Fatal Festival Days Read online

  “Well, it won’t be happening here,” he said. “In case you haven’t heard, my father was murdered.”

  “I know. I’m so very sorry. My husband is Officer Hayman, our town’s policeman.”

  “Officer Hayman who refuses to arrest that Indian who poisoned my dad?” He took a step forward, his expression going from angry to downright menacing. “You have a lot of nerve showing up here.

  A lot of nerve going through with this festival when it’s the reason my father was murdered.” His chin lowered so his eyes could glare at me at a better angle, and his hands clenched into fists.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I fumbled for words. “I understand how you must—”

  “No, you don’t understand!” he roared. “You’re in charge of this festival and you’re going through with it. You’re making a mockery of a dead man! You’ll be sorry, Cameron,” he threatened, spitting out my name with venom. “You’ll pay for going through with this. Now get out of here before I remove you myself.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I spun around scanning the bushes for my purse. It lay overturned on the sidewalk, everything inside scattered in the snow. “I just need to gather my things. They all spilled. It’ll just take me a second or two.”

  Who was I kidding? I’d be there until midnight searching around in the half-dark through snow and ice. I hustled—very aware of where my boots were landing this time—and knelt beside my collection of bric-a-brac.

  The door slammed shut behind me, and the porch light went off, leaving me in darkness. Even moonlight was shut out by the dark clouds threatening more snow. I scrambled around searching blindly for my wallet and cell phone; anything else wouldn’t be the death of me to leave behind. My hand grasped something round and I shoved it in my purse. My wallet was a few inches away, and my cell was a little farther down the sidewalk. Good gravy, I hoped the screen wasn’t broken.

  After finding several more items, a few of which I vaguely identified as a tube of lipstick, a pack of gum, an empty sunglasses case, a nail grooming kit, and a bottle of travel-sized shampoo, I threw my bag over my shoulder and hightailed it to my car. Actually, it was Monica’s car since Mia totaled mine a while back and I hadn’t replaced it, but that was neither here or there.

  I jumped in and started it up, hit reverse and got out of there as fast as a four-cylinder hybrid engine could take me. I always teased Monica that she drove a wind-up toy, but it had some power and got me out of there in a hurry.

  Good gravy, I was panting like I’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Clayton’s son sure had a temper! I couldn’t hold it against him, though. He was shocked from the news of his father’s murder and grieving. I’d have to make due without the flags marking the course. We’d figure something out. The Action Agency always came through in a pinch.

  I might not have gotten the flags, but I left with something more valuable. Information. The cause of Clayton’s death was poisoning.

  • Three •

  I spent most of the night awake, attempting to focus on the little last-minute details for the festival, but finding my mind wandering in circles trying to think of anyone who might poison Clayton Banks. And how?

  Standing at the top of the cross-country course at Landow Farm with the early-morning sun glittering across the snowy fields, we were an hour away from our first event. Johnna was stringing bubble gum pink yarn between tomato stakes that Roy had pounded into the frozen ground as substitute course markers for the flags I wasn’t able to retrieve. Logan was tapping away on his laptop keyboard while Anna berated him for making the Excel spreadsheet to track the scores for the event in a way she deemed totally wrong. I needed to set aside some time to talk with her. She was behaving so differently from her normal analytical but easygoing self that something had to be wrong. Poor Logan was taking the brunt of whatever it was.

  “Get into a cat fight?” asked my best friend, Brenda Fields, looking at the scratches on my face as she walked up next to me.

  A mauve toboggan hat covered her hair, which she always wore in a bun with a lace doily pinned around it. She wore matching mittens and a scarf with Johnna’s initials knitted on a corner. Anything Johnna made these days, she wanted the world to know she’d crafted.

  “Barberry bush fight,” I said. “It looks worse than it is.”

  Looking past me, her jaw dropped. “It looks better than that.”

  I turned to see what she was talking about and almost fell over getting an eyeful of Phillis Landow in a fur coat spotted black and white like a cow. Like a Dalmatian. I gasped. “She’s Cruella de Vil.”

  Brenda’s wide eyes gleamed and she grinned. “I’ve never seen a more realistic imitation of a cartoon character. I didn’t know you were putting on the Ice Capades.”

  Phillis was arm-in-arm with David Dixon, my Olympian. His old wool coat looked moth-eaten and like it had gone a few rounds with a greasy towel, but he was who we had on offer. I reminded myself again that beggars couldn’t be choosers. Anyway, he was a nice, older gentleman who represented our town well. I was just being judgmental because I was panicked about this festival going off well in front of television cameras.

  “No, no, not them too,” I said, spotting the Daughters of Metamora getting out of their Cadillacs and Lincolns with picket signs.

  “Cat-A-Strophic Speciesism?” Brenda said, tilting her head as if she’d read my mother-in-law, Irene’s, fluorescent yellow sign wrong. “What’s speciesism?”

  “This can’t get any worse!” I threw up my hands in surrender.

  “Now, it’s not that bad.” Brenda patted my shoulder trying to console me.

  “Not that bad? A) I have Cruella de Vil as a spokeswoman. 2) Johnna and Roy are stringing pink yarn as course markers. And thirdly, I have the newly founded cat cartel picketing the festival. The local TV station will be showing up any second!”

  “Okay, okay. It’s not the best situation. I’ll go deal with the Daughters and call Soapy and Theresa for backup. You focus on the event.”

  Soapy and his wife would get Evil Irene and her minions to back down. The last thing the Daughters of Historical Metamora wanted was to make their town look bad.

  I took a deep breath and tried to refocus. “Thanks for your help. It’ll be okay. It’ll be great.”

  “That’s the spirit.” She gave me a thumbs-up and headed toward the group of women who were determined to make my life impossible.

  I knew they were doing this to get back at me for refusing to repaint Ellsworth House white again. Well, I wouldn’t. I’d had more compliments on the sea green and lavender that I’d ever had on my white house.

  I headed down the slope toward Cruella—I mean Phillis—and Dixon. Phillis’s bright-red lipstick shown like a beacon against the white backdrop of snowy fields. “Morning!” I called, waving. “The announcer’s booth has coffee and donuts if you—”

  “Don’t be silly,” Phillis said. “I’ve brought a catering crew in from Brookville for the VIPs who will be happy and warm in a heated tent on the first turn in the course. Great angle for the cameramen,” she said, nodding at Dixon with a cat who ate the canary smile on her overwaxed lips.

  “You’ve gone to such trouble,” he said, patting her hand. “I hope this last-minute change in events didn’t put you out too much.”

  I wanted to throw snowballs at them both. “That was very nice of you,” I said instead. I mean, who was I kidding? It was nice. It was something I didn’t have the money to do. Heck, the coffee and donuts stretched my budget. I just wished it wasn’t something for her to hold over my head. I pictured a little yellow feather poking out of her mouth and I was the canary she’d gobbled down.

  “You go on ahead and make sure the skiers know what to do and where to go,” she said, giving me a little shove. “David and I will greet the camera crew.” She turned to Dixon again. “Did you know they’re sending
their top reporter to cover the festival? Ed Stone.”

  “Ed covered my story back when I competed in Japan,” Dixon said. “He was at the airport with his cameraman when I got home.”

  They continued their chat as they hiked up toward the parking area, leaving me to wonder who was in control of this festival. Clearly not me. It was becoming obvious that I had to let this first event fall into Fate’s hands and hope for the best. It was a Hail Mary anyway. The main goal was keeping Ed Stone from reporting on Clayton’s murder more than the festival coverage.

  “Wait!” I yelled, chasing after Phillis and Dixon. “Wait a minute!”

  They stopped and waited for me to catch up. “Do us all a favor and steer Ed Stone away from any idea of talking on camera about Clayton’s death. That’s the last thing we need.”

  “Oh, psh.” Phillis waved me off. “It’ll make Metamora more interesting. More urbane and sophisticated.”

  “Three murders in less than a year isn’t sophisticated!” I said, trying not to shout even if I couldn’t keep my voice from raising hysterically. “The focus will shift from something good—the festival—to something bad—a town of under two hundred people with a murder problem.”

  Phillis literally clutched her pearls. “When you put it that way, it does sound wretched. Are we in danger, Cameron? Should I sell the farm and move out of Metamora? I don’t want to be killed!”

  “Please tell me you’re not serious,” I said. “This is no time for these questions.”

  “That’s two percent,” Dixon told her. “Two percent of the town’s population has been murdered in the last eight months.”

  “Two percent,” she repeated, whispering with terror-filled eyes. “And one my dear ex-husband, Butch.”

  “Anyway,” Dixon continued, hooking his arm through hers and resuming their journey uphill, “it’s a terrible time for real estate sales. Nobody wants to buy in a murder town.”

  Murder town? Fabulous, our celebrity host was calling Metamora a murder town. It didn’t seem like there was any way to keep a lid on those two. Unless …

  I jammed my hand into my bag, searching for my phone. The screen had been unscathed in its slip and slide across Clayton’s sidewalk, thankfully. Something in my bag sounded like a maraca or a little container of Tic Tacs, neither of which should be residing in my purse.

  I found my phone and dialed Andy. “Where are you and Cass? I need help.”

  “Is this a genuine distress call from Cameron Cripps-Hayman, Metamora Wonder Woman?”

  “Don’t play games with me. Where are you?”

  “Walking over now from Fiddle Dee Doo. What’s up?”

  “I need you two to stay close to Phillis and David Dixon. Make sure they don’t talk to the TV reporter about the murder.”

  “Why are you letting Phillis anywhere near the reporter?”

  “What?” I heard Cass cry in the background. “We’re on our way, Cam!”

  “We’re on our way,” Andy repeated and hung up.

  If Andy couldn’t keep the conversation with Phillis and Dixon on track, Cass would spellbind Ed Stone by batting her beautiful blue eyes at him.

  My phone rang. Soapy’s number showed on the screen. “Thank goodness,” I said, answering. “Are you and Theresa helping Brenda keep the Daughters under control?”

  “They want a cat competition,” he said.

  “A cat competition? Like what? A race climbing the snowiest tree? What do I do with cats?”

  “I don’t know, but you better think of something. Elaina Nelson’s passing out headbands with cat ears. Their protest is gaining support. People like cats, Cam.”

  “I like cats, too.” Elaina Nelson was the oldest person in town and battier than— “Soapy, what is that I hear?”

  In the distance I could just make out a raspy, deep male voice over a loudspeaker, chanting, “Metamora’s gone to the dogs!”

  “Old Dan’s got the CB radio in his pickup hooked up to a blow horn on top of the cab. You know Elaina’s got him wrapped around her finger these days.”

  The two oldest people in town were the hot new couple on the block. Old Dan and Elaina, or El Danaina as Mia liked to call them. She said it was their celebrity name, combining their two names into one that sounded like a Mexican resort to me. Or maybe a Mexican old folks home, since it was Dan and Elaina.

  “Fine,” I said. “Tell them I’ll have something indoors featuring cats. I’ll call Irene tonight. Just get them out of here!”

  “Will do. Oh, and Roy, Old Dan, and I have the hockey tournament all figured out. You don’t have to do a thing.”

  “Perfect. I won’t.”

  I hung up. The last thing I wanted to do was worry about a hockey tournament when I had a spontaneous cat fiasco to put on.

  I checked the time. Thirty minutes until this event was to start, and I had no idea where any of my skiers were.

  I marched over to the starting line, where Anna and Logan were still bickering. “What time did you guys tell the contestants to be here?”

  They both fell silent. Their eyes tracked back and forth to each other and to me a few times. Logan’s fingers flew over his keyboard and he turned his laptop screen toward me. “We weren’t assigned that task. Our task list for this week includes hanging flyers, meeting at your house for an emergency brainstorming meeting, and adjusting the score sheet in Excel from downhill skiing to cross-country skiing. Each has been confirmed completed.”

  “Some more poorly than others,” Anna said, spurring their debate to start again.

  “Wait!” I held up my hands in a T for time out. “Are you telling me nobody told the skiers not to go to Clayton Banks’s house?”

  “That doesn’t sound like something you’d put Johnna and Roy in charge of,” Anna said, tucking a strand of fiery red hair behind her ear. “So, if we weren’t asked to tell them … ”

  “Oh, for the love of all that’s good and gravy! Someone call Monica and get her over there diverting people over here. I’ll call Ben to help.”

  Anna wasted no time dialing Monica’s number on her cell phone while I got Ben on mine. “I have a serious emergency,” I told him.

  “Have you called 911? We’ve talked about this before, Cam—”

  “Ben! Not that kind of emergency.”

  “What other kind is there?”

  “The kind where I forgot to tell the downhill skiers to come to Landow Farm and not Banks’s place.”

  I heard the siren on Metamora One blast to life. “On my way,” he said and hung up.

  “Monica and Quinn are heading to Clayton’s,” Anna reported back to me.

  “Good, thanks. Between them and Ben, hopefully we can get the skiers over here before the television crew starts to wonder where they are.”

  And hopefully before Clayton’s son went ballistic finding them on his property.

  “Cam, I have bad news.”

  I knew that tone from Ben. Firm but gentle. He wasn’t someone to let you down easy. He was more the rip off the Band-Aid type. This was going to be bad, bad news. “I don’t want to know,” I said. “Just make it go away.”

  “Sheriff Reins is here at Banks’s. He’s arresting the skiers for trespassing. Jason Banks, Clayton’s son, was waiting with his phone in his hand to call the cops if anyone stepped on his property. And there’s something else. He said to tell you this was what he said you had coming, and if you continue to go on with this festival there will be hell to pay. You want to tell me when you talked to him, Cam? When you talked to him, and he threatened you and you didn’t think it was a good idea to tell me—your husband and the town’s only law enforcement officer?”

  This was worse than bad. Now Ben was involved. “It wasn’t a big deal. I went over there last night to get my course markers. He wasn’t pleased that we were going through with the festival
after his dad was murdered. That’s all. I understand why he’s upset.”

  “I don’t like him doling out threats, especially not to my family. You should’ve told me.”

  “We can discuss this later. Right now I have a cross-country ski competition without skiers! The TV crew will be here any minute!”

  “Sounds like you better strap on a pair of skis, Cam.” He hung up, still in a huff. I stared at my phone. He’d get over it. He always did.

  “Emergency Agency meeting!” I shouted. Anna and Logan were standing two feet away from me.

  “You don’t have to yell,” Anna said. “I’ll call Johnna and get her and Roy over here.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a little chastised by Miss Snippy. Logan shot me an apologetic look.

  Roy and Johnna shuffled their way through the snow, Johnna using a tall walking stick and wearing boots with treads so big I didn’t know how she lifted them off the ground. Roy didn’t even wear a winter coat, just his everyday navy sport coat that had to have been purchased sometime during the seventies, which was most likely the last time it was clean.

  “What’s the good word, boss?” Roy asked.

  “No good words, Roy. We have a huge problem. The skiers went to Clayton Banks’s and got arrested for trespassing. We need to round up some of our neighbors to compete.”

  “Our neighbors are old!” Johnna said, winding her pink yarn into a ball. “Get your sister and Mia.”

  “What about Andy and Cass?” Roy asked.

  “I’ll ask them. You four come up with some other names and start dialing.”

  “What about you?” Anna said. “Logan and I can compete, and I’m sure you can cross-country ski at least enough to get to the end of this course.”

  The last time I raced through Landow Farm, I ended up tail over teakettle chasing a killer. I wasn’t eager to repeat the trip. “I will if it comes to it,” I said, noncommittally.

  “It’s your festival,” she said, shrugging with a smirk.

  “You and I need to talk,” I said. “Later.”