The Grave Truth

by Rickie Blair

  Nothing’s ever so bad that it can’t get worse.

  I had no trouble remembering the source of that quotation, though—Aunt Adeline. In fact, I was a teenager before I realized “Murphy’s Law” was not original to my aunt. I’d always assumed Murphy was some hapless acquaintance of hers who refused to take her advice to heart—including such gems as, If you swim after eating you’ll sink to the bottom, Rusty nails cause tetanus (which she referred to as the much-more-terrifying lockjaw), and—my personal favorite—Trampolines will kill you.

  Although, a trust fund would have been nice.

  With a modest bump, the elevator stopped. The button for B3 glowed red on the control panel. “I didn’t know the elevator went down this far,” I said.

  “It doesn’t, unless you have a key. This is a private parking area. Family and top executives only. We share this space with the equipment room that houses the electrical and heating systems.”

  I was curious about the parking rates on B3, but I thought better than to ask. “My truck is parked a floor above this, in the public lot.”

  “No problem. We’ll put these boxes in my Jag, and then swing past your truck on the way out.” She strode off into the darkened garage, leaving me to ask myself—had she said Jag?

  Of course she had.

  Hesitantly, I put one foot outside the open elevator door and peered out. “Why is it so dark here?”

  “The lights are motion-activated. A bulb’s probably burned out,” she called from the darkness ahead. “This way. It’s not far.”

  As the elevator door hissed shut behind me, my spine prickled again. Clutching the heavy banker’s box to my chest, I set off, my ears straining to follow the confident tap-tap-tap of Tracy’s heels. White concrete columns loomed in the darkness around me, one after another.

  Several columns in the distance, a light flashed on overhead.

  “The lights are working here,” Tracy called. “Can you see me?”

  “Yes.” I picked up the pace, striding toward her backlit silhouette. “Be right there.”

  But that was the thing about Adeline’s Law—there was a little more to it. Such as the key point. If something can go wrong, it will.

  So I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when a man stepped in front of me from behind a column only inches away.

  I shrieked, unwilling to shatter the artifacts in the box I carried by dropping it on the floor. Before I overcame that split-second of indecision, I saw the glint of a blade in his hand.

  I froze.

  The air conditioning unit blasting from the ceiling shut off with a whine, leaving only the sound of slow and steady breathing. My assailant’s face was in shadow. He knew what he was doing—and that no one would see him do it.

  He took a step toward me, raising his hand with the knife.

  With my own hands shaking so much the artifacts clanked together, I slowly placed the box on the ground.

  “Tracy,” I yelled. “Run.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The last thing I wanted to do was fight an assailant with a knife. There are Krav Maga moves to try if I had no choice, but to tackle a man with a blade while unarmed was risky.

  The best approach was the simplest—run.

  And I would have—except another attacker grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms.

  My screams for help echoed off the concrete walls.

  “Go on, yell your guts out,” said the man with the knife. Stepping nearer, he pressed the flat of the blade against my throat. “No one will hear you.”

  I froze. Something cold slid around my wrists, then tightened painfully with a snap that made me flinch. Twisting my hands only made it worse. Plastic slip ties, I assumed. I knew how to get out of those, but not while I was being watched.

  “Stop squirming,” hissed the man behind me.

  I reviewed my options for escaping two men with my hands tied behind my back and a knife at my throat. My choices were bleak. And became bleaker still when a third man spoke inches from my ear.

  “We’re not going to hurt you, Verity. We simply have a few questions. If you answer them correctly, you can go home.”

  I doubted that, but I had to remain calm.

  Even though I was pretty sure I recognized that voice, “Who are you?” I asked, afraid to twist my neck against the blade to check.

  Meanwhile, the second assailant—the one who’d tightened the slip ties—had finished his search of my handbag. “It’s not here.” Tossing the bag aside, he ran his hands down my body from behind.

  “Hey,” I objected. “Watch it.”

  His fingers slipped into my back pocket, dug out my cell phone with more vigor than necessary, and handed it to the third man. “Here it is.”

  The phone’s flashlight app flicked on behind my back, casting our shadows on the floor. A man stepped out in front of me, holding the phone up to shine into my face. Wincing, I shut my eyes against the blinding light. When I opened them again, the phone was pointed at the floor. But enough illumination remained to make out the gentle smile and twinkling eyes of Roy Palmer, the elegant white-haired co-founder of Palmerston Corp.

  I gritted my teeth. Son of a—

  “The last of the infamous Palmer brothers,” I croaked, trying to keep my throat rigid under the knife. “I should have known.”

  The old man gave my captor a curt nod. The man with the knife—I could see now he was young, maybe mid-twenties—lowered the leather-handled blade and took two steps back. But the weapon was in his hand and ready for use.

  The third man stepped out from behind me. A fleece hoodie shaded his face. It did little to disguise his enormous shoulders and arms, though. This guy was a weightlifter, definitely.

  With a practiced eye, Roy Palmer sized me up. “You’re not bright, are you, Verity? Your mother was smarter. Smart enough to know when she was up against an implacable foe.”

  Implacable foe? Did this old man think he was a superhero villain? I half-expected Stan Lee to walk through the frame. That thought temporarily diverted my attention from the furious pounding of my heart, but only for a moment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you? Perhaps a history lesson is in order.”

  “There’s no time,” growled the young man with the knife.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his fingers twitch on the handle. Was that nerves, indicating an unskilled assailant—or blood lust?

  Roy ignored his objection. “Twenty years ago, Verity, Palmerston was poised to make a huge leap forward. Our plans for this splendid tower were underway, and our first share issue was about to go public.”

  “I know that.”

  His mouth twisted briefly. “What you don’t know is that our transformation was financed by a single multimillion-dollar land sale. The hydro company needed to run a transmission corridor through Strathcona city limits—and they came to us for the property.

  “It took us years to accumulate those parcels without attracting undue attention. Finally, the papers were signed, and there was nothing to stand in our way. Palmerston was balanced on the cusp of greatness.”

  With those words, Roy Palmer stood a little taller, lifting a defiant chin. The light from below picked out the hint of a wobbly jowl.

  Suddenly, his expression blackened.

  “Then that obnoxious professor told us we couldn’t sell the land—that a key connecting plot was the location of an indigenous burial ground. Can you imagine?” Roy’s hand stiffened on my cell phone until his knuckles turned white. His foot tapped on the concrete. “We had no alternative route. There was no way to go around that parcel because everything else in the area had been developed. Without that one insignificant piece of real estate, the entire deal was doomed. Hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain, and our company with it.” He shook his head with a look of disgust. “Randall Dignam blathered on and on about that burial site. It was centuries old, he said. Great historical significance, he said.” R
oy snorted. “None of your business, I said.”

  “Hah,” said the man with the knife, taking a step forward.

  Roy shot him a withering look, and he backed off. Then, with a curt nod, Roy said, “Get him.”

  The man nodded and sauntered off.

  While watching the man with the knife walk away, I asked, “Was the professor right about that burial site?”

  Almost as if he hadn’t heard me, Roy turned to the burly man in the hoodie to pick up the thread of his narrative. “Dignam could have been a wealthy man. We offered him a king’s ransom to keep his mouth shut. And it was that extinct Neutral tribe anyway—”

  “Attiwandaron,” I corrected him.

  He turned his head to glare at me. “No descendants is the point I’m making. Nobody to raise a fuss.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You don’t get it. No one knew about this supposed burial site but Dignam. But if he’d reported his theory to the authorities, there would have been a government-mandated investigation.”

  “Burial sites are protected by law.”

  Roy narrowed his eyes at me a moment before replying. “A ridiculous law. That location would have been closed to development until the investigation was complete. It might have taken years. Meanwhile, the hydro utility would have found another route for its transmission corridor.”

  “You don’t know that. None of that might have happened.”

  “We couldn’t take the chance. The future of the company was riding on that deal. We weren’t about to let some snot-nosed academic ruin it with unfounded claims. So—we dealt with it.”

  “We? Your brother Eugene agreed with you?”

  “Of course. We built this company together. We agreed on everything.”

  “What do you mean—dealt with it?”

  “I sent Eugene out to that dig site—”

  “The one my mother worked at?”

  He frowned. “Try to keep up, Verity. I sent him there after hours to drive that idiotic professor back to Leafy Hollow. I met them at Dignam’s home. We tried to get him to see reason. There was an argument. He was obstinate. He said he planned to report his theory about the potential burial site, and there would be an investigation. He said he had evidence. Eugene argued with him—pleaded, really. It was nauseating.”

  Roy paused to brush lint from his jacket with a gesture of disgust. “While they were squabbling, I took a more direct approach. I picked up his wife’s ridiculous ashtray—a huge glass thing—from the coffee table. One blow was all it took.”

  I sucked in a breath. “You killed him? He’s—dead?”

  Briefly, he clenched his jaw. “Obviously.” Roy swept an arm to indicate the building overhead. “But our company is alive and thriving.”

  “If you killed Professor Dignam, where is his body?”

  “Ah. That was brilliant, really. We heaved him into the trunk of his car, then drove it out to the purported burial site in Strathcona. Dignam had already dug a hole while investigating his supposed find.” Roy chuckled. “It was exactly the right size. We merely had to fill it in.”

  “Of course,” he mused. “I don’t do that sort of work anymore. I leave it to the younger members of the family.” He glanced at his brawny helper. “And their friends. They’re good for staging car accidents, too.”

  My mouth dropped. “You were behind the crash-and-grab at the bakery?”

  Roy shrugged. “Your father was not being helpful. I thought a reminder was in order. I sent the boys to arrange one.”

  Before I could respond, footsteps announced the return of the young man. If it hadn’t been for his knife glinting in the light of my cell phone, I would have head-butted Roy, gray hair or not.

  “Hold on—if you put the professor’s body in the trunk, there must have been bloodstains in it.”

  “There were,” another voice said behind me.

  Jumping at the sound, I whirled to face my father.

  His hands were tied behind his back, one blackened eye was swollen shut, and his upper lip was gashed. The man with the knife shoved him forward.

  “You saw this blood?” I asked.

  My father nodded. When he opened his mouth, I noticed a gap in his teeth. “They brought the professor’s Audi to the chop shop to be dismantled,” he said. “I recognized it because I parked beside it at the university whenever I picked up Claire. It still had his faculty parking permit hanging from the dash.”

  Roy gave a mild snort. “According to you.”

  Frank ignored this taunt.

  “The next day, when I heard he’d disappeared, I had a feeling…” He shook his head, looking wretched.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “I couldn’t.” He glared at Roy—as best he could with one eye. “When I took my suspicions to this bastard, he promised to frame me for murder. I said I’d fight it, and…” His voice shook. “He threatened you, Verity. In detail. I couldn’t take that risk. We couldn’t take that risk.”

  “We? Mom went along with this?”

  He grimaced. “Sort of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Claire knew that Dignam had found something when he gave her those finger bones for safekeeping. He said there’d be blowback from the Palmers when he went public, and he wanted someone else to hang on to the evidence. Just in case.”

  “So Mom knew where the burial site was located?”

  “No. Nobody knew except the professor—and he died before he could tell her. She assumed he wanted to preserve the site’s secrecy until he could document it. But it meant we had no way to prove why Roy Palmer would want Dignam dead. Whereas I—” He grimaced.

  “Was the volatile, jealous husband,” I said.

  “It’s worse than that. The night Dignam disappeared… I drove out to the dig site.”

  “Why?”

  “I just wanted to talk to him.”

  “And did you?”

  “I wandered around for a while, but I never found him. And Claire convinced me that I was being ridiculous, so I drove back to the village.”

  “People saw you at the camp.”

  He nodded. “After that, the police got suspicious. They questioned Claire and me repeatedly. Then—” He paused to swallow something. I hoped it wasn’t blood. “Roy came to see us one night,” he continued. “He said the police were going to arrest me for murder, and Claire as an accomplice.”

  “How did he know?”

  Beside me, Roy chuckled. When I shot him an indignant look, he raised his hand in a half-hearted wave. “Ignore me, please.” He was smirking.

  I turned back to my father. “Continue.”

  “Palmer said once we were both in prison, there would be no one to protect you. Young children are so—vulnerable, he said.” Frank gnashed his remaining teeth.

  “Obviously, you didn’t go to prison. What happened?”

  “Palmer offered us a way out. He said he would engineer a story to leave me in the clear, but Claire could never reveal what she knew about the burial site. He didn’t know she had those bones. Your mother hid the box, and I left. We hoped one day we’d be able to reveal the truth, so I could come back.”

  Under the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights, I saw him wince. “I’m sorry, Verity. It was a mistake. I should have told the truth.”

  Roy’s tone was cool. “Do you really believe the police would have taken the word of a cheap crook against that of two prominent businessmen with impeccable credentials?” He curled his lip. “We saved you from prison. You should be grateful.”

  Frank looked down at the ground.

  My eyes narrowed as I studied his sagging shoulders. “No,” I said. “That’s not the truth.”

  He raised his battered head to stare at me. “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t explain why you left the country. If you were in the clear, there was no reason to leave.”

  Roy Palmer’s smirk widened. That old man had no idea how clo
se he was to a smackdown. I struggled with the twist ties holding my wrists, yearning to inflict a hammer fist to the head, followed by a groin kick if it was necessary—and even if it wasn’t.

  Oblivious, Roy continued to smirk.

  I stopped my pointless floundering and turned to Frank. “What really happened?”

  My father shot me a look so pathetic it reminded me of a stuffed toy after a round or two with Boomer. Realization struck me like a sudden jab to the stomach.

  “Mom didn’t know about the chop shop, did she?”

  He shook his head miserably.

  “She was furious, wasn’t she?”

  He nodded, also miserably.

  A memory flooded back of my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, carefully gluing together my miniature Star Trek ship. I’d forgotten all about that—not surprisingly, since that was also the day my father left. “Mom didn’t accidentally step on my spaceship—she threw it at you. That’s how it got smashed.”

  Frank heaved a long sigh. “It hit the fireplace. Look, Verity—Claire wouldn’t go along with the plan. She insisted we had to tell the truth. Your mother had faith in the police. She was confident they’d believe us if we gave them the skeletal hand, even though we had no way to prove where Dignam found it. I explained if we did that, the Palmers would learn we had those bones, and we’d lose our last bargaining chip. But I couldn’t get her to see reason.”

  Inwardly, I winced. See reason? That approach would have infuriated my mother. But I did not point that out. “Go on.”

  “There was only one thing I could do. If I left the country, the police would assume my guilt—and Claire’s, as my accomplice.”

  “Accessory after fact to murder,” I mused.

  “Exactly. The police would bring me back, and we’d both be charged. Then she’d have to go along with this bastard’s scheme.” He shot a vicious look at Roy. “So, I left.”

  “Without telling her?”

  “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”