Murder, She Edited

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  Beneath a waxing gibbous moon only a few days short of being at the full, I could see the overgrown field and the distant tree line. Nothing moved in that ghostly landscape.

  Despite listening hard, I couldn’t hear anything more ominous than the gentle rustle of the leaves of a nearby tree. A light breeze had come up while I’d been sleeping, enough to make the window curtain flutter after I dropped it back into place.

  I was in Tessa’s old room on the first floor. Since I was already awake, I got up to make use of the bathroom. I didn’t bother turning on a light. I could find my way along the hall by touch and moonlight provided adequate illumination in the bedroom and the bath. I was about to flush when I heard what sounded like a shout.

  I froze with my hand on the lever, listening hard. Even with my head cocked, the rise and fall of voices barely reached my ears. The speakers had to be some distance from the house. I could only hear them because sound carries well on a clear night with the wind behind it.

  Moving quietly, I returned to the bedroom, donned my robe and slippers, and collected my cell phone and my cat. I tucked the phone into the pocket of my bathrobe and carried Calpurnia slung over my shoulder with one hand firmly planted on her backside as I made my way through the living room. Once I reached the middle room, I leaned over the easy chair and the little table that held the old-fashioned, long-out-of-service telephone and peered through the window.

  I didn’t see any vehicles in the driveway, but there was a glimmer of light coming from somewhere farther back on the property. When I moved to the rear window in the kitchen to get a better view, I could hardly believe my eyes. A truck was parked in front of the barn, its headlights illuminating a portion of the interior. Through the open door—the small one that had been padlocked—I could just make out two moving silhouettes.

  Some people can punch numbers into their cell phones one-handed. I’m not that coordinated, especially when my fingers aren’t quite steady. I had to shift the cat and hope she wouldn’t take off on me while I called for help.

  The 911 dispatcher answered promptly. I tightened my grip on Calpurnia while I gave her my location and tried to explain the nature of my emergency. I guess “strange men on the property” and “woman alone in the house” were sufficient cause for alarm. She promised to send someone ASAP.

  While I waited, I stayed at my post at the window. How long it would take an officer to reach the farm was anybody’s guess. Swan’s Crossing has no police department of its own, so the sheriff’s department is responsible for handling complaints. The nearest deputy could be anywhere in the county—five minutes away or thirty.

  As I kept an eye on the barn, I tried to figure out what the men were doing. It didn’t look as if they were unloading contraband. They hadn’t carried anything in or out while I’d been watching. If the police arrived in time to arrest them, they could be charged with trespassing, but it would be even better to find evidence of what they were up to. Whatever it was, it had to be illegal.

  Five minutes passed. Then ten. I didn’t hear any sirens, but all of a sudden the men seemed to panic. They ran to their vehicle and it started to back away from the building even before I heard the truck doors slam shut.

  “Drat,” I muttered. “They’re getting away.”

  I watched, helpless to stop them, as the truck slowed to execute a three-point turn in front of the garage. With its headlights illuminating that structure, the barn should have been swallowed up by darkness. Instead there was a dull, flickering red glow coming from inside. I bit back a gasp. No wonder those men were in a hurry to get away!

  I hit REDIAL to place a second 911 call. This time my request for assistance was much more urgent.

  “The barn is on fire,” I told the dispatcher after I identified myself. “The nearest fire station is only a couple of miles away, at the center of Swan’s Crossing. They need to get here as fast as possible.”

  That might not be very quickly. The fire department is manned by volunteers, and it was the middle of the night. It was anyone’s guess if they’d arrive in time to save the building, let alone catch the arsonists.

  The call took only seconds to complete. The truck was still in the driveway, stopped just short of the house. I watched in bewilderment as one of the men got out of the passenger side and trotted back along the driveway to peer into the garage.

  I swore under my breath. When they’d turned their vehicle around, the headlights must have picked out the bright green of the Ford Taurus parked inside. Now they knew that someone else was here at the Swarthout farm.

  With a shout, the man turned and pounded up the outside stairs to the apartment above. A second man got out of the truck and followed him. A moment later, I heard wood splinter as they broke down the door.

  Once they discovered that the apartment was empty, they’d either take off—the sensible thing to do, since they’d just set a building on fire—or they’d keep looking for the owner of the car, hoping to cover their tracks by eliminating a potential witness to their crime.

  I didn’t wait around to see if cooler heads would prevail. Moving as quickly as I dared in the semidarkness, I made my way back through the middle room and living room to the front hall.

  Calpurnia chose that moment to decide she’d had enough of being carted around willy-nilly. She kicked and clawed in an attempt to make me release her. At the same time, a voice from the cell phone in my pocket implored me to “stay on the line.”

  I ignored both of them, spurred on to greater speed when I heard a distant shout.

  The words were crystal clear: “Find her!”

  As fast as I could, I headed for the one place in the house where my cat and I could hide without fear of discovery.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Even after shoving aside the candlestick and the framed photograph of Nellie Swarthout, I could barely squeeze both myself and Calpurnia into the cupboard under the stairs. Once I’d closed the hidden door behind me and squirmed around a bit, I ended up sitting on the floor with my head nearly touching my upraised knees. It was an awkward position, but I didn’t have room to maneuver.

  Determined to stay put until help arrived, I struggled to catch my breath while keeping hold of a squirming feline who seemed to have grown extra claws and added another five pounds in weight. The scratches she’d already given me stung.

  Using one arm to press her close to my chest, I fumbled for the phone in my pocket with my free hand. I could hear the dispatcher’s increasingly loud demands to know if I was still on the line.

  “They’re looking for me,” I whispered. “I have to hang up.”

  As soon as I disconnected, I turned off the phone, fearing that if it rang, or even vibrated, it would give away my location.

  Calm down, I ordered myself.

  My heart pounded so loudly that it was nearly impossible to hear anything else, like the footsteps of those men or their voices.

  Calpurnia continued to fight me. Even if I’d dared speak, there was no way I could explain to her that we had to be quiet. I tried stroking her with soothing motions. For my trouble, she bit me right on that tender spot at the base of the thumb. I could hardly blame her for the display of temper. She sensed my tension, but she had no way of knowing how dangerous our situation was.

  When she growled low in her throat, I released her. She couldn’t get out of the cupboard. I had to take the chance that, free to move about in the confined space, she wouldn’t scratch at the door or make some other suspicious sound that would attract the attention of the . . . what? Thieves? Smugglers? Arsonists, certainly. And, quite possibly, men desperate enough to add murder to the list of their crimes.

  My breathing was still ragged from the run up the stairs and the struggle to stuff myself into the cramped cupboard. I closed my eyes. I’ve never been claustrophobic, but in that moment I felt an overwhelming need to stretch out full length—the one thing impossible to do in such a confined space. That I had to remain immobile made me t
witchy. When my left leg spasmed, I all but twisted myself into a pretzel trying to massage it without making any noise.

  Help will arrive soon, I told myself. No more than a couple of minutes had passed since I reported the fire. I just had to be patient.

  As my breathing and my heart rate steadied, I could hear faint sounds coming from the floor below. My eyes flew open. As I’d feared, after those men broke into the apartment and found it empty, they’d decided to search the house.

  I listened harder, trying to judge if they’d found the room where I’d been sleeping. Once they saw that empty, rumpled bed, they’d be certain they’d been seen. They’d have to assume I’d already called 911. If they had half a brain between them, they’d give up the search and make a run for it before the cops arrived.

  I couldn’t understand why they were so intent on finding me in the first place. They’d set the fire and been heading out at a fast clip before they caught sight of my car. Why had that made them stop? It didn’t make sense that they’d try to locate the owner. The rational response would be to assume that person was still blissfully asleep in the house. It wasn’t as if I could identify them. If they’d just kept going, they’d be halfway to Monticello by now, free and clear.

  More sounds reached me. Footsteps. A crash as something fell, or was flung to the floor.

  Why didn’t they just leave? Why risk getting caught to look for an unknown person who couldn’t possibly have seen their faces and wouldn’t be able to tell the authorities anything about the fire in the barn?

  Then it hit me. They weren’t looking for some random individual. They were looking for a woman. One of the men had shouted, quite clearly, “Find her.”

  Find her. Find me?

  Maybe I’d misheard. The searchers might have realized they were looking for a woman after they saw my clothes in the bedroom, but they couldn’t have known before they entered the house. Could they?

  Did they know who they were looking for? Hardly anyone was aware I’d inherited the place and even fewer had been told that I’d temporarily moved in.

  I sat very still, ears stretched, scarcely daring to breathe. I prayed for the distant wail of a siren, but the next sound to reach me came from much closer at hand. Someone opened the door at the foot of the stairwell and started to climb. He was just on the other side of the wall. I could feel the vibration of each heavy footfall.

  When he spoke, it sounded as if he was standing right beside me. “She can’t have gone far, and there’s no way out from up here.”

  “We don’t have time to mess around,” a second man yelled up to him from the first floor. “Go get that can of kerosene from the truck and torch the house.”

  “With her in it?” the first man’s voice went up an octave.

  “With you in it if you don’t snap to it.”

  The footsteps retreated downward. A moment later, the door at the bottom of the stairs was slammed shut.

  Stunned, I felt frozen in place. This couldn’t be happening. Why would anybody want to kill me? I was no threat to anyone.

  I reached for the latch, then pulled back as if it was already red-hot.

  What if this was a trick? Maybe they were trying to lure me into showing myself so they could . . . what? Kill me some other way than by burning me to death?

  Anything was better than being roasted alive in a cupboard. I shifted until I was on my hands and knees.

  “Don’t scratch,” I whispered to Calpurnia as I gathered her into my arms.

  With extreme caution, I opened the door. Crawling out in total silence with a cat clutched to my chest was next to impossible. After the first second or two, I gave up trying to be quiet about it. Those men might still be downstairs, but I didn’t sense the presence of anyone else on the second floor.

  The short, narrow hallway was very dark. The only light came from faint moonbeams filtering in through the window at the front of the house.

  I sniffed the air. No smoke. Not yet. I hoped they’d been bluffing about setting the house on fire but I wasn’t about to stick around to find out.

  Shifting Calpurnia so that I was once again carrying her slung over my shoulder, I used my free hand to feel my way along the wall to the wide landing at the top of the stairwell. Even less light penetrated that far.

  I discovered that the door was open when I stumbled through it and nearly took a header down the entire flight of steps. Twisting my body to avoid a fall, I lost my grip on Calpurnia. She squirmed out of my arms and took off.

  The thought of losing my cat sent a new wave of panic through me. The compulsion to find her before I escaped from the house myself was unbearably strong. I’d taken a few steps away from the stairwell before I realized how futile the effort would be. She could be anywhere. I’d be a fool to risk losing my own life to save hers.

  The sound of a siren, rapidly coming closer, decided me. I ran downstairs as fast as I could, lost precious seconds fumbling to release the deadbolt on the front door, and stumbled across the lawn to the driveway. By the time I got there, there was no sign of the bad guys. Two fire trucks were just turning in from the road. They headed straight for the blaze in the barn, speeding past me before I could redirect their attention to the house.

  I couldn’t blame them. The barn was fully engulfed in flames.

  My heart in my throat, I turned to look behind me and breathed a sigh of relief when I didn’t see any smoke or flames showing through the windows. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a fire inside, just that it hadn’t yet had time to take hold. Frantically waving my arms, I ran after the fire trucks.

  It seemed to take ages to reach them. By the time I was close enough to grab the nearest firefighter’s arm, my legs felt as if they’d turned to rubber and I was wheezing like an old geezer with COPD.

  “The house,” I gasped. “They were going to set it on fire.” I gulped in air polluted with smoke from the burning barn and started to cough, but I managed to add, “My cat is in there!”

  He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  I repeated myself with greater urgency. The second time around the meaning of my words got through to him and he barked out orders to the other firemen, but it would take time to reposition one of the trucks and all the hoses were already out.

  I turned and ran back the way I’d come. There was a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. Maybe I could get to it—

  I was saved from this lunacy by the timely arrival of a sheriff’s deputy. Since I was in the middle of the driveway, nearly level with the path to the side porch, he had to stop to avoid running me over. I changed course, staggering a little as I approached the patrol car.

  “The men who set the barn on fire were going to torch the house, too,” I blurted out.

  “Calm down, ma’am. How do you know this?”

  With an effort, I managed coherent sentences. “I overheard them. They had kerosene.”

  I swiveled my head to look at the house. There were still no flames showing, but I was frantic with fear that a fire had already taken hold somewhere it couldn’t be seen. I turned and took two stumbling steps in that direction before the deputy caught me around the waist, lifted me off my feet, and put me down again flush with the side of his car.

  “You don’t understand! My cat is in there!” My voice rose to a wail.

  “Stay here,” he ordered, releasing me.

  I obeyed only because he immediately took off toward the side porch, calling for backup on his portable radio as he ran.

  One of the fire trucks from the barn rolled to a stop next to the police cruiser. Two firemen followed hard on the heels of the deputy as he took the porch steps two at a time. By the beam of his flashlight, I saw that in their hurry to leave, the arsonists had left the kitchen door wide open.

  A moment later, the kitchen lights came on, swiftly followed by the lights in the middle room and living room. When I couldn’t bear to watch through the windows any longer, I disobeyed orders and joined the firefighters in the
kitchen.

  The stench of kerosene made my nostrils sting and my eyes water.

  “Careful,” someone warned. “It’s all over the floor.”

  It had been sloshed onto the kitchen cabinets, too.

  One of the firefighters bent to pick something up off the linoleum. “Looks like they tossed a lit match, but it went out before it landed.”

  “Damn good thing,” said the other fireman.

  No smoke, I thought. No fire.

  I headed for the front of the house, calling Calpurnia’s name as I went.

  The deputy waylaid me in the front hall. “Ma’am, you shouldn’t be in here.”

  I ignored him and opened the door to the stairwell. “Calpurnia,” I shouted. “Where are—”

  I broke off when I caught sight of her. She was halfway up the steps, her tail fully fluffed. She looked as if she was about to bolt.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” I crooned. “The bad men are gone and we can go home now.”

  I took a step up. She retreated at speed.

  It took me the better part of the next hour to coax her back into my arms. By then Detective Brightwell had arrived. I didn’t ask how he knew about the fire or why he’d come out to the farm in the middle of the night. I was just glad to see a familiar face.

  With Calpurnia safely confined in her carrier and the fire in the barn nearly out, I retreated into the downstairs bedroom to dress and pack. The nightgown, bathrobe, and slippers I’d been wearing throughout the crisis weren’t fit to save. I bundled them into a plastic bag to take home and toss into the trash.

  Brightwell was on his cell phone when I came out. A deputy helped me load Cal’s carrier, my laptop and suitcase, and the box containing Nellie’s diaries and scrapbook into the car. I was about to get in and head for Lenape Hollow when the detective emerged from the farmhouse.