A Crime for Christmas Read online

  I caught her up on the details of the case to launch her search and gave her the twenty-four-hour “hack-off” deadline Joe and I had agreed to.

  “Looks like I’ve already got a head start on that Hardy amateur,” she said gleefully. “All those negative posts that travel writer Carol Fremont has been making inspired me to do a little digging. Turns out, before she got the cushy gig at Travel Bug, she was an independent travel blogger.”

  “Um, sounds like a pretty normal career path for a travel writer to me,” I commented.

  “Yeah, but it was what she blogged about that caught my eye,” George insisted. “She made her name writing hit pieces that slammed travel destinations any time something went wrong. The blogs are funny and stylish, but they’re also totally sensational and downright vicious some of the time. And they got her a ton of hits to help launch her pro writing career.”

  “Not too surprising, really, seeing how eager she is to tell everyone on social media as soon as something goes wrong,” I said. I liked Carol, but the joy she seemed to get from others’ misfortune wasn’t her best personality trait.

  “Well, things seem to go wrong a lot when Carol Fremont checks into a place,” George said, adding the next piece to the puzzle. “Fires, burst pipes, food poisoning, theft, even snakes. It’s almost uncanny. Everywhere she went for a couple years before she landed the Travel Bug gig was some kind of crazy vacation disaster, and each one got her more followers and boosted her profile.”

  “You’re saying you think she makes things go wrong just so she can write sensational stories about them?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but bad luck has been pretty darn lucky for her, and she seems to get a lot luckier than your average vacationer,” George said. “The online content world is supercompetitive, and people can be pretty cutthroat when it comes to getting ahead.”

  “Oh, she’s definitely competitive,” I informed George. “She’s totally determined to land the Travel Bug cover with this story.”

  “It would be her first one,” George told me. “She’s written a bunch of articles for Travel Bug, but none of them have made a big enough splash to make the cover. So the question is—”

  “Is she competitive enough to manufacture the travel hit piece to end all travel hit pieces in order to make it happen?” I finished George’s thought for her.

  The implication gave me chills. Would someone really go to such extreme lengths to boost their own career? I’d seen on other cases how competition and greed could drive a person to do some pretty crazy things, so I knew the answer was yes. But was Carol someone like that?

  Her social media posts lambasting the lodge to promote her article were getting a ton of hits for both her and the magazine. I didn’t know if she would stoop to that level, but she was definitely benefiting from it.

  “I’ll keep an eye on her,” I said.

  Only it turned out to be someone else I found my eye on next.

  Later that night, after staring at the backs of my eyelids for a few hours as my mind raced through all of the case’s peculiar complexities, I decided to give up the ghost on a good night’s sleep and pick up my binoculars. It was already after midnight, and the lodge was pretty quiet, with lights on in only a few rooms. Carol’s room and Grant’s suite were both dark, and the grounds were perfectly still. And beautiful! With the day’s fresh snowfall and the holiday lights sparkling, it looked like a Christmas dream.

  The peaceful scene had just about lulled me to sleep in my chair when movement off to the side of the lodge brought motion to the still life and shook me awake. A figure was making its way through the snow beyond the shoveled paths toward the shadows at the edge of the lodge.

  I raised the binoculars to my eyes, adjusting the focus to bring the person into sharp relief. Whoever it was looked bundled up against the cold, with a scarf covering the lower half of their face, but the determined look in the person’s exposed eyes made it easy for me to identify her.

  What was Chef K doing trudging through the snow at the witching hour?

  She looked furtively over her shoulder, like someone might be following. Then she vanished behind the lodge, moonlight glinting off the knife in her gloved hand.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hunted

  THE FIRST THING I DID the next morning was call Liz and Brady. I planned to investigate Chef K’s midnight wanderings, and I was going to need some help.

  I’d stayed up for hours, hoping to glimpse Chef K returning—and hopefully without a bloodstained knife!—but she never reappeared. Which was odd, because there weren’t any entrances that I knew of on that side of the lodge. What was odder was the knife. Who takes a hike through the snow at midnight carrying a deadly weapon? Unless they plan to use it.

  The knife had been about four inches long with a wicked curved blade that almost looked like a mini scythe. I shivered as the image of Chef K as a culinary grim reaper popped into my head. I had no idea why she’d ventured out in the middle of the night armed with a knife, but the possibility that she wanted to catch the culprit on her own and exact revenge definitely flashed through my mind.

  What was Chef K hiding? I wondered if there was a reason someone was targeting her kitchen that she didn’t want us to know about. Hopefully, following this lead would be the breakthrough I needed to solve the case.

  I didn’t know what we were facing. Liz said she would sign Things One through Three up for ski school that day. We all agreed that this wasn’t a mission for kids.

  It wasn’t a mission for me, either, not without some professional help, at least. My old-fashioned wheelchair wasn’t exactly built for following a person’s tracks through the snow. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be modified.

  “Cross-country skis,” Liz said definitively. “We’ll turn your wheelchair into a chariot, and Brady can pull it like a horse!”

  “An especially handsome horse,” he added.

  “As fancy as a chariot pulled by Brady sounds, wouldn’t it still be easier to just push me?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Liz conceded. “Way to ruin all the fun, though.”

  A quick call to Henry at the front desk, who made a quick call of his own to the rental shop, earned us a pair of cross-country skis that met Liz’s specifications, and with a bit of tinkering, Liz and Brady had them strapped under my wheels in no time. My wheelchair had been transformed into a ski-chair!

  “I trained with some amazing Paralympic skiers after my crash who inspired me never to give up,” Liz shared. “They used all kinds of great adaptive gear that allowed them to ski with their different abilities and go anywhere on a mountain they wanted, and now you can too!”

  “That’s really cool, but I still think I’ll leave the double diamonds to you,” I told her. “I’m definitely down for some deep-snow detecting, though!”

  It hadn’t snowed since yesterday and there hadn’t been much wind overnight, so the conditions were perfect for tracking. Chef K’s boot prints stood out in clear relief in the snow. Brady wore snowshoes to make pushing my ski-chair easier, while Liz skied alongside me on a pair of her own cross-country skis.

  “She couldn’t have been walking far in this stuff without snowshoes,” Liz observed.

  “Tell me about it!” Brady huffed. “Chariot pushing is a workout even with snowshoes.”

  “I think you’re right, Liz. The tracks look like they lead behind that shed.” I pointed to one of the small wooden outbuildings off to the side of the lodge.

  My heart began to beat faster. What were we going to find?

  “Well, it’s definitely not a body,” Liz remarked, looking at the disturbed snow behind the shed.

  “What is it, though?” I asked as Brady pushed me closer to what looked like frost-covered glass windowpanes buried in the snow.

  “A trapdoor!” Brady exclaimed, eagerly reaching down to open it.

  “Careful,” I cautioned. “We don’t know what’s inside.”

  This was it! A
clue so important that Chef K felt the need to hide it in a trapdoor buried in the snow. I was buzzing with anticipation as Brady carefully lifted the first windowpane to reveal its secrets.

  “Is that kale?” Liz asked.

  “Ooh, and Swiss chard, I think, too,” Brady said, snapping off a large red leaf and taking a bite. “Yup! These clues taste great!”

  We’d found a clue, all right. The clue to growing cold-hardy greens like kale, chard, and spinach outdoors in the winter! The windowpanes covered wooden boxes about two feet deep with lush foliage growing inside. Once the boxes were open, I recognized them immediately.

  I blushed with embarrassment at my big “clue.” “They’re called cold frames. Our housekeeper Hannah tried using them one year to extend the garden’s growing season. The glass acts like a mini greenhouse, warming up the soil enough for frost-tolerant veggies to keep growing even in the snow.”

  I looked at the freshly severed stems on three of the plants. “It looks like the only thing Chef K got revenge on last night was the kale. I’m pretty sure that wicked-looked curved blade she had was just a pruning knife. Hannah keeps a smaller one that looks kind of like it in her garden bag.”

  I hung my head. My first trip outside the lodge since breaking my leg had led to a dead end.

  “Well, where’d she go from here?” Liz asked, undeterred. “You’d said she went behind the lodge and didn’t come back. Maybe there’s still more to the mystery.”

  “You’re right!” I agreed, perking up instantly. What was I pouting about? A good detective has to be persistent, and I wasn’t about to let either a broken leg or salad greens get me down. “Onward, driver! Follow those tracks!”

  They might not lead to the huge revelation I’d hoped, but I was outdoors with friends and I was at least going to have some fun!

  “That’s strange,” I muttered a couple of minutes later as we followed the tracks around the side of the lodge right into another dead end. And by dead end, I mean the boot prints led straight into one of the lodge’s solid log walls!

  “Where’d she go?” Brady wondered, as the three of us looked at the tightly interlinked logs of the lodge’s old log-cabin-style exterior. There weren’t even any windows. We were on the side of the lodge where the restaurant was, but there was no way for anyone to get inside. Did Chef K have secret Spider-Woman powers?

  “It’s like she just vanished,” Liz said, sliding closer to the wall. “Maybe she’s a ghost!”

  “The ghost of Christmas dinner!” Brady joked.

  There was a muffled click as Liz reached forward with her left ski pole to slide herself closer to the wall.

  “What was . . . ?”

  The question was cut off by a loud metallic SNAP as a pair of metal jaws leaped from the snow and slammed shut on the bottom of her ski pole, snapping it clean in half.

  Liz jumped. I gasped. Brady screamed like he’d been the one to trigger the trap and rushed over to her.

  “I’m okay, sweetie,” she reassured him, eyeing the metal trap now lying in the snow with the clipped-off end of her ski pole in its jaws. “Angry, but okay.” She scowled as she leaned down to pick up the antique iron trap. “It’s just my stupid pole, but if I hadn’t been wearing skis, I could have stepped right on it. If it had been someone in boots or snowshoes, they could have been really hurt.”

  The jaws were two rusty iron bands clamped together like a pair of angry metal lips with a heavy chain hanging off them. There was an iron plate underneath that must have triggered it when Liz unwittingly poked it with her ski pole.

  “It’s an old animal trap like the ones hanging on the wall in the lodge from when trappers used to stay here during the fur trade era,” I observed, my heart still racing as Liz held up the trap so I could examine it. “Only I’m guessing this one wasn’t meant for animals. It looks like someone filed down the teeth, so it wouldn’t actually impale anyone.”

  “Well, that was nice of them,” Liz said sarcastically.

  I looked from the lighter-colored filed iron edges where the teeth had been to the century-old rust covering the rest of it. Whoever had done the filing, it had been recent.

  “It’s like they were trying to scare someone, not necessarily trap them.” I shuddered as I watched Liz strain to reopen the jaws of the heavy iron trap. Even without the metal teeth, stepping in it still could have broken someone’s foot.

  “I’d like to trap someone right about now,” Liz growled, jabbing the air with her broken pole. “This is the nastiest prank yet.”

  “The question is, who was it meant for?” I wondered aloud.

  Chef K’s boot prints stopped just a foot to the right of the trap, and there was no way to tell whether she’d known to avoid it or had just gotten luckier than Liz and missed it.

  “Do you think Chef Angry Apron left it as a booby trap in case someone followed her—or do you think it was meant for her?” Liz’s scowl turned to confusion as she looked from the trap to lodge wall. “And where the heck did she go, anyway?”

  “This is freaking me out, guys,” Brady whispered, speaking up for the first time. “Let’s get out of—”

  Brady’s sentence was cut off by a loud, creaky moan that sounded like two ancient tree trunks rubbing together from inside the wall. Liz raised her broken ski pole like it was a weapon, Brady whimpered, and I just stared as a huge hidden door cracked open in the side of the lodge.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Open Sesame

  STANDING ON THE OTHER SIDE with an intense scowl and a meat cleaver was Chef K. The hidden door certainly explained how she’d gotten back inside the lodge, but I was suddenly less concerned with that than what she planned to do with the cleaver.

  “What in the world is going on out here?” she snarled before cutting herself off with a gasp when she saw the animal trap lying in the snow in front of her secret door, its metal jaws still clinging to the tip of Liz’s ski pole. From the way the color drained from Chef K’s face, the answer to Liz’s question from a moment earlier was obvious. The trap had been set to catch her.

  “What—what—what is that?” she stammered, looking at the trap.

  It was the first time I’d seen Chef K look the least bit rattled. Angry, oh yeah. Loud, definitely. Just never unsure of herself before now. Even when half the banquet hall was screaming from being hot peppered, she’d come off as confident and in command. But the trap had her shaken.

  “It’s definitely not a welcome mat,” Liz quipped. “Nice secret door, by the way.”

  “But no one knows about this entrance!” Chef K insisted.

  “Tell that to whoever put the trap there,” Brady said.

  “If we were able to track you here, someone else could have as well,” I told her.

  “Who is behind all this stuff? Why are they doing this?” she whispered, sounding downright vulnerable.

  “Can we come in?” I asked. “I plan to find out, and it’s probably best that they don’t see us talking.”

  She stepped aside without answering and let Brady push my ski-chair inside, with Liz following close behind.

  She swung the secret door closed behind us. The heavy door groaned, then locked into place with a THUMP. It was as if the door had vanished and been replaced by a seamless, solid, shelf-lined wall. The outline of the door was perfectly hidden in the natural seams between the logs, and the hinges and opening mechanism must have been disguised by the built-in shelves.

  “Amazing. You’d never guess it was anything but a wall,” I remarked. “It opens from the outside as well?”

  “Just from the inside, I think,” Chef K replied. “If I plan to come in from the outside, I leave it disengaged just a hair so I can push it open.”

  Brady had unhooked the skis from my chair so I could wheel myself around again, and I did a full turn, taking in the room. If you didn’t know about the hidden exterior entrance, you’d just think it was a regular large pantry. The only thing unusual about it was the odd mix of old and
new construction. The wall with the hidden door and the exposed-beam ceiling were clearly as old as the original lodge, but the food-filled floor-to-ceiling shelving units on the other two walls, and the interior door across from us, looked brand-new. The shelves were covered with all kinds of interesting foodstuffs, including a lot of raw vegetables, like beets, winter squash, and cabbage (thankfully still fresh and un-stinky!). Strands of dried peppers, garlic, and herbs hung from the ceiling.

  Everything was well organized, but any fantasies I’d had about a secret door leading to a chamber full of the lodge’s legendary hidden gold quickly vanished. It was clearly a food pantry. At least that’s what it was now that Chef K had discovered it.

  “Is this the hidden room they uncovered during the renovation?” I asked, taking a guess that this was the chamber Henry had told me about.

  Chef K nodded. “The workers found it when they tore down the old wall to put in the storage and freezer space under the restaurant, so I had them put it to good use.”

  “Henry told me Mrs. Bosley thought finding a secret room proved her theory that there was hidden treasure somewhere in the lodge from the old gold rush days,” I said. I was still hoping the room might hold clues to the golden nugget that had somehow wound up in Clark’s pocket. Maybe Chef K knew something that Henry didn’t.

  “Oh, yeah, sure, we found a treasure chest full of gold,” Chef K deadpanned so convincingly I nearly got my hopes up. “But a leprechaun riding a unicorn ran off with it.” She rolled her eyes. “What they found was dust, dirt, and a perfectly cool, dry space with a natural earthen floor for me to use in place of a root cellar.”

  “A root cellar with a hidden door no one but you is supposed to know about,” Liz observed. “How convenient.”

  “I didn’t know the door was there until the renovation was done,” she explained. “I had the contractor leave the back wall exposed because it already had shelves built in. I found the door by accident a few weeks later when I was trying to fix a loose shelf.”