Poisoned Ground

by Sandra Parshall

  Tom thought anybody was capable of anything if pushed hard enough. And Joanna had gone off the rails. She hadn’t been herself since the Packard proposal was announced and the company had started pressuring her to sell her land. Even so, he saw her as a more likely victim than a killer.

  “Tom?” Dennis broke into his thoughts.

  “I’m not ruling anybody out. Maybe we’ve got people on both sides who are willing to commit murder to get what they want. Maybe we’re making a mistake to keep looking at their families, the people close to them. There might be an angle we haven’t even considered, some connection between these murders that we’re not seeing.”

  “Then we’ll keep digging until we unearth it,” Dennis said.

  Tom blew out a sigh and glanced at the window. The lights in the parking lot had blinked on while they’d been talking, as the sky faded from deep blue to black. “Let’s all go home and get some rest. If anything happens overnight, short of another shooting, the Blackwood twins can handle it. Maybe tomorrow’s the day we’ll catch a break.”

  ***

  “Tom’s home!” Simon slid off the stool and barreled out of the kitchen and down the hall with Billy Bob trotting behind.

  Rachel, cutting up vegetables at the counter, paused to listen to Simon’s chatter and Tom’s responses. Without seeing them, she knew they stood by the open door of the hall closet while Tom stripped off his equipment belt and holstered pistol and stashed them out of Simon’s reach at the back of the shelf. Their words were indistinct, but the rhythm of their voices made her smile. She could imagine this scene playing out every night, a child—or children—of their own running to greet Tom. Someday, Rachel thought. But the part of her that still couldn’t believe in her happiness added its insidious whisper: If we ever learn to trust each other completely.

  “I’m starving,” Tom said as he came into the kitchen with Simon and Billy Bob in tow. He kissed Rachel and patted Frank the cat, who had been napping on a chair. “Let me get out of my uniform and Simon and I will take care of setting the table.”

  Simon followed him out, eager to share his teacher’s astonishing revelations that day about the inner workings of volcanoes. “Can you believe that?” Rachel heard him say as they started up the stairs.

  The telephone rang. Still smiling at Simon’s excitement, Rachel grabbed the receiver of the wall-mounted phone. Her smile faded when she heard the strained voice of Simon’s grandmother, Darla Duncan.

  “What’s wrong?” Rachel gripped the coiled phone cord in her fist, winding it around and around her hand.

  “Can Simon hear you?” Darla’s voice broke on the last word, and Rachel heard her husband, Grady, murmuring in the background. “No, I’ll tell her myself,” Darla said to him, her voice muffled as if she’d placed a hand over the mouthpiece.

  Rachel freed her fingers from the twisted cord and leaned her palm and forehead against the wall. “Simon’s upstairs with Tom.” She tried to keep her voice level, but it sounded like a hoarse croak to her own ears. “But he’ll be back in a minute.”

  Darla drew an audible breath. Her voice had turned brisk when she spoke again. “We wanted to let you know we have to stay another couple of days. Maybe until the end of the week. Can you manage Simon that long?”

  Sudden tears burned Rachel’s eyes and her throat closed up. She forced her words out. “Of course we can. We love having him. Darla, what’s—what did the doctors say?”

  “It’s not too bad, not really. They want to do another test or two, get another doctor’s opinion. I’ll give you all the gory details when we come home.”

  It’s spreading, Rachel thought. It’s not going away. “Don’t worry about Simon. We’ll take good care of him.”

  “I know you will, honey. He couldn’t be in better hands.”

  Rachel heard Simon’s cheerful voice then, and the thump thump thump of his footsteps on the stairs. She wonder, irrelevantly, how one small boy could make as much noise as a herd of hoofed stock. Blinking to clear her eyes, she told Darla, “Simon’s coming down. Do you and Grady want to talk to him?”

  While Simon spoke with his grandparents, Rachel held Tom’s gaze, and without words they shared their fear and sadness and their determination to keep up a good front for the boy’s sake. Whatever Darla and Grady told Simon must have been reassuring, because he hung up with a smile on his face and launched into a description of the great book about dinosaurs his grandparents had found for him.

  By the time they got Simon to bed, Rachel felt drained, exhausted by the effort of pretense during dinner and early evening. In the privacy of their bedroom, she and Tom put their arms around each other.

  “Darla’s tough,” Tom said. “Let’s hope for the best.”

  “I feel terrible for her and Grady.” Rachel’s voice was muffled against his shoulder. “And Simon. That poor little boy has so lost so much already.”

  “He hasn’t lost us, and he’s not going to.”

  No, he wouldn’t. Tom would always be here for Simon, and so would she. Suddenly she didn’t know why she’d cared about Tom keeping the county officials’ threats from her. Even his suspicion of her good friend Joanna seemed unimportant. It would work out. Tom would arrest the real killer, and Joanna would eventually concede that he had simply been doing his job.

  They showered and went to bed. Tom fell asleep quickly, but Rachel lay awake, staring at shadows on the ceiling and trying not to think, not to let her mind wander to the unknowable future. She was still awake when the telephone rang a few minutes past two a.m.

  The sound didn’t surprise her. This call, whatever it might be, felt like something she’d been expecting, dreading. Tom stirred as she reached across him in the dark to grab the receiver.

  The young female dispatcher blurted an urgent summons. She added, “I know the sheriff didn’t want to be called tonight, but I figured this is too important—”

  Tom pushed himself upright and switched on the lamp.

  Rachel handed him the receiver. “Somebody set fire to Joanna’s stable.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Tom jumped out of his cruiser and sprinted toward the chaos.

  Fire roared from a hole in the stable’s roof, spewing burning cinders into the air. Whipped by the wind, the flames lit up the night sky and cast a reddish glow over a towering cloud of smoke. A Mason County fire truck sat sideways on the road, its headlights and flasher illuminating the ground around the stable. Two firefighters held a hose, alternately directing a stream of water at the blaze and dousing the red-hot cinders that threatened the undamaged part of the roof.

  In the paddock next to the stable, terrified horses crowded together, snorting and whinnying and stamping, their eyes reflecting the fire’s glow. Joanna and two of her ranch hands moved among the horses, stroking their necks and patting their sides.

  Sheila Kelly stood outside the paddock in semi-darkness, her arms folded and shoulders hunched against the chill wind. Tom joined her and called Joanna’s name.

  Joanna left the horses and ran to the fence. “Marcella’s still in there!” she cried. The firelight threw flickering red and orange shadows across her face. “They wouldn’t let me go in and get her.”

  “Let the fire chief and his men get her out,” Sheila pleaded. “You can’t go in a burning building.”

  “But they can’t manage her. She’s going to die in there.”

  A strong gust of wind blew smoke and ash their way and made all of them cough.

  “Just hang on,” Tom said. “They’ll get her out. What the hell happened here anyway?”

  “It was arson. Somebody deliberately set fire to a building that had twenty horses in it.” Never taking her eyes off the stable, Joanna raked her disheveled hair off her face with both hands. In the poor light, her hair looked wet, and so did her jeans and sweatshirt, but she didn’t seem to care about bei
ng drenched in the cold night air. “Some little shit called me, woke me up, said I’d better get my horses out before they burned to death. Then he laughed, can you believe that? And I heard somebody else laughing in the background. There were two of them.”

  “Boys? Men?” Tom asked.

  “They sounded like kids. Teenagers.”

  “Did their number show up on your Caller ID?”

  She shook her head. “It was blocked.”

  “We can still get it. We’ll find out who did this.”

  “Right now all I care about is Marcella.” She bounced up and down on her toes. “God, what’s taking so long in there? I’ve got to go in and get her myself.” She started to move away from the fence.

  Tom reached over the rail and caught her arm. “No, Joanna. It’s too dangerous, and the firemen shouldn’t have to worry about you and the horse both.”

  “Please listen to Tom,” Sheila said. “You know he’s right.”

  Joanna yanked her arm free of Tom’s grip, but instead of bolting she leaned on the fence and buried her face in her folded arms. Sheila patted her shoulder.

  After a moment Joanna raised her head and swiped at her eyes with the back of a hand. “Thank God for the sprinkler system. But part of the roof was already falling in by the time I got here. If I’d been a few minutes later I couldn’t have got half of them out.”

  “So that phone call saved their lives,” Tom said.

  “But I left Marcella in there, way in the back where the fire is. I’ll never forgive myself. Why didn’t I get her out?” She covered her face with hands.

  “You did all you could.” Tom added, hoping it would help, “Rachel’s coming any minute. She had to wait for my aunt and uncle to come over to the house and stay with Simon. She’ll be here if Marcella needs her.” Time seemed to be crawling by although he knew he’d only been there a few minutes. How long could it take to get one horse out, even a cranky one like Marcella? For a second he considered going in to help, but he knew he’d be ordered out when the fire chief spotted him.

  “Look!” Sheila grabbed Tom’s sleeve and shook it. She pointed toward the front of the stable. “They’ve got her.”

  Joanna was already running that way. Tom jogged after her.

  Light spilled from the barn directly across the narrow farm road and fell on the scene in the wide stable doorway. The fire chief, his coat and hard hat dripping water, was backing out and pulling the furious chestnut mare by her halter. Marcella tossed her head, snorted and reared, forcing the chief to let go. She slammed her front hooves down, barely missing the man’s head and shoulder.

  Joanna approached the mare, crooning, “Marcella, Marcella, come on, girl, it’s me, Marcella. Calm down, girl, calm down, you’re okay now.”

  The horse whinnied and shook her head again, sending drops of water flying in every direction. A smattering hit Tom’s face, and he wiped the water away with his sleeve as he moved in to help Joanna.

  Two firefighters behind the horse tried to push her all the way out, but she bucked and kicked backwards. Tom heard one man let out a loud “Oof!” and guessed Marcella had landed a punch in his stomach.

  Joanna grabbed one side of the halter and Tom the other, and together they guided Marcella into the paddock. A haze of smoke hung in the air, and Tom heard a timber crack as more of the stable roof collapsed. The fire, though, was dying down under the relentless stream of water pumped up from Joanna’s well and fed through the fire hose.

  Rachel appeared, marching out of the darkness with her medical bag, and followed them into the enclosure. “Are they all safe?” she asked Joanna.

  “Yes, thank God, but Marcella was in there the longest.”

  Rachel dropped her bag on the ground, unzipped it, and pulled out a flashlight. “Hold her still if you can. Let me check her for burns and cuts.”

  The horse didn’t want to stand still. She wanted to spin in circles, complaining and kicking up clods of grass and dirt. Together Tom and Joanna kept her from breaking free, and Rachel moved with her, playing the light over her body from neck to flanks.

  “She has a burn on her right flank,” Rachel reported.

  “Oh, no,” Joanna groaned.

  “Don’t panic. It’s not bad. But she won’t like me cleaning it, so hold on tight.”

  Easier said than done, Tom thought, bracing himself for a kick or a bite. The sharp odor of alcohol cut through the stench of smoke and horse sweat as Rachel prepared a gauze swab. Tom and Joanna both threw arms around Marcella’s neck, gripping the halter with their free hands. Tom leaned his weight against the horse to steady her. When Rachel dabbed the burn with alcohol, Marcella whinnied and jerked, trying to turn her head toward the source of the pain. The ripple of her powerful muscles sent a tremor through Tom’s body.

  “Good girl,” Rachel crooned. “Now I’ll put on something to make it stop hurting.”

  Tom noticed that the other horses were calming down, growing quieter, as Joanna’s employees moved from one to another, touching them and talking to them. Marcella finally stopped struggling and stood still while Rachel applied medication and a bandage. The fire was dying down, and when Tom glanced at the sky, he saw the nearly full moon through a break in the cloud of smoke.

  “Now what?” Joanna said when they let the horse go. “Where am I going to put twenty horses? I’d better see if any of the stable’s usable.”

  “Let me go talk to the chief first,” Tom told her. “Hang on for a couple minutes.”

  The fire chief stood in the undamaged front section of the stable, shining a handheld spotlight into the interior. He and Tom walked down the wide center aisle, inspecting every stall and the ceiling above it.

  “No damage past the back end,” the chief reported. “Aside from everything being wet, I’d say seventy-five percent of the structure’s sound.”

  “You think it was arson?”

  “Oh, yeah, no doubt about it. Looks like somebody threw a fire bomb, maybe more than one, on the roof at the rear. A lot of accelerant. I could smell kerosene when we first got here. It burned right through the roof to the rafters.”

  “Joanna said some kid called her and told her the stable was on fire. Laughing about it.”

  The chief grunted. “Let’s hope the little s.o.b. was dumb enough to use his own phone. I sure would like to get my hands on him for about five minutes.”

  The same thought had crossed Tom’s mind. “I guess Joanna can’t put the horses back in here tonight.”

  “Not till it’s cleaned up and aired out. She’d better make other arrangements, at least for tonight.”

  Tom nodded. “I’ll call the State Police and ask for a crime scene unit to go over the ground out back. Come see me tomorrow, after you work up a report. When I catch these kids, I want to throw everything I can at them.”

  Outside, he discovered Winter Jones, Jake Hollinger, and Ronan Kelly had arrived while he was in the stable with the chief. Jake had left his truck’s headlights on, and he stood in the glare with Winter, Ronan, and Sheila, all of them clustered around Joanna. Rachel had joined them and seemed to be arguing with Jake.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. “They’ve been stressed enough without being loaded in a trailer and moved to a strange place in the middle of the night.”

  “They’ll be fine,” Jake said. “My barn’s big enough for half of them.”

  Tom interrupted to give Joanna the fire chief’s assessment of the stable’s condition.

  After thinking it over, she said, “Thank you, Jake, I appreciate the offer, but they can all stay in my barn until morning. They’ll be a little crowded, but they’ll be okay and out of the night air. By the end of the day tomorrow my men can have the hole in the roof covered and the inside cleaned up. Thank you all for coming over. Now go on home and get back to bed.”

  “We
need to talk about this right now,” Jake protested. “I’m afraid something like this is going to happen again. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve been getting threatening letters. I already gave them to Tom. Tavia got some too.”

  “I found some letters at Mom and Dad’s house tonight,” Ronan said. “Unsigned. Full of crazy threats.”

  “Oh my God,” Sheila said. “Death threats?”

  “Yeah. And they sure as hell weren’t idle threats, were they?”

  “I want to see those letters,” Tom said. “I’ll come and get them in the morning. Don’t handle them any more than you have to. Miss Jones, what about you and your sisters? Has anybody been threatening you?”

  “Well, we have had some very nasty phone calls lately.” Winter pulled her long black coat closer around her. “My sisters and I don’t feel safe at all. We’re so afraid someone is going to attack us on our own property. In our own house.”

  So why the hell didn’t you tell me you’re getting threats? “You should have told me this earlier. We can find out where the calls originated. I’ll be over to see you in the morning, too, and I want you to try to remember everything—what was said, what the voices sounded like. Everything, all right?”

  “Yes, of course, Thomas.” Winter sounded chastened, a first in Tom’s memory.

  Tom turned to Joanna. “Did anybody threaten you before this happened?”

  She sighed, sounding and looking exhausted. “I got some letters. Just garbage full of misspelled words and foul language, telling me I’d be sorry if I didn’t get out of the way and sell my land to Packard. Nothing about burning down my barn and killing my horses. If I’d thought something like that might happen, I would have had somebody guarding the stable all night.”

  “We could all be at risk,” Jake said. “It could be one of our houses set on fire next time.”

  “You and Joanna are on opposite sides of the land sale issue,” Tom pointed out. “If somebody’s trying to drive Joanna out, why would they bother you, when you’ve already decided to sell to Packard?”