Menace in Christmas River (Christmas River 8) (22 page)

I was injured, freezing, and alone.

And in that moment, the hopelessness of my situation hit me with all the force of an out-of-control freight train careening off the tracks.

I leaned forward and sobbed hysterically into the cold, unfeeling, never-ending night.

The building couldn’t have been that far, but it might as well have been the moon.

And all I had to hold onto was regret and anger and pain.

I could have blamed Holly for doing what she did. I could have blamed Cliff for treating others so badly. I could have blamed Samantha for the part she had played in turning a decent person into a bitter, mean, and cruel one.

But the reason I was out here, alone, was because of the decisions
I
had made, and the decisions I had made alone.

I had gone too far, yet again. Instead of stopping before it got to a point like this, I had kept pushing. Driven by something inside of me that had to know the truth and expose it to the light of day.

It had once again gotten me into trouble, and maybe this time, the biggest of my life.  

I tried to heave myself forward in a desperate push to get to my feet again, but the pain was too intense.

I slumped back down onto the ice, with no hope left.  

My cheeks were numb and I couldn’t feel my arms or my legs anymore. In a few more minutes, I wondered if I would feel anything at all.

That would be something to look forward to, at least.

I lifted my head, staring into the void in front of me.

“Daniel,” I whispered to no one. “Daniel, I wish you could hear m—”

I stopped speaking.

Something touched my back.

Something with a frail, light, delicate touch.

I held in my sob, wondering if the sensation was real, or just the next stage of hypothermia.

I turned my head.

A small figure stood behind me, looking scared and lost and broken.

But at peace, too. 

She kneeled down, reaching for my good arm. She placed it over her shoulders, and helped me back up.

I gritted my teeth in pain, but got through it.

Then I turned my head, looking at her for a long moment.

She didn’t say anything.

But she didn’t have to.

We both knew the score.

Holly Smith might have killed someone.

She might have planned it, executed it, and tried to run from it.

But she was doing the right thing now.

A massive gust howled past us then, and as if by fate, the wall of ice up ahead cleared enough to see the faint outlines of the culinary building.

We stumbled toward it.

A moment later, over the whipping wind, I heard the sound of a car engine somewhere in the distance.

A familiar car engine.

One that I had been waiting on the whole night.

The joy I felt in my heart made me forget all about the searing pain.

We watched as the high beams of Daniel’s truck illuminated the storm.

Chapter 49

I opened the oven and pulled out the
HubbaHubba Hazelnut Cherry Chocolate Love
pies one at a time, inhaling a greedy breath of the hot, nutty, sweet air as I did.

I wasn’t normally a fan of fruit and chocolate combinations when it came to pies. It always seemed to me like when combined, the two strong flavors would battle each other for the spotlight, leaving their best attributes by the wayside when they did. I much preferred it when flavors took a more pacifistic view of things, and danced together instead.

But something about this pie flavor – with the bright, dazzling taste of the cherries and the seductive and almost-sinister qualities of the dark chocolate joined together by the flaky, buttery hazelnut crust… well, it was a match made in heaven.

I lined up the pie tins in a row on the marble counter top with my good arm and hummed along to a live version of Frank Sinatra’s “The Very Thought of You,” feeling taken by Old Blue Eyes’ smooth, soulful crooning.

I pulled my mitten off with my teeth and dusted off my apron. My eyes drifted out the back window for a second, and I paused, admiring the scene.

It was a beautiful, sparkling morning in late February. Snow from the storm earlier in the month was still piled in drifts around the deck and in the forest, but a good deal of it had already melted. With warmer temperatures lately, the trees that had survived the storm had finally emerged from their icy tombs, feeling the rays of sunshine on their bare branches for the first time in weeks.

And most importantly, there was no trace anywhere of the deadly ice that had kept us snowbound in the culinary school’s auditorium this past Valentine’s Day.

I watched for a moment as a gust of warm wind wound its way through the trees, making their damp pine needles sparkle in the sunlight like diamonds floating through the air.

I took in a deep breath, enjoying the moment.

Here in the pie shop, surrounded by the soul-warming smells of sugar and pastry and fruit and chocolate, looking out at such a pristine, picturesque landscape… the Valentine’s Day Chocolate Championship Showdown felt like just a nightmare. Just some fuzzy, half-remembered dream that had never existed this side of reality.

But every once and a while, those half-remembered moments would come back to me. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d close my eyes before bed and see Holly Smith’s young and scared face staring back at me in the storm. Her eyes desperate and terrified, brimming with tears and pain and madness.

I felt a chill pass through me at the memory now, and I rubbed the side of my compromised arm out of habit.

Holly Smith had had a very bad Valentine’s Day, and the rest of the year wasn’t going to be any better for her. She was in deep, and sometimes, I wondered whether she was strong enough for what was up ahead. The publicity, the trial, the reliving of it all, the sentencing… It wasn’t going to be pretty. And her life was going to be forever altered by what she had decided to do that afternoon at the Chocolate Championship.

But there were two silver linings to all of it – at least, from what I could see.

Holly had done the right thing. She’d come back, of her own freewill, and she’d helped me get back to the culinary building, thereby saving me from a cold and bitter fate.

And aside from that, she wasn’t facing a murder charge like she might have been if Cliff had died from his injuries.

Cliff Copperstone had survived the blow. Daniel had gotten Cliff to the hospital in time, successfully navigating a nightmare of icy roads and white-out conditions. The Sheriff had lived up to Eleanor Tunstall’s opinion of him – he showed everyone that he was a man who got things done.

Cliff had lost a significant amount of blood from his head injury and had suffered a fractured skull, but according to the newspapers, his outlook was very good. When weather conditions improved, he’d been airlifted to Legacy Emmanuel Hospital in Portland. His doctors there told the press that Cliff would most likely make a full recovery.

The news had been a big relief. And not just for Holly Smith.

Samantha Garner had been pretty relieved to hear that her former fiancé was going to be okay, too.

Because even though their past had already been written in stone, there was no reason that the future couldn’t be different.

“Uh, Ms. Peters?”

I pulled my eyes from the majestic landscape out the window and turned around.

Good old Tobias was standing there by the dividing door, the way he usually did when he had a question or was running low on a certain pie flavor out in the dining room.  

I smiled to myself for a short second.

It was the small things in life that made it worth living.

“Yeah, Tobias?”

“Are you doing okay in here with that shoulder of yours? Do ya need any help while Tiana’s on her break?”

I glanced down for a moment at my arm.

After dislocating my shoulder in the fall, Daniel had, for the second time that night, driven somebody to the emergency room. It was slow going there for a while on those icy roads, and I threw up along the way. But we’d been lucky: we didn’t slide off or have the truck’s battery die again, the way it had on Daniel’s return trip to the auditorium – which had been the reason it took him so long. The poor sheriff had damn near frozen himself trying to get that truck’s battery up and running again.

“Thanks for your concern, Tobias, but I’m managing just fine,” I said, nodding to my injury. “I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of this.”

My shoulder still ached often, the way an injury like that could. But I was lucky – it hadn’t required surgery, and it was getting better with each passing day. And while I felt impatient with its slow recovery, the doctor had said I’d be back to baking pies with both arms within a month or so.  

And I guess compared to everything that could have happened the night of the big storm, a dislocated shoulder and a broken phone wasn’t all that bad.

“Well, you let me know if you do need any help, ma’am,” he said  

“I sure will, Tobias.”

He started to leave, heading back out to the dining room. But then he stopped in his tracks.

“Oh, almost forgot. That wasn’t the only thing, neither,” he said, leaning forward and resting his arms on the dividing door. “I wanted to tell ya that there’s a visitor wanting to see you out here.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, dusting my good hand off on my apron. “Who?”

He shrugged.

“I better just let ya see for yourself.”

And with that, he disappeared back out into the front.

Chapter 50

I leaned back against the edge of the counter, trying to conceal my surprise.

Though I couldn’t explain why, I hadn’t expected to see him ever again. At least, not in person.

I figured after what had happened, the chances of him ever coming back to Christmas River were slim to none.

After all, there was nothing but unpleasant memories here for him.

But here he stood in my pie shop kitchen, looking like he’d just crawled out of a car wreck.  

“What are you… should you be here?” I finally managed to say.

He looked a little green around the edges of his jaw, and the back of his head was bandaged. But for a man who had been bludgeoned just two short weeks earlier, Cliff Copperstone didn’t look half-bad.

He was standing on his own two feet, and that was a big improvement right there. And while his eyes might not have been the picture of health, they were lucid.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be,” he said. “But here I am anyway.”

He gave me a small smile. It came out a little strange and lopsided, but the sentiment behind it was what counted.

His eyes fell on my sling.

“You too, huh?” he said.

I shrugged with my good shoulder.

“Councilwoman Tunstall was the only judge who escaped unscathed,” I said. “But I’m trying to look on the brightside – I’ve got a story to tell my grandkids one day.”

“Yeah, that’s one way to look at it.”

I was glad to see that his faculties didn’t appear to be damaged.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I’ve been better,” he said. “It’s going to be a little while before I get back to where I was – that’s what the doctors say. But, uh…”

He cleared his throat.

“But I guess you could say that I’ve been trying to look on the brightside of things, too.”

He hesitated for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts.  

“I know you probably never want to see me again after the way I treated you,” he said. “But I came here because…”

A strange, queasy expression came across his face.

And for a moment, he looked no older than 12. A scared 12-year-old at that.

I could tell Cliff didn’t have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.

“Could I interest you in a cup of coffee and a slice of warm chocolate cherry pie, Mr. Copperstone?”

I said it in the most genuine, kind, hospitable voice I could muster.

At first he looked puzzled.  

But then, though his lips betrayed nothing, I could see something flicker in his eyes at the prospect of pie and coffee.

I smiled to myself, going for a serving plate.

I wagered that a slice of warm pie could melt even the coldest of hearts.

Chapter 51

“After she left me, I never talked about her. I never told anybody about what happened, even. I stopped speaking to all of our friends who’d been invited to the wedding. I shut the whole ugly experience up inside myself and threw away the key. I focused on my career, instead. I was always the hardest worker in the room. And I knew that I was the smartest, too. I was going to make it all the way. People would know me. Everybody would want me. And I was going to show her just what she had missed out on.”

He let out a deep sigh, leaning forward on the kitchen barstool.

“She was the one.”

He lifted his eyes.

“My
one
. And when she left, all I wanted to do was to make her regret what she did to me.”

His hand, which had been resting on the counter next to the half-empty coffee mug, curled up into a fist.

“So I did everything above and beyond. I excelled in the internship. I graduated at the top of my class. When I came back to Portland, Sue Smith promoted me at
The Stone Wall
. It wasn’t long after that she saw what a mind I had for business, and offered me a stake in the restaurant. I made the smart moves and made
The Stone Wall
the most successful eatery in Portland. And when the old lady was running the business into the ground, I found a way to take control of it. Sue wasn’t the only one I screwed over, either. I left a nice little trail of dead and wounded behind me in my quest to make it big.”

His eyes met mine for a split second.

“But when I made it, when I was the biggest chef on the West Coast, appearing on television and in ads and magazines… when I had finally reached the top? You know what I discovered?”