Magic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 7) (12 page)

I plopped down in the beat-up old leather chair opposite the desk.

I couldn’t help but notice that stacks of files were obscuring not only the Sheriff’s desk, but also the shelves, the windowsills, and just about anywhere in the office that had enough space.

To the layman’s eyes, Daniel’s office was in serious need of organization. However, I knew that he had his own special kind of system going with all of it – even if it wasn’t the most visually appealing.

“Well, I don’t know how much luck had to do with it,” I said. “We had a fire at the shop.”

Daniel’s eyes bulged slightly.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Everything’s fine. Just a few burnt pies and a few tears, that’s all.”

He let out a sharp breath of air.

“Your tears, or somebody else’s?”

“Tiana’s,” I said. “But it was an accident – plain and simple.”

“Hmm,” he muttered.

He rubbed the stubble on his cheeks and looked past me for a moment.

“Been having a few of those lately, huh?”

I bit my lower lip, not answering the rhetorical question.

“I found something else out about Ralph,” he said, changing the subject after a moment.

“So did I.”

He readjusted his positioning in the chair, leaning forward toward me.

“Really?”

I nodded.

“It’s not anything that will break the case,” I said. “But it’s a strange coincidence.”

“Well, you go first, then,” he said.

I told him what Warren had said – that Ralph Henry Baker was my great uncle.

Daniel’s reaction was the same one I’d had when I first heard the news.

“What?”

I nodded.

“On my dad’s side. My grandmother was Ralph’s sister.”

Daniel made a sharp whistling sound, then shook his head in disbelief.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “His class ring falling out of your pie shop’s wall, and you not even knowing he’s your great uncle. What are the chances of that happening?”

“Pretty slim, I’d say,” I said. “Maybe about the same as a knife lodging in your shoe, but not cutting your foot in half. Or a worried mother backing her car up into you, but by some grace of God, not running you over.”

Daniel rubbed his chin again.

“None of those incidents are related, Cin.”

I shrugged.

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Some strange things have been happening lately. You can’t deny that.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But there’s nothing to tie any of those strange things together.”

Except they all happened to me
, I thought.

“All I know is that I want to find out what happened to Ralph Baker,” I said. “It’s not just some stranger anymore: and it feels like there’s a reason I was the one to find that ring. You know? Like I’m the one who needs to figure this out.”

I had never gotten the chance to meet anyone from my dad’s side of the family. And after he left, it didn’t seem to matter. It was like I just tried to pretend that none of them had ever existed – including him. It hurt less that way.

But now, it felt like if I could find out what happened to Ralph, then maybe I could somehow salvage something from that side of my family. I wasn’t sure how, but that’s how it felt, anyway.

Daniel studied me for a long moment.

Then he stood up. He grabbed his leather Sheriff’s jacket from off the chair in the corner of the office, and pulled it on.

“Well, in that case, let’s get going,” he said.

I watched him for a moment, not understanding.

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

Chapter 26

“I haven’t found much on Hannah Templeton,” Daniel said, pulling up near the First Presbyterian Church on Mirth Avenue and killing the engine. “After 1960, she might as well have vanished, too. There’s no record of her living in Pohly County. There’s a woman by the name of Hannah Templeton living in New Hampshire, but she’s fifty-two years old – which would make her too young to be the Hannah we’re looking for.”

I nodded, my eyes following the church’s tall pointy spire as it jutted high up into the sky above us.

I still didn’t understand why we were here.  

“But I did find something else – something that might help the case a lot,” he continued.  

“What’s that?”

“Well, I went to city hall this morning,” he said. “And I did a little research into the building your pie shop’s in. I dug up some history about what used to be there.”

I turned toward him in my seat: he had my full attention.

“During the timeframe we’re looking at – the fifties to the mid-sixties – the building housed a bakery called “Orvil’s.” And do you know who owned it?”

“Well, Orvil,
obviously
,” I said.

Daniel smirked at my silly comment.

Sometimes I just couldn’t help myself.

“Yeah, right. So getting back to what I uncovered,” he said. “The bakery was owned by a man named Orvil Morgan.”

It took me a moment to put it together, but when I did, I suddenly understood why we were parked outside the First Presbyterian Church.

“Morgan…? As in Pastor Frederick Morgan?”

Daniel nodded, the corners of his mouth turning up just slightly.

“Yep,” he said. “The very man who married Aileen and Warren just a few days ago. He’s Orvil’s son. How’s that for a coincidence?”

There had been so many lately, it felt like they were becoming every day occurrences.

“So you think Pastor Morgan might be able to shed some light on how Ralph Baker’s class ring ended up in the wall of his father’s bakery?” I asked.

Daniel zipped up his coat, and reached in the backseat where he’d placed his cowboy hat.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I figure it’s worth a shot. Don’t you think?”

I nodded, feeling a kind of warm pride rising in my chest at Daniel’s good detective work.

I squeezed his shoulder, before unbuckling my seatbelt.

“Here’s to hoping the old pastor doesn’t make us listen to the rest of his speech about respect,” Daniel said, winking at me.

He got out of the truck, and I followed. We made our way up the steps of the church, getting inside just as a gust of frigid wind knocked the remaining leaves down from the aspens in front of the foreboding building.

Chapter 27

“I hope I’m not in trouble, Sheriff,” Pastor Morgan said, slowly setting his old, arthritic-ridden body down on one of the church’s hard fold-out seats. “Though I take it that since you brought your wife along, the matter can’t be
too
serious.”

He nodded toward me with a lukewarm expression, his old eyes meeting mine before slowly making their way back to Daniel.

It was interesting – even though the Pastor was several years younger than Warren, he seemed to be infinitely older. Maybe it was his old-fashioned robe, or the stiff expression plastered across his face that had all the liveliness of a cardboard box. But for whatever reason, the Pastor looked as old as the lava fields on the south slopes of the Cascades. How he had managed to get through my grandfather’s wedding ceremony a week earlier was a mystery.

Warren said time was slow to catch up to him because he always stayed young at heart. And as I examined the Pastor, and the dour, downcast look that had set itself practically in stone on his face, it became obvious that nothing about him – his heart perhaps least of all – had stayed young.

When it came to showing age, the church itself hadn’t fared much better. Though I didn’t know exactly how old the building was, it looked like the congregation was struggling with its upkeep. The front door didn’t properly close, and a cool draft blew down the aisle toward the pulpit. The whole building creaked like an old ship in the wind.

It seemed like if a big enough gust came, it might just knock the small building over, bringing that long skinny spire crashing down into the street.

“Oh, you’re in no trouble at all, Pastor,” Daniel said, removing his hat and taking a seat next to me. “I’m just here to ask your help with something, if you can spare the time.”

“What is it you need, young man?”

Daniel cleared his throat, his eyes drifting toward me for a split second.

“It’s about your father’s bakery,” Daniel said.

The old man’s eyes softened.

“My father’s bakery? Now that’s something I haven’t thought about in ages.”

He looked past us, as if those old memories were playing out on the far wall of the church.

“We were wondering, Pastor, if you could tell us a little bit about the business,” Daniel asked.

The Pastor paused for a long moment.

“For what purpose?”

“It has to do with a case I’m looking into,” Daniel said, keeping it vague. “Now, your father owned and operated the bakery from 1956 to 1961, is that right?”

The pastor nodded slowly.

“Yes. And it was a fine establishment. It was called
Orvil’s
, after father, of course. He made the best bread this county ever saw. He used these very old recipes passed down from his Swedish grandparents. ”

“Did the bakery have many employees?”

The Pastor shook his head.

“No, not many at all,” he said. “It was a small mom and pop operation. The kind that doesn’t exist much around here anymore, what with all the Starbucks and McDonalds setting up shop in the downtown. In my time, local businesses were just that: local. The money would go right back to the people who lived here. Not like now, where most the money’s going to a big greedy corporation in Seattle or New York while the people around here struggle to feed their children.”

His voice took on a thunderous tone, and his eyes lit up, the way I imagined they did when he was giving a sermon.

And while he had gotten carried away somewhat, I realized that I couldn’t argue with him. Just a few months earlier, a new fast-food chain restaurant had gone up a couple of blocks away from my pie shop in Christmas River’s downtown. And while it didn’t take much business away from me, I knew that a few locally-owned burger joints – ones that had been here for years – had taken up issue with it as they watched their customers migrate to the chain restaurant.

The Pastor looked like he had more to say on the topic, but then the fire in his eyes went out, and he seemed to realize that he wasn’t delivering a sermon to his congregation.

“It was mostly myself and my younger sister working there with our father,” he said. “Other than that…”

He trailed off. Then he shook his head.

“My memory isn’t what it used to be, Sheriff,” he said. “I know there was a young man that worked there, too, that we hired to tend the front of the house. But I can’t remember his name.”

Daniel nodded, taking out his notepad, flipping it to a clean sheet, and writing something down.

“And if you don’t mind me asking, what caused the business to close in 1961?”

The nostalgic expression on the Pastor’s face faded, and a dark shadow replaced it.

“Father couldn’t pay the mortgage anymore,” he said. “He lost it to the bank, and had to go back to working at the mills. And that’s what he did the rest of his short life thereafter. That was his big American dream, owning a bakery. And when it died, his zest for living did, too.”

He let out a sorrowful sigh.

“The lung cancer eventually got him,” he said. “I was in Haiti doing missionary work when he passed.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” Daniel said.

The old man nodded.

“But I suppose going bankrupt is the risk you take owning a small business,” the Pastor said. “At least he got to live his dream out for a little while. Which is a lot more than you can say for some people.”

“Do you know what happened to the building after the bakery closed?”

The Pastor shrugged his old shoulders.

“The bank repossessed it. I know it sat vacant for a few years before some couple started up a diner in that location. Places have come and gone out of that building. And then in recent years, you, Mrs. Brightman, have run your
delectable
pie shop out of the location.”

I smiled warmly.

“That’s nice of you to say, Pastor,” I said, though for the life of me, I couldn’t remember Pastor Morgan ever stopping in for pie. With his thin frame and humorless features, pie and all its warm and bright flavors just seemed like something he wouldn’t like.

“So when the building was sitting vacant all those years, could anybody have gotten in?” Daniel said.  

“I suppose so,” the Pastor said. “We didn’t have problems with hooligans back then like we do today, but I suppose if somebody wanted to get in there, they probably could have easily.”

Daniel nodded, writing something else down on his notepad. Then he looked back up at him.

“Pastor, did you ever know somebody named Ralph Henry Baker?”

The old man’s eyes widened slightly.

“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Everybody in this town knew Ralph. The Bakers were a well-respected family.”

The Pastor’s old eyes drifted toward me then, and there was a sense of understanding in them.

I realized he must have known about Ralph being my great uncle.

I thought that I knew a lot about the people who lived in this town. But I had nothing on someone like Pastor Morgan, who had lived and worked and listened to the problems of Christmas Riverites for decades.

“You see, Pastor,” Daniel continued. “I’m trying to find out what happened to Ralph Baker. Of course, you must have heard about how he disappeared in 1960. And how nobody ever found out what happened to him.”

“Sure I remember,” the Pastor said, rubbing his chin. “But, Sheriff, why investigate now? Don’t tell me crime is so low in Pohly County that in order to keep yourself busy, you’ve had to resort to investigating cold cases? Because if you want something to do, then I’d start by cracking down on underage marijuana use. Did you hear what happened at the high school the other day?”

The stern man shook his head disapprovingly.

“Legalizing that drug was the worst thing Oregon voters could have done. Anybody with any sense could have seen that coming.”