Fourteen

“This is all sorts of creepy,” I said to Betts as we took the freight elevator that just so happened to be big enough for a church cart to carry a dead body to the freezing cold basement of the only emergency clinic in Normal.

“The morgue is in the basement, so yeah. It’s creepy.” Betts didn’t seem to be as uncomfortable as I was as I fidgeted in my skin. “Here we are.”

The doors opened onto a long hallway with concrete flooring, making it even more eerie. The sound of the elevator ding echoed off the walls, creating goosebumps all over my arms.

“You coming or not?” Betts had noticed my hesitation when I didn’t get off the elevator behind her. She held the box of leftover donuts in her hands, which I found odd.

The sound of our footsteps was the only sound around us as we made our way down to the end of the hall. There was a big silver button on the wall that we had to push to open the steel doors.

“Colonel? It’s Betts.” We stood in the entrance of what appeared to be an office.

Colonel’s face appeared in the small round window in another set of double steel doors. He smiled when he made eye contact with Betts.

“Betts, to what do I owe the pleasure?” He peeled off the long yellow gloves that reached to his elbows before he reached out to pat her on the arm.

“This is my friend Mae West.” She introduced me.

“Ah, the famous Mae West. Owner of Happy Trails Campground.” He bowed. “Part-time sleuth.” He lifted his brows and gave me the side-eye.

“So you’ve heard about me?” I asked with a smile.

“I’ve been warned that you might stop by. It wasn’t with this case, but a previous one. Now, what are you snooping around about?” The corners of his mouth turned up.

“Since you asked, you know that it appears as if Nadine White, um, Dembrowski’s cause of death was a stab wound to the neck.” Here was my conspiracy theory. “I’m wondering if that was a secondary wound and maybe poison killed her.”

“Since I’ve just started to work on the victim, I can tell you that I’ve only gotten to the stab wound.” He grabbed a chart off of his desk and pulled the glasses down off of his bald head. “Without saying anything to hurt Hank Sharp’s investigation, and honoring my commitment to Betts and her friendship, I will tell you that the blood around the stab wound doesn’t correspond with when the rigor mortis set in, which I’m placing at around 8 p.m.”

“So, you can confirm that something else killed her?” I asked.

“I’m not confirming anything until I talk to Hank first.” His stomach grumbled. His eyes shifted to the box Betts held.

“Here.” I took the box. “We brought you some donuts.”

“Betts,” he winked. “You know my weakness.”

“I’ve never stopped by without bringing you a sweet treat.” Betts had known all along the Colonel loved donuts and I loved that she had used them to get what we wanted.

Colonel took the box and laid the file on the desk. He patted the file.

“I’m going to grab my coffee. It might be a few minutes.” He gave me a sly smile. One that told me he wasn’t giving me permission to look in the file he’d left behind, but he didn’t try to hide the file either.

Once he was through the door, Betts grabbed the file.

“Where’s your cell?” She asked me in a hurried voice. “You need to take pictures of this quickly.”

“You are awful, and I love it!” I was excited to have Betts on my side with this one. She was just as invested in getting Abby out of jail and bringing the real killer to justice as I was.

“Are you done?” He’s coming back.

“Yes.” I flipped the file closed with one hand and put my phone back in my pocket with the other. “I noticed you didn’t get your hands dirty.”

“That’s for you to do. I just said I knew Colonel.” Betts wasn’t dumb. She knew exactly how to keep her squeaky clean image as the preacher’s wife.

“Now. Where are those donuts?” Colonel didn’t give us a second glance. His eyes were focused on the Cookie Crumble Bakery box. “You know, Christine is a whiz at this.” He took one of the s’more donuts out of the box and rotated it, looking at it from all angles. “There’s something to be said about using fresh ingredients. Did you know she buys as many local ingredients as she can from local farmers and the farmer’s market?”

“I can tell a store-bought chicken egg in a minute.” I smiled, lying through my teeth. “That’s why I love this town so much. We support each other. That’s what we’re doing with Abby Fawn.” I gestured between me and Abby. “I truly don’t think she did it and if what you said about the blood from the neck . . .”

“What did you say?” Hank Sharp stood behind us. His green eyes had a hint of wonder in them.

“You were right.” Colonel pushed the box across the desk with his free hand. “She even brought me some good donuts.”

“Mae.” The sound of my name coming out of Hank’s mouth was filled with more disappointment than romance like there was before he kissed me the other night. “Betts, I’m shocked to see you here.”

“I’m just here to say hello to Colonel and thank him for his generous offering during last Sunday’s collection.” Betts wasn’t fooling anyone, even though she’d fully convinced herself she had.

“Mmmhhhh.” Hank took one of the donuts from the box. “Mae, can I see you in the hall?”

“Umm. . .okay.” I walked past him with my chin held high. Once we were outside and the door was shut behind us, I told him what I thought, “This is a free country Hank Sharp. You or no one else can’t tell me that I can’t come visit the morgue or the coroner. It’s my tax dollars and my vote that put him in this building and I can darn well go anywhere I please.”

“You’re right.” He nodded and took a bite of the donut.

“I’m what?” I asked. My jaw dropped, but my head said that something wasn’t right. There was no way Hank Sharp just told me I was right.

“I said, you’re right. You do have a right to be here and check out what your tax dollars go towards, but.” Here it came. “ You don’t have the right to snoop into an official investigation.”

“You’d think that after three other crimes,” I jabbed my finger in the air, “Make that three other murders, that you’d get used to me trying to help you figure this out.”

“Why is it that makes you so drawn to murder?” He asked a very good question that I should explore. Maybe with a therapist or something.

That thought aside, I retorted, “Because I love this town and I want to make sure the whole world gets to know how we care for each other. We support each other and that’s why we have such amazing shops and wonderful people that want the tourists to come explore.” I pointed to his donut. “You want to know why Christine’s donuts taste so good?”

“Sugar?” He asked and stuffed the rest of it in his mouth.

“No. The fact that she uses fresh ingredients from local farms. That’s what it is. Real love is baked into all that.” I circled my finger around his lips before I used the pad of my finger to swipe off the little bit of chocolate that’d dripped down on his chin.

“How about supper tonight?” The corner of Hank’s lip curled up. “You’re so cute when you get all huffy and puffy mad. Like an old wet hen.”

“Hank Sharp, I don’t like to be compared to an old wet hen.” My shoulders drooped as a big sigh left my body. “Supper is good. I need to eat.”

“And. . .” He hesitated as though he were deciding whether or not to tell me something. “I’m not sure why, but people love to talk to you. If you do hear anything about the case, I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“Are you asking me to snoop?” I asked. “Because you know that Abby Fawn didn’t do this.”

“Ava Grady said you sent her down here.” He turned all serious again. “From the phone call I got from Colonel this morning, the initial autopsy report says there was a primary cause of death and the stab wound was secondary.”

“Like the killer was making sure they’d gotten the job done.” The thought that someone had such hatred towards someone else sent chills all over my body.

“I’m not sure, but I’ve got a theory.” Hank took a couple of steps towards the door.

“What is your theory?” I asked.

He turned shy of the door and glanced at me over his shoulder.

“That, you don’t need to know. I’m the detective, you’re the ears I need in the community and around the campground.” He made the line very clear. “Nobody in the campground wants to talk to me.”

I followed behind him as he headed back into the room. Betts and Colonel were discussing some sort of theological issue I had no knowledge of, but stopped when we were all present.

“Are you ready?” Colonel asked Hank and picked up Nadine’s file.

“Yep.” Hank gave a hard nod. “Mae, I’ll see you tonight.”

“Mae,” Betts gushed after there was plenty of time Colonel and Hank to leave the room and head back into the morgue to discuss whatever it was Colonel had discovered. “You’ve got a boyfriend. And you said it was just a date.”

“It was a date,” I reminded her. “But a dead body interrupted what could’ve been a really good night. First one I would have had in a long time.”

“It sounds like it didn’t interrupt anything.” Betts curled her arm in the crook of mine as we made our way back to the elevator.

This time, I wasn’t nervous because we were going up and getting out of there.

“Now what?” She asked, dropping me back off at the Cookie Crumble Bakery where I’d left my car.

“I’m going to get a Facebook account and check out what this guy meant about Dawn’s photo with Nadine.” I didn’t want to get on social media, but it was time. Especially if I wanted to figure out just who Dawn was and how to get her on the suspect list.

“I’ll go and see Abby. Make sure everything is okay. I’ll see if she remembers anything else.” Betts waved me off.

I hurried to my car, dodging more big flakes of snow. There were a lot of snow squalls, where the snow would stop for a brief time before it fell again, but in very large quantities. It was something that wasn’t unusual for this area, which made me take it extra slow on the way back to the campground. 

By the time I made it back, it was lunchtime and I could smell the chili Dottie had cooked in the large kettle pot on the outside fire pit. I’d initially had it built for the nightly cookouts the campers enjoyed so much during the warmer weather.

Around suppertime, each camper that wanted to participate would build up their outdoor firepit and get it going with something tasty, making enough for everyone to come around and have some. By the time you made it around to each camper, you’d had a full meal. That turned into me making the main meal over the big fire pit and something the entire town turned out for.

We had desserts out the ying-yang along with any sort of drink, including cocktails, you could imagine. The meats, vegetables and dairy were fresh from the farm, which reminded me of the Cookie Crumble Bakery and Dawn Gentry.

Dottie was sitting at her desk with her feet propped up, looking through one of them trashy celebrity magazines.

“Looky here.” She flipped the pages taut and folded the magazine in half. She tapped the article she wanted me to read. “It’s the account of that photographer who had a fight with Nadine White. I bet he killed her.”

“Let me see that.” I hurried over to her, shedding my coat as I went.

“According to this, Nadine White got a restraining order against this photographer. Her photos brought him tons of money, making her his cash cow.”

“And he could have killed her to get revenge.” I grabbed my notebook out of my purse and made another timeline below Dawn’s. “Does it say what his name is?” I sat down at my desk.

“Mmmhmmm…” Dottie pulled her eye readers off the top of her head and put them on. She lifted her chin and drew her eyes down her nose. “Some feller by the name of Reed Fowler.”

“Reed Fowler,” I repeated and wrote his name down along the line. “Now I have three suspects other than Abby.”

Things were looking a little better and I couldn’t wait to tell Hank about it tonight.

“Who?” Dottie dragged her feet off the desk and took her readers off.

“I’ve got Valerie Young because Nadine White was going to take her income away by firing her as her agent.” I quickly told Dottie how I’d overheard Valerie and Nadine yelling when Fifi and I were walking home.

“Money can be so bad.” Dottie tsked. “It brings out the evil in people.”

“Then there’s Dawn Gentry.” I’d completely forgotten I’d not told Dottie about the name listed as Nadine’s contact person on the rental contract. “What do you think about that?” I asked after I told Dottie all the sketchy stuff Dawn had done since she’d been in town. “I’m going to open a Facebook account, so I can dig deeper into that photograph.”

I shook the mouse hooked up to the computer and brought the blank screen to life.

Dottie looked over my shoulder with her readers back on the edge of her nose.

“Put your email there.” She pointed out. “Right there is a password.”

“Dottie,” I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “Do you want to do this?”

“I want to make one for Happy Trails, but you didn’t want to do that.” She was good at reminding me of things I’d been opposed to once the campground started to take off. “I told you that millennials have got this spirit to camp, glamp, and hike. They are begging for a place like Happy Trails.”

“Fine.” I pushed my chair back. “Have at it.”

“Now you’re talking about killing two birds with one stone. We get business, while you can use it to snoop around.” She was able to talk and get the Happy Trails Facebook page up in no time.

We talked about Abby and how we needed to figure out if she had an alibi, which made me wonder if she had been able to remember anything for either Ava or Betts. Neither of them had called me, and I didn’t want to bug them, so I’d keep trying to find new suspects. I was pretty proud of myself so far. Three would put a little bit of doubt in Hank’s head.

“Also, I went to see Colonel Holz.” I took out my phone. “He said Nadine’s stab wound was secondary.”

I scrolled through the photos of the autopsy report that I’d illegally taken.

“Where’d you get those?” Dottie was caught off guard with the photos.

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” I teased and decided it was best for her not to know. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Abby didn’t kill her. It was something else, but he wouldn’t tell me what.”

“Let me see that.” She reached for the phone. Her eyes squinted behind the readers as she used the tips of her fingers to make the photos bigger and smaller. Drawing them together and then apart. “It looks like she had been poisoned.”

“I knew it!” I grabbed the notebook. “I think Dawn Gentry poisoned the donuts and gave one to Nadine.”

“Even if she did poison her, how did she get poison?” Dottie asked, looking up over the top of her glasses at me.

“I don’t know. But it’s a good theory anyways. Good enough for me to tell Hank and he can do his detectiving to find out.” I recorded the poisoning theory in my notebook.

“Is detectiving a word?” Dottie smiled and went back to typing on the computer. “I’ll use the pretty lake photo from the tiki summer party we had.” She was getting into building the Facebook page.

“Can I look around and let you finish that up in a minute?” I asked.

“Why are you in such a hurry? Got a date?” She snickered. “One without a dead body?” She laughed louder.

“Yes. Yes, I do. It’s a do-over date. And without a dead body.” I flipped the notebook closed and looked over her shoulder at the screen. “Look up Dawn Gentry,” I told her. “On her page, you’ll find a photo of her and Nadine.”

I watched her scroll down.

“There. Stop. Back,” I instructed after she scrolled right on past the photo.

“It’s recent too.” She pointed to the date on the status, which was two weeks ago. “Here’s the comment.” She used the pointer of the mouse to point to the photo of the guy who’d left it. She clicked on it and brought us to his Facebook page. “Mae,” she gasped. “Reed Fowler.”