Menace in Christmas River (Christmas River 8) (17 page)

A silent tear ran down her cheek.  

“The next day, he came to my place, and I could tell something
big
had just happened,” she said. “He had gotten this big internship in New York. And he was so excited. He picked me up and twirled me around, and told me it was the best day of his life – so far anyway. He said our wedding day would be the best day of his life.”

She wrung the Kleenex between her hands nervously.

“I smiled that day and acted happy. But inside… inside I was dying. Because I knew that it…
us
… would never work. We both wanted different things. He needed to focus on his career because he had something going. And meanwhile, I realized that there was nothing I wanted more than a big family. And we couldn’t have it both ways. Not if I was going to be happy. Not if he was going to be happy, either.

“I should have told him the next day that it was never going to work. But the problem was… I still loved him. Some selfish part of me wanted to hold on. I loved him so much, and I never wanted to hurt him. I knew too that if I tried to tell him about it, he’d just talk me out of it. And he would have. He could always do that.”

She swallowed hard.

“But as the wedding drew closer and closer, I couldn’t stop thinking about what a mistake it would be. It wasn’t just cold feet, either. Because I saw that no matter how much we loved each other, we just were two different people.

“With my parents’ help, I finally found the courage to leave. I left him a note the night before our wedding, and I took off to Salt Lake to work with the church there and to eventually do missionary work. To reassess my life and try to come to terms with what I had just done.”

Kara made a muffled noise.  

I knew it was killing her not to say something judgmental. Something like
you must have been out of your mind for leaving him like that.

And while I did a better job of hiding my own thoughts, I couldn’t help but feel the same way.

It seemed like such a cruel thing to do – to leave a man practically at the altar like that. To just leave a note and take off. To not even give him a chance to hear the words from your own mouth.  

I tried to imagine the crushing shame and embarrassment and sadness that something like that would cause.

And in a small way, I found that I was beginning to understand why Cliff was how he was.

I closed my eyes for a second.

She ruined me…

He had to have been talking about Samantha. For goodness sakes, he still carried around the engagement photo of her in his wallet.

Like a breaker wave, an immense feeling of sorrow rushed over me.

It wasn’t an excuse necessarily. But I could now see that Cliff’s behavior was the product of a broken heart that had festered for far, far too long.

“I know how horrible it sounds,” Samantha continued, as if she knew what we were both thinking. “But in my heart, I felt it was the right thing to do. I knew that I couldn’t weigh him down like that.”

She took in a deep breath.

“But I’m not proud of how I did it. I made it worse by waiting until the night before the wedding to tell him. I know that the way I did that nearly killed him. I got married a year later to a man who went to the same Latter-day Saints church in Lake Oswego that I grew up going to, and I know the news got back to him. I’m sure Cliff thought that I’d been seeing Trevor on the side while we were together.

“I heard Cliff was different after all of it. People said he turned mean. That he’d become ruthless and cruel to those around him. That he mistreated his business partner – the same woman who first hired him as a line cook and really believed in his talent. I heard that he became… he became….”

Her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling and she sucked in a deep breath.  

“He became a very bad person. And over the years, I’ve been haunted by the knowledge that I’m responsible for that,” she said. “And that even though I did the right thing for the both of us – something he wouldn’t have ever been able to do – I killed him in the process. I killed that good man, same as if I’d stabbed him in the heart.”

I felt a chill pass through me when she said that.

Her eyes filled with tears again, and she seemed to be stuck on that one thought for a while.

The wind screamed outside and filled the empty pause with an emptiness of its own.

“Was today the first time you’d seen him since then?” I finally asked.  

“Yes,” she said. “When I entered the competition, I had no idea that he was judging it. I didn’t know until I read the local paper a couple of days ago. I thought about pulling out when I saw that he was set to judge, but then I thought maybe the Lord orchestrated this. Maybe it was finally my chance to apologize to him. To make things right. After all these years.

“And when I thought about it that way, I realized that the Chocolate Championship itself didn’t matter one bit. That this was a chance for me to fix the mistake I’d made. To tell him that I never wanted to hurt him. That I had always loved him, and that I always will. I just couldn’t be an excuse for him not to follow his dreams. And he couldn’t be an excuse for me not to follow mine.

“I came here today with only the best intentions, Ms. Peters. But when he saw me… when I tried to talk to him this morning, he was completely stunned. And then repulsed. He wouldn’t speak to me or hear me out. He just walked away, like I was nothing. Like we had never…”

She bit her lip, and I thought about what Kara had told me. About how she’d seen Cliff crying earlier that day.

It must have been shortly after he’d seen Samantha for the first time.

What a shock that must have been to him.

“I deserved nothing less,” she said. “I know that. But it devastated me. I should have just left the show, but stupidly, I stuck around thinking I could try and talk to him after. I couldn’t go home on that note.

“Then, this afternoon…” she trailed off.

A couple of big fat tears let loose across her red cheeks.

“I…”

But she couldn’t seem to speak.

I glanced sharply at Kara.

She looked nervous.

I could read her thoughts easy enough.

She did it. She tried to kill him. She took that hammer and—

“Samantha, you can tell us what happened,” I said. “We won’t judge you. I’m sure it was just an accident. They happen, you know. Just tell us what went wrong.”

Samantha suddenly eyed me, a strange expression on her face.

“I did just tell you what happened,” she said. “I tried to see him this morning, and he wouldn’t talk to me. During the break this afternoon, I wanted to find him again, but then there was the blackout, and later I heard that scream.”

She shuddered visibly.

“I know I’m responsible for what happened to him today, too,” she said. “Cliff must have been so distraught by seeing me, that he went out there into the snow and ice, and he slipped and fell.”

She drew in a ragged breath.

“I can’t believe the good Lord would let something so horrific happen.”

I cleared my throat and furrowed my brow.

“So… so you didn’t see Cliff during the break? You didn’t talk to him at all?”

She shook her head.

“No, I was in the auditorium the whole time,” she said. “That young guy with the chocolate fairytale castle came up to me and had some questions about my technique. I was trying to leave him politely to find Cliff when the lights went out.”  

I studied Samantha, wondering if she really was telling the truth.

If she hadn’t hurt Cliff, then who had? Who else at the event would have had a motive to do such a thing?

I knew that criminals could be experts at hiding who they really were. I knew that it was possible that Samantha was one of those types and that she was lying through her teeth to us. Laying on the religious, devout, wholesome angle hard so that we wouldn’t suspect anything.

But Daniel was a big believer in hunches, and so was I.

And right now, I had a hunch that Samantha Garner was telling the truth.

She hadn’t hurt Cliff.

In fact, she’d been trying to do the opposite today – somehow, undo the hurt that she had done to him in the past.

As I looked over at Kara, I realized that we seemed to be on the same page.

Samantha caught the look, and suddenly appeared confused.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Is something else going on that I don’t know about?”

I didn’t say anything for a while, trying to assess the situation logically.

Maybe she deserved to know the truth about what happened to Cliff – that it hadn’t been an accident.

But I also knew that I couldn’t afford for the truth to get out to the rest of the folks here. Because if they found out that a possible murderer was somewhere among them, fear would follow close on the heels of that discovery. And that would be the most dangerous thing of all, given the fact that we were all snowed in together.  

But as I gazed into Samantha’s sad, tired face, I could tell that she was already making pieces fit.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It has to do with Cliff, doesn’t it? With what happened to him?”

There was no use in lying now.

She closed her eyes and looked like she was bracing herself for the worst.

Chapter 37

“Did you see that?”

Kara’s sharp blue eyes narrowed and locked on something beyond the pane of glass.

I followed her gaze, trying to see past the swirling ice that blurred the landscape, but I could see nothing beyond it.

“I don’t—” I started.

“There!” she said, pointing with an exaggerated motion, almost hitting the window. “There’s a light. I swear, I just saw it!”

I squinted and cupped my hands against the pane, still unable to see anything.

“I think I saw it, too,” Samantha Garner said, her eyes still puffy and swollen after I’d told her that Daniel thought it was a good possibility Cliff had been hurt on purpose. “Look! There it is again.”

A dim, unsteady glow suddenly emerged from the darkness, growing brighter with each passing moment.

I felt my heart skip a beat.

He’d come back for me, just like he said he would.

I looked at Kara, feeling for the first time a glimmer of hope that we would actually make it out of this auditorium before the spring thaw.

Before I knew it, I was running down the hallway, busting through one of the heavy metal doors. I almost cried out in shock as the wind barreled into my body, meeting me with the wickedest of greetings.

“
Cin
!” I heard Kara shout after me, her voice mostly drowned out by the shrieking gale.

I forced my legs to move toward the light.

I stopped when the pavement ended and the ice began. Knowing that if I took one more step beyond, I’d most likely be off my feet in two seconds flat.

I peered into the whipping air, my eyes growing watery as I watched the light grow more vivid in the blackness.

“Daniel?!” I yelled.

But the sound had hardly come out of my mouth before it was taken by the wind like a dead twig in a fast-rushing river.

“
Daniel
!” I shouted again, cupping my hands over my mouth.

There was no answer.

I shook and shivered from the chill, which cut right through my thin sweater.

I watched as a dark figure came into focus.

It was followed shortly by another.

Daniel must have brought the med student back with him. That would have been the smart move. That would have been—

“
Heelllppp
…” a small, distant voice cried out from the darkness. “
Help us
…”

It didn’t sound like Daniel.

And as I peered into the inky night, I realized that one of the figures was shorter and a good deal plumper than the other.

“Right here!” I shouted out, my breath freezing. “Right over here!”  

A second later, the two figures came into view, one of them carrying a flashlight.

I almost gasped at the sight of them.

They looked like death walking out of the storm.

Their cheeks were hollow in the dim light. Their skin-coloring was a lifeless shade of blue-grey. The only way I knew they were still alive and didn’t belong to the walking dead was the way they both trembled and shook, like dying leaves in the first winds of winter.

“Barney?” I said, trying to steady myself as a gust attempted to knock me off of my feet.

Barney McBride no longer had that righteous expression he’d had when he was proclaiming to the crowd of Chocolate Championship attendees that nobody could make him stay anywhere.

Instead, he looked exhausted, half-frozen, and frightened.

His wife, Libby, looked even worse.

“The… the car… it…”

His teeth were chattering so bad, he couldn’t finish the thought.

It was no time for talking anyway.

“Come inside,” I said.

I led them back toward the metal doors, and as I did, I couldn’t help but notice the strange look on Barney McBride’s face.

It wasn’t an emotion he was used to expressing:

Gratitude.

Chapter 38

“The car went off… went off the highway… down an embankment and we…”

Libby McBride’s teeth chattered like a truck full of seashells going down a ripped-up road.

Her eyes still had a deadened, matted look to them, and she still had trouble speaking. But at least her coloring was better than it was when she first came in from out of the storm. Her skin had gone from a shade of birch bark to the color of poppies since we’d sat her down on a beat-up chair in the student lounge area of the culinary building.

Between what she’d said, and what I’d gathered from Barney, it appeared that a mile into their drive, the McBrides’ car hit a patch of black ice, slid across the road, and rolled down an embankment. Barney had said it was pure luck that they’d been able to get out of the car with only Libby’s sprained ankle and a few bruises between them. From there, they had walked back to the auditorium in almost white-out conditions.