Murder, Wrapped Up Page 3

I didn’t like where this is going.

  “We need your help,” he finally said. “We’d like you to be a witness for the Federal government, as they say, against the ‘Ndrangheta. Tell us everything you know about them, and their ties to the town.”

  And there it was.

  “No,” I told him, picking up his half-eaten bowl of stew and bringing it over to one of the sinks. “I can’t help you.”

  “Well, you could, actually.”

  “Really. How’s that?”

  “Tell me about the people here in town. Like Alfonse Calico, for instance.”

  “I told you, I don’t really know him. And there’s no one else in town that I could say two words against.”

  Well, I reminded myself, there was Senior Sergeant Cutter, but why would one police officer listen to me about another one? I told Cutter a while ago that I’d see him removed from the senior spot here in town. I didn’t have any real evidence to make that happen, and until I did, there was no sense in talking ill of the criminally stupid.

  “You sure?” he asked me. “I’m thinking you have a lot of information to share.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  That seemed to surprise him. The thing was, I knew I couldn’t say anything. I knew, deep in my heart, that the ‘Ndrangheta were leaving me alone for now. If I said anything, if I spoke to the Federal cops, then they might just decide I was worth their attention again...

  I gripped the edge of the sink as the room began to spin.

  There was so much going on in my life. So many bad things had happened. It wouldn’t be so hard, if my husband were still with me. Back then, he would have held me and told me that things were going to come good. Back before he left me and ran off to join the circus or build a cabin in northern Canada or start a bloody rock band or whatever it is men do when they leave a marriage without so much as a text message to tell you they’re leaving.

  My husband is gone, sure, but I’ve got a good man in my life. Now, if only I could stop keeping him at arm’s length and start letting him get really close to me.

  With a sigh, I tried to remember when life had been uncomplicated.

  “Okay over there?” Bostwick asked me, and there was still that little smirk in his voice. The man was so sure of himself. So... arrogant. He honestly thought all he had to do was waltz in here with that badge and his good looks and he’d get me to roll over and play puppet for the Feddies. Tell him all the juicy gossip on Alfonse Calico and all my friends.

  Not today.

  I went back over to him, and maybe it was the wrong decision or maybe it was the right decision, I don’t know, but it was what felt right for me.

  “No,” I told him again, putting as much emphasis as I could on a two letter word. “Hope you enjoyed the stew. If you need a room for the night I’ve a few rooms available.”

  He looked amused. Amused, that I had told him no.

  There’s very few folks I’ve ever wanted to slap in my life. Bostwick here just made the list.

  “I’m all set with a room,” he said. “Thanks anyway. Your friend Alfonse has some rooms to let over the pub. I’m staying there. Until I’m done in Lakeshore, anyways.”

  I’m sure my jaw dropped. Alfonse was renting rooms over the Thirsty Roo now? Well. News to me. Not that I minded. Much. It’s just that for the longest time I’d been the only place in town to get a room. Fifteen rooms, and I’ve been doing a good business with it lately.

  I shook my head. There couldn’t be more than four rooms up above that pub. Hardly make a difference to my business here.

  “Uh, glad to hear that,” I told him. “So. I think it’s time for you to leave, Officer Bostwick.”

  He nodded, and held his hands up in a what-can-I-do gesture. “Well. You think on it. Like I say, I’ll be in town for a bit. If you don’t want to talk about Alfonse to his face, as they say, we can go somewhere else more private.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.” I picked up his hat and handed it to him.

  He took it, then folded his arms, cocking his head to one side. “Don’t like police much, Miss Powers?”

  “Some of them,” I said, honestly. “Maybe if you were my son my answer might be different, but I doubt my son would ever ask me to do something like this.”

  “Ah, yes. Your son. I hear he’s making quite the name for himself even though he’s new. I wonder what he’d have to say to you ‘bout all this?”

  “I’ve got a feeling you already know, Officer Bostwick.” I stepped away from him, over to the door leading between the kitchen and the dining room, standing there and making it very obvious that I wanted him to leave.

  Instead of taking my hint, he quirked an eyebrow at me. “You don’t think your son would want you to tell me what you know, Miss Powers?”

  “No he wouldn’t. And you know it.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  My turn to smile. “Because you didn’t bring him with you.”

  That finally put some cracks in his expression. “Ahem. Right. Smart woman. Well, guess I’ll be going then. Just remember. I’ll be in town for a bit. Come see me when you feel like talking. Merry Christmas, Miss Powers.”

  He eyed me on his way out of the kitchen, but it was in a different way than before. There might have been something close to respect there. Good. Let him get a good look at who he's dealing with.

  When he was gone at last, I slumped up against the wall and ran my hands back through my hair. Was I doing the right thing? The ‘Ndrangheta were bad people, to be sure. I’d learned that firsthand from a couple of their people trying to kill me. One of them did kill Jess, even if it was by mistake. But what could I tell the Feddies that they didn’t already know?

  Last month this town had been crawling with Australian Federal Police. Back when Arthur Loren had accidentally revealed the location of a dumping ground for people killed by the organized crime syndicate. I’d talked to them at length back then. None of them had asked me to become some sort of professional witness. Why was Bostwick so intent on that now?

  That was a curious question. It made me think that Officer Bostwick didn’t want to use me for information, so much, as he wanted to use me for something else. Like maybe bait.

  Looking at it that way, my decision to say no really made sense. Oh, yeah. The ‘Ndrangheta had been doing business in Lakeshore for a long time, just like they’d been doing business in a lot of Australia. Thing was, they didn’t have as much reason to be here anymore. Their drug ring was broken up. The field where they had been burying their dead bodies had been discovered. If anything, they had a lot of good reasons to stay away from Lakeshore. All eyes were on this place. At least for now.

  I wasn’t going to be the one that gave them an excuse to come back. Especially if it meant they’d be hunting for me when they came.

  So. I’d made the right decision. Good to know. There. Now that was settled, I could go back to the business at hand.

  Getting the smell of burnt chicken bits out of the ovens.

  As I went off to find Rosie, a little doubt nagged at me. Just a little one, mind you, but it was there just the same. Something about Bostwick didn’t sit right. Or maybe that was just my desire to slap him as hard as I could.

  Well. Little doubts could wait. Life happened too fast to get bogged down by every niggling little doubt that comes my way.

  ***

  I was exhausted by the time ten o’clock rolled around that night. It was a good kind of exhausted, but I was still so tired that I fell into bed fully dressed and I couldn’t have cared less. The bed was soft, and my pillow was whispering sweet whispery things to me that made me so drowsy I don’t even remember closing my eyes. I was just suddenly asleep.

  Until the loud banging on the door woke me up.

  I tried to yell at whoever it was to go away so I could sleep for at least another two hours. What came out instead was more like “Mrumph.” My brain still wanted to be asleep and my tongue was too heavy.

 
It took me a few more minutes—and another round of banging on my door—before I could rouse myself enough to form coherent sentences. “Hold on,” I called out as I sat myself up... and that was when I realized I was only in my shirt and panties and socks. When did I get undressed? A quick search of the floor next to the bed turned up the same pants I’d been wearing yesterday. Good enough for now. Whoever was at my door wasn’t going to wait for me to take a shower and freshen up.

  I combed my fingers through my hair and rubbed my eyes and then felt around my neck for my unicorn necklace.

  It wasn’t there.

  Bang bang bang.

  “I’m coming!” There was no way I took the necklace off before I went to sleep. I hadn’t even taken my shirt off. So where—

  Bang bang bang.

  “Okay, okay.” Tossing aside pink sheets I jumped off the bed and went to my door. “Who is it?”

  “Senior Sergeant Cutter.”

  I froze in my tracks. Cutter. Here, at my door. My room was at the far end of the third floor hallway, a little bigger than the other guest rooms and plenty enough for me, but there was only the two rooms. My bedroom-slash-living room here and the bedroom there. It was a tight space, and I did not like the idea of being alone up here with Lakeshore’s senior sergeant.

  “What d’ya need, Cutter?” Slowly, quietly, I reached out to make sure the deadlock on the door was set in place. It was.

  “Miss Powers, I need ya to come with me. Down to the station.”

  Just for good measure, he banged on the door again, making me jump.

  “I don’t think I’ve got any business down at the police station, thanks.”

  See, I don’t trust Cutter any further than I can throw him. My Kevin was the only one with any kind of brains or integrity on the police force here in town and now that he’s gone, things are worse than before.

  Besides. Cutter’s a dirty cop. I know it in my heart. Just because I can’t prove it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. I know it, and he knows it. If he’s asking me down to the police department it can’t be for anything good.

  So I figured I was better off right here.

  “Don’t be making a blue here, Miss Powers.” Cutter’s voice came to me through the door. He always called me Miss, never used my first name. “Come on out peaceful like and I promise to give ya a fair go.”

  “What are you talking about, Cutter?”

  He didn’t answer. I could hear him trying the doorknob.

  Oh, snap.

  “Senior Sergeant, tell me what’s going on, right now, or get out of my Inn.”

  “Hold yer tongue, woman,” he shouted, rapping the door a single time hard enough to rattle the hinges. “Only one giving orders here is me. Got that? Now get on out here.”

  This was getting out of hand, fast. I had backed up so far that I was standing by the bed again, and from here my telephone—the landline—was close to hand. I picked it up, knowing I could call Rosie for help. Or my boyfriend. Or better yet, every single person in Lakeshore to come down here and be a witness so that Cutter didn’t end up doing something that I’d regret.

  Picking up the receiver, I held it to my ear, listening for the dial tone.

  I heard a voice instead.

  “...remember... me...”

  “Hello?” I said into the phone. “Who is this?”

  The phone went silent in my hand. No static. No dial tone.

  Just the silence of the dead.

  Bang bang bang.

  Cutter. At the door. The explosive rapports of his knocking startled me and I dropped the phone.

  “Clumsy.”

  My friend, Jess, sat on the bed. It was her who called me clumsy.

  Somehow, Jess never seemed to understand how she was dead. I see her ghost around the Inn from time to time. She tells me things, even. She gives me messages by moving things around. Turning pages in books. Sometimes a message written in the steam on my bathroom mirror.

  She does not talk to me. Ever.

  But she’s talking now.

  How?

  “Ya need to go with him, Dell.” Jess tossed her hair over her shoulder. It was long and black today. She liked to go back and forth between her natural blonde and her dyed brunette look. Guess that’s your privilege when you’re a ghost. You get to decide how to be remembered. “There’s no way ‘round it. Don’t give Cutter a reason to be a bigger ratbag than he already is. Ya have to go with him.”

  I reached out for her. I wanted to touch my friend again, to tell her I missed her. “Jess...”

  She smiled, and crossed her long legs in her torn jeans, and turned sideways to look out my window at the morning sun.

  When she did, she disappeared.

  That’s my girl. Here to help, and gone again.

  She told me to go with Cutter. Why would she do that?

  “Miss Powers,” Cutter called in to me, his voice oozing impatience. “Open this door right now before I put my size eleven boots to work kicking it in!”

  “What is going on, Cutter?” All of this was beginning to make my head spin. It was all so... unreal...

  Of course.

  That’s why Jess was talking to me. When I’m awake, she can’t talk to me directly.

  But that doesn’t matter, when I’m still asleep.

  “Listen to me,” Cutter said.

  Only, when I turned, he was already in my room. His square-jawed face was staring at me with fierce hatred. He was a pompous blowhard in that pressed blue uniform shirt of his, puffing out a breath through his bushy white handlebar mustache. I always thought he looked a little bit like a troll. With that sneer he was wearing on his lips he really looked the part. “You listening to me, Miss Powers?”

  This wasn’t real. I kept telling myself that. “I hear you, Cutter.”

  “Good. Here’s what we’re going to do. You and me is going down to the police station. We’re going to have a long talk ‘bout why you killed Officer Jason Bostwick.”

  The world began to go fuzzy. There was a ringing in my ears, and a pounding that matched the beating of my heart. Bostwick was... dead?

  No. This was just a dream.

  Just a dream.

  And I wanted to wake up.

  Wake up.

  With a jolt and a deep, shaky breath, I sat upright in bed. I grabbed at the blankets as I looked all around my room. Nobody was with me. I was alone in my room. The sun was just rising over Pine Lake outside my window.

  When I looked down I saw the phone on the floor where I’d dropped it in my dream.

  I was fully dressed again. Just like in my dream.

  But this time when I felt for the unicorn necklace, it was there. I sighed, glad to have the comforting little point of the curling wooden horn pressed into my palm again.

  I wondered what parts of the dream had been real, and what parts had just been fantasy created by my foggy brain. This happened, sometimes. It wasn’t just that I could see and hear and talk to ghosts. That wasn’t the full stretch of my strangeness. It was like I was in touch with the other side, if that made any kind of sense. That’s the only way I can explain it. Sometimes my dreams were more than just dreams.

  Running a hand back through my hair, I decided it was probably a good time to get up and take a shower and try to relax.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  A knock at my door. Two guesses who was there. The first one didn’t count.

  “Miss Powers,” Senior Sergeant Cutter called in to my room. “I need ya to come with me. Down to the station.”

  He didn’t even have the words out before I opened the door. No sense changing clothes. Cutter wouldn’t wait for me to take a shower and freshen up. He looked at me in surprise, his brow wrinkling up to the thinning stubble of gray hair on his scalp. His mirrored sunglasses reflected my own face back at me. It wasn’t determination that I saw in my eyes, so much, as it was resignation.

  This was going to happen whether I wanted it
to or not. Jess had told me so. Good old Jess, always watching out for me.

  “Let’s go, Senior Sergeant,” I said to him. “You’ve got a murder to investigate.”

  Chapter Three

  My dreams aren’t normal, as you may have figured out.

  Oh, sometimes I’ll have the ridiculous nonsense dreams that everyone does, where I’m at lunch with people I’ll never meet in real life or I’m prancing around my Inn wearing my jammies and singing show tunes. Sometimes, that’s all they are.

  Other times, they tell me things. Things that are going to happen. Or, things that already have.

  Guess it’s part of whatever blessing or curse I was born with. At least I think I was born with it. Didn’t really know I had it until Jess died. Of course there have been times when I’ve sensed the ghosts or spirits about the place but didn’t really want to admit that was what was actually happening. I guess I’m still trying to figure out how a grounded woman like myself can somehow interact with the spirits of dead people, but there it is. I’ve got a sixth sense, and it lets me do things that most other people can’t. It tells me things that I wouldn’t know, otherwise.

  Sometimes, I really wished for the bliss of ignorance.

  Officer Jason Bostwick was dead. Just like in my dream. I’d just talked to the man yesterday, and now he was dead. Doubt I was the last one to see him alive, but that didn’t matter to Cutter.

  He had me in the interview room inside the police station. I’d been in here any number of times, of course, with Kevin. The walls were a plain greenish color, recently painted to cover the spots that had been peeling. There was a table here in the middle of the floor, a metal one, with a single plastic chair on either side. I was sitting in one of them. All the times I’d been in here with my son, watching him interview suspects or put together a case against someone, I never thought I’d be the one sitting on this side of the table.

  Opposite Senior Sergeant Cutter, being questioned like a criminal.

  At least he hadn’t handcuffed me to that metal ring in the table.

  He’d left me in here for nearly a half hour. I knew that tactic. My son had used it many times. Leave someone alone and it makes them wonder what you have planned for them. Often times if they’re guilty they’ll start to sweat a bit.