All Roads Lead To Murder Read online

  “He’s not a suspect, although Owens is not only high profile politically, he’s very wealthy. Two potential reasons someone may want to kidnap his daughter.”

  “I thought I read that he’d remarried.”

  David nodded. “He did. His daughter lives with her mother and stepfather in Seattle. He lives in Spokane–that is when he’s not in D.C.” He sighed and put his arm around me. “Let’s not talk shop. How can I help with dinner?”

  “Pour the wine,” I said. “And then you can put this on the table.” I pointed to a divided platter with cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes. “I’ll get the meat.”

  We spent the next twenty minutes chatting while we enjoyed dinner. When the topic turned to the trip, David reached over and grabbed my hand.

  “I’m going to miss you, you know, even though you’ll only be gone a week.” He gave me a shy smile as if he’d gone too far in expressing his affection.

  My heart fluttered as a big grin spread across my face. I turned my hand over and laced my fingers through his.

  “Let’s face it; with me gone your life will slow down for a while. At least you won’t have to rescue me from some crazy killer.”

  He chuckled and tilted his head to one side, his brown eyes dancing. “To be honest, I’ll miss that, too.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” I said, smiling. “I feel almost guilty leaving you, though.”

  “No, it’s a good thing you’re going,” he said, letting go of my hand and sitting back in his chair. “You need some fun in your life, away from the hectic running of the inn, and…” he stopped and shrugged. “Everything else.”

  “Having a bit of normalcy would be good,” I agreed. “No murders. No adventures. No ghosts. Just my friends and a few evenings spent around a campfire under the stars.” My spoon suddenly slid off the table onto the carpet. I glanced down. “I’ll miss you, too, Chloe.”

  David knew about the ghosts, but never said much about them. I think his cop brain had trouble accepting the whole concept. As proof, he ignored the spoon.

  “You’re not taking the dogs?”

  Mickey had his feet on David’s leg, begging. David reached down to pat his head.

  “No. April will take care of them. I’ll miss them too, though. I don’t think I’ve ever been away from them for more than a day or so.”

  “I’m kind of envious,” he said, reaching for his wine. “Sitting around a campfire under the stars sounds pretty good.”

  “Hey, why don’t you meet us in Chicago? You and I could spend a long weekend together. After all, you never finished telling me about your early days at the police department in Detroit.” I smiled and reached over and rubbed my foot against his leg, imagining running my fingers through his thick gray hair. “And maybe we could have a repeat performance of that little game we played at the beach.”

  He nearly choked on a sip of wine. “Well, I, uh,” he sputtered.

  “You’re blushing,” I teased him.

  “No, no I’m not,” he blustered. “You just took me by surprise.”

  “Never been propositioned by a woman, I suppose.”

  He grinned, revealing his dimples. “Oh, I’ve been propositioned by plenty of women, just not one so brazen.”

  “Sure,” I said with a brief laugh. “With all the women of the night you must come across?”

  He shrugged. “I come across a lot less of those since coming to Mercer Island. But…I’ll take you up on that offer,” he said with a warm smile. “Depending on what happens with this investigation, that is. I’ll check flights into O’Hare for next Saturday. Have you ever been to Wrigley Field?”

  “Wrigley what?”

  He frowned. “C’mon. You have to know what Wrigley Field is.”

  I snickered. “Of course, I do. They make gum, don’t they?”

  We shared a good laugh, and then he reached out and took my hand again. “What time do you leave tomorrow?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “Are you all packed?”

  “Yep. I’m ready to go.”

  “Well then, I’d hate to mess up that pretty auburn hair of yours, but any chance I could give you a proper goodbye before I head back downtown?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I was up by 6:00 a.m. the next morning to help April with the guests’ breakfasts and then finish last minute packing. It was just after 9:00 a.m. when the dogs alerted me to the arrival of the RV.

  Our circular driveway slopes down from the street to the front of the inn, and my rose garden fills the large patch of ground in between the two curves of the drive. By the first of July, the roses were in full bloom, but Rudy had parked the Hulk so it blocked most of the garden and the big house across the street.

  As I dragged my rolling suitcase through the front door and onto our wraparound porch, April met me with a box of freshly baked cinnamon rolls and a bag of brownies.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking them from her. “You know me too well. Listen, I have my cell phone, so don’t hesitate to call if there’s a problem.”

  “Are you kidding? I don’t plan to bother you at all. Go have fun.” She reached out and drew me in for a hug. I smelled the familiar scent of coconut oil she used daily to keep her dark skin velvet soft and felt a nostalgic sense of warmth overtake me.

  I pulled back. “You have the Butlers and the Griffins checking in tomorrow,” I said. “Between them, they have four kids. It’s going to be crazy around here.”

  “Never mind that. Just take care of yourself,” she said. “Don’t let them leave you behind at a gas station or something.”

  “We should put a bell around her neck,” Blair said, coming up the steps.

  Even though we were about to set out for several days of camping, Blair had chosen to wear a skin-tight, sparkly red tank top, black leather crop pants, and red and white polka dotted high heels.

  “I don’t need a bell. I’m not a cow,” I responded.

  “Yes, but it would be good to know where you are at all times,” she said. “You do have a tendency to get yourself into trouble. Where’s your sleeping bag? I’ll take it to the Hulk.”

  “The Hulk?” April asked.

  Blair’s pretty face tensed as if she’d bitten into a lemon. “That’s what we’re calling that big green hunk of metal behind me.”

  “Who cares what the motorhome looks like?” Rudy said, joining us.

  “I have a reputation to keep,” Blair said, throwing her chin in the air. “Who wants to be seen in some giant rusty tin can with a motor?”

  Rudy snorted. “I doubt they make motorhomes with the kind of turning radius you’re used to.”

  Blair’s first husband (first of four) had been a race car driver and had taught her the finer points of driving at high speed. Her current husband, Mr. Billings, owned a string of foreign import car dealerships, giving her the pick of cars to drive. It was usually a Porsche.

  “Speaking of drivers,” April said. “Who’s going to drive that thing?”

  “We’ll share the driving,” Rudy said.

  “Not me,” I blurted out. “I was deemed inadequate.”

  “Not inadequate,” Blair said. “Just dangerous.”

  I didn’t disagree since they were all well aware of my reputation for causing mishaps.

  Case in point.

  When Doe and I recently went to interview a woman at an assisted living center, I bumped into an old woman sitting behind me in a wheelchair on the outdoor patio. Someone had forgotten to lock the wheels to her chair. Not my fault. But her wheelchair lurched forward and slammed into a nurse’s aide, forcing the poor woman to somersault over a wall and down a steep slope towards the lake.

  “I’m happy to just be a passenger,” I said, shutting off the memory.

  “We decided Julia can be in charge of the map,” Blair added with a smug smile.

  “Funny. My sleeping bag is by the front desk,” I said, pointing behind me.

  Blair stepped past me into the foyer, he
r heels clicking on the hardwood floor.

  “What route are you taking?” April asked Rudy.

  “I-90 most of the way,” she said. “We’ll spend our first night just outside of Spokane. Then we travel across the top part of Idaho into Montana. I hope to make Missoula the second night, maybe even Billings. If we have time, we’ll swing down through Yellowstone and then back onto I-90 into South Dakota.”

  “Can we stop at Mt. Rushmore?” I asked. “I’ve never been there.” I felt like a little girl going on a field trip.

  “I don’t see why not,” Rudy said.

  “How about Joe’s Bar and Grill in Billings?” Blair asked, coming up behind me with the sleeping bag in her hands. Her crystal blue eyes sparkled at the suggestion.

  “You want to stop at Joe’s Bar and Grill in Billings?” Rudy asked with a smartass curl to her lip.

  “Don’t tell me,” April said. “That’s where you met Mr. Billings.”

  “It was where we had our first date,” Blair confirmed with a brilliant smile.

  “Date?” Rudy said, spitting out a breath. “What’s the name of the motel next door?”

  “The Billings Mote…oh, very funny,” Blair replied with an arch to her neck.

  Blair was infamous for her ex-husbands. Mr. Billings had come into the picture after Blair had dumped husband number three. She was in Billings to visit her aunt when they met. Though separated, Mr. Billings wasn’t yet unencumbered from his then-current wife. That hadn’t stopped them from beginning a relationship however, probably in that motel next door to Joe’s Bar and Grill.

  Thereafter, although his name was actually Jack Wentworth, Blair referred to husband number four as Mr. Billings. Well, that’s not exactly true. He hadn’t earned the nickname because of the town where they’d met. It had more to do with a nickname she’d given a singular part of Jack’s body she loved the best. And I don’t mean his brain.

  “Where will you spend the Fourth of July?” April asked, bringing our attention back to the trip.

  “Hopefully, Rapid City, South Dakota,” Rudy replied. “There’s a big campground there that puts on a fireworks display. Then we spend our last night in Onalaska, Wisconsin. We’ll drop off the motorhome in Madison the next day and spend the night with the Aberdeens before renting a car to drive to Chicago.”

  “Stopping first in Waukegan to drop off my mother,” I added.

  The fact that my mother’s ashes had been on a shelf in the garage since she’d died from emphysema a year and a half earlier had been a constant source of amusement for my friends. There was also the fact that she’d begun calling me on my cell phone during the first murder investigation, usually to warn me of some impending danger.

  Yes, I said that, too.

  My dead mother calls me on my cell phone. The calls are short and very much to the point. She knows, or can feel somehow, that I’m in danger. On occasion, she’s intervened with elaborate distractions, giving me the opportunity to get away.

  We never get a chance to talk or catch up on these phone calls, but I guess that would be even weirder. I could certainly tell her what’s going on in my life, about David, the inn, or her granddaughter, Angie. But what would she say? Honey, I have to go because I have a date to play bridge with a group of women at the dead people’s home?

  The problem was that I’d gotten used to hearing from her in times of trouble, and I had mixed feelings now about returning her ashes to her home town. A part of me was afraid that locking her away in a small metal box would sever my ethereal ties to her—that I might never hear from her again. And yet, I’d promised to take her home. And a promise is a promise.

  “You realize there’s a big Republican meeting in Chicago right around the time you’ll be there,” April said.

  I sighed. “I know. They’re calling it the Freedom Conference. All the Republican governors will be there, as well as most of the Republican leaders of Congress.”

  “Is Graham going?” Blair asked.

  My ex-husband was the current governor of the state of Washington—an anomaly if there ever was one since Washington is such a ‘blue’ state. Though divorce often ripped families apart, our separation had been undramatic. Graham and I remained on good terms, though on different sides of the political aisle.

  “Yes. He’ll be there. I spoke to him last weekend.”

  “I think Senator Owens is making the keynote address,” April said.

  “That turd?” Rudy said with a grimace.

  Like me, Rudy was a staunch liberal and didn’t think too highly of Senator Jim Owens. Besides being a bully, he was a hard-right conservative, making Rudy’s small brown eyes glint with anger.

  “Didn’t you read the paper this morning?” April said. “His daughter was abducted.”

  “David mentioned it last night,” I said. “Really sad.”

  “Julia!” Doe called from the motorhome. “Did you remember to bring a lantern?”

  “José should be here in a minute with our camping stuff,” I called back.

  At the mention of his name, José’s lean figure appeared around the corner of the garage carrying a big cardboard box.

  “Right on cue,” Rudy said. She left the porch and moved over to the side of the motorhome to open a large storage compartment. “Here. You can put it in here.”

  I clumped down the steps with my jean jacket thrown over my arm as José slid the box into the compartment.

  Rudy peeked inside. “You brought marshmallow sticks.”

  “They’re about a million years old,” I said, coming up behind her. “But they’ll work. I have a bag of charcoal in there, a couple of flashlights, the lantern, and of course, Mother.”

  Blair erupted with a chuckle. “She won’t be too happy about riding back here with the charcoal.”

  “She won’t care,” I said. “She’s going home.”

  I felt myself choke up a bit. Rudy saved me.

  “I brought lawn chairs,” she said, changing the subject. “They’re strapped onto the back of the RV.”

  “I brought my bug zapper,” Doe called out from the RV.

  “Guess what Blair brought?” Rudy asked with a mischievous smile. She turned to Blair, who still held my sleeping bag in her arms.

  “My oversized, battery-operated makeup mirror,” she said, flashing her perfectly white teeth. “We can all use it. I’ll throw this on the bed inside.”

  She disappeared into the RV.

  Rudy turned back to me with a raised eyebrow.

  She and Blair had a friendly and yet adversarial relationship–probably because they were so different. Rudy had been a jock in college and spent her entire professional career as a pit-bull journalist. She was small and wiry and didn’t even wear makeup. She also didn’t take guff from anyone.

  On the other hand, although Blair had a photographic memory and was smart as a whip, she down-played that part, focusing instead on her looks. Add her carefree attitude toward life, and it was a perfect setup for the two of them to butt heads.

  “This trip should be interesting,” Rudy said, grabbing the handle to my suitcase. “The four of us have never traveled in close quarters before. Between Doe’s obsession with cleanliness, my lack of patience, Blair’s focus on the opposite sex, and your…” She stopped mid-sentence.

  “Clumsiness,” I said with resignation.

  Her weathered face broke into a grin, making her small brown eyes dance. “Well, let’s just say, if we all come back friends the trip will be a success.”

  “I have no doubt we’ll come back friends.”

  “Julia, I forgot to bring Lysol. Do you have any?” Doe called through the RV window.

  “And so it begins,” Rudy said with a cynical expression.

  I laughed and shook my head, turning to José. “José, I have a bottle of Lysol spray under the sink in my kitchen. Can you grab it for me? Also that box by the front door?”

  “Sure,” he said and left.

  As I pulled my arms through my
jacket, Rudy took my suitcase into the motorhome. José returned a minute later with the spray cleaner and box, which he stowed safely in the storage compartment.

  “What’s in the box?” Blair asked, coming back down the motorhome steps.

  “Three bottles of wine and all the condiments and spices we’ll ever need.”

  She grinned. “Awesome.”

  We were in the process of saying our goodbyes to April and José when my neighbor Caroline and her daughter Amelia appeared around the back of the motorhome. They lived in the house across the street. Amelia was only five and a Downs Syndrome child. She had a bright and happy personality and was dressed in blue denim shorts and a matching blouse embroidered with strawberries.

  “Hi, Julia,” she said, running forward to grab my hand.

  “I’m glad we caught you,” Caroline said, coming up behind her. “You look like you’re all ready to go.”

  Caroline had formerly worked at Microsoft as a programmer and now worked from home. She was tall and slender, with short, curly brown hair.

  “Yes, we were just about to leave.”

  “How far do you think you’ll get today?”

  “We plan to stop in Leavenworth and then head over to Spokane,” I replied.

  Leavenworth was a touristy Bavarian-style town in the Cascades, about two hours east of Seattle.

  “I thought you might like to take these.” She handed me a pair of binoculars. “They’re Jack’s. He does a lot of bird watching. Since you’ll be traveling through some beautiful country, I thought they might come in handy.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “We’ll take good care of them.”

  “Tell her, Mommy,” Amelia whined, squinting up at her mother and pulling on my hand.

  “Tell me what?” I asked, handing off the binoculars to Blair.

  Caroline glanced at our expectant faces. “Uh, well…it seems that…” She paused, making Amelia bounce up and down in frustration.

  A small whirlwind of dust began to circle us. I suspected it was Chloe again. She often showed herself in this way. Chloe liked to play tricks on people she didn’t like, or show her displeasure in unsuspecting ways. None of us had ever seen her, although her mother’s gossamer image had often appeared inside the inn. Elizabeth had even once accompanied me in the car, warning me in advance that I was about to hit a deer.