Poisoned Ground

by Sandra Parshall

Archer nodded with fake solemnity. “Of course. It’s just a question of how much you’re willing to sacrifice for the sake of your opinion. How much you’re willing to hurt the most important person in your life.”

  “I beg your pardon?” She felt the heat of outrage flooding her face, and she hated knowing he could see her fury.

  He raised his hands as if trying to calm her. “I overheard something on Saturday, after the meeting, that worried me, and I wanted to be sure you’re aware of it. Maybe your husband’s told you all about it, and I’m totally out of line for bringing it up, but I had to make sure.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. But she’d be damned if she would admit that to him.

  When she didn’t respond, Archer leaned against the exam table, hands in his pants pockets, looking as if they were engaged in a friendly exchange. “You know, we’ve been in situations like this quite a few times, when a community’s divided over the whole question of development. We’ve always found a way around the opposition. If we weren’t able to reach an agreement with property owners, the local elected officials have been willing to help bring it about.”

  “They can’t force people to sell private property.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised what can be done. Rezoning, increases in property tax rates—and most property owners have no idea how much latitude the courts have given to local government to exercise public domain, if the commercial development is vital for the community’s economic survival. Wouldn’t you say Mason County’s economy is on its last legs? In desperate need of a boost?”

  Archer’s words chilled Rachel. Was it possible? Could the county take Joanna’s land away from her if she refused to sell? She wondered if Tom knew such a thing could happen. “Is that what you overheard on Saturday? The county commissioners plotting to steal people’s land and give it to Packard?”

  He waved away her question. “No, no. It was something that affects you much more personally. I just thought you should be aware of it, for your sake and your husband’s.”

  “Then why don’t you just tell me so I can get back to work.” Rachel glanced at her watch, trying to mask her growing anxiety with a show of irritation.

  “All right then.” He gave her an apologetic little smile. “The local officials have informed your husband in no uncertain terms that if he doesn’t control you—I believe that was the expression that was used—if you continue to publicly oppose the development, your husband will suffer the consequences. There are ways, it seems, that an elected sheriff can be removed from office.”

  Rachel’s first impulse was to dismiss this as nonsense. The voters had elected Tom sheriff. The commissioners couldn’t take the job away from him. Or could they? She had been a Mason County resident long enough to know that almost anything, from the absurd to the outrageous to the downright illegal, was possible in this insular little mountain community.

  If the commissioners had threatened Tom with the loss of his job—threatened him because of her—why had he kept it from her?

  That was between her and Tom. Right now the only thing she wanted was to get Archer and his smarmy grin out of her sight. She yanked open the door. “You’ve delivered your message, loud and clear. Goodbye, Mr. Archer.”

  ***

  “Finally.” Tom tossed a handful of business envelopes onto the conference room table. Dennis had been waiting for him to return from the courthouse next door. They’d found only old photographs of Tavia’s children in the fireproof box, which was just as well because the prosecutor wasn’t happy they’d removed the box from the house and opened it without getting a warrant to make sure all the technicalities were covered. He had ordered Tom to get warrants to open Tavia’s safe deposit box and to authorize further searches of the house. “I had to wait for court to recess before I could get the judge’s signature.”

  “Probably not worth the trouble.” Dennis took a seat at the table. “If she didn’t have her kids’ contact information in her address book, and we didn’t find anything in the lock box, how likely is it we’ll find it in her safe deposit box?”

  “I still want to see what she considered worth keeping locked up. There’s not much of it, just these envelopes and this.” Tom pulled a small plastic bag containing a blue velvet ring box from his jacket pocket and dropped it on the table. “Have you heard anything from Brandon?”

  “Yeah, he called a few minutes ago. The pro-development people have started showing up and it’s getting noisy, so I sent over a couple more men.”

  Tom removed his jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair. Taking a seat across from Dennis, he reached for the first envelope on the small stack. “All we need is a brawl in the middle of Main Street. But I’d rather have them fighting in public than shooting each other.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be an either-or question. They’re doing both. We’ve got two killers out there.”

  Tom didn’t answer. He was afraid Dennis was right, and he felt a mounting frustration with their lack of progress in the investigation. Using a finger, he broke the seal on the envelope.

  Dennis picked up the bag containing the ring box. “Her wedding ring?”

  “Yeah. I doubt she’s worn it since her husband died.”

  “You know, I can understand her, and her kids too, being glad to get rid of the son of a bitch, but I don’t understand her kids breaking their ties with their mother. What did she do to deserve that?”

  “She reminds them of what their lives were like growing up. And my guess is that they put a lot of blame on her for not getting them away from their father. It’s not fair, but that’s the way people think.” Inside the envelope, Tom found a sheet with Tavia’s bank account and credit card numbers and a list of three investment accounts. He set that aside and opened a business envelope with a local law firm’s return address in the upper left corner. “Here’s her will, or a copy of it.”

  “She’s probably left everything to them. It’ll be up to her executor to track them down and find out what they want to do with the property.”

  “I don’t think there’s much doubt about what they’ll want to do.” Tom scanned the first page of the document and raised his eyebrows in surprise. “This will is less than a month old.”

  “Hunh. Do you think she updated it because she believed she’d be coming into some money from the sale to Packard?”

  “Could be,” Tom murmured, reading on. Writing a will seemed like a grisly thing to do in the midst of life. He didn’t have one himself, although he knew it would be sensible to draw one up now that he and Rachel were married.

  “What does it say about her sons and daughters?” Dennis asked.

  Tom looked up. “This specifically cuts out her children. She spells it out—they don’t get anything.”

  “Well, I guess the hard feelings went both ways.”

  Tom’s eyes landed on a name in the document. “Damn him.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Jake Hollinger is her sole beneficiary, and he’s also the executor.”

  Dennis shrugged. “Make sense, doesn’t it? Weren’t they planning to get married?”

  “I don’t know if marriage was part of the deal. They were planning to live together somewhere else—if they sold to Packard. Everything depended on that. Well, if the deal goes through, Jake Hollinger’s going to be twice as rich. He must know about this will, but when I told him I needed to reach her children because they’d have to handle the estate, he didn’t say a damned word about it.”

  “Maybe he was afraid to, because it might make him look guilty,” Dennis said. “This inheritance gives him a motive for killing her. But you and Brandon saw him right after the shot was fired. Wasn’t he too far away? You’re sure he couldn’t have killed her, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” Tom tapped his fingers on the will. “If we believe she was murdered because she wan
ted to sell to Packard, the killer could be almost anybody. And Hollinger, maybe the Jones sisters, too, could be in danger. But I still think there’s a good chance Hollinger was the target and Tavia was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “So who would benefit from Jake Hollinger’s death?” Dennis asked. “His son?”

  “That’s assuming his son is his heir. Jake might have changed his will, too, and made Tavia the beneficiary. So if Jake had died instead of Tavia, his property would have gone to her.”

  “Which would’ve made Jake’s son damned mad, if he knew—” Dennis broke off when his cell phone chimed. He pulled it from his shirt pocket and looked at the display. “Brandon.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  Dennis slid the phone across the table.

  “Hey, Brandon, it’s me,” Tom said. “How’s it going?”

  “You need to get over here right now.” Brandon sounded breathless, frantic. “All hell’s breaking loose.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Tom saw the commotion from three blocks away, as soon as he turned onto Main Street, and when he powered down his window he heard people screaming insults and threats at each other.

  Damn Joanna. What made her think she could stage a protest march without attracting a mob from the other side? What had begun with a dozen men and women marching back and forth on the sidewalk had grown to at least fifty people spilling into the street, yelling, shoving, playing tug-of-war with protest signs.

  The Main Street office of Packard Resorts was in easy walking distance of Sheriff’s Department headquarters, but Tom had decided to drive over in his cruiser so he’d have a place to stash anybody he arrested. Dennis would follow with the van they used for transporting more than one prisoner at a time.

  Tom parked in the middle of the street and waded into the melee in search of his deputies. Opponents parted, stepping back from their confrontations to let him pass, then closed behind him to pick up where they’d left off. He found Keith Blackwood and yanked on his arm to claim his attention. “Get on the outside,” he shouted over the racket of the crowd. “Don’t stand here in the middle of it.” He located Keith’s twin, Kevin, and gave him the same order.

  Brandon was trying to force two men apart, but the heftier of the two leaned around the deputy and threw a punch at a slight, bespectacled man carrying a protest sign. The second man’s glasses flew off and his nose spurted blood. Dropping his sign, he covered his nose with both hands.

  Tom grabbed the attacker’s arms, jerked them behind his back, and handcuffed him before he realized what was happening. “What the hell?” the man sputtered, craning his neck to see Tom behind him.

  “Shut up and settle down,” Tom told him.

  Brandon was holding back the people around them as the other man, one hand over his bleeding nose, groped for his glasses on the pavement. With the toe of his boot, Brandon nudged them into their nearsighted owner’s grasp.

  “Put this one in my car, then stay on the outside of the crowd,” Tom told Brandon. He foisted the handcuffed man on the deputy.

  “Aw, shit,” the man groaned as Brandon hustled him away.

  Where was Joanna? She’d started this, and now Tom was going to make her help him get it under control. With the advantage of being over six feet, he skimmed his gaze over the heads in the jostling crowd, looking for Joanna’s distinctive strawberry blond hair. He spotted her on the sidewalk in front of the plate glass window of the Packard office, and started toward her. The crowd shifted and he lost sight of her again.

  The sound of shattering glass abruptly silenced the crowd. All heads turned toward the big window. A jagged hole gaped in its center, with cracks snaking outward on all sides. A cheer went up from some in the street, but most stayed silent.

  Swearing under his breath, Tom pushed to the front, where Joanna and another woman peered in through the hole. They seemed not to notice that big shards of glass at the top of the window were loosening as horizontal cracks formed. Tom grabbed both women by the arm and hauled them backward just as the glass broke free and, piece by piece, dropped with a crash to the sidewalk. In seconds, a layer of splintered glass covered the concrete at their feet.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tom demanded. He hadn’t seen Joanna break the window, but she’d been the one in the best position to do it. “What do you think you’ll accomplish with vandalism?”

  Joanna drew back, indignant. “I didn’t do this. I was as surprised as anybody else.”

  “All right, then who did? You were standing right here. You must have seen what happened.”

  Joanna hesitated, opened her mouth, closed it again, as if debating what tack to take. She decided on defiance. Folding her arms, she returned his angry gaze with a stony stare. “I didn’t see a thing.”

  Tom looked at Maureen McCoy, the other woman he’d pulled out of harm’s way. She was in her late thirties but looked younger, with her makeup-free face covered in freckles and her dark hair hanging in a braid down her back. “Did you do this?” Tom asked.

  Her gaze darted to Joanna, back to Tom. “No.”

  “Did you see who did it?”

  “No.”

  Tom turned to the crowd. “Can anybody tell me who broke this window?”

  Some of them glared at him. Some dropped their gaze, refusing to meet his eyes.

  Tom glanced around, spotted Brandon, and motioned him over. “We’re taking both of them in.”

  “What?” Joanna and Maureen cried in unison.

  “Do you want to go peacefully, or do you want us to cuff both of you?”

  “You’re such a disappointment to me.” Joanna shook her head. “Whose side are you on? This is your home. Do you want to see it destroyed by a greedy corporation—?”

  “We’re not talking about this on the street.”

  A sudden buzz ran through the crowd, and a man yelled, “Look who’s decided to show up.”

  The drama with Tom and the two women lost everybody’s attention as they turned to watch Lawrence Archer approach, ambling up the sidewalk as if he were out for a casual stroll. The crowd was getting worked up again, some of them jeering at Archer and promptly being shouted down in return.

  Tom faced them and raised his voice to drown out theirs. “I want everybody off this street in two minutes, or I’ll charge all of you with disturbing the peace. We’ve had enough violence. We don’t need you stirring up more.”

  They hesitated, shuffled around without moving far, waiting with keen curiosity for Archer’s reaction to the destruction.

  The man stood before the hole that had been a window, scanned the shattered glass on the sidewalk, and looked up at Tom with a wry smile. “I don’t suppose you could recommend a skilled glazier?”

  “You’re on your own, pal.”

  Tom and Brandon escorted Joanna and Maureen to the van that now sat behind Tom’s cruiser in the street. Brandon helped Maureen mount the steps into the back of the vehicle, but Joanna shook off Tom’s hand and climbed in unaided. A couple of doors down, the manager and waitresses at The Mountaineer had come outside to observe the fracas.

  As he closed the door on the woman who had been a friend to him all his life, he looked across the street to the animal hospital. Rachel stood at her office window, watching, too far away for Tom to read her expression.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The side door leading to the jail opened and Joanna strode into the Sheriff’s Department lobby, looking disheveled and angry. Rachel rose from the bench to greet her, braced for an outpouring of fury.

  Joanna halted when she saw Rachel. “Don’t tell me you bailed me out.”

  “You didn’t need bail. Tom isn’t charging you with anything. He let Maureen go too, but I guess you know that already. Her husband just picked her up.”

  “He’s not charging me? Are yo
u kidding?”

  Rachel reminded herself that the distrust on Joanna’s face and the hostility in her voice weren’t aimed at her. For three years Joanna had been a steadfast friend, someone she could lean on, and she believed Joanna regarded her the same way. “He didn’t see you do anything. He’s not going to hold you responsible without any evidence.”

  “Well, isn’t that magnanimous of him.” Joanna raked her tangled hair back from her face and yanked the hem of her jacket to straighten it. “He didn’t think twice about dragging us over here and locking us up. You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t feel grateful right now.”

  “Joanna—”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t concern yourself.”

  That stung. Rachel stifled her impatience and kept her tone mild. “Of course I’m concerned. I care about you.”

  Joanna answered with a contemptuous grunt and started for the door.

  Rachel fell in step beside her. “Is that so hard to believe? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  Joanna rounded on her, fixing her with a cold glare. “Your husband came to my farm yesterday and accused me of shooting Tavia Richardson. Has he told you that? If I didn’t have you and Robert McClure to give me an alibi, he’d probably think I killed Lincoln and Marie, too.”

  For a second Rachel could only stare at Joanna, then she fumbled for words. “I’m sorry, I— I didn’t know about that.”

  “Sounds like you and Tom haven’t been talking much lately.”

  That was true enough. What else was he keeping from her? “Listen—”

  Deputies Keith and Kevin Blackwood came through the front door, and Rachel moved out of their way. The lanky young men, identical blond twins, nodded in greeting to Rachel, then Joanna, and hurried past as if they wanted to avoid any verbal exchange.

  “Listen to me.” Rachel stepped closer to Joanna. “You know I don’t believe you killed anybody. And I doubt that Tom does. Will you please talk to him? You might be able to help him solve these murders. You knew the victims, you know everybody connected to them. He’s desperate to keep anybody else from getting hurt, and you could probably tell him a lot that would help.”