A Festival of Murder (23 page)

The tree line was
where Nicholas had found what he believed to be a candy wrapper. Someone with a
sweet tooth? And where had the candy come from? His shop? It occurred to him
that the killer could be a secret admirer of his. He shook off the thought for
the moment.

“There’s nothing
behind the Gingerbear,” he said. “Why would Rocky and his murderer be out in
the woods during the party? And I thought you said you were talking to people
on the radio at the time of Rocky’s death?”

“I can do two things
at once, can’t I?” Captain Sam pointed at a collapsed tripod leaning against
the wall beside the only window in the trailer that appeared recently cleaned.
A telescope was propped beside the tripod. “I was settin’ those radio idiots
straight while I was watchin’ what was happenin’ behind the Gingerbear. It’s
called multi-taskin’, Trilby.”

Nicholas bit the
side of his tongue. “Describe what you saw.”

“I seen ’em
struggling’, and then Rocky staggered like he been hit in the head, or maybe
punched. Dunno which. He went down, and he stayed down. That other person
hauled him up and carried him to the lake. Dumped him in like he was a bag o’
trash. Sent the boat in after ’im, guess to throw the hounds off the scent.”

“Captain Sam,”
Nicholas said very distinctly, “it’s imperative that you identify Rocky’s
attacker. You’re the only one who can bring about justice.”

“Maybe you should
be askin’ yourself who all was plannin’ somethin’ special for the festival,”
the other man retorted. Captain Sam fished a green plastic half-liter bottle
from amid two others on the floor and spat something brown into it. “Someone
who had the most to lose if Johnson messed around with ’em.”

“Everyone had a
motive.”

“But that night
someone had an extra special motive.”

“Why can’t you
just tell me?”

Captain Sam
winked. “‘Cuz none of this concerns me, Trilby, and I ain’t getting’ tangled up
in no courts and police stuff. I told you what I have only as a favor. On
account of that misunderstandin’ we had earlier with your cabin.”

He was lying and
he was afraid. Nicholas knew the signs, having seen it a time or two in the
bathroom mirror after surfacing from nightmares. Who was Captain Sam most
afraid of? The police or the killer?

“You’d be doing me
a bigger favor by telling me who did it,” Nicholas said sternly. “I’m the
police’s number one suspect. My alibi isn’t thick enough to fold into a paper
airplane. I need help, Captain Sam.”

“An’ I just gave
you all you need.”

Captain Sam heaved
himself to his feet and picked his way through the debris cluttering the floor
to open the door of the trailer. He held it open with one arm and glared back.
It was a hint Nicholas didn’t bother to resist.

Out in the cold
air of early morning, he glanced back. Captain Sam ducked back into the trailer
like an opossum crawling back into a trash can. It was apparent that the man
felt that his civic duty to Hightop had been well and truly fulfilled.

But for Nicholas,
learning that he had at some point looked the Hightop killer in the eye and
spoken to him or her made him feel more vulnerable than ever.

Nicholas
left Captain Sam’s place with the firm belief that the man had told him the
truth. Captain Sam’s unwillingness to point the finger at anyone convinced
Nicholas that the man didn’t have an agenda. Not one that made sense, anyway.
Crazy or not, he’d seen something, and it was now Nicholas’s job to piece
together the clues the man had given him.

To
do that he faced an avalanche of mysteries: Why had the killer confronted Rocky
Johnson behind the Gingerbear? What was the “something special” that Captain
Sam claimed the killer had been preparing that night? Who was shoveling snow
around Nicholas’s property and why? The killer was a neighbor, someone he’d
already interacted with. So why couldn’t he figure out who’d done it?

After
a quick shower and a change of clothes, he jumped in his Subaru and headed to
the scene of the crime. When Nicholas arrived at the Gingerbear, he wasn’t
surprised in the slightest to find Candy pulling the lunch shift. Phoebe’s MO
since the killing had been to be conspicuously absent, and oh, did Nicholas
feel like a traitor for using Phoebe’s name and “MO” in the same thought.
Nonetheless, it was the truth, and he tried not to read too much into that as
he left the inn and drove away from Main Street.

New,
different questions swirled through his head with as much force as the snow
eddies buffeting his windshield. Why had Phoebe been seen with a shovel at
night? What explained her absences from work and her excessively skittish
behavior whenever she was questioned about them? Why hadn’t she ever agreed to
go on a date with him?

Granted,
the last question was less urgent than the others and not likely to get her
arrested (even though Nicholas did consider it a crime), but it was still high
on Nicholas’s list of Questions to Ask. He’d been enamored with Phoebe since
the moment he’d laid eyes on her. The lunch special that day had been chicken
potpie, and Phoebe had served it to him piping hot and with a faintly
dismissive air that had set his heart to fluttering. He could still remember
her first words to him: “I’m supposed to push the special. Do you want it?”
That chicken potpie was the best he’d eaten then or since, and he had the
strong feeling it was because Phoebe had been the one to serve it to him.

But
nearly a year had passed since then, and the closest he’d come to wrangling a
date from her was the dinner with Kevin and the twins. It had ended on a
positive note; he was convinced that had they been alone they would have
staggered to his bed and had their wicked ways with each other. But it was all
about momentum, and with Phoebe frequently absent, Nicholas feared he was
losing whatever traction he’d gained and was gradually sliding back into
permanent bachelorhood with Winchester as company.

Phoebe’s
car was in the driveway when he pulled up to her cabin. It was one of four
cabins in Hightop that an enterprising carpenter had built and now rented out
from his home in Lyons at the base of the Rockies. Phoebe’s home was heavily
frosted with snow and the stone path to her front door was buried beneath more
snowfall, which meant she hadn’t left the cabin since last night’s snow. He
tramped through it, a new concern growing that she might be ill. He was
reluctant to use the gargoyle knocker on her door, afraid of disturbing her.
But he’d come all this way. And he needed her help.

Her
face registered surprise but not dismay when she answered the door. “What are
you doing here, Nicholas? Is everything all right?”

“I’m
sorry to disturb you at home, Phoebe. May I come in?”

Apparently,
he wasn’t as sneaky as he’d hoped, for a degree of suspicion shaded her eyes. “What
is this about?”

His
smile felt charmless and he detested the feel of it on his face. “Please,
Phoebe, just let me in, and we’ll talk.”

When
she stepped back with slumped shoulders, he felt as victorious as a man who’d
knocked aside an elderly woman to grab the last gallon of water during a
hurricane warning.

It
was the first time he’d stepped foot inside her home. Since she’d once confided
to him that she was interested in Wicca, he’d expected her home to look like
the interior of a haunted house, with fake cobwebs hanging in the corners,
shelves filled with jarred animal parts preserved in formaldehyde, and maybe a
cauldron bubbling in the hearth. To his pleasant surprise, her place was
quaintly Victorian, favoring shades of light blue. At her urging, he took a
seat on a plush sky blue velvet sofa while she took a wingchair upholstered in
a darker shade. She drew up her legs beneath her. Between them sat an oval
rosewood table with scalloped edges and clawed feet. The walls were bare but
the mantle above a stone fireplace was cluttered with ceramic figurines of
ballet dancers and shy lovers.

“This
is lovely,” he said honestly as he looked around himself.

“Expected
everything to be black and red, did you?” Her smile was wry.

“Something
like that.”

She
tucked her black skirt around her legs. He could see her bare feet beneath the
hem. Her toenails were little shells of pink lacquer.

“Why
are you here, Nicholas?”

“I’m
concerned about you. You missed another day of work.”

She
looked away. Her neck reminded him not of a swan but of an ivory tower that
couldn’t be scaled.

“You
know I value a person’s privacy more than most,” he said when she remained
silent. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think the visit was justified.”

Her
attention remained fixed on the ice-hazed window for so long that he began to
wonder if she intended to ignore him until he left.

“I
trust you,” she said at last. Her dark gaze fell on him with all the
hopelessness of a drowning woman embracing a plank of wood. “I’ve been calling
out of work.”

His
amorphous fears that she held a dark, mysterious secret crystallized into sharp
panic. “Are you ill?”

“No.
That’s not why.” She studied her hands as they crawled over each other in her
lap. “I’ve been calling out because I can’t bring myself to work there anymore.”

An
image flashed through his mind of Charles, wielding an axe as snow fell around
him. Nicholas gulped away
The Shining
association. “Why?”

“I
can’t work for Charles.”

Nicholas
sat back, finding the back of the sofa considerably less cushy than the bottom.
“Why do you have a problem with Charles?”

“It’s
not because of anything he’s done to me,” she said hastily, as if she’d picked
up the direction of his thoughts. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s because of
something I saw him doing. With the food.”

Nicholas’s
stomach lurched and quite abruptly he could again taste the shepherd’s pie he’d
eaten days earlier. “What has he done to the food?”

His
tone must have betrayed something for her eyes shot to him. She let out a quick
laugh. “It’s nothing like you’re thinking. Honestly, Nicholas, do you really
think Charles would poison you?”

“Considering
what we found in the lake recently, I honestly believe anything is possible
these days.”

Her
smile fell away, the sun eclipsed by storm clouds. “That’s true, isn’t it? But
this is nothing like that. I saw Charles recycling meals. You know, saving
uneaten bread rolls, scraping the untouched bits off plates into the warming
bins to be added to new orders.”

“Good
lord, and you think that’s an improvement over poison?”

“Well,
I doubt it will kill anyone, but it’s definitely a health code violation. I was
horrified. He was, too. He genuinely was. He begged me. He
begged
me not
to report him.”

“That
doesn’t excuse the fact that he’s putting his customers’ health at risk,
Phoebe.”

She
hung her head, looking as upset as if the crime had been her idea in the first
place. “He told me that business has been abysmal lately. He’s barely hanging
on to the Gingerbear.”

Though
not a week ago Nicholas would have been thrilled to hear that interest in
Hightop was waning, he couldn’t summon that same enthusiasm when it was a
friend’s livelihood being threatened because of it. This conflict of interest
was a new thing, and he wasn’t certain he liked it.

“Maybe
he should consider other options,” he said.

She
laughed, the sound dry and mirthless. “Charles threw everything into Hightop
just like the rest of us, Nicholas. The only other option is ascension with the
aliens. Up is supposed to be the next step.”

He
shifted, uncomfortable.

“He
told me he rarely recycles food and is very careful about what he chooses to
reuse. He was so pitiful, Nicholas. I couldn’t do anything except promise not
to say anything. But now that I know what he does . . . it’s
nearly impossible for me to serve people that food.”

Nicholas
tiptoed around the question he yearned to ask. “The shepherd’s pie—”

She
gave him a look. “Do you think I would allow you of all people to eat recycled
food?”

That
warmed him.

“But
that’s the thing. I sometimes can’t tell the difference between what’s old and
what’s new. The thought of giving my friends and neighbors that old food by
mistake—I can’t do it.”

“Then
you should quit.”

“It’s
not that easy. Charles is still a friend. If I quit, he’d be in even worse
straits. He can’t run the inn and the restaurant both. He’s, well, he’s
slightly incompetent, really.”

“Phoebe,
you don’t agree with what he’s doing. You have the right to leave. It’s not
your fault his business is down.”

“It
feels like abandoning him when he needs me most.”

“You’re
calling out every other day. There’s not much of a difference.”

“In
my mind there is.” She sighed. “I know that sounds naïve of me.”