Criminal Crumbs (16 page)

Chapter 23

“W
hat just happened, Suzanne?” Grace
asked me as she joined me at the top of the stairs.

“Someone’s locked us down here,” I said, frantically trying to open the door.

It wouldn’t budge, and even if it did, we’d still have that heavy object placed on the other side to contend with.

“There’s no use fighting it,” Grace said as she raced down the steps.

“You’re not just giving up, are you?”

“You know me better than that,” she replied. “Whoever tried to keep us down here must not know about the cellar door.”

“There’s another way out of here?” I asked as I followed her lead.

“Janelle mentioned it to me yesterday. I thought you heard it, too.”

“No, I must have missed it.”

“Her team found it when they were searching down here yesterday,” Grace explained.

“Did they all know about it?” I asked as Grace worked at unlocking the barrel latch of the other exit. It appeared to have been neglected for years, and it was going to take a little work to get it open.

“Absolutely,” Grace said as she continued to fiddle with the latch.

I found a hammer on a nearby workbench and said, “Step aside.”

“Do we really need to break it?” Grace asked me.

“We do when someone’s life is at stake,” I said, taking the claw end of the hammer, putting it under the latch, and lifting abruptly, snapping it off. A little bit of wood splintered when I did it, but the door would at least open now.

“Suzanne, what do you know that I don’t?” she asked me. I held onto the hammer. It just might be useful again.

“Think about it,” I said as we raced outside. “Dina, Georgia, and Janelle all knew about this other exit. That means that none of them would have tried to lock us down here.”

“Did we just eliminate three suspects?” Grace asked me.

“As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what happened. We know for a fact that Hank didn’t do anything, so that just leaves Celia and Nicole.”

“Then it’s got to be Celia who’s been trying to get rid of her sister,” Grace said.

“I don’t think so,” I answered as we raced toward the cottages.

“Are you saying that Nicole tried to push herself off the edge of the cliff? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“
Nobody
tried to push her, just like nobody tried to run her over earlier or blew out her pilot light,” I said. “She’s been setting us up from the very start. Georgia told me that Hank was going to fire Nicole, and she couldn’t have that, so she must have pushed him off the edge herself to keep that from happening. I’m willing to bet that Nicole couldn’t stand the idea of losing her job to one of you, but the money she’d be losing was even more important to her. You said yourself that she only buys the best, and I believe you. I’ve seen her outfits and jewelry with my own eyes, and after Dina lost so much of Nicole’s money playing the stock market, what’s the only other source of income she’s had access to?”

“Celia’s trust fund,” Grace said breathlessly. “
That’s
why she wanted to extend the arrangement. If she’s forced to turn the money over to her sister next week, then Celia and everyone else will know that Nicole has been stealing from her.”

“I’m willing to bet the books won’t stand up to a careful audit. She even explained something away that we noticed earlier. When she wiped that warning off the mirror, she got a little lipstick on her sleeve. Did you see how quickly she explained it away? The woman’s a gifted liar, I’ll give her that much. She even set up something to make me sympathetic to her cause by booby-trapping her own door. Nicole’s been playing us for fools from the very beginning.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re saying that my boss was never anyone’s target at all? You’re right! That explains why Celia had to go, and so did Hank! Suzanne, are we too late to save her?”

“I don’t know, but we have to at least try,” I said as we hurried to the exact spot where Hank had met his own fate.

As we neared Hemlock cottage, Grace asked me, “What about those footprints in the snow we found?”

“Nicole had to be sure that Hank was really dead,” I said. “I don’t think she bought our story from the beginning. I wonder if she spotted his body, even though we couldn’t. I saw a dark impression, but I couldn’t be sure it was Hank. Maybe she could, though. That’s the only way that any of this makes sense, given the way she’s been acting.”

They weren’t in Hemlock or Fir or Spruce.

As we approached Pine, the last cottage in the row, I realized that Celia had just about run out of time when I looked in through the window and saw Nicole and her both inside. Nicole’s hand was reaching into her sweatshirt pocket, and Celia’s back was turned to her.

Whatever was about to occur was going to happen quickly, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

That wasn’t going to stop me from trying, though, as I watched Nicole pull a handgun out of her sweatshirt and turn it toward her sister.

Chapter 24

“N
icole!” I screamed at the
top of my lungs just as I swung the hammer in my hand back and threw it through the glass window. The pane shattered on impact, but we couldn’t afford to wait around to see what happened after that. I grabbed Grace’s arm. “Run!”

She nodded, and we both took off, I assumed heading for the others at the lodge. I glanced back and saw Celia bolting into the bathroom and slamming the door behind her! Those doors were made from heavy wood, and I hoped that they’d stop the bullets, but I couldn’t be too concerned about that now. I’d reacted to the scene about to play out without giving much thought to what might happen next. Would Nicole follow us, or would she finish the job she’d intended to do by killing Celia first? I heard an explosion behind us, and I could swear that I felt the slug whistle through the air past my ear. She’d made her choice. Evidently we were a more active threat to her plans.

I glanced over at Grace, who had peeled away and was running in a completely different direction than I’d been. Instead of heading toward the lodge, she was pointed directly for the maze. “Where are you going?” I shouted out.

“The maze,” she said as she pointed in that direction.

“Why?”

“It’s safer there!” she said breathlessly.

I didn’t agree with her, but I didn’t really have any choice at that point. I changed my direction, intent on catching up with her by the time she got to the entrance. It might not have been the best place to run away from her assassin boss, but I was going wherever Grace was heading.

I took a second and turned to look back at Nicole. She was standing in place, holding the handgun carefully and pointing it straight at me.

This was it.

As close as I’d come in the past to being killed, my luck had finally run out.

And then I heard the hammer click.

Instead of shooting a round at us, it had been a misfire.

There was time to save ourselves, and I was about to tell Grace not to go into the maze when she vanished inside.

I managed to come up with a burst of momentary speed, and a few seconds later, I was inside as well. Just as I left the outside behind, I glanced back one last time.

Nicole still had the gun in her hands, but now she was running, too. She was going to chase us down and shoot us, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.

I’d used my only weapon to try to save Celia, and it might just end up costing Grace and me our lives.

“What do we do now?” Grace asked me breathlessly, sobbing as she hurried along the maze.

“We keep going and hope for the best,” I said as I caught up with her.

“You go on ahead,” she said as she collapsed to the ground. “Suzanne, I got us into this. You go. I’ll try to stop her.”

“That’s not happening. Either we get out of this together or we die side by side,” I said.

“How touching,” Nicole said as she rounded the corner, holding the handgun out toward us. “I choose the second option, if it’s all the same to you.”

Running into the maze had indeed been a fatal mistake, and our final one.

Chapter 25

“W
hy are you doing this?”
Grace asked her as I dropped to the ground beside my best friend at Nicole’s coaxing. “I thought we were friends.”

“Do you honestly think that I want to shoot you both?” Nicole asked her incredulously. “If you hadn’t been snooping around so much, none of this had to happen. Honestly, I didn’t think either one of you were any good at this detecting business. I figured I’d get you both up here, throw around some false clues, and you’d end up backing up my story when the police finally showed up. Now I’ve got to kill you both, and then I have to take care of that pesky sister of mine.”

“At least tell us one thing,” I said. “It was all about the money, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was! Why should Celia get any, when I knew that she’d just squander it? I started borrowing a little from her trust when Dina lost my money, but it was so easy that I couldn’t stop myself. It would have been bad enough to lose out on Celia’s money, but then Hank said that he was going to fire me! I should really kill Georgia, too, while I’m at it. She’s the one who started this whole mess.”

This woman was a sociopath! If anybody escaped her wrath, it would be a miracle, all for pretty things and nice clothes!

I had to stall her. Maybe Celia would go for help once she knew that she wasn’t the target anymore, at least not the main one. “Where did you get the gun?”

“I’m not going to stand here answering your questions,” Nicole said with disgust.

“You hid it upstairs and grabbed it this morning, didn’t you? That’s why you waited until Celia went to the bathroom. Why didn’t you go ahead and shoot her then?”

“Because you wouldn’t go to sleep, you fool! I was going to blame it on Hank, but I didn’t get the chance.”

“He’s dead, though,” I said.

“I know that. I saw his body where he crawled under that tree, at least part of it. You left the message on the mirror for me, didn’t you?”

Maybe I still had a bluff left in me. “Message? What are you talking about?”

Nicole wasn’t buying it. “Don’t kid a kidder. It was the two of you. Is that what gave me away, that lipstick on my sleeve? You saw that, didn’t you?”

I nodded. This was hopeless. It was clear that Nicole was nearly out of patience with us.

I had one chance left. If I could lunge out at her, then maybe Grace could get the weapon if I managed to dislodge it somehow. I would most likely die, but she’d at least have a fighting chance. Then again, maybe we’d get lucky and the gun would misfire again.

I shot out from my hands and feet, and just at that moment, as though we’d timed it perfectly, Grace was just a single beat behind me.

We still might have died if Celia hadn’t come around the corner at that moment swinging a heavy branch at her sister’s head. She screamed a horrific war cry just as Grace and I got to Nicole. If the cold-blooded killer hadn’t begun to turn toward her sister, one of us would have probably been dead, but it had been enough of a distraction to take the gun off us for a moment, and that was all we needed.

As Grace and I hit her legs nearly simultaneously, I could feel the impact of Celia’s branch on Nicole’s body. She fell on top of Grace and me, and for a moment I thought one of us still might get shot, but I soon realized that Nicole wasn’t in any shape to kill anyone else; she was unconscious.

Celia had aimed for her sister’s head, and it had evidently been a direct hit.

“Are you two okay?” Celia asked, her voice shaking as she stared down at her sister. “Did I kill her?”

I checked for a pulse and found one immediately. “You managed to knock her out, but she’s still alive. Does anyone have anything we can tie her hands with?”

“Why don’t we use her fancy belt?” Grace suggested. “It must have cost her a fortune, so it’s only fitting, right?”

I did as she suggested, and then Grace said, “We couldn’t have planned that better if we’d tried.”

“Sometimes quick action is better than a well-thought-out plan,” I said.

“Should we just leave her here?” Celia asked.

“Not on your life,” I said. “I don’t care if we have her gun
and
she’s unconscious. I will never turn my back on your sister again.”

“Smart thinking,” Celia said. “Neither will I.”

With Nicole’s hands bound, I grabbed one leg and Grace grabbed the other. We dragged the killer out of the maze and into the lawn in front of it, no doubt ruining her precious outfit in the process.

I couldn’t have cared less.