Menace in Christmas River (Christmas River 8) (20 page)

“Yeah, you’ll be in court, honey,” she said. “But you’ll be sitting on the defendant side. And it won’t be for slander, I can tell you that much.”

Julie leaned in closer to Kara.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re implying, but I swear, if you—”

“That’s enough,” I said in the strongest voice I could muster.  

Kara had just laid out all of our cards on the table and for no reason whatsoever that I could see.

And continuing down this road with the meager resources that we had at the moment wasn’t going to accomplish much more than salt water would stave off thirst.

Julie lifted her head up arrogantly and straightened out her dress.

“You’re going to regret speaking to me this way, you little tart,” she said to Kara in a not-so-veiled threatening tone. “You have
no
idea who you’re dealing with.”

“Oh, I know exactly who I’m dealing with,” Kara said, never one to back down.

Julie let out a snort. She turned on her heels and walked angrily across the room.

I watched as she hiked up the steps, heading out into the hallway.

Julie now knew that we suspected her of something.

And we were going to be cooped up with her now for who-knows-how long.

Kara seemed to know my thoughts exactly.

She had blown whatever advantage we’d had.

“Sorry, Cin,” she whispered, sheepishly. “I just… I just can’t
stand
that woman. I couldn’t just sit here and let her spew her B.S. like that.”

I could have been angry with my best friend over it. After all, she’d just opened up a can of worms – the contents of which could be downright lethal.

But for some reason, I wasn’t as angry as I might have been.  

“I know,” I said. “Believe me, she’s not my favorite person in the world, either.”

She let out a sigh up into the air.

“Did I really blow it that bad, Cin?”

I didn’t know yet. But I shook my head anyway.

Chapter 43

Libby McBride took a sip of hot cocoa, her hands still trembling slightly as she brought the paper cup up to her lips.

“I thought… I thought maybe we wouldn’t make it,” she said after nodding at me gratefully for the hot drink. “It was so cold out there. So very, very cold.”

She looked past me with the haunted eyes of someone who was still trying to come to terms with how close she’d come to the edge.

After the Julie incident, I had spent some time helping Marty Higgins look for that missing hammer, while Kara was helping Eleanor assess the food situation in the culinary school. But after scouring the auditorium from top to bottom with the big man, the tool was still missing, with absolutely no trace as to its whereabouts.

A sense of gloom had overtaken Marty after losing his grandfather’s hammer, and the normally jovial fellow was as devastated as I’d ever seen him.

I began to worry that even if we did somehow find the hammer, Marty might not want it then. Not after the bloody part it had played in what might now be a possible homicide.

If I had been Julie, I’d probably have hidden it somewhere, maybe in one of the culinary classrooms. That, or I’d have stashed it outside beneath one of the many snow drifts, where it would be safe until the thaw.

Throughout the search, I’d found it hard to concentrate. It seemed as though every few seconds, I was checking my phone, looking for some sort of message from Daniel.

But there was nothing.

And that feeling of worry and not knowing if he was out there in that horror show of ice and snow was as stomach-turning as a broccoli tofu imitation-cheese casserole.

I knew that the only way to keep from losing my mind completely with worry was to stay busy.

That was how I had ended up back in the student lounge area with the McBrides, making up some Swiss Miss hot cocoa I’d found in one of the classrooms next to that box of orange licorice tea.

Though they seemed to be physically okay for the most part, the emotional scars left over from the incident were still written all over their faces – especially Libby’s.

I realized I wasn’t the only one needing a distraction. 

“I’m sorry we never got around to judging your chocolate sculpture,” I said, taking a seat next to her on the sofa, where she sat with her twisted ankle propped up on a stack of pillows.

“Me too,” she said. “I spent every spare minute I had these last two months putting it together. I mean, I’m not a professional pastry chef or anything. I know I didn’t have a chance in heck at winning. But I figured since it was taking place in Christmas River this year, I might as well join in, you know? I always thought that if I didn’t have to tend bar at our place, then maybe I’d go to culinary school or something.”

Her eyes drifted over to her husband, who was standing by the window, pressing a phone up to his ear in an attempt to get reception.

“Now I wish I hadn’t entered in the competition in the first place,” she said, her voice quivering some. “If I had known all this was going to happen, then I wouldn’t have…”

She trailed off.

I tried to steer the conversation in a more cheerful direction.

“Well, can you tell me about your entry?” I asked. “I’d really love to hear about it. Especially since I didn’t get a chance to see it for myself.”

Hers had been part of the one-third that the judges hadn’t gotten around to.

She forced a smile.

“It was called “For the Love of Beer,’” she said. “It was a bottle of beer made out of chocolate with these two big red chocolate hearts floating off of it. I thought the theme was fitting since I’m a bartender.

“The beer bottle came out a little lopsided, and one of the chocolate hearts fell off and broke on the ride over here… but it was still really nice. Probably the prettiest thing I ever made. I thought for sure that Cliff Copperstone would like it. On that TV competition he judges? He always likes dishes infused with beer. He always gives those a good score. I thought for sure he would like my…”

She trailed off again.

“It’s such a shame what happened to him,” she mumbled. “Poor, poor man.”

No matter how I tried to steer the conversation, Mrs. McBride seemed to find her way back to gloomier topics.

“Yeah, it is a shame—”

“You know, during that break we took right before the power outage?” she said, cutting me off. “I went outside for a smoke and I saw him for a short moment. He was just standing out there, looking up at the sky. I was about to tell him how much I liked his show, but then somebody else came outside and started talking to him, and I chickened out.”

I suddenly felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end.

I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“How close was that to when the blackout happened?”  

She just shrugged, taking a sip of her cocoa.

She didn’t seem to notice the desperation in my voice

“Not a couple minutes before,” she said. “I was lucky – when the power went out, I had just about stepped into the auditorium, so I found my way out pretty quick—”

“You’re saying somebody was outside with him at that time?”

I felt my heart thudding hard in my chest.

If Libby had seen Cliff Copperstone a few moments before the blackout, then that would have had to have been right around the time he was bludgeoned.

Meaning that whoever was out there with him then might have…

“Mrs. McBride,” I said, gripping her arm. “Who was it? Who was talking to him?”

She furrowed her brow in bewilderment.

“I don’t… I don’t know exactly,” she stuttered. “I don’t know her name.”

“What did she look like?”

I found that I had unconsciously started tightening my grip on her arm.

“She looked official,” she said. “She was one of the gals organizing the show, I think.”  

I felt my nerves jump around inside of me like live power lines.

Julie
.

Kara had been right.

I couldn’t believe it.

Julie had done it. In a jealous rage, she had stolen Marty’s hammer, found Cliff alone outside, and exacted her revenge. She had—

“And she was short,” Libby said.

Julie wasn’t exactly short. But she wasn’t tall either. Maybe next to Cliff, and from a distance, someone might have thought she was—

“She was flittering around here a lot,” Libby continued. “She had a clipboard and this big purse. And I know maybe I ain’t one to speak, but I think the gal could stand to put on a few pounds. She’s so thin, you know? Like she might just blow away in the wind. She also…”

I felt my ears suddenly ringing, and the rest of Libby’s description was lost on me.

I didn’t need to hear anymore.

I knew who she was talking about.

I shot up from the chair.

“I… I have to go,” I said.

I ran out of the student lounge, feeling Mrs. McBride’s puzzled stare on me the entire way.

Chapter 44

She had lied.

She hadn’t just stumbled across Cliff Copperstone’s body after coming out of the restrooms, the way she said.

She’d been there, with him, right before it happened.

Meaning that she…

Even as I rushed down the hallway, I couldn’t believe it.

The screaming.The crying. The horrified expression.

The squeamishness she supposedly had with blood.

Had it all been an act?

Or had it been real? A real reaction that occurred after she’d taken a hammer to Cliff Copperstone? Real horror at what she had just done?  

I didn’t know.

All I knew was that I needed to find Kara. We’d been looking in the wrong direction all along– thinking Julie had done it when the true culprit was right under our…

I stopped dead in my tracks as something out the window caught my eye.

A clear, distinct glow burned brightly in the distance, cutting through the black, icy night like a laser.

I felt my heart lunge forward with hope.

“Daniel…” I whispered.

But as I watched the light, I realized that it wasn’t coming toward the building, the way it would have been if it was the headlights of an approaching car.

With each passing moment, it was becoming smaller and fainter.  

I felt a twinge in my gut and the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up again.

I hardly thought it through. But I didn’t need to. Because I just knew. It was a gut feeling, a hunch… a moment of pure intuition.

It wasn’t Daniel out in the storm.

It was
her
.

Trying to get away.

Trying to get away with murder.

Chapter 45

“Holly!”

The sharp, icy wind wrapped around my vocal chords and squeezed as I shouted her name again.  

The grey sweater I was wearing was no match for the hammering gusts and frozen sleet.

The small shadowy figure up ahead didn’t respond when I yelled. It just kept going, slipping here and there on the ice, but walking with a marked determination.

The flashlight the figure held danced in the darkness.

“Stop, Holly!” I shouted again, nearly falling over myself as my snow boots hit a particularly slick patch.

Whether or not she heard me over the gale, or whether she was ignoring me, I didn’t know.

But the fourth time I yelled her name, she stopped dead in her tracks.

For a long moment, she just stood still. Still as a statue. Almost like if she didn’t turn around, she wouldn’t have to face me.

Or face what she had done.

I stood back, waiting for her to do something, feeling the frigid air claw at my lungs with each breath.

She slowly turned around.

She wasn’t dressed for slogging through a wilderness of ice. She was wearing a skirt, fashionable boots, and a long wool jacket that was already completely covered in ice pellets.

It was the kind of outfit that could mean death in this kind of weather.  

Holly Smith was dressed for the Valentine’s Day Chocolate Championship Showdown. Not for being a fugitive.

Her big blue eyes locked on mine. They were wide and scared and full of raw emotion.

“I just need to get something from my car,” she stammered.

Her words came out weak and utterly unconvincing.

“I know what happened, Holly,” I said, raising my voice.  

She furrowed her brow, pretending to be dumbstruck by what I was saying.  

But the game was up. I knew it. And so did she.

“Why’d you do it?” I said. “Did he hurt you in some way? I mean, was it… was it self-defense or something? Was that it, Holly?”

In the dimness of the flashlight, I could see a fat tear stream down one of her cheeks. It slid down her face slowly, freezing along the way.

“There must have been a reason—”

She made a sudden movement, and my breath suddenly caught in my throat.

A moment later, she pulled something from that large purse of hers, holding it at her side with a trembling hand.

The dull, stained metal caught the glow of the flashlight, and I shuddered.

“You don’t know how long I’ve waited, Ms. Peters,” she said, a few more tears dropping from her eyes. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to hurt
that man
.”

There was a kind of rage bubbling up in her words as she spoke.

And I knew that there was a lot more to the story than I had bargained for.

Chapter 46

“My mother,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “My mother is a good person, Ms. Peters. Her heart’s so big and so generous... There’s nothing she wouldn’t do to help somebody if she could.”

She paused as a gust blew into us, tossing ice pellets the size of deer flies into our faces.

I shivered. My hands and arms were starting to go numb.

“Years ago, my mother owned a restaurant called
The Stone Wall
in Portland. All that love and generosity she had? She put that into her food. And people could really tell – they absolutely loved it. The restaurant did well, and she made enough to support raising me and my sisters all on her own…”