Six Sweets Under, page 18
“I bet he wants your autograph,” Dizzy said.
“I doubt it.” Even though I’d been asked for my autograph many times, I still had trouble understanding why anyone would want it. Despite my relative success with my acting career in the past few years, I was a far cry from the celebrity A-list.
“Dizzy’s probably right,” Sawyer said. “But if you see him again, give me a call. If you can point him out to me, I’ll have a chat with him.”
“I think that would be going overboard. He really hasn’t done anything much more than look in my direction.”
“Then if he does anything to make you feel uncomfortable, give me a call,” Sawyer amended.
“I will.” I watched as he surveyed the room. “What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.” He tugged off one of his gloves and ran a hand through his hair again, leaving it disheveled.
I liked the look on him.
“I feel like we’re missing a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “Probably several pieces. If nothing else, I was hoping that coming here would jog some new ideas.”
“It did that for us,” Dizzy said. “Well, for Becca, anyway.” She told Sawyer about our theory that Archie might have stolen something that would reveal a dark secret, one worth killing Archie to keep it under wraps.
Sawyer raised an eyebrow. “I’m guessing you’re basing that on nothing but conjecture.”
“You guessed right,” I admitted.
“But it’s an idea, at least,” Dizzy said.
Sawyer nodded, but he seemed distracted. He opened one of the doors along the back wall and disappeared into the next room.
Dizzy and I wandered farther into the living area. I stopped in the middle of the room. From there, I could see Sawyer in Archie’s bedroom. I opened the other door and peeked through it. As I’d thought, it led to a bathroom. I made a face and backed out, closing the door again. Archie hadn’t exactly kept up on his housekeeping.
Dizzy stood by the stone fireplace, inspecting a collection of odds and ends lying scattered across the mantel. I stepped into the bedroom, where Sawyer was now searching through a closet to the left of the door. As with the kitchen cabinets, he was running a hand along the inside of the closet. He moved all the way into the small space, which held only a few garments, and looked up toward the ceiling. He pushed at a panel above his head and it lifted up.
“Access to the attic?” I guessed. “Did that get missed during the previous search?”
“No,” Sawyer said. “It was checked.” He let the panel fall back into place and stepped out of the closet, closing the bifold doors behind him. I stared at the wall next to the closet. I retreated to the hall and looked at the wall out there.
Dizzy appeared by my shoulder. “What’s up? Did you find something?”
“I’m not sure.” I returned to the bedroom. “It’s probably nothing.”
“But?” Sawyer prodded.
I squeezed between him and the foot of the double bed so I could get to the far side of the closet. I was about to touch a hand to the wall when Sawyer caught my arm in a gentle grip.
He handed me a glove. “Just in case.”
I tugged on the glove and rested my hand against the wall. “The closet only extends halfway along this wall. There’s no other closet out in the hallway, so doesn’t that leave a big space between the bedroom wall and the one in the hall?”
I started knocking on the wall, moving from the end of the closet toward the corner of the room. The first knock sounded slightly different than the ones that followed. Less hollow.
Sawyer and Dizzy noticed the difference too. They came over to join me as I started pressing at the white-painted wood paneling on the walls. One of the panels seemed to give more than the others. I leaned my weight into it and something clicked. A portion of the wall opened toward me.
“A secret room!” Dizzy bumped my fist. “Way to go, Jessica Fletcher.”
“Don’t encourage her, Dizzy,” Sawyer admonished, but I could tell he was interested in my discovery.
I pulled the paneled door open wider. “More like a secret hidey-hole than an actual room.”
I stepped back so the others could see into the space between the bedroom and hall walls. It was the same height as the closet and roughly half as wide.
“Jackpot,” Dizzy whispered as she got a look inside.
Rough shelving filled the space. The shelves held all manner of small items, from cell phones and jewelry to video game consoles and a couple of laptop computers. A series of pegs had been driven into the wall above the shelf that stood level with my eyes. Several necklaces, bracelets, and watches hung from the pegs.
Dizzy reached toward some of the jewelry.
Sawyer stopped her with a hand to her wrist. “Don’t touch anything. Not even with gloves.”
Dizzy snatched her hand back. “Right. You’ll want to photograph the evidence as we found it.” Her eyes lit up. “Archie must have stolen all this stuff. Maybe something in here is the reason why he was killed.”
A phone rang. For a second, I thought it was one of the phones on the shelf, but then Sawyer pulled his out of his pocket.
He checked the display. “I have to take this.” He pinned Dizzy and me with his gaze. “Remember, don’t touch anything.”
I tucked my hands behind my back.
He stepped out into the hall and answered the call.
I whipped out my own phone and snapped a few photos of the contents of the hidey-hole.
“Good thinking,” Dizzy said with approval.
“I don’t know that it’ll help us at all.”
“You never know. And we need all the help we can get right now.”
I couldn’t deny that. Despite the find, I didn’t think I was any closer to proving Pops’s innocence. Clearly, I was far better at making chocolates than I was at detecting.
I slipped my phone back into my pocket a split second before Sawyer returned to the room.
“I need to call this in,” he said. “I’ll walk you two out to the road.”
“Don’t you trust us to leave on our own?” Dizzy asked, all innocence.
“Nope.”
He motioned us out of the bedroom and toward the front door. I stepped outside first, with Dizzy right behind me, and Sawyer following after her.
A twig snapped off to my left. I whirled around.
“Sawyer!” I exclaimed with surprise.
He swore under his breath and took off after a dark figure that was running away from Archie’s cabin like greased lightning.
Chapter Twenty-Six
After a second of hesitation brought on by surprise, Dizzy and I raced after Sawyer. By that point, the mystery person had already disappeared from my line of sight. Sawyer’s brief head start and the fact that he was a faster runner than me meant I didn’t catch up to him until I reached the dirt road. Sawyer stood there, hands on his hips, not looking happy.
“Where did they go?” I asked, scanning the forest around us.
Dizzy ran up behind me. “They got away?”
“They were gone by the time I got to the road,” Sawyer grumbled. “I have no idea which way they went.”
I couldn’t hear any sounds of someone crashing through the underbrush, but that didn’t mean much. Aside from the road, there were nearby trails leading off in different directions. Even though it was raining, the dirt on the road was so hardpacked that there weren’t any discernible footprints. The three of us walked up and down the road, checking each trailhead, hoping we’d have more luck with footprints, but we didn’t come up with anything.
Finally, when we were all well and truly soaked from the rain, we gave up and huddled beneath the broad branches of a pine tree, where it was still relatively dry.
“Did you get a look at the person before they took off?” Sawyer asked me. “Did you see their face?”
I shook my head, disappointed. “I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman.” The hood of the roomy coat had been pulled up, hiding the person’s face and hair. “What about you?”
He looked as disappointed as I felt, plus a bit frustrated. “Whoever it was, I’m pretty sure they’re shorter than I am, but that’s it. Dark pants and a black raincoat. It could have been almost anyone.”
“I did notice one thing,” I said, remembering a small detail. “The back of the raincoat was torn at the bottom.”
Sawyer nodded. “I saw that too.”
I rubbed my goose bump–covered arms. “I don’t think that will help much, though.”
“It might,” Dizzy said.
Sawyer sounded less hopeful. “We’ll see. I need to call Detective Ishimoto about what we found in the cabin. Do you want me to walk you home?”
“That’s all right,” I said after exchanging a glance with Dizzy. “We’ll be fine.”
Despite that assurance, Sawyer walked us around the bend in the road and then stood and watched us until we left the woods. Either he wanted to make sure that we really did leave, or he wanted to be certain that the mystery person wouldn’t leap out at us before we made it into the open. Maybe both.
“You know,” Dizzy said as we crossed a bridge, “what just happened fits with our latest theory.”
“Because the person who ran away could have been the killer, coming to search for whatever Archie stole from them?” I guessed.
“Exactly.”
“Or the murder could have had nothing to do with any of Archie’s thefts, and the killer was returning for some other reason. Maybe to get rid of some other type of incriminating evidence that they think the police haven’t found yet.”
Dizzy stopped in her tracks. “We should search the whole property again.”
I tugged her back into motion. “The police will do that, considering what just happened.”
“True.” She shivered and tucked her wet hair behind her ear.
“We should probably get warm and dry. How about hot drinks at my place?” I suggested.
Dizzy readily agreed to that idea.
Back at my cottage, I changed into dry clothes and loaned some to Dizzy. Everything of mine looked ridiculously large on her, but since we didn’t plan to do anything but lounge around inside, she didn’t care. She put her wet clothes in the dryer so she could change back into them later before heading home.
I filled the kettle and turned it on while Dizzy got mugs down from the cupboard. Once the tea was made, we settled at the kitchen table with our drinks. Binx and Truffles brushed up against our legs but then returned to the couch, where we’d found them upon our arrival. The rain continued to pour down outside, and the cats showed no interest in heading out to their catio.
I felt bad for Sawyer. He was probably still out in the rain, unless he’d taken shelter in Archie’s cabin while waiting for Detective Ishimoto to arrive. Either way, if the police did decide to search Archie’s entire property again, Sawyer probably had a very wet couple of hours ahead of him. I considered taking some hot coffee over to him later, but I didn’t think he’d be too impressed by me showing up at Archie’s place twice in one day. Plus, if his colleagues were with him at the time, they might wonder how I’d known where to find him. I didn’t know for sure, but he might not want to explain that Dizzy and I had been with him earlier. It was probably best to leave things be in that respect.
“So,” Dizzy said, once we’d both taken time to get some tea into us, “regardless of what the mystery person was after, we know Archie stole more than Pops’s scooter.”
“It’s pretty hard to think otherwise after what we found,” I agreed. “Have there been a lot of thefts in town in recent years? I remember occasional break-ins, especially with the summer homes when they were unoccupied, but crime was never a major issue here before I moved to LA.”
Dizzy took a sip of chai tea. “It’s been a problem on and off. Every so often there’ll be a rash of thefts or break-ins, then things go quiet for months at a time. Same thing up at Snowflake Canyon. Sometimes the police catch the culprits, but not always.”
“I think it’s safe to assume that Archie was responsible for at least some of the unsolved thefts.”
Dizzy set down her mug of tea with a thud. “We still have no way of knowing what the mystery person was after.”
“Or who they were.” I stared into my empty mug, wishing we had more to work with.
Dizzy sat back in her chair after finishing her tea. Her cheeks had turned pink. “That was good tea, but now I’m hot.”
“Me too.”
Although the temperature had dropped when the rain started, it was still fairly warm out. The inside of my cottage felt muggy and oppressive now. I opened the windows, and Binx and Truffles immediately got up from the couch and hopped onto the sill of the largest window. They looked out through the screen at the rain while Dizzy and I collected our mugs and put them in the dishwasher.
The cats remained on the windowsill, and Dizzy and I got comfy on the couch. We spent the next half hour or so brainstorming how we could narrow down our list of suspects. Our ideas were limited, unfortunately. We decided we needed to keep a lookout for anyone with a torn black raincoat. Although we didn’t know if the person who’d run away from us at Archie’s cabin was definitely the murderer, their shifty behavior made that a good possibility.
The rest of our meager plan involved taking a closer look at Tammy Doyle and Oliver Nieminen. We thought maybe we could chat with members of the hiking club in an effort to find out more about Oliver’s problems with Archie, and whether any of the hikers had reason to suspect Oliver of being the murderer. We wanted to do that in a subtle way. Hopefully that was possible.
Eventually, the rain stopped, and Dizzy decided to head home in case the break in the weather was only temporary. After she’d changed back into her own clothes and had set off for home, I curled up in an armchair with a notebook and pen. I wrote down the names of all our suspects, hoping that seeing them in print would somehow spark new ideas. It didn’t, so I gave up on sleuthing for the day, and lost myself in a good book.
* * *
• • •
While making chocolates the next morning, I tried to figure out what kind of questions I could ask the hiking club members to subtly gather more information about Oliver. As I thought things over, I realized that the questions I would ask weren’t the only things I needed to figure out. First, I had to locate members of the hiking club. I thought back to the snippet of the meeting I’d witnessed in the library the day that Archie had intruded. I couldn’t remember recognizing anyone aside from Oliver and Estelle. That didn’t really matter. I could start with Estelle and go from there. There was probably a way to get her to reveal the names of other club members without me saying exactly why I wanted to track them down.
After I’d finished working for the day, I decided to go for a jog before turning my mind back to Archie’s murder. The rain had stopped the day before, but the weather was cloudy and cooler than it had been lately. I planned to do a loop around the town, and maybe stop in at Lolly and Pops’s place on my way home. I ran along the canal paths, following a route that took me around the north side of the Larch Haven Hotel and then on to Cherry Park. When I reached the oak tree where we’d stopped during the vigil for Lexi, I slowed my pace. Her photo, the flowers, and the toys were all still there, the flowers now well past their prime.
I was about to continue on when I stopped short. I moved in for a closer look at Lexi’s photo. Tugging my phone out of my armband, I pulled up the photos I’d taken at Archie’s cabin the day before. When I found the one I was looking for, I zoomed in.
I didn’t think there was much room for doubt.
One of the pendants mixed in with the other jewelry Archie had stashed in his hidey-hole was a perfect match for the one Lexi was wearing in the photo.
The one she’d been wearing the day she disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I texted Sawyer right away, telling him i needed to talk to him about the murder case as soon as possible. He wouldn’t be impressed when he saw the text, considering that he wanted me to stay out of the investigation, but once he heard what I had to say, he’d probably forgive me. Maybe the police had already made the connection between the pendant in Archie’s stash and the one Lexi Derendorf wore, but there was a good chance they hadn’t, and they needed to know about it. It could possibly change the course of the investigation. It was certainly making me look at things from a new angle.
Sawyer didn’t respond to my message right away, which didn’t surprise me. He was likely on duty and might not see my text for a while. I considered heading straight for the police station to share my discovery, but in the end, I decided to give Sawyer a bit more time to respond. That way I could finish my run, which would give me a chance to think.
Before leaving Cherry Park, I snapped a photo of Lexi’s picture, making sure the necklace was in focus. As I jogged along the tree-lined avenue leading out of the park, I tried to calm my spinning thoughts so I could make sense of them. If Archie was in possession of the necklace Lexi was wearing when she disappeared, that suggested that he’d had something to do with her disappearance.
A cold, sickly sensation trickled through me, despite the fact that I was sweating from jogging on a warm summer day. After an entire decade with no sign of Lexi, she was most likely dead. It was also highly likely that she died very soon after storming out of her family home on the night she was last seen. Last seen by everyone except Archie or whoever had harmed her, anyway. If Archie had stolen Lexi’s necklace when he killed her, perhaps as a sick memento, that would explain why he had it hidden away in his cabin.
