Beef Brisket Murder: Book 11 in The Darling Deli Series Read online

  “Reginald may very well be injured, dehydrated, or exhausted,” he said. “He may not have the strength to call out very loudly, and we wouldn’t want to miss a cry for help.”

  As the search progressed with no hints that the elderly man had come this way, and no news from any of the other teams, Moira began to worry that he might not be found in time. How long could he go without food and water before he got too tired to go on? Was he missing important medications?

  “How do you think he got out?” she asked David quietly as they walked to take her mind off of the terrible possibilities.

  “I’d have to take a look around the building to give you my guess,” he said. “Probably he found out what the code was and simply decided to go for a late night stroll. It can be hard for people to adjust to living in homes like this, and some don’t handle the loss of freedom well at all. From what you told me, he’s used to being independent. He may not have considered the dangers, then when he started getting tired, fatigue would have set in and he would have gotten turned around.”

  “Do you think we’ll find him?” She was almost reluctant to hear his answer, and was surprised when he gave her an optimistic one.

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “It’s not too cold, and—especially under the trees—not too hot. He hasn’t even missed one meal yet, so his blood sugar shouldn’t be too low. Unless he has a health issue that I’m not aware of, or has gotten himself hurt somehow, he should be fine. With the number of people that turned out to search, I doubt it will be much longer before he’s found.”

  She was about to respond when she saw something pale blue on the ground in front of them, half hidden by a dead branch. She rushed over and bent down to pick it up.

  “Look,” she exclaimed. “A slipper!”

  “The tag has his initials on it,” David said, taking it from her. “Call Eli and tell him where we are. I’m going to go look around.”

  Only a few minutes later they found Reginald sitting on a stump at the bottom of a hill. He looked tired and confused, but burst into a smile when he saw them.

  “I thought some people might be looking for me,” he said. “I was just about to get up and start trying to find my way back again. Just taking a little break, you know?”

  “Grandpa, what are you doing out here?” Eli rushed forward and helped his grandfather stand up. He embraced the old man, then helped him put his slipper back on. “We were all so worried.”

  “I was just going on a walk with Clint,” he explained. “I got a bit turned around. Did he make it back okay?”

  “Clint?” David asked, raising an eyebrow and looking at Eli.

  “Yes, he’s back at Misty Pines,” the young man told his grandfather. He turned to David and explained, “Clint is another resident at the home. He had dinner with us the other night in fact. I don’t know what happened, but I’m sure the staff will clear it all up when we get back. No one should have been walking through these woods, especially not so late at night.”

  Back at the retirement home, after all of the commotion had died down, Reggie retired to his bed. David, Moira, Eli, and Candice—the only visitors left—sat down in the common area together and talked.

  “I just want to say thanks again for your help,” said Eli. “This could have turned out so much worse.”

  “I’m just glad he’s okay,” Moira told him. “Did you ever clear things up with the nurses? How did he get himself outside at night, anyway?”

  “Well, he claims Clint visited him in the middle of the night and asked if he wanted to go for a walk, but Clint claims to have slept straight through the night. He says he doesn’t know what Reggie is talking about and, though I hate to say it, I believe him. My grandfather has had some issues with confusion in the past, and isn’t always good at telling his imagination from the reality.”

  “But how would he have known the code for the door?” she asked.

  “According to one of the nurses who passes out the medication, she had the code written down on a notepad in the medicine room—I guess they had just changed it, and she was worried about forgetting it. He could easily have seen it when he went to get his evening meds. They’ve already changed the code, and the director is giving the nurse a talking to. For security reasons, it’s against their policy to write the night code down.”

  “I’m just glad things turned out how they did,” said Candice. “Reggie has been happier than ever lately—he’s been talking nonstop about the girl you found in the basement and those missing people from years ago. He’s really hoping that you’ll come back and talk with him more. I guess he always wanted to work as a detective back when he was younger.”

  “Once he’s feeling better, I promise to visit again,” Moira told her daughter. “I hope he’s not too disappointed when I tell him I don’t know anything more about the case. I think we’re all going to have to wait for the police to release information officially before we can find out who the poor girl was.”

  David walked her out to the car after she had said her goodbyes to the others. He was being unusually quiet, his expression far away when she glanced up at his face.

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  “Just having a mental debate,” he told her, giving himself a quick shake and focusing on her. His lips shifted into a soft smile as he met her eyes, but she could tell that he was still concerned about something.

  “Is everything all right?”

  They paused by her car. She leaned against the hood, watching him carefully. She knew his expressions well, and knew that he was struggling with something. When he finally came to a decision he sighed and leaned back against the car next to her.

  “You know how I said I’d do some digging into old police files?” he began. She nodded. “Well, I found something.”

  Moira raised her eyebrows, encouraging him to continue when he paused. She realized that whatever he found must be pretty bad, she thought as he shifted his weight from side to side and stared out across the parking lot, stalling as he gathered his words. He really doesn’t want to tell me.

  “Go on,” she urged when he continued to hesitate. “You can’t just tell me that you found something, then trail off. My imagination will get out of hand.”

  “I’m not sure even your imagination would come up with something as dark as what I found,” he said grimly. “But I did say I’d tell you if I found something, and if you still want me to, I’ll keep that promise. I meant to bring it up at the park, when we would have time to talk about it in depth, but finding Reggie was obviously more urgent. Do you want to hear about it right now?”

  She searched his gaze for a second before nodding. Whatever it was that he had found, it couldn’t be worse than what she had found in her basement… could it?

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “As you wish.” He took a deep breath, preparing himself. “According to the old police reports I got hold of, about twenty years ago, at least five girls went missing. Two of them were from this area, others were from some other towns, but all were within a few hours’ drive. They were all similar in age to the woman that you discovered—high school students. And Moira… none of them was ever found.”

  Ice seeped through her veins as what he said sank in.

  “The police suspected a serial killer at the time,” he continued when she didn’t say anything. “But with no bodies discovered and no evidence to go on, they weren’t able to make any progress in the case. The girls all disappeared shortly after major school events, but that was the only thing that they could find linking the cases, other than the common age of the victims, of course.”

  “So you’re saying whoever killed the young woman and hid her body in my crawlspace might have done the same to four other young women?” she asked. “And whoever he is… he was never caught?”

  “Likely not, not unless he was arrested for some other crime. I didn’t want to tell you this, Moira, but besides keeping my promise to you, I also think it’s important f
or you to realize how serious this case it. You need to be careful, because if this guy is still out there, then he certainly won’t appreciate anyone who has anything to do with uncovering his crimes… and you’re already waist deep in all of this.”

  She knew what he was saying was true. Any killer was dangerous, but someone who was capable of doing it over and over again without remorse was especially so. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t get involved any further in this case. The only question was… was she already in over her head?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Moira drummed her fingers on the steering wheel impatiently. What was taking Darrin so long? When he finally slammed shut the truck’s back doors and came around to the front, she rolled down her window.

  “All set?” she called.

  “Yep. I’ll go tell Allison you’re about to leave. Good luck, Ms. D! I hope everything goes well.”

  “Thanks Darrin.” Despite her impatience, she gave him a smile. It wasn’t his fault that they were running late, and he had been nothing but helpful all morning. She just always found these catering events stressful. She hadn’t done enough of them yet for them to feel routine, and the thought of an entire gym full of teenagers and parents waiting on her made her nervous.

  A moment after her young manager disappeared into the deli, Allison hurried outside. Her blonde hair up in a ponytail, Moira was amazed once more at how much she looked like Candice. The two young women had become fast friends, and many people mistook them for sisters when they were together.

  “I’m ready, Ms. D,” she said, hopping into the truck’s passenger side front seat. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”

  “Don’t worry, Allison. I know I’ve been stressed since I got here, and it’s my own fault for leaving the house later than I should have. But we’re on our way now, and luckily for us, the Maple Creek High School is only a few minutes away.”

  Being asked to cater the high school’s science camp’s fair had been a nice surprise when it happened. She had always enjoyed the fair, both during her own stint at the school and while Candice had attended it, and it should be fun to go back.

  The high school had changed a lot since she had been a student. An entire wing had been added ten years ago, and the interior had been updated with the times. The library had modern computers, their slim screens sitting darkly in the silent room as she passed. The one thing that seemed like it hadn’t changed much was the gym. Even with the tables, posters, and bubbling science experiments set up, the bleachers, ancient floor, and whitewashed brick walls were all recognizable. She swore it even smelled the same.

  “You can go ahead and set up over there,” said the principle, Mr. Lafferty. He waved his hand towards the back corner, where a few cafeteria tables had been pushed together to for a long booth. “Do you need any help? I can send a few student volunteers your way if you do.”

  “I think we’ll be able to manage,” Moira said with a smile. Mr. Lafferty had only been the vice principal when Candice had been a senior, and she was glad he had gotten promoted. He was a kind, if high-strung, man, and seemed to care seriously about his students’ wellbeing.

  The spread for the science fair was a simple assortment of sandwiches, and didn’t take them long to set up. The most important thing was making sure all of the potential allergens were labeled clearly, and she triple-checked the little placards listing the ingredients before setting out the paper plates, napkins, and little packets of condiments so that people could begin making their sandwiches.

  The nice thing about letting people put their own food together was that it didn’t require much more than supervision on her part. She left Allison to watch over the table, and went out into the gym to look at the various booths set up with projects. There were the expected baking soda volcanoes, netted cages full of monarch butterflies, and cardboard posters observing the life cycles of frogs, but there were also things that she hadn’t seen before. Robotics seemed to have been popular that year, and she saw cute little robots walking around a table, programmed not to fall off the edge; a voice-controlled robot that a kid was making spin in circles; and a fully functioning robotic arm made from a 3D printer. She marveled again at the advances in science and technology that had happened since her high school years. She couldn’t imagine building a robot for her science fair!

  She traded places with Allison a little while later so the younger woman would also have a chance to look at the projects. When she came back, the deli owner excused herself to find a bathroom. The school’s layout hadn’t changed too much, and she found one relatively easily.

  She took her time walking back to the gym after she was done. It was nice to take a walk through her memories, plus the hallway was much quieter and less stuffy than the gym, which had become considerably warmer as it heated up outside.

  She paused by the trophy case in the hallway outside of the gym and spent a moment gazing at the pictures. She hadn’t been particularly athletic in high school, and Candice had never been on any of the varsity teams either, but it was still fun to look at the pictures and awards that had been granted to people that she knew.

  An older picture on the lower shelf caught her eye, and she crouched down to get a closer look at it. When she realized that it was the same picture that she had seen in one of the newspapers in her basement when she had been cleaning it out, her heart skipped a beat. In the newspaper, the girls’ faces had been circled, and one of them had been crossed out. This picture, however, was clean, and she could see the faces of the girls clearly. Something about the coincidence nagged at her. Could one of these girls be the one that the skeleton had belonged to? It was something of a stretch, but she just couldn’t rid her mind of the image of that ominous X through the young woman’s face in the newspaper clipping.

  Did the police know about that picture? She knew they had gone through the garbage bags of all of the stuff that she had thrown away while she was cleaning out the basement, but of course she didn’t know if they had found that particular clipping or not. She had forgotten about it until now herself.

  She considered her next move. The picture probably wasn’t important, but she couldn’t not tell the police about it. They might have ignored all the old newspapers in her basement. She wondered if the girl with the X across her face was the target of the killer, maybe even the body in her crawlspace. She would investigate, and tell the police if this evidence proved at all useful.

  She looked surreptitiously over her shoulder towards the gym doors, but they were shut and no one else was in the hall. Sliding open the latch on the display case, she carefully opened the door and maneuvered the framed picture around a basketball trophy from the 1990s. She took a picture of the photo with her phone’s camera, then, checking behind her once more, opened the frame and flipped the photo over. As she had guessed, the back of the photo was dated, and the names of the girls on the team were written by hand. She snapped a second picture with her phone, replaced the original photo in the frame, put it back next to the basketball trophy, then shut the cabinet. At the very least she would be able to pore over the photo when she got home and try to remember which girl had had an X over her face. Then she would try cross-checking the young woman’s name with the articles about the missing girls that Eli’s grandfather had found for her. With any luck, she would find a match. And if she did, the police would be the first to know.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Late that evening she settled down at her kitchen table with a mug of chamomile tea and her tablet, onto which she had downloaded the photos of the picture from the trophy case. Maverick was laying at her feet under the table, and Keeva was stretched out in the hallway. The house felt peaceful and quiet, and everything would have been perfect if her mind wasn’t on murder.

  The tablet’s bigger screen made it easier for her to see when she zoomed in on the photo, but even that wasn’t helping her much. The problem was that the original photo wasn’t high quality to begin with, and now that she was l
ooking at the camera phone photo of an old, faded photo, it was even blurrier. With a lot of guesswork, she decided that the girl with her face crossed off in the old newspaper clipping from her basement had been the one third from the left in the second row. From the names on the back of the picture, she decided that the girl’s name was Meredith Franklin.

  She was sure Candice or any of her employees would have been able to figure out a faster way to search through the articles that Eli had emailed her for the girl’s name, but she had to do it the old fashioned way—by skimming through every single page and hoping her eyes didn’t skip over a paragraph.

  After what felt like ages her hard work was rewarded. She believed that the girl whose face had been crossed out in the newspaper clipping had gone missing in the summer of 1990. Her name was Meredith Franklin, and she had just turned eighteen years old the month before she disappeared.

  This still wasn’t solid evidence that the girl in the basement had been one of the missing girls, let alone Meredith, but Moira couldn’t shake the feeling that she had finally found the owner of the skeleton. She gazed at Meredith’s face in the picture of the volleyball team for a long time before she decided to call David and share her discovery with him.

  “Meredith Franklin,” the private investigator muttered. She heard the clack of computer keys over the phone, and knew that he was running a search on the name.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked when he was silent for a moment.

  “Yeah,” he told her. “But it’s nothing more than what you already know. Just the stories about her disappearance, and a blurb a few years later—the year she would have turned twenty-one—stating that she still hadn’t been found.”

  “Do you think it’s her?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Moira,” he said gently. “Why do you think it’s her specifically, instead of any of the other missing girls?”