I turned and smiled, happy to see Ian stamping his feet to rid his boots of snow before he entered.
He slipped off his jacket and hung it on the coat tree stand I kept near the door.
I smiled recalling how my brothers made fun of me when I bought the old-fashioned coat tree stand at a secondhand shop but after seeing how handy it was in the snow and rain, since everyone enters through my front door, they’re now searching for their own.
“The Zoom call was postponed until the end of the week,” Ian explained as he slipped his boots off and placed them on the leather matt, then hurried over to me.
I shivered and grimaced when he leaned over from behind the couch to hug me and give me quick peck on the cheek. “You’re ice cold.”
“Warm me up?” he asked playfully.
I leaned my head back to look up at him, scrunched my brow, and tapped my chin. “Hmm… hanky panky or murder, which shall it be?”
Ian laughed. “You were born in the wrong time period, Pep.”
I offered a reasonable excuse for my out-of-date reference to sex. “Blame my mom and aunt Effie. I got it from them.”
He landed a not-so quick kiss on my lips and followed it with a faint kiss. “Murder,” he whispered.
“Be still my heart,” I joked. “A man who preferred murder to hanky panky.”
He laughed and walked to the kitchen. “Not quite true. I simply know that this thirty-five-year-old unsolved murder has us too curious to be totally present during hanky panky, and I refuse to share our lovemaking with murder.”
“Good call,” I said, happy to see he was making us tea and even happier that we continued to think alike.
“Did you get any breakfast this morning, Pep?” he asked.
I had to think a minute.
“If you have to think that hard, it means you didn’t have breakfast and since I didn’t either, I’ll cook us something. Bring all that stuff over to the island and we can talk while I cook.”
I didn’t hesitate. Still trying to comprehend that I had found a man who kept me fed in more ways than one.
“Tell me what you know about Rita Carson’s murder,” Ian said, handing me a mug of vanilla almond tea.
“From what I’ve learned through the years it was a case that shocked the town. Murder, especially back then when the town had had nowhere near the population it does now, was something that happened somewhere else, not in the quiet town of Willow Lake. My dad hadn’t been on the force long. He was a new parent, Danny just over a year old. He got the call about a body found in the woods. It was around Halloween and the sheriff at the time, Ted Barrett, along with the other two men on the force, Abe Jameson—known to most as Officer AJ, and Officer Dennis Sparks, figured it was a dummy left by teenagers to prank the officers, something that had become a normal occurrence at Halloween. My dad believed they thought of it as an initiation of sorts for the new guy on the force.”
“Your da strikes me as a man who wouldn’t fall prey to such an obvious scheme,” Ian said as he chopped veggies.
“He isn’t, which was why Sheriff Barrett didn’t believe him when he called it in. My dad remembers hearing the other two officers laughing in the background until it finally sunk in, and Chief Barrett and Officer AJ rushed to the scene. With the population of the town being so small at the time, it was easy to identify the victim… seventeen-year-old Rita Carson. My dad never let me see the crime scene photos, but I think he will now. He’s not going to be happy until he solves this, and since it’s a fairly old cold case, it won’t get top priority.”
“Even with the second set of bones found?”
“Those bones aren’t going to be easy to identify, unlike on TV that solves a case within an hour. It could be months before even a clue is found as to who the victim might be. And while my dad will want to dig into the case, he is already considering the amount of snow we’re having this early in the season. The police force will be busy with vehicle accidents, snow sports accidents, both minor and major ones, lost hiking enthusiasts, and endless people getting stuck and needing tows. The winter is a busy time for the sheriff’s department.” Pepper shook her head. “If this was anything other than a cold case, he wouldn’t let me participate.”
Ian smiled. “I am definitely aware of that from the previous two murders we stuck our noses into.”
“At least you’re not a suspect this time,” I said.
“And happy I am for that,” he said and placed two plates with veggie omelets, bacon, and wheat toast on the island two stools over from where I sat. “Time to eat.”