Digging For Trouble

by K. J. Emrick

  Not Jess, either.

  Who, I wondered, had been creeping in my room?

  I was suddenly very glad that James would be spending the night with me, even if he would be sleeping on a spare mattress on my floor. Something had been in here.

  I was sure it would be back.

  On my way downstairs again, I stopped at the door to room three, on the second floor. I know I had to look in the room Danetha Alexis had been renting to find those jars for Kevin, assuming they were still there, but that could wait.

  This bit I’d found out just now by looking through the registered guests... this couldn’t wait.

  After a few knocks, a very tired looking girl in her early twenties opened, wearing one of our short guest robes and, well, probably nothing else. The way it fit loosely around her left very little doubt about that. She had her hair up in a looping bun and her eyes barely squinted open as she looked up at me.

  “What?” she mumbled.

  I tried to remember her when she checked in. No. It wasn’t her I was looking for. The name on my list had belonged to the other person in this room. “Is your friend in? The one who booked your stay?”

  The girl looked back into the room like she wasn’t sure. Then she turned back to me with a shrug. “Nah. She said something about going to visit family. Is there a problem?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. I just had a question for her.”

  “Don’t know when she’ll be back.” With another shrug, she shut the door on me.

  Not that it mattered. I knew where to find her friend.

  Chapter Ten

  Arthur Loren’s house.

  All this time I’ve been looking for Arthur Loren’s daughter, and it turns out she really was right in front of me, staying right at my Inn. Just a few doors down from Danetha, as a matter of fact.

  Hindsight’s a wonderful thing.

  The front door to Arthur’s place was ajar, slightly, so I wasn’t breaking in. Someone else had already done that for me. The yellow police tape across the front was ripped apart. The frame was cracked and there were scuff marks against the front that showed where someone had kicked it over and over. Someone who didn’t possess the same physical strength a man would have to break it open on the first or second try. A woman.

  Arthur’s daughter.

  I could hear her further inside the house, throwing things around, opening and slamming drawers. Whatever she was looking for, she hadn’t found it yet.

  That was the last piece of the puzzle that I hadn’t had before. Everything had fallen into place, once me and Kevin and James had another conversation about it with the new bits of information I was able to provide. Now we knew everything.

  Well. Not everything. We still didn’t know what it was that Arthur had been looking for so frantically two days ago, out on the trails.

  Whatever it was, it was something important enough to draw his daughter here while all the real excitement had been going on down at my Inn. She must have figured all eyes would be off her with that hullabaloo going on. She would’ve been right, too, if I hadn’t caught the discrepancy in the books that had been eluding me and Rosie for the past few days.

  I had convinced James to wait up the block. It wasn’t easy, but he trusted me, and I liked that about him. I argued with him that I wasn’t always going to have my son around to protect me. I needed to do some things on my own, just like I’d been doing since my Ex left me.

  It was that last bit that had finally got him to agree to sit tight in his car while I came here to the house alone. The last thing he wanted to be was anything at all like my Ex.

  Stepping carefully through the kitchen, through the mess that Arthur’s daughter had made of the papers and dishes and...well, everything, I found her in the living room upturning the couch cushions. By the looks of it, she’d been through everywhere else in the tiny little home already.

  She was short and stocky, built a lot like Arthur, actually. Although she must’ve gotten her looks from her mother, thankfully for her. Her oval face was graced with wideset, green eyes and pouty lips that were set in a frown. Those lips were painted a dark red. Her pink hair bobbed around her as she tossed one torn cushion aside and went for another.

  Then she saw me.

  “Please don’t run.” I decided that was as good an opening as any. If she ran, then I’d have to run too, and that really wasn’t how I wanted to end this day. Not after everything else that had happened.

  Besides. Where was she going to run to? All of her things were back at my Inn.

  “Um. Hi,” she said, shifting her feet. “This isn’t what it looks like... Wait. Don’t I know you? From the Inn, right?”

  “I’m Adelle Powers,” I answered. “Dell, to my friends. And you are Jillian Levison. That a married name?”

  She blinked at me. “Excuse me?”

  “I asked if that was your married name. I don’t see a ring on your finger, but it would make sense. Especially since the account you paid for your room with is under the name of Jillian Loren.”

  Arthur Loren’s daughter stared back at me in disbelief. She’d been found out.

  It had been right in front of me the whole time. Sort of. When Danetha Alexis came into the Pine Lake Inn, looking so out of place and obviously hanging around town for some reason, I figured whoever Arthur’s daughter was had to be staying at the Inn, because the way rumors fly around town we would have heard if a stranger was staying in town with someone local. The only way to hide herself would be to check into my Inn and act like just another tourist.

  Or in her case, just another University student in town for the weekend on a lark.

  All those university students staying at the Inn. I’d seen Jillian around for days, and never thought anything of it. Since she’d booked online I hadn’t even seen her payment information. Until I went looking.

  “Fine,” she said with a defiant set to her jaw. “I’m Arthur’s daughter. Never knew he had rellies, did you? No, ‘course not. Good ol’ Dad never talks about me. Too much a reminder of his dearly departed wife.”

  I remembered the story that Kevin had told me about Arthur’s wife dying years ago. It must have driven quite the wedge between Arthur and Jillian here, judging by the hatred on her face.

  “So that means,” she said to me, her hands on her hips, “that this is my father’s house and I have every right to be here and you don’t. Now, rack off.”

  “I don’t know if Arthur wants you here, or not,” I said to her, holding my ground, “but I doubt the police want the woman who attacked him messing up the crime scene.”

  “Attacked him!” she blurted. Her face burned red. “I did not attack him! He just had to give it to me, and I woulda left! But he said no. Just wanted my mother’s necklace. It should be mine anyway! Not like I was asking him for any of his blessed rocks! He doesn’t care about her. He never cared about Mom! All he cares about is digging holes in the ground! Searching for buried treasure? Get off! He never finds anything. I saw all those jars in the closet just now. All of them are full of dirt and rocks! Useless!”

  My mind kept picking details out of her rant, even as I put my weight on my back foot and made ready to bolt if she tried to attack me like she’d done to Arthur. She saw the closet full of sample jars... just now. That meant she hadn’t seen it the day Arthur was attacked. She didn’t break into the closet. That had been Danetha.

  But Danetha hadn’t attacked Arthur.

  His daughter did.

  She glared at me still, coming closer and closer. “He wouldn’t give it to me. I should have her necklace. I loved her! I sat at that table with him and I drank that foul pigswill he calls coffee and I played all nice and sweet but he just kept saying no, no, no! I screamed at him, just give it back! Give it back! But, oh no, not the high and mighty Arthur Loren. No, he says. No! So I picked up that shovel, the only thing he ever cared about, and I gave it to him! I gave it—!”

  Her tirade stopped short. Jillian must have
realized what she’d just said, admitting to the attack on her father. Her face flushed scarlet and her painted mouth kept working to make words that just wouldn’t come.

  Her eyes narrowed at me as she began to tremble.

  And then she bolted forward like a jackrabbit and nearly bowled into me.

  With my foot planted back like that, I had the advantage, and a hard push sent her tumbling into the couch. She’d already taken the cushions away, and now her hand tore through the thin under fabric, down into the springs.

  She tried to get back up, but couldn’t. Something—her hand or her sleeve, perhaps—was snagged on the metal framework. The best she could do was lay there, yanking on her arm, screaming and crying, cursing me and her father both.

  Behind me, Kevin and James burst in through the front door. “In here,” I called to them.

  Kevin entered first, gun up in his hands. James came next. Both men stared at the pink-haired woman furiously trying to free herself from the sofa.

  “Hi, Mom,” Kevin said with a sly grin as he put his gun away in its holster. “I see you got this one handled by yourself.”

  “Well, she wasn’t trying to shoot me, so that made it a little easier.”

  “Give yourself some credit,” he told me. “You figured this one out on your own. I’m just glad you called me before you came over.”

  I was glad, too. I’d told James to wait for him down the street, to give me a few minutes to talk to Arthur’s daughter on my own. Maybe that was stupid. Maybe it was brave, like Kevin seemed to think. To me, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

  James put his arm around my shoulders as Kevin helped free a sobbing Jillian from her snag and then put handcuffs on her. The cells at the Lakeshore PD were going to be full tonight, that was for sure.

  “Hey,” James whispered to me as we walked out of Arthur’s house, hand in hand. “You remember that thing we said to each other earlier?”

  I tensed, sure he was going to say some stupid guy thing and ruin my memory of that perfect moment. “I remember. Why?”

  “I just want you to know, I meant every word.”

  He kissed the tip of my ear, and that was another moment I’ll never forget.

  ***

  What time was it? When had I eaten last? Would there be anything to snack on in the cabinets up by the dispatch desk?

  Those were the questions I thought were important in that moment.

  Senior Sergeant Angus Cutter had other thoughts on the matter.

  “Explain it to me,” he growled at Kevin. “Again.”

  Cutter’s office was an austere room, bigger than most of the others in the building but still small. The walls were dark, cheap paneling, and the filing cabinets were lined up next to the window under a picture of the current Queen of England, God save her. The desk was the same old, beaten up metal thing from the seventies. Two bare wooden chairs were positioned on this side of the desk, while Cutter’s chair was a leather-padded thing that looked like a poor man’s throne.

  It suited him.

  He sat behind his desk now, listening to Kevin, an immovable object in an immaculate blue uniform shirt and a polished badge. He’d come back into town this morning, the day after Kevin’s arrest of Jillian Loren, cutting short his trip north after a few frantic phone calls from Bruce Kay. The scruff of Cutter’s white hair was cut down so close to his scalp that he looked to be nearly bald. A handlebar mustache made up for what he lacked on top. The pair of mirrored sunglasses that he favored were tossed carelessly on top of his desk. He was a bull of a man, short and thick-necked and thick headed on top of it.

  Partway through Kevin’s third time explaining everything, Cutter rested his elbows in front of him and folded his hands together.

  I put a few words in here and there, but for the most part Kevin hit every detail. The fire department guys had gone digging in the section of Arthur’s land marked on Kevin’s map. The spot where the missing sample jars would have come from. What they found confirmed what Kevin and I had already figured out.

  Three bodies so far. Probably more.

  I found the jars in Danetha’s room after going to Arthur Loren’s house. She still had them in her suitcase. Maybe she was going to bring them back to the ‘Ndrangheta as proof she’d done her job. Maybe she just liked to keep trophies. I don’t know which. Whatever the reasons, I found out why the jars were so important.

  Arthur had dug up samples that contained bits of bone. Human bones.

  Love to ask him about that when he wakes up. What had he thought he’d found? An Aboriginal burial ground, maybe. That would’ve made the land a historical site, at least. Better than what it really was.

  Those acres of Arthur’s land didn’t have any precious metals or gems on them. He’d searched the whole property, taking samples from specific points, looking for something valuable. He hadn’t found a thing. I’m betting that didn’t matter to him. All he wanted was to keep them in the family and hand them down to Jillian—his daughter—when his time came. He still cared for her. Jillian, in turn, didn’t want anything from her father.

  Except the one thing he couldn’t bring himself to part with.

  Her mother’s necklace.

  Jillian had supplied that missing piece for us. It was a keepsake locket, with her mother’s photo on one side and Jillian’s on the other. She described it to us with all the detail and longing of that five year old girl she had been on the day her mother died. It was all she wanted from Arthur. When he refused to give it up, she went bonkers and lashed out.

  “I get that just fine, thanks,” Cutter interrupted. “It’s the rest of it that’s got me lost. Where’s Myles fit into this? Not to mention Dell here bringing the mafia to my town again.”

  “Not the mafia,” I corrected. “The ‘Ndrangheta.”

  “And she didn’t bring them here,” Kevin said with tired patience. “They were here to protect their interests. That dumping ground of theirs. What better spot for them to get rid of their victims than a section of unused tract in the bush outside of Lakeshore? We’re practically the last stop in civilization around here for a long while. Chances of anyone finding what was buried out there? Slim and none.”

  “Until,” Cutter grumped, “our local coot does exactly that.”

  “Right.”

  When Arthur had stumbled on the killing field by accident, out there digging for gold like usual, he’d gotten too close to secrets that certain people wanted to keep buried. Me and Kevin were guessing at this bit again, but the ‘Ndrangheta probably saw Arthur’s handiwork, the last time someone came out to dump a body. The thought of someone finding those shallow graves had them spooked. All those crimes, coming to the surface again, would not be good for them. God alone knows how that would have played out, if it had been the only part of this puzzle.

  But now, enter Myles Sinclair. He has people looking to buy all the land around Gallipoli Lake. He finds out that Arthur owns a fair chunk of it and offers to buy it for what probably looked like a lot of money for a useless bunch of dirt.

  Now the crime family realizes their secrets won’t stay buried for long.

  Pun intended. Cutter didn’t laugh, but Kevin’s play on words made me snicker a bit.

  When Cutter rolled his eyes to me I sighed and took up the story.

  “See, Danetha wasn’t in town to kill me. Not at first. That whole mess came about because I started nosing around.”

  “Told ya being a stickybeak would get ya dead one day,” Cutter snarked at me in a not-very-nice tone.

  I glared at him, but I was past caring what Cutter thought about me. “Danetha came here to kill Arthur. She probably would’ve found some way to buy off Myles, too, or scare him off the deal. When I became part of the problem I was just collateral damage to them. Or I would’ve been, if not for Kevin.”

  Cutter snorted, and I saw Kevin’s hand fist up in the chair where he sat. He wanted to hit his boss. A lot.

  So did I.

 
“The point is,” I went on quickly, “Jillian got to her father before Danetha. She clubbed him with the shovel and he went off wandering around, trying to make things right with Jillian the only way he knew how. By digging up his wife’s necklace. Only, he was so out of it that he didn’t know where he put it. He’s got it buried out there somewhere, I’m sure, but I doubt it’s anywhere near the Wailing Lady and the trails where I found him.”

  The Senior Sergeant reasoned the next bit through himself, much to my surprise. “And you finding him before they could kill him upset the ‘Ndragona...’Nderagoon...” Cutter faltered over the name. Couldn’t really blame him on that one. It was a tongue twister for sure. "You upset the crime family’s plans.”

  “Right,” I said with a nod, hoping he was finally getting it. “Danetha missed her target. So, she had no choice but to stay in town to see if Arthur came back and to see what everyone else knew about the property. I’m betting Myles was going to be on her hit list, too. Your boy Kay arresting him might actually have saved his life.”

  “Bruce does good work,” Cutter said, in a serious tone that made me want to vomit. I was actually a bit confused as to whether Myles really did have connections to the crime family as he seemed to intimate in our conversation or was just big noting himself for my benefit. I guess it didn’t really matter that much anyway now.

  “Danetha wasn’t done,” Kevin stressed. “Mom, Arthur, me, Myles, maybe every police officer in town. Woulda been a massacre, Senior Sergeant.”

  “Think yer exaggerating a bit,” Cutter told him flatly.

  Kevin just shook his head. “No. I’m not.”

  Cutter scrunched his eyebrows together and I swear to you I could see the smoke coming out of his ears as his brain put all the pieces together. “So, Friday morning, Myles Sinclair goes over to Arthur’s house, and offers to buy that bloody piece of land. Arthur turns him down, basically runs him off. Wants to keep it for his daughter, and he knows she’s coming over. When she gets there, she demands the necklace. Arthur says no, it’s mine, and she goes mad and whacks him with a shovel. She runs off, Arthur runs off, Miss Powers here finds him wandering.”