Criminal Crumbs by Jessica Beck Page B

that we weren’t visited later while you were busy in the kitchen.” She frowned a moment before adding, “Suzanne, there’s something else we need to consider.”
    “What’s that?”
    “What if Hank really isn’t dead, and he somehow managed to climb up that embankment last night?”
    It was a sobering thought. “You saw the way his neck was positioned. Is it really possible to fake that?”
    “We didn’t have very good light,” Grace said, “and besides, he was pretty far away. Maybe we were wrong.”
    “Why wouldn’t he join us at the lodge if that were the case?” I asked her.
    “If you’d tried to prevent a murder and ended up being the accidental victim yourself, would you rush back to be with the killer?”
    “I honestly don’t know what I’d do in those circumstances.”
    “Let’s see how close these footprints come to the lodge,” she said.
    It was a good idea, so we tracked the steps away from the cottages, instead of the ones going toward them. Grace’s hunch turned out to be a sound one.
    There was a clear set of footprints that led straight up to the side entrance of the lodge.
    “Suzanne, he must be inside!” Grace said. “We’ve got to tell everyone right now.”
    I put a hand on her shoulder, restraining her. “Take it easy and think about it. We don’t know anything for sure yet, Grace. These footprints could easily have been someone coming and going, stepping in the same spots both ways.”
    “I still think we should check the lodge thoroughly,” she insisted.
    “I do, too, but it’s going to have to wait.”
    “For what?”
    “We need to see if Hank’s body is at the bottom of that precipice or not,” I replied.
    “What if he’s still down there?” she asked me with a shiver. “What do we do then?”
    “We try to figure out who was out walking in the snow alone. They clearly had the same idea that we had to check on Hank’s body. It’s not hard to see that these prints head straight to the cottages from here and to the spot where your district manager fell.”

    Grace and I approached the edge carefully, but when I looked over the lip, I couldn’t see anything out of place below; in particular, there were no dead bodies lying there. The snow must have collected and blown sometime during the night, because now there was enough of it down there that I couldn’t tell if it was hiding Hank’s remains or not. “Can you see anything?” I asked Grace.
    “He’s either not there, or the snow somehow covered him up,” she said.
    “I think he’s still there,” I answered after a minute of thought. “He must be.”
    “How can you say that? Did you see something that I missed?”
    “It’s not what I see, it’s what I don’t see,” I told her.
    “Leave the riddles to Hank, would you? I need you to be a little clearer with me.”
    “Look around,” I said as I pointed to the slope below us. “Do you see any evidence that someone climbed out of there?”
    Grace looked intently for a full minute, and then she finally glanced back at me and shook her head. “I don’t see anything, but there’s another possibility; he might have found another way up.”
    “That’s true,” I said, frowning at the thought. If those footprints did belong to Hank and he was now hiding somewhere in the lodge, I was afraid of what might happen next. It was pretty clear that he was in no rush to come forward, so that meant that he was lurking in the shadows, staying out of our way and hatching a plan for revenge of his own. I didn’t want to be the person who had caused him to fall if that were the case.
    “What do we do now?” Grace asked me.
    “What can we do? We press on.”
    I took a step in the direction of the cottages, and Grace put a hand on my shoulder, stopping me. “Suzanne, is that really a good idea? I have a feeling that we should rejoin the others and postpone the rest of this until later.”
    “We still have to uncover what’s really going on around here,