Menace in Christmas River (Christmas River 8)

Menace in Christmas River

A Christmas Cozy Mystery

by

Meg Muldoon

Published by
Vacant Lot Publishing

Copyright 2016© by Meg Muldoon

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance whatsoever to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Meg Muldoon Collection

The Christmas River Cozy Mystery Series

Murder in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery
(Book 1)

Mayhem in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Book 2)

Madness in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Book 3)

Malice in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Book 4)

Mischief in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Book 5)

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

Magic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Book 7)

Roasted in Christmas River: A Thanksgiving Cozy Mystery Novella

The Cozy Matchmaker Mystery Series

Burned in Broken Hearts Junction: A Cozy Matchmaker Mystery (Book 1)

Busted in Broken Hearts Junction: A Cozy Matchmaker Mystery (Book 2)

The Dog Town USA Mystery Series

Mutts & Murder: A Dog Town USA Cozy Mystery (Book 1)

Coming Soon to Amazon

Bulldogs & Bullets: A Dog Town USA Cozy Mystery(Book 2)

Ginger of the West: A Broomfield Bay Cozy Mystery (Book 1) (with Jools Sinclair)

Missing in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Book 9)

Menace in Christmas River

by Meg Muldoon

Prologue

She could apologize all she wanted to.

She could pout and cry and sob and tell him that she still cared about him. Tell him that she hadn’t meant to rip his heart out like a butcher discarding an undesirable cut of meat. That she hadn’t meant to feed that still-beating heart to the dogs for everyone to see.

She could play the part of the sorry, remorseful ex.

It wouldn’t change what happened.

It wouldn’t change the last fifteen years, either.

She was a bad actress.

He stepped out from beneath the covered area and out onto the ice, as if daring it to bring him down.

At times like this, he wished he smoked. Wished he could afford to burn and incinerate the things that had given him his livelihood. Wished that he could be left alone to sulk and smoke and think his sour thoughts uninterrupted.

But nobody here would let him have so much as a moment to himself.

And now, he was stuck in this place. Stranded. With all of
them
.

He tilted his head up to the tombstone-grey sky, sucking in a deep breath of bitter, frosty mountain air, feeling the chunks of ice ping against his face.

Sometimes he wondered whether she had ever truly loved him. Countless times, he’d awakened in the middle of the night, panicked, fearing that she hadn’t. Fearing that she’d been just as bad of an actress back then as she was now. Only he’d been blind to it then.

The thought terrified him. Because if she hadn’t really loved him, then it meant that nobody had. Ever.

They threw themselves at him. They shouted for him. They claimed all they wanted was him.

But none of them really loved him. Not the real him.

Only she had.

But then, maybe not even her.

The ice showering down from the cruel sky was as cold as the dead space where his heart used to be.

Dead space that still somehow ached.A phantom pain that radiated out from the void, like a six-headed monster that just wouldn’t die. 

Nothing had been able to fill it, either. Not fame or fortune or glory.

Nothing had—

“Cliff?”

There they were again. Wanting something. Always wanting something from him.

Please…
just leave me alone!

He never knew what hit him.

Chapter 1

“Damn you, Cupid!” I muttered as the delicate chocolate wings broke apart in my hands. “Damn you and your stupid arrow, too!”  

The inflection of my voice rose as the three-dimensional chocolate cupid, which I had attempted to embellish with wings, collapsed altogether beneath my firm grip.

“Oh, for the love of Eros!”

For a few seconds, I just stood there, dumbstruck – completely stunned that not only had I just destroyed Cupid, but that I had destroyed him…
yet again
.

I leaned my head back, looking up at the ceiling. Then I let out a long, long groan.

The chocolate gods were punishing me. Though how I had ever ended up on their bad side in the first place was anybody’s guess.

It was the third time that my endeavor to make a large, elegant and whimsical cupid sculpture out of marbled chocolate had ended up in a pile of unrecognizable broken hunks and shards. That alone was frustrating. But what made it even worse was the fact that I couldn’t afford such mishaps at this stage. The annual
Valentine’s Day
Chocolate Championship Showdown
, the first one that Christmas River had ever hosted, was in less than four days. And if things continued like they were, then I’d be going to the competition this year with nothing but melted chocolate all over my hands.

I tossed the broken pieces down on the marble counter and stifled another frustrated sigh. Then I folded my arms and went over to the window in an effort to regain my cool.

Outside, the light spilling from the kitchen cast ghostly, ominous shadows on the forest floor as the trees swayed in a stiff February wind. A light layer of frost was starting to form on the branches, and though it was cold outside, it wasn’t anywhere near as cold as it could be this time of year. In fact, the past few weeks had been quite mild. Blue skies, temperatures in the high fifties during the day, and not a single snowflake… it had been unusual weather for February in Central Oregon.

After a moment, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the window pane.

My dark brown hair was tossed up high in a messy bun. My eyeliner had smeared, giving me a distinct
raccoony
look. And beneath my haphazardly-tied apron, I had misaligned the buttons on my cardigan.

I shook my head silently at myself.

I looked like the very definition of a woman who was in over her head.  

Why had I thought the Chocolate Championship Showdown would be as easy as The Gingerbread Junction? Why had I thought that little ol’ Cinnamon Peters – a self-taught baker with absolutely zero professional pastry training or expertise – could possibly compete with some of the best pastry chefs on the West Coast?

Sure, when it came to cookie houses and marzipan and the occasional sugar sculpture, I could compete with the best of them. And not only that, but I could win in most cases. I had done just that at this past December’s Gingerbread Junction, where, like most years, I’d crushed the competition.

But building art pieces out of chocolate… now
that
was an entirely different beast altogether.

Unlike hard sheets of cookie, chocolate was volatile, difficult to work with, and wholly unforgiving if the temperature was so much as half a degree off. In addition, the liquid stuff was messy, and it rebelled against the warm temperatures in my pie shop kitchen.

And while I had heard warnings about working with chocolate before entering in this February’s grandiose competition, I’d been foolish enough to think that it couldn’t be any more difficult than working with cookie dough and frosting.

Only now, mere days before the Championship, did I realize how foolish and overambitious I had been.

The last Gingerbread Junction win must have inflated my head to the size of a small planet for me to think that I’d be able to have a breath of a chance at competing in the Chocolate Championship Showdo—

“Ms. Peters?”

Startled, I glanced over my shoulder to find that there were more than just regrets and feelings of stupidity here in the kitchen with me.

A petite woman with a youthful face and eyes that were almost too big for it, stood in the doorway separating the dining room from the kitchen.

I shot a quick glance at the clock on the wall.

It was half past six, darker than a tar pit outside, and we’d sold out of every tin of Apple Whiskey, Chocolate Hazelnut, Cranberry Lime, Lemon Ginger, Mocha Chestnut, Pumpkin Gingersnap, Hubba Hubba Hazelnut Chocolate Cherry, and Moonshine Bourbon pie in the house hours ago.

The young woman shouldn’t have been standing there, as the front door to the shop should have been locked when we’d closed. But I supposed in the hectic frenzy of the last few hours, I had clear forgotten to lock up.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my chocolate-stained hands off on my old apron. “I’m afraid I’m fresh out of pie for the evening. But if you come back first thing tomorrow morning, I’ll be sure to have whatever flavor you’d like in a pink box with your name on it. On the house, too.”

I wasn’t the type who liked to say no to people. It just wasn’t in my nature. Whenever folks wandered in near or after closing time, I did my best to accommodate them with whatever I had on hand, even if it was with just a sliver of leftover pie and the last little bit of coffee in the pot. But tonight, I had far too much to do and so little time to be doing it in, to accommodate folks who wandered into my shop after hours.

Namely, I had to make sure that I didn’t make a complete fool of myself in front of some of the top pastry chefs on the West Coast at this weekend’s Chocolate Championship Showdown.

“But if you’d like a cup of coffee or tea, I can offer you that,” I said to the young woman, realizing that even though I knew I should, I just couldn’t turn somebody away outright.

And anyway, something about the stranger made me feel kind of sorry for her for some reason, though I couldn’t say exactly why. She was short and small-boned, and below her oversized bulky coat, a skirt that was slightly too long for her short legs peeked out. She had a thin nose and thin mouth, which only made those big deer-in-the-headlights eyes of hers more out of proportion with the rest of her face.

She wore her stringy blond hair in a high, tightly-wound bun, and she had a look about her of an overworked young professional – the kind that was more commonly seen in big cities. You didn’t often see those types in a small, easygoing town like Christmas River.