The Silence of the Elves: A Holly Hopewell Cozy Mystery by Meg Muldoon

Author:Meg Muldoon [Muldoon, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vacant Lot Publishing
Published: 2016-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

I suddenly felt the Peppermint Drop crawl back up my throat.

Chapter 25

“You don’t really think he thinks you had anything to do with Topher’s murder, do you?” Elmira said a little too loudly as we walked back to our cabin later that evening.

A few dogs in neighborhood yards started barking at the noise.

Elmira didn’t seem too concerned by it, though.

“I mean, it’s insane for him to think that somebody like you could have committed such a heinous crime,” she continued. “You’re the most innocent person in the whole of Mistletoe. Anybody with a shred of sense could see that plain as day.”

Her words slurred a little at the end of her thought.

I wasn’t sure how much Elmira had to drink. But it couldn’t have been much more than me. The difference was I’d been shocked into being sober by my conversation with Detective Harry Ebenezer. Meanwhile, she’d spent the whole night telling stories, laughing, and being merry with the rest of our co-workers from The North Pole Emporium.

I let out a troubled sigh.

“The detective knows that there was no other department store in Juneau where we worked – which is what I told him,” I said. “He looked into it. And he said he knows that I was called into Topher’s office the night before Julie Jingles found him dead. And he said that he knows I’m hiding something. That several of us from the department store appear to be hiding something. And he said he’s not going to stop investigating us until he finds out what that is.”

Elmira didn’t say anything for a long moment. She stopped walking quite as fast, her heels clicking slowly against the cracked asphalt.

“You didn’t tell him anything, did you?” she said, turning toward me, her face suddenly fixed in a serious expression.

I gave her a look of disbelief.

“Of course not. I didn’t tell him anything about us or the North Pole,” I said, lowering my voice. “I just told him that he had it all wrong. And that he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

I shook my head, clutching my book tightly under my jacket to protect it from the rain.

“Julie Jingles must have ratted me out,” I said. “She was the only one who knew I was there in his office that evening.”

I sighed.

The spiky-haired tattooed back-stabber.

“Well, the detective might think that you’re hiding something, Holly,” Elmira said. “But it’s a long way from that to proving you murdered Topher.”

I nodded glumly.

I couldn’t help but feel like I’d fallen into some sort of trap. It’d been so freeing and nice to be able to talk to someone the way I’d been talking to Detective Ebenezer about my childhood. It felt as though it’d been the first real authentic conversation that I’d had in ages. He’d been a good listener, and I’d told him more about myself than I told most people.

On some level, I must have trusted the detective.

But then, out of nowhere, he’d changed the direction of the conversation. And I’d been taken completely off-guard by it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.