Close to Home

by K. J. Emrick

  Follow the clues, the message says.

  Cryptic as always, my Jess.

  With my finger, I wrote under her words. Why did Mick kill Richard?

  I’d asked Richard last night, of course, but the answer I got could hardly be described as straightforward. Or as an answer, for that matter. I was hoping Jess would tell me what Richard was unwilling to.

  The mirror erased itself, as if a palm had been wiped across it.

  Then the words again.

  Follow the clues.

  I rolled my eyes. “You could be a little more vague, don’t you think?”

  The mirror wiped itself again, and then very slowly, the same words drew themselves out again. Only this time, a line got drawn under clues.

  Clues. Plural.

  That set me to thinking. Richard hadn’t told me much, in my dream, other than he loved me and always would. Anything I’d asked him directly he said he couldn’t answer. Except for one other thing.

  He told me that Kevin had found the one clue I needed.

  One clue.

  Not clues, plural.

  So why is Jess telling me to follow more than one clue now, when Richard told me I only needed one? It was like they were talking about two separate mysteries. Why Mick killed my husband, for one, and then the other would be… what?

  In the fog that had coated the mirror again, I used my finger to draw a puppy dog face, and then a question mark. In pictures, I was asking her if she meant the mystery of where Jonas’s dog was. I’d almost figured that one out, I think, but if she had some more insight…

  Slowly, a circle appeared around my crude picture of a dog with floppy ears, and then a slashing line through the whole thing. The universal symbol for no.

  Not the missing dog.

  Then…?

  This could take me a lifetime.

  Next to the dog picture in its circle, I wrote my question. What clues?

  “Writing notes to yourself?” James asked me, his arms suddenly snaking around my naked shoulders from behind.

  I startled, and he felt me jump. “Oh, sorry,” he told me. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on ya. I figured I was making enough noise to wake the… ahem. Never mind. Everything all right in here?”

  I looked at our blurry reflections in the mirror and as I did, another letter started drawing itself out in Jess’s ghostly hand.

  Very quickly I swept my hand across the glass and erased whatever message was about to come through. As badly as I wanted to see it, I wanted James to not see it that much more. Unless I wanted to introduce my boyfriend to my dead best friend.

  For the record, I did not.

  “Uh, yes,” I stuttered. “Everything’s fine here. Uh, just about to take a shower.”

  “Me too,” he told me, with a little tantalizing kiss behind my ear to emphasize his point. “Got an early meeting.”

  He cut off so abruptly that I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. His body felt good pressed tight to mine, and I could really look forward to a morning shower with Mister James Callahan, but once again my curiosity got in the way.

  “Your meeting… it’s about Mick Pullman, isn’t it?”

  ‘Yes,” he admitted without hesitation. He might not want to burden me with stuff about my dead husband, but he wasn’t going to hide things from me, either.

  That was another hurdle he and I had gotten over a while back.

  Turning in the circle of his arms, nestling my body up against his in the warm, humid room, I flicked back my hair over my shoulder and looked directly in his eyes. “Did something happen?”

  He shook his head. “No. Well. Not as such. Mick’s still saying he can’t remember what happened with your fireplace. Says he was drinking so hard back then that he was drunk most days.”

  I snorted, and kissed his collar bone. “Mick’s drunk most days nowadays. That hasn’t changed.”

  His hands caressed my back as we talked and I really wouldn’t mind spending the entire day this way. Right here, in my room. Chance would be a fine thing if we could.

  Someday.

  “So, um,” I hummed as his fingers trailed my spine. “What’s Mick got to say that’s different from yesterday?”

  “He’s saying things ya don’t need to hear,” was his cryptic answer. “Maybe Kevin should fill ya in.”

  I felt my eyebrows lift. “What could be so bad? Come on, James. We don’t hide things from each other.”

  “This is… it’s more complicated.”

  His hands felt so nice, and the heat of his body against mine mixed with the heat from the shower spray, and I cursed myself for ruining such a perfect moment as this but I couldn’t let it go. So I opened my mouth and asked anyway.

  “What did Mick say? More of that running around with other women piffle?”

  “Sort of.” He sighed, and his breath slid over my damp skin. “Mick… he’s trying to say that Richard was meeting another woman before his death. That he knows because he saw it.”

  Ice flooded my veins. The heat in the room no longer touched me. The ice became a cold fire and suddenly I didn’t want to stand in the bathroom all day anymore. Now I wanted to march back into the police department and cram my fist down Mick’s lying throat and pull those words out of his mouth. How dare he slur my husband’s memory? How dare he!

  I didn’t realize I’d spoken that out loud until James was cradling my face in his hands and leaning in to kiss me gently. “He isn’t worth dirtying yourself to slap him, Dell, let alone putting your fist anywhere on his person. Kevin found that out when he had his go at him. Don’t sweat the bugger or his lies. He’s guilty as sin. He’d say anything at this point to save his own neck.”

  “So why won’t he just say why he did it?” I demanded of the empty air over James’s shoulder. “Why keep spouting these awful lies? What could Richard have done to him that was so bad… so evil… why would he kill a man like my Richard?”

  James kissed me again. “That’s the big question, and too right.”

  “So what’s the answer?” I asked, my frustration showing in the tight tone of my voice. “Why can’t anyone tell me that?”

  “Because,” he said. “The only one who knows the answer is Mick Pullman.”

  And Richard, I added. He knew the answer, too, but I hadn’t had any success in getting Richard to talk about it, either. Now Mick Pullman was going to try disgracing my husband when Richard wasn’t around to defend himself? Well. I was around. I could defend him.

  “You’re going down to the police station this morning?” I asked James.

  “As soon as I clean up. Want to join me?”

  His hands were on me again, and the muscles in my shoulders and back relaxed and shivered as heat flushed through me again at his touch. “I’ll be down later. I have something to check on first.”

  He kissed my forehead. “Sounds good. I’ll let Kevin know…” Looking over my head, he let his sentence drift off. “Huh.”

  “What is it?” I pushed him back a bit, just enough for me to turn and look at where he was staring.

  In the mirror, the condensation had collected and dripped to form a new shape. A heart.

  “Don’t see that every day,” James remarked, massaging the slope of my shoulders.

  “No. You don’t. Oh, that feels nice.”

  I let him do that for maybe a minute more while I watched the mirror to make sure Jess wasn’t going to write any other messages for me. I liked this one. She could see the love that me and James had for each other, even from beyond the grave.

  “Come on,” I said to him. “Dirty man needs to get clean. We can steal a little bit of time for just the two of us.”

  James left before me. It takes more time for a woman to get ready than a man, most mornings. As much as I wanted to be down at the police station with him right now, he was right. It wouldn’t do me any good. Kevin had Mick in custody. Sometime today he’d be officially charged, and then arraigned, and then sent off to be held for tr
ial. Nothing I could do would change that.

  If I was going to find out why he killed my husband almost six years ago, then I was going to have to come at it some other way. There was only one real clue. That crystal my Richard had in his hand when we found him.

  As I was thinking on that, I came down from my rooms to the second floor, and face to face with Mister Brewster.

  The man certainly had a habit of showing up where you least expected him. Our last conversation came back to mind, when he’d been telling me not to look into the fireplace but then waved it off as just a general concern for my welfare. I wasn’t convinced, at the time, that was all there was to it.

  I still wasn’t.

  “G’day, Miss Powers. A beautiful morning outside, or so I’m told. I haven’t been downstairs yet myself.”

  “Oh?” I asked him, hanging back a dozen steps or so. “What have you been doing instead?”

  His strange silver-gray eyes pierced me. “Waiting for you.”

  Without meaning to, I took a step backward.

  “Is there…” I cleared my throat and started again. “Is there something you needed?”

  “Oh, no. I’m quite fine. I just thought you might have a question you need to ask me.”

  “I, um, I do. Actually, yes. I do.” Deep breath, I told myself. “Were you here… in the hotel I mean. Were you here when Richard was killed?”

  “If I were,” he said, slowly, “would that not mean I was the killer?”

  “No. Of course not. I never meant… my Kevin has the man who did this down at the police station. Mick Pullman killed my husband.”

  “Ah, so you know that, do you?”

  “Of course. Mick’s admitted to rebuilding the fireplace when Richard’s body was put in there.”

  Mister Brewster nodded. “So then, you know why your husband was killed?”

  I started to tell him no. That was the real mystery here, and I definitely didn’t know the answer. That’s what I started to tell him.

  Then he lifted each of his sleeves and tugged at the cuff. A little sparkle caught my eye with each movement. Those cufflinks. Diamond cufflinks. No. Not diamonds.

  Crystals.

  I gasped, remembering that I’d seen those before. Yesterday, before we’d found out the body in the wall was my husband. Before we’d found the one single clue that Richard had managed to give us about his death. The crystal. The piece of broken crystal.

  “Now you see,” Mister Brewster said, as if that was supposed to mean something to me.

  “You didn’t kill Richard,” I told him, but it came out more as a question this time. Suddenly, the world seemed to shift, and I wasn’t sure that Kevin had arrested the right man after all.

  “I promise you, Miss Powers, that I did not kill Richard.” A little smile tugged at his lips. “I had no reason to kill him.”

  The way he said that made me wonder if he made a habit of killing people when there was a reason. It wasn’t a very settling thought.

  “The question you have to ask yourself,” he went on, “is what reason would Mick Pullman have for killing your husband? Hmm?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Then I suggest you find out. The mystery won’t be complete, until you know why someone would want to kill your husband. I am sincerely sorry for your loss, Miss Powers. Your husband was a fine man. Taken well before his time.”

  He made his cufflinks flash again, before tipping his head to me and stepping back into his room.

  I couldn’t suppress a shudder any longer. There was something about Mister Brewster. The way he said people were taken before their time, and things like that. I swear, there’s times he reminds me of the Grim Reaper.

  Blinking, I realized that he was gone now, and I had too many things that needed doing to be standing around in the second floor hallway. Follow the clues, Jess had told me. Find out why Richard was killed, Mister Brewster had suggested. All great advice.

  But what did that help me, when all I had to go on was a single, broken crystal?

  Chapter 8

  First things first.

  James would meet me down at the police station later, and I could try to get some closure on my husband’s death when I was there. I’d worked the puzzle of the crystal in Richard’s hand every way I could think of this morning and nothing was coming to me. The quarry outside of town didn’t mine crystals of any kind. Just rock. Richard had never had any special interest in crystals. I didn’t wear jewelry of that kind. Too gaudy. Stuff like that was for people who were into spiritualism and psychic projection.

  Not me. I just saw ghosts.

  Totally different.

  Or so I like to tell myself.

  Anyway, I’ll catch up with Kevin and James later. Mick won’t be arraigned until this afternoon because Judge Carmichael doesn’t like to do business before lunch. That gave me plenty of time to finish finding Jonas’s dog. Shouldn’t take me too long, if I was right about which line of sight my instincts were leading me down.

  It took me a few minutes to walk over to Revelation Way after conferring with Rosie and Jack Reese about the schedule for the Inn. Rosie had the meals all planned out and the shopping list ready for next week. Jack was ready to handle another day of standing at the front registration desk and fielding phone calls. There’d be a lot of them today, and no doubt. I told him to politely take messages for any newspapers that called, and to make sure he didn’t overbook us with guests. At this point, we’ve even got the honeymoon suite rented out for the next three weeks.

  Nice to know the place can run just fine without me. On the other hand, it was kind of disappointing, too. Me and Rosie had made a go of the place together. We’d brought it up to the standards it has today, and it runs like a well-oiled machine precisely because me and her made sure it would. I guess I’m just being silly, but it kind of makes me feel redundant to see Jack and Rosie—and George, too—handling everything without me. Half the things I brought up this morning as really important issues were already being handled by one or the other of those three.

  I suppose I’m just a little bit sad, too. I’ve lost my Richard for real, now that we have his body. It was the Inn that gave me a purpose for these past six years. I don’t want to feel like I’ve lost that along with Richard, too.

  Putting on a brave face after making sure Jack knew everything I needed him to do backwards and forwards, I ate a plate of Rosie’s pikelets and poached eggs, and hiked on out of the Inn, up here to Revelation Way.

  In jeans and one of James’s old cotton shirts, my hair tied back in a ponytail, I was dressed a bit too warm for the day. There was a reason for it, though. I planned on finding the pastor’s dog today. If I’m going to be walking a dog, I want to be dressed for it.

  Standing in front of the Thorne house again, I stared at the front door, but this time no one came out to challenge me. Hopefully, the talk that James had given young Barnaby Thorne made a big enough impression that peace could finally come to this home. If not, I was sure my Kevin would make good on the promise to stop in and check on everyone. I’d be reminding him about it, that was for sure.

  Yesterday, when Barnaby had been out here on the lawn talking to me and James, he’d had this nervous habit of looking off to his left whenever he answered a question he didn’t like. I looked in that same direction now, up to where the street came to a dead end.

  Following the line of sight Barnaby had kept returning to.

  Just like Heeral Stone had told me to.

  Only these four houses here on Revelation Way. Barnaby hadn’t been looking at any of the houses, though. He’d been looking past the end of the street.

  Just like with most other spots in town, wherever there wasn’t a street or a house, there was tall Monterey pines waving in the breeze. There was a small grove of them here at the dead end. I counted seven of the rough-barked trees, dropping their needles in a blanket on the ground, spaced wide enough for anyone to walk through them with ease.

&
nbsp; Which was what I did. On the other side was more of our neighborhood. I looked around me for a few seconds, orienting myself, before I recognized where I was. Danskin Street. Modest homes and mostly lower-income families. Folks in this section of town didn’t have much, but they kept good care of what they did. The homes were simple, even plain, in their coats of white paint, but they were neat and well kept. So were the small patches of lawns that bordered the sidewalk.

  Where I had come out of the pines I was actually in someone’s backyard. Stepping quickly, I crossed over to the curb, looking up and down the length of Danskin Street.

  Okay Dell, I said to myself… now comes the part where you get to look like a fool.

  I’d thought this all up at breakfast. The smell of food baking in Rosie’s kitchen had been wonderful, like usual, and it had given me an idea. If Rosie’s food made my stomach growl, then I could just imagine what it would do for a dog.

  From the little paper bag I’d brought with me from the Inn I took out the strips of short cut bacon I’d swiped straight out of the pan. They weren’t warm anymore, but they sure did smell great.

  Where I was standing was pretty much the middle of Danskin Street, so I picked a direction at random and went to my left. As I went, I chewed bites of a piece of the bacon, slowly, making it last. I’d rather be seen going out for a walk with a snack than just wandering around with pieces of bacon in my hand. I can imagine my neighbors adding that to the list of “weird things Dell Powers does.”

  No thanks.

  The first strip gone, I went on to the second one. I hoped this worked. I only brought the four…

  At the end of the street, at an intersection that curved back toward the main part of town, I stopped, swallowing the salty bit of bacon I’d been chewing. I listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything.

  There’s lots of dogs in Lakeshore, of course. More’n a few cats too. I was taking a chance, based on my belief that Barnaby Thorne actually did steal the pastor’s dog, and thus knew exactly where the dog had gone. Seems to me he’d given himself away while he was talking to us, even if he hadn’t meant to. His little side glances down this way had sold him out. The dog was somewhere on this street.