Honey BBQ Murder: Book 10 in the Darling Deli Series Page 5

  When she finally cleared the basement, which was the last place in the house that someone could have been hiding, she breathed a sigh of relief. She had no idea what that person had been doing in her yard—it was two in the morning, definitely not a normal time for someone to be going on an innocent walk in the woods. She had the feeling that whoever it was had been trespassing on purpose. But why?

  She checked Keeva’s stitches, then put her back in the mudroom for the night and brought Maverick upstairs to her room. She wished Keeva could come too, but she knew the dog would want to jump on the bed and play with Maverick, and she didn’t want to risk Keeva’s recovery. She turned out the bedroom light and spent a moment looking out the window at the dark forest below. Should I call the police? she wondered. No. I’m overreacting, she decided. Maybe the figure she had seen hadn’t even been a person. Maybe it had been a deer running across her yard. Yeah right, she thought. A deer that was running on two legs?

  She was about to turn away from the window and get into bed when she saw a red glow light up the trees near where the end of her driveway was. She didn’t realize what she was seeing until the red lights began to move. They were taillights. Someone had been parked at the end of her driveway.

  She slept fitfully that night. Every slight creak and groan of the house jolted her awake. Maverick seemed to be on high alert too; during one of her wakeful periods she saw the dark outline of his head at the window as he gazed into the night. She doubted she would have been able to sleep at all if not for his watchful presence.

  She was relieved when morning finally came and sunlight streaked through the branches above to light up her yard. The thought of someone walking around the outside of her house in the dark didn’t seem quite as frightening in the daylight, but she was still uneasy enough to call David as soon as she thought he would be awake.

  “Have you called the police?” was his first question when she related her frightening experience.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said. “Do you think I need to?”

  “With your track record? Yes.”

  “It could have been someone who just turned into the wrong driveway on their way home from a bar,” she said, not really believing it, but reluctant to contact the Maple Creek police station. The head detective there, Detective Jefferson, was bound to hear about it, and she was already notorious enough around the station without adding yet another incident to her record.

  “You’re going to make me go grey early, Moira Darling,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “At least I know you have two big dogs to protect you.”

  “See? I’ll be fine. I doubt whoever it was will come back, not after the sort of greeting that they got.”

  Feeling a bit better, she said her goodbyes and hung up. Convincing David that she wasn’t in any danger seemed to be the best way to convince herself of the same.

  CHAPTER TEN

  She barely had time to worry about the mysterious person who had been lurking around her house that night. Meg, bedridden with the flu, called shortly after Moira got off the phone with David, so the deli owner began working double shifts for the next few days. She was glad that she had agreed to hire Logan to take care of the dogs. They seemed to like him a lot, and she didn’t have to feel guilty for leaving them alone for long hours.

  When Meg finally felt better enough to return to work, Moira breathed a sigh of relief and took a couple of much-needed days off the next weekend. If more than one of her employees ever got sick at once, then she would be in serious trouble. Would it be best to hire another couple of people on a part-time basis? She hadn’t really felt the need for it before, but Meg’s absence had shown her just how much she depended on each and every one of her employees to be able to do their part every week. She knew that some things just couldn’t be avoided, and there was bound to be more instances of employees getting sick, injured, or even just wanting to take a vacation.

  More employees would mean my current employees losing hours, she thought. She knew that the deli was the main source of income for most of her employees, and she would feel terrible if she had to cut their hours. There had to be a good solution, a middle ground of some sort. With a sigh, she decided it was a problem for her to think about on another day. She had worked twelve-hour shifts for the last three days, and wanted nothing more than to relax at home. Candice would be coming over soon, and their plan was to drink smoothies, watch the dogs play in the yard, then spend a few hours shopping in town.

  She spooned the last of the yogurt into the blender, then covered the top and pressed the button down. With a loud grating sound the blades began to spin, pureeing the strawberries, blueberries, melon, and mango that she had chopped up and frozen earlier for the smoothies. The sound made her wince. The blender at the deli was top of the line and still nearly new, but she had gotten her personal blender from a garage sale earlier in the year when she had been desperate to replace some of what she had lost in her house fire. Maybe it’s time for an upgrade, she thought. Then, remembering the hit her bank account had taken thanks to Keeva’s emergency surgery, she decided that it had better wait. The blender blended, and that was all it really needed to do.

  “Her stitches look good,” Candice said, rising from the floor where she had been kneeling to pet the Irish wolfhound, who was still belly up on the floor and waiting hopefully for more petting.

  “Yeah, she seems to be healing quite well,” Moira told her daughter as she poured the smoothies into two glasses. “On Friday I’m taking her back to the vet for a checkup. If all goes well, she’ll be able to run and play the way she used to. It’s been tough keeping her from wrestling with Maverick. It will be nice to let them roughhouse again.”

  “I bet.”

  The young woman took the glass that her mother offered her, and the two of them headed outside. Keeva lay down between them on the front porch, seeming to know that she should take it easy. The German shepherd, on the other hand, raced across the yard and busied himself with marking every tree he could. He was pretty good about sticking around while she was out there with him, and he definitely seemed to like having the freedom to run around without the constraints of the fence in the back.

  “So, how’s the candy shop?” Moira asked. She had been so busy at the deli that she hadn’t stopped by as much as she would have liked. Here her daughter was, forging her own path in life and building a career for herself, and she was too busy to even stop in once a week and buy a piece of homemade fudge.

  “It’s doing really well,” Candice said. “Now that school has started up again, I’m actually getting more business. A lot of kids walk home after school, and they go right by the candy shop. I’m sure their parents hate me by now—the candy is just flying off the shelves.”

  “Well, at least the dentist must like you,” the deli owner joked.

  “I’ll have to ask her if she’s had more cavities to deal with than usual next time I go in for a tooth cleaning,” her daughter said with a chuckle.

  “How’s Eli?” She hadn’t seen Candice’s boyfriend since her daughter’s birthday.

  “He’s great.” The young woman smiled brightly. “The ice cream shop has been pretty busy too, so we haven’t been able to see each other as much as we used to, but we still go out a couple of times a week. I’ve started eating dinner with him and his grandfather at the retirement home on Thursday nights, which is actually pretty fun. His grandfather has a lot of good stories about what things were like in this area years ago.”

  “I’m glad it’s working out between the two of you. He seems like a good guy.”

  “He is. I think…” her daughter trailed off, blushing. “I think I’m in love with him,” she continued after a moment. “It’s way different than it was with the other guys that I’ve dated. This feels way more serious.”

  “That’s wonderful, sweetheart. Just be careful that you’re not moving too quickly.” She hadn’t been much older than her daughter was now when she married Mike. While s
he wouldn’t change her past for anything—it had given her Candice, after all—her marriage definitely hadn’t ended well. If she had waited until she was older and more experienced, she might have found a better man, someone she would still be with today. Someone like David, she thought.

  She and Candice spent the next few hours in town, walking slowly along Main Street and stopping at each of the small shops. It had been a perfect late summer day, and by the time she and her daughter parted ways, each of them ready to head home, she felt happy and relaxed. Sure, sometimes she was so busy she barely had time to sleep, but days like this that made everything worth it. A beautiful day spent in her hometown with her daughter—what more could a woman ask for?

  Evening was falling when she pulled up her driveway. As always, the sight of her beautiful stone house sitting in the clearing in the middle of the woods made her heart swell with happiness. She really was lucky, wasn’t she? She had the perfect house, a perfect daughter, and two wonderful dogs, not to mention an promising relationship with a handsome private investigator, and a thriving business. Somehow, all of the jumbled pieces of her life had come together to make a pretty satisfying whole.

  Her good mood lasted until, fumbling for her keys as she walked up to the porch, she noticed that the front door was already ajar, the doorframe splintered and broken where someone had forced their way in. Her house had been broken into, and Moira had never felt more keenly the acres of woods that separated her from even her closest neighbor.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Please calm down, Ms. Darling. Start from the beginning. We just need to know what happened,” Detective Jefferson said. His voice wasn’t patronizing, but gentle. Moira took a deep breath, attempting to center herself. The panic that she had felt when she had come home to find her house broken into and both dogs missing was only just beginning to fade. Where to begin? She decided to start by telling the detective about the mysterious person that had been in her yard the other night.

  “I haven’t seen him or her since,” she finished. “To be honest, I had decided that whoever it was probably wasn’t going to come back, and that was that.”

  “There hasn’t been any other suspicious activity? No cars driving past your house that don’t seem to belong in the area?”

  “Not that I noticed,” she said. “But I can’t really see the road from my house.”

  “Can you tell me what happened today? Leave no detail out. Even the smallest thing could give us a clue as to who did this.”

  Moira patted Keeva’s head, turning to look at the house for a moment as she gathered her thoughts. The officers were still inside, taking photos of the mess and checking every nook and cranny on the off chance that the criminal was still inside.

  “Well,” she began, “I went to town for a few hours, shopping with my daughter, and when I got back I noticed that the front door was half open. At first I wondered if I had forgotten to close it all the way. Then I noticed the broken door frame and realized that someone had actually forced the door open. I didn’t know what to do. I was worried about the dogs, but I was also terrified that someone might still be in the house.”

  The memory of that fear made her shudder. Horrible scenes had flashed through her mind the instant she had realized that someone had broken into her house while she was gone: visions of the dogs shot and dead, or suffering somewhere on the road after being let out and hit by a car still worried her. She had hardly noticed the damage to the house as she walked through it searching for the dogs.

  “Luckily Keeva was still locked in the mudroom and started barking as soon as I called her name. She was terrified, poor thing. When I heard her, I hurried through the house and let her out. I didn’t touch anything—everything is exactly how I found it. Then I went back outside with Keeva and started looking for Maverick.”

  Maverick had been harder to find at first. He had gotten outside when the burglar broke in, and eventually came running up from the direction of the stream, sopping wet and blissfully happy. By then she had nearly been in tears, and had given him a relieved hug despite his muddy coat.

  “Once I found him, I grabbed my phone and called the police station. You know the rest.”

  He nodded. “There was no sign that anyone was still hanging around the property when you got here?”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t see any cars or people. Nothing.”

  “All right.” The detective glanced over at the house, where one of his men was giving him a thumbs up. “They’ve cleared the house. Would you mind going and taking a look around to see if you can tell what’s been taken?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  It was harder than she had thought it would be. She had already lost most of her possessions once in the fire at her old house. To see the rooms of her beloved new house ransacked like this was nearly too much to bear. Drawers had been pulled open and emptied, their contents strewn about on the floor. A glass had been broken in the kitchen, and she was careful to step around the shards, glad that she had left the dogs outside in the care of one of the police officers. The only room in the house that was untouched was the mudroom, where Keeva had been locked up. She figured that the burglar had probably been reluctant to deal with the huge barking dog, and had decided that there probably wasn’t anything in there worth getting bitten.

  It took her only a few minutes to notice.

  “This is weird; nothing’s missing,” she told the detective. “I mean, not that I can tell. The TV is still here, and my tablet is sitting right on the counter, untouched. Look, the twenty-dollar bill is even still on the fridge. I leave it there for my dog sitter. What sort of burglar would leave everything valuable behind, and not even take money that’s sitting out in plain sight?”

  “Interesting,” Jefferson mused. “None of your jewelry is missing either?”

  “I don’t have very many expensive pieces anyway, but no. It’s all there.”

  “This sounds like whoever broke in here was looking for something specific,” he said.

  “I don’t think I have anything that anyone would want.”

  “Have you bought anything from a pawn shop recently, or from a private buyer online? It could be that someone changed their mind about something they sold you and wanted it back.”

  “No,” she told him. “I haven’t gotten very much new stuff recently, and certainly nothing anybody would break into my house for. I stopped at a garage sale last week, but all I got was a small, cast-iron table for the back porch—and that’s still there.”

  “I take it you aren’t harboring any criminals here or evidence that someone might be looking for, right?” his tone was joking, but she could tell from his eyes that he was half serious. The poor man seemed to think she was capable of anything.

  “No,” she promised him. “Well, there’s Keeva. She saw her owner get murdered—but she’s not talking. And whoever broke in didn’t seem interested in her anyway.”

  Detective Jefferson raised an eyebrow and asked her to relate the story about her second acquisition of Keeva.

  “Do you think Chelsea’s death had something to do with this?” she asked him.

  He was silent for a moment as he considered her question. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t see how it could. Like you say, the dog wouldn’t make a very good witness in court. Besides, she wasn’t stolen. If you’re right and nothing was stolen, then that might mean that the burglar didn’t find whatever he was looking for.”

  “Do you think that he’s going to come back and try again?” she asked, feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Maybe she should have bought another house in town, instead of moving way out here. At least then she would have neighbors close by when something like this happened.

  “It’s possible,” the detective said. “Do you have somewhere else you could stay for a while?”

  “Not with the two dogs,” she told him. “My daughter’s apartment is too small for both of them and me.”

  �
��I’m going to post someone outside of your house for the next couple of nights, then. At the very least, the police presence should scare away any potential criminals. At best, we might actually catch someone if he does come back for round two. Be sure to give me a call if you realize that you are missing something. If we can figure out what this burglar was after, it could very well help us figure out who committed the crime.”

  The police left her shortly thereafter. She had already called David and knew that he would be here at any moment to help her and offer what support he could. Cleaning up the house would be a big job, but even worse than the damage to her things was the damage that the burglar had done to her sense of safety. Home no longer felt quite so welcoming.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Wow, Ms. D. That must have been really scary,” Allison said when Moira told her, Dante, and Darrin about the break-in when she stopped at the deli on Monday. “I can’t believe that you went into the house on your own. You could have been killed.”

  “It was pretty awful,” she agreed. “Luckily nothing bad happened to me or either of the dogs. It took me the rest of the weekend to clean it up, though, and both David and Candice helped me. Thanks to David, I have a great alarm system in the house now.”

  “At least nothing was stolen,” Dante said. “That’s lucky.”

  “I don’t even know if that’s a good thing,” she told him. “What if the burglar comes back and tries again? I almost wish they had just stolen all of the electronics and left. This feels more personal somehow.”

  “Do you think someone you know did it?” he asked.

  That gave Moira pause. Would anyone that she knew have broken into her house? She didn’t think so, but she had been wrong about people before. Besides, if it was someone who knew her then wouldn’t they have known where to find whatever it was that they had been looking for? Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong, she thought. What if this wasn’t actually a burglar? What if the person wasn’t intending to steal anything, but wanted to scare me by wrecking the place?