“Don’t ask me what went on between your parents. All I can tell you is that your father loved your mother more than anything in the world. And you can just forget any crazy ideas you’ve got about him being Mary Lee’s father.”
Tom clutched the chair arms. Knobby upholstery tacks dug into his palms. Could he believe this story? Durham had already lied to him once. He’d been close to both Tom’s father and Pauline and might go to any lengths to protect their memories. Frustrated, Tom demanded, “Then who is her father? Ed McClure?”
Durham shook his head. “He probably wishes he were. But there’s no possibility of it. Even Pauline didn’t know who her daughter’s father was.”
“What?”
“Adam was sterile,” Durham said. “But his mother kept asking when he and Pauline were going to give her a grandchild. She wanted the McClure line carried on by her eldest son. She wasn’t the kind of person who would’ve accepted an adopted child. So Pauline and Adam went to a sperm bank, somewhere up north where nobody knew them. Some anonymous sperm donor is Mary Lee’s biological father.”
Tom didn’t have time to absorb this before Durham’s phone rang. He answered, said, “Right here,” and handed the receiver to Tom. “It’s your sergeant.”
Dennis Murray told Tom, “We’ve got a major new development. It’s…not good. But I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”
Tom jogged back to headquarters, his thoughts bouncing from Dennis’ alarming words to his conversation with Durham, all the new questions it raised, the old questions it left unanswered. When he rounded the side of the courthouse, he saw a State Police car parked outside the Sheriff’s Department. What now?
When he walked into his office with Dennis, he found two State Police cadets and the middle-aged instructor who was supervising the trainees’ search of Indian Mountain. The cadets, one female and one male, looked ready to burst with excitement. A cardboard box sat on Tom’s desk.
Their instructor, a solid ex-Marine named Cochran, introduced the cadets and told Tom, “The snow didn’t make these two quit. They wanted to search the caves. They found a bear in one of them and had the good sense not to bother it. But in the other one—”
“Way in the back,” the young woman piped up. As soon as the words escaped, she clapped a hand to her mouth.
Cochran smiled. “You can tell it, cadet.”
She went on eagerly. “We crawled way in the back, where it’s real narrow, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. And we started finding gobs of long black hair.”
A chill passed through Tom.
“And when we got all the way to the back, we found this.” The girl glanced at her supervisor for permission, got a nod. She folded back the flaps of the box.
With dread rising in him like brackish water, Tom looked in.
Another skull.
Chapter Thirty-two
Rachel settled at Joanna’s desk to work through the long list of people she had to call—clients with appointments, insurance agent, contractors recommended by Joanna. She’d just finished the client list when the door flew open.
Holly rushed in, slammed the door, and leaned against it as if barring invaders. “My grandma’s here! With Uncle Jack. They’ve come to get me.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Rachel said. “Don’t these people ever give up? Tell her you don’t want to go home.”
“No! I can’t talk to her. She’ll try to make me feel like a bad person ’cause I don’t want to live with her anymore. Please don’t make me talk to her.”
“Holly, I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, and neither can she.”
“Will you tell her to go away?”
“Yes, I will. You can stay in here if you want to.”
When Rachel reached the front door, Brandon was talking through the screen to Mrs. Turner, who stood on the porch. Out on the farm road, Jack Watford sat in a pickup truck. He was going to let the little old lady do the dirty work this time.
“Good morning, Mrs. Turner,” Rachel said, the soul of graciousness. A blast of cold air through the doorway made her fold her arms and tuck her hands against her sides. “Can we help you with something?”
The woman’s arthritic fingers, without gloves on a frigid morning, clutched her coat collar tight around her neck. “I’m lookin’ for my granddaughter,” she said, her voice a whine. “I need her to come home with me.”
“Holly asked me to tell you she prefers to stay here,” Rachel said.
Brandon added, “She’s old enough to make her own choices.”
Mrs. Turner stepped close to the screen door and lowered her voice to an urgent whisper. “She’s got to come home. She’s not gonna be safe if she don’t come home.”
“Are you making a threat?” Brandon said.
Rachel touched his arm to silence him. She watched Mrs. Turner’s mouth quiver as a tear coursed down a wrinkled cheek. This wasn’t an act. The woman was seriously frightened. Maybe if they let her come in, they could pry some information out of her. But no. It probably wouldn’t work, and it would upset Holly for no good purpose. “Holly is safe here, Mrs. Turner.”
“She’s not safe anywhere!” Mrs. Turner gulped air and made an effort to calm herself. “I heard about her bein’ shot at. Then on the radio this mornin’ they said somebody set the animal hospital on fire. What if Holly’d been in it? She coulda been burnt to death. She needs to come home.”
“She doesn’t want to.”
“She don’t have a job now, with the animal hospital bein’ closed. You got no reason to keep her here, and I really need her at home. I can’t get by without her.”
The poor-old-me act again. If Rachel hadn’t seen it before, she might be swayed. “Be careful, Mrs. Turner. I’ll start thinking you set my clinic on fire to get Holly back.”
“You stupid girl!” The woman’s face twisted into a snarl. “Why can’t you stay out of our family business?”
“Now, listen here, ma’am,” Brandon said. “We’re trying to be polite to you—” He broke off, looking beyond Mrs. Turner.
Rachel followed his gaze. Jack Watford was out of his truck and trudging through the snow to the house.
“Stop right there!” Brandon yelled. He shoved the screen door open, forcing Mrs. Turner to scoot out of the way. With one hand on his pistol, Brandon marched across the porch to the top of the steps. “Captain Bridger told you not to come anywhere near Holly or Dr. Goddard. So get back in your truck and get out of here.”
Watford stopped, hunched his shoulders and crammed his hands into his jeans pockets. “My mother-in-law asked me to drive her. She’s too old to be drivin’ around by herself with the roads so bad.”
Mrs. Turner took advantage of the distraction to pull the screen door open again and scurry past Rachel into the front hall. “Holly!” she cried. “Honey, it’s Grandma. Come on out and talk to me.”
“Mrs. Turner, please stop this.” Rachel caught up with her and blocked her way. The scene was entirely too much like Jack Watford’s invasion of the clinic on Friday. Rachel wouldn’t knock an elderly woman to the floor the way she had Watford, but she would restrain Mrs. Turner if necessary. “Holly is free to go anytime she wants to. But she doesn’t want to. If you think she’s in danger, you should tell the police who’s trying to hurt her.”
“You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about!”
“This conversation’s over.” Rachel grabbed Mrs. Turner’s arm and push-pulled her to the door and out onto the porch. “Leave. And don’t come back.”
“Get your hands off her,” Jack Watford shouted. He started for the porch.
Brandon intercepted the man in the yard, caught his arms and twisted them behind his back. “You’re about two seconds away from being arrested, mister. What’ll it be—go home or go to jail?”
“Okay, okay.” Watford stopped resisting and Brandon let him go. “Come on, Mama Turner. We’re not gonna get anywhe
re talkin’ to these people.”
Mrs. Turner peered through the screen door into the house, and Rachel was afraid she’d make another dash for it. But in the end, Mrs. Turner started down the steps. Watford gripped her arm and kept her upright on the snow as they made their way to the truck.
In the house, with the door closed and locked, Rachel listened to Brandon rant for a couple of minutes. Finally he looked at her and said, “You’re awfully quiet.”
“Mrs. Turner said she heard on the radio that somebody set fire to the animal hospital. But Tom asked the fire chief not to spread around the fact that the fire was arson. I listened to the local radio news this morning, and they said the fire was probably caused by bad wiring. They didn’t say a word about it being deliberately set.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Sunlight slanted through the windows of Tom’s office and fell like a spill of cream on the skull in Gretchen Lauter’s hands.
“It’s Jean Turner,” she told Tom and Sheriff Willingham. “The teeth match Jean’s dental records perfectly. It’s a stroke of luck the mandible wasn’t separated from the skull, since most of her fillings and extractions were in the lower jaw.”
Tom raked his fingers through his hair, but a stab of pain made him wince and lower his injured arm. How was he going to tell Holly her mother had been dead for years? “Any idea how she died?”
Gretchen laid the battered skull in the box on Tom’s desk as if she were handling a delicate piece of sculpture. “Since no other bones were found in the cave, I think a bear may have torn the head off the body and taken it there to gnaw on at leisure, and at least some of the damage could have been done while the animal was feeding.”
The sheriff scowled at the box with its grisly contents. “God almighty, Gretchen, sometimes I think you enjoy this stuff.”
She shot a sour look at Willingham, then said to Tom, “There are three fractures that don’t look like animal damage to me. The pathologist can be more definite, but it’s a pretty good guess that Jean Turner was beaten to death with a blunt object.”
Willingham grunted and fixed an accusing glare on Tom. “Now I want you to get moving and haul Shackleford’s ass in here for questioning.”
“I intend to,” Tom said. “But I don’t have any evidence against him for the murders, and he’s not going to crack and confess. He’d get up and walk out, and he’d have a right to. I need to find grounds to arrest him, so I can hold him at least overnight.”
“What’re you planning?”
“A raid on the diner while the Shacklefords are selling drugs. He’s back in the county—one of our guys drove past his mother’s house a while ago and saw Troy’s SUV in the yard. He’ll be at the diner tonight, and I’ll have good cause for an arrest. I’ll be able to hold him till he’s arraigned.” As an afterthought, Tom added, “If it’s okay with you.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Willingham’s permission sounded grudging.
If the sheriff had raised objections, Tom would have dropped the subject. But not his plans for the raid.
***
Tom shuffled through the accumulation of paper on his desk, gathered the message slips with names of reporters who wanted to talk to him and dumped all of them into the wastebasket.
He knew he was procrastinating, delaying the trip out to the horse farm to give Holly the news. She’d grown up believing her mother was out there somewhere, loving her, thinking about her and sending money for her support. Now Tom had to rob her of that comforting fantasy. Theoretically, she should be able to take it like an adult, but as he’d recently learned, age didn’t matter when you discovered a big part of your childhood had been a lie.
With the junk cleared from his desk, he pulled his notebook from a breast pocket and flipped it open to the page where he’d jotted Mary Lee’s phone number. He wanted to follow up a hunch before he saw Holly.
When Mary Lee’s maid had summoned her to the phone, Tom told her, “I have some news that might affect our investigation of your mother’s death.”
“Oh?” A faint, reluctant sound. Tom imagined a wary expression on her beautiful face. He pictured her black hair cascading to her shoulders, her slender body dressed in an impeccably made outfit that cost more than he earned in a month.
“I’m afraid your aunt, Jean Turner, is dead.”
A gasp at the other end. “When? How?”
“We found her remains this morning, on the same mountain where we found your mother’s. There’s no doubt about her identity. We believe she was killed around the same time your mother was.”
“You’re sure it’s her? You’re sure she was murdered?”
“Yes, on both counts. How well did you know Jean?”
For a moment she didn’t answer. Tom heard her two children laughing and talking in the background. “I didn’t know her well,” Mary Lee said. “But she was a blood relative. I’m shocked by all this. When is it going to end?”
Mary Lee was pleading with him, as if he had the power to call a halt. “We’re doing our best to get to the bottom of it,” he said. “I need you to answer some questions.”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know what happened. I don’t really know either the Turners or the McClures.”
“Holly believes her mother’s been sending money to her grandmother all these years, to provide for Holly. Now we know it’s not possible. Did you send the money?”
Mary Lee sighed. “Yes.”
“Why did you think you had to help support Holly?”
“Because my mother did. I thought she’d want me to continue helping Holly, especially since the child’s mother had left—” She faltered. “I thought— Everyone thought—”
“Did you pretend the money was coming from Jean?”
“No, I didn’t. If my grandmother invented stories for Holly— I don’t know, maybe she was trying to make the child feel less…abandoned.”
Or did Mrs. Turner have a more selfish reason for perpetuating the idea that Jean was alive? Tom moved on to another puzzle. “Did you know your cousin Amy? Bonnie’s daughter?”
“Why are you asking about her? Has something happened to her too?”
“There’s a chance the second skeleton we found, the one we haven’t identified yet, is Amy’s.”
“Oh no.” The words came out on an exhalation of breath.
“Her parents claim she’s living in South Carolina, and Holly gets cards and letters from her. Supposedly from her. But we haven’t been able to find her.”
“If her parents and Holly are in touch with Amy,” Mary Lee said, “why would you think she’s dead?”
He ignored the question and asked, “Did you know her? She was pretty close to your mother, wasn’t she?”
A silence, then, “All I can tell you about Amy is that she was greedy. She got close to my mother because she wanted the things Mother gave her. Gifts, money.”
“Can you make a guess about why we can’t find Amy?”
“My guess would be worthless, as I’m sure you’re well aware,” Mary Lee said.
Tom rubbed his gritty eyes, wishing he’d had more sleep the night before. This was shaping up to be another endless day. “Well, thanks anyway.” He added, “I hope you don’t mind me saying you have a very odd family.”
He heard a gust of humorless laughter, then a click and the dial tone.
***
Rachel’s heart lurched at the sight of Tom’s grim face and bleak eyes. Bad news.
Closing the door, Brandon asked, “What’s up, Captain?”
Tom led them into Joanna’s living room before he spoke. “The searchers found a third skull. It’s Holly’s mother. She’s probably been dead as long as Pauline.”
Brandon groaned.
For a second Rachel couldn’t find words or the voice to speak them. She remembered the radiant look on Holly’s face the night before when she’d heard her mother’s dental records didn’t match the second skull. I knew s
he wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. Her eyes burning with tears, Rachel said, “This will break Holly’s heart.”
“What will?” Holly asked from the doorway. “What are you talkin’ about?”
“Come sit down.” Brandon, who looked as if he wanted to cry, tried to nudge her toward the couch.
Holly stood firm and shook her head without taking her eyes off Tom.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news.” Tom spoke with the kindness he might use to force an awful truth on a child. “I didn’t come to you until I was absolutely sure of the facts. We’ve found the remains of another woman. The teeth match your mother’s dental records perfectly. I’m sorry, Holly, but there’s no doubt it’s your mother.”
Rachel slipped an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”
“No!” Holly pulled free and raked them all with a furious gaze. “It’s not true. It can’t be. You made a mistake.”
“I know this is a terrible shock.” Rachel’s voice trembled with pity.
When Brandon reached out, Holly spun away. She gripped the edge of the mantel and stood with her head lowered, her slight body heaving with suppressed sobs. “She sends money for me.” Holly faced Tom defiantly. “Dead people don’t send money orders through the mail.”
For an instant Rachel felt a spark of hope. One look at Tom extinguished it.
“You said your grandmother never let you see the return address,” Tom said.
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Holly,” Tom broke in, his voice firm now, “your cousin Mary Lee told me she sent the money. Your grandmother lied to you.”
Holly crumpled, folded in on herself, her knees giving way. Rachel and Brandon caught her and helped her to the sofa. She sank against the cushions and burst into ragged sobs. Rachel could do nothing except sit with the girl and watch her grief pour out.
Holly cried for ten minutes. At last she grew quiet, wiped tears from her cheeks and blew her nose on the handkerchief Brandon offered. “Have you told Grandma?” she asked Tom.
He sat in a chair facing the sofa. “No. I’ll go see her when I leave here.”
Disturbing the Dead Page 26