Innkeeping with Murder - Tim Myers [57]
Alex said to him, “I’m surprised to find you here. Have you retired from Mor or Les’s?”
Mor shrugged and frowned at his feet. “Well, I felt kind of responsible for Emma, since I was the one who
brought her in. I’ve been checking on her quite a bit, just to make sure she was going to be okay.”
Emma smiled. “And now I have two men visiting, with me still in my pajamas.” Her grin took on mighty proportions. “I should get pushed off a rock more often.”
Alex walked to the bed. “You were pushed then? Did you happen to see who did it?”
Emma looked perplexed. “No, and that’s the funny part. The whole incident is still fuzzy in my mind.”
Alex looked over at Mor as she said it. It seemed to him that the man had more than a casual interest in the matter.
She added, “It’s odd though, there is one thing I remember, but it’s almost too silly to mention.”
Alex pressed her, leaning over the bed. “Whatever it was, you can tell me. It could be a clue as to who might have pushed you.”
Emma smiled slightly. “Okay, I’ll tell you if you; promise not to laugh. I could swear it felt like a tree branch was nudging me over the rock.”
Alex said, “A tree? You mean like a branch caught by the wind or something?” There were no trees around: Bear Rocks. In fact, one interpretation of the name was that the original designation had been Bare Rocks until someone had started seeing bears in the granite formations.
Emma said, “Wipe that expression off your face, Alex, I know there aren’t any trees up there. But that image is stuck in my mind. A tree branch pushed me. Now imagine that.”
Mor coughed gently and walked to the other side of
Emma’s bed. “I’ve got to be going, but I’ll try to make it back sometime this evening.”
Emma turned on her brightest smile for the fix-it man. “I’ll be counting the minutes.”
After Mor left, Emma said, “Now that fellow is a man I could wrap my arms around. Seems to be interested in me, if I read these visits correctly. The nurse in Intensive Care said he had to be thrown out last night, he was hovering around the station so much!”
That was news to Alex. Mor hadn’t seemed all that interested in Emma when Alex had talked to him before. Alex wondered if Mor could have been the one to push her off that rock. It would explain him finding her so fast, and also the fact that he was hovering so close to her hospital bed. If she did happen to remember that Mor had been the one who’d pushed her, he could finish the job he’d started earlier. For that matter, he could have stabbed Reg, too. While Alex hadn’t seen him at the inn earlier, Mor could have parked in the woods and walked up one of the trails that covered the property. Finster wouldn’t have been any harder for the powerful man to kill. The “why” of it just didn’t make any sense. Alex looked up from his thoughts to see Emma staring intently at him. “You’ve got something on that mind of yours. Anything you want to talk about?”
Alex didn’t know how to address that particular question. If he was right about Mor, he could warn Emma. But if he wasn’t, it would make him look like a fool.
Instead of a direct reply, Alex asked, “Is there a buzzer around here in case you need a nurse?”
Emma pointed to a button pinned to her sheet. “Here on the bed. Why do you ask?”
“How fast do they come when you push it?”
Emma looked perplexed by the sudden shift in questioning, but she explained, “I’ve only pressed it once, but the nurse was here in a few seconds. She said it was because I was so close to the station desk. Now what is aII this about, Alex?”
“I don’t mean to alarm you, but whoever pushed you off that rock might come back to finish the job. If they do, I want help close by.”
Emma laughed. “Who in the world would want me that badly? I can’t imagine why someone would