“She did,” Kaine acknowledged.
Grant nodded. “And whoever this creep is that’s still out there, he sees what we don’t. That quilt piece he left behind was a direct message. If the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, then that means you must be like your great-great-grandmother in some significant way.”
Kaine bit her lip. “There isn’t a soul alive who would be able to draw the conclusion that I resembled her.”
Grant squeezed her hand, then released it to put the truck into drive. “If I can draw that conclusion, someone else certainly can. And we’re going to find out how. Then we’re going to find out who.”
Chapter 34
Kaine clawed at the piece of material positioned between her car’s windshield and wiper blade. Morning mist dotted the glass with tiny pinpricks of moisture. She looked over her shoulder at Joy’s modest ranch house. The windows were dark. Joy and Megan still slept on this Saturday morning. Kaine scanned the short blacktop driveway, the street in front of the house, and the line of neighboring yards.
The quilt that had brought a smile to her face when Leah told her of it now served as a reminder of one thing: She wasn’t alone. Apparently, more than one piece of the quilt had been cut from it. She wouldn’t know. The police had kept it as evidence.
Danny’s face flashed in her memory, and Kaine blinked her eyes fast to clear it. His killer had been caught. Her hunter had been put behind bars and yet there was another one. A copycat. Someone who knew far too much about her life in San Diego, her life here, and her vulnerability. Kaine crumpled the quilt scrap in her hand, her breaths coming rapidly in short gasps.
“What do you want!” She yelled into the morning’s emptiness. A pickup truck and a work van drove past the house, oblivious to her shout.
Kaine spun in a circle. Olive barked from inside the car where she waited. “If you’re there, show yourself. Let’s have this out!”
A mourning dove cooed. Another car drove by, the woman at the wheel focused on the road, her red hair so red that Kaine had the fleeting thought the poor driver had overdyed it.
“Fine.” She jammed the material into her pocket. “Be a coward.” She yanked open the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. Olive nosed the back of her head, and Kaine scratched the dog’s chin before turning the key. The Jetta hummed. She cast a disconcerted glance at the rear window. No red handprints.
She put the car in gear and headed toward downtown Oakwood. Filing another police report was a must, but she needed to meet Grant first. He’d told her the night before that he’d be heading out early to his office at his house but then would meet her at a little coffee shop. It beat Joy’s burnt gas-station coffee—the woman brought home the leftovers.
Her phone trilled, and Kaine snatched it from the passenger seat.
“Hello?”
Expecting Grant, the whispered voice in her ear made Kaine let off the gas.
“Are you still lonely?”
“Who are you?” Kaine demanded. How on earth had he gotten her replacement cell number? She steered the car off the street into the Walmart parking lot, her knuckles white from gripping the wheel.
“I’ve been lonely my entire life.” The man’s voice was so soft, so muffled, it was like he’d covered the mic of his phone with a thick towel.
“Well, stinks to be you.” She was goading him. It felt good. She felt strong—and maybe reckless.
“No, no. I’ll be fine.”
As if she was concerned with his welfare.
“How dare you stalk me? Why did you paint my husband’s name on my porch? Put my great-great-grandmother’s quilt piece there?”
“Why did you come to Oakwood?”
“That’s cryptic.” Kaine fumbled for paper in her purse. A pen. She had to write down snippets of what he was saying. To remember. To tell Grant later. To report to the Oakwood authorities. He wanted her to believe this was still tied to Danny’s murder, but she knew better. And if she wasn’t mistaken, he would too in a matter of days. When news of Danny’s case hit the online world, her stalker would know the jig was up. He would be exposed as a sole entity with an entirely different agenda. But what was it? And how did it link Kaine, Ivy, and Foster Hill House?
“Do you love him?” The question took Kaine off guard.
“Who?” Danny was dead. He knew that. Kaine jotted down the question.
“Grant Jesse.”
Kaine’s breath halted. “I haven’t even known Grant for more than a month.” Why had she answered? The creep didn’t deserve one word.
But he would capitalize on it. “Mmm, you do. I see.”
“No.” Kaine’s hand shook as she pushed her straight hair behind her ear. “I don’t.” And even if she did have feelings for the man, she would never admit it. Not to this pathetic piece of humanity.
Olive jumped from the back seat onto the passenger seat. Her paw crinkled the paper Kaine was writing on. She pushed on the dog, and Olive readjusted but whined deep in her throat.
“I saw Grant at the coffee shop.”
Okay, that was it. Kaine was now determined to jump-start her prayer life. How in the world did this man know where Grant was? Please, God . . . “You leave him alone.”
“Ooooh.” The dry chuckle riveted Kaine to the phone. His words were slurred, the voice undiscernible. “It’s so hard when what you love is threatened, isn’t it? Sort of consumes you.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to stop gripping your steering wheel so hard. I want you to hang up the phone and drive yourself home. To San Diego. You never should have left, you know. It wasn’t wise. It wasn’t smart. Foster Hill House should be left alone, as it has been for years.”
Stop gripping her wheel? Kaine pulled her hand from the black steering wheel. He was watching her! She scanned the parking lot of Walmart. Cars. Empty. Another car drove down aisle four. Female. With two little children in car seats.
Kaine turned her attention to the narrow two-lane street with its one stoplight at the Walmart intersection. A few cars drove by, the 25 mph speed limit allowing her to see the occupants. A blue sedan. A tan minivan. A Dodge Neon from the late nineties. A jalopy that should have been retired in 1982. A white Suburban.
The stoplight turned red. The driver slowed the Suburban. A hat was pulled low over his eyes. A baseball cap with a white M on the brim. She couldn’t make out his features as his hand lifted in a wave.
“Now go home where you belong.”
Then the light switched to green and he drove away. The phone went silent. The Suburban’s taillights blinked three times as if in a final message. Kaine squinted, trying to read the license plate—except there was none to be read. The huge vehicle turned the corner and disappeared, taking with it the answers to the hundred questions that riddled Kaine’s mind.
They’d interrogated her at the station for over an hour. Did she have the piece of the quilt left on her windshield? Yes? They’d need it for evidence. Had she left her new cellphone number with anyone? No. Was she positive? Well, she’d given it to Detective Hanson, Leah, to Grant, and to Joy. Had she let anyone use her phone? No. Maybe. There was the lady at the grocery store the other night who had a dead battery in her car and needed to call her husband to come jump it. Kaine had let her borrow it but only for a call. Who was the lady? She didn’t know. Did her husband come? Kaine hadn’t stayed to find out.
By the time she was through, the police were fairly convinced the only plausible way Kaine’s number had been obtained was that the mystery woman had stolen her number off the phone. But finding out who she was and how she was connected to a male caller was a shot in the dark. They would try to trace the call back to the originator, but odds were high it’d come back as a burner phone.
Kaine held the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb, squeezing away the headache. It was calming to see Grant waiting for her in the lobby of the station. He took her by the arm and led her outside. She opened the passen
ger-side door to his truck, and Olive met her with a few friendly licks.
“Hey, girl.” She rubbed her neck, then urged her to the back seat with a tug on her hot-pink collar. Settling into the passenger seat, Kaine slammed the truck door shut. With a deep sigh, her head rested back against the seat and she closed her eyes. She fiddled with a button on her purple flannel shirt. Tylenol. She needed Tylenol.
“What’s next?” Grant waited.
Kaine kept her eyes shut. So much for coffee this morning. She had to admit, she’d hoped it’d be more like a first date and less like another traumatic layer in their relationship.
“Same as usual. They’ll investigate. The alarm at the house hasn’t been tripped since they installed it. I was stupid and gave my phone to a stranger to use, trying to be helpful. They probably stole my number from there.”
“We’ll figure this out.” Grant’s assurance fell flat. She’d thought the same thing with Danny’s death. Two years later, that resolution had collided with an entirely new case.
Kaine ran her fingers through her dark hair. Finally, she turned her head, and her gaze fell on the books in his lap.
“What are those?”
Grant furrowed his brow at the swift change in subject, but he followed where she was looking. “Oh, those. They’re books on the Fosters. I checked them out at the library.” He chuckled. “Patti begrudgingly showed them to me. I think she’d gladly trade places with you if it meant she could own Oakwood’s Foster Hill House.”
Kaine rolled her eyes. “She wouldn’t if she had to deal with filing endless police reports and running for her life.”
Grant smiled at the sarcasm. “Anyway, according to Patti, the books were self-published about thirty years ago by a local historian who passed away in the nineties. I thought maybe they’d give us some insight into the house’s history.”
Kaine reached over and picked up the top book, a paperback. It was square, more like a coffee-table book, its cover including a photograph of the faded portrait of Myrtle Foster from the hallway. She eyed the author’s name. “Who’s Levi Foggerty?”
“A descendent of the man who used to trap animals in the woods around Oakwood.” Grant grabbed another book and thumbed through it. “Patti told me it was his grandfather who first discovered the body of the woman in the oak tree.” He showed Kaine a black-and-white photograph taken in 1906 of a hollowed oak tree, its bark gone from its skeletal form. “But Levi Foggerty traces the history further back into who Myrtle Foster was, her children, and even some weird things that happened while they were living in the house. It seems Oakwood thought Myrtle Foster was a bit crazy before she left town.”
“Interesting. Oakwood has a history of accusing women of lacking intelligence.” Kaine set the book back onto Grant’s lap, remembering how the town had labeled Ivy as a mystic. “I think we need to let it rest. The whole thing. Just let it be.” After the phone call today with the veiled threat toward Grant, Kaine couldn’t even fathom seeing another person she cared about hurt or killed in the cross fire of her choices. Panic replaced her earlier sarcasm, and she tried to swallow it. When she couldn’t, she turned away and stared out the window at the trees, the birds, the city park, anything but Grant. “Just let it be,” she repeated.
“Oooookay.” He put the books in the back seat.
“Okay?” Kaine pulled back. “Just like that? Okay?”
“I’m not going to force you to go somewhere or do something you don’t want to.” Grant was too understanding, but Kaine could see disappointment in his eyes. He wanted to uncover how she was tied to Ivy and in turn to the dead girl, Gabriella. He wanted to see resolution to her fear. So did she. But not at the cost of his safety. Or Joy’s or Megan’s. Her choices had already killed Danny. She couldn’t bear a repeat of that.
“When he called me . . .” Kaine paused. Grant deserved to know. He needed to know. “The man knew you were at the coffee shop waiting for me.” She pulled a strand of hair to her mouth and chewed on it.
Grant reached over and pulled it from her fingers. “Don’t, Kaine.”
She grimaced and sighed. “Grant, you don’t understand. He knew you were at the coffee shop.”
“I heard you.” Grant’s hazel eyes drilled into hers. They held a stormy kind of strength. “But I’m not going to overreact, and I’m not going to put myself in lockdown mode.”
Kaine leaned into the middle part of the front seat, her eyes wide. “C’mon, Grant. He’s studied me. Now he’s studying you. He even asked—” Whoa. She didn’t want to go there.
“Asked what?” Grant pressed. He leaned over the center console toward her, filling the remaining space between them. He let his hand rest against hers, the sides of their palms touching. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t pull away. She glanced at their hands before she looked out the truck window again.
“What did he ask?” Grant asked again.
Kaine turned back and pulled her hand away. “He asked if I . . . cared for you.”
“What did you say?” Grant looked out the front window. Whether to give her emotional distance or because he was uncomfortable, Kaine couldn’t tell.
“What could I say?” Kaine’s brows dipped in frustration. “Yes, I care for you? Have him kill you like that other creep in San Diego killed Danny?”
“No one is going to kill me, Kaine.”
“Said the man before he died,” Kaine muttered.
“C’mere.” Grant grabbed her hand and tugged. “Listen. Don’t let him win. We’re obviously getting close to the truth.”
“I know, and that’s basically why he threatened me. When he called, he told me he wanted me to stay away from Foster Hill House. That I shouldn’t have left San Diego.”
“So it all comes back to Foster Hill House.”
Kaine glanced back at the books. Myrtle Foster stared at her. Her dead eyes seemed to come alive, to plead with them to keep investigating.
“I think you’re right.” Grant interrupted her link to the woman on the book cover.
Kaine lifted her face to his.
“Think about it,” he continued. “Two women, both rumored to be crazy, both drawn to Foster Hill House, and yet no historical records kept to complete either of their stories. There had to be a cover-up of something. It’s obvious Gabriella had been held there.”
“That’s a pretty difficult thing to cover up.” Kaine reached back and grabbed the book. “Erasing history?”
“Even you said Ivy’s genealogy in your family Bible stops with her. Why?”
Kaine met Grant’s frank stare. She grimaced. “I don’t know.”
“Get this.” Grant snagged the book from her hands and flipped a few pages into it. “Gabriella’s body and Ivy’s attack and subsequent suspicions around Foster Hill House took place forty years after Myrtle Foster claimed she’d seen strange women wandering the halls of her home in the middle of the night.”
“What?” Kaine leaned forward and stared down at the words on the page.
Grant nodded. “I was reading while you were in the station. Myrtle claimed she would awaken periodically in the night only to see figures that were never accounted for. It says that to go back to sleep, Myrtle played piano into the wee hours of the morning. Beethoven. She was partial to Beethoven.”
“Piano music and ghosts? In the middle of the night?” Kaine shook her head slowly. “This gets more farfetched the deeper we dig.”
Grant reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. He gave her his quirky smile, the sideways one that hinted of mischief and daring at the same time. “Then let’s keep digging.”
Chapter 35
Kaine’s mouth watered when Joy set the bowl of green beans in the middle of her dining room table. Megan grinned. “I love green beans! But I need butter, please.”
She pointed to the butter plate, and Grant handed it to her. “Go easy and leave some for me.”
Megan laughed. She was so full of glee. Precious. Hopeful. Her twenty-two
years hadn’t scarred her like the other women Kaine knew.
Joy passed Kaine the platter of lasagna. While green beans and lasagna was an odd combination, Kaine was hungry. The pasta tickled her nose with scents of garlic and oregano, and cheese—lots of Wisconsin mozzarella cheese. She noted the bright red of the sauce from a jar. Danny’s mother was Italian and made her marinara sauce from scratch. Kaine took a bite and savored it. From a jar or not, it was delicious.
“The police called today.” Joy’s announcement stilled Kaine’s fork on its journey to her mouth. She had intentionally tried to leave Joy out of her situation. It was bad enough she was presuming upon the woman’s hospitality, but if the man decided to threaten Joy, or God help her, Megan, in any way, Kaine might lose her mind.
Joy smiled. “Don’t worry. They just wanted to verify that you were staying with me. Apparently, they’re going to send a squad car around at different intervals, for your protection.”
Her protection. Their protection. The message was very clear.
Grant met her eyes across the table. “That’s a good thing, Kaine.”
“And you won’t have to sleep on the couch, Mr. Jesse, with your loaded shotgun. You can go home.” Joy chuckled, and Kaine shot Grant a sharp look.
He grinned. “You want to get rid of me?”
“Never,” Joy replied.
“You keep the gun loaded?” Concern edged into Kaine’s voice. She was quickly losing her appetite.
Grant waved his empty fork between her and Joy. “I protect my women,” he mumbled around a mouthful of lasagna. “And I’m not going home. Sophie and I are staying put. On the couch.”
Kaine rested her fork on her plate without eating the bite stabbed on its prongs. She knew Joy and Grant were trying to add levity to a dire situation, but she was nauseated all the same. “I hate putting you all in the middle of this mess. I thought that one day, when the police found Danny’s killer, it would all subside and I could just keep building my virtual assistant consulting job and make enough money to paint rooms in my new house and buy vintage furniture at estate sales.”
The House on Foster Hill Page 23