Born in a Barn (Clucks and Clues Cozy Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  I watched Andrea’s face, too. I saw her delight as she shared her children’s enjoyment and also a tiny smidge of regret that Steve wasn’t there to witness it, too. When the kids had finally opened everything in their piles and began playing with their new toys in earnest, it was our turn.

  Chapter 13

  Andrea distributed the gifts from her and Steven, with an apology to Eli that she didn’t have anything for him as she handed packages to her dad and me.

  Eli patted his stomach. “No worries. That dinner was a gift to beat all gifts.”

  She’d gotten me and Peterson matching Fair Isle sweaters. “I picked them up when we took the kids to Scotland this summer,” she explained when we opened the paper. I tugged mine on over my head. Peterson seemed to debate a moment, and then did the same.

  Peterson’s presents were next. A beautiful emerald bracelet for Andrea, a bottle of 15-year-old Scotch for Eli that he’d picked up at the liquor store this morning. Then, to my surprise, he pulled a small package from his pocket and handed it to me. Unlike the others, it was not perfectly wrapped in shiny paper with matching ribbons and bows on it. It was clumsily covered in what looked like a decorated brown paper grocery bag, with too much tape and a piece of yarn binding it all together.

  “The kids helped me wrap it,” he explained.

  “It’s beautiful. Thank you.” I smiled at the twins as I accepted the gift. He was smart to recruit their help; if it’d been from him alone, I wouldn’t have taken it so eagerly. He had a poor history of choosing gifts for me. Usually they revolved around some form of physical self-improvement: a gym membership, a gift certificate for liposuction, a chemical peel at a medical spa. Stuff he thought I needed, but I didn’t particularly want.

  With some trepidation, I pulled the paper off the small box and opened it. A key rested inside. More specifically, it was a car key, the jellybean-shaped electronic kind. It bore the distinctive, shield-shaped Porsche logo.

  I looked up at him. “What is this?”

  “Don’t say no, Leona. I want you to have it,” he said quickly.

  “A key?” I asked stupidly.

  “I ordered you a new car. That’s why I’ve been on my phone so much the last couple days; I was negotiating with the dealership in Bend. They can’t deliver it until tomorrow, but I had them FedEx the key so you had something to unwrap. It’s white; I hope that’s OK...” He trailed off, knitting his eyebrows worriedly at my stunned expression. “This is the present I should have given you decades ago. You were right, earlier, when you said I didn’t get to know you, not really. In some ways I can see you better now than I ever did when we were married.”

  “This doesn’t mean we’re getting back togeth—” I started, but he cut me off.

  “No, no. I miss you, but it’s pretty clear we aren’t compatible. This is a peace offering, Leona. An apology for everything I put you through.”

  I blinked back the moisture that rushed to my eyes as I stared at the key in the tiny white box.

  Eli nudged me. “Say thanks,” he hissed, grinning. “I want to drive it.”

  “It’s the GTS,” Peterson added.

  That clinched it for me. I couldn’t pass up a GTS, not when it was accompanied by a genuine apology. “I don’t know what to say except thank you.” I bit my lip as guilt twisted in my stomach. “I didn’t get you anything, though. I’m sorry, I didn’t know—”

  Peterson interrupted me again, which would have been annoying under any other circumstances. “You got me this.” He gestured around the room. “You got me my family back, Leona. There’s no better gift than that. It’s something money can’t buy.”

  I swallowed hard and Eli, sensing my swell of emotion, squeezed me close.

  “Next round!” Andrea announced, handing me a flat, plaid package.

  Beside me, Eli stiffened. “Maybe you should save that one until the real Christmas,” he said, swiping it out of my hands. I understood why—a brand-new Porsche was a hard act to follow. But I wanted him to know that the price tag didn’t matter. I valued his gift, whatever it was, just as much.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, swiping it back and tearing into the paper. “I’m sure I’ll—” I froze when I saw what the strip of torn giftwrap had exposed. A pair of tanned, toned abs.

  “What is that?” Andrea got up and came to look over my shoulder. She leaned down, squinting, and tugged the paper open a little further before I could stop her. “Is that you?” she asked Eli.

  Eli pulled the rest of the paper off the gift, blushing, revealing the gift. It was a calendar titled Honeytree Heroes, and Andrea was right—Eli was the cover model. Shirtless in his sheriff’s hat, he posed in the middle of the highway, straddling the yellow line with an adorable German Shepherd puppy tucked under his arm.

  “I’m Mr. January,” he said sheepishly, flipping it to the back and pointing to the thumbnail of the first month. “The rest is other people.”

  I scanned the tiny images of the rest of the year. A volunteer firefighter, biceps flexed, with a pair of Dalmatians. A rear view of a paramedic with a cat perched on his shoulder. A Forest Service search-and-rescue officer, mounted on a horse and wearing a very tiny pair of shorts. Now it was my turn to blush.

  “It benefits the county animal shelter,” Eli explained, his cheeks still flaming as he avoided eye contact with Peterson.

  “Um...” I flipped the calendar to January and soaked in the larger view. “Is it OK if I keep it on this month all year?”

  “You like it?” he asked.

  “I love it,” I said definitively. I set it to the side and pulled out the last remaining gifts from under the tree. I handed one each to Andrea and Eli. “Your turn.”

  They opened them simultaneously. I’d made a gift basket for each of them, tucked full of little treats I’d collected throughout the year that I thought they’d like. Oregonian wines and homemade blueberry jam for Andrea and Steve, inside jokes for Eli like a Costco-sized pack of Doublemint gum, his favorite. They both got a good chuckle out of it.

  “Uh oh,” Andrea said, noticing Izzy’s yawn. “Time for some people to hit the hay so Santa can come down the chimney.”

  “I guess that’s my cue, too,” Eli said. After bidding good night to the twins as Andrea led them upstairs, he pushed himself up from the couch. “Can I talk to you a minute before I go, Leona?”

  I nodded, worried by the seriousness of his expression after such a nice evening. I hoped he still wasn’t on his whole “give your ex a chance” kick just because of the unfortunate mistletoe zone mishap and Peterson’s crazy gifts. We grabbed our jackets and I followed him out to the porch and then the driveway, just outside the circle of the cottage’s glow. The dark winter night had a piercing chill that turned our breath into clouds, but the sky was crystal-clear. A swath of brilliant stars stretched across the inky sky like a flurry of snowflakes.

  “What’s up?” I asked him, dreading the answer.

  “I didn’t want to ruin the evening, but I have some bad news. Here, I made a copy.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and passed it to me. I squinted at it in the dim light, unable to make out anything except the words at the top that told me it was from the medical examiner’s office.

  “Homer’s report?” I guessed.

  Eli nodded. “It doesn’t look good for Peterson, unfortunately. I think he’s going to have to stay in town a while longer.”

  My breath caught. “Why? Did they change the cause of death back to blunt force?”

  Eli shook his head. “Worse. Homer was poisoned by injection. Someone stuck him full of antifreeze. That, combined with his blood alcohol content, did him in.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. It wasn’t a freak accident or a health issue; someone really had intended to kill Homer. “How awful! I don’t understand why’s that bad for Peterson, though.”

  “He’s a doctor, Leona. Plus, he’s from out of town, and he was the last one to see Homer alive, and they didn�
��t exactly have a friendly exchange. As soon as it gets out that Homer was killed by injection, lots of fingers are going to be pointed his direction.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” I protested. “He’s a jerk sometimes, but he’s a good doctor. He takes the Hippocratic oath seriously. ‘First, do no harm.’ He wouldn’t use his medical knowledge to hurt someone, not on purpose.”

  “I believe it, but until I can prove otherwise, he has to stick around. Can you convince him to stay another day?”

  I sighed. As warm as I was feeling toward Peterson—helped a great deal by my new Porsche—I knew our truce was fragile. It’d be a whole lot easier to stay cordial if I didn’t have to see him every day. “Can’t you break the bad news? You guys have the whole buddy-buddy thing going on. I think he’ll take it better coming from you.”

  Eli shook his head. “I don’t want him to know what’s going on—at least, not until I dig around a little bit. If I come out and tell him that he’s moved back to the top of the suspect list, he might run back home and lawyer up. If anything is going to arouse the DA’s suspicion, it’s the prime suspect hiring a big city defense attorney. Let me quietly clear things up, and he can be on his way, none the wiser.”

  “You want me to lie to him?” I frowned. It wasn’t like Eli to ask me to do something like that.

  “No—just don’t tell him about the report. Make up some excuse for him to stay another day.” Eli rubbed his chin and looked past me at Peterson’s gold Rolls parked next to my Suburban. I must have looked skeptical, because then he added, “Do you trust me?”

  I nodded immediately. If there was one thing I knew, it was that Eli never let me down.

  “Then will you try, at least? If he refuses to stay another day, then you can show him the report, send him home to my guest room, and I’ll convince him it’s in his interest—one way or another.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But promise me that first thing in the morning, you’ll get that security camera footage from Ed so you can see that Peterson was telling the truth. He may have scuffled with Homer, but he didn’t hurt him seriously. Then you can cross him off the list and find the real killer.”

  “I promise.” He planted a kiss on my cheek and strode off into the dark beyond the chicken coop. I heard the click of the gate latch between our properties and then the quiet crinkle of his footsteps in the grass between the blueberry bushes faded.

  Well, I couldn’t stand here all night in the driveway. I went inside to do Eli’s dirty work.

  Peterson was surprisingly easy to convince. Maybe it was the afterglow of the meal and gift exchange, but with the thin excuse of attending the Walk-Thru Nativity the next day, he quickly agreed to stay one more day. I felt a little guilt at repaying his generosity with a big fat lie, but I trusted Eli, and Eli said it was in Peterson’s best interest.

  After Peterson left for Eli’s, yawning, still wearing the sweater that matched mine, Andrea and I filled the kids’ stockings over a half-glass of wine each.

  “It means a lot to me that you accepted Dad’s apology,” Andrea said, apropos of nothing. “It gives me hope. I was worried that Steve and I might end up the same way.”

  “What way?” I tucked a chocolate orange covered in bright foil on top of J.W.’s stocking and turned to her.

  “I don’t know—angry? Alienated? The twins are so little, and if we split up, I don’t want there to be animosity between us. I want us to be able to celebrate Christmas together without causing them pain.” Her last word nearly silent, like the idea had stolen her breath.

  “You’re not going to split up.” I guided her over to the sofa, the stockings having been stuffed to the limits.

  Andrea’s face was flat and strained as she finished off her glass of wine. “You don’t know that. Nobody can know that. You and Dad had thirty good years together before it all fell apart. Even if Steven and I make it another year or two, how can we possibly do this for our whole lives? We’re already in counseling!”

  “I know it because you’re already working on it. You’re already recognizing and addressing the issues. That’s how you fix them! I wish your dad and I had done that instead of just pushing it all down and letting it build up for decades. They weren’t good years. Honestly, they were all kind of cruddy.”

  “Don’t say that. I had a great childhood,” Andrea said stoutly.

  I smoothed her hair where a flat-ironed lock had sprung back into a spiral curl that matched my own. “I’m glad. That’s why we stuck it out for as long as we did, and I don’t regret a minute of it.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Chapter 14

  December 24

  Beep, beep, beep. The sound from the driveway woke me. I cracked open my eyes, moaning slightly at the stiff neck I’d been bequeathed by the somewhat lumpy couch cushions underneath my head. Oh well, small price to pay for a house full of grandbabies.

  It was still dark out, but the clock claimed it was morning, so I yawned and trudged to the kitchen to see what all the beeping was about. In the early morning dim, I saw the glowing taillights of a flatbed truck backing up to the house.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  Perched on the back of it was a white-as-snow, pretty-as-a-dove, brand-spanking-new 718 GTS with a huge red bow tied to the front. Magical. It felt like Santa just might be real. I tugged my jacket on over my PJs and ran out in my bare feet. I regretted it the minute my soles hit the gravel.

  “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” I said in time with the backup beeps as I picked my way gingerly toward the cab of the truck.

  “Morning!” The passenger in the truck, a young guy with spiky short dreads and a Bend Porsche dealership patch sewn on his shirt pocket, swung out and checked his clip board. “You Leona Davis?”

  I nodded, and he passed me the clipboard to sign. It felt like he was handing me one of those big lottery checks. I signed it in a daze as he and the driver collaborated to lower a ramp from the tailgate, then backed my new car down it so it blocked in the other three cars parked there—Andrea’s rental sedan, my ancient Suburban, and Peterson’s Rolls. The two men circled the car, carefully inspecting it to make sure it hadn’t incurred any damage during the delivery.

  Then the driver got back in the truck and the other delivery guy returned to shake my hand and retrieve his clipboard. He tore off a sheet and handed it to me along with a fat envelope of information about the car. “You’re good to go, ma’am. Congrats on the new ride. Merry Christmas!”

  Still in a daze, I waved goodbye and watched them head down the driveway. It wasn’t until they’d turned onto the highway toward the freeway that I shook myself out of my trance and went to admire the car myself.

  It was like a dream. Even sitting in my poky little farmyard, surrounded by a motley crew of other vehicles like we were in the middle of a used car lot, the new GTS looked like it was the star of a magazine spread. It was immaculate.

  I couldn’t believe it was mine—or that it came without strings attached. Behind me, someone cleared their throat, startling me. I jumped and whirled around. It was just Peterson, holding up his phone, his face apologetic.

  “I walked over when I got the delivery notification,” he said. “Nice PJs. Where are your shoes?”

  “I didn’t have time to dress for success,” I said a little sourly, but with the car in my view, I couldn’t be crabby for long. “This was too much, you know. I shouldn’t accept it.”

  “You have to. If it helps, remember that you got the short end of the stick with the prenup. You never should have signed it to begin with, frankly.”

  I gave him a crooked smile. I’d signed it in good faith, never expecting that our relationship would go south, but I guess nobody does. I shrugged. “I loved you.”

  “I loved you, too. That’s why I should have been more generous from the get-go. I hope this makes up for it a little. Plus, my business has doubled since our TV appearance went viral, so I can afford it.”

  Mothercluck
er. He made money off the worst moment of my life. Any guilt I felt over not getting him a Christmas present evaporated in an instant. I smacked his arm with the back of my hand. “In that case, I think you owe me a new car every Christmas.”

  I LEFT PETERSON AND Andrea basking in the glow of the twins’ glee as they emptied their stockings out on the living room rug and pawed through the contents, while I ran to town to pick up the promised doughnuts from Ed. I pulled the Suburban up to the back of the tiny brick building and knocked at the rear entrance. The smell of cinnamon-sugar wafted from the vent to the right of the door, making my mouth water.

  Ed answered, wiping his hands on the apron tied around his waist. “I need to fry another batch still. Do you mind waiting a few? I can pour you a cup of joe if you want to come on in. I’m closed for the holidays, so it’s quiet.”

  “I won’t turn down a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning.” I wouldn’t turn down one of those doughnuts, either. I followed him into the diner’s small kitchen area. A counter separated it from the tables, but the seating was all empty, save one person at a counter stool—Eli, in full uniform, with an electronic tablet in his hand. He flipped it around so I could see that it was Ed’s security monitor. It had a video all queued up.

  “Want to watch it with me?”

  My curiosity piqued, I slid onto the stool next to Eli, gratefully accepting the white mug of coffee that Ed pushed across the counter toward me.

  “Don’t judge me too harshly when you see what’s on there,” Ed said, turning back to his fryer. In a deft motion, he slipped some raw dough from a tray into the bubbling oil. “I had my reasons.”

  I was right—Ed had been hiding something on the footage. I exchanged a look with Eli. My look said I told you and his said don’t be smug. I reached over and hit the “Play” arrow on the monitor.