Magic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 7) (10 page)

I cleared my throat.

“I don’t under—”

“Stop picking. Or
else
.”

“Excus—”

But I stopped, realizing that there was nothing but dead silence on the other side of the line.

The mystery caller had said what he’d called to say, and had abruptly hung up.

I turned the phone off and numbly slipped it into my pocket.

“Who was that, Cin?” Kara said, her eyes fixed on me.  

I shook my head.

“I, uh, I don’t know.”

“Well, what did they say?”

I found myself shaking my head again.

“I, uh… I didn’t really understand.”

Kara rubbed the side of her face.

“Cin, you look like you just saw a ghost.”

I looked up, forcing a weak smile.

“It was probably just a wrong number,” I said. “They didn’t make much sense.”

Kara continued to look at me, the way she did when she knew something was the matter that I wasn’t saying.

“You know, I’m just a little spooked lately. With seeing Old Hattie around my pie shop, I guess,” I said. “Seems like every corner I take, I’m expecting something bad to be around it.”

I smiled again, as if trying to convince myself as much as her that it was all in my mind.

“You sure there wasn’t more to that call?” she said.

She lowered her head, glancing around quickly to see if anybody else was within earshot.

“You know, you can tell me, Cin, if there was,” she continued. “You can tell me if you’re having money problems and that was a bill collector or something. You can tell me anything, and I won’t ever judge. In fact, if you need a loan, John and I have some savings. Just say the word, Cin. I know those renovations at the shop probably have put some strain on you lately.”

I smiled. An authentic one this time.

It was easy to see why suffering through all those never-ending mother-in-law stories was worth it.

Kara always had my back. No matter what. And that was worth an eternity of listening to her rant about Edna Billings.

“It wasn’t a bill collector,” I said. “But thanks for the offer, Kara. It really means a lot to know that you’re there for me.”

She smiled back warmly, but then tilted her head to the side.  

“Of course,” she said. “But if that wasn’t a bill collector, then what did the caller say exact—”

“That one!”

Laila abruptly interrupted her mother, pointing her small finger toward a short, grotesquely plump pumpkin whose shape reminded me of a fat cat spread out in front of a fire.

Kara stepped away from the stroller and walked over to the gourd Laila was pointing at.

“This one, baby girl?”

Laila responded with a pleased, mischievous nod.

“I swear,” Kara said, leaning down and hefting the pumpkin up to her chest. “This little girl’s trying to kill me. This is the biggest one in the patch.”

“Need help carrying it?”

“Naw,” she said as we strolled down the lane, heading back toward the pumpkin stand. “I’ve got to get a workout in somewhere.”

We walked back as the late afternoon sun slipped behind some clouds, throwing the patch into deep shadows.  

I talked and laughed with Kara, hearing more of her stories and plans for retaliation against Edna. But while I was hearing the words, I wasn’t really listening.

My mind was elsewhere.

On the mysterious caller and the warning, which with each passing minute felt more and more like a threat.

“Stop picking.
Or else.”

Chapter 20

I was in the middle of sautéing several pounds of chopped pears and cranberries for a batch of Cranberry Pear Hazelnut Shortbread pies when I saw him looking in the back door.

The pie flavor was a variation on an old recipe that my mother used to make for Thanksgiving. Her version was more of a cobbler than a pie, with hunks of shortbread dough spattered across the top of the bubbling fruit filling. But nonetheless, despite not being a true pie, her annual dessert left a strong impression on me as a youngster. Every Thanksgiving until I was 14, her pastry was the thing I looked forward to the most out of all the delicious fare. That palate-pleasing combination of sugar, pears, and cranberries, and that to-die-for buttery shortbread topping, along with the big helping of love she put into the dessert was a big reason why, as an adult, pie had become my profession.

I had caught the pie bug at an early age, and thus far, it had not faded one bit.

The sunrise hue of the sticky berry and fruit mixture had just started bubbling when he appeared on the back porch and knocked, the darkness of night quickly falling in the woods behind him.

Though there was a plate of glass between us, I could tell by the look in his eyes that something was up.

I quickly wiped my hands off on my apron before heading for the door. I unlocked it, and he brushed past me, not saying a single word.

I was about to say something snide like “
Well, hello to you too
,” but stopped when I saw him come to a halt in the middle of the kitchen and look around intently, his eyes scanning the walls.

“You found the ring over there?” he said suddenly, nodding to the small hole in the brick wall that had yet to be repaired.

“Yeah,” I said.

He went over and carefully inspected the area. He pulled out a small flashlight, the one that he kept in his truck’s glove compartment in case of emergencies, and shone it in the wall.

I furrowed my brow, wondering why it was suddenly so important to him where the ring was found.

“Did you find Ralph Baker?” I asked.

Daniel didn’t answer for a long moment.

“Daniel?” I said, finally.

“Not exactly,” he said.

I paused for a moment, trying to understand what he meant by that.

“Did he pass away?” I said.  

Daniel turned around to look at me.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody does. Ralph Henry Baker disappeared from Christmas River in 1960 and was never heard from again.”

I felt my eyes grow wide with surprise.

“
What
?” I said.

Daniel lowered the flashlight.

“He was last seen driving away from a party,” he said. “There’s a case file about it in the Sheriff’s archives with clippings from
The Redmond Register
about the disappearance. But it seems like half the file is missing. There aren’t any witness interviews or anything helpful – just the news clippings.”

I shook my head as I thought it through, the realization hitting me like a ton of bricks dropped off a ten story building.

“So that means…
that
means…”

Though nothing had so much as touched me, I felt the wind get knocked right out of me all the same.

Daniel nodded, knowing what I was going to say even before I did.

“That means this class ring here,” he said, taking an evidence bag out of his pocket and holding up the metal object inside of it. “This ring, and the fact that it was hidden inside the wall, might mean something.”  

I met his eyes.

“Like somebody trying to get rid of evidence,” I said.

“Yeah,” Daniel said, flashing his green eyes at me. “Cin – it might be a break in a case that’s been dead for nearly
fifty-five years
.”

Chapter 21

I leaned against the windowsill of our bedroom, sipping a mug of Sleepytime mint tea, wishing my mind would stop racing so I could finally get some sleep.

But so far, the tea wasn’t doing its job.

I watched as a werewolf moon, as swollen as a beach ball on the first day of summer, rose up over the meadow and drowned out the stars in the sky. It illuminated the frost-covered grasses and surrounding woods with its electric blue light.

“
Or else
…”

The two words echoed in my head as I mulled over what I had learned about Ralph Henry Baker from the newspaper clippings that Daniel had brought home along with the incomplete case file.

Ralph was just 20 years old in 1960. According to the newspaper, after high school, he’d left Christmas River for Corvallis with a football scholarship to Oregon State University. But halfway through his freshman year, Ralph hurt his knee badly during a game, and didn’t play another minute that season. He returned home to Christmas River that summer and took a job at the Drutman Mill.

He never returned to college.

The night that Ralph Henry Baker disappeared was a chilly evening in mid-December. He’d been at a party at Sutter’s Barn, the newspaper account had said, which from what I could gather, was an old hangout on the outskirts of town. Witnesses said he’d gotten in a fight with his girlfriend and high school sweetheart, Hannah Templeton, that night. He took off in his Ford F100 truck in a rage, witnesses said, shouting that he was done with her.
Forever
.

But what the fight was about never made it into the papers, and nobody at the party seemed to know. Some people thought Ralph just took off that night, leaving Christmas River for good and finding a new home elsewhere. But Ralph’s family didn’t think so. They couldn’t believe that Ralph would just disappear from their lives like that. They were close – a respectable Christmas River family that had been in the area for decades. The type that didn’t just cut ties with one another on a whim. In the article, Ralph’s mother insisted that something terrible happened to her son that night.

Only that terrible thing was never discovered. A clipping from several months later showed that the police hadn’t made any progress in the case.

“It’s almost like he just vanished into thin air,” the then-chief of police had told the reporter.

I took a sip of my tea, shivering at the thought of it. .

I knew that disappearances were more common than people wanted to believe. Just a look at the Christmas River Sheriff’s Office statewide bulletin board, and it was clear just how prevalent it was. People disappeared all the time – whether that was by their own choosing or not.

It was frightening to think that one day you could be in the middle of your everyday life, going about mundane things, and the next day, your face could be plastered across the bulletin boards of law enforcement agencies across the country with a large question mark next to it.

But the thought of Ralph Baker disappearing into thin air wasn’t the only thing keeping me from a peaceful night’s sleep.

It was the realization that somebody else out there clearly knew that I had found the ring.

And they had told me to leave it all be.

What the “unknown” mystery caller had said earlier hadn’t made complete sense until this evening, when Daniel told me about Ralph’s disappearance. But now that I’d had a chance to think it through, it was obvious that the man had been warning me not to dig any further into the old case.

Although why that mattered so much to him was something that I didn’t know – but it was something I needed to find out.

I shivered slightly, recalling that gravelly, murky voice.

Just how dangerous was he?

And how had he known that I was looking into Ralph’s disappearance?

Mrs. Longmont came to mind. Not only had she seen me at the library, looking at the old yearbook, but she had warned me also to not “stir the pot” as she’d phrased it.

Just what did she know about Ralph Baker’s disappearance? Why was everybody so keen on keeping the past dead and buried? Just what did they have to hi—

“Something tells me that you’re not up admiring that beautiful moon out there.”

His arms slid around my waist and wrapped around me tightly.

“I’m sorry if I woke you,” I rasped.  

“Nu-uh. You didn’t,” Daniel said, following the statement up with a big yawn.

I was fairly certain he was being untruthful on that score, but I let it slide.

I glanced back at him, amused at the serious case of bedhead he was rocking. I reached over, running a hand through his hair to even out the unruly mess.

“What’s keeping you up?” he said. “That phone call you told me about from this afternoon? I told you, you don’t have to worry about that.”

I had told Daniel about the mystery man who had called me, along with the caller’s disturbing, vague warning. Daniel had been angry about the mysterious threat – and said that he’d take care of it. Though how he planned to go about doing that, I didn’t know.

“I guess I just can’t stop thinking about it all,” I said.  

“Any thoughts in particular?”

I stared out the window for a long moment.

“I think we need to find Hannah Templeton tomorrow,” I finally said. “She was the last person to talk to Ralph Baker. We need to find out what that argument was over.”

I looked back at Daniel. He was smirking slightly.

“Are you telling me how to run my investigation?”

“So what if I am, Sheriff Brightman?” I said. “What are you gonna do about it?”

“I guess do what you say.”

“Good answer,” I said, resting my hands lightly on his arms.

“Only I think when you said we should find Hannah Templeton tomorrow, you really meant we should find her
today
,” he said.

I glanced back at the alarm clock on my side of the bed. It glowed a harsh 3:45.

I let out a groan, leaning my head back into Daniel’s chest.

“Ugh… I’m sorry. It’s
so
late.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “There’s still plenty of time for sleep.”

He yawned again.

“That is, if we hit the hay now,” he added. “You think you’ll be able to get some shut eye?”

I took a final sip of my mint tea, and set it down on the windowsill.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ll give it a try.”

“C’mon,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

He took my hand, leading me to bed. Then he wrapped his arms around me and held me tight. In a soft, reassuring voice, he gave me a recap of everything that had been going on in the National League Championship Series, baseball-related facts and figures and names rolling off his tongue like a babbling brook.