Menace in Christmas River (Christmas River 8) (13 page)

I knew he was right.

But the thought of Daniel going out into the storm, with such treacherous road conditions, and with just a first year med student to help him, didn’t sit well with me.

“Daniel, I—”

“Look,” he said in a hushed voice. “It’s more important than you know that you stay here.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“What do you mean—”

“I can’t be sure – it’s just a gut feeling. But Cin… Cin, I don’t think Cliff Copperstone slipped on the ice out here and hit his head,” he said. “That wound of his looks like something more to me. You understand what I’m saying?”

I furrowed my brow, pausing for a quick moment.

“No, I—”

“I think somebody did this to him, Cin. Somebody hit him with something and left him here to die. I can’t be sure, but something about all this just doesn’t seem like an accident to me.”

I felt myself inhale sharply, sucking in frigid air.

He gazed deep into my eyes.

“I
need
you to keep an eye on things,” he said. “But don’t do anything rash, all right? Just… observe. Can you do that for me?”

The words froze in my throat.

I finally looked up into Daniel’s eyes, and nodded.

He squeezed my shoulder.

“After I get Cliff to the hospital, I’ll come back for you, Cin. And we’re all gonna get out of this just fine,” he said. “Okay? Just fine.”

A hurricane-strength gust howled into us.

“Promise me,” I said.

He placed a hand to my face.

“I promise.”

I hugged him hard, wanting to believe that promise more than anything.

Chapter 27

“You know that Daniel’s an expert winter driver, Cin,” Kara said, putting an arm around my shoulder. “He’s going to make it to the hospital just fine. You’ll see.”

I watched from the hallway window as the truck’s high beams disappeared into the white wall of snow, and I closed my eyes and internally said a prayer as they did. Praying that it wasn’t too late for Cliff. That he and Daniel and the young med student would all be safe. That what Daniel had said earlier to me would be true – that by tomorrow morning, we all would hardly remember any of this.

Kara squeezed my shoulder reassuringly, and we just stood there at the window for a long moment, staring into nothing.

Then, when I decided that the high beams had truly disappeared into the white expanse, I finally pulled out the photo that Cliff had slipped into my hand just after we’d gotten him into Daniel’s truck.

I gazed down at the weathered, wrinkled picture in the winter twilight, feeling the bumpy paper between my fingers.

I knew the photo – I’d seen it before. It was the same one that Cliff had kept in his wallet. The one that had come tumbling out onto the floor of the resort hallway last night.

The one of the blond woman standing on the bridge, smiling.

“What’s that?” Kara said, looking down at the picture in my hands.

“It’s something Cliff gave me before they left just now,” I said.

She furrowed her brow in confusion.

I looked back down at the paper.

I didn’t know whether it was because this was the second time I was looking at it, or if there was something more to it. But the woman in the photograph suddenly looked familiar to me. Very, very familiar.

“Do you think he wanted you to find this woman? You know, in case he…”

She trailed off, and we both knew how that sentence finished.

I bit my lip.

I hadn’t told Kara that Cliff’s injuries might not have been accidental.

And as I gazed at the photograph of the blonde, and remembered what Cliff was mumbling when he first came to, I wasn’t sure if keeping that secret to myself was the right move.

The person who had hurt Cliff was, most likely, still somewhere in the building.

And if Cliff died today, then it wouldn’t be just assault.

It would be murder.

And someone was going to have to take responsibility for that.

“Cin?”

I glanced over again at Kara. The look on her face told me it wasn’t the first time she’d said my name.

“Yeah?”

“Cin, there’s something—”

“Did they take him away already?” a frantic voice suddenly rang out from behind me. “Oh, lord, is he… is he going to be okay?”

I pocketed the picture and turned around to see Julie Van Dorn standing there.

Strangely enough, she had been MIA these past few critical minutes, missing out on Cliff’s entire ordeal.

Though I supposed that news traveled fast in a space this small.

I couldn’t help but notice that Julie’s makeup was slightly smeared, and that there were black bags under her eyes.

Julie Van Dorn was as frazzled as I’d ever seen her – and with good reason.

In the matter of a half-hour, the Chocolate Championship Showdown had turned into a full-scale catastrophe for the PR woman. Stranded by a storm and with the most high-profile of the competition judges critically injured, Julie was going to be taking a lot of heat for the Chocolate Championship committee’s decision to continue on with the event despite the weather reports.

“They won’t know anything for sure until they get Cliff to the hospital,” I said.

“How was he?” she said. “Did… did he say anything?”

Her eyes desperately probed mine for an answer, and I realized that there was real concern in them.

Though I couldn’t tell if that concern was because a man was badly injured, or because of what it could mean for her career if a celebrity chef died at an event she had been in charge of.  

“He didn’t say anything that made sense,” I said.

She chewed on her upper lip.

“How’s Holly holding up?” I asked.

The last I had seen of Julie’s assistant, she still had that deer-in-the-headlights look about her and was sitting on a bench in the hallway, completely mute.

“She’s pretty shaken,” Julie said. “But she’s just going to have to realize that it’s not all about her. I mean, Cliff’s the one who…”

Julie trailed off.

She looked a bit shaken herself, which is why I tried not to judge her insensitivity toward her assistant too harshly.

“What a disaster,” she finally said. “Just… what a complete and total disaster.”

She rummaged around her purse for a long moment, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She popped one of the sticks in her mouth and lit it.

I was about to tell her that smoking was prohibited in the building, but stopped myself before saying anything. It was, after all, a highly stressful thing that had just happened. And it wasn’t as if she could go outside easily and smoke there.

After a long moment, she shook her head.

“This is all the city police department’s fault, you know,” she mumbled. “It was their call whether to carry on with the Chocolate Championship. They should have known what a danger it was to let us continue with the event. The Sheriff’s Office should have stepped in, too. Daniel knows what a fool Captain Ulrich is.”

I felt my jaw come unhinged slightly as she said it.

“It’s their job to protect people, isn’t it?” she continued. “What good is law enforcement if they don’t look out for the people they claim to protect?”

It was obvious that Julie was doing what PR professionals did best – she was spinning things. And in this case, she was spinning things to draw attention away from herself and the committee.

I wasn’t one to point fingers. But I particularly hated when people who were responsible for something didn’t own up to it and tried to pass the blame onto somebody else. Because though Julie was technically right about it being the city police department’s call, I was sure that she’d applied a good deal of pressure to them to let the event continue.

I bit my lip, trying to keep myself from starting down a path I might regret.

But my teeth just weren’t strong enough.

“I’d say there’s probably more than enough blame to go around, Julie—”

But just as I was about to launch into a tirade, there was a loud noise and the lights above us flickered.

A moment later, the fluorescents came on full force.

There was a giant rushing sound of relief that made its way through the crowd in the hallway, followed by nervous talking, and a few chuckles.

At least if we were going to be stranded here, we’d have electricity and heat going for us.

When I looked back at Julie, seeing her clearly in the glow of the overhead lights, she had her arms crossed defensively, and her face was scrunched up into a look of disdain.

“What was that you were saying, Cinnamon?” she said.

She said it with a measure of intimidation. As if she was offering me a chance to back down from what I was saying.

But I wasn’t the type to back down like that. Not when she had practically accused Daniel of being irresponsible to my face.

“I was saying that it’s not only the city police department’s fault that we’re here,” I said. “And it’s not the Sheriff’s Department’s fault, either, Julie.”

“Oh, so I take it you’re implying it’s somehow
my
fault, too?” she said, lifting her eyebrows.

“I’m saying that you and the event committee saw the weather reports, same as everybody else. And I’m also saying that you could have called off the event too, but you chose not to. So before you start trying to level blame at everybody else, you ought to remember that your hands aren’t clean either.”

She took a drag from her cigarette, then let out a smoky scoff before stepping closer to me.  

“Look, honeybuns. I know you’re only trying to save your husband’s reputation, so I’ll try not to hold it against you,” she said. “But if you’re a smart woman, you better not whisper a word of what you just said to anybody else. Because I’ve got a little dirt on you I’d be happy to make public if you’re looking to get into a sparring match.”

I felt my head snap back in surprise.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I growled. “What dirt?”  

“I know where you were last night, oh, around 10:40 or so, Cinnamon,” she said. “And that’s something
I’m sure
the rest of the town would be
very
interested in hearing about, too.”

Her eyes narrowed like a snake’s, and I finally caught a glimpse of what I had somehow always known existed beneath the fake smile and plastic façade.

The wench.

She was referring to me dropping Cliff off at the resort the night before.

And in addition, she was implying that there was more to what happened last night than that.

I felt my fists curl up at my sides as I met her nasty stare.

“You can say whatever you want about me,” I finally said. “It won’t make any of it tru—”

“You better just back the hell off, Julie,” Kara said before I could finish. “You don’t talk to my friend like that. And if you want to go down that road, then maybe we should talk about the
real
reason you left the Pohly County PR department – that you left because you were too embarrassed to keep working there after the Sheriff asked you to stop hitting on him. I’m sure a bit of juicy gossip like that could go really far in a town this size—”

“Ladies,
ladies
!”

Kara stopped mid-sentence, her eyes having the look about them of a scrappy dog in a territorial brawl.

Kara always was the kind you wanted on your side in a fight.

“Ladies, this simply won’t do,” Councilwoman Tunstall said in a hushed whisper, stepping up and looking hard at each of us. “Look… I know we’re all feeling a little on edge right now, given what happened to Mr. Copperstone. But now is
not
the time to let our lower natures get the best of us.”

Julie looked like a bull ready to charge. Her nostrils flared slightly, and her blue eyes burned like coals. She was staring at Kara like she wanted to rip my best friend’s head off.

“Ms. Van Dorn?” Eleanor said, clearly seeing that her words hadn’t made much of a dent. “Ms. Van Dorn, did you hear me?”

Julie’s expression suddenly changed. The plastic façade came back.

A moment later, a fake smile flooded her face.

“My apologies, Councilwoman,” she said, lifting her head in the air. “I’m afraid you’re right. I’m just wasting my time here.”

She gave Kara and me one long nasty look before backing away and hurriedly heading down the hallway in the direction of the restrooms. The sound of her skyscraper heels furiously clicking against the linoleum let everybody within a five-mile radius know what kind of mood she was in.

Councilwoman Tunstall let out a long, troubled sigh.

“Well, now that the power is back on, Cinnamon, I think we should gather everybody in the auditorium and speak to them about the situation,” she said, ignoring the deafening noise of Julie’s heels. “And as the two remaining judges, I feel that it is up to us to do so. What do you think?”

I took in a deep breath.

Eleanor was right. Julie might have been in the wrong, but fighting with her about it wasn’t going to help anything.

It wouldn’t change the fact that we were all where we were now: stranded in the biggest snowstorm to hit Christmas River in recent memory.

“I think that’s a level-headed idea, Eleanor.”

She smiled, the skin around her mouth pulling with the effort.

“Good,” she said. “The sooner the better, I should think.”

I nodded, then looked over at Kara. The anger in her eyes had faded slightly with Julie gone.

“We’ll talk after,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.  

I squeezed her arm, then followed the Councilwoman back into the auditorium.

Trying my very best to get a grip and regain my cool along the way.

Chapter 28

“Screw that! I’m not staying here ‘til you
ladies
deem it okay for me to go home. Where are we… Communist Russia?”

Though I had expected as much from a pinheaded pipsqueak like Barney McBride, the sexist way in which the Redmond bar owner said the word
ladies
really got under my skin.