Manic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 6) (12 page)

Warren stretched his hands out in front of him, looking at the dried blood.

“Cin, how could… how could…” he started saying, but then his frail voice gave out like a skinny old mule carrying a heavy load.

I put an arm around his shoulders, which felt small and bony.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”

The words came out as hardly above a whisper.

Because the truth of the matter was, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t okay.

How could it be with Rip’s blood all over his hands?

How could it be when the brew house smelled of gunpowder?

I glanced over at Daniel, who was talking to Aileen and writing something down on his official Sheriff’s Office notepad.

As far as I could piece together, Warren had been the one to find Rip Lawrence’s lifeless body here in the brew house. Aileen arrived shortly after, saw the body herself, and had let out the bloodcurdling scream that had stopped everybody dead in their tracks.

I had plenty of questions, but for the time being, I tried to focus on the good that I could find in the situation.

For one, Warren was alive.

He hadn’t had a heart attack or an accident, the way I had thought when I first ran in here like a bat out of hell.

He was here, his heart beating, breathing, if not completely coherent.

“I just… I walked in and he was just… on the floor…” Warren started saying again, his voice shaking. “And the blood.. and the way he looked just...”

He held his hands out again, staring at them like they were a thing apart from him.

“Maybe we should wash those,” I said, nodding toward the sink in the back. “How does that sound?”

He nodded solemnly, still staring at his hands like they belonged to somebody else.

I stood up, nudging him along.

But before we could get very far, we were stopped.

“Don’t be doing that, young lady,” he said, leaping out in front of us. “Don’t be touching
a single thing
in here.”

Chapter 26

Christmas River Police Department Captain Lou Ulrich took off his American flag baseball cap, and glared at Warren and me with a searing, righteous expression. An expression that sure as hell hadn’t been there when he’d ordered his third IPA in the pub only moments earlier.

“I’m only trying to—” I started.

“You were only trying to destroy crime scene evidence,” Lou said, interrupting me. “Now step away from him, Mrs. Brightman.”

“Don’t you talk to them that way,” Daniel said, putting his notepad down and getting between us and Lou.

The pudgy police captain held up his hands.

“Didn’t mean nothing personal by it,” he said. “But your wife was just trying to destroy critical evidence. I would think, you being a law man yourself, you’d understand how someone in my shoes might view that.”

Daniel stepped closer to him.

“No I don’t know. Enlighten me,” Daniel growled.

Lou shrugged.

“Someone like me who just happened upon you all might think you were trying to cover something up,” he said. “I mean,
think
about it, Brightman. You’re already in enough hot water as is. I wouldn’t think you’d want any more trouble.”

“This is all going to be handled above board, Lou,” Daniel said quickly. “But right now, I need you to leave. You’ve had several drinks, and you’re not in any condition to take over this investigation.”

Lou didn’t seem to hear Daniel. He pulled his phone out of the pocket of his pleated, khaki shorts.

Then he walked over to my grandfather and snapped a photo of his hands.

It took every ounce of self-restraint to keep from mauling the SOB.

“Just so there ain’t no misunderstandings about what we all saw here,” Lou said, backing away and taking more snapshots of the brewery and the blood-stained concrete. “We wouldn’t want any more of them misunderstandings, now would we?”

“Dammit, Lou, get the
hell
out of here,” Daniel said, brimstone and fire in each word.

Lou finally came to his senses. He walked out through the plastic curtain just as Sheriff’s Deputy Owen McHale walked in.

“I came as soon as I could, sir,” he said.

Daniel’s blood seemed to cool slightly at the sight of the young deputy.

“Owen, you’re taking lead on this.”

Owen’s face scrunched up in slight confusion as he noticed the blood on the concrete.

“But…”

“It’s a conflict of interest for me,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “I can’t.”

Then he came over to us.

“C’mon, Warren,” Daniel said gently, putting an arm around the old man’s shoulders. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Appreciation flooded Warren’s haunted eyes.

Chapter 27

If there was anything I knew after being on this earth for thirty-plus decades, it was that most problems in life could be solved, at least temporarily, by a steaming cup of coffee and a heaping slice of homemade pie.

But thus far, the portions of Whiskey Apple Pie and the mugs of Christmas River Mountain Roast I’d placed out on the diner table hadn’t solved a single thing.

“I know you’re tired, Warren,” Daniel said, leaning back in his chair. “I know you didn’t get much sleep last night. And I’m sorry to put you through this questioning again, but the more I know about what happened, the better I can make the situation. You understand?”

Warren nodded solemnly.

It was early morning, before the pie shop opened for the day. I was a walking corpse, kept upright only by several cups of strong black coffee and a couple of Advil. And I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling tired: Nobody had gotten much sleep after the night we’d had.

While just about everyone else in Christmas River was sleeping off their hangovers from the wild Fourth, Daniel, my grandfather, Aileen, and I were trying to figure how Rip Lawrence ended up murdered in Geronimo Brewing Company’s brew house.

And maybe more importantly:

We were trying to figure out who would have wanted him dead.

Warren rubbed his wrinkled face and started retelling the story yet again.

“About an hour after the fireworks show, I saw that we were going to need another keg of the Sparks Lake Stout before the night was through.”

“And you keep the kegs in the brew house?” Daniel asked, already knowing the answer, but asking again anyway.

Warren nodded.

“To keep them temperature controlled,” he said. “So Aileen and I head in there. The lights were out, which now that I think about it, was unusual. I had kept them on last I was in there so I wouldn’t run into anything if I needed that extra keg.”

Daniel nodded, writing down something in his notebook.

“So I go over and turn on the light and then suddenly…”

He swallowed hard.

“Suddenly, it’s like I’m in a
horror
movie.”

The old man’s voice trembled slightly at the end. He reached for his cup of coffee and took a long sip.

“Cin, you got anything to take the edge off of this coffee here?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

I went back into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels, a key ingredient in the Apple Whiskey pies.

I poured a healthy dollop into his cup.

“Should have thought of it sooner,” I said, leaving the bottle on the table.

Warren nodded gratefully and then reached for the refreshed mug, taking another long drink.  

“I tried to stop the bleeding,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his jacket sleeve. “That’s why my hands were the way they were when you saw me. He was bleeding from his chest, and I tried to stop it, but…”

Warren shook his head.

“I’ve seen men die before,” he said. “An accident in basic training in the army. And at the mill once. But you put things like that out of your mind. It’s the only thing you can do to cope with a thing like death. But then you forget just what it really feels like to see a man die.”

He stared off into the wall behind us, the whites of his eyes the color of aged papyrus.

“He didn’t deserve to go like that,” Warren said. “I don’t care what kind of fella he was. That’s no way to go.”

Warren’s words just hovered in the air above of us for a moment like a black moth.

I stole a glance at Aileen.

She was staring down vacantly at the diner table, appearing to still be in a state of deep shock.

“Was he alive when you got there?” Daniel asked Warren.

The old man nodded.

“Just barely,” he said. “He was blue in the face. All that blood just…”

“Did he say anything?”

“He started to,” he said. “But he didn’t finish. He said the word ‘hail.’ Maybe he was hallucinating. Then he…”

Warren trailed off again.

“There’s, uh, there’s something else,” he said. “I need to tell you about.”

He pulled something from the pocket of his jeans.

“Rip didn’t come to Geronimo last night just to try our beer,” he said. “I, uh, I invited him over special.”

“How come?” Daniel asked.

With trembling hands, Warren unfolded a piece of ruler-lined paper and straightened it out on the table.

I felt my gut tighten at the sight of it.

“I was hopin’ to have a heart to heart with Rip,” he said, tapping the paper. “I needed to talk to him about
this
.”

I felt my mouth drop open slightly, recognizing the jagged, unsteady scrawl on the page.

“YOU’LL REGRET TONIGHT FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE,” it read.

“Cinny knows what this is,” he said. “I told her about it. Somebody had been leaving notes like these on the pub door for the past few weeks. Someone who I thought had to be Rip. Who else would care about us opening? So I called Rip over to confront him about it. That’s what he was doing there last night.”

“And did you?” Daniel said. “Did you confront him?”

Warren nodded.

“What’d he say?”

“That he didn’t do it,” Warren said. “That he wouldn’t dream of sabotaging a fellow brewer like that. That to do that would be a violation of his ethics.”

Warren bit his lip as a heavy silence fell over the room.

“Tell me the truth, Daniel,” he finally said. “As a law enforcement officer, this looks bad to you, don’t it?”

Daniel looked at the page and then back up to the old man.

He cleared his throat. 

“The way something looks don’t matter a bit, Warren,” he said. “What matters is what actually happened. Which we’re going to find out. I give you my word.”

“Well I hope to God you do, son,” he said, his quaking hands reaching for the coffee cup. “Because right now, I got a feeling that I’m up a creek without a paddle, and I’m headed for a damn waterfall.”

He looked down glumly. Aileen grabbed a hold of his hand, but it didn’t appear to reassure the old man in the least.

Nobody had as much as touched their apple pie.

Chapter 28

“I just can’t believe something like that would happen,” she said, pacing the pie shop kitchen, the baby’s head resting peacefully on her shoulder. “I mean here in Christmas River? This isn’t that kind of town. People don’t just get… they don’t just get
murdered
.”

I looked up from the pan of recently roasted peaches in front of me.

Kara was saying the same thing that was said in countless small towns where a crime like this had taken place.

People always thought that small communities should be immune to murder, theft, and other crime, though I never understood why. The evils that existed in any big city existed easy enough in every wholesome, God-fearing small town in the world. All you had to do was go to a city council or school district board meeting to see that malice and other untoward sentiments did indeed exist in the hearts of small-town folk.

Murder may not have been a regular customer in Christmas River, but it sure as hell wasn’t a foreigner, neither.

“And I just… I just can’t believe that it was
Rip
who was murdered,” Kara continued. “Remember how crazy I was about him during senior year when he worked at the Gas Mart? How I made you come with me there to strut up and down the aisles and try to get his attention? For a while there I was convinced I was going to be the next Mrs. Lawrence.”

She shook her head at what I imagined was the memory of her misspent efforts.

“Well, I’m glad it didn’t turn out that way,” I said. “You make a much better Mrs. Billings.”

She smiled warmly.

“I think so, too,” she said, looking down at the precious baby in her arms.

These days, it was easy to forget that once upon a time, Kara had zero immunity to bad boys like Rip Lawrence.

“What do you think he wanted to talk to you about?” she said, peering hard at me.

I’d told her about Rip’s little visit to my pie shop. About how he’d wanted to talk to me about something. How odd it had been, considering how he’d never said so much as a full sentence to me before.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He said it had to do with a mutual friend. I thought he meant Warren. Maybe he wanted to talk about Geronimo Brewing or something.”

I wished to God that I hadn’t blown him off the way I had that afternoon. Now, I would never know what it was he wanted to tell me. Or whether it had any connection to his demise.

“Did he say anything else?” Kara asked.

I had debated not telling her about the last part. But I figured now that the man was dead, it wasn’t my place to censor the things he’d said.

“He mentioned you.”

“Me?” Kara said, lifting her eyebrows.

“Yeah,” I said. “He asked what you were up to these days. I told him, and he said to give you a message.”

“A message?”

“He said that should you find yourself
unhappily married
anytime soon, that his door was open. And that he always did like you. He was, uh, just involved with somebody back in the day and that you were too young then. Jailbait, is what he called you. But nowadays, since you’re all grown up, he’d reconsider dating you.”