by B. J Daniels
She knew she should have been relieved. “What if this Dennis Jones isn’t the only one from Harper House in town?”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you,” Carter said. “Jones hadn’t made contact with either Frank or Rosemarie. The truth is, he recently escaped from a mental care facility where he was being treated for schizophrenia. His doctors believe he returned to Harper House because that was the part of his life he dwelled on most.”
She shook her head, feeling as if she’d stepped into a nightmare and couldn’t wake up. “What about Nate?”
“What about him?”
“He isn’t being held for anything, is he? If he hadn’t killed the man when he did…”
“No. He’s free to leave.”
To leave? “Is it true that he’s a cop?”
Carter eyed her strangely. “He’s on personal leave from the Paradise Police Department. You didn’t know that?”
She hated to admit that she’d thought he owned a construction company until last night—when she’d seen him kill a man with a .38.
MCKENNA WAS ALMOST to the turnoff into Harper House when she saw Anita Samuelson’s little white sedan pull into the yard ahead of her.
With a groan, McKenna turned into the driveway and parked beside the elderly woman’s car.
Nate’s pickup and horse trailer were parked out by the barn, but for how long? If she was right, Nate would be leaving town now. She couldn’t shake the feeling that what had happened last night was why he’d stayed around. Why he’d finagled his way into staying near Harper House to begin with.
McKenna hoped to cut this short with Anita. The last thing on her mind was photographs of the house. But Anita was already getting out of her car, an old shoe box secured with a rubber band under one arm, her huge purse in the other.
“Perfect timing,” Anita said as she headed for the porch. “I haven’t had time to go through the photographs. I thought I would just let you see if there are any in here you can use of the house.”
“Thank you,” McKenna said, wishing the woman would just leave them and let her go through them later. But clearly that wasn’t Anita’s plan.
“I’d ask you in, but we’re in the process of painting,” McKenna said quickly. “Hardly any furniture, either.”
“This will do fine,” the older woman said as she lowered her bulk into one of the rockers McKenna’s sisters had given her for a housewarming present.
“How are you doing today?” Anita asked once she’d settled in the rocker, one large hand lying protectively over the box of photos.
McKenna shot her a look. “You heard about last night?”
“Everyone in town knows. It must have been horrible. What did the man do to you?”
McKenna was glad that the shirt she wore covered most of the bruises on her neck. “He didn’t get a chance to do anything before he was killed.”
“Yes, by a police officer from Paradise.”
McKenna shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was stunned at how news moved on the Whitehorse grapevine. “Yes. That’s why I don’t have long to visit. I need to speak with the sheriff again.”
“Oh?” Anita asked, all ears.
“You know he’s marrying my sister Eve. He just worries about me being out here alone. In case the man hadn’t been acting alone.”
Anita suddenly glanced around, clearly nervous now.
“I’d better have a quick look at those photographs and get back into town,” McKenna said.
Anita shoved the box at her.
McKenna slipped off the rubber band and opened the lid of the box. A dank, musty smell rose up from the snapshots. She’d thought there would be old photographs of the house that she might be able to enlarge and frame. It was an idea that had lost its luster after everything that had happened.
Her fingers began to shake as she saw a photograph sticking out of the box of three young boys standing in front of the house. Her heart thundered in her ears as she looked into their faces. She knew at once they had to be the boys who’d once lived in Harper House. The troubled boys that no one wanted.
For a moment she almost closed the box and handed it back to Anita, who was rocking nervously next to her. McKenna wasn’t sure she could do this. She knew that seeing these boys in these photographs would only make her more invested in what had happened at this house. Her house.
“If this is a bad time, you could stop by my house one day—”
“No,” McKenna said, and with her heart in her throat, began to leaf through the photographs.
There were old photographs of the Harpers intermixed with the others. Many of the photos were taken in the front yard of Harper House. Would it ever feel like it was hers? Or would it always belong to the boys and the horrible memories they had of the place?
The Harpers’ own photographs resembled those of the boys. Grim faces, backs ramrod-straight, eyes narrowed. The Harpers hadn’t been a cheerful bunch.
But the few photographs of the boys were heartbreakers. It was their expressions and what she saw in their eyes. A lack of hope.
In one shot she recognized a boy who could have been Dennis Jones. He was large and plain-faced, his expression hurt and angry.
She turned the photo over, hoping someone had written the name of the boy on the back. The back was blank.
In each snapshot the boys ranged from six or seven up to maybe eleven. They were dressed shabbily, hair uncut, faces appearing expressionless. But it was the eyes in some that made her draw back from them. She’d never seen such cold hatred in young boys’ gazes.
She couldn’t bear to look at any more. She scooped up the photographs, intending to tell Anita that she was going to have to take them to Carter at the sheriff’s department. She couldn’t bear the pain she saw in these boys’ faces. Or her fear of what they had become as adults. She thought about Dennis Jones, that crazed look she’d seen in his eyes.
But as she was putting the photographs back into the shoe box, one of the boys’ faces caught her eye. She froze.
The rest of the snapshots tumbled out of her hands and onto the porch floor. She’d seen that face—and that expression—before.
Her pulse boomed in her ears. He was the boy she’d seen all those years ago in the third-floor window. Her memory had been imperfect, but seeing the photograph and having seen him as an adult, she recognized him.
Now she knew why Nate Dempsey had looked so familiar. And why she’d thought Dennis Jones had said Nate’s name.
The boys had both once lived in Harper House.
DENNY JONES. NATE HAD been so sure the man McKenna had described—the man who called himself Hal Turner—was Vaughn. Instead it was Jones?
Nate wondered if he wasn’t wrong about everything else, as well. He was still shaken after last night. It wasn’t every day that he killed a man, thank God.
Even when he’d seen that it was Denny instead of Roy Vaughn, Nate had been so sure that Vaughn had put him up to this. But Denny had been lost in the past. He’d been talking as if it were more than twenty years before and they were boys and telling anything you knew could get you killed.
The irony had cut Nate to the core. Denny had been dying and yet he’d refused to tell anything—even though Nate had always suspected Denny had been one of the boys who’d helped carry Johnny’s body out to be buried.
The morning he awoke to learn that Johnny was gone, Nate didn’t get a chance to talk to any of the other boys. The state had come and taken them away, most in separate cars to different destinations.
When he’d joined the police force in Paradise, Nate had tried to find out what had happened to some of the boys. Roy Vaughn in particular. But he’d come up empty. Roy had dropped off the radar. Just like Denny Jones.
Recently he’d discovered that Steven Cross, Lyle Weston and Andrew Charles were dead. Bobby French was in prison. Nate had thought about paying him a visit. But Bobby had been in his bed that night at Harper House. So had Andrew Charles. The other
boys had slept a floor below, in one of the large bedrooms next to the caretaker’s room.
Nate rubbed his forehead. He hadn’t gotten any sleep last night and it was starting to catch up with him. But how could he sleep? Right before Denny died, his mind seemed to clear and he’d said something that had rocked Nate to his core.
I saw Roy’s soul leave his body. It drained off him like the blood that ran from his throat. I’m telling you the truth, Dempsey. The truth.
All McKenna had heard was the Dempsey part.
“Before he died,” Nate had told the sheriff last night at Carter Jackson’s office, “Jones said something about a man named Roy Vaughn.” The moment Nate said it he saw the sheriff’s expression.
“I got an APB this morning on Dennis Jones,” Carter Jackson had told him. “Along with his escape from the mental facility, Jones was wanted for questioning in the death of one Roy Vaughn Martin.”
So someone had adopted Roy. “He told me Vaughn’s throat had been cut,” Nate had said.
The sheriff had nodded. “The authorities found Jones’s prints all over the murder scene, and there is an eyewitness who saw Jones leave Roy’s after what sounded like an altercation. The neighbors had already called the police.”
Nate had been thinking about Denny’s last words. “He told me Vaughn’s soul left his body just like his blood.” No doubt on the way to hell. “I guess Jones was thinking his was about to do the same.”
The sheriff had nodded. “Ravalli County is going to be glad to hear that Jones is dead. I would imagine it will help them tie up the loose ends in their murder cases.”
“Murder cases?” Nate had asked.
“Roy had only recently gotten out of prison on a medical release,” the sheriff had explained. “He was dying of cancer. He only had a short time to live. Are you thinking Roy got Dennis Jones out of the mental facility? If that is the case, then Jones probably did him a favor by cutting his throat.”
Nate remembered the switchblade Vaughn had kept under his mattress at Harper House. Had Dennis Jones used Vaughn’s own knife?
“Scares the hell out of me that he was after McKenna,” the sheriff had said. “I’m glad you were there. We owe you a lot.”
Nate had said nothing, having trouble fitting into the hero role the sheriff was trying to put him in.
Since leaving the sheriff’s office, he’d been trying to come to grips with the fact that Roy Vaughn was dead. He knew what was bothering him: he’d wanted to be the one who killed him. Instead he’d killed the man who’d taken that privilege from him. But if Vaughn had already been dying of cancer…
It wasn’t supposed to end like this.
Or maybe it was, he thought, his thoughts going to McKenna, as they often did now.
For the first time Nate noticed that the wind had kicked up. The limbs of the cottonwoods slashed back and forth, groaning and creaking. In the distance he could see the black clouds of a storm coming this way and could almost smell the rain on the wind.
He looked toward the house and saw McKenna headed toward where he stood by the creek waiting for her. He’d heard her drive in earlier along with another car.
Her blond hair blew back from under her straw hat, her face in shadow. He watched her give a wide berth to where Dennis Jones had been killed the night before. The crime-scene tape had been taken down this morning after the sheriff had closed the investigation.
Nate knew that if he hadn’t been a cop, it would have taken a whole lot longer. Even if he was a cop on leave. When he’d asked for the personal leave after hearing about Ellis Harper’s death, he hadn’t planned to go back to Paradise, let alone to the police department. He thought he’d be a murderer, possibly on his way to Mexico. Or prison.
Now he wasn’t sure what he was going to do.
As McKenna grew closer, he saw that she wore a pale blue checked shirt that brought out the same color blue in her eyes. The jeans hugged her slim body, the cowboy boots dusty from her walk out to him. He remembered every curve beneath her clothing, the pale soft skin, the tiny sprinkling of freckles, the feel and taste of her. It was all indelibly branded on his memory.
She raised her head, the wind whipping the ends of her hair, and he knew what was coming. It had been inevitable.
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” she said, an edge to her voice.
“I wanted to see you before I left.”
She raised a brow. “Were you finally going to tell me the truth about why you came here before you left?”
“No.”
She nodded, anger sparking in all that blue. “I know. I know you used to live in Harper House. I know you were the boy who I saw in that third-floor window twenty-one years ago. I know you’ve been lying to me.”
He hated the way she kept some distance between them. It reminded him of the way people had treated the Harper House boys when on the rare occasion they’d been taken into town. Fear, repulsion. And with her, anger. Was there regret there? Or just the anger?
“I should have told you,” he said. “But then I knew what your reaction would be and I needed you to trust me so I could protect you.”
“Protect me?” She shook her head angrily, raising her voice over the shriek of the wind. “You were waiting for that man to come back to kill him.”
Not that man, but he didn’t argue the point.
“You knew he’d come here,” she said, eyes narrowing speculatively as she studied him. “Because of the pact you made as boys. Why wasn’t your name on the list?”
“My brother and I refused to sign it,” he said.
“Your brother? Let me guess—the one who owns a construction business in Park County?”
“The truck and construction company belong to my younger brother Robert. My mother had him after she farmed my older brother Johnny and me out to Harper House.”
McKenna stopped, all her anger spent. How could she be angry with this man who had suffered so much at this house? The wind was screaming now and battering the cottonwood branches overhead. She felt the dark clouds moving in, but her mind was on nothing but the storm going on inside her.
“The scars on your back?” she asked.
“My mother’s boyfriends. You should have seen my brother Johnny’s back. He got it much worse for standing up for me.”
She felt tears flood her eyes and bit her lip, forced herself to look away. Her hair blew into her face. She made a swipe at it as she looked at him again. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
He shook his head. “Harper House isn’t something I tell anyone about. Especially someone who’s just bought the place and plans to live there.”
She stared at him, wondering how that would be possible now. “You mentioned your older brother Johnny. What happened to him?” she asked, recalling what he’d said about him and his older brother refusing to sign the revenge oath.
“Roy Vaughn killed him. He would have killed me, too, if the state people hadn’t shown up the next morning when they did.”
“Roy Vaughn?” She remembered the name from the list. She couldn’t hide her shock. “You reported it, didn’t you? And this Roy Vaughn went to prison.”
“I told the state people, but they didn’t believe me. Roy was twelve, older than most of us and bigger and stronger. He got the others to swear that my brother ran away the night before. The state never investigated. They had their hands full just trying to figure out what to do with us.”
Her heart broke for him. “I’m so sorry.”
He nodded, and she could tell the last thing he wanted was her sympathy.
“Your future brother-in-law told me last night that Vaughn’s dead,” Nate said. “It appears that Vaughn helped Dennis Jones escape from the mental facility, for whatever reason. Vaughn was dying of cancer and didn’t have much time to live. Dennis apparently killed him before coming back to Harper House, presumably because the place still haunted him.”
She thought about the digging behind the house and suddenly
it all made sense. “You came back here to find your brother and kill the man who you believed murdered him.”
He didn’t answer, but she knew she was right.
“I take it you didn’t find your brother’s body,” she said.
“No. Maybe Roy Vaughn moved it that night before the state came. I don’t know.”
She glanced back to where she remembered he’d been digging and frowned. The tall green grass undulated in the wind like ocean waves.
“Did you know there was a flood along the creek nine years ago?” she asked. “It washed out a part of that hillside and changed the course of the creek.” She turned to point down the creek where a mound of dirt from the hillside had been deposited.
Nate swore as he stared down the creek to where she indicated, his face grim. “Would you mind if I did this alone?”
“You’re going to get wet,” she said, glancing up at the storm clouds, and realized how foolish that sounded. He wouldn’t care about something as mundane as a rain shower.
She hesitated, wishing there was something more she could say, then she turned and ran against the wind back to the house. The sky overhead was black, the clouds ominous. She hadn’t heard the weather report but suspected that a severe storm alert had gone out. In this part of Montana extremes in weather were common.
Back inside the house, she glanced out the window and saw Nate get the shovel from the barn and head down the creek. She turned away, unable to watch.
She wandered through the house. On the third floor, she stood at the window, the same one where she’d first laid eyes on Nate Dempsey. She tried not to think about what his life had been like here. Or his brother’s. She prayed he would find his brother—and the peace she knew he so desperately needed.
Hugging herself, she looked around the room, seeing it through Nate’s eyes. She’d told herself it was just a house made of inanimate objects that had no memory. No ability to hold on to the past. Or harbor evil.
But she knew this house would always remind her of the boys who’d lived here and suffered. It would always remind her of Nate.
How could she stay here?