Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
Sweet Peach’s was still open when we wandered back into town, with a special outdoor seating area set up where people could watch the fireworks. It looked like they had pulled some old booths out of storage, because the leatherette seating was cracked and discolored, but no one seemed to mind.
Rich and I grabbed one of the empty outdoor seats, but the way they were set up meant we had to sit side by side facing out to the street rather than across from each other.
I was hyperaware of his very existence as we pretended to read the menus we already knew so well. Jaspreet, a newer waitress, came out to take our order, and before she left to get our food, she set an unlit sprinkler for each of us on the table.
The band was winding down, playing a Boyz II Men cover, and while I couldn’t see Main from where we were sitting, I had no doubt people were giddily slow dancing in the street. It was a truly delightful evening and a good reminder of why this town was so magical to live in, but I couldn’t quite get out of my head the bizarre events that had led us here tonight.
“Do all your stakeouts end like that?” I asked, drumming my fingernails on the laminate cover of the tabletop.
“I have it on pretty good authority that none of my previous stakeouts ended in an on-foot pursuit that took me to a bird sanctuary.”
I nodded.
The bird sanctuary was actually an old run-down estate that had belonged to George Bullock, the same precocious millionaire who had sold my aunt Eudora all the land and buildings he owned on Main Street. He had been famously reclusive, and after losing his wife and having a falling-out with his only son, he had decided the best thing to do would be to keep the properties with someone who would love Raven Creek as much as he had.
Evidently, he’d also been an avid nature enthusiast, because when he died, one of the conditions of his will was that rather than selling his property, the town was to turn it into a bird and nature conservancy area.
For a while the old mansion had been used to do lectures, demonstrations, and classes on conservancy and local birds and wildlife as well as basic tutorial sessions on how to care for injured animals. I remember doing at least one or two summer day camp sessions there in my youth and being totally in awe of the rehabbed owl and falcon ambassadors.
But in spite of the money George had left to keep the place running and the money Eudora had regularly siphoned into maintenance, there simply hadn’t been enough interest to keep the institute part of the conservancy open. They couldn’t exactly justify paying a full staff to stay on board when they couldn’t fill classrooms, and Raven Creek was a bit out of the way for school tour groups.
It had been about fifteen years since the actual education center had closed, though I understood there was a local caretaker who tended to the maintenance of the house and grounds. Since the property was closed to the public and accessible only to visiting naturalists with a special pass, I had never seen the place as an adult. I’d heard people around town talking about how it was such a waste of a great location and how the mansion should have been torn down to make way for something else.
I disagreed. It had been George’s goal to keep that place for the birds, and so it was kept. Was it a bit weird to have a gated-off mansion tucked back out of sight from the town? Sure. But what the heck else would that land be good for? It was remote, practically outside town limits, and while Raven Creek had a decent-sized population, it wasn’t as if there were such a dire need for housing that anything new needed to be created.
Plus it was conservancy land, so it was a moot point. It was, quite literally, for the birds.
The real question was, what did Melody want or need on that property?
“What’s funny to me is that with Sebastian’s fame and popularity, I’m sure he and his crew would have been given a special pass to the park if they’d just asked for it.” I was surprised I hadn’t thought to suggest it to them, given his area of focus. Honestly, I usually forgot the conservancy was even there.
“Do you think there’s an innocent explanation for it?” Rich asked.
“Like what? I mean, I’d love to give her the benefit of the doubt, but she’s sneaking onto private property in the middle of the night, bundled up like she’s off to steal cars, and all this while she’s supposedly grieving the death of her boss and friend?” An idea occurred to me. “Maybe she did kill Sebastian and went to the conservancy to hide the weapon. Or maybe she found those gloves in her suitcase and decided she needed to get rid of them.”
Rich mulled this over. “That’s certainly a possibility, and something we’ll need to present to Detective Martin so she and Detective Kim can go check it out.” That part I was on board with. It was one thing to trail someone we suspected of being involved in the murder, quite another to get ourselves tangled up in anything involving possible physical evidence. Plus I still needed to tell the detectives what I’d found at the inn earlier this evening.
I really wasn’t sure what I’d thought we’d discover by following Melody, but things weren’t looking great for her at the moment.
And yet there was something that perplexed me more. She had been so distraught when she learned about Sebastian’s death, and it hadn’t felt like acting or a fake-out. I had genuinely believed her tears. There was also still the matter of Deacon to consider. He, more than Melody, had had the motive to kill his former business partner and love interest. And he just kept disappearing on me, which felt highly suspicious.
If someone had put those gloves in Melody’s room to frame her, maybe that someone was Deacon.
The first whistling firework spiraled up into the sky as Jaspreet brought out our food. For a moment, Rich and I just sat together, shoulders leaning in against each other and delicious diner food in front of us. It still wasn’t our first official date, and yet it somehow felt like our thousandth. Being next to him was so comfortable that it was difficult to imagine being anywhere else with anyone else.
We might be on the trail of a killer, but it was also a wonderful moment to pause and be completely aware of the present. I had never felt so at home before. Not when I was with Blaine and not in Chicago with my family. This just felt so unbelievably right . I had come to Raven Creek because of two deep losses—my marriage and my aunt—but in coming here I had gained something beautiful and life-changing that I didn’t regret for a second.
I reached over and took Rich’s hand in mine, giving it a squeeze.
He glanced over at me and I rested my chin on his shoulder, marveling at the way the technicolor fireworks reflected in his eyes. His eyelashes were so long they made me jealous.
“Hey, you,” he said, so quietly I could barely hear him over the crackle of explosives and the distant siren of an ambulance.
“Thank you.”
“Thank me, for what?”
Wait. Fireworks. Distant and the growing sound of an ambulance.
I sat upright. “Do you hear that?”
“Talk about a subject change,” he said, shaking off the romantic daze that had been washing over him. “Is that—”
“Sirens.”
We listened a moment, wondering if there had been an accident at the party—perhaps someone had passed out or there had been a fight. Or a more horrible option to imagine was something going wrong with the fireworks. But they continued to bloom in the sky, sparkling night flowers in shades of red, blue, green, and a gold. The oohs and aahs of the Main Street crowd were audible even here, a block away.
The siren advanced, and then a different kind of red-and-blue flash zipped past the end of the block.
There were plenty of things in that direction, lots of homes and small businesses where an ambulance could be headed. But Rich and I shared a quick and immediate glance of concern.
“The B and B,” he said first.
“The B and B,” I answered back.