Murder in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (4 page)

“Starved,” he said.

Chapter 6

Daniel Brightman sat at the kitchen island and ate the reheated slice of Christmas River Cherry pie in the same way that Huckleberry ate it.

Like he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

Something about watching him eat the pie like that was oddly satisfying. I hadn’t seen anybody eat one of my pies like that in a long, long time. The customers were usually self-conscious, eating the pie neatly, bite by bite, afraid that if they didn’t someone might think they were a pig.

But Daniel was scarfing it down, like he was in love with every bite.

Maybe it was because he was drunk, but I liked that he didn’t seem to care. He ate it the way he felt.

Starved.

I sat across from him, drinking a cup of pomegranate tea and waiting for the oven timer to go off so I could take the pies out and call it a night.

I watched him silently, hardly able to believe that he was sitting there in front of me.

He looked a little older, but not in a bad way. Just more mature. His beard had completely thrown me when I first saw him in the tavern earlier. But when I saw his eyes—those same light green eyes that he’d always had—I’d recognized him immediately. Well, almost immediately.

But he still had yet to remember me. 

 “I thought the dog was a wolf,” Daniel said in between bites. “He was just there in the woods, staring at me.”

“Really?” I said.

He shrugged.

“And I had nothing better to do, I guess. My gut told me he wanted me to follow him. And I ended up here.”

“Yeah, he keeps showing up here at night lately.”

“I don’t blame him,” Daniel said, smiling and finishing off the last giant forkful of pie. “When I saw the lights from the woods, I wondered if I hadn’t froze out there, and if I hadn’t just wandered into heaven.”

I shook my head and tried to suppress a smile. It sounded like a line out of a bad novel, but he had said it with such sincerity, I just couldn’t laugh at it.

“He’s a hard dog to catch,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to trust me quite yet.”

“He’ll come around,” Daniel said. “Especially if you keep feeding him so well.”

He looked up, his eyes lingered on me, then he cleared his throat and looked back down.

“So how long have you been running this place?” he asked. “I don’t remember ever seeing it when I used to live here.”

“About five years,” I said. “I moved back here with… well, about five years ago from Portland.”

“Do you like what you do?” he asked.

I smiled, looking around the quaint, cozy kitchen that held all my dreams.

The place that had been my rock, my true source of strength, for the past two years. 

“I don’t get as much sleep as I used to,” I said. “The hours are long. I’m here early in the morning and late at night. But at the end of the day, it’s all worth it. You know what I mean? All the bad stuff just melts away because I belong doing this.”

He looked up and smiled like he understood what I was talking about.

“Plus, you get to have drunk bums who show up on your doorstep in the middle of the night, scaring you half to death,” he said. “You probably don’t get that in your average 9 to 5 job.”

I laughed.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess you could call it a perk. Homeless dogs and bums arriving at my doorstep in the middle of the night. Definitely didn’t get that at my advertising firm job in Portland.”

“Is that where you’re from?” he asked. “Portland?”

I hesitated. Thinking about whether I should tell him who I was. But then, I decided not to. He’d figure it out in his own good time. 

“No. I’m not from Portland,” I said, clearing my throat. I went back over to the oven, checking the pies. The lattice on top was turning a nice golden brown, and the fruit filling was starting to bubble. They needed a couple more minutes and they’d be ready.

I turned back around. He was looking at me with that same expression of drunken awe.

“The smell is murder,” he said, shaking his head. “How do you not just sit here and eat pie all day long?”

“Well, I won’t lie. I used to be a few pounds lighter,” I said, smiling.

“Well, you look great to me,” he said.

The comment filled me with a sort of vain happiness. I quickly shooed it away, though. He was just being nice. 

I walked back over to the kitchen island and took a seat on the barstool.

“So, stranger. What do you do?” I asked.

“Me?” he said. “I thought you’d have guessed it by now. I’m a professional pie-taster.”

That made me laugh. He looked back at me with a straight face. 

“No, really,” he said. “You laugh, but I’m very distinguished. I’m constantly traveling from town to town, dispensing my wealth of knowledge to bakers around the world. I’m very well-known in some circles, you know.”

“Lucky me,” I said. “Of all the shops you could have stumbled into tonight, you found mine.”

“I’m beginning to think this is fate,” he said.

“You believe in such things?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Don’t you?”

The timer went off. I went to the oven and put on my pair of mitts and took out the pies.

“No,” I said. “Fate’s just something invented to make us feel better about the crazy things that happen in our lives.”

I placed the pies on a cooling rack and turned off the oven.

“It’s hard to believe that a person who owns a pie shop and builds gingerbread houses and listens to Otis Redding doesn’t believe in a little magic.”

I shrugged.

“Well, I’m not your average gal, I guess.”

“No,” he said. “I’m beginning to see that.”

I felt chills run down the back of my spine.

But they weren’t the bad chills I usually got.

These were different.

He stood up from the kitchen island.

“Now I’ve really taken up too much of your time,” he said. “I better leave.”

“How are you getting home?” I asked. “You can’t drive.”

“I’ll walk,” he said. “It’s not coming down as hard as it was.”

I looked outside. Snow was coming down in droves out there, and the wind chimes in the back rang out in the fierce gusts.

“Get your coat,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

He tried to protest, but I wouldn’t hear of it.

Chapter 7

He gave me directions, but I remembered where the Brightman house was.

I wanted to ask him what he was doing back here, but on the drive home, he’d fallen quiet. I figured the booze was wearing off, and he was getting sleepy. I pulled up to his house. The lights were all out.

He looked over at me for a brief moment before getting out of the car.

“I’ve taken advantage of your kindness,” he said, looking guilty.

“No,” I said. “I would’ve felt rotten if you’d passed out in the snow and frozen on the walk home. This isn’t kindness. It’s just me trying to make sure nobody dies.”

“I don’t want you to be sad,” he said suddenly.

He said it in a serious tone that was unexpected.

I looked over at him, confused.

Was that the whiskey talking?

“What?” I said.

“I don’t want you to be sad anymore,” he said. “I see that you are. I don’t know why you are, but I don’t want you to be. You’re too…”

He trailed off and looked over at me with his deep-set eyes, holding my stare for a moment. Then he suddenly opened the car door and got out.

“Goodnight,” he said. “And thank you, miss.”

He tipped his hat as he said it.

“Okay,” I said. “Goodnight Daniel.”

He shut the door and then stood in the snow, looking at me through the car window for a moment.

He was realizing that he’d never told me his name, I could tell.

I drove away down the icy, deserted street, leaving him behind to think it out in the snowstorm.

The entire way home, his words haunted me, leaving me with an unsettled feeling.

I don’t want you to be sad anymore…

I didn’t like that he could read me so easily.

Chapter 8

I went to sleep that night, thinking of days that felt so distant in my memory, it was like they belonged to another lifetime.

Thinking back to those long summers when I was a teenager. Driving down forest back roads with the radio turned way up, rooting for the Christmas River High boys of summer while they circled the bases, and spending the evenings out under a blanket of stars.

I had never been a carefree person. The death of my mother at an early age took care of that. But those summers were the closest thing I’ve ever felt to being carefree. Those long, lazy summers where the woods would burst to life under the hot sun. Where the nights would be short and magical and filled with bright moonlight.

It was during one of those summer nights when I first met Daniel Brightman. I mean, when I first really met him.

He was two grades above me at Christmas River High. I’d known of him and seen him in the halls before. He was tall, even back then, with dark hair and bright green eyes, and a crooked nose, the result of breaking it one too many times while playing baseball. In the halls, I never saw him without a guitar slung over his back.

I was an awkward teenager. I hardly socialized, and Kara was really my only friend. I was shy. Painfully shy. I was still dealing with the death of my mother and the feelings of being lost and unsure in the world. I didn’t get along with many other kids.

But one evening, Kara dragged me down to The Burned Tree, a place by the lake where high school kids liked to hang out and drink and make-out around a big fire underneath a large pine that had been hit by lightning. It wasn’t my scene, to the say the least. In fact, it scared me. But Kara wanted to go meet up with Billy Sanders, a boy she’d been chasing for half the summer, and she needed me as her wing man. Or wing girl.

When we pulled up that late August night, I immediately wished we hadn’t. I didn’t belong there. I didn’t belong with the Callie Bennetts or the Julia Mathesons—the girls who had fathers who were real estate developers or lawyers. Who got cars for their 16
^th
birthdays, and walked around school like they owned it. The kind of girls who only spent time outdoors if boys were going to be there.

The kind of girls who had mothers to teach them about how to put on make-up and curl their hair.

Kara was pretty, and could pass with them. But not me. No. I didn’t belong with them, or with the boys that were there either. I stuck out like a sore thumb. Like a homeless person at a charity ball. Like a beat-up Hyundai in a parking lot full of Porsches. Like a pair of weathered Reebok sneakers next to shiny Air Jordans in a shoe closet.  

I sat alone most the night, staring at the campfire, wondering why I’d let Kara drag me there.

But then, a pickup truck pulled up, and a boy got out and pulled his guitar from the flatbed, and he walked over and sat down, and mesmerized everyone there with his playing and singing.

And when he stopped playing, the Julia Mathesons and Callie Bennetts all wanted to talk with him. But from across the flickering flames of the campfire, I noticed that he kept looking over at me.

Not at them. At
me
.

At first I didn’t believe it. But as the night wore on and people started leaving or finding more secluded places to make-out, Daniel Brightman got up, walked around the fire, and took a seat right next to me.

And he talked to me. Really talked to me. He asked me questions about my life and what I liked doing and what I wanted to do someday. I told him about playing poker with my grandfather and hiking in the woods and making gingerbread houses for the competition each year. He told me about his dad, that he didn’t get along with him, and how his mom had left them a long time ago. He knew a little bit about what I was going through. He knew what it was like not to have a mom around.

He started strumming on his guitar, playing an old song from the 70s. I’d heard the song before, but never heard it sung so sweetly. 

It was like it wasn’t even the same song.

 And I soon realized that we were the only ones left sitting around the dying campfire. Everyone, including Kara, had left.

But I wasn’t angry at her. I might have been at another time during the night, but I wasn’t then.

I remember the fire died out, white smoke curling up into the blackness. Daniel put his guitar down, and took my hand, and we walked down to the lake, the waves gently lapping up on the sandy shore.

A crack of thunder lit up the night sky suddenly, and I jumped.

He grabbed a hold of me and pulled me close. Suddenly, I was looking up into his pale green eyes, and he was smiling at me.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said.

I started saying something stupid. That the thunder didn’t scare me. That I spent half of my waking hours out in these woods. That I wasn’t a typical girl who needed a boy to tell me not to be afraid of the thunder.

But I didn’t get a chance to say any of that. Because Daniel Brightman brought me closer to him and kissed me.

One of those kisses that no matter how long you live, you never forget. Because for once in your life, you’re in the moment. Completely and totally and absolutely living in that very moment, with no thoughts about anything or anyone else except him.

And that’s how Daniel Brightman stole my heart, all those years ago.

We talked a little more that night, and then it started to rain. We ran to his truck, and he gave me a ride home.

He promised he would call me the next day, and that we’d go to Christmas River High’s pre-season football game together the next weekend.

When he dropped me off, I thought my heart might just about burst out of my chest with joy.

I was young and impressionable then. I realize that now. It was young love, if even that yet. It had just barely started to bloom.

But it’s strange how things are. In that moment, I felt more than I’d ever felt since. Even when I met Evan, it wasn’t the same feeling. The same feeling of delirious happiness and wild abandon.