Poisoned Ground

by Sandra Parshall

  “The porch is fine. I’m going to include Bonnie. She’s due.” Marie Kelly had made an appointment to bring the dog to the clinic for a routine visit later in the week. Shannon had called it to Rachel’s attention that morning and canceled the visit.

  The dogs escorted her across the yard and up the steps. For the next few minutes Rachel focused on the animals, kneeling on the porch to administer vaccines, listen to hearts and lungs, peer into eyes and ears, fend off Riley’s slobbering kisses. Joanna, sitting in a wicker chair, answered her questions about the dogs’ behavior, diet, and activity in a cool, impersonal tone.

  Rachel waited until she was zipping up her medical bag to say, “I need to talk to you about something. I want your opinion.”

  She saw Joanna tense again as a protective wall went up between them. “Oh?” Joanna said. “What would that be? My opinion doesn’t seem to have much value these days.”

  Sighing, Rachel took the chair next to Joanna’s without being invited to sit. “You know, this marriage thing takes some getting used to. All of a sudden we’re a unit, not two individuals. I have to answer for what Tom does, even when I don’t know he’s done it. Even when I don’t agree with him.”

  Joanna grunted. “He’s your husband. I’d expect you to go along with him.”

  “I thought you knew by now how stubborn I am.” Rachel grinned. Softly, softly. She didn’t want to provoke another outburst by flatly telling Joanna that her assumptions were both wrong and hurtful. “Tom’s pretty much given up trying to tell me what to do. And God knows I’d never get away with telling him how to do his job.”

  For a second Joanna looked as if she might cry, as her eyes filled and her chin trembled. But true to form, she instantly banished all signs of weakness, and the tough, stubborn woman Rachel knew took charge again. “I’ve known Tom all his life. I’ve never been so disappointed by anybody. How could he accuse me of murder?”

  Rachel doubted Tom had made a bald accusation, but she let it go. It had felt that way to Joanna, and at the moment that was what mattered. “He hasn’t discussed it with me. I really don’t know what’s going on. But I certainly don’t think you killed Tavia Richardson.”

  “Well, I wish you’d tell him that.”

  “I will. He won’t like me interfering, but I will. You know, some people are holding him responsible for my behavior too. I’m sure his life was a lot easier before he married me.”

  That piqued Joanna’s interest and made her swivel her head toward Rachel. She was silent a moment, and Rachel knew she was wrestling with her curiosity as she tried to maintain her chilly aloofness. “Is Tom in some kind of trouble because you spoke out against the resort development?”

  “Yeah. Apparently the county supervisors expect him to keep me on a leash. Lawrence Archer stopped by this morning to tell me they’ve threatened to remove Tom from office if I side with the opposition.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Joanna’s invisible wall collapsed in the face of her outrage. “Lawrence Archer is a snake oil salesman. You’re giving him way too much credit if you believe a word he says.”

  “I’m afraid it’s true, though. They’ll invent something they can use under the law to take Tom’s job away from him.”

  “Honey, listen to me. Those bozos on the county board don’t have as much power as they pretend they do. And you have a right to your opinion. Don’t you ever let anybody take that away from you. Not Tom or anybody else.”

  Rachel wished it were as easy as holding onto her principles, with no regard for the way her actions affected others. The anxiety she’d held at bay since Archer’s visit gripped her now, as all her fears burst from their hiding places like monsters ambushing her from behind doors. She would hurt Tom. She would cost him something he valued. She would never fit in here and would always be a liability. But those were minor worries, dwarfed by her deepest and darkest fear.

  “People are getting killed over this, Joanna. If somebody thinks the sheriff is on the wrong side, just because I mouthed off at a meeting—”

  “Stop that.” Joanna reached over to squeeze her arm. “Don’t let yourself think that way.”

  Rachel searched her friend’s face and found, despite Joanna’s bravado, an echo of her own terror. “You’re scared too, aren’t you?”

  Joanna pulled in a sharp breath and raised both hands to her face. “Oh, God. I try not to think about it. I try to go about my business, do what I normally do.”

  “But it’s there in the back of your mind.”

  Joanna dropped her hands to her lap and clasped them tightly. “Always. Every second since Lincoln and Marie—and then Tavia, for no earthly reason. She was on the other side. It’s crazy. I don’t know what’s going on, so how can I protect myself against it? I’m always thinking I could be next.”

  Rachel nodded. “Winter Jones said pretty much the same thing today. I think she and her sisters feel like sitting ducks.”

  Joanna’s abrupt laugh startled Rachel. “I wouldn’t worry too much about them. They hardly ever leave their house, and they can defend themselves if somebody tries to get in.”

  “Defend themselves how? Winter told me they haven’t had any guns in the house since their father died.”

  “Well, I remember them selling a whole collection of shotguns and rifles to Sam Richardson, but I just assumed they’d kept one for protection.”

  “Would they know what to do with it?” Rachel couldn’t picture any of the Jones sisters wielding a firearm.

  “Are you kidding? Isaac Jones made sure all his daughters knew how to use a gun. Somebody told me that when they were kids, he forced them to go hunting with him, and he wouldn’t let them come home until every one of them killed something. They’d come back bawling, carrying all these dead squirrels and rabbits, then he’d make them skin the animals and cook them and eat the meat. No wonder they became vegetarians.”

  “And no wonder they never got married, with that kind of father representing the male gender in their lives.” The thought of any child being forced to kill an animal appalled Rachel. “He sounds like a sadistic bastard.”

  “No, I’m afraid he was just a typical father for these parts. You’d be amazed how many ten-year-olds are out trying to kill some innocent animal to please dear old dad. You know, now that I think about it, I guess it makes sense that they got rid of all their father’s guns. But they ought to have one now, just to be on the safe side. In fact, I think I’ll tell them exactly that.”

  Rachel had come here intending to ask Joanna’s opinion about the strange pastry incident, but now she felt so sorry for the sisters that she hesitated to say anything accusatory. Winter had explained Rachel’s sickness. Simon was lucky enough not to have a sensitivity to the toxic plant the cow had eaten.

  The thought of Simon brought her to her feet. “I have to pick up Simon before I go home. Tom’s aunt and uncle are keeping him after school while Tom and I are both at work.”

  Joanna rose to see her off. “When are Darla and Grady coming back?”

  “Tomorrow or Wednesday, if the news is good. If it’s not, they might stay a little longer while the doctors work out a new treatment regimen.”

  “Well, let’s hope for the best. We’ve seen enough tragedy lately to last us a while.” Joanna startled Rachel by stepping closer and pulling her into a tight hug. “You be careful, okay? Don’t go out walking or running alone, and keep Simon close to home. Remember there’s a nutcase running around loose with a gun.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The tangy smell of raw pine, pleasant enough when Tom split kindling for the fireplace, stung his nostrils when he crossed a lot where thousands of boards lay bound into pallets. The whine of high-speed saws inside the lumber mill drowned out every other sound in the yard.

  The mill looked like what it was, a relic of the early twentieth century, a big wooden building so weath
ered that no trace of exterior paint remained. It sat on a strip of flat land between steep hills, bordered by the paved road on one side and railroad tracks on the other.

  A man using a forklift to load pallets on a flatbed truck paused his work to let Tom pass in front of him, and Tom threw up a hand to thank him.

  One side of the building stood open, the metal door of the bay rolled up. Half a dozen men in hard hats and thick plastic ear muffs moved around the cutting floor, shepherding logs along the conveyers to saws that sliced off the bark, then cut the wood into narrow boards.

  Wishing he had a pair of earplugs, Tom pulled open a door marked OFFICE. The large room he entered had a counter along the front and three desks, none of them occupied, spaced out farther back. Tracked-in sawdust and bark slivers littered the floor, and a fine film coated the counter. Somewhere a phone was ringing, barely competing with the noise from the mill’s saws, but Tom didn’t see it and couldn’t pin down its location. The small brass bell on the counter almost made him laugh. Was he supposed to tap on that little thing to get somebody’s attention? He’d have better luck using telepathy.

  A door at the side of the room opened, and the decibel level rose enough to make Tom’s ears ring. Mark Hollinger strode in, wearing a hard hat and ear muffs, and closed the door on the worst of the noise. He started when he saw Tom on the other side of the counter. Knowing the other man couldn’t hear him, Tom lifted a hand in greeting.

  Mark lifted his hard hat and slid the ear muffs’ metal band off his hair and down around his neck. He fixed his strange silvery blue eyes on Tom as he approached. “What can I do for you?”

  Tom raised his voice to answer. “I need to talk to you.”

  “I’m busy.” The phone rang again, and Mark reached under the counter and came up with the receiver. “Hollinger Lumber,” he said, loudly enough to be heard over the background noise.

  What was it like, Tom wondered, to spend every working day, all day long, shouting?

  “Yes, sir,” Mark was saying. “We’re loading it right now. It’ll be on the road at daylight, ought to reach you by midday tomorrow. Yes, sir. Thank you for the business.”

  The receiver disappeared under the counter again. Mark frowned at Tom as if annoyed that he was still there. “I’m busy,” he repeated.

  “I need to talk to you. Is there anyplace quiet?”

  Mark let his shoulders slump and screwed up his face in a peevish expression. Without speaking, he rounded the corner and stalked out, not bothering to hold the door. Tom caught it before it could slam shut.

  Outside, Tom took the lead, gesturing for Mark to follow him to the cruiser parked outside the high chain link fence.

  Once there, Mark balked at getting into the car for their chat. “We can talk standing right here. What’s this about?”

  Tom leaned against the front fender and crossed his arms. “I want to talk to you about your father’s will. And Tavia Richardson’s murder.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “I heard you weren’t happy about your father leaving everything to Mrs. Richardson.”

  Mark fidgeted, adjusting the position of his hat. “He wasn’t going to leave her everything. I’d still get the mill.”

  “But his land, and all the money from selling it to Packard—provided he does sell—all that would have gone to her.”

  Hot color flooded Mark’s face. He stared past Tom, his jaw set in a hard line.

  Tom persisted. “Did you know your father was planning to move away with Mrs. Richardson if they sold their land to Packard?”

  “He doesn’t talk to me about his so-called love life.”

  Tom allowed the anger underlying Mark’s bitten-off words to build for a few seconds before going on. “It must have been hard on you, all the rumors about the two of them while your mother was dying.”

  “It’s not like she was the first. He had other women. I don’t know how my mother put up with it.”

  “He must have cared about Tavia Richardson, to make her his beneficiary. He says he loved her.”

  The ugly sound Mark spat out sounded like a cross between laughter and strangulation. “Like he knows the meaning of the word. He wasn’t thinking about her. He was thinking about me, how he could slap me down, teach me a lesson.”

  Tom kept his voice neutral. “I know a lot of fathers and sons that don’t get along, but I’m having trouble understanding why your dad would want to cut you off, especially since you’re a hard worker and he’s leaving the mill to you.”

  Too wound up to keep still, Mark paced back and forth beside the car, flinging his hands around in broad gestures as he spoke. “He knows I don’t respect him. I’ll never forgive him for what he did to my mother. So he wants me to fail. He doesn’t give a damn what happens to the business when he’s gone. If he did, he’d be investing in it, bringing it into the goddamn twenty-first century. Other mills have got computers running the machines, but we’re still operating like it’s 1950. We’ll be lucky if we get any business from the resort development.”

  “Now that Tavia Richardson’s gone, maybe your father will change his mind.”

  Mark shook his head. “That’ll be the day. He’d leave everything to that woman’s cat before he’d leave it to me.”

  If Mark believed he had no chance of inheriting anything but the lumber mill from his father, he had no financial motive to kill Tavia or Jake. But hatred was always a stronger motive than money. Mark had no reason to kill the Kellys, though, unless his motive was so deeply concealed that Tom hadn’t caught a glimmer of it. “Was your father really here on Friday? Did he ask you to lie for him?”

  “Soon as you left his place that day, after he fed you that story, he called me and told me what to say when you got around to asking. He made some promises if I’d go along, but I found out soon enough he didn’t mean a word of it.”

  Tom nodded. That kept Jake in the picture for the Kelly murders. But he hadn’t killed Tavia. “He told me he’s changing his will again, to make sure there’s no loophole that’ll let you inherit. So Mrs. Richardson’s murder hasn’t done anything for you. Unless you hated her so much that just knowing she’s dead gives you satisfaction.”

  Still pacing, Mark stumbled over a rock half-hidden in weeds and swore under his breath. He delivered a swift, hard kick that sent it sailing through the air. It banged into the chain link fence and dropped to the ground. Mark stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head, anger and frustration mixing on his face. “When I first heard she was dead, I was glad. But it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change what the two of them put my poor mother through.”

  “Where were you yesterday afternoon?”

  He took a minute to answer. “Hiking. Trying to think, figure some things out.”

  “By yourself? Can anybody back that up? Did anybody else see you?”

  Mark raised bleak eyes to Tom’s. “Not a soul.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Tom dropped the faxed ballistics report, a single sheet, onto his desk after reading it. Leaning back in his chair, he rubbed his tired eyes. “We’ve got nothing,” he said to Dennis and Brandon. “We can’t seem to get off square one.”

  Brandon leaned against the window sill, the darkening sky at his back. “You think the gun that killed Tavia Richardson was stolen from her house?”

  “Maybe,” Tom said. “But maybe not. We don’t have any way of knowing for sure what she had and what’s missing. Whoever got into her house must have had a key, and was smart enough not to leave fingerprints. Hollinger swears it wasn’t him, for whatever that’s worth.”

  Dennis, slouched in a chair facing the desk, said, “At least we know the gun we found at the scene is the one that killed her.”

  “But it wasn’t used to kill the Kellys. And the rifle I took from her house wasn’t either.”

&nb
sp; “So what does all this tell us?” Dennis asked. “Two killers? One killer using different guns?”

  “But remember that the Kellys and Mrs. Richardson were on opposite sides of the development fight,” Brandon reminded them.

  “We know Jake Hollinger didn’t shoot Tavia.” Tom picked up a pencil and tapped it absentmindedly against the edge of the desktop. “But he could have shot the Kellys. He lied about his whereabouts and told his son to back him up.”

  “And his son could have killed Tavia,” Brandon said. “Mark had plenty of motive.”

  “Father and son killers?” Tom shook his head. “It’s possible, but how likely is it?”

  “Well, greed does seem to run in families,” Dennis said.

  “Speaking of greed, what’s Ronan Kelly been up to?”

  “He’s still at his parents’ house. I had guys go by there a couple of times to check. And Sheila’s been busy making funeral arrangements. I’ve been doing as much as I can by phone, checking on their movements, and neither of them was anywhere near Mason County when their folks were killed. You still think Ronan could’ve paid somebody to do it because he thought he was going to get half their assets?”

  “Yeah, I think he’s capable of it. Proving it is something else.” Tom dropped the pencil and sat forward. “We’ve got a whole county that’s divided over the Packard project. A whole county full of suspects. And not an ounce of solid evidence against anybody.”

  “What about Joanna McKendrick?” Brandon said. “She’s got an alibi for the Kellys, but not Tavia Richardson.”

  For a long moment they were all silent, the only sound in the room the scrape of Brandon’s boot soles on the floor as he shifted position. Tom couldn’t forget the way Joanna had looked at him when he’d questioned her at the horse farm. Her sad disappointment had cut more deeply than her anger. If they came out the other side of this crisis with somebody else in custody, would she ever forgive him for believing her capable of lying in wait and murdering a defenseless woman in cold blood? Did he believe that?