Standoff At Christmas. Margaret Daley
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“All I have to do is the bread. The stew has been simmering half the day.” She turned from the stove, her eyes red from crying for the past hour. Aunt Linda held the baking sheet in her hands like a shield, her fingertips red from her tight grip on it. “I know Randall asked you to come home, but Jake stayed and I want to know what they found out about Betty’s death. Murder! I still can’t believe it.” She slammed the cookie sheet on the countertop and placed the rolls on it. “My sister was one of the sweetest people in Port Aurora. She never hurt a soul. I’ve got to make some sense out of this.”
“I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to do that.”
“They should have been here five minutes ago. Call them to make sure they’re coming,” her aunt, a petite woman with short blond hair, said in a determined voice.
Aunt Linda was always where she was supposed to be on time, if not early. “I will,” Rachel said before her aunt decided to do it instead. Since she’d returned home an hour ago, Aunt Linda had fluctuated between tears and anger, much like what Rachel had been experiencing since she glimpsed Aunt Betty leaning against the tree. Stiff. Snow covering her.
As Rachel made her way into the living room, she heard the doorbell. She continued into the arctic entry and let Jake and his grandfather into the house. They removed their snowshoes and stomped their feet to shake off what snow they could.
“You two walked?”
“The wind has died down some.” Jake removed his beanie.
“But the snow is still coming down a lot.” Rachel had been looking forward to seeing him and spending time with her best friend from childhood. A few months ago, he’d almost died, and now her aunt had been murdered.
“With what happened this afternoon, I needed to walk some of my stress off.” Jake hung his coat and his grandfather’s on two pegs in the arctic entry and headed into the living room.
Lawrence looked around. “Where’s Linda?”
“In the kitchen. Dinner will be soon.”
“I’ll go see how she’s coping. I still can’t believe someone would kill Betty.” Lawrence strode from the room.
The second he was gone, Rachel pivoted toward Jake. “Tell me what happened after I left.”
“How’s Linda doing?”
“Mad one minute, emotional the next. She wants to find the person responsible and...” Rachel’s mouth twisted. “I’m not sure what she would do, but she wants the murderer caught. She’s trying to make some sense of what happened to her sister.”
“Have her come in here, and I’ll tell both of you before dinner. Although I can’t say any of it makes sense.”
Rachel headed toward the kitchen, but Lawrence and Aunt Linda were already at the doorway.
“I turned the oven on to warm so the rolls ought to be fine while Jake tells us what happened.” Aunt Linda took a seat on the couch with Lawrence next to her, his arm around her shoulder. Her aunt leaned against Jake’s grandfather as though she couldn’t hold herself upright without him.
Jake stood by the roaring fireplace, while Rachel sat down and told her part of the story. “When I went back to Betty’s house, Officer Bates had returned and was trying to pull fingerprints while the chief finished with photos, especially of the kitchen and pantry. When I told him what we found, he left his officer processing evidence and told me to go home, then he started toward the woods.” The sight of Aunt Betty on the ground haunted her. Rachel shut the memory down and shifted her attention to Jake. “Your turn.”
With his hands behind his back, he drew in a deep breath. “The chief took photos of Betty, then we carried her to the house. When I left, he was waiting for Doc to come take her. It appeared she died either from the head wound from someone hitting her with some kind of round object—possibly a can from the pantry—or she succumbed to the cold. Either way, the police chief is looking at the case as a murder.”
Aunt Linda dropped her head, tears falling on her lap. “I can’t believe this.”
Lawrence cupped Aunt Linda’s hand in her lap. “We haven’t had a murder here in years. A couple of deadly bar fights. That’s all.”
“Do you know if they found what they were looking for?” Aunt Linda lifted her gaze, her eyes red.
“No. The police don’t know what she had of value at her house.” Jake stepped away from the fire and took the last seat in the living room. “Was the TV the only thing of value that a robber would steal?”
Her aunt shook her head. “She had a few pieces of jewelry, but nothing to kill over, a state-of-the-art food processor and an old Kodak camera. Do you think Chief Quay would like for me to go through the house and see if I can find anything?”
“I’ll call him tomorrow. It might help to know if that was the motive for the break-in. Knowing the motive might help find the killer.”
Rachel remembered her brief encounters with Aunt Betty earlier that day. “I don’t think it’s a robbery. I think Aunt Betty discovered something that concerned her. She asked about talking to you, Jake, because you were a police officer in Anchorage. Aunt Linda, do you know of any place she uses for hiding valuable items? I can’t think of any.”
Her head lowered, Aunt Linda stared at her folded hands, the thumbs twirling around each other. “She had a cubbyhole in her kitchen. If you didn’t know about it, you wouldn’t see it. It’s where the two cabinets form an L-shape near the sink. But it only can hide small objects. She kept her spare key to the truck in there. A diamond ring our mother passed on to her. I’m not sure what else.”
“Then that should be checked.” Rachel glanced at Jake, who nodded. “We can do that tomorrow.”
Her teeth digging into her lower lip, Aunt Linda rose. “Since we’re her only living relatives, it’s our responsibility to see to her—” she swallowed several times “—belongings. Now, I’m going to set the table, and dinner will be in about ten minutes.”
Lawrence also stood. “I’ll help.”
After they left the room, Jake leaned across the end table that separated their chairs and said in a low voice, “Is something going on between your aunt and my grandfather?”
“Good friends. That’s all. Over the years, they’ve helped each other, and their friendship has grown. It kind of reminds me of us when we were kids. Not that I’m saying theirs is childish. Aunt Linda told me a few years ago that she’d had a wonderful marriage she would always cherish in her memory, but she didn’t want to get married again.”
“How about you? I thought by now you’d be married. You have so much to offer a man.”
But not you. When they had been friends, before Celeste, Rachel had wondered if Jake and she would fall in love, and whether the marriage would work—unlike her mother’s six marriages—because she knew Jake so well. Her mother would date a man for a couple of months, marry him, then discard him in a few years. “I don’t have a lot of faith in marriage—at least what I’ve seen of it.”
“You might be right. A successful marriage is becoming rarer.”
“Is my cynicism rubbing off on you?”
He grinned. “I’ve been around you for a day, and look what happened.” His gaze shifted to the Christmas tree in front of the living room window. “Your lights were what we focused on. Even with it snowing, we could see them from our front porch. Of course, it’s not snowing as hard as earlier.”
“We always decorate the day after Thanksgiving. Aunt Betty comes over...” Thinking about how her aunt died churned her stomach. She needed to forget the last few hours for a while or she wouldn’t be able to help Aunt Linda. “Is Lawrence going to put a tree up this year? He usually doesn’t because he visits you in