Dangerously Dark, page 3
I recognized him as the vendor I’d seen setting up earlier.
“We’ve got to call for help,” I said, taking charge.
“We’ve got to get her out of here,” he disagreed. “Now.”
The whole incident—from hearing Carissa scream to entering the trailer to meeting Beardy—probably took twenty seconds, tops. But it seemed to be happening in super slo-mo.
At least to me, it did. Beardy was another story. He didn’t have any problem operating in real time. He knelt beside Carissa with evident concern, then hoisted her in his massive arms. He turned, looked around, then galumphed down the steps with an involuntary grunt. The trailer shuddered again. I followed him outside, just in time to watch him lay Carissa on the ground.
Beardy stripped off his flannel shirt, heedless of the onlookers who’d begun gathering (other vendors, I surmised). Dressed only in his undershirt and baggy jeans, he bundled up his flannel button-down, then tenderly placed it beneath Carissa’s head for a pillow. She moaned, then began to stir.
Thank God. She wasn’t dead. Shaking and feeling faint with what I assumed was leftover adrenaline, I hurried to her while digging for my cell phone. We still needed help. We needed an ambulance, paramedics, someone knowledgeable about killer vapor. . . .
Even as I had that ludicrous thought (killer vapor?), a siren cut through the springtime air. Help was already coming for Carissa, probably thanks to one of the other Cartorama vendors. She’ll be fine, she’ll be fine ran through my head like a comforting litany—then hit an awful, unsettling speed bump.
“The man! Inside!” I gestured wildly toward the trailer. “We’ve got to go back and get him. He’s still in there.”
Beardy pursed his lips and very faintly shook his head. His pale face and drawn expression were trying to tell me something. In my fraught state, I didn’t know what. I looked around at the onlookers, then singled out one person who appeared capable—a stocky, thirtyish blond woman wearing a T-shirt featuring a screen-printed piglet and the scripted words BACON HAD A MOM.
Hey, if she was compassionate toward animals, she’d help.
“You.” I pointed. “Help me carry him out of there.”
“No!” Beardy heaved himself to his feet. He wiped his hands on his jeans-covered backside, then cast an apprehensive glance at Carissa. “I haven’t turned off the safety valve yet.”
He was wasting time. I peeled off toward the Airstream trailer anyway, trusting my designated helper to follow me.
She didn’t. I only made it a few steps before realizing as much. I glanced backward. Her face was as pale as Beardy’s.
“Is it . . .” She faltered and knit her brow. “Who’s in there?”
This was no time for discussion. Yet everyone around me seemed to be frozen in shock. The piglet T-shirt woman. Another vendor nearby, who was headed our way wearing a va-va-voom skintight vintage dress and an armful of tattoos. Even a tall, hipster-y man who’d wandered out of a nearby building, frowning at us with his arms crossed over his deep-V-necked T-shirt.
What was wrong with all of them? Couldn’t they see this was an emergency? Ordinarily, people listen to me. When I’m on a consultation job, I’m the expert. Clients pay for my opinion, so they tend to comply with it. But here, I might as well have been invisible. I was no match for the stunned inertia around me.
Whatever. I didn’t care if these people wanted to stand idly by in a crisis. I didn’t. I’d drag out that man myself, one inch at a time, if I had to. There was no time to waste.
But just as I took another step, Carissa’s voice pierced the sounds of distant traffic. “Declan?” she asked brokenly.
Oh no. Beardy turned to her. I couldn’t see his face.
Carissa could. The sight made her burst into tears.
“Declan!” Muzzily, she lurched to her feet. With an awful wail, Carissa ran back to her trailer. She staggered inside.
My gaze met Beardy’s. He looked dazed, sad . . . and guilty?
What the... ? Before I could pursue that line of thought, I realized the awful truth. Carissa had just stumbled upon her fiancé’s dead body. Declan Murphy was dead. I had to go to her.
Part of me didn’t want to. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true. It had been one thing when I’d thought the man merely needed to be helped out for some first aid. It was another now that I knew he was beyond first aid. Permanently.
Poor Carissa. I heard her keening from inside her trailer and I was in motion before I could think up any reason not to be.
“Carissa?” I stepped into the tiny Airstream trailer through the open door, squinting to see in the gloom. It was still so cold in there.
Declan Murphy was still so unmoving. Handsome and lifeless.
I couldn’t believe it. I suppose I was in shock. So was Carissa. She lay over Declan, her arms wrapped around him, sobbing against his big, broad, completely immobile chest.
“No, no, no,” she murmured in a shattered voice. “Please—”
Whatever she was about to plead for was drowned out by the sound of Beardy lurching into the trailer behind me. I turned to him, annoyed that he’d intrude on Carissa’s heartbreak.
The look on his face stopped me. He appeared devastated.
Humbled, I watched as he moved across the trailer, past bags of sugar, containers of cocoa, and ten-pound blocks of chocolate arranged in tidy stacks. Comically, he appeared to be tiptoeing across the space, but he wasn’t built for stealth. The whole place rumbled vaguely beneath his ungainly footsteps.
He hunched his undershirt-covered shoulders, looking embarrassed. But Carissa seemed to neither notice nor care.
Poor Carissa. I went to her, then laid my hand on her shoulder. Comfortingly, I patted her. “I’m so sorry, Carissa.”
She sniffled, her thin shoulders shuddering. She looked up at me. When her gaze met mine, it was damp with tears, yet oddly bright with hope. “He’ll be okay. Really, Declan is tough.”
It was the “really” that broke my heart. Carissa’s hopefulness couldn’t have been more obvious—or more agonizing.
I could see actual frost on Declan’s waxy, slightly yellowed face. The situation was grim.
“We should all get out of here,” Beardy broke in, standing over both of us with a helpless mien. “Carissa, you know how dangerous the nitro is. I’ve got the safety valve shut now—”
He looked younger than me—probably in his midtwenties—but he seemed knowledgeable about the science involved. I couldn’t forget his guilty expression earlier, though. What did it mean?
“—but it was totally hashed, and I don’t know how stable my fix is.” Beardy spoke faster now as he gestured for us both to move. “It’s better with the door open, but until all the nitro has dissipated, there’s still a serious risk of displacement.”
It was all Greek to me. I’d majored in . . . well, a little of everything, really. You won’t be surprised to learn that I wasn’t the most decisive college student. Unlike Carissa, who’d seemed to have found her métier early on in art and design, I’d dabbled in all kinds of things. Eventually, chocolate found me.
But that’s a story for another, less tragic day.
“I’m not leaving him.” Carissa nudged aside her glasses to wipe her teary eyes. The gesture made her look like a toddler—one who wanted no part of the nap that would help her feel better. “It’s our engagement weekend! How can I leave him?”
Sobered by that, I went still. But Beardy didn’t.
He came to Carissa, then took her arm. “Come on. Please.”
Outside, the siren I’d heard drew closer. I could hear what had to be an ambulance’s doors banging shut. Footsteps neared.
“Just come outside for some fresh air,” Beardy insisted.
His stalwart stance reminded me of Danny. He and Carissa’s friend couldn’t have been more different, but this was exactly the way Danny had reacted when Adrienne Dowling had been found dead, only steps away from me, at Maison Lemaître. His strong and protective presence had helped me enormously that night.
There was never a good time to encounter your first dead body. It helped to have someone less emotionally invested on hand. Taking Beardy’s lead, I patted Carissa’s shoulder again.
“Come outside with us,” I urged. “There’s help coming for Declan. We’ll need to be out of the way of the paramedics.”
That seemed to get Carissa’s attention. Her desperate gaze swerved to mine. Held. I thought I was getting through to her.
Then, “They can’t help with Chocolate After Dark.”
I frowned. “‘Chocolate After Dark’?”
Carissa nodded. Her hair shielded her face. “Declan’s—”
She wept, unable to continue. I looked to Beardy.
“Declan’s culinary tour,” he explained, sotto voce, casting Carissa a fretful look. He clenched and unclenched his hands, shaking his head. “It was supposed to launch on Monday.”
“Not ‘was.’ Is!” Carissa exclaimed heatedly. She jerked up her chin, even as voices outside penetrated the trailer. The Cartorama vendors, I assumed, directing the paramedics to the emergency. “It is launching on Monday! Declan’s worked so hard for it! Chocolate After Dark has to go forward. It has to!”
Gloom fell over the trailer’s interior as one of the EMTs stopped in the doorway. It was time to get serious.
“Yes,” I told Carissa. “Yes, of course it will go forward!”
“It can’t without Declan!” Her scattered gaze flashed to the paramedics. She gulped. “You do it, Hayden. You do the tour. Just until things are . . . settled with Declan. Okay?” She focused in on me. “Promise me you will. Please do it.”
I wasn’t sure what doing “it” involved. But under the circumstances, there was only one thing to say. I squeezed Carissa’s hand. “I’ll do whatever you need me to,” I promised.
Like magic, my words got Carissa upright. She took in the waiting paramedics, glanced at anxious Beardy, then returned her attention to me. Like a frail ghost of her formerly cheerful self, she tried to smile. All she could muster was a lip wobble.
Carissa was being so brave. I teared up all over again.
If my would-be fiancé turned up dead during my engagement party weekend, I would have hoped to have behaved just as admirably as Carissa was, I decided as I helped her outside—me with one arm, and Beardy with the other. Carissa was remarkable.
And okay, so her fixation with making sure Declan’s culinary tour launched on time was a little odd. But there was no telling how people would react to trauma. I knew that. Sometimes people focused on random details during a catastrophe, as a way of momentarily escaping whatever ordeal was at hand. By this time tomorrow, probably, Carissa would have forgotten all about the way she’d talked about the Chocolate After Dark tour.
She’d have forgotten about my promise to launch it, too, more than likely. Not that that’s what I was thinking about over the next half hour or so, as we all—vendors, visitors, and neighborhood residents alike—waited for the EMTs’ pronouncement.
The paramedics checked out Carissa, then released her to us. The Portland police arrived and took statements—from me, from Beardy, and from Carissa. A local TV-news satellite van parked across the street behind my rented Civic, disgorged its crew, then grabbed footage of the goings-on, even as Deep V-Neck—the wiry, frowning man I’d noticed earlier—crossed the street and berated them for it. He scowled, dark and intense.
I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but body language didn’t lie. Whoever he was, he wasn’t pleased with Oregon’s news media invading Cartorama during its moment of misfortune.
All too soon, Declan’s body was carried out of the trailer on a scoop stretcher, hideously zipped into a large plastic bag. By then, I think we were all becoming numbed to the proceedings. Hugging Carissa tightly, I watched as the EMTs loaded Declan’s body into their waiting ambulance. The controlled, purposeful activity of the past thirty minutes felt like a dream.
Well, technically, it felt like a nightmare. Especially for Carissa. She couldn’t stop crying. Everyone had rallied around her, exchanging worried, teary-eyed glances and helpless words of sympathy. None of us knew what to do or how to do it.
The surprising thing about tragedy is, life goes on—and so do you, one moment at a time. Maybe by numbing out. Maybe by clinging to a routine. Maybe by becoming cynical or angry—or by engaging in some unprecedented sleuthing. I’d learned that after seeing someone close to me die unexpectedly in San Francisco.
Then, I’d helped bring some justice to the situation. Now, I just wanted to be there for Carissa, in any way I could.
Not that my sentiments were shared by everyone, I couldn’t help observing. The vivacious-looking brunette I’d noticed earlier had vanished shortly after the EMTs had arrived. I’d last glimpsed the short (but not especially petite) piglet T-shirt wearer at about the same time. Not everyone was good in a crisis. Me? I’m usually on the move myself. But not this time.
“Carissa, I’m going to be in town awhile,” I told her as gently as I could, deciding in that moment to stay as long as was necessary. “If there’s anything I can do to help—”
“Just get Chocolate After Dark off the ground,” she said in a desperate tone. “For me. For Declan. For all of us. Okay?”
Her teary gaze swept Cartorama and its vendors. Everyone around me seemed to shift uneasily. Then Carissa pushed away, hauled in a deep breath, and followed the EMTs to the ambulance.
Her slender shoulders trembled as she peeked inside it. Then she climbed in beside Declan Murphy’s lifeless body, the ambulance doors closed behind her, and Carissa was gone.
As soon as the ambulance pulled away—moving with an awful slowness that told everyone at Cartorama there was no help for Declan Murphy now—I wished I’d gotten into it with Carissa.
“One of us should have gone with her.” Beardy stood nearby me, clenching his cast-off flannel shirt in his fist as he watched the ambulance disappear down the tree-lined street. “Carissa shouldn’t be alone right now. Not after all this.”
His emotional tone was heartbreaking. He was obviously upset by the events of the morning—and I’d callously thought he’d seemed guilty earlier. What was the matter with me?
I couldn’t let what had happened at Maison Lemaître color my whole life in shades of gray. That was no way to go forward.
There weren’t killers around every corner, I reminded myself. The paramedics had told us Declan’s death had seemed to be an accident. The police had agreed. It helped. A little.
“She won’t be alone,” I told Beardy, taking refuge in that fact. One of the vendors had already called Carissa’s parents. They’d be meeting her soon. “You were really amazing,” I added, meaning it. “Thanks for all you did this morning. I don’t know how I’d have gotten Carissa out without you.” I held out my hand to him. “I’m Carissa’s friend from college, Hayden Mundy Moore.”
I’m here for Carissa’s engagement party, I was about to say. But he cut me off before I could explain my presence there.
“You’re the chocolate expert. Yeah, Carissa told us about you.” Warmly, he clasped my hand. “I’m Austin Martin.”
Austin stopped, seeming to wait for something. I didn’t know what. He gave a fleeting, puzzled frown, then went on.
“I run The Chocolate Bar cart next door.” He angled his burly shoulder toward the small, brightly painted building I’d noticed earlier. It stood partly open with its counter bare. “I specialize in imported, nostalgia, and hard-to-find candy bars.”
“Do you stock Kit Kat Chunky?” I couldn’t help asking, taking refuge in normalcy. I needed the comfort just then. “Cadbury Double Decker? Flakes?” I inhaled, then, “Maltesers?”
Those were among my international favorites. Austin’s eyes brightened. “Of course. Plus, Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Kinder Bueno. Mars bars. Aero bars. Every kind of Kit Kat. The works.”
My eyes widened at the possibilities. You might not know this, but Nestlé makes Kit Kat bars in all kinds of flavors, all over the world. Strawberry in Japan. Cookie dough in Australia. Banana in Canada. I don’t know why those flavors don’t play in the States. They just don’t. They’re not exactly artisanal chocolates made of extra-spendy, ultra-rare Criollo cocoa beans and handmade praline, but they’re pretty tasty, all the same.
“Sometimes I get a wicked craving for a nice Matcha Kit Kat,” I confessed. “I’ll have to hit up your cart sometime.”
We both smiled, momentarily connecting over something less traumatic than Declan’s death. The other vendors and neighborhood residents still milled around, murmuring in groups of two or three. It was awkward, but also consoling. I guess none of us wanted to be alone just then. It felt heartless to go back to ordinary life while Carissa was facing such a crisis. Maybe that’s why I lingered. Even though I didn’t know anyone there, I didn’t want to be alone. Not then. Not after . . . everything.
“So you really were great with Carissa,” I told Austin, feeling inexorably drawn back to those events. “Without you—”
“Carissa would have been asphyxiated. Just like Declan.”
I didn’t understand. “Asphyxiated? In her trailer?” That’s what one of the EMTs had alluded to earlier, but it still didn’t make sense to me. “But Carissa was alone. I checked.”
Foolishly, I recalled. A wave of nausea rolled over me at the memory. I still felt overwhelmed. Light-headed too. You know that feeling you get when you’ve mainlined six espressos standing at the counter in a Naples caffe? No? Well, it involves a lot of shakiness, buzzy thoughts, dry mouth, and queasiness.
Overall, it’s not pleasant. But at least I was alive.
Poor Declan. How could he have been asphyxiated? Aside from the frost on his face, he’d seemed to be the picture of health.
I wished I could have met him earlier. Seen him and Carissa together. Helped them embark on their married life together.
