Manic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 6) (16 page)

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “Let’s just get you back home now. ‘Cuz there’s a mammoth hunk of Marionberry pie waiting, and you don’t even have to steal it when nobody’s looking. It’s got your name on it.”

“You have any vanilla ice cream to go with that?” he said.

I scoffed.

“What do you think I am? A barbarian?”

He chuckled.

“No, I think you’re my sweet, thoughtful Cinny Bee.”

He hugged me, and then we walked toward the far end of the bridge, where Aileen and Daniel were waiting.

Chapter 35

“Uh, can I, uh, can I talk to you for a moment, miss?”

I looked up from the pan of cream, eggs, and sugar that in just a few minutes, would become a pan of delicious, creamy pudding for a batch of Raspberry Vanilla Cookie pies.

The balance between sweet and sour was always something I continuously played with in my creations, and was a big reason why my pies were
my
pies. The dainty sweetness of the vanilla pudding danced with the wicked tartness of the raspberries to create a filling that was so explosive in flavor, it transcended both ingredients to become something entirely new.

But as I observed the distress written on Tobias’ face, the momentary escape I had found in the kitchen vanished, and that old familiar feeling of worry came back in full force.

It was early morning, and it was just me, Tiana, and Tobias working. Ian was set to come in later so he could help with closing this afternoon.

“Of course we can talk, Tobias,” I said, nodding for him to come in the kitchen.

I turned off the heat and placed the large saucepan of pudding on the backburner so it wouldn’t curdle.

“I, uh, I mean, can we talk private-like, miss?”

No matter how often I told him to call me Cinnamon, Tobias just went right on calling me ‘miss.’  

I noticed that he seemed to be a bit jittery this morning. Actually, when I thought about it, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen him on edge like this lately. He started acting this way on the Fourth, when he had needed to take that long break in the middle of our busiest da—.

A thought suddenly occurred to me that hadn’t before.

One that made my spirits sink.

Before Tobias had come to work for me this past December, he’d been homeless. I’d first met him when he set up shop across the street by the Christmas River Drug Store, begging for change. Tobias had suffered from PTSD on account of his time in the military, and had developed substance abuse issues. Since coming to work with me, he’d stopped drinking. But I knew that alcoholism wasn’t a one and done deal: It was a battle, and I’d heard that relapses were common.

And now, seeing him jittery and jumpy like this, I had a bad feeling.

A real bad feeling.

“We can go outside to talk if you like,” I said, dusting my hands off on my apron. “I think that should be private enough.”

His eyes shifted to Tiana, who was working on a batch of pie dough on the other side of the kitchen, then back to me.

“Okay,” he said.

I led the way outside to the back deck.

Hoping to God that I was wrong about what my gut was telling me.

Chapter 36

“It’s, uh, it’s not an easy subject to broach, miss,” he said.

He sat on the wooden bench, his weathered hands clutching his faded jeans and nervously wringing the fabric.

“I understand, Tobias,” I said, squinting at him in the bright morning sun. “Just say what’s on your mind.”

He swallowed hard. His right leg was shaking something fierce.

“Well, you know the other day, when I tol’ you I needed to take that break?”

I had seen Tobias come so far in his recovery. He’d been attending AA meetings, he had a sponsor, and he had a permanent apartment just down the street.

I hated to see all that good work he’d been doing, all that difficult soul-searching, go down the drain the way it appeared to be going.

“Well, I asked for that break then, even though I knew it’d inconvenience you, because I had some things to think about,” he said. “Some big things that have been pressing on my mind lately. And I find that sometimes, the best thing you can do when you’ve got such things pressing on your mind is to go for a walk in the woods. You understand?”

I nodded, fearing where the conversation was going.

The homeless camp where Tobias used to live was still there in the woods, on the outskirts of town. He might have seen some guys he used to know. They might have gotten to talking. They might have offered him something.

Tobias might have slipped.

His leg kept shaking.

“This is just… this is just so hard to say,” he said.

I went over and took a seat next to him on the bench.

“It’s okay, Tobias,” I said. “I’m your friend. You say anything you need to.”

“I know you are, miss,” he said. “You might just be about the best friend I ever had. I was out there on the street and nobody in this town cared. Nobody ‘cept you, miss.”

I smiled warmly.

“Then knowing that, Tobias, tell me what’s troubling you.”

Tobias was a good man. But even good men slipped up every once and a while.

“Well, I go out in the woods, on Yurt’s Trail. You know that one?”

I nodded – the trail cut right through town and followed the Christmas River for a ways.

“Well, I’m on the trail, thinking my thoughts, and I see something in the distance,” he said. “And I stop before I happen upon it, because I got this feeling that it’s something I shouldn’t be seeing.”

Tobias sure had a roundabout way of saying things.

“What was it?” I asked.

“Well, I see this young man up ahead. And he’s talking to this other man. And their words are pretty terse, miss. So terse, I wouldn’t venture to repeat the things being said on account of a lady being in my presence.”

I smiled at the idea of being called a lady.

But it still wasn’t clear to me what he was talking about.

“Well, what was the gist of the conversation?”

“The young fella was telling the older one that he wasn’t going to hurt anybody anymore,” he said. “He was saying to the older one that he could take his money and stuff it… well… where the sun don’t shine. And then the older one, he was plumb mad.
Plumb mad
by that. He started threatening the younger man that if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, then… then something bad would happen. Something
real
bad.”  

Tobias fell silent for a spell.

I studied him a while, trying to understand why he thought he had to tell all this to me.

Not that I didn’t enjoy hearing Tobias talk, but this retelling didn’t shed much light on anything, and didn’t account for why he seemed to be so jittery and on edge.

I cleared my throat, noticing that Tiana was standing close to the window inside. It was an old trick I’d played many a time myself: she was trying to eavesdrop. No doubt worried about the way Tobias was acting.  

“Well, that’s a mighty odd conversation you stumbled onto,” I finally said. “I wonder what it was all about.”

Tobias ran a hand nervously through his hair.

“See, I was wondering that myself, miss,” he said. “And at the time, I couldn’t figure it out.”

“But you can now?” I said.

“Uh, no miss. No. The situation’s only become more bewildering.”

His leg started shaking harder.

“How’s that, Tobias?”

“Well,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning in closer to me. “Ya see, the older fella?”

“Yeah.”

“That was the fella that got himself murdered the other night at your grandfather’s brewery. That tall elf guy.”

My mouth fell open slightly. I started saying something, but then stopped, trying to find the right words.

I searched Tobias’s face.

He looked as though he felt bad. As if he was being forced to tattle to the teacher about a fellow classmate.

“You’re… you’re saying you saw Rip Lawrence arguing with somebody in the woods the day he was killed?”

He nodded vigorously.

Could this be the break we were looking for? The one that would put Warren in the clear?

Tobias took a deep breath in.

“And that young fella he was having the dispute with?”

“You know him too?” I said, my heart beating hard in my chest.

He nodded, looking away.  

“Well, that was the Scottish fella. The one you’ve got working here, right in your pie shop, miss.”

I nearly gasped.

Chapter 37

I grabbed my purse and keys from the coat rack in the kitchen, then peeked my head through to the empty dining room.

Just as they had done since that magazine article came out, folks were milling around outside on the sidewalk, waiting like hungry zombies for our doors to open.

Which was supposed to happen in T-minus 10 minutes.

But I had bigger things to worry about at the moment than how many people would storm through those doors once the hands of the clock reached 8.

Like how Ian even knew Rip Lawrence in the first place.

And why he’d been talking to him in the woods the day he was murdered.

And what they’d been arguing about.

I felt a tightening in my stomach, like somebody was squeezing hard on my insides.

The conversation we’d had the day before on the footbridge echoed in my head.

Ian had wanted to know if I believed in forgiveness.

If I believed in whether a person should be forgiven if they sincerely asked for it. Even if what they did was really bad.

I had thought he was talking about that girl back in Scotland.

But now I was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t talking about something else.

Ian didn’t seem like a violent person to me. But then there was that other thing he’d dropped, the thing about him beating up the owner of the bakery he worked at back in Scotland.

That wasn’t something a normal 19-year-old kid did.

And though I couldn’t fathom why Ian would want to hurt Rip Lawrence, I also couldn’t fathom how he’d come to know him in the first place.

But there was one thing I knew.

I needed to find out.

I decided leaving through the back door would be the sensible move given the crowd amassing out front.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” I said, breezing past Tiana and Tobias, opening the kitchen door.

To my utter shock, I came centimeters away from running smack dab into Meredith Drutman.

Chapter 38

She was the last person in the world I expected to see in my pie shop.

The last person in the world I
wanted
to see in my pie shop, at that.

Meredith Drutman wore a sleeveless Jackie-O dress and high, narrow heels – a look that fit with the dozens of relator signs around town featuring her smug and haughty face. As usual, her makeup was heavy, settling into her wrinkles and giving her an all-around ghoulish look. Her lips were stained a shade of Bing cherry red that looked all wrong in the July heat, and on her cheeks sat a layer of blush that Marie Antoinette would have been proud of.

But there was something new about Meredith Drutman now as she sat here in my pie shop kitchen, not drinking coffee from the mug I had graciously placed in front of her.

There was an expression, a look on her face that seemed entirely foreign. Like a frown on the Cheshire Cat, the look of regret Meredith Drutman had just seemed all wrong.

I leaned back in my chair, trying not to explode with anger while I waited for her to say something. But it seemed as though she was about to choke on the words stuck in her throat. She looked around the pie shop kitchen awkwardly, as if she’d never seen saucepans or cookbooks or ovens before.

I didn’t say anything, enjoying seeing her sweat.

She did deserve my coldness and hatred, didn’t she? Hadn’t her daughter called me names and threatened me just the other day? Hadn’t Meredith tried to sabotage my business last Christmas by having all her friends post those nasty reviews on Yelp and Google about my pie shop? Hadn’t her husband totaled Daniel’s truck and nearly killed me in the process? Wasn’t the bastard now suing the Sheriff’s Office?

If she was looking for someone to make things easier on her, she was looking in the wrong direction.

I crossed my arms and gazed at the aging beauty queen with a cold and unfeeling stare.

She looked like a deer in the headlights under my hard gaze, and a vindictive part of me felt pleased.

Very pleased.

She finally let out a beleaguered sigh.

“Look,” she said. “I’m not going to sit here and pretend that we’re on good terms, Cinnamon.”

“Neither am I,” I snapped.

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, looking around the kitchen some more.

“I don’t even know how or why we got off on the wrong foot in the first place,” she continued. “I guess sometimes two people just don’t get along.”

“I can tell you
exactly
how we got off on the wrong foot, Meredith,” I said. “I can take you through every incident, from you disrespecting me and my pie shop, to insulting Tobias, to calling an innocent 11-year-old boy white trash. And that’s not even going into this most recent business.”

She looked away sharply, as if me bringing up all her nasty behavior from the last few months injured her somehow.

She bit her lower lip.

“I’m not proud, Cinnamon,” she said. “I know I have a lot of work to do on myself. I know that I’m not always…”

She trailed off and I was surprised to see a solitary tear slide down her powdered cheek.

“I’ve made
mistakes
. And I know I come off as abrasive and rude sometimes, but it’s only because things haven’t been easy for me in my life. You know, not too many people know this, but my father left my family when I was just 8 years old. And I know it sounds like a BS excuse, and it most certainly doesn’t pardon my actions, but that’s had a big impact on me. I never felt loved or wanted. It’s led me to do a lot of things, to say a lot of things that I…”