'Twas the Knife Before Christmas Read online

  “Where did you go after the benefit dinner last night?” he asked.

  “To my shop,” she said. “I spent an hour eating whipped cream and watching Cupcake Wars, and then I fell asleep at the counter. Why?”

  Evan adjusted his ball cap over his thick dark hair and keen green eyes, the Sheriff’s Department logo centered above the bill. “I’m just trying to get an idea of how Mr. Waggoner’s night went after that clip that played on the news and before this.” He motioned to the coroner’s van. “Did he drive you home after dinner?”

  “No. He walked out after I made that scene.”

  Evan nodded. “Why don’t you come with me to the station,” he suggested. “I can take your official statement there.”

  I raised a palm, telling him to halt. “Whoa. A trip downtown with you right now will make her look guilty. That’s not fair.”

  Evan fixed me with an impatient stare.

  “Caroline!” An unfamiliar voice cut through the evening’s white noise, effectively interrupting my conversation with the sheriff.

  Cookie grunted. “It’s just Scooter,” she said. “Should’ve known he wouldn’t be far. He rarely is.”

  “Who’s Scooter?” Evan and I asked in near unison.

  “He’s that schmoopy guy who’s always hanging around the shop,” Cookie said. “At first I thought he had a sugar addiction, but then I noticed he only comes in when Caroline is at the counter, and he stays until she leaves.”

  “He’s a nice guy, but I don’t want to talk to him right now,” Caroline said.

  “Nice guy?” Cookie raised her brows. “I think you’re mispronouncing stalker.”

  Evan stood straighter. “Stalker?”

  Gooseflesh rose on my arms—nothing freaked me out more than the idea of being followed. I shivered.

  Caroline rolled her eyes. “He just needs a friend. He’s new in town and doesn’t know anyone.”

  I scanned the crowd in search of Caroline’s schmoopy stalker. A gangly man in a puffy orange ski coat and Harry Potter glasses waved from the other side of Evan’s crime scene tape. “Caroline,” he called. “It’s me, Scooter.”

  She groaned, then forced a smile and looked his way. “Hello.”

  “Can I bring you anything?” he asked, one gloved hand curved beside his mouth for maximum sound projection. “A blanket? Coffee? I’ve got a space heater in my garage I can bring out here.”

  “No, thank you,” Caroline said. “I’m fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  He smiled. Clearly thrilled with her response and unaffected by the body recently removed from a giant candy dish.

  Evan scrutinized Scooter. “What’s his last name?”

  Caroline shrugged. “I’ve never asked, but I think he could use a friend.” A hopeful look crossed her troubled face. “Maybe you could say hello,” she suggested to Evan.

  “I definitely will,” he promised. Though his expression said he wouldn’t be looking for a new friend when he did.

  A fresh gust of wind whipped hair into my eyes, and I ignored the whiff of gingerbread and cologne that lifted from him in the breeze. “How’ve you been?” I asked him.

  “Good.”

  “I stopped by to see you last weekend. Missed you again,” I said. “It seems like every time you have a day or two off, you’re gone.” It had been his pattern all year to vanish at every turn. At first, he’d dodged my attempts to get answers about what he was up to. Then he’d just started to dodge me. “Maybe you can pencil me into your schedule before Christmas.”

  “That sounds nice,” he said, and he looked as if he meant it.

  Evan popped the collar on his jacket, creating a tiny barrier against the wind, then puffed air into his palms and rubbed them together.

  “You want a little something to take the chill off?” Cookie asked, pushing her thermos in our direction. “I bought my special tea.”

  Evan eyeballed the offering. “No, thank you. The last time I had your tea, I needed a designated driver.”

  Cookie grinned. “You even let me use the lights and siren.”

  He lifted troubled eyes to mine. “I still don’t know how she reached the pedals.”

  I covered my mouth to stifle a laugh, and turned my attention back to the men at the bowl. Evan and Cookie were hilarious, but this wasn’t a time for humor. Handsy or not, Derek Waggoner had lost his life unfairly, and I hated knowing it had happened in our sweet town.

  “What are they doing now?” Cookie asked, pouring herself a cup of tea.

  “Evidence collection,” Evan said. “They’ll take the candy to the lab and look for clues about how Derek wound up in there.”

  I grimaced, trying not to imagine what they might find.

  “This is last year all over again,” Cookie said.

  I pulled my eyes open and fought the nausea swirling in my tummy. “I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head no. Sure, someone had been killed last year around this time, but that had happened on my family’s property, and afterward the murderer had set his sights on me. “This isn’t like that,” I insisted. “This is very different.” I looked to Evan for reassurance.

  He was watching Caroline.

  Her ruby lips quivered. “I feel so awful,” she whispered.

  “Why?” Evan and I spoke in unison again. He gave me a pointed look.

  Caroline pressed a wadded-up tissue to her red nose. “The last thing I said to Derek Waggoner was mean. I’m mean.”

  Cookie slipped a narrow arm around Caroline’s back and tugged her close. “No, honey. He was out of line at the time, and you told him so. There was nothing wrong with that.”

  Evan shifted his weight, still scrutinizing my best friend. “And you said that was the last time you saw him?”

  “Holly!” A familiar voice called my name, and I spun at the sound, a smile immediately budding on my lips.

  Ray Griggs, a local reporter and dear friend of mine ducked under the crime scene tape and headed my way. At five foot eight, I was no shorty, but Ray had at least half a foot on me. He was tall and lean, boyishly handsome, and charming in a goofy way that I dearly appreciated. Ray had been a freshman at Mistletoe High School when I was a senior, and he claimed we’d worked on the yearbook staff together, but I had no memory of him. At eighteen, I had been far too mature to notice a freshman. Truthfully, I’d noticed very few men whose names weren’t Renoir, Dali, or Van Gogh.

  I met Ray with a hug, then turned back to watch Evan chatting with Caroline from a few paces away. “Can you believe this?”

  Ray pushed his hands into his coat pockets. “Not at all.”

  “You heard anything?” I asked, flipping his press badge lanyard with my fingertips. “I know how you hate to miss a story.” Ray had been hired at the paper as a photographer, but his heart was in journalism, specifically investigative journalism, and he’d gotten his first front-page headline last Christmas morning. He’d been balancing the photography assignments with his thirst for newsworthy stories ever since.

  Ray’s eyes sparkled. “Hey, I was only here to cover a tree lighting and the big candy bowl reveal. No one could have seen this coming.”

  Someone could have, I thought. I took a careful look through the remaining nearby faces. Was one of them the killer?

  Ray widened his stance and crossed his arms. “Since I’m here, I figured I’d talk to folks. Find out what they’d heard or seen before the big discovery. I need to prove myself to those senior reporters. They only see me as the guy who takes pictures, but the paper will run this mess as front-page news for days, and I want one of those big bylines like last year.”

  I didn’t like all these references to last year.

  “How’s Caroline doing?” he asked, watching Evan and Caroline closely. “What’s going on with those two? Is the sheriff giving her the business over this?”

  “The business?” I smiled.

  Evan’s face jerked in our direction. “I’m her advocate,” he said.

 
“And there’s clearly nothing wrong with your hearing,” Ray muttered.

  “Don’t forget it,” Evan said, turning back to Caroline.

  I stilled as the men dressed like human marshmallows headed our way with the coroner. One of the men in white carried the equivalent of a giant freezer bag in his hand.

  Evan jumped into action, quickly meeting them halfway.

  Ray and I followed close on his heels.

  “The victim was stabbed,” the coroner told him. “Estimated time of death is between midnight and one AM.”

  The man with the freezer bag offered it to Evan. “We found this in the mints. Looks like blood on the blade and the marble handle. We’ll send it to the lab for confirmation and try to match the sample to the victim. We’ll run the item for prints while it’s there.”

  Evan lifted the bag into the cone of streetlight, and Caroline made a deep strangling sound behind us. I glanced over one shoulder to find her doubled over and white as a ghost.

  The high-end butcher’s knife in the evidence bag had a marble handle with two letters etched into the stone: “CW.”

  Caroline West’s butcher knife.

  Chapter Three

  I woke the next morning to the loving nips of my rescue cat, Cindy Lou Who, who stared into my bleary eyes as I worked to peel them open. Some people might have accused her of biting my nose and fingers, but I recognized the sweet sting for what it was: the gentle encouragement I needed to refill her food and water bowls, which she’d probably overturned in the kitchen. “Morning, Cindy,” I croaked.

  She leapt onto the floor and strode away.

  I pulled a soft, Sherpa-lined robe over flannel pajamas, stuffed my toasty feet into fuzzy slippers, and swiped my phone off the nightstand before padding quietly down the guesthouse hallway, doing my best not to wake Caroline. She’d asked to sleep over, and I hadn’t blamed her for not wanting to spend last night alone. We’d picked up some of her things before returning to Reindeer Games and eating our way through three bowls of kettle corn tossed with candied pecans.

  The tree farm guesthouse became my home last year when I moved back to Mistletoe following a wrecked engagement. My cheating ex-fiancé, Ben, had dumped me for his yoga instructor a few days before our would-have-been Christmas Eve wedding. Then, in a good show of karma, the yogi dropped him a few weeks later.

  I tucked my phone back into my robe pocket and stopped short when Caroline came into view. She stood at the kitchen counter, refilling a mug with coffee. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” she said as I shuffled into the room.

  “Not at all.” The delectable scents of blueberries and cream filtered into my fatigued mind, and my tummy growled. “Are you baking?”

  “Yeah.” The oven timer dinged, and Caroline donned Rudolph-themed mitts to retrieve two big trays of mini muffins from inside. “I helped myself to your pantry. I hope that’s okay.”

  I grabbed a fork and went after one of the little chunks of heaven. “That is always okay. Anytime you want to raid my cupboards and bake, please do.” I pressed my hands briefly into prayer pose before shoving a steaming hot bit of muffin between my lips. “Mmm. I usually have to walk all the way to the Hearth for a hot breakfast.”

  Caroline removed the muffins from the tins with the help of a little spoon, then nestled them in a basket lined with a holiday-print cloth.

  I squinted at her perfectly arranged curls and expertly applied makeup. “Did you sleep?”

  “A little.” She poured a second mug of coffee and extended it in my direction. “I was restless until about four thirty; then I drifted off for a while, but it didn’t last.” She tipped her head toward the window over the sink in my small galley kitchen. “I heard the construction crew arrive before dawn to begin work on the inn.”

  Slowly, I registered the faint sounds of morning construction. A hammer. A drill. A compressor motoring on. The muffled voices of workmen carried across the distance outside. “Sorry about that. I guess I’ve grown immune.” I set my fork aside to fill Cindy’s dishes, and returned them to the floor.

  It had been my dad’s lifelong dream to open an inn on the Reindeer Games property, and that was finally coming to fruition. When the place was finished, I would be the innkeeper. I wasn’t sure I was up for the job, having never been an innkeeper before, but my parents seemed to think I was the perfect choice, and they were rarely wrong when it came to their farm or me.

  “The crew Dad hired to build the inn is really making good time. They had the whole thing under roof in a month. Now they work every day, from dawn to dusk, on the interior and big-picture landscape details. Weather permitting.”

  Caroline peered wistfully through the window. “Growing up here must’ve been amazing.”

  Basically, but I didn’t want to brag. Caroline had grown up in town under the heat of a political spotlight, where everyone was watching and her every move mattered. My time in the spotlight had been limited to the holiday season, when I’d helped serve cookies and cocoa at the Hearth and judged our annual Reindeer Games. I’d spent the rest of my formative years reading books under trees and grooming horses. I’d never dreamed I’d still be doing the same holiday things at twenty-seven, but I was learning to let go of my plans and start enjoying life’s surprises.

  “The inn is beautiful,” she said, smiling at the window, admiring the new structure across the field.

  I stole another muffin. “The construction noise was an adjustment, but Christopher says they’ll be done by Christmas.”

  “Christopher?” she asked, tucking a second layer of fabric over the steaming muffins in her basket.

  “The contractor. He’s a really nice guy.”

  Caroline’s shiny red lips quirked to one side. “Is he cute?”

  “For someone more than twice our age? Definitely.”

  She looked a little disappointed. “Christmas is in eleven days. Do you really think they’ll be done by then?”

  “I think they have to be. His crew has another job up north immediately after this one.”

  It wouldn’t have mattered to us if the inn wasn’t finished until spring. Dad was just glad his dream was finally becoming a reality. He was getting an inn, and Mom was finally getting a much-needed kitchen update at the Hearth. They were about as happy as two kids on—well … on a Christmas tree farm.

  I stirred a little peppermint creamer into my coffee and blew over the tendrils of sweetened steam. “Sorry we have to stand at the counter,” I said. The kitchen table was working double-time as my jewelry-making station and office space. “I really need to get those orders filled and out the door.”

  “Maybe we can work on it tonight,” she said. “I’ll run the finished products to the post office in the morning. One less thing you’ll have to worry about.”

  I dropped my head back. “I forgot to check my online store’s email last night. There are probably more orders.” I righted my head and frowned. “I need to set an alarm to remind me to check every day. Between helping Mom at the Hearth and answering all the contractor questions for the inn, I feel like I already have two full-time jobs.” I sighed. “It feels a little like I’m running in circles.”

  “I have an idea.” Caroline shoved her palm in my direction, curling and stretching her fingers in the universal signal for “gimme.” “Let me see your phone.”

  I handed it over. “What are you doing?”

  She swiped the screen to life and tapped it a few times. “I’m setting up a notification. Anytime you get an order or message from your online store, the phone will tell you. The same way it does when you get a text message.” She flipped through a few more screens, then paused. “Oh. My. You have a lot of orders waiting here already. When was the last time you checked?”

  I had to think about that. Life on a Christmas tree farm in December was a little busy. “Last week?”

  She returned the device to my hand. “We’ve got a ton of work to do tonight.”

  The phone applauded, and I laughed
. “What was that?”

  “You just got another order,” she said. “New orders are exciting, so it feels appropriate that you should be applauded each time a new one comes in.”

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. You have a ton of things to do. This might make at least one of them a little easier.”

  My phone dinged now with an incoming text message. “Speaking of things I have to do,” I said. “Christopher is starting early with questions.” I turned the screen to face Caroline. “So, what do you think?” Christopher was constantly asking for interior design decisions, which I was nearly incapable of making. I knew nothing about the historic Victorian style that my parents had chosen, but they’d delegated me to handle the details since they were slammed between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Had they built a five-thousand-square-foot log cabin, I’d be their girl.

  I was ashamed to admit I’d resorted to Eeny, meeny, miny, moe over cabinet pulls for the laundry room.

  The current dilemma seemed to be bathroom fixtures. “Should he install this faucet in the main floor half bath,” I asked, “or this one?” I flipped between two nearly identical photos while she looked. “I wish Dad hadn’t asked me to do this,” I said. “I know how important the inn is to him. What if I screw it up?”

  Caroline rolled her eyes. “Your dad asked you because he trusts you, and you’re about to become their very first innkeeper. This place will be your home. It’s kind of exciting, if you think about it.”

  “I’d be more excited if all these choices weren’t so important. It’s not like choosing the wrong rug or porch chairs. I can’t just switch out the faucets if I change my mind.”

  Caroline gave an exhausted sigh. “Actually, you can, but I know what you’re saying. If I were you, I’d tell the contractor I like the oil-rubbed bronze fixture and the finish, but I’d really like to see the porcelain index buttons included as well. The second photo has the index buttons, but the finish is all wrong, and the look is too colonial. Maybe ask if he can find something like the first photo that also has the porcelain inserts.”