“They’re right behind us,” Kate cried. “How can that be?”
I didn’t know. “Keep running,” I panted out. “Keep running until you get to the road. Someone will help you.”
“Aunt Minnie—”
“Run!” I yelled, and slid to a stop. Then I dropped into a crouch and turned to face Luke Cagan.
Three sets of blindingly bright headlights flashed on all around me. “Police!” a megaphone boomed out. “Hold it right there! Put your hands up!”
“Not you, Minnie,” Ash said, walking into the light cast by the sheriff’s vehicles. “Those two.”
“Oh. Right.” I dropped my hands and watched as deputies hurried forward to handcuff Luke and Courtney. I looked around for Kate, and saw her being attended to by a female deputy.
“Minnie!” Rafe ran out of the darkness. I bleated a bit as he hugged parts of me that hurt, but not very loudly. “You haven’t answered your texts for hours,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”
“So you called out the cavalry?” I nestled my face into his shoulder. “So romantic.”
“I’ll show you romance.” He dropped to one knee and took my hands. “Minerva Joy Hamilton, I love you, you love me, and we belong together like . . . um, like . . .”
“Peanut butter and jelly?” Ash suggested.
The female deputy talking to Kate said, “Bogie and Bacall.”
Another deputy laughed. “With Niswander, it’s more like Abbott and Costello.”
I looked around. At the deputies, at Kate, at Ash, at the empty expressions of Courtney Drew and Luke Cagan. This was a night that would forever be shadowed by how close Kate and I had come to being killed.
Putting on a smile, I tugged Rafe to his feet as Eddie, who had again appeared out of nowhere, bumped his head against my shin. “Don’t you dare propose to me like this. I want a marriage proposal we can tell our kids about. Besides, I’m a filthy mess. What I want more than anything else is a long, hot shower.”
He pulled me tight. “You got it.”
Two hours later, after all the questions were answered, all the papers signed, and all the necessary phone calls made, I fell into bed. And I never did get a shower that night.
Chapter 22
Aunt Frances added another piece of bacon to my plate. “But where did all those medications come from in the first place?”
Rafe, Kate, and I had walked up the hill for an aunt-cooked breakfast, and I was almost hoarse from telling the story of what had happened the day before. It was now clear that I had to eat before answering any more questions, because if I didn’t, everything would get cold and that was no way to treat my aunt’s cooking.
I ate a bite of bacon and took another gulp of coffee. Aunt Frances’s question was a good one. The array of prescription medications in the shed had rivaled a pharmacy’s, and it had taken Ash, Hal Inwood, and the sheriff herself a fair amount of time in the interview room with Those Two to get the full explanation. They’d been interviewed separately and Courtney had remained silent until Luke had started talking. And talking. And talking.
I’d been long asleep by that time, but an hour earlier, Ash stopped by the houseboat to give me an update. He’d looked exhausted but satisfied, and what he’d told Kate and me had made the final pieces of the puzzle click into place.
“Courtney is a home health aide,” I said, adding jam to a piece of buttered toast. “She’s been stealing pills, a little bit at a time, from her clients. Just one or two at a time. Small amounts so you’d think you dropped one, or accidentally took a double dose.”
She encouraged that, too, Ash had said. If a client mentioned missing medication, Courtney would look all concerned and mention that the client had forgotten something just the other day, and had the doctor checked for signs of senility?
Ash’s face had hardened. “Ms. Drew laughed,” he’d said. “Said old people are so easy to take advantage of. All you have to do is scare them a little and they’re putty in your hands.”
“There’s more,” Kate said, glancing at me. I was busy getting the right ratio of maple syrup to pecan pancakes, so I nodded and she continued. “Courtney is apparently well known within her company for lending a hand with end-of-life care. A lot of people don’t want to do that, but she was always volunteering.”
Otto sighed. “And pocketing all those medications instead of disposing of them properly.”
“When did Luke Cagan come into it?” Aunt Frances asked.
I swallowed a spoonful of raspberries. “They’ve known each other since they were kids, so it’s hard to say. The shed was on property owned by Luke’s uncle on his mom’s side, and the uncle is only there during deer hunting season.”
Aunt Frances nudged the bacon in Kate’s direction. “So the uncle wouldn’t know a thing.”
“Yep. The shed was originally a sugar shack, but no one in the family has made maple syrup for years.” I eyed the stack of sourdough toast and reached for another piece. “According to Courtney, Luke kept pushing her to steal more and more medications because he wanted to go on guided hunting trips all over the world.” I considered jam options. “Of course, Luke said Courtney was the one who was pushing him to get better prices because she wanted to buy a house on Lake Mitchell.”
The sadness of the entire saga had weighed heavily on me when Ash had described it. However, coffee, good food, and even better company were combining to push back the darkness, and my spirits were on the upswing.
“I’m still struggling with the why of it,” Otto said. “Not the drugs, that I understand. It’s the murders.”
“That’s what was so confusing,” I said. “Nicole, from her back pain, had ended up with an addiction to opioids, and she’d found an Up North supply courtesy of Courtney and Luke. They often sold their pills out on Brown’s Road, right where the bookmobile stopped that day, not far from Rex’s house.”
Otto nodded slowly. “And Rex saw an exchange?”
“With Nicole, on the Fourth of July.” Not that Luke was confessing to the murder, but now that his handgun was in evidence, there’d be a ballistics test. “That last day on the bookmobile, Nicole had stayed late on our stop because she’d wanted to connect with Courtney to get more pills. They set up a purchase on the Fourth of July. Rex had wanted to explore more of that road on his bike, and he went back on the Fourth. He saw Nicole with Courtney, and he stopped to talk.”
“So sad,” Otto said.
“But why didn’t Rex tell anyone?” Aunt Frances asked. “If I’d seen a drug deal, the first thing I’d do is call the police. Did he even tell his wife?”
“No,” I said. “But Rex confronted them, right on the spot. And Courtney and Luke and Nicole spun some story that apparently Rex said he’d believed. And maybe he was going to tell the police the next day.”
“What about Nicole?” Otto asked. “Why on earth did they kill her?”
“Different reason altogether.” I ate a bite of marmalade-laden toast. “She had to be downstate for some family things after the Fourth of July and didn’t hear about Rex’s murder right away. When she did, she figured straight off that Courtney and Luke had killed him.”
I put down my toast and spoke quietly. “Nicole was using Rex’s murder as a way to get free pills.”
Aunt Frances reached over and squeezed my hand. “Addiction is a horrible thing, my dear. We can only hope that someday there will be a better way to cure it.”
I nodded agreement and tried to focus on breakfast.
It had been thanks to my own big mouth that day at Rupert and Ann Marie’s house, that Courtney had known I was curious about Rex Stuhler’s murder. Which explained why she and Luke wanted me out of the picture, and probably explained the air conditioner episode, but the timing didn’t work for my fall into the street, so maybe that had been an accident after all. And it had turned out that neither one of them had known of Violet or Julia’s existence, a fact for which I was extremely grateful.