Murder in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (16 page)

He didn’t look at me, and I knew I hadn’t gotten through to him.

If he could just hear me out. If I could just explain it, if he just understood what I had gone through for the past two years and what I had learned in the past of 48 hours.

But I wouldn’t get my chance to tell him.

“You should get back in there,” he said. “I’ve got a few things to do, too.”

“Daniel, I—”

“It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll talk later.”

He walked away from me, into the packed auditorium. I wanted to chase after him, tell him to stop, to listen to me, that nothing was more important than he hear me out on this. That what I felt for him was more important than the bloody knife or someone trying to frame me or broken gingerbread houses or winning stupid competitions.

But I couldn’t seem to make my feet move after him. I stood, stunned, trapped in some sort of web I couldn’t get out of. Just gazing at the empty hallway where he had been.

Chapter 41

The crowd was starting to get antsy.

The judges had been conversing now for half an hour and it appeared that they still hadn’t chosen a winner yet.

I felt the knot in my stomach tighten. I watched Bailey from across the room. Evan was standing beside her. They looked like a happy couple. Like he hadn’t just kissed me in the hallway.

It made me want to vomit, realizing that where Bailey was now, I was two years ago. Evan and I had looked like the perfect couple. He was good at that. Good at being one half of the perfect couple. Even when he was cheating on the other half.

I looked at him with disgust. How foolish I had been.

I searched the crowd, looking for Daniel, for his trademark cowboy hat, for that tall, graceful figure, but I didn’t see him anywhere.

I sighed.

I wondered if I should find Sheriff Trumbow and tell him about Bailey and the evidence of her sabotage.

But then I remembered how he treated me the last time I brought Bailey up.

With suspicion.Like I was the jealous ex-wife who wanted to frame her.

Frame
her
. That was funny.

“What are they talking about already?” Kara said, shaking out her arms out nervously. “There’s nothing to discuss. Ours is the best.”

I tried to smile, but had a tough time doing it.

I just wanted the judges to come out and announce the winner. I didn’t even care if it was us anymore.

I just needed to get this over so I could talk to Daniel.

I couldn’t focus on anything else.

“Hey, you still alive there, Cin?” Kara asked, waving a hand in front of my face.

I shook my head.

“I’m just tired,” I lied. “I just want this to be over.”

“I know what you mean,” Kara said. “When this is all over I’m going to take a giant na—”

“Cinnamon Peters,” a deep voice said from behind me.

The voice was familiar.

I turned around, my heart dropping floor after floor, down, down, down as I realized what was going on.

Sheriff Trumbow was standing in front of me, an authoritative look on his face. To my right, a camera with an eager-looking reporter was leering at me.

My mouth suddenly went as dry as the high deserts of Eastern Oregon.

I couldn’t say anything.

All I could think was:

Sheriff Trumbow, you son of a...

“Cinnamon Peters, you’re under arrest for the murder of Mason Barstow.”

I gripped the table, and looked around at all the eyes staring at me.

None of it had seemed real until this moment. Mason’s death, the break-in, the knife on the porch.

But now, now, it was more real than I could possibly have imagined.

As real as the cold steel bars of a jail cell.

Chapter 42

The sheriff had grabbed my wrists and started placing metal cuffs on them when a scream ripped through the crowd.

It was a scream of pain, of agony, of frantic hurt.

“Get this goddamned animal off me!” a woman screamed. “Get it off me!”

Sheriff Trumbow loosened his grip on my wrists. The news reporter and her camera man stood on their tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd of people.

There were too many people in the crowd to see what was going on.

Sheriff Trumbow looked at me sternly.

“Don’t you go anywhere,” he said.

He let go of my wrists and started pushing his way through the crowd, his big frame bumping people left and right.

“Move it, folks,” he said. “Make way!”

For the most part they didn’t listen to him, and he had to fight his way through.

“Get Mason’s goddamn runt away from me!” the voice cried again.

There was something familiar in the voice. But in the high-pitched shrieks, I had trouble placing it.

I watched as the sheriff got knocked aside by a tourist who had accidently backed up into him. He was useless.

I disobeyed the sheriff. I left where I was standing and went away from the crowd, sweeping around, threading through the masses until the cries became louder and louder. I pushed my way through, finally making it to the huddle of people surrounding whoever was being attacked.

I saw the familiar cowboy hat, and squeezed through.

Daniel was looking down at the woman on the ground.

I followed his gaze.

And my mouth fell open.

Chapter 43

Huckleberry had a hold of Gretchen O’Malley’s leg like it was a drumstick that someone had used to beat him with, and he was getting his revenge.

He let out a low guttural growl and held his jaw firmly clamped on her calf. He shook it, and she screamed again, her cries echoing through the gymnasium.

The strange thing was, though, that nobody was doing anything. It was as if we were stuck in a snow globe, watching the scene unfold in a glass orb of water.

Daniel had the leash wrapped around his hand, but he wasn’t tightening it. He was just staring down at Gretchen, a look of perfect understanding on his face.

“Will someone please help that woman!” Sheriff Trumbow shouted from somewhere back in the crowd.

“Yes, please help!” she shouted.

Huckleberry shook her leg again and she let out another cry.

Daniel suddenly kneeled down beside her.

“You killed him, didn’t you?” Daniel said. “You killed Mason Barstow.”

“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she cried, her face red and puffy, her hair a tangled mess.

“You do, I know you do. The dog knows you did it and so do I. Say it.”

She tried to lash out at Huckleberry, but he came back at her tenfold.

She screamed again. It was bordering on torture, now. I placed a hand on Daniel’s shoulder, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“She’s bleeding, Danie—”

“Fine!” she cried. “I did it! But I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to do it. I swear!”

Daniel pulled back on the leash, and Huckleberry was yanked backwards. He continued to growl though, a look of insane vengeance in his eyes.

I knew at that moment, seeing the anger in little Huck’s eyes, that it was true.

The dog didn’t lie.

Gretchen had killed Mason. And Huckleberry had seen it happen.

And now he was avenging his dead master.

Gretchen moaned in pain, and finally Sheriff Trumbow appeared, red in the face and out of breath.

“Someone call this woman an ambulance!” he cried out. “And you get that mutt out of here, Brightman!”

Sheriff Trumbow saw me, and then pushed his way over to me.

“Cinnamon Peters, you’re under arrest for the murder of—”

“No,” Daniel said, standing up from his position kneeling over Gretchen. “This is who you want here, Sheriff.”

He stood in front of me, protecting me, and then nodded to Gretchen, who was whimpering in a fetal position on the cold auditorium floor.

“This is your killer,” he said, nodding to her.

Chapter 44

There was no trip to Hawaii for Kara or me.

There was no trip to Hawaii for Gretchen either. Or Bailey for that matter.

Nobody got the grand prize. Because after the freak show that had taken place at the competition, after Christmas River showed up on every news station radar for 500 miles around, the annual Gingerbread Junction Competition was cancelled for the first time since anyone could remember.

The organizers came out with a statement saying they were wrong in letting it continue after Mason was found murdered under suspicious circumstances. They said their actions had been unbecoming of such a prestigious competition. One of the organizers stepped down, and there were promises of regulating next year’s competition so it wouldn’t ever get out of hand again.

There was a lot of national media attention. A lot of stories about Gretchen and Mason, and how the murder unfolded. Some of them even mentioned me and how I found the body behind my shop, and that Gretchen had tried to frame me, her gingerbread junction archenemy.

I couldn’t complain with the publicity, though. It brought a flood of tourists to my shop. Tourists who came in to get the gory details of the murder and left with a full stomach of homemade pie. Tourists who left behind generous tips.  

It wasn’t even Christmas yet, and I had already doubled my earnings from the December before.

The details of the murder eventually came out, though I heard it mostly from second hand sources.

Even after everything I had seen, I still had trouble believing it all.

Nobody knew exactly how long the affair had gone on for. It could have been years, or just a few months. The first record of it was a credit card receipt from the High Springs Lodge four months earlier. Gretchen had bought dinner for two there. Mason, a room. Both were on the same night.

It was hard for me to imagine… the two of them. They were both so old, so past the reasonable age to do something like that, if there ever was a reasonable age to do something like that.

From there, though, it appeared that things went south. In a search of Gretchen’s house, they found a note stuffed inside the base of a lamp on her nightstand that was written by Mason.

Promises had been made, and promises appeared to have been broken. Mason was going to tell Gretchen’s husband about the affair.

Apparently, it never got to that point, though.

One thing I wondered a lot after all the details came out was whether or not Gretchen had gone on a walk with him that day planning to kill him. She’d brought the knife along. That showed premeditation of some sort.

But maybe she only wanted to threaten him, or get him to listen or get him to leave her alone.

But either way, the story ended the same. With Mason dead in the woods, a knife wound in his chest, the snow around him red with his blood.

But there was one thing Gretchen hadn’t counted on.

She hadn’t counted on Huckleberry.

She must have just expected him to run away, but he didn’t.

He attacked her. Police found partially healed bite wounds on her calf, the same one he later grabbed a hold of at the competition.

She broke free, though, made it out of the woods, and got in her car, leaving it all behind.

But then she realized that in all the terror and excitement of the moment, she’d forgotten one thing.

The knife.

She’d left the knife behind. Without knowing if they’d be able to trace it back to her somehow.

The police thought that she probably took some time to think about her next move, and finally settled on the wild notion of framing me for the murder. Our gingerbread rivalry was well-documented, and police believe she looked at it as killing two birds with one stone.

At some point, she left the knife on my back porch, sometime after she got word that Mason’s body was found.

The police said that she also broke into my shop to draw attention and move the process along a little bit, but they had no real proof on that end.

And besides. I knew better on that one.

That particular instance of breaking the law still had Bailey’s name written all over it.

But since there was no evidence to support what I knew, there was no way I could press charges.

And besides, even if there was, I didn’t know if I would have pressed them. I had already gotten back at Bailey. And my form of revenge had been way better than breaking a window and reducing a gingerbread house to a pile of rubble.

Gretchen was now in police custody, charged with murder in the first degree pending an official trial date.

When I thought about it, part of me couldn’t help but feel sorry for Gretchen O’Malley. I didn’t know why. She’d tried to frame me for murder, and if it hadn’t been for Huckleberry, I’d be the one sitting in that cold jail cell.

But I thought back to that day she’d come into my shop, right before the competition. And looking back, I now realized what I saw was an unsure woman, not necessarily a malicious one. She’d done something bad, and she knew it. And she’d come into my shop that day with a guilty conscience.  

I’d disliked Gretchen since the very moment I’d met her nearly two decades ago. She represented the opposite of what I wanted to be. She was snobby, cold, and harsh.

But she was human, too. Just like any of us, she’d gotten caught up in a web of love, lies, and deceit. It got to the point where she couldn’t see straight anymore, and she lost her way. The same as getting caught out in a blizzard. She’d lost all sense of direction.

So much so that she felt she had to resort to murder to free herself from it.

There were parts of her story I could relate to. Parts of it that I knew could have easily been me, in another lifetime.

I felt sorry for her. And her story, her fall, had given me some much-needed perspective.

Winning wasn’t everything. Trips to Hawaii were nice, but in the big scheme of things, Hawaii was just a place on the map.

There were more important things.

More important things I had to take care of.

Chapter 45