Dana R. Lynn - Amish Christmas Emergency

He shrugged and sat up a bit straighter, pulling his legs back to his side of the table.

“One thing about all this that might be to our advantage is that our sniper obviously thinks Mr. Hostetler is dead.”

“That’s a good thing?” she blurted.

“Absolutely,” Parker answered. “If he thinks his target is dead, then Hostetler is easier to protect.”

She nodded slowly. She could see that. If her admirer—she shuddered—thought that Noah was dead, he wouldn’t go after him again.

“Alexa.” She raised her gaze to Gavin’s face. The smile was gone. “How long have you been getting flowers from someone?”

How long had it been? She bit her lip as she considered. “I moved here in August. So I guess they started late October. Not frequently. The first time I received a rose, I thought Megan had brought it in to spruce up the receptionist’s counter. There wasn’t a note or anything. It sat there for a day before she asked if I wanted my flower. They’ve been coming every two weeks. At first I thought the whole secret admirer thing was really corny.” She took a sip of water, giving herself time to organize her thoughts.

Gavin shifted in his seat. “You looked irritated when the delivery came. Was there something about the flowers that made you uncomfortable or nervous?”

“Nervous? Yeah. I was afraid my boss would fire me. He’d been okay the first time. But as they kept coming, he grew angrier with each delivery. I don’t know why it bothered him so much, but I called the florist that had been used for the last delivery and told them not to accept any more for that address.”

“Were all the flowers from florists?”

Shaking her head, she answered, “No. It was about half and half. I’m not sure how the others were delivered. I would come to work and find them.”

Sergeant Parker was typing on a laptop. She couldn’t tell if he was paying attention or not.

A moment later, she got her answer. “Well, this last one wasn’t from a florist, either,” he said.

“The name on the box,” she began.

Gavin looked over at the laptop. “That name on the box is for a florist in Chicago. No way the flower was from there.”

She cocked her head at him. “Why not? I’ve received flowers from there several times. Plus I used to live near Chicago. When my fiancé died fifteen months ago, I remember seeing flowers from Bressler’s at the funeral home.”

She definitely did not like the look on Gavin’s face.

Shaking his head, Gavin turned the laptop so it was facing her. The image on the screen was a building that had been decimated by a fire. A hollow sensation blossomed in the pit of her stomach. The headline read, Bressler Family Florist Destroyed by Arson.

“The place was never rebuilt,” Gavin informed her.

It felt as if the air had been sucked from the room. “When?” she managed to gasp out. “Does the article say when the shop burned down?” She ignored the sympathy on his face. She didn’t need sympathy. She needed answers.

“Yeah,” he answered after scouring the article again. “It burned down three years ago. The arsonist was never caught. The owners had an apartment right above the store. It was destroyed also. Three bodies were found when the fire was investigated. The owners and their son had apparently all perished in their sleep.”

She slumped. The flowers she’d received had been after the florist shop was long gone. She’d never checked. Another thought struck. “What does it mean that there were flowers from that place at Brett’s funeral?”

“It means you might have a stalker. It also means that your stalker may have been the same person who burned down the building. At the very least, we know he had access to the building.”

Setting the bottled water on the table, she covered her face with her hands. Suddenly, she was so tired. Lethargy seeped into her skin and worked its way down her body. A shiver caught her by surprise. It was difficult to tell if she was shivering because it was cold or if it was a delayed reaction to the horrific events of the past few hours.

“Hey, Alexa.” Gavin’s voice brought her back to the present. “We will find whoever this nutcase is. You know that, right? We will do everything we can to protect you.”

She nodded, more to make him feel better than because she believed him. After all, how would they find someone if they had no idea who the person could be? Or why the person was fixated on her.

Sergeant Parker closed his laptop. “Do you have any thoughts about who could be stalking you?”

She racked her brain to come up with possible suspects, but no one came to mind. “No, sorry. I can’t think of anyone. I want to go home.”

All she wanted to do was to go home, lock the doors and the windows, and snuggle with her cat on the couch. Maybe she’d even call her brother, Allen. Although he’d no doubt ask her what was bothering her, as she never called him when something wasn’t wrong. Her brother loved her, but he was so much older than her and lived so far away that he didn’t give her too much thought. She received a Christmas card every year from his wife and a phone call on her birthday. He’d never even seen her apartment. No. She’d be better off dealing with this alone.

“Soon,” Gavin promised. “Let’s finish here, then I’ll let you go.”

She nodded. If it would help catch whoever hurt Noah, she’d do whatever the police said.

Gavin hesitated. “Alexa, we need to know what happened to Brett. How did your fiancé die?”

She’d known it was coming. And she’d thought she was prepared for the question. But the way the question came at her, forcing her to put the two situations together, chilled her blood. Were they connected?

The sudden conviction that they were connected caused her to blurt out, “I think he was murdered.”

Gavin and Parker exchanged a glance. “You think he was murdered?” Gavin asked.

A grimace twisted her face. Then it smoothed into resignation. “I do now. At the time it never occurred to me. It wasn’t something we were looking at. And, honestly, it just never would have occurred to me.”

“Okay, Alexa. Why not start back at the beginning? What happened with your fiancé?”

Her head dropped for a moment. He could almost see her trying to collect her thoughts and gather her courage. Admiration flickered briefly before he squashed it. Leaning forward, he waited.

“Brett Stevens and I had been dating for six months.” His heart wrenched at the sorrow on her face, in her voice. “We had gone to high school together, but never really knew each other. There were over five hundred students in our graduating class. We met up again at a five-year get-together and just clicked. We dated for six months before we got engaged. I know that doesn’t seem like a long time, but we’d been talking marriage since the second month. We’d gotten engaged just five days before he died. I was over the moon.”

She swallowed. He knew that she was struggling, but to her credit, she kept going. “I went to a conference, and when I came home, he was in the hospital. An overdose. No one even knew we were engaged. Brett wanted to wait to announce it.”

The heartache in her eyes was painful to even watch. But he made himself. Maybe if he could get some answers for her, she’d have some peace.

“So he was in the hospital...” he said when the silence grew too long.

She ran a hand through her shoulder-length blond hair. “Yeah. He was actually supposed to be one of my patients. Isn’t that ironic?” She huffed a bitter laugh. “When I told the head nurse who he was, she put another nurse in charge of his case. During the night shift, he was somehow given the wrong IV. He went into cardiac arrest. They were unable to revive him.”