The Angel Creek Girls: A totally addictive crime thriller packed full of suspense (Detective Kay Sharp Book 3)

by Leslie Wolfe

  Only wisps of white can be seen streaking through as they approach. Betty’s crumbling voice resonated in her memory. With her cataracts, that’s what a white truck would look like, a wisp of white streaking in front of her window. The lamppost being out of commission, the driveway must’ve been engulfed in darkness, and all she would’ve seen was the white of the truck’s body, maybe its headlights if the unsub didn’t turn them off.

  And what was it she’d said a little later about the spirits of the valley? Something about trails of their blood, bright, living red through the darkness as they leave. What if those were their brake lights as they departed? After the unsub had pulled out of Cheryl’s driveway, Betty could’ve caught a blurry glimpse of something red leaving into the night, and her Alzheimer’s-fueled imagination had created the rest.

  The old woman wasn’t crazy after all.

  Kay almost smiled, when something caught her attention in what the men were arguing about. Based on what the youngest of them was saying, Calvin had opposed Avery and somehow had ended up dead. That brought a new perspective to Cheryl’s actions, one that had completely eluded Kay.

  Whatever Calvin’s gripe had been, he must’ve shared it with his wife. That’s why Cheryl was adamant he’d been killed. That’s why she’d changed her name, further deepening the rift between her and the old man.

  But then, if she despised the Montgomery family so much, why had she been dating Dan?

  Kay instantly remembered what Frank had said, that had made little sense at the time. He’d said something about Cheryl having or wanting to find the truth.

  Her heart cried for the widow who’d been willing to sleep with a Montgomery only in the hope she’d expose her husband’s killer. She must’ve known about the legend, or maybe even more than that, from Calvin. She must’ve felt safe, thinking she was family and Julie would never be taken, safe enough to stay in the town where she’d been born. Until one day, Dan had come to visit with a different agenda in mind.

  The last piece of the puzzle fell into place and the entire image became clear, even if some questions still remained. Calvin had died when the scaffolding had collapsed due to a landslide in bad weather. But who was to say what he was doing on that scaffolding? Maybe Avery had sent him up, or someone else who wanted him silenced for good. A few hours with either of these men in her interrogation room and she’d know.

  Avery approached her and grabbed her hair, pulling her head backward, wondering if she was still alive. She nearly shrieked, but managed to keep her eyes closed. Soon enough, he let go of her head, sending a renewed throb of pain through her skull, so strong she nearly fainted. She struggled to stay conscious, while the three men argued about pouring concrete in the rain and burying both her and Julie.

  Julie… she had to be there somewhere, close.

  She opened her eyes slowly, careful not to be seen. Thankfully, her hair still covered her face, and she could peek between the strands.

  Laid on a large design table, the teenager was perfectly still, arms crossed at her chest as if she’d died, wearing a white dress. Her vision still blurry—she couldn’t make out the details—but she thought she saw the girl’s chest heaving, ever so slowly.

  Julie was still alive.

  Avery said something about Anna again, and the pain in his voice made Kay wonder. Had Anna’s death been the trigger of his urge to kidnap and kill women, and, if what she’d heard was true, bury them in concrete? Or had he killed Anna himself, driven by a bout of psychosis, triggered by who knows what factor?

  Weather.

  That had been the factor. That’s why he’d never accelerated, never devolved. His urges weren’t sexual. His psychosis reminded Kay of a religious fanatic who hears voices driving him to kill. Only Avery’s demons demanded the girls be buried in concrete or walled in, to appease the weather his psychotic mind saw as supernatural.

  The answer had been in front of her the entire time. His propensity for buildings set proudly atop hills, like his own headquarters and this hospital, and several others she’d recognized from the company’s portfolio of achievements. The landslide threatening the foundation of the building he was erecting. Landslides appearing everywhere in the region, driven by reckless deforestation done in the past century, leaving earth exposed to the elements without tree roots to stabilize the soil. That was what his words about Mother Earth had to be about.

  She remembered Anna’s missing persons report as if the pages were still in front of her. She’d burned every word in her memory. The children left behind unharmed. The side door left open. And Anna, vanished without a trace, never to be found again, because she’d been buried under who knows what building he was erecting at the time, a building that weather had threatened just like it did this one.

  It was time for her to “wake up.”

  Lifting her head slowly, she grit her teeth as pain shot a throbbing blade through her skull. Right after Avery had closed the door to the trailer, the men argued fiercely about pouring concrete in the storm. From their DMV photos she’d reviewed earlier, she recognized Mitchell, Lynn’s father, and Victor, Dan’s son.

  Three generations of killers.

  She cleared her dry throat silently, then asked, “Your wife was your first sacrifice, wasn’t she?”

  49

  Anna

  Fifty-seven years ago

  The past couple of years had been a challenging time for young Avery Montgomery. Intense happiness mixed with heartbreak and grief, over and over, until his heart had grown numb. He’d lost his father, a man he’d loved dearly, after a sickening and hollowing battle with cancer he’d witnessed powerlessly and increasingly angry. Then, a few months later, his beautiful wife, Anna, had given birth to his first son, Mitchell. But joy was short-lived in the Montgomery family.

  Avery’s mother, Hope, had been wasting away; within months of her husband’s death only a shadow of what she used to be. Until his passing, Avery rarely remembered he’d had an older sister, Grace, who’d died very young, before he was born. Hope’s devastating grief after the loss of her husband had brought with it memories of Grace, the two loved ones she’d lost forever connected in her mind just as she believed they’d become connected in heaven.

  Avery wasn’t sure how Grace had died; it had something to do with a landslide or perhaps an earthquake, because Hope talked about “the day the earth opened and took my baby girl,” always touching the locket she wore around her neck every time she spoke of her daughter. Or maybe the little girl’s funeral had been so devastating for Hope she only remembered that moment when the earth was open to receive her body, and not the actual moment of her daughter’s death. Even so, she rarely mentioned her; she barely said a few words anymore.

  She’d stopped eating, and soon couldn’t keep anything down if she tried. The only times she emerged from her room and stopped grieving were when she fixed the family meals.

  Wearing black clothing that no longer fit but adamantly refusing to give up her mourning habit, she wandered aimlessly through the house like a ghost, as if searching for her absent spouse. The locket she always wore was a mystery to Avery; she never shared what she kept inside. Sometimes, when she didn’t think anyone was hearing, she talked to her husband and to Grace as if they were still there. The only times she seemed to be better, even if in the slightest, was when she was making dinner. She never tasted her own cooking, nor did she eat, although Avery had insisted she at least sat at the table with them, thinking maybe she’d grow a little bit of an appetite seeing them wolf down her delicious meals. Reluctantly, she’d obliged a couple of times, then turned angry and shouted at Avery to leave her alone.

  He had done just that, too tired to fight her after sleepless nights with a screaming, colic-ridden infant and a difficult and demanding job in charge of his father’s legacy, the construction company. Sometimes he stopped by his mother’s bedroom and stuck his head in after knocking and pointlessly waiting to be invited in. He always found her in the same
spot, in her chair, looking at her bedroom door as if waiting for her husband to return, absentmindedly touching the locket on her chest. She never had a smile for him, nor a good word, only harsh ones if he tried to pull her out of her all-consuming grief.

  Then, one day, while cooking dinner, she just dropped to the floor, lifeless, without showing a sign of distress or making a sound. Nothing Avery did could bring her back. Doctors had told him she died of a broken heart; Avery said she just wanted to be with her husband so badly, she left her son behind without hesitation.

  He was heartbroken by her passing, but also enraged, blaming Hope for dying as if she’d done it on purpose, because Avery strongly believed she had. Otherwise, she would’ve at least tried to enjoy life a little bit, get to know her new grandson, or grab a bite every now and then with her son and his family. By embracing her grief instead of the life he offered, by starving herself, she’d effectively killed herself, and he resented her for that, for abandoning and rejecting him.

  He attended Hope’s funeral with dry eyes and a stiff upper lip, watching her frail, emaciated body in the open casket without anything but resentment tugging at his heart. She seemed almost lifelike, wearing a black dress and the same locket he’d seen around her neck ever since he could remember. In a mindless impulse, he approached the open casket and snatched the locket from her body. Later, by the graveside, he opened it when no one was paying attention, and found inside the weathered, black-and-white photo of a beautiful little girl dressed in white. Seeing that girl twisted and broke something inside him as if he suddenly understood Hope’s grief—as if he was starting to feel it also, for the sister he’d never met. Kneeling by the graveside, he took out the picture and placed it on the casket, then he picked up a few grains of earth and sprinkled them over the girl’s photo, laying her memory to rest. A few of those grains of earth, smelling of raindrops in the spring, of grass blades and wildflowers, found their way into the locket he closed and slid under his shirt.

  That’s when his dreams of her started, about a week or so after her death, soon after the funeral had taken place and the flurry of activities had finally ceased to occupy his mind. He’d dream of her walking toward him in her black mourning attire, sometimes menacing, other times warm and kind, but always giving him some advice. What to say to an upset client, to make things better. How to deal with a problem employee. How to help Anna with her postpartum depression after the birth of their second son, Dan.

  The mother in his dreams was entirely different from the one she’d been in reality. A young woman prematurely embittered with raising Avery by herself while her husband was away at war, she’d never been too soft with the little boy, and the thought of offering him a joy-filled childhood had never crossed her mind. Favoring dark, somber clothing and keeping her voice low and stern, she’d filled Avery’s young mind with her opinions of life’s perpetual miseries and how hard it all was. Rarely had she offered advice on anything while she was alive, having known little else than the adversities of raising a child by herself during an economy ravaged by war and crying herself to sleep every night, wondering if her husband was still alive.

  But whatever advice she offered in his dreams he followed, and it worked. One by one, his most annoying problems went away, and he’d grown to rely on his mother’s nocturnal calls so much he would nap in the middle of the day if he had an urgent problem to solve, inviting her to visit. Missing her dearly, yet still angry with her. Sometimes, that anger crossed the subconscious barrier and he dreamed of himself shouting at his mother in anger, asking her why she’d quit on him when he needed her most, with young children to raise and a business he knew little about running. But the specter of his dreams didn’t reply; just told him what to do, her advice always proving correct, even if the solutions she offered were sometimes unusual.

  By the time his third son was born, his business had started to pick up—the Montgomery name recognized in the area often enough to give him the occasional contract he didn’t have to bust his back selling. The contracts were mostly for residential homes, few and far apart, the main source of income remained the deals with the local and federal government his father had initiated. William Montgomery’s old contacts had frowned somewhat before signing deals with the twenty-six-year-old, but he had an entire business behind him, with knowledgeable workers, and he’d graduated from college cum laude in his field.

  That’s how he landed the contract for the new City Hall, without even trying, the client an old friend of his father, a tall and bony man by the name of Nestor Carson. With the voice of a town crier and blowing cigar-smelling breath in his face, he’d patted young Avery on the shoulder, then awarded him the contract for the construction of a new location for the town’s leaders.

  Carson had already secured the plans for the new building. The rendering showed the proud, 26,000-square-foot building atop a gentle sloping hill, the land bought from local owners.

  When Avery visited the site, still covered in greenery and shrubs growing wildly, he fell in love with the future building. The setting gave it such majestic appeal, from up close and from the nearby highway, promising it would become a renowned landmark people would soon love.

  Too proud and too ambitious to tell the client he didn’t have the money to start working on the new building, Avery mortgaged the family house without saying a word to Anna. There was no reason to worry his beautiful wife. Then, knowing the loan barely covered the cost of the materials and equipment, he offered his workers a ten percent increase in pay if they agreed to accept deferred compensation, payable after the building had been eighty percent completed. The laws governing construction contracting and advance payments were strict, allowing for only a ten percent advance before work started. The standardized, nonnegotiable contract called for incremental payments as the work progressed, but the largest chunk of money, forty-five percent, was due only after the building had passed its final inspection.

  The advance barely covered the cost of surveying the land, clearing it, and preparing the foundation pour. The concrete mixer trucks were expensive rentals, begrudgingly leased by the hour from a competitor outbid for the same project. But, one by one, the mixers paraded up that hill, their loads spinning slowly, then lined up to pour the foundation of what was going to become the city’s most valued edifice.

  Then the rain started.

  At first, he wasn’t worried, only annoyed. Anna was going through a particularly rough time with a new bout of postpartum depression, crying at night, face buried in the pillow, and there was nothing he could do to soothe her. He’d been gone from home a lot, working sixteen hours a day every day, leaving her to raise three young boys by herself. After he finished pouring the foundation and cashed the second installment, he was planning to bring in some help for his sweet Anna, even if he was a little worried the workers would get wind of that and frown that the boss had money for a new housekeeper or nanny, but didn’t pay their salaries.

  Every time thunder rolled, or lightning illuminated the room, he’d wake to find Anna’s tear-streaked face on the pillow, her eyes watching him, loaded with love and yearning and infinite sadness. He held her tight, whispering promises and apologies in her ear, and falling asleep mid-word.

  The first day the rain turned heavy, threatening the uncured concrete, the workers covered it with tarp and stopped pouring, paying a fortune for the concrete mixers to be parked down the road. With a satisfied grin, his competitor had warned Avery that if he returned the trucks for the duration of the storm, he couldn’t lease them out again when the weather turned. Out of options, he resigned himself to incur the extra cost, his eyes on the final prize: a building to make him and everyone else proud, enough money to double the size of his business, and buy everything Anna wished for, to put a smile on those loving, quivering lips.

  Three days later, the land started to slide, and took with it the northeast corner of the foundation. Within minutes, under his petrified stare, the concrete had crumbled i
nto pieces as if it were a cookie, and had been washed by the rain to the base of the hill, in a cascade of mud, dirt, and shattered dreams.

  Taking a second mortgage on the house took a lot of convincing, but he managed it somehow, showing the contract he’d signed for the City Hall and invoking his father’s good name several times. He stated he needed the money not because of any hardship, but because of inclement weather delays, but bad weather doesn’t last long, does it? Especially in California.

  The second loan barely covered the land stabilization and the cost of new concrete, once the rains waned. He was just about done pouring the entire section, when long, ominous thunder told him his dues weren’t paid yet. Within minutes, a deluge started, and he rushed, with his team, to lay sheeting all over the uncured foundation and the sides of the hill. By the time he was done, the entire top of the hill was covered in blue plastic, while rain fell heavily.

  Workers now gone, he fell to his knees in the mud, looking at what he’d built, and realizing it was about to fall apart again if the soil shifted even a tiny fraction of an inch. Mr. Carson and his daughter were scheduled to visit the following day, expecting to find the entire foundation poured and cured. Instead, blue plastic covering everything would tell the man who’d taken a risk on Avery Montgomery that the soil under his new building wasn’t stable enough to support a building, something Avery should’ve known.

  His life was over.

  Unable to deliver the building and cover the huge costs he’d incurred, he’d be going to jail, leaving his poor wife homeless, with three hungry boys clasping at her skirt.

  He had raised his eyes toward the sky, squinting to keep the water out, and bellowed. “What do you want from me? What do I need to do to get this building done? Just tell me what you want, please!” Then, tired of pleading without an answer, he raised his fist and made threats he knew he couldn’t deliver, shouting and sobbing until he couldn’t draw breath anymore. Exhausted and broken, he fell on his side in the mud, his hands clasped together at his chest, shivering under the rain’s forceful drumming against his weary body.