?! From now on, I was putting all such thoughts out of my head.

I knocked softly.

No answer.

“Mikara?”

I rapped loudly on the door. Still no answer.

Uneasy now, I opened the door and entered slowly. Her bed was neatly made and empty. “Mikara?” I turned. She was standing in front of the window, staring outside.

“I can see some of the path to the bridge from here,” she said. “If I’d been here last night, watching out this window, I might have seen him. Or her. Angie’s killer might be behind bars right now. Or I would have realized Angie was out there and gone to check on her. Maybe I could have prevented it.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mikara. It’s all so terrible.”

She started crying. “I had to leave her there. In the snow. A batch of strangers poking and prodding for evidence. My only sister!”

I rubbed her back a little. She should be with a friend now, not me.

“Why did she have to come here last night?” she asked me.

“She must have been coming to visit you again, right?”

“I guess so.” Mikara dried her tears. “Sheriff Mackey told me they found her car on a street, at the other side of the open space. Which makes no sense. Why would she walk all that way in the dark? Why not park near the house?”

“Could she have been out on a late-afternoon hike, maybe?”

“That’s possible, I guess. There’s a space between fence posts wide enough to walk between. And the path’s only a couple of miles long, round-trip. Henry walks that way every day and has it all tamped down. She might’ve been inspecting a construction site in the cul-de-sac at the end of the day, decided to drop by to see me, and that’s when she was ambushed.”

“Was she familiar with the path?”

“Yeah. We call it—” She broke off and her face fell. “We used to call it ‘Henry’s hike.’ Since it starts on his private property. When Henry and I were … friends, years ago, we used to walk there. Angie and her ex-husband were here with us a lot back then.”

“Angie was married?”

“Yeah, but she’d been divorced for several years now. Alex, her ex, left Colorado after they divorced. That was my first thought when I heard she was dead—that maybe he did it. I even told Greg … Sheriff Mackey I thought so. But, when I thought about it some more, it’s really unlikely. Somebody would have seen him and told me if he’d come to town. Our local government sucks, we get
blackouts all the time, can’t always count on running water. But something like Angie Woolf’s ex-husband sneaking back into town?
That
would spread to every corner of the town within ninety minutes, tops.”

She rubbed at her forehead and slumped onto her bed. “How can this be happening? Angie. Murdered. She’s the only family I had left in the entire world.”

“Mikara, I’m so sorry. That’s all I can think to say, and I know you’ll hear it dozens of times in the next few days.”

She sighed and nodded. She wiped a tear from her cheek.

“Can I fix you some breakfast?” I asked. “I could make you a tray if you’re not up to having company in the kitchen.”

“That’s really thoughtful of you, Erin. That’d be great, actually. I’d just like a cup of coffee, black, and a cereal bar. I brought a couple of boxes over yesterday. They’re in the pantry, by the door.”

“Be right back.”

I closed the door behind me and returned to the kitchen. Henry was pacing by the stove and promptly asked, “How’s she doing?”

“She’s awake. Depressed, of course. Maybe still in shock. I’m bringing her some coffee and a cereal bar. She’s not really up to facing people yet.”

“Of course. I’m going to tell her to just come and go here as she pleases, for as long as she likes. I figure she might feel better here than at the apartment she shared with her sister.”

I poured the coffee as he got out one of Mikara’s cereal bars and handed it to me. “Tell her I asked about her. I
just …feel so guilty. Maybe none of this would have happened if I hadn’t hired her.”

“You can’t know that. Angie’s death might have had nothing whatsoever to do with Mikara, or with the inn.”

“Yeah. Or it might have had
everything
to do with it.”

S
heriff Mackey returned to the inn that afternoon, holding court in the dining room and interviewing everyone separately. He spoke first with Chiffon, who’d been sitting at the kitchen table when I returned from bringing Mikara her coffee and breakfast bar. Mackey then interviewed Audrey, Henry, Mikara, and Ben.

Annoyingly, Mackey had asked all of us to stay close as we awaited our turns. I settled into the wonderful wingback chair in the minilibrary on the second-floor landing. I was searching for leaping-lord figurines on my laptop
when Ben came up the stairs. Because there was no door, he rapped on the wall. His beard, I noticed, was starting to get heavy; he was still a couple of days from shaving. Tomorrow, I remembered incongruously, was Friday, when the filter was supposed to arrive.

“Sheriff Mackey wants to talk to you now,” Ben said wearily.

“Okay. Thanks. He sure kept you in there for quite a while, considering you’d already left for the day before anything happened.”

Ben hung his head. “Not according to the time of death. Or the footprints in the snow. Although I’m not supposed to repeat anything Mackey said.”

“So those boots he took from the mudroom were yours?”

He hesitated. “I have a feeling I’d better talk to a lawyer.” He looked at me with vacant eyes. “I’m going to head home for the day. I’m not good for much right now anyway.”

He turned and trudged down the stairs without meeting my eyes. I followed him downstairs, but he clearly didn’t want to talk.

Mackey was standing at the head of the table when I slid open the pocket door to the dining room. “Close the door behind you,” he said.

I did so, and then took a perversely childish pleasure in seating myself at the opposite end of the long table. Mackey hesitated, annoyed, but then picked up his notepad and headed closer. He dropped his pad in front of a chair near mine but continued to stand. “I’ve done some checking around.” He hitched up his pants and
rocked on his feet. It looked like a move I’d seen the lawmen make in B-grade Westerns on TV. “I can’t help but wonder why death seems to follow you around.”

“I don’t know the answer to that question.”

“You seem to have created a nice little alibi for yourself and your old beau …Wendell’s hatchet man.”

“Cameron Baker and I had dinner together, like I told your deputy. We were getting caught up on old times, not deliberately establishing an alibi.”

“Good thing for you,” Mackey said with a snort, still choosing to loom over me. “’Cuz the alibi thing’s coming up short. See, the coroner can only put the death within a three-hour time span ahead of when Angie’s body was discovered. You’d’ve had plenty of time to kill her before you went out on the town with Mr. Baker.”

“Oh, my god! You can’t possibly suspect me! I had no motive whatsoever to kill Angie Woolf! I barely knew her! Besides, I was hanging the lights on the house! Passersby would have seen me up there. All you have to do is check with the neighbors, and they’ll confirm my whereabouts!”

He pulled out the seat beside mine, angling it to face me, and then sat down, eyeing me the whole time as if this proximity might cause me to crumble. “’Fraid that’s not what I’m hearing through the local grapevine, Miss Gilbert.”

“Then you’re getting garbled information from somebody!” I took a couple of calming breaths. It was terrifying to have an officer of the law suggest that I was a murderer. “I only met Angie twice. Once when she came out here to inspect the gazebo, and a—”

“That’s when she told you the place wasn’t up to snuff, setting your design schedule back considerably.”

“Which is something that happens all the time in my line of work, and which, frankly, often leads to an increase in my earnings. The second time we met was when I interrupted her and Mikara arguing in the shed. Yesterday morning. We were all a little embarrassed, and she left quickly.”

“Yeah. Mikara already told me about that.”

“So you
also
already know that Angie and I are all but strangers!”

“Nobody’s disputing how well
you
knew the victim.”

I was baffled by the remark and looked at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He started jotting notes in his pad, and when he finished, he sneered at me.

Even though I was certain he was trying to intimidate me, it worked. I was scared. Could the townies here hate us so much that one of them was now framing me?

“I’m not following you, Sheriff Mackey. What exactly is somebody ‘disputing’? Every word I just said is the complete truth!”

Mackey rose. “You and your partner might want to get your story straight.” He collected his cap from the far side of the table and centered it on his head. “Be seein’ you, Miss Gilbert. You’d better not plan on leaving Snowcap Village without checking with me first.”

He let himself out through the kitchen door, walking with a studied saunter. The moment I was sure Mackey had left the house, I snatched up my cell phone and called Steve. Barely giving him time to answer, I said,
“Sheriff Mackey just left. He implied that I had a motive to kill Angie Woolf. And that
you
would know what it is.”

There was a pause. “Pardon?”

“Had you been talking with Angie Woolf, or something, the day she was killed?”

“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you? I forgot to get myself coffee for the trip to Crestview, so I went into town to grab a cup. I ran into Angie in the coffee shop. I figured it was in our best interest to chat her up, so I paid for her latte, and we shared a table for a few minutes.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing much. Just small talk …ski conditions and what the mountain was like before the resort opened. Our plans for the holidays. That kind of thing. How could something that trivial possibly be of interest to Sheriff Mackey?”

“Apparently he thinks I could have killed Angie in a jealous rage.” I felt queasy at the thought of being a murder suspect—in a town that hated outsiders.

“That’s ridiculous! It was a five-minute conversation over coffee, for God’s sake!”

“Well, that was apparently all that it took to get that damned Sheriff Mackey to focus on me, instead of on whatever clues there might be that point to the actual killer.”

“Jeez. I’m sorry, Erin. I had no idea …”

“It’s not your fault.” Suddenly exhausted, I dropped into the nearest chair. “Obviously the sheriff’s an idiot. It’s just that
he’s
heading up the murder investigation,
and
he’s got a big chip on his shoulder regarding outsiders. As does half the population of Snowcap Village. So who
knows if he’ll be able to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant?” Audrey came into the dining room, no doubt to check on me. “Are you heading back soon?” I said into the phone. He’d gone to an antique store in Denver to select some miscellaneous items for the bedrooms.