A Death in Duck: Lindsay Harding Cozy Mystery Series (Reverend Lindsay Harding Mystery Book 2) (2 page)

For the first time in her four years of working as a hospital chaplain at the Mount Moriah Regional Medical Center, Lindsay did not have to work on the holiday. In fact, her boss and best friend, Rob Wu, had miraculously given her the entire week off, from Christmas Day until New Year’s Day. This was unprecedented; Rob usually did everything in his power to schedule her for punishing back-to-back night shifts and as many holidays as he could manage. Looking back on his generosity during the weeks that followed, Lindsay realized that she should have known something was amiss.

Teresa peeked around the door. “Okay, kids! It’s time for dessert and presents.”

Lindsay was just drying her hands on a towel when she heard Warren’s phone start to buzz. They had been dating for almost six months, and she had come to learn that even on his days off, Warren was never really off duty. As one of only two detectives, he could be summoned to work whenever a serious incident took place. As he listened to the caller, Warren’s face took on a grave expression. He hung up the phone and looked at her. “I’m sorry, Lins. I’ve got to go.”

“But we haven’t even opened presents.” Lindsay realized she sounded childish, but she couldn’t keep the disappointment out of her voice.

“I’m sorry, but it’s important. They need me.”

“They always need you.” Warren’s dedication to his work was one of the things that had drawn Lindsay to him when they began dating the previous summer. Working together, the two of them had kept an innocent woman out of prison. While others on the New Albany force had been content to accept easy answers, Warren always kept pushing until he arrived at the truth. Lately, however, Lindsay had begun to realize that Warren’s ambition and drive had serious downsides. Whenever they talked about the future, Warren made it clear that if anyone’s career was going to be sacrificed on the altar of marriage and family, it would be hers.

Warren pocketed his phone and replied, “And the hospital always needs you. How many times have you covered somebody else’s shift or stayed late when you didn’t even need to?”

“If I’m sitting with a patient, I can’t just get up and walk out because my shift is over. It’s not like, ‘Oh, hey, person who was just diagnosed with terminal cancer, it’s 7 o’clock now. Can your spiritual crisis wait until tomorrow? I’m supposed to go and see
Thor
with my boyfriend in 20 minutes.’” Her words sharpened with each syllable.

“Look, Lins. I’m disappointed, too. You know I’d rather stay.” He placed his hands gently on her shoulders.

“I know.” She nodded and tried to smile. “Well, how am I supposed to get home? You drove me.”

“I’m sure Gibb can give you a lift if you want to stick around for dessert.”

The memory of sixteen tiny sets of claws was still too fresh; she wasn’t sure she could handle the 20-minute drive home with Tanner, Gibb, and the not-so-Fab Four. “That’s okay. Really. I’ll come with you. You can drop me off after you finish.”

“It could be awhile. Someone has,” he paused and lowered his voice almost to a whisper, “passed beyond.”

Despite the macabre topic, Lindsay couldn’t keep the amusement out of her voice. “‘
Passed beyond
?’ Are you sure they didn’t ‘Go to their eternal rest?’ or ‘Cross over Jordan’s River? or ‘Join the choir invisible’? You can tell me ‘somebody died,’ you know. Chaplains deal with death and dying almost every day.”

Warren put his hands up in a mock gesture of surrender. “Sorry. You win. I forgot that you’re the Cadaver Queen, Extinction Expert.”

“Very funny.”

“Come on, Lindsay. I know it’s a let down. I’ll make it up to you next week. We’ll spend the whole New Year’s holiday together. No interruptions. I promise.” He looked annoyingly handsome—the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up, his full lips curled into a playful smile.

There were occasions when Lindsay found Warren’s even-temperedness irritating—his near-inability to become emotional sometimes felt like an implied judgment of her own, more volatile nature. Today, however, she allowed herself to be soothed. “I’m sorry, too. Just take me with you, okay? If you get stuck at work, I can get Rob to come and pick me up after he gets off work.”

They headed into the living room to give their apologies to Teresa, Tanner and Gibb, who were sitting near the fire drinking mugs of hot apple cider.

“At least let me make you up a plate of desserts to take with you,” Teresa protested. “I can’t let you leave here unless I can be sure that you’re more stuffed than the turkey.” She advanced toward the adjacent dining room but stopped in mid-stride. “Oh dear.”

On the sideboard, spattered with chocolate, stood Ringo, George, John and Muffin. Lindsay had left her chair pushed back from the table when she went into the kitchen to clean, and the dogs had managed to use the chair as base camp for their ascent onto the sideboard. They had bypassed the cookies, the fruitcake, and the chocolate fountain and headed straight for Lindsay’s Yule log. Their furry orange manes and tiny paws were painted with smears of frosting. They had hollowed out the entire middle of log, leaving only an empty shell of icing at the sides. The whole scene looked like a shoebox diorama of miniature lions devouring an unlucky wildebeest.

Tanner rushed past and gathered all four dogs into her arms at once. “Oh, no!” she screeched. “Oh, good lord!”

Lindsay stepped past Teresa toward the Christmas carnage on the sideboard. “It’s okay. Don’t worry, really,” she said. As soon as she caught sight of Tanner’s expression, however, she realized that the concern had been directed at the dogs, not at her.

Tanner’s black eyes stared accusingly at Lindsay. “Don’t you know that chocolate is poison for dogs?! You might as well have baked strychnine muffins!”

“There’s only milk chocolate in the recipe,” Lindsay quickly reassured her. “I think they’d have to eat pounds of it before it’s really dangerous.”

Tanner ignored her. “Gibb, get our coats. I’ll meet you in the car. We’re gonna have to take ‘em all to the animal hospital and have their little stomachs pumped.” She stroked the dogs as tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “Hang in there, babies. Mama’s got you now.” She rushed out the door without a backwards glance.

They stood for a moment in shocked silence.

“Well, guess we’d better head out, too. Thanks for supper, Mama,” Warren said, leaning down to kiss his mother’s cheek. “Sorry we have to rush off.”

“That’s okay, baby. I know how important your job is,” Mrs. Satterwhite said, tousling his hair affectionately.

“Yes. Thank you so much for the lovely meal, Mrs. Satterwhite,” Lindsay said. Gibb had retrieved the jackets and was pushing past them out the door. “Please tell Tanner I’m sorry about the chocolate. I didn’t really intend for the cake to be eaten by dogs.”

As he passed her, Gibb uttered the first words that he’d spoken all night. “Yeah, it looked more like you intended it to be put in a slop bucket and fed to hungry pigs.”

Chapter 2

Eleven p.m. found Lindsay sitting in the passenger’s seat of a New Albany Police patrol car, paging through a two-year-old copy of
Car and Driver
. She suspected that the car had been used earlier that day to transport a “drunk and disorderly”—the strong smell of PineSol didn’t quite manage to mask the reek of sweat and vomit.

She and Warren had driven straight from Teresa’s house to Gilead Manor, a run-down trailer park that stood in a patch of flood-prone acreage at the edge of New Albany. The trailers were scattered willy-nilly among the trees, as if an enormous hand had dropped them from the sky and then left them where they fell. The crime scene was inside an aluminum double-wide, cordoned off with police tape. Floodlights had been erected both inside and out, and they lit the place up so that it looked like the set of a tawdry B-movie.

Warren had stayed only briefly before driving off to make further inquiries, so one of his fellow officers had allowed Lindsay to set up camp inside his squad car. She had trouble imagining that the NYPD or the LAPD would have allowed a detective’s girlfriend to hang out at an active crime scene. However, in the hinterlands of the North Carolina Piedmont, things ran a little differently. The New Albany volunteer fire department changed the batteries in old ladies’ smoke detectors. The mayor of Mount Moriah worked as the assistant manager of the tractor supply store. And if the local police found a drifter wandering along the interstate, they often took him home to their own houses, where he’d be given a good meal and some clean clothes.

Lindsay sat with the car windows cracked open, managing to catch occasional snatches of conversation. From what she heard—“…self-inflicted gunshot wound” and “…history of mental instability”—it sounded like they were treating the death as a cut-and-dried suicide.

At last, Lindsay saw the lights of Warren’s car heading up the gravel track. She got out of the car and crunched along the path to greet him. “You’re still here?” he asked, not unkindly.

“‘Fraid so,” she shrugged.

“Sorry this is taking so long.” He looked toward the crime scene.

Carrying a laden stretcher, two uniformed men struggled through the bushes, garbage, and trampled chicken wire that surrounded the trailer. They loaded the body into the back of an ambulance that was waiting to convey it to the coroner’s office. “I’d better get on back inside and see what else they’ve turned up for me,” Warren said.             

They stood in silence a moment, watching the men go about their grim work. “How’d it happen?” Lindsay asked.

“Gun. The woman was a drug addict. Psychiatric problems, too.”

“So, it was a suicide then,” Lindsay said quietly.

“It’s made out to look that way,” Warren said.

“What do you mean ‘made out to look that way’?”

“Well, I can’t say anything for definite until the autopsy’s done, but it just doesn’t add up to round numbers. On the face of it, it’s a suicide. There’s the mental history, hospitalizations for depression and whatnot. She was in a bad way with drugs, painkillers mostly. There’s a note sitting in there on the table that says, ‘I’m sorry’. I was on the phone just now with the state crime lab. I convinced them to go ahead and run the prints, even though it’s only being treated as a suicide for right now. The fingerprints on the note are hers—only hers. She was shot clean through her mouth, point blank, at an angle consistent with somebody holding a gun themselves. There were powder burns on her right hand and she still had hold of the gun. Got them to do the prints on that, too. Nobody’s else’s were on it. All that would point to suicide.”

“Sure sounds that way,” Lindsay agreed.

“But her mouth troubles me.” Warren took a stick of chewing gum out of a packet. He unwrapped it carefully, folding the wrapper into a neat rectangle before placing it into his shirt pocket.

“Her mouth?” Lindsay prompted. She was accustomed by now to the way that Warren processed information. While Lindsay’s brain was a smoking wok that always cooked on full flame, Warren’s was more like a slow cooker. You added ingredients and set it for an all-day simmer.

“Yeah,” he said. “She was shot through the mouth. Right through the lips and teeth.”

“Her mouth was closed when she was shot?”

“It would appear so.”

“That is odd.” Lindsay knew from her work with suicidal patients in the hospital that, though women are much more likely to try to kill themselves, men are much more likely to succeed. This disparity was almost entirely down to the differing methods employed by men and women. Women favored pills; men often used guns. There was a theory that women didn’t like to leave a mangled corpse. They wanted to die prettier, with less violence. “Why would she have kept her mouth closed?”

              “I believe that’s what I’m getting ready to find out.” Warren chewed his gum vigorously. When he was describing the crime scene, he had switched into what Lindsay called his “Policeman Mode”—matter-of-fact and almost cold. “I’ll see if Vickers can take you home. I’ll more’n likely be tied up for at least another couple of hours.”

“You go ahead and get back there. Rob gets off work soon. I’m sure he can pick me up.” Lindsay rose up on her toes to kiss him goodbye. She noticed how his eyes darted to the crime scene—a split-second glance to make sure no one was watching—before he leaned down and gave her a quick peck on the lips. Warren’s reserved nature made him shy of even minor public displays of affection, and his strict professionalism sometimes caused him to hesitate to even acknowledge Lindsay in front of his co-workers and superiors. While she didn’t want or expect a passionate
Casablanca
kiss at a crime scene, part of her wished that she didn’t always have to compete with corpses for his attention.

Lindsay placed her hand on his arm. “Try not to work too hard. I’ll call you tomorrow.” She sighed as she watched him walk away. Her friend Rob would be finishing his evening shift at the hospital soon, and she hoped she could convince him to retrieve her. This same scenario had played out more than a few times over the previous months. She and Warren would be out somewhere when Warren would suddenly get called into work. Sometimes he’d drop Lindsay off at home on his way to the station. Sometimes she’d take his car and let him catch a ride home later. But, other times, like tonight, she found herself stranded. Almost always, one of Warren’s fellow officers would eventually offer her a lift home, but they would insist on making her sit in the back, behind the metal cage. It wasn’t easy for her, as a minister’s daughter and hospital chaplain, to explain why she was constantly being driven through Mount Moriah in the back of a squad car.

Whenever she called Rob, he would whine about having to drive out of his way to pick her up. He’d complain about it being too early (or too late). About the weather being too hot or too cold (or too rainy). He’d negotiate a free dinner or swap her a night shift for a day one. But he always came through in the end.

Tonight, however, no sooner than the words had left her mouth than Rob responded, “Of course, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“You’ll come? No jokes about following in my parents’ criminal footsteps and ending up in the back of a police car? No negotiations to get me to take your night shifts? Have you been possessed by whatever the opposite of a demon is?”

“An angel.”

“Is it? I don’t think angels possess people. Actually, I didn’t believe in demonic possession either until I had to spend an entire evening with Warren’s sister’s dogs. Those goggle-eyed monsters ate my log cake.”

“That’s awful. You worked so hard on that thing. You can tell me all about it when I get there. Are you hungry? Do you want me to bring you anything?”

“Wait, first you give me a whole week off over the holidays, and now you’re expressing concern about my physical and emotional well-being? Seriously, if you weren’t the only person I’ve ever met who speaks with a mixed North Carolina-Taiwanese accent, I’d be sure someone was impersonating you,” Lindsay replied.

Rob had been her best friend since their freshman year of college when he had come from Taiwan to study theology at the small Christian college that Lindsay had also attended. Even though they were completely devoted to one another, an outside observer would usually be hard pressed to tell their abiding friendship from a murderous animosity. Rob was always the first person to tell Lindsay when her hair looked weird, and she was always the first person to call him out when he made a bad decision at work. But there was no question between them that their friendship was as tough and resilient as a rubber ball.

Rob’s disturbing kindness continued for the whole ride home. He let Lindsay choose the radio station, he checked to make sure that the temperature was comfortable for her. She was beginning to get seriously freaked out. “Rob, what’s going on? Do you know something I don’t? Do I have only two weeks to live or something and no one has told me?”

“Can’t I just be nice to my best friend?”

“Not in my experience, no.”

“It’s late. You must be tired. I’ll see you tomorrow at Anna’s bachelorette party.”

Lindsay walked up to her house, noting with increasing alarm that Rob waited to check that she was safely inside before pulling away.

###
 

The next morning, as Lindsay stood in the hospital cafeteria dissolving multiple sugar packets into her coffee, she spied her friend Anna Melrose walking toward her. Anna was just finishing a night shift in Mount Moriah Medical Center’s ER, where she worked as a doctor. Although her shift had been relentlessly busy, Anna, as ever, looked fresh and cool. Her glossy brown hair was swept back into a loose knot. She looked much younger than her 40 years, and, though her hair had recently developed a single streak of gray near the crown, this had the strange effect of making her lovely, unlined face look even younger.

Anna took a sip of her coffee and frowned. “Blech. Would it kill them to put a Starbucks kiosk in here? This coffee tastes like burnt hair. Hey, speaking of poison, how are things with Warren? Rob said you poisoned his mom’s dogs?”

“They were his sister’s dogs. And I didn’t poison them. Well, I suppose I did
a bit
, but not intentionally. Not that I would hesitate to poison them intentionally.”

“I thought you liked dogs.”

“I like actual dogs. You know, ones that make themselves useful by herding sheep or fetching slippers. These little freaks do nothing but run around splitting everybody’s heads open with high-pitched yapping.”

“So, how did Warren handle it?”

“He ignored it and ran away to work.”

Anna raised her eyebrows. “Trouble in paradise?”

“I dunno. He just works all the time. And even when he’s not working, he’s thinking about work. And when he’s not working or thinking about work, he’s hanging out at his mom’s house, washing her car, fixing her computer, spreading her mulch…”

“And you want him to be spreading your mulch?” Anna asked with a mischievous smirk.

“Gross. That’s his mother’s mulch you’re talking about.”

“Look, Lins. This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. You’re no slacker when it comes to work. You’re both just going to have to decide whether or not this relationship is what you want.”

Lindsay frowned, tipping her face forward and looking at Anna over the top of her glasses. “It’s too early in the morning to go all Dr. Phil on me. Let’s talk about tonight. Are you ready to paint the town red?”

“It’s Sunday night in Mount Moriah. We’ll be lucky if we manage to paint the town a very pale pink,” Anna said.

Later that evening, Lindsay, Rob and Anna planned to celebrate Anna’s impending marriage to her neurosurgeon fiancé, Drew Checkoway. The bachelorette party would be an evening of homemade Chinese dumplings, board games, and cheap champagne at Rob’s house. Mount Moriah offered few venues for celebration. There were no bars, and the town’s few halfway decent restaurants were closed on Sundays. It seemed excessive to rent out the Knights of Columbus hall for just the three of them. They had briefly considered driving to the Olive Garden in New Albany, but the lure of Rob’s comfortable couch ultimately won out over all-you-can-eat bread sticks and salad. Even if they’d wanted to plan something more elaborate, Anna and Drew’s whirlwind courtship had left little time to do so. Only six months previously, Lindsay herself had been out on a few awkward dates with Drew. After their brief romance fizzled out, Anna and Drew began dating. A few months later, they got engaged, and their wedding was now set to take place on New Year’s Eve. They intended to hold a small ceremony in a hotel on North Carolina’s Outer Banks—only family and close friends.

“Are you sure you’re okay with such a low-key end to your years in the dating wilderness? I feel like I’m not fulfilling my maid of honor duty. You deserve something awesome. Do you want some strippers? Maybe I can get a last-minute deal on a really hairy guy with buckteeth.”

“Hmm.” Anna furrowed her brow.

“Yeah, I suppose when you’re marrying a gorgeous brain surgeon, I probably won’t be able to tempt you with bargain bin man candy. Oh! We could rent a karaoke machine!”

Anna smiled. “Honest to goodness, I just want the whole thing to be low-key. No fuss. We did a huge thing for my first marriage. Bachelorette party in Manhattan, limos, big church, princess dress, his and hers spray tans. You’ve seen the pictures. I was so over-primped, I looked like a toy poodle at the Westminster Dog Show. I’m never doing that again.”