by Kathi Daley
“How about burgers on the deck?” I asked everyone gathered in the living room discussing their plans for the upcoming holiday season.
“Sounds good,” Ellie said. “I can make a potato salad.”
“And I’ll make a fruit salad,” Mom offered.
“I figure it’ll be around six if we wait for Dad and Levi, but it should be a warm evening, and we have the fire pit and heaters.”
“It’ll be like a fairyland with all Zak’s lights,” Nona added.
“That’s what I thought.” I smiled. “And it might be our last chance for a while. I heard there’s a storm blowing in tomorrow, to be followed by a cold front. I’m going to call Salinger and check in; then I’ll check on Alex and Scooter. I assume Catherine is napping.”
“Yes, but both babies should be up shortly,” Ellie informed me.
With our plans for dinner firmed up, I headed upstairs to call Salinger. He didn’t answer, so I left a message, then went to see the kids.
Scooter was laying on his bed, tossing a football into the air, catching it, and tossing it again.
“Something wrong, buddy?” I asked.
“Nothing’s wrong, but I decided not to go to the dance.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. “I thought you were looking forward to it.”
“I was,” Scooter said as he tossed the ball extra high.
“What mind you change your mind?”
Scooter shrugged.
“Did you have a fight with Tucker?” While they’d been best friends for a lot of years, the boys got into spats every now and then.
“No, Tucker and I are cool.”
I paused, trying to work this out. Scooter hadn’t been planning to go to the dance with a date, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t tried to get one. “Does your change of heart have to do with a girl?”
Scooter shrugged again.
I just kept guessing to see where it got me. “You decided to ask someone other than Tucker to go with you?”
“Lacy Martin.”
“Lacy Martin?”
“She’s just a girl in my English class. We hang out sometimes. I guess you could say we’re friends.”
“So you asked Lacy to go with you and she said no?”
“She said her dad was real strict and wouldn’t let her date, but she was going to the dance with a friend, and maybe she’d see me there. That’s when I asked Tucker. I figured we could go together and Lacy would go with her friend, and we’d meet up.”
“That sounds like a good plan.”
“It was, until I found out Lacy was going to the dance with a date after all. Danny Green. I called and asked her about it, and she said she talked to her dad and got him to change his mind about the no-date thing.”
“I see. I’m so sorry. I know that must make you feel bad.”
Scooter continued to toss the ball. Normally, I’d suggest he find someone else to go with, but given the situation, it might be best if he did stay home. “If you want to go I think you should go with Tucker like you planned. I’m sure there will be girls there without dates who’d welcome the opportunity to dance. But if you definitely don’t want to go maybe Tucker can come here and spend the night. You guys can set up in the den and watch Halloween movies and eat popcorn.”
“Can we get pizza?”
“Absolutely.”
“And it will be just me and Tucker? Everyone else will have to stay out?”
“If that’s what you want.”
Scooter’s face grew thoughtful. “I’ll ask him. I was looking forward to the dance, but having a sleepover sounds good too.”
Sometimes it amazed me how different Scooter and Alex were. Socially, I would say he was slightly behind the curve for kids his age in terms of things like girls and dating. I supposed the fact that he had a girl he liked and wanted to take to the dance showed he was maturing, but he was still at a point where he could be easily distracted by monster movies and video games. Alex, though, who had already been in high school for a couple of years, felt almost like a young adult to me. The two still got along really well, which I was delighted about, but their interests had most certainly deviated.
After I’d settled things with Scooter, I went in to see Alex, who was sitting at her desk working on a complicated-looking mathematical equation. “What are you doing?”
“My homework. I had Phyllis e-mail everything to me so I wouldn’t get behind. Hazel’s going to stop by later to drop off some material she gathered on the Norlander mine. I really want to go out and take a look at the place. Reading and research is fine, but a firsthand experience will be better.”
“I’ll talk to Zak about it. Maybe he can take you. Is Hazel coming by tonight?”
Alex nodded. “She said she’d come by after she closes the library. She asked if I thought you were going to make it to book club. If you were she was going to give it to you then, but I said you probably wouldn’t.”
“That was nice of her. Did she find anything interesting?”
Alex stopped what she was doing and looked up. “Yes. The Norlanders had a sister, Amelia, who lived with them and kept house for them while they worked the mine. After the brothers died she stayed in Devil’s Den. Hazel told me she married and raised a family there. After all the mines closed and everyone left, she and her husband claimed some acreage and lived off the land.”
“Wow. That is interesting. I’d like to hear the rest of the story once you work out the details.” I glanced at my phone, which had begun to vibrate. “It’s Salinger. I should take this. BBQ on the patio at about six.”
I walked out into the hall before answering the phone. “Hi, Salinger. Thanks for returning my call. I’m really just looking for an update.”
“I have one, but I think it would be best to deliver it in person. Is Zak there with you?”
“I’m upstairs and he’s downstairs in the computer room, but yeah, he’s here.”
“Okay. I’ll be right over.”
******
When Salinger arrived we all went into the computer room. He pulled a photo out of an envelope and said, “I’ve been going through all the photos in the box you found to see if I noticed anything that might be construed as a clue. I found this.” He handed the photo to me.
It was me, walking past a large delivery truck. “Okay. So?”
“If you look closely you can see your image reflected in the aluminum siding.”
I looked closer. Salinger was right; you could see my image. You could also see someone else’s. “The man who took the photo.”
“Exactly.”
Zak walked up next to me and looked at the photo as well. It wasn’t a great photo. The guy had on a baseball cap and the large digital camera was being held in front of his face.
“It would help if we could see his face,” I said. I turned to Salinger. “This was a good catch, but I don’t think it tells us anything.”
“Sure it does. The photographer appears to be male, so if we go with that assumption, we eliminate about half the population. The lab was able to determine the photographer is five feet ten to eleven inches, which eliminates everyone either taller or shorter than that. He’s of average weight, maybe one seventy to one seventy-five, so that eliminates people who are under- or overweight. His hair is short and the cap covers most of it, but there’s enough showing at the bottom of the cap to tell us it’s brown. If you look at the hand holding the camera, you can see a few liver spots, so he isn’t very young, but it doesn’t appear to be that of a man over fifty either. My lab estimates the hand belongs to someone between thirty-five and forty-five.”
“That still leaves a lot of people,” Zak pointed out.
“It does,” Salinger agreed. “Now let’s narrow down when the photo was taken.”
I studied the image and tried to place it. “I have on my fuzzy orange sweater,” I said. “I only wear it at this time of the year, and I only dug it out of my storage chest a few weeks ago, so the photo was taken
within the past three weeks.” I paused and looked at the area around me. “It looks like I’m in the parking lot at the grocery store. Zak does the weekly shopping, but I pop in for milk and diapers and stuff. Given the orange sweater and the fact that Catherine isn’t with me, I’m going to say this photo was taken when I stopped by for diapers after the events committee meeting the Wednesday before last.”
Salinger was jotting down notes. “Time you were there?”
“I guess around noon.”
Salinger closed his notebook. “Okay, now that we know when and where the photo was taken, I’ll start asking around to see if anyone remembers seeing a guy standing in the parking lot taking photos. It’s not normal behavior. I bet someone took note of it.”
Wow, maybe Salinger really did have something.
“I know you can’t see the guy’s face,” Zak said, “but something about him is familiar.”
I looked at the photo again. “Yeah. I had the same feeling. It’s like I can almost recognize him, but there isn’t quite enough there to connect all the dots.”
“It might help if you both went through the box of photos to try to create a timeline,” Salinger said. “Sort them by date taken. Try to identify where the photos were taken. Maybe Zoe will remember seeing something. We sometimes catch a glimpse of something, though it doesn’t really register. Still, the image is buried in our subconscious, just waiting for someone or something to jar it loose.”
“Do you have the box with you?” I asked.
Salinger handed me the envelope he’d been carrying. “I made copies of the best ones. Start with these to see if we can figure out who this guy is.”
That, I decided, would make my life a whole lot easier.
Salinger left, and Zak and I sorted through the photos. It was giving me the creeps that this guy had photos taken in so many of the places I’d been in recent weeks. It seemed to me if someone had been following me frequently I would have noticed I had a tail. The fact that I hadn’t suspected a thing was causing me concern. Sure, it looked as if a lot of the photos had been taken with a telephoto lens, but still. I couldn’t believe my Zodar hadn’t kicked in to warn me that something was up.
“You know what strikes me as I look at these photos?” I said to Zak. “Their randomness. None of the photos seem particularly important. Most were taken as I walked through parking lots, crossed streets, walked the dogs, shopped for diapers. They don’t seem to have been taken to prove something or to tell a story. They don’t seem to reveal anything important or a pattern. So why bother to take them in the first place?”
“I guess your stalker might have wanted to demonstrate he had eyes on you wherever you were at whatever time of the day.”
“Okay, say that’s true. Say my stalker wanted to prove to me that he could watch me at any time, in any place. Why make the photos so hard to find? I feel like I was led to the basement at Henderson House specifically to find the body of Edgar Irvine, but the photos were hidden in the loft of the barn, where it was entirely possible no one would ever find them. If the purpose of taking the photos was to scare me, why not plaster them to the walls of the basement? Because I have to tell you, if I had found these plastered to the walls at the same time I found the body, it would have scared the bejeezus out of me.”
Zak’s expression turned to a scowl. “You make a good point. On one hand, the fact that the photos were stored in the loft certainly didn’t guarantee the photographer they’d be found, if that was his intention, but the loft also wouldn’t be a good choice for a storage location if the stalker didn’t want them found.”
“So why were they there? And how long had they been there? And does the fact that they were in the barn indicate in any way that my stalker has been spending a lot of time there? Is he camping there? I didn’t see evidence of a camper, but there was an old mattress in the attic that wasn’t there when I was last at the house.”
Zak groaned. “There really isn’t a single thing about this that makes a lick of sense. The only consistency I’ve found at all is that there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to any of it.”
I sat on the floor and began to create a timeline with the photos. “I think we might want to consider that the photographs were taken by someone other than the vampire killer. It seems like the person who killed Irvine must be in some way linked to his life. Maybe it’s someone who blames him for Becka’s death, or it’s one of his weird cult buddies. The use of the serum from an African black mamba seems too specific not to be relevant. And it does seem like Irvine was intentionally lured here. But these photos of me seem random and unfocused. Even the choice of a storage place makes it seem as if the stalker wasn’t sure whether he wanted the photos to be found or not. I’m not getting the vibe that the person who meticulously planned out and executed the elaborate murder at Henderson House is the same one behind this hodgepodge of photos.”
“But there’s one common variable,” Zak said. “You. Both the killer and the stalker seemed weirdly interested in you.”
I supposed Zak could be right, but the longer I looked at the photos, the more certain I was that they were taken by an amateur, not a methodical killer who’d lure a man to a small town where, as far I as I knew, he’d never been before, only to kill him using a fanglike contraption to deliver venom from a black-market snake that happened to be the same kind that had killed his assistant. And then there was the fact that he not only got the media involved but managed to maneuver me to the same house on the same day. The man who killed Irvine knew what he was doing and had most likely killed before.
Chapter 10
Friday, October 26
“How’d you sleep?” Nona asked the following morning, after I dragged myself to the kitchen table, where Zak had a cup of coffee waiting for me.
“I didn’t sleep.” I yawned. “At least not much. I have a feeling there’s a nap in my future.”
“I think a nap is a good idea,” Zak said. “In fact, you should probably plan to stay in today. I’d feel better if you didn’t leave the house at all.”
I wanted to argue but figured that could wait. Changing the subject, I said, “Where are the kids?”
“Catherine is still sleeping and the older two are upstairs,” Zak answered.
I frowned. “Seems late for Catherine to still be sleeping.”
“I checked on her a couple of times and she seemed to be sleeping peacefully. I’ll see if I can wake her in a little while if she doesn’t get up on her own.”
I took a sip of my coffee but didn’t reply one way or the other.
“I’m going back to my suite to shower,” Nona said. She took her mug and plate to the sink. “I have a doctor’s appointment in Bryton Lake, so I’ll be gone until late this afternoon.”
“Do you need a ride?” Zak asked.
“No. A friend is taking me. We’re going to do some shopping after my appointment and maybe have some lunch. Make a day of it.”
“That sounds like fun,” Zak replied. “Do you need some money?”
Nona looked insulted. “No, I don’t need any money. I’m a grown woman. I can pay for my own expenses.”
Zak offered a sheepish grin. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just used to asking the kids if they need money.”
Nona’s face softened. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I should have realized. I’m just having a cranky day. A trip down the mountain will do me good.”
After I’d had my coffee, I headed upstairs to get dressed. I peeked in on Catherine, who was still fast asleep. It wasn’t unheard of for her to sleep this late, but it didn’t happen very often. If she was still sleeping by the time I was dressed I’d gently wake her. I knew from experience it wasn’t a good idea to allow her routine to become too skewed if I didn’t want an unhappy infant on my hands.
It looked to be a cooler day today, so I chose jeans and a sweatshirt. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, then went to wake my sleeping princess.
“Good morning, sweetie,�
� I said in a soft voice as I slowly lifted the blind.
Catherine rolled over but didn’t open her eyes. I put a hand on her forehead. She felt cool, so it didn’t seem as if she had a fever.
“It’s time to get up and have some breakfast,” I said, gently rubbing her stomach.
One eye opened and then the other.
“Are you hungry? Daddy made pancakes.”
Catherine sat up and looked at me. “Da.”
“Daddy’s in his office. How about we get you dressed?”
Catherine reached out her arms and I picked her up. I kissed the top of her curly hair before I carried her to the changing table and laid her down. I handed her a dolly to hold while I changed her diaper and dressed her in a warm outfit. Then I picked her up and took her downstairs. I was halfway there when Zak appeared at the bottom.
“Da,” Catherine screeched, almost squirming out of my arms.
“There’s my girl.” Zak smiled. I carefully transferred my little daddy’s girl into his arms and followed them into the kitchen. “I think I may have found something,” he informed me. “Let’s feed this little munchkin, then we can discuss it.”
I really hated it when Zak opened the door to a conversation that sounded intriguing, then made me wait for the rest of it, but Catherine did need to be fed, and I didn’t want to discuss an unpleasant subject, like death, while she was within hearing range, even if she couldn’t understand what we were saying.
Once again, I changed the subject. “I wanted to talk to you about the dance at the Academy,” I dove in, thinking this was as good a time as any to address it. “I know you don’t want the kids leaving the house, and I support that, but Alex has worked hard on her costume and has been looking forward to the evening. I’d like to discuss an option where she can follow through with her plans.”