Poisoned Ground

by Sandra Parshall

  “Retaliation. Getting back at the other side. We’ve got our own little civil war going on here, haven’t you noticed? And it’s escalating.”

  “We’re doing our best to get things under control.”

  “Well, we can see how that’s going.” Jake flung an arm in the stable’s direction. “And you still don’t seem to have any idea who killed Linc and Marie. Now Tavia’s dead. When’s it going to end?”

  Rachel opened her mouth to shoot back an answer, but Tom shook his head and she stayed silent. Reining in his temper, he managed to keep his voice level. “I’m not denying we’ve got a bad situation here. But we’ll find out who’s behind the murders, and sooner or later we’ll find out who set this fire.”

  “Tom,” Sheila said, “do you think the person who started the fire is the same one who killed Mom and Dad? Since they were on the same side of the resort issue as Joanna.”

  Joanna shook her head. “I think kids set my stable on fire. Vandals. Not cold-blooded killers.”

  “I think you’re probably right,” Tom said. “But I’m not ruling anything out.”

  “I’ve got a pretty strong suspicion about who killed my parents,” Ronan said. He glared at Jake Hollinger.

  “What the hell are you looking at me for?” Jake demanded.

  Tom raised his hands. “Stop it, both of you.” What brought this on? The first time Tom had suggested Jake Hollinger as a suspect, Ronan dismissed the idea. “Ronan, if you’ve got something to say, then say it to me. Don’t throw out accusations in the middle of the night when everybody’s worn out.”

  “I’m going to take care of my horses,” Joanna said. “If you all want to fight, please do it somewhere else.”

  As Joanna rejoined her employees in the paddock, Tom told the others, “Let’s all go home. The fire chief has to finish his inspection and Joanna has to get her horses settled for the rest of the night, and they don’t need anybody else underfoot.”

  Jake shot another venomous look at Ronan, then climbed into his truck. He made a tight U-turn on the narrow pavement and sped off, tires screeching.

  Tom blinked, trying to adjust to the sudden absence of Jake’s headlights. Ronan, his sister, and Winter lingered, as if each was waiting for the others to leave.

  “Ready to go?” Rachel asked Tom.

  “Yeah, I am.” Tom looked from Winter to Ronan. “I’ll talk to both of you in the morning. Go home now and get some sleep.”

  Sheila tugged her brother’s arm. “Come on, Ronan. You can give me a ride back to Joanna’s house.”

  He shook off her hand and spoke to Tom. “There’s something you need to see. Besides the letters, I mean.”

  “What? Is it something to do with your parents’ deaths?”

  Ronan threw a wary glance at Winter as if reluctant to say more in front of her. “I think it might. It could, anyway. I don’t know. I can’t be sure. You need to see it and figure out what it means.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of it. It might not mean anything.”

  Why didn’t Ronan come right out and tell him what it was? Why didn’t he want to spell it out in front of Winter? “You want to show it to me now?”

  “Oh, Ronan, for heaven’s sake,” Sheila said. “Can’t it wait until morning? These people want to go home and get back to sleep. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Ronan hesitated, then gave in. “Yeah, yeah, it can wait a few hours.” As his sister pulled him away, he said over his shoulder, “You’ll come to the house in the morning?”

  “I’ll be there.” Tom was beginning to think he’d spend the whole day in this neighborhood.

  “What do you suppose that’s about?” Rachel asked, watching Ronan and Sheila go.

  “God only knows. Miss Jones, can I walk you to your car?”

  “Oh, thank you, Thomas. My eyesight isn’t very good in this poor light.” She looped her arm around his. “I’m getting to the age when I’m always afraid of stumbling and falling.”

  With Rachel on her other side, they accompanied her down the road, past Tom’s cruiser and then Rachel’s Range Rover. A little farther along, car doors slammed and Ronan’s headlights flashed on. The three of them moved out of the way so he could turn around. As the car passed, Sheila waved from the passenger seat.

  When they resumed walking, Winter said, “I confess I’m terribly curious about what it is Ronan wants to show you. He sounded so urgent. Thomas, what do you suppose it is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Could it relate to Lincoln and Marie’s deaths?”

  Could I get that lucky? Tom wondered. He’d be willing to bet it would be nothing. The threatening letters interested him more. “I can’t even begin to guess.”

  “He’s such a hotheaded boy,” Winter said as they reached her old station wagon. “He always has been. But do you think he was insinuating that Jacob Hollinger was the one who killed Lincoln and Marie?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss that with you.” Tom opened the car door for her. “I’ll come by tomorrow and we’ll talk about ways to make you and your sisters feel safer.”

  “Thank you, Thomas. But I do wonder—”

  “Good night, Miss Jones.” Tom took Rachel’s arm and set off toward their vehicles at a brisk pace.

  “Nice try,” Rachel said, “but don’t think you’re going to stop her from gossiping about all this.”

  “At least I didn’t feed her any extra tidbits. God, I can’t wait to get back in bed. I have a feeling tomorrow’s going to be a hell of a day.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Under a clear morning sky and a bright sun, the stable and barn area looked much the same as always to Rachel—except for the dark streaks down the side of the stable and the gaping, black-rimmed hole in its roof. Horses draped with blankets grazed in the surrounding paddocks as if their night hadn’t been interrupted by a terrifying fire.

  Rachel found Joanna inside the stable, using a push broom to clear sodden straw out of a stall.

  When she saw Rachel, Joanna gestured at the mess around her. “Welcome to my own personal disaster area.”

  Rachel could tell she’d never gone back to bed. Exhaustion had turned her skin pasty and darkened the half-circles under her eyes. She’d changed out of her wet clothes from the night before, but her fresh jeans were already splattered with grime up to her knees.

  “It’s really not as bad as I expected,” Rachel said. “Most of it’s still usable, right?”

  “Yes, thank God. After we get it cleaned up and dried out.”

  The four men Joanna employed wielded brooms, pitchforks, and shovels, cleaning the two rows of stalls and loading the detritus into wheelbarrows. The stench of smoke stung Rachel’s nose and throat even now, hours after the fire. No one had touched the rear of the building, where chunks of charred wood covered the floor and a fallen timber had demolished the door and one wall of a stall. Sunlight streamed through the hole in the roof and glinted off a pool of filthy water in the center aisle.

  Rachel returned the men’s greetings, but she couldn’t muster a smile for them. The sight of the damage, and the thought of the malice behind it, sickened her.

  Joanna leaned on the broom handle, looking toward the rear. “We need to get that hole covered, but we have to wait until the guy from the insurance company takes a look at it.”

  “Is he coming today?”

  “Later this morning. Then I’ve got a builder coming after lunch to give me the bad news about the cost of repairs. God, this makes me want to organize a lynching party. All of my horses could’ve died last night.”

  “Tom’s going to get the phone records,” Rachel said. “He seems sure he can find out who called you. Maybe by the end of the day the kids who did this will be in jail.”

  “They’d damn well better pay a price for it. This ought to teach their par
ents a lesson. Kids hear mom and dad talking about me like I’m the devil incarnate because I won’t knuckle under, and they get the idea I’m fair game.”

  “I’m sure you’re right about that.” And organizing a protest and getting arrested had made Joanna an even more inviting target. Yet how could anyone tell her she was wrong to fight back against the people trying to force her off her land?

  Joanna went on, “The crazy thing is, Packard wants my stable so they wouldn’t have to build one. They’d take my horses too if I’d sell them. So whoever set the fire wasn’t doing the developers any favors.” She propped the broom against a stall door. “Come on, I’ll make Marcella behave while you check on her. I’ve got a pocketful of sugar.”

  The chestnut mare proved more cooperative than she’d been during the night. While Joanna fed her sugar cubes, Rachel examined the burn on Marcella’s flank, getting a better look than she’d had during the night. “It should heal without any problems.” She placed a fresh bandage over the injury. “By the way, where’s Sheila this morning?”

  “Over at their parents’ house with Ronan. She’s curious about what he wants to show Tom.”

  “He didn’t tell her last night?” Rachel was curious too, and she’d hoped that Joanna had ferreted out the information by now.

  “No, she couldn’t pry it out of him.” They walked to the paddock gate and Joanna swung the latch up. “I didn’t tell Sheila this, but I’ve got an inkling what he found over there.”

  “Really?” Rachel stopped outside the gate and turned to Joanna. “What? Is it something that’ll help Tom?”

  “I doubt it. But I’m sure Ronan’s in shock, and Sheila will be too.”

  “Oh, now you have to tell me. Come on, spill it.”

  Joanna grinned and leaned back against the paddock fence. “I hate to disappoint you, but it’s not all that exciting. It just seems sordid and sad to me. You know Jake Hollinger’s got a reputation as a womanizer? Well-deserved, I might add. He made a pass at me once—groped me in my own kitchen—but I threatened to neuter him with my shotgun if he ever touched me again. I never had any trouble with him after that.”

  Rachel laughed. “I’m sure you didn’t. He seems like an ordinary older man to me, but I guess he was attractive when he was young. Winter Jones made him sound like the local Casanova.”

  Joanna snorted. “Like she has any right to be sanctimonious.”

  Startled, Rachel said, “What? Don’t tell me she—”

  “No, no, not her, for heaven’s sake. Can you imagine Winter Jones rolling around naked in the hay with Jake?”

  The image was so ludicrous and unlikely that Rachel burst out laughing. “Yeah, that’s a stretch. So who—one of the other sisters?”

  “Autumn, the youngest one,” Joanna said. “That was pretty low, even for Jake. She was just a kid. Nineteen, I think, and Jake was a married man in his thirties. He took advantage of that poor girl.”

  “Winter was gossiping about other women, but she forgot to mention that her own sister was involved with Hollinger.”

  “They don’t talk about Autumn. They’ve got her picture on the mantel, but aside from that it’s like she never existed. She killed herself, you know.”

  “Don’t tell me she did it because of Jake Hollinger. Good grief, he couldn’t have been that special even in his heyday.”

  Joanna shook her head. “No, I think it was her mother’s death that tipped her over the edge. Then her father died in that freak accident not long afterward. But I doubt that being involved with Jake did the girl any good. From what I hear, she was pretty messed up emotionally.”

  “All of them seem a little…” Rachel couldn’t come up with the right label for the Jones sisters.

  “Odd? Spacey?” Joanna grinned. “Downright weird? Am I getting close?”

  “Well, eccentric is a kinder word. Winter comes across as very strong and capable when I deal with her, but you should have seen the little old lady act she put on for Tom last night. Summer really does seem fragile, though. She got upset when Winter was talking about Hollinger and his affairs. Now I understand why.”

  “Yeah, bad memories. I think she and Autumn were pretty close. The older two are hard as nails, but Summer’s sweet-natured, and Autumn was the same way. I wouldn’t advise you to eat anything Summer cooks, though.”

  Jolted, Rachel asked, “Why do you say that?”

  “She’s got some awfully strange things growing in her garden. She likes to experiment, and you never know when you’re going to be her guinea pig. I learned a long time ago it was safer just to say no.”

  Why had Winter told Rachel that tainted milk had made her sick? Made all of them sick—except Simon. No real harm was done, but Rachel felt uneasy about the differing stories.

  She pulled her mind back to the original question. “So what do you think Ronan found in the house?”

  “Pictures. Lincoln Kelly had some pictures he took of Marie with Jake, decades ago, back when they were all young. From the way Ronan was looking at Jake last night, I’ve got a feeling he found those pictures of Jake and his mother. I don’t know what else it could be.”

  My God, it’s true. Marie Kelly, a warm and unpretentious Earth Mother type who’d seemed devoted to her husband, had fallen prey to Hollinger’s charms. “Wow. Winter mentioned the rumors that they had an affair, but I didn’t believe her. Are you saying Lincoln spied on his wife and took pictures of her with her lover?”

  “Oh, they weren’t pictures of them having sex. But it’s pretty clear something was going on between them. You know, kissing, touching. The way they looked at each other.”

  “How do you know all this? Have you seen the pictures?”

  Marcella had ambled over to the fence and now laid her chin on Joanna’s shoulder. Joanna rubbed the horse’s muzzle up and down. “I wish to God I hadn’t, but Linc showed them to me. Just recently, about three weeks ago.”

  “Why?”

  Joanna hesitated. “It was pitiful. It just broke my heart. You know Linc had Alzheimer’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “His short-term memory was just about gone. So he began confusing past with present. When he came across those old pictures, he thought they were new. It didn’t matter that Jake and Marie looked so young in them. He seemed to believe he was young too. He thought everything was happening right now.”

  “Oh my God. How did you get involved?”

  “He came over here crying like his heart was breaking, and he begged me to help him get his wife back. But he hadn’t lost her. Marie never left him and the kids. Jake never left Sue Ellen. I don’t know how Marie coped with Lincoln. She had a lot more resilience than I would under those circumstances.”

  While telling the story, Joanna had stopped petting the horse, and now Marcella lifted her head and caught the end of Joanna’s ponytail in her teeth. “Hey, whoa, girl! You can’t eat my hair.” Joanna tugged on the ponytail but the horse held on.

  “Maybe she wants more sugar,” Rachel suggested.

  Dipping into her barn jacket’s pocket, Joanna found a couple more sugar cubes to offer the mare. Marcella let go of the ponytail, scooped the cubes off Joanna’s palm, and moved off to resume grazing. Joanna fussed with her ponytail, which the horse had pulled askew.

  Rachel nudged her back to the subject. “Are you sure Marie didn’t destroy the pictures? That’s what she should have done.”

  “She told me she was going to, if she could get them away from Linc, but she never told me whether she did. I didn’t bring it up because she was so embarrassed that I’d seen them and I figured she wanted to pretend it never happened. But I’ll bet you anything Ronan found them. He’s been over there tearing that house apart.”

  “Do you think Ronan believes Jake Hollinger killed his parents?”

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly what he believes.”
Joanna shook her head. “But Jake didn’t kill Linc and Marie. He’s got his faults, but I don’t believe for a minute that he’s capable of that. He knew Linc was sick and harmless.”

  “Those pictures weren’t harmless.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Marie was embarrassed that Linc was bringing it up again, but I don’t think Jake cared. His wife is gone, she can’t be hurt by it now. And God knows Tavia never had any illusions about him.”

  “Tell Tom all this when he comes by later,” Rachel said. “He’ll want to know.”

  “Honey, what’s the point? It just confuses the issue. He doesn’t need to go off on a tangent while people are getting killed and buildings are being firebombed. This is about the resort development. It’s big business, big money.”

  “But who would kill over it?” Tom’s own frustration, so deep and intense it was palpable, was infecting Rachel. “If everybody in the county’s a suspect, how is Tom ever going to find the killer?”

  “He doesn’t have to look too far. And no, I’m not going to tell you who I’m talking about. But I’ll point Tom in the right direction. I’m not going to let him waste any more time thinking I could have killed Tavia, when it’s obvious as the nose on his face who had a reason to want her dead.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Tom, accompanied by Brandon, pulled into the driveway at the Kellys’ small farmhouse and parked behind Sheila’s blue rental. Ronan’s black sedan sat in front of his sister’s car. “Looks like we’ll have to deal with both of them at the same time.”

  “Can I just hide in the car?” Brandon asked.

  Tom laughed. “Not a chance. If these two start throwing punches and heavy objects at each other, it’ll take both of us to separate them.”

  They heard the shouting before they’d made it as far as the front porch. Tom exchanged a look of commiseration with Brandon and banged on the door, hoping the battling siblings could hear over their own racket.