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Since I never carried much cash, I had to use my debit card to pay for the food. As soon as I placed my finger on the screen to enter my PIN, however, a sudden brilliant image flashed into my mind. I saw an unfamiliar room — a dining room, with a long table and six chairs made of dark wood placed around it, although two of those chairs had been pushed out of the way. Sitting on the table were several thick bundles of what looked like hundred-dollar bills…and next to them was the stolen baby Jesus.
Not stolen anymore, of course, and so I realized that blink of an image was from the past, not the present or future. Before the snapshot faded, I also saw a woman standing next to the table. She was tall and pale blonde, with coolly attractive features and icy blue eyes, her hair pulled back from her face in a low ponytail.
She also seemed familiar to me, and as I made sure to hold the image in my head, I realized why. Although she appeared to be several years younger, she looked eerily like Miriam Jacobsen.
Then it clicked into place. Miriam’s younger sister Beth Faulkner had come to Globe with her son Jack to pack up Miriam’s house and get it ready for sale, since all her assets had been frozen and she needed the money to pay her lawyer’s bills. Why Beth hadn’t contributed to that effort — her husband was supposedly some rich developer up in Payson — I had no idea. Maybe the husband had balked at the idea of supporting his jailbird sister-in-law.
Anyway, the kid who’d been waiting in line in front of me must have been Jack…and it sure looked as though he had a guilty conscience.
“Everything okay?” Kris asked. He was holding out a receipt to me, a receipt I hadn’t even noticed while lost in the fog of my thoughts.
“Oh, sorry,” I said with a blink, glad that I already had a woo-woo reputation in town, and so it probably wouldn’t have seemed too odd that I’d gone moony there for a second or two. “I guess I was just thinking about everything I still had to get done before Christmas.”
“’Tis the season,” he agreed. “Your order will be up in a minute.”
Right then, I cursed myself for ordering a sandwich rather than just getting a pastry to go. Not that a cherry Danish probably would have sustained me for very long, but at least that way I would have had a fighting chance at tailing Jack to see where he was going.
He’s probably headed back to the Miriam’s house,I told myself as I slipped over to one side of the café to wait for my food.Where else would he be going?
Good question. I really hadn’t seen him out and about since his arrival in Globe, which meant he and his mother were most likely staying close to home…Miriam’s home, anyway. It shouldn’t be too hard to buttonhole him there and see if I could get him to spill the beans. Anyone whose aura looked that guilty had to be aching for a chance to unburden themselves.
Of course, that plan had the teeny little flaw of his mother also probably being at Miriam’s house, doing the Goddess only knew what. That brief glimpse had given me the impression that Beth Faulkner was just as much of an iron lady as her sister, and so I doubted she would be the type to fold easily.
As I waited for my sandwich, I mentally reviewed what I’d glimpsed in that brief psychometric flash. I had no idea how much money was contained in those bundles I’d seen, but if they were all hundred-dollar bills, it had to be a tidy amount.
Maybe even enough to get Miriam back on her feet after she was released from prison. And with all her other assets frozen and her brother-in-law not terribly likely to lend a helping hand, it only made sense that she’d been squirreling money away.
Kris called over to me that my sandwich was ready, so I took the bag from him, offered a quick thank-you, and hurried out. I’d planned to take my lunch with me back to the store, but now I had an entirely different destination mind. What I’d actually do once I got to Miriam’s house, I didn’t know for sure. Somehow I doubted her sister would offer me a warm welcome. No doubt Beth Faulkner had been briefed on my involvement in discovering her sister’s role in the supposed “haunting” at the house my mother and Tom had bought.
As it turned out, however, I didn’t have to walk all the way to Miriam’s house. About halfway between Broad Street and my planned destination was a small pocket park, really just a large lawn with a few border trees and shrubs — now mostly bare — and one slide and a set of swings.
Sitting on one of those swings was Jack Faulkner.
The cookies appeared to have disappeared, so I assumed he must have eaten them on his walk up here. He held the peppermint latte from Cloud Coffee, and occasionally paused in his idle swinging back and forth to take a sip before continuing to push at the sand beneath his feet every once in a while so he never came to a complete stop.
Well, I wasn’t going to get a better chance than this. I’d never pretended to be a mind reader, but I got the impression from his overall demeanor that he was in no mood to return to Miriam’s house.
I walked over toward him and offered a smile. “Hi,” I said. “You’re Jack Faulkner, right?”
He blinked at me, clearly startled to be approached by someone who was a total stranger. “Ye-es?” he replied.
“I’m Selena Marx,” I said. “I run Once in a Blue Moon.”
Suddenly, his expression turned guarded. I had no idea what his aunt or his mother might have said to him about me, but it obviously wasn’t anything good. Who could blame them? After all, if it hadn’t been for my interference, Miriam might have gotten away with her plan to sell the Bigelow mansion to a bunch of developers, and no one would have been the wiser.
In fact, the gossip around town was that it had been her brother-in-law who’d introduced her to the developers in question, but no one knew that for certain, since he wasn’t talking…and neither was anyone else.
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” Jack Faulkner told me, and made a move as if to get up from the swing where he sat.
“Maybe not,” I said easily. “Then you can just listen. You’re feeling guilty about taking the baby Jesus, aren’t you?”
At once, Jack’s hazel eyes flared wide with surprise. In the next moment, his expression clamped down again, but I think he knew the damage was done. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled.
Poor kid. It really wasn’t fair for his mother to have dragged her son into his aunt’s dirty business.
“Yes, you do,” I replied, although I did my best to keep my tone light and easy, not accusing, and I made sure to remain standing where I was rather than get any closer. “You cracked open the baby Jesus figure to get the money inside. It’s for your aunt, right?”
Now Jack had gone pale beneath a light tan that I guessed he must have picked up while skiing. It wasn’t exactly the right time of year for most other outdoor activities. “How could you know that?”
