Where’s Hansel and Gretel’s Gingerbread House?:
A Gabby Grimm Fairy Tale Mystery #2
by Sara M. Barton
Copyright Sara M. Barton 2012
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Chapter One --
“Holy crap!” Those were the first words out of my cousin’s mouth when she saw me come through the door with my overnight bag the day after I fell two stories off a roof. “You look like hell!”
“And a fine howdy-do to you, too,” was my sardonic reply. I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed.
“Seriously,” Annette continued, “you’re a mess. You should be home in bed.”
“I should, but I’m not, so why don’t you put on your Florence Nightengale hat and make me a cup of java?”
“You should see a doctor,” she insisted.
“I did, smarty pants. Doc Morris said it’s just contusions. I’ll heal. Now, how about that coffee?”
“One of these days, you’re going to get yourself killed. It’s a wonder it hasn’t happened already.” She disappeared into the kitchen. I looked at the Christmas tree sitting in front of the window. It twinkled with miniature white lights. Tiny, colorful birds, decorated gingerbread cookies, and red-and-white striped candy canes were tucked in beside hand-blown glass ornaments. Annette put a blue mug in front of me. I could see the steam coming off the coffee. I could also see it coming out of her ears. She was boiling mad.
“Relax. I don’t look that bad!” I chuckled.
“Yes, you do. You are all black and blue!” Annette was my cousin, almost six years older and still a busybody know-it-all. “Why did you have to go up on that roof?”
“I wasn’t about to let that bastard ruin Kinsey’s company. I needed the USB stick. It had all that data on it.”
“And you couldn’t have waited for the cops? You had to rush him?”
“I’ll remind you that I’m a deputy sheriff up in Latimer Falls. That makes me a cop. He had the stick, Nettie. It was the only way I could prove Bob Kinsey didn’t steal all that money.”
“So, you’d give up your life for some jerk you barely know?” Nettie put her frustrated hands on her wide hips, standing there like an old farmer’s wife scolding the farmer’s sheepdog. “What am I supposed to do if you get killed? Where am I going to find another job at this point in my life?”
Nettie’s husband, Paul, died last year, and ever since, she’s been a bit shaky, always worrying about everyone and everything. I cut her some slack.
“Oh, you’re just impossible to talk to, aren’t you? I give up. Go ahead, throw yourself down a mountain. Or off a ship. See if I care!” She retreated to her bedroom. I figured I’d let her cool off a bit before approaching her.
Yesterday, I had been back home in Vermont, chasing after a thief who had broken into Bob Kinsey’s office. The financial planner, a recent resident of Latimer Falls, was in charge of a number of big accounts, and about a month ago, rumors started surfacing about how Bob was dipping into the well to assuage his thirst for cash. My boss, Rufus Parteger, and I met with Bob when he showed up at the Latimer Falls Sheriff’s Department just after Thanksgiving.
“You have to help me,” the frazzled money expert insisted. Bob was the new go-to guy for the village of Latimer Falls when it came to municipal employee pensions. When his clients started discovering their investments were rapidly tanking, he turned to us for help.
It took a stake-out in his office to catch the thief red-handed. Not only was the cheese weasel breaking into the financial planner’s office with frightening regularity, he was using Bob’s own computer to create the money trail that was supposed to get Bob convicted. It turned out to be Bob’s former partner, Marty Fleishman, but the only way I found that out was to pop out of the closet with my Glock drawn while Marty tampered with Bob’s computer.
Rufus was sitting outside the office, in the official SUV marked “Sheriff”. His son, Rusty, was with him, keeping him company and learning the ropes of surveillance on his winter break from the University of Vermont. The pair was waiting for the bad guy to leave, so they could tail and identify him. Me? I was supposed to monitor the intruder’s activities in the office. Observe and report. Why did I come out of the closet? The answer is simple. Bob showed up unexpectedly. Talk about bad timing. The second that door opened, the thief was up and out of Bob’s desk chair, grabbing the USB stick with all the evidence on it.
“Marty? What are you doing?” the stunned financial planner asked. The only answer he got was a shove as the assailant took off.
You might expect the chubby guy to run down the stairs, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he ran to the end of the second floor hallway in the Kinsey Building, opened up the window, and crawled out onto the adjacent roof of Voneger’s Bridal. What could I do? I followed, even as Bob was screaming obscenities at his former partner.
It shouldn’t have been all that complicated. I holstered my weapon and I gingerly made my way across the icy asphalt shingles. I could see the middle-aged, pudgy man struggling to keep his balance as he crawled ahead of me on hands and knees. That gave me the advantage of speed and agility, which I used to my advantage, covering ten feet quickly. As I reached down to apprehend the suspect by the collar, the bastard turned around, looked me right in the eye, and kicked me in the knee. It was just enough to knock me off balance. Screaming as I slid down the roof, I desperately tried to grab the gutter even as I flipped head over heels. I caught the edge of the metal lip and that briefly stopped my freefall. I hung suspended in air for a split second before I went feet first at warp speed towards the ground. Even as I felt myself flying through the air, I prayed. Please don’t let me kill myself, God.
Winter is a funny thing. With all that cold weather in the Green Mountains often comes snow, and with snow comes snow removal. It was my lucky day, because the Bartle brothers, who have the contract to plow the streets of Latimer Falls, had managed to do what I had often cited them for doing. They dumped the snow from the streets in the alley behind the Kinsey Building, just about blocking the back door completely, which is a violation of the fire code. Even as I hit that pile of crusty snow, I decided I was going to cut them a break just this once. When I landed on the top of the heap, I felt my boots briefly grip the surface, but then suddenly, as the rest of my weight caught up, they went out from under me, and I was sliding on my fanny. Bumping and thumping, I tumbled all the way down to the pavement, where I lay sprawled in a very undignified position as I tried to catch my breath. That would have been bad enough, but what happened next just added insult to injury.
“Damn!” said a male voice from above me. That was followed by a rather loud scraping sound. That’s when I saw a black loafer drop and slide about ten feet before coming to a stop. I should have figured that there would be more to come, but at that point, I was still optimistic that I had reached the end of my danger phase and was now in recovery. Boy, was that a mistaken assumption. Smack! That other black loafer landed on the top of my head, and as I winced, it bounced off my right shoulder and skidded across the icy surface of the alley. It was followed by a very loud groan and the creak of the gutter as it gave way under the weight of the suspect, and the next thing I knew, I was desperately scrambling to get out of the path of the two-hundred pound ex-partner of Bob Kinsey. Marty Fleishman’s legs struck the top
of the heap first, breaking up a substantial chunk of that snow pile. I heard that horrible sound as his left femur snapped like a twig.
“Aww-grrr!” A primeval animal sound reverberated through the night air as the pain went from possibility to cold, hard reality for the suspect. I wiggled my fanny as fast as I could to avoid the rest of his bulk, but I just wasn’t fast enough. His head landed on my rear end with a hard thwack. Sometimes it pays to have a little padding. I guess he has me to thank for preventing a concussion.
“Gabby!” I could hear my boss hollering my name, even as I was trying to stand up and read the suspect his rights.
“Here, Sheriff!”
“You okay?” He was a good twenty yards away. I could see his silhouette in the soft glow of the street lamp.
“We’re going to need an ambulance,” I yelled back. “Suspect fell off the roof, too.”
Rufus had his son call it in as he came to my assistance. By that time, Bob had also joined us.
“Marty, how could you?” The financial planner was aghast. “How long have you been stealing from those accounts?”
“I want a lawyer!” said the man with a broken leg, the words coming out in gasps between tightly clenched teeth.
“Lawyer, my ass!” Who knew the financial planner could move that fast? The next thing we knew, Rufus and I were pulling Bob off his former partner. It was understandable that the man responsible for all those pension investments wanted to pummel the life out of the man who siphoned off the funds. We didn’t want to have to charge Bob with assault, so we broke it up. I yanked him away from the snow pile with both hands, even as my legs wobbled and weebled to keep me upright.
“It’s okay, Bob. Take a breath. We’ve got the guy,” I reminded him. “He’s not going anywhere.”
A short chirp of a siren wail announced the arrival of Earl, one of the other deputies. Rusty must have called him at home after he requested an ambulance. My colleague pulled his vehicle into the alley, aiming the headlights at the snow pile and giving us some light to see by. That was good, because it took another fifteen minutes for the ambulance to arrive from three towns over. That’s the thing about Latimer Falls. We’re kind of in the middle of nowhere.
Doc was already at work by the time the medical van arrived. The patient was sedated, his vitals were recorded, and Doc had a list of notes for the ER team at Fletcher-Allen Medical Center in Burlington.
We put Bob in Earl’s car, to keep him out of trouble, while we waited to get Marty on the stretcher. He ranted and raved about his former partner the entire time. By then, I was in a world of hurt. The bruises were emerging all over my body, and I twisted uncomfortably on the passenger seat beside Bob.
“Gabby,” said the official police physician as the volunteer ambulance team finished packing Marty Fleishman onto the stretcher,” how are you?”
“Fine, Doc. Nothing wrong with me,” I assured him.
“Yeah?” I could see the physician’s beady little eyes studying me. Then he looked up at the roof and down to the snow pile below it. “You sure about that?”
“I was actually pretty good till I got hit in the head with the shoe and then hit in the butt with his big, fat head,” said I, shaking my head sadly.
“Oh, to be a fly on the wall,” Doc smiled. “I’ll be imagining that scene in my sleep tonight.”
“It could have been worse. The guy could have landed right on top of me.”
“True, Gabby. I’m still going to have to examine you for the incident report. Either that or you have to go to the Emergency Room. What’s it going to be?”
That’s how I found out that I was just suffering from contusions. Even now, almost twenty-four hours later, my muscles still protested every time I tried to use them. The long train trip down to New York City saved me from sitting behind the wheel of my trusty VW bug. That would have been unbearable. But I had no idea that, as painful as my injuries were, they were nothing compared to the pain Annette was experiencing.
She returned twenty minutes later, eyes puffy and pink. She sunk into the chair opposite me.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you, Gabby.” Another sniff and a dab at the eyes with some wadded-up tissues.
“Why am I here?” I wondered. “You said it was an emergency.”
“It’s not important. Shall we go out for a bite?” It was in her eyes -- that utterly defeated look. As long as I had been the junior cousin, tagging along after the older mentor, Nettie had been in charge. But as I observed her now, I could see the dark circles under her eyes that were sure signs of sleepless nights, the nervously chewed fingernails, and the chapped line of her lower lip. How long had Annette been fretting?
“What is going on, Nettie? First, you call me up, begging me to come down and help you with a problem you won’t explain, and now you’re telling me to forget it. I just spent almost ten hours on the train to get here. Please tell me I didn’t waste my time sitting on my fanny all day on the ‘Vermonter’.”
“It doesn’t matter. There really isn’t anything you can really do,” she insisted.
“Try me.”
“No, Gabby. Let’s just make the best of a bad situation and have a pleasant weekend.”
“I didn’t come to have a pleasant weekend, as tempting as that might be,” I retorted. “You said you had a problem. What was it?”
“I’d rather not say,” she replied, brushing at imaginary lint as she sat on the edge of the chair.
“I don’t really care whether or not you feel like telling me. I want to know.”
“It’s...it’s embarrassing.” Sure enough, there was the telltale blush spreading up from her neck like a flame.