Kaine couldn’t fathom putting that yellow foam on her head and sporting it as a hat. Who would be silly enough to wear such a thing?
Apparently, the older woman behind the counter.
Sparkling brown eyes greeted Kaine as she paused to control her reaction.
“What can I help you with?” The attendant had to be nearing sixty. Her short brown hair was permed and squashed beneath the foam hat. An oval nametag informed Kaine of her name. Joy.
Kaine snatched a Snickers bar from the display in front of the counter. Her hand shook with nervous energy as she set it on the Formica countertop. “Only the candy, please.”
She glanced out the gas station window. No daffodils. No faceless stalker. Just her car, and the handsome stranger jogging across the street toward a brick office building.
Joy waved the candy bar under the infrared scanner. “Are you passing through?”
No. She wished she was. To Canada, maybe. But she’d signed for that rotted house. How could she walk away? She’d be throwing away everything Danny had left her. But then how could she stay?
“I’ll be here for a bit.” It was all she wanted to offer.
Joy smiled and slid the candy bar back to Kaine. “Where ya staying?”
Were all Midwesterners this nosy? Kaine handed two one-dollar bills to Joy. “I’m—not sure.” Some place with about thirty dead bolts, grilles over the windows, an alarm system, and a closet full of high-powered automatic rifles would be nice. And, she was from California where gun control was popular. Kaine bit back an ironic smile. Circumstances certainly changed a person’s ideals.
“There’s a motel not far from here. Just head down the road about a mile. It’s small, but it’s clean.”
That sounded comforting. Four walls would be better than four car windows exposing her to the dangerous world outside.
Kaine took the quarters Joy offered. “Thanks.” She had planned on camping out in her new house, but now it was an utterly horrific idea.
“Where are you from?”
Good grief. Kaine pocketed the change. “San Diego.”
“San Diego?” Joy parroted.
Was there more than one? Kaine nodded.
“You don’t say!” Joy’s brows raised, the lines darkened from the overuse of an eyebrow pencil. “I have a brother in California. But not in San Diego. He lives closer to Oregon.”
“Mm.” Kaine nodded. As if she cared. She should care. She had always cared about people before.
“What brings you to Oakwood?” Joy leaned against the counter. “I’m sorry, we don’t get many tourists here. Just a tad too out of the way. Wisconsin Dells is the place where they like to congregate, what with all the water parks and the circus nearby. But we’re too far north for them to care.”
“I’m . . .” What could she say—that she thought God wanted her to buy a dilapidated house in the hometown of her ancestors just so she could fulfill a dream of her dead husband? Her stomach rolled. If only she had listened to Danny three years ago, when her job started eating her contentment.
“You all right, buttercup?”
Drat. Kaine swiped at her eyes. The wetness on the back of her hand betrayed her.
“Aww, sweetie.” Joy snatched some Kleenexes from a box behind her and shoved them toward Kaine. “Don’t mind me and my questions. I can be a motormouth.”
Kaine took the tissues. She wasn’t accustomed to being on the receiving end of care. She was the one who cared. The social worker who could read a broken woman simply by the way her shoulders bent and her head hung.
Joy rounded the counter. “Do you drink coffee? You do, don’t you? Who doesn’t?” She filled a styrofoam cup with coffee from a utility-sized carafe. These Midwesterners and their styrofoam. Whatever happened to going green?
But Kaine didn’t argue when her hands wrapped around the cup. She didn’t even argue when she tasted the burnt gas-station coffee. The warmth in Joy’s eyes comforted her raw nerves. Joy’s smile, even though it was bordered by red lipstick that bled into the wrinkles around her lips, reminded her of a mother’s. Kaine’s mom had died when she and Leah were preteens, and their dad had disappeared years before that. They’d been raised by Grandpa Prescott. There’d been little feminine influence in their lives after Mom. Joy appeared to be what every little girl imagined in a mother—at least at first impression.
“I bought the house on Foster Hill Road.” Kaine offered it up in exchange for the complimentary coffee.
Joy’s caterpillar brows hunched upward again. “Foster Hill House?”
Kaine sipped the coffee and nodded.
“Well, I’ll be.” Joy filled her own cup with brew. “That place is—well, I—hmm.”
Even Joy didn’t have words.
Kaine nodded.
Joy grimaced.
They laughed.
Kaine heaved a shaking sigh. “I have no idea why the realtor sold it to me.” Sure she did. Unsuspecting out-of-state sale, easy money, effortless off-load of a property that had probably been tacked to his bulletin board for years. She, the out-of-her-mind, still-grieving widow, jumping at a chance to escape. Smart.
“It’s a mess.” Joy nodded. She slurped her coffee as if cooling it between her teeth. A flicker of concern flashed across her face. “I keep telling my daughter to stay away.”
“Your daughter?” Kaine knew the house had been deserted when she arrived. But maybe that explained the open door.
Joy blinked rapidly.
Oh no, now the gas-station lady was going to cry.
“Please, don’t be upset.” Joy sniffed. “I know it’s your property now. But, Megan is—well, she likes to wander, and that old place . . . she pretends it’s her playhouse.” She waved her hand in her face as if to dry the tears.
A playhouse?
“Megan is twenty-two, but she has Down syndrome. Sometimes my friend Grant watches her when I’m at work, but God love him, he gets sidetracked and . . . well, Megan loves to wander for flowers and hiding places. Foster Hill House is that to her. Yesterday Grant found her there and she’d picked all the daffodils in a patch at the corner of the house. I’m so sorry.”
Daffodils?
Daffodils! Thank God Almighty! And then her inward praise turned outward, and Kaine’s breath released in a whoosh of anxious relief.
“Oh, thank God!” Kaine’s exclamation turned Joy’s expression quizzical.
It wasn’t him. He hadn’t followed her here. It was a horrible, awful mistake caused by an innocent special-needs young woman who lived in a fantasy world of flowers.
“You’re not upset?” Joy charged on. “The flowers are the only nice thing about that place. I wasn’t concerned when Megan picked them, but I hadn’t a clue the house had been bought. I mean, that place should’ve been bulldozed years ago. No one wants to touch it.”
“I’m not upset. I’m just surprised your daughter even wants to go there.” Kaine set the coffee on the counter and ripped open her candy bar. Her first bite was celebratory.
“Megan has an imagination, and Foster Hill House inspires that.” Joy shrugged, her beaded earrings hanging low enough to brush her shoulders. “But it creeps everyone else out. Superstition, y’know?”
“I suppose they say it’s haunted.” Kaine spoke around a heavenly mouthful of peanuts, caramel, and chocolate. Blessed relief.
“Some do.” Joy squeezed a plastic lid onto her coffee cup, her eyes widening as if she knew far more than she was willing to spill over gas-station brew. “But, it’s more what happened there.”
“What happened there?” What could be worse than a haunted house?
“Of course, the realtor didn’t tell you.” Joy sniffed. “Foster Hill House has a litany of oddities. All the way back to the 1860s. Legend says people saw strange lights there in the middle of the night, lanterns glowing, and they heard piano music. Little things would be moved in the house. A candlestick or an old umbrella stand. Rumors that people were coming and going, but in t
he daytime no one could ever find anything to explain it.”
Kaine swallowed the candy, the mouthful suddenly as big as a softball in her throat. The relief from knowing Megan had left the daffodil oozed away, forced out by the house’s legend. It was eerily familiar. The coffee cup she’d left at her bedside table moved to her dresser with a daffodil propped in it. Her red cardigan flung over the back of the chair when she was sure she’d hung it in her closet. Her kitchen light on when she was positive she’d turned it off before leaving for work in the morning.
The police blamed it on post-traumatic stress disorder. Any wife whose husband was killed in an accident, but insisted it was murder, could be shaken enough to see things, even hear things. It didn’t mean it was real. But she’d never prop a daffodil in a coffee mug. It deserved a vase. Her favorite flower.
“And then the murder.”
“The murder?” Kaine choked, and it wasn’t because the coffee was awful. The knot in her stomach grew larger than when she’d first laid eyes on Foster Hill House.
Joy nodded, her yellow cheesehead not shifting at the movement. “She’s become something of a renowned mystery.”
“Who? What happened to her?” Kaine didn’t want to know, but reflex forced her to ask. It was dumb luck she’d flee the memories of death only to buy a house shrouded in shadows of the grave.
Joy sucked in a breath. “That’s the mystery of it. It’s been over a century and now it’s more folklore than fact. No one really knows any more. I’m not certain if anyone back in 1906 really understood it all. Just a young woman. Her body was stuffed into a massive, hollowed oak tree at the bottom of the hill. Some like to say she’s the one who lit the lanterns at night. They stopped shining after she died. At least”—Joy flicked the air with a green fingernail—“that’s what legend says.”
Chapter 3
Jvy
Stillness shrouded the examination room, but peaceful was not a word Ivy would use to describe its crypt-like atmosphere. The body on the table revealed all of the young woman’s secret wounds with stabbing reality. There would be justice for her, if Ivy could commandeer the future. But paramount to justice was a mission to search and save, and one that Ivy would not be left out of. She’d had that same desperation when Andrew died, watching him as he disappeared beneath the ice on the lake. But this time, death would not—could not—become the final signature penned to the end of this woman’s tale.
Gabriella had borne an infant. Within the last two or three weeks. Alone with the body, Ivy held the dead girl’s hand in the bowl of warm water and ran the washcloth over her pale skin. The mud caked under Gabriella’s fingernails dirtied the water.
“Where is your baby?” Ivy whispered. But, did it matter? Yes, Gabriella had been murdered, but perhaps her child was safe. Or was the babe out there, alone for the last thirty-six-odd hours? Would it even be able to survive such a stretch on its own?
Ivy scowled in concentration as she passed the wet cloth over Gabriella’s bruised wrist. Her father had exited the room to soothe his own unsettled nerves in a cup of coffee. She heard the front door shut with a thud. As promised, Joel had returned from the sheriff’s office to hear the analysis of the cause of death.
She wrung water from the cloth and laid Gabriella’s hand over her sheet-covered chest. Drying her own hands on a towel, Ivy tucked a loose strand of her hair into the pinned mass on the top of her head. Her own dark hair and olive skin were a severe contrast to the ethereal paleness of Gabriella. Eyes that were as blue as the sky were now covered with closed eyelids. Ivy knew her own eyes, hazel and catlike, sparked with spirit that Gabriella could no longer claim. Life.
The door pushed open, and Joel entered, Dr. Thorpe on his heels with a pointed look at Ivy. Her father was beseeching her to cooperate. Now would not be the appropriate time to challenge Joel Cunningham’s reappearance in Oakwood, in their lives. Not with a murdered woman and the reality of a missing child.
“Thank you,” Joel’s cool politeness rankled Ivy’s nerves, and he was clearly already well engaged in conversation with her father. “I do take my role here very seriously. I have an obligation to find the truth.”
“I believe the truth may be hard to reconcile,” Ivy inserted before she could bite her tongue.
Their eyes locked. His narrowed, but Ivy preferred to foster an unaffected expression, even though her stomach churned with the intensity of his stare. Their foundation was already well on its way to being irreparable, yet in this moment they were forced to get along.
Under duress. She laid a possessive hand on Gabriella’s shoulder.
“I am not intimidated by difficult truth.” Joel raised an eyebrow, his gaze burrowing deeper into hers, blazing with conviction that implied he had the right to defend not only his position in the room but also his past actions.
Dr. Thorpe cleared his throat. The connection between Ivy and Joel evaporated as Ivy shifted her attention to her father, whose sharp expression communicated he’d missed none of the underlying messages tossed between the two of them.
“It is very clear the woman died from asphyxiation.” Ivy’s father’s white walrus mustache wobbled as he sniffed. His spectacles slid down his nose when he looked down at Gabriella and pointed toward her eyes. “The burst blood vessels in the eyes, the bruising around the neck—both imply strangulation.” He traced the bruising while Joel leaned over the body to examine it. Ivy edged aside as her father pushed his way in. Frowning, she repositioned herself at the head of the table and allowed the two men to go about their discussion, effectively excusing her from it.
“The killer’s fingers left their mark, to be sure.” Dr. Thorpe ran his finger along the distinct edge of a bruise. “And it is evident she fought back,” he concluded.
“How so?” Joel was so focused, so intent on the body before them, that it allowed Ivy a moment to study his face. His jawline was clean-shaven, his dark hair trimmed with a slight wave around the ears, his starched collar touched his Adam’s apple, and his blue eyes were bordered by thick lashes. Everything about Joel Cunningham was straightforward. Except where he had been for the last twelve years.
Her father’s voice brought Ivy back to the explanation of his postmortem examination results. “We found skin particles underneath her fingernails, mixed with some mud that would be consistent with the earth near where she was found.”
“Was there a scent?” Joel inquired.
“A what?” Dr. Thorpe drew back with a perplexed frown.
“A scent on the skin or even to the mud,” Joel clarified, and Ivy had to begrudgingly admit Joel was sharp. “Of soap, or perhaps a cleaning solution? Manure or pond algae? I’m looking for something that may help us identify the killer and perhaps the exact location of death.”
Ivy shook her head and answered before her father could. “The skin beneath her nails was too tiny to tell a scent. The mud smelled like earth after the snow melts. Her body has no distinctive smell.” Other than death itself.
Her father gave her a quick glance. Yes, Daddy, I smelled it. She loved her father, but he often questioned her sensibilities, if not her own sanity.
“What else?” Joel brushed past her explanation.
Dr. Thorpe lifted Gabriella’s hand and turned it so Joel could see. “This strikes me as odd. The bruising around her wrists is older but not consistent with a struggle. It’s almost as if she had been bound once, not terribly long ago, but also not within the past few weeks. She has some scrapes and cuts that are scabbed.”
“She was held against her will, then. Are there other wounds?”
Dr. Thorpe scratched a spot above his ear and cleared his throat, looking at Ivy. She raised an eyebrow. She had already been through the examination, but she assumed her father thought it terribly improper to discuss it with another man present. Considering they’d already far breached the boundaries of propriety, Ivy tried to muster an encouraging smile for her father and realized it probably came out more like a grimace. He coughed
again, then proceeded with a final nervous glance in her direction.
“There was a child.”
Joel raised his head from his inspection of Gabriella’s wrists. “Excuse me?”
“A baby,” Ivy said, drawing Joel’s icy-blue attention to herself. “She gave birth no more than two or three weeks ago.” Urgency filtered into her voice and Ivy didn’t try to disguise it. “Somewhere out there”—she waved toward the window—“is Gabriella’s baby.”
Joel followed the wave of her hand to the black-and-white, snow-melting landscape outside. Ivy could read his thoughts. Cold. Ice. Dark nights. Little warmth.
“How long has she been dead?”
Ivy hoped Joel was doing the math in his mind. A baby left alone for more than eighteen to twenty-four hours would have little chance of survival.
Her father did not waltz around the horrid truth. “She has been gone at least thirty to thirty-six hours. Doubtful any longer.”
“There isn’t any way, if the infant was left to fend for itself, that it would survive that.”
Joel’s conclusion, coupled with the cold tone of his voice and the unapologetic delivery of fact, incensed Ivy. She stared at him, curling her fingers into the sheet that covered the examination table. She tipped her head.
“You cannot draw such a blatant conclusion.” Ivy drew in a shaky breath, not from tears but from a frustration enhanced by their past, by Andrew’s death, and by the lack of empathy Joel had a history of displaying.
He matched her sigh, only his was stable and unemotional. “If the infant was abandoned, then I can conclude little else, outside of a miracle by the hand of God.”
Ivy opened her mouth to protest, then snapped it shut. He was right, of course, but he didn’t seem convinced that God would choose to work miraculously. She had seen enough in her life to know He usually erred on the side of tragedy. But until she knew God’s decision, there was a little life that needed to be accounted for—and she was determined to see it was done.
Chapter 4
Nighttime crept upon them with its frigid clutches, sending Gabriella’s body on its way to the mortician’s table and leaving Sheriff Dunst and Joel behind in the examination room to deliberate their next move. Ivy shouldn’t have eavesdropped, but when the words “wait until morning” passed across Sheriff Dunst’s lips and Joel did nothing to protest, she knew she had to listen on behalf of Gabriella and her child. She pressed her ear to the door, her hand gripping the knob under debate of whether to barge in or remain silent.
The House on Foster Hill Page 3