Stolen Secrets: A Collection Of Riveting Mysteries

by J. S. Donovan

  Elegant marble floors, white walls, and countless artistic displays decorated the various exhibits hidden in Andrew’s home. There were centuries-old oil paintings, abstract sculptures human in shape, and an entire exhibit full of ancient pottery, armor, and weaponry. Most of these pieces were not just rare, and costly, they each had a story behind them. Whether their creators were simple-minded artistic geniuses or the piece was owned by a handful of international influencers, Andrew’s private collection was not just full of masterworks, it was full of history. Last night, much of that was destroyed in a hail of gunfire that nearly took both of their lives.

  Ellie found Andrew at the back of the gallery. His hair, faded on the sides and big on top, was frizzled and falling down his gaunt face. Wearing last night’s bloodstained white suit, he rested on his knee at the foot of a marble statue and collected the shards of the stone woman’s shattered face. He glanced at Ellie as she approached but kept on his task. He turned his bloodshot eyes to the marble statue’s damaged face. The bullet was still jammed in the woman’s shattered cheek. Andrew looked at the broken pieces in his hand. Shoulders sinking, he let out a depressing sigh.

  “Glue won’t fix this one,” he said and glanced about the gallery. Bullets had punched holes in massive portraits and shattered various priceless vases. “Glue won’t fix any of it.”

  Ellie thought she should say something encouraging, but her words stuck to her tongue like thick sap. She stood in silence next to her mentor, the man she saved last night.

  Andrew chuckled. It was the hopeless laugh of a defeated man. “This statue was worth seventy thousand dollars yesterday. That painting was forty thousand. The vase... well, with everything that was destroyed, I’m looking at a couple million in damages.”

  “I’m sorry, Andrew,” Ellie replied.

  Andrew turned to her and smiled sadly. It seemed like he’d lost weight over the past twelve hours. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes were heavy. Ellie guessed he got no sleep. He stood up. “I shouldn’t complain. You saved me last night.”

  “I wish I could’ve done more,” Ellie replied.

  “Me too,” Andrew replied.

  Ellie felt guilt pressing on her shoulders.

  “Three people died because of me,” Andrew replied. “Two of the security staff members I hired last night and a patron. I didn’t know any of the men particularly well, but to have them gunned down because I ran away. It’s pathetic, really.”

  “You’re not responsible for that monster’s actions.” That’s what Troy told her last night, though it didn’t change her feelings.

  “No, but I did nothing to stop him,” Andrew replied, unwilling to accept any encouragement. “Enough grim talk. Have you come to see me off?”

  Ellie shook her head slowly. “I’ve come for answers. Where can we talk?”

  Andrew looked even more sober, if that was possible. He opened his mouth to speak but shut it before any words came out. He gestured for Ellie to follow him to a small table in the modern art section. It had been perfectly set with triangular napkins on each plate and fancy silverware. Ellie didn’t understand how this was art, but decided to keep her opinion to herself. She removed both canvases from her cardboard box. The first one showed Pamela Cornish’s warm cadaver resting against a piano bench with stab marks peppering her chest and stomach. The next portrait showed Andrew lying on the marble floor of his gallery with his arms stretched out and a slash across his throat. Nearby, there was a dead crow with a matching cut neck.

  With his red-rimmed eyes, Andrew scanned the paintings. His parted lower lip trembled slightly. Tears welled in his eyes. “What are these?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know,” Ellie admitted. “But when I painted them, they came true.”

  “This is Pamela,” Andrew pointed to the woman in the painting. “How did you... Why would you...”

  “I don’t know,” Ellie replied. “I have these blackouts and when I wake up, the person who I paint dies in the same way.”

  Andrew eyed her with doubt. “So whoever you paint, dies? Like you have some sort of homicidal superpower?”

  Ellie shook her head. “No, it’s more like a prophecy. I wasn’t sure if the person’s death could be prevented until I saved you.”

  Andrew took a step back and rubbed his hand down his face. “Ellie, this is...”

  “Terrifying. Impossible.” Ellie completed his sentence. “You don’t think I know that? Look here.”

  Ellie pulled out her phone and showed him a picture of real-life Pamela from right after she was murdered. The blood spatter, the way her body fell, all of it was perfectly identical to the portrait.

  Andrew gawked at the gore. “I knew that woman.” He sounded like he was going to puke. Ellie felt the same way but wore a hard face. She put the phone away.

  “I painted her portrait less than 24 hours from when she died. I didn’t know her name or face, and everything happened exactly how I created it. Same with your portrait.” Ellie pointed at the dead crow. “This crow landed in that same exact spot right before the killer attacked.”

  “But I was saved?” Andrew asked.

  “Yes,” Ellie said as if she were repeating it for the twentieth time. “Fate can be changed. That’s why I need your help. I painted Troy’s death last night. I have less than a day to prevent it, and I still don’t know the killer’s identity or why he targeted you, Pamela, and Kimberly. At first, I thought he was a competitor of your latest art venture: the one where you, Kimberly, and Pamela were going to compile resources to make a gallery that would rival those in all of Northampton. But that’s not the whole story, is it, Andrew?”

  Andrew’s face turned stark white. He stumbled over his words. “This is… it is impossible. Ellie, you sound crazy.”

  Ellie glared at him.

  Andrew corrected himself. “Okay, you’re not crazy but… this situation doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Who cares?” Ellie retorted. “My husband is going to die. I need leads. Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know why this man wants me dead, or why he killed those women,” Andrew complained.

  Tossing aside her sunglasses, Ellie marched up to where she was inches from Andrew’s face. “Think real hard. This is life or death.”

  “I don’t know,” Andrew replied with frustration.

  Ellie balled her fist and did everything in her power to prevent herself from punching his nose. The nice, naive painter from last week was dead and gone. The new Ellie wasn’t going to waste time with meekness and timidity. Not when it came to her family, to her lover, or to finding the man who shot at her. “Andrew. You’re lying.”

  Her mentor locked eyes with her. “I’m not, Ellie. I wish that I were.”

  Ellie stared at Andrew for a long moment, trying to read him. She couldn’t glean any insight. Perhaps he was just another pawn in the killer’s grand conspiracy. She recalled the hooded man’s final words to her when she confronted him about his motive. “You’re wrong, Ellie Batter. So, so wrong.” This had nothing to do with some random art deal, but what was the connection? There was a moment where she wished Detective Peaches was by her side. He actually had experience doing this type of work. Ellie was as green as grass and relied on her twisted gut instead of following the detective's rules she never learned.

  Andrew’s phone rang, ending the staredown. He backed away from Ellie and took the call. “I’ll be right down,” he replied to the man on the other end of the line. He looked at Ellie after hanging up. “My flight will be departing soon. I have to go.”

  He glanced at Ellie’s portraits one last time, shuddered, and then headed for the entrance of the exhibit hall.

  Ellie shouted out to him. “How long will you be gone?”

  Andrew looked over his shoulder at her. “Until that madman has left.”

  Ellie felt her heart sink. Her one lead was leaving. Maybe she should go too.

  Before Andrew stepped out of the door, he
said, “You may stay awhile, if you wish...”

  “Andrew--”

  He gave Ellie a final, pity-filled smile. “Goodbye, Ellie Batter. Good luck with everything.”

  With an echoing click, the doors of the gallery shut behind him.

  It took a moment to set in, but then Ellie knew the truth. She’d be alone for the remainder of this investigation.

  And that terrified the hell out of her.

  3

  FIRST BLOOD

  Packing up her canvases, Ellie returned home in her rented Mitsubishi. The apartment was dark and empty. Ellie took hesitant steps inside and scanned the corners before entering fully. She placed the canvases on the kitchen bar and pulled a steak knife from the rack. Going from room to room, she checked for the hooded man. The downstairs was clear. She hiked the spiral staircase to the loft. The master bedroom was clear. She checked the upstairs bathroom, feeling her pulse quicken as she pulled aside the shower curtain. No one. She let herself relax and returned downstairs. Grabbing her canvases, she went to the art room. She set up the Pamela and Andrew portraits on her massive oaken easel. She removed the paper sheeting covering the nine-foot death mural of Troy. The paper fell out of her hand and rolled into a cylinder by her feet.

  Ellie took a few steps backward, getting a look at all three paintings. She looked over Pamela’s, seeing a hidden marble statue and Aztec war mask hidden in the woman’s stab wounds. Andrew’s portrait didn’t have the same type of symbolism disguised within his slashed throat. Ellie spent time reviewing it to see if his painting foreshadowed Troy’s death location the same way Pamela’s portrait had with the marble statue and Aztec mask that were located in Andrew’s private gallery. She used a magnifying glass to look over the dead crow, finding an image hidden in the reflection of the bird’s beady black eye. It appeared to be a very small door, made from vertical wooden planks painted red. Maybe it was from a shed or barn?

  Ellie moved her attention to her husband’s portrait. There was something surreal about Troy’s fatal wound, and it only got harder to gaze upon it as time passed. Ellie wanted to splash the mural with a bucket of paint to wash away the death and red. To be strung up by the wrists and cut up like a science-class frog... Ellie wanted to vomit. With teary eyes, she fortified her mind with the mental repetition of her mission: stop the hooded man.

  She met her eyes with her husband’s. Though they were painted, there was something lifelike about the color of his dark brown irises. Like an eclipsing sun, Ellie saw rings in the black of his pupils. It had to mean something.

  She examined his handsome nose, sleek bearded jaw, and slightly parted lips. The flesh on the corner of his lip was busted and painted slightly purple. Perhaps he got hit in the jaw. Angela’s heart spiked with rage. She didn’t know why the minor wounds infuriated her more than the crude cut that would kill Troy. Perhaps it was because the minor injuries seemed real. The death wound was too much to consider as a reality. Unable to find any more images masked in Troy’s handsome face, she stepped down from the stool and turned her attention to the massive scarlet gash. Ellie was not a forensic expert. She religiously avoided gory horror movies in place of the cheesy Hallmark films where predictability was a pleasure. Still, even with her lack of context, common sense told her that the weapon used to tear Troy’s flesh was probably serrated and slashed without much precision. The center of the wound had the darkest crimson, proving that it was deepest part of the wound. Deep within the red, Ellie saw the head of a scythe outlined a shade lighter in red. Was it the weapon that killed him? Ellie’s stomach twisted. She felt dizzy and closed her eyes to keep herself from fainting. Her powerfully detailed imagination worked against her as she envisioned the curved blade swiping down the middle of her screaming and thrashing husband.

  Ellie took a few more minutes to look over her husband’s wrinkled khaki pants and bare feet. No clues. Lightheaded, she walked to the desk at the side of the room and opened her laptop stained with hardened paint droplets. Some of the keys were stuck in place by paint. Others had her fingerprints. She opened her web browser and watched that familiar typing bar flicker in the search box. She didn’t know where to start. She typed in “red door,” hoping she could find something like she’d seen in Andrew’s portrait. After twenty minutes of scrolling through countless Google images, she knew chasing the symbols were too generic. She needed something that would directly lead her to the killer.

  Ellie leaned back her chair and craned her neck to the ceiling. After a moment of thought, she quickly sat up, moved up the front of her chair, and typed in “dead crow murders.” She searched dozens of pages of websites, looking for any sort of stabbing with a dead bird at the crime scene. She was sure that the police database would’ve been a much better resource. Too bad Ellie didn’t have access to that. She kept researching until her vision was blurry. Her finger clicked on the track pad, going through pages of news articles. The sleepless nights started to catch up with her. She found herself fighting the nods and heavy eyelids. She got up every few minutes and stretched, reaching to the ceiling to touching her toes. She returned to her search, feeling her morning headache pounding in her skull. As she clicked on an article from last April, the pain instantly subsided and the sleepiness left. It was about two paragraphs long and described a robbery/murder where a man was killed alongside a crow. The victim’s name was Kenny Parkland. He was killed in his backyard. As requested by his wife, the address was not listed. He was stabbed multiple times. His wallet and cellphone were missing, hence why it was labeled a robbery. There was a dead crow found by his body. Ellie wondered why the police never researched this. Perhaps they already had. Ellie didn’t expect Detective Skinner to reveal any of the case information to her. She looked at the date of the article. April 21. The same day she painted her first death portrait one year later. She looked at the newspaper’s city. Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Ellie’s heart rate spiked. That was her hometown. She checked the time. It was 11 am. The drive to Lancaster would cost her nearly five hours. That meant at least ten hours away from Troy.

  Ellie chewed her inner cheek as she weighed her options: run away early with Troy, or see if the year-old murder shared any similarities with the recent killings. She sent Troy a text, telling him to be watchful of his surroundings. She couldn’t bring herself to reveal the entire truth about the latest painting, knowing that he’d drop everything he was doing to rush home and make sure Ellie was safe. She just played up the concerned wife card, said that she was still thinking about where to vacation, and made up some other BS explanation that would keep Troy happy.

  Ellie researched a little while longer, seeing if she could find anything more about Kenny. Nothing. The man was a ghost, and there was always the chance someone else killed him. Ellie tried to erase the doubt, knowing that the date was exactly a year before Ellie’s first portrait. Ellie got goosebumps. She said a silent prayer that Troy would be okay for a few more hours, put on her coat, locked the front door, and drove out of Northampton.

  She attempted to listen to music on the drive over, but every song seemed to hurt her head. The closer she got to her destination, the more she longed for silence. She called up her parents, telling them that she’d be stopping by for the day. She kept the call brief, not wanting to involve them.

  After a few hours on the highway, she took an off ramp onto a country road and sped past a horse and buggy. Ellie cracked a smile, knowing she was back in Amish country. She drove by horse farms and open fields parallel with Strasburg Railroad. The train on the tracks blew its whistle, and Ellie was reminded her childhood rides with her father. She would lean into him and look out the window, watching nature pass her by. It fueled her painting. Heavily influenced by Luminism, Ellie’s artwork showed the American frontier, not as a grandiose marvel, but in a somewhat quiet, spiritual way, with heavily detailed natural phenomenon and soft but impactful lightning. Her death portraits were the complete opposite of that. They were realistic, yes, but the shading was d
ark with strong contrasts and use of many gloomy colors. They were unlike anything she’d painted. Worse, unlike anything she’d imagined painting.

  Ellie’s parents lived in a picturesque ranch home with a big barn, a hill for sledding, and a few acres of hay that had already been cut and put into bales by faithful neighbors who had been cutting the Smiths’ fields since they moved to the area thirty-seven years ago.

  Her father’s diesel truck was parked next to her brother Paul’s 1971 Dodge Demon. Mom’s minivan was parked behind that. It looked like the whole family was home. Without much room in the driveway, Ellie parked in the front yard. She got out and walked past her mother’s small flower garden encircled with cracked bricks. Tulips and daffodils made up the bulk of the garden flowers.

  As Ellie moved up the front porch steps, the door flung open and her mother, a short woman dressed in a colorful, flowing shirt, ran at her and gave her a big hug. She was skinny, with her graying blonde hair hovering over her shoulders

  “Oh my, Ellie. Your face!” her mother Martha exclaimed.

  “It’s nothing. Really.” Ellie’s stitched-up cheek ached and her neck graze still stung.

  “How did this happen?” Martha prodded at the bandages. Ellie grimaced and pulled her head away from her mother’s touch.

  “I crashed my bike,” Ellie lied, just like she had practiced on the drive over.

  “Oh, do you need any ice or--”

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  “How about peroxide?”

  “No, Mom. Please.” Ellie loved her mother dearly, but found the whole interaction draining. She walked inside, finding her father at his living room desk, repairing an O-gage Lionel train. He was tall with a clean-shaven face, round head, and short snowy hair. He got up at Ellie’s approach.

  “Ellie, your--”

  “Face,” Ellie finished. “Bike accident. It will heal up soon.”

  “I hope so,” her father Howard said as he gave her a hug. “Troy with you?”