Magic in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (Christmas River Cozy Book 7) (17 page)

I hoped luck was on our side this time.

Chapter 43

Thwacckk!!!

Daniel loosened the rusty lock, and with all his weight, pushed through the door of the old abandoned cabin.

The noise was followed by the mad-dash scurrying of small rodent feet against aged wood.

Daniel shone the flashlight inside, then glanced back at me.

“Be careful where you step,” he said. “And stay close. Okay?”

I nodded as he reached for my hand, taking it gently in his, leading the way.

It was obvious that nobody had legally lived in Frederick Morgan’s former house for a long, long time. There was, however, evidence of people having been there. Teenagers, or vagrants, maybe. The walls were covered with varying neon shades of graffiti saying things that made no sense to anybody other than who had put them there. A pile of rusted Budweiser beer cans sat on the floor beneath one of the broken windows.

The place somehow felt colder than it did outside. Which on a night like tonight, wasn’t easy to do.

I wasn’t sure how this place had looked in 1960. But today, it would have made the perfect place to kill somebody and hide any evidence related to the murder.

“Okay,” Daniel said, taking a look around the walls. “Let’s start in here, and make our way to the adjoining rooms.”

He gave me the flashlight to hold, and started putting on some latex gloves.

“Now, if we find anything, let’s not get our hopes up right away,” Daniel said. “It looks like a lot of people have been through here over the years. Anything we find might have nothing to do with Ralph Baker. And even if it does, identifying it as such is still gonna present us with some significant hurdles.”

I nodded, but Daniel’s practical points didn’t stop my heart from beating quickly with the thought that something in this room could help tell us what happened to Ralph.

I held the flashlight as steady as I could while Daniel pulled out the bottle of luminol, and began spraying down the floor and walls of the room.

Maybe it wasn’t such a long shot after all, I thought.

Maybe, just maybe, the answer to all our questions was right here in this very room.

Chapter 44

Daniel glanced up at me, shaking his head. Again.  

I let out a disappointed sigh.

I wasn’t sure how long we’d been in the small cabin for, looking for evidence that Frederick Morgan had killed his best friend fifty-five years earlier. But what I did know was that I could no longer feel my fingers or my toes on account of the icy air, and that thus far, there was not a single drop of possible blood spatter, or any evidence, that we had found between the old walls of Pastor Frederick Morgan’s former residence.

And hope, whatever little there had been, was fading quickly.

Daniel got to his feet and stood up off the floor. I could see that hope was fading for him, too.

But being a naturally persistent person, especially when it came to rectifying injustices, Daniel wasn’t going to give up so easily.

“Okay,” he said. “So maybe it didn’t happen in here. Or maybe it was a clean, bloodless death. But we haven’t checked the surrounding property yet. Tomorrow, I’m going to call Sheriff Hines over in Crook County and see if we can’t borrow their cadaver dog to search this area. It could still be right here, under our noses, Cin. It could still—”

I felt the buzz of my phone in my jacket pocket.

I looked at Daniel, my mouth going bone dry.

I had become afraid to answer my own phone.

He looked back at me reassuringly.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to him. I’ll take over.”

I nodded slowly, then fumbled around in my jacket pocket until my numb fingers gripped the plastic square. I pulled it out, handing it to Daniel.

I couldn’t even look at the screen.

“You said that his calls came up as
unknown
?” he said after a moment.  

I nodded.

“Well this isn’t unknown,” he said. “It’s a real number.”

He handed the phone back to me. The number had a local area code.

I felt a sense of relief course through my veins.

Daniel raised his eyebrows, as if to ask if I still wanted him to answer it.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I got it.”

I brought the phone to my ear.

“Hello?”

“
Ms. Peters
,” the ancient voice rasped. “He’s here at the house, Ms. Peters. You have to come here. You have to come here now!”

Chapter 45

We roared down the dirt road, picking up speed as it turned to pavement. Daniel hooked a left onto the bridge that spanned the Metolius, and we fishtailed slightly as the truck hit a patch of frost.

Daniel slowed after that and didn’t pick up speed again until we hit the highway.

“Owen should be there any minute,” he said again, glancing over at me. “Did she sound like she could hold on?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She sounded really scared, Daniel – I mean, completely panicked. She kept saying that he was out on the street, that he was… that he was coming for her.”

My voice grew hoarse and cracked mid-sentence.

A single thought was replaying over and over in my head.

She was the thing in his way
.

Without Hattie’s story, and without her testimony about what she saw at
Orvil’s
that night, there was nothing concrete to tie Frederick Morgan to Ralph’s disappearance.

And there she was now, alone in her old house, completely vulnerable and exposed – the killer onto her.

And I knew that I had played no small part in that. Frederick Morgan could have been following me. He could have seen me visit Hattie’s house. He could have put two and two together that she’d spilled the secret she’d been keeping for fifty-five years – about Frederick hiding the ring, thereby implicating him in Ralph’s murder.

I bit my lower lip hard.

After everything she’d been through, this couldn’t be the way that Hannah Templeton’s life ended.

It just
couldn’t
.

Chapter 46

“Oh, no,” I muttered quietly, feeling my eyes grow wide as we approached the flashing lights, cutting through the dark like blue and red lasers. “
Oh, no
.”

Daniel pulled up to the side of the street, parking the truck slowly, killing the engine and the headlights, almost as if he too was afraid of what we were about to find out.

That
he
had beaten us to her.

That we were too late.

That her blood was on our hands.

I unbuckled my seatbelt, but I couldn’t seem to get it off fast enough. I stepped out of the truck, my legs feeling like melting rubber.

He was right
, I thought.

Pastor Frederick Morgan was right. I should have just let the past stay where it was – dead and buried.

Because even if the Pastor
had
killed Ralph Baker nearly six decades ago, was finding justice for Ralph more important than Hattie’s life?

The answer was, of course, no.

He was right
.

I watched, horrified, as two paramedics exited the front door of the house, carrying a gurney down the rickety old steps of the porch.

“
Oh
,” I gasped, losing the ability to talk, feeling hot tears flood my eyes.

I felt Daniel’s arm around my shoulders as he tried to comfort me.

But there was little comfort to be found on a night like tonight.

We were too late.

Frederick Morgan had done his work –
again
.

“She wasn’t hurt,” a voice suddenly said from behind us.

Deputy Owen McHale stood there in his uniform, having emerged from somewhere across the street.

“The Pastor knocked on the door, but she never answered it,” Owen said, taking off his hat. “Nothing happened. But when I got here, she was complaining of chest pains, and I thought given the scare she’d had and her age, it’d be best to get her to the hospital as soon as possible.”

I had never felt so happy to see Owen McHale in all my life.

Hattie was okay – Pastor Morgan hadn’t hurt her.

Her blood wasn’t on our hands.

We watched as the paramedics carried the old woman past us.

“It’s going to be okay, Hattie,” I said after her. “Don’t worry.”

She nodded, her hollow eyes locking with mine until the ambulance doors closed.

A moment later, they pulled away, the sirens echoing loudly down Santa’s Nightmare Lane.

“Good work, Owen,” Daniel said, nodding at the young deputy. “You could very well have just saved that woman’s life.”

The deputy smiled slightly, but the smile faded and the serious expression returned to his face a few moments later.

“The Pastor probably hasn’t gotten too far,” he said, shining his flashlight across the street, toward the path from where he’d come. “Mrs. Blaylock said he was on foot. I don’t suppose we can arrest him for knocking on her door, but we could question him. And if need be, tell him we’re recommending that Mrs. Blaylock file a restraining order against him.”

The Sheriff nodded.

“Let’s search the area then, Owen.”

Daniel looked down at me.

“Cin, you ought to wait in the car,” he said. “Take the keys, lock the doors, and keep your phone handy, all right? If you see him, call me right away and don’t go near him. You understand?”

I thought about protesting, to insist that I come along in the search. But sometimes, I forgot that I wasn’t a sheriff’s deputy. And that having me along on a search would only complicate things for the law enforcement officers – no matter how much I wanted to go.

“Okay,” I said, grabbing the keys from his hands. “You be careful, all right? Don’t take any chances with him.”

He nodded.

“I won’t.”

He squeezed my hand, then waited until I was safely in the truck with the doors locked. I watched him and Owen walk across the street and disappear into the woods.

I’d only been in the truck for about ten minutes when it dawned on me.

I knew where the Pastor was.

Chapter 47

I hurriedly walked across the length of Meadow Plaza, which was as abandoned and empty at this hour as the old overgrown Pioneer Cemetery on the south side of town.

An owl hooted loudly in the distance, filling the night with its ghostly cries. A vicious, frosty wind kicked a pile of dead leaves into my path, their sharp edges clawing at the bottom of my jeans. I walked quickly through them, down the cobbled path that jutted away from the plaza.

Down the path that led to the river.

A few moments later, I saw a lone figure through the trees.  

I stopped dead in my tracks.

He was nothing more than a specter. A sad, hunched-over shadow sitting on the obsidian boulder that Hattie had told me about.

The figure was still and unmoving in the eerie glow of the waning moon, and I found a strange emotion grip my heart at the sight of the old man. A feeling that pulled at me as I took in his frail shoulders and curved spine.

Something like compassion.

Something like empathy.

But as I stepped closer to him, I pushed those feelings away. There was no room for them… not after what this man had done. And a moment of looking sad and forlorn wasn’t going to change that.

My foot suddenly hit something, and a moment later, the crack of a twig snapping filled the silent night.

The man sitting on the rock turned around to see where the noise had come from.

His eyes fell on me, but showed no hint of being surprised or startled.

“Ah,” he said, a sense of defeat in his voice. “So you’ve found me.”

I knew I should have hung back, the way Daniel had told me to on the phone a few minutes earlier, waiting until he and Owen arrived before talking to the Pastor.

But something in me felt compelled to keep going.

To hear the full story of what really happened to Ralph Henry Baker.

Finally.After all these years.

Chapter 48

“It should have been
me
she fell in love with,” he said, looking numbly at the swift river below.

His shoulders were so hunched over, I thought that Frederick Morgan’s ribcage might cave in at any moment.

“Ralph was my best friend and I loved him like a brother. But he didn’t understand Hannah. He didn’t know what a pure spirit she was. And he didn’t know what she needed.”

He said the last part through gritted teeth.

“And you did?” I said quietly.

The old man slowly nodded.

“She needed more love than Ralph was capable of giving her,” he said. “He took her for granted. But I held my tongue about it. For years, I kept my feelings to myself, knowing how dangerous they were. I knew that if I let them, they’d destroy all of us.”

He stared out ahead with haunted eyes.

“For six years I prayed over the matter, and God said nothing to me,” he continued. “I took it for an answer. That God believed my feelings were based in lust, instead of love. I planned to lock up those feelings and throw away the key forever.

“After Hannah accepted Ralph’s proposal, I decided to take up the path of a missionary. I received a posting in Haiti. That was what I wanted to tell Hannah and Ralph at the Snowcap Diner that day.

“But then… that day…”

His voice cracked, and I could tell that this was hard for the normally reticent pastor to speak about.

He cleared his throat.

“Hannah told me how she really felt about me.”

He looked down at the black obsidian boulder he was sitting on.

“Right here,” he said, patting the smooth, shiny surface. “On this rock, I kissed her. And I felt… I thought…”