Poisoned Ground Series, Book 6

by Sandra Parshall

  Tom raised a hand in greeting, and the drapery dropped back into place.

  Winter opened the door. “Oh, Thomas, hello.”

  Instead of swinging it wide to invite him in, she cracked it about six inches, just enough to look out at him. Enough for Tom to see that her white hair, usually wound into a neat knot at the back of her head, hung in untidy wisps around her face, and the hem of her green blouse had come untucked from the waistband of her black skirt on one side.

  Tom had never seen her when she appeared less than immaculately groomed and self-possessed. “Are you ladies okay?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, we’re fine, thank you.” Winter’s gaze slid sideways, as if drawn to something or someone in the living room. “Of course, we are concerned about the goings-on down there in the road.”

  Yet they hadn’t come out to investigate. “There hasn’t been any damage, but some kids put a pipe bomb in your mailbox. You’ll probably be getting a visit from a federal agent at some point.”

  “Oh, dear lord.” Winter pressed a hand over her heart, and her eyes shifted to look beyond him, down the gentle hill to the road.

  “Like I said, they didn’t do any damage, and an explosives expert from the State Police is down there right now, disarming it. The boys are in custody, so you don’t have to worry about them coming back.”

  “Who are they? Do we know them?”

  He told her.

  Winter shook her head. “That’s terrible. Simply terrible.”

  Why was she keeping him at the door? “May I come in? I wanted to talk to you about the phone calls you’ve been getting.”

  Winter hesitated, her reluctance obvious. After a moment, though, she opened the door wider and moved aside. “Of course. You’ll have to forgive my rudeness. We’re all very much on edge.”

  Tom stepped inside. “That’s understandable. I think everybody’s a little—” He broke off, stunned by the sight of the living room.

  The sofa and chairs sat undisturbed, their plump throw cushions perfectly placed, but they were islands of order in a wash of destruction. Two ceramic end table lamps lay in pieces on the floor, their shades bent. Shards of china and glass littered the coffee table and the rug around it. A long streak of what looked and smelled like coffee trailed down one wall and pooled around a framed painting on the floor. Heavy splatter on the country landscape and a tear in the canvas told Tom the painting had been the point of impact. A mop leaned against the wall. Evidently Tom had interrupted Winter’s cleanup effort.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked. “Did somebody break in? Why didn’t you report it?”

  “It wasn’t a break-in,” Spring said. “I did it.”

  She had appeared in the doorway between the living room and dining room, looking as disheveled as her older sister, her bright gold hair a mess, her purple blouse wrinkled. Most startling was Spring’s total lack of makeup. Tom wasn’t sure he would have recognized her without the garishly dyed hair.

  “You did it?” Tom said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, dear, this is so embarrassing.” Spring fluttered a hand before her face. “We’ve all been under so much stress, the constant tension and worry. Winter has been a rock, but I simply reached my breaking point. I snapped, as they say.”

  “And you…” Tom looked around. “You started throwing things?”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s it in a nutshell.” She pressed her hands to her flaming cheeks. “I’m so ashamed of myself. I can’t imagine what you must think of me.”

  Tom wasn’t sure what to think.

  Winter had regained her composure, and she seemed eager to cut off discussion of Spring’s meltdown. “You wanted to ask about the phone calls. What can we tell you? We want to help in any way we can.”

  Neither Winter nor Spring had suggested that they sit down, another oddity for these women. The air in the room seemed to thrum with a disturbing vibration. And where was Summer? At the thought of the youngest living sister, his eyes were drawn to the mantel, to the photograph of Autumn. She smiled, forever fresh and pretty, from a gilded frame. But a crack ran diagonally through the glass over the picture, from upper left to lower right.

  Dragging his attention back to Winter, Tom said, “That’s right. We’re getting your phone records. With any luck, we’ll find out who made the calls. Was it always a man?”

  “Oh, yes.” Winter began tucking strands of hair behind her ears. “Always the same man, as far as I could tell. His voice was rather muffled, as if he had something covering the mouthpiece. So I’m not at all sure what his natural voice would be like. He was trying very hard to make himself sound menacing.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “It was classic bullying,” Winter said. “If we didn’t sell our land and make way for the resort, we would be sorry, that sort of thing. Once he threatened to burn down our house while we were sleeping, if that was what it took to force us out.”

  A strangled cry pulled Tom’s attention back to Spring. She slumped against the door frame. “You never told us that.”

  Winter sighed. “I didn’t want to provoke the kind of hysteria you’re demonstrating at the moment.”

  “Did you always answer the phone?” Tom asked her.

  “Yes, I do tend to be the one who takes calls. What few we receive.”

  “Why haven’t I heard about this before?”

  “It was weeks ago,” Winter said. “Before Lincoln and Marie died. And the Richardson woman. As I explained, it sounded like typical bullying to me. Remember that I taught high school for many years. I’ve known boys—and a good many girls, I might add—to make far worse threats than those to their unfortunate victims. But the worst that ever materialized was a scuffle or minor hair-pulling. I believed our caller was also engaging in bluster, nothing more.”

  “Now that three of your neighbors have been murdered, I hope you’re taking this whole situation more seriously.” Tom doubted that their anonymous caller had anything to do with the shootings, but it ticked him off that they hadn’t reported the threats. How could citizens expect the police to protect them if they withheld potentially vital information?

  The color had risen in Winter’s pallid cheeks, but it looked more like a flush of irritation or anger than a blush of embarrassment. “Of course we take it seriously, Thomas,” she said, in that tight, admonishing tone he remembered from high school. Miss Winter Jones never lost her temper, but she could freeze a student into submission with her frosty voice and eyes. She waved a hand at the mess on the floor. “You can see the toll it’s taking.”

  “From now on I’ll expect all of you to let me know about anything and everything out of the ordinary that happens around here.”

  “We will,” Winter said. “I promise you that.”

  A thud overhead drew Tom’s gaze upward. “Is Summer upstairs? I need to see her.”

  “Oh, she’s suffering from one of her migraines,” Winter said. “She needs to rest. Those headaches are a plague.”

  Tom heard the unmistakable creak of a floorboard directly above him. “Sounds like she’s up. Would you ask her to come down for a minute? I want to talk to all three of you at the same time.” When Winter hesitated, he added, “I won’t keep her long, but I want to see her.”

  With a sigh, Winter walked past him to the stairs. As she mounted the steps out of sight, Tom heard a clinking noise that sounded like a ring of keys pulled from a pocket. For a second he wondered if Summer might be locked in her bedroom, but that seemed so crazy and unlikely that he dismissed the thought.

  Spring remained in the doorway from the dining room, but when a Siamese cat appeared beside her and seemed about to venture into the living room where broken glass and china posed a hazard, she shooed it away.

  Tom turned when he heard footsteps on the stairs. At the sight of Summer, he almost regretted
forcing her to leave her room. Her normally rosy complexion had paled to a grayish cast, her uncombed brown hair fell over one eye, her sweater and slacks were wrinkled, disarranged, as if she’d been lying down in them. Winter gripped her arm to steady her.

  “You’ll have to excuse my appearance.” Summer pulled her arm from Winter’s grasp and brushed her hair off her face. Her pink sweater, Tom noticed, matched the scarf that created a bulge in his jacket pocket. “I’m not having a good day, to put it mildly.”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Tom said. “I’ll let you go in a minute. I have a couple of questions that I want to ask with all of you here.”

  “What questions could you possibly have,” Winter said, “that we haven’t already answered?”

  He hesitated, wondering how to phrase it, and decided to get straight to the point. “Did Lincoln Kelly come to see you recently with some pictures he took a long time ago? Pictures of Jake Hollinger and your sister Autumn?”

  Outrage flooded Winter’s face. “What on earth does our poor little sister have to do with your work? Why are you prying into our personal business?”

  “I’m just trying to make sense of—”

  Summer’s hand darted out and grabbed at Tom’s jacket. Startled, he caught her arm and forced it back. The pink scarf slid from his pocket, unfurling from the edge she gripped in her fingers.

  They all stared at the length of fluffy knitted wool.

  “Why do you have my scarf?” Summer demanded, sounding like a child whose belongings had been pilfered.

  “Jake gave it to me. He wanted me to bring it to you, so you won’t have to go back to his house for it.”

  “You see?” Winter said. “I told you he didn’t want you over there.”

  Summer lunged at her. For a second Tom was too astonished to act, then he got an arm between them and forced Summer to back off. Her face contorted with fury, she spun away. The pink scarf trailed from her hand as she ran from the room and up the stairs.

  In the quiet moment that followed, all Tom heard was raspy breathing, in and out, and he couldn’t separate the sound of his own from that of the two women remaining in the room. “You all right?” he asked Winter.

  Winter cleared her throat and said, “I’m perfectly all right. We’re all overwrought. We have cooperated with your investigation, Thomas, but we never expected you to open up the terrible wound of our sister’s…indiscretion.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Tom said, “but I need to know whether Lincoln Kelly came over here recently with those pictures.”

  “All right, if you must know, if you must have your curiosity satisfied, yes, Lincoln brought his shameful pictures here again, three weeks ago.” Winter shook her head, anger and defeat mixing in her expression. “I have done my very best to protect this family in the way our father would have wished. To preserve our family’s reputation so that we can live here and hold our heads up without shame. I believed that…that incident was behind us. Marie promised us years ago that she would destroy those pictures, but here Lincoln was, throwing them in our faces.”

  “Why now? Why bring it up again after all this time?”

  “The man was sick. He thought Autumn was still alive. He thought our father was still alive, and he demanded to see him. He’d completely forgotten that he drove our sister to suicide, that our father would not have died the way he did if he hadn’t seen those pictures and gone looking for Jake Hollinger to confront him.”

  Tom’s mind was racing, making connections, throwing up more questions. “I thought your father’s death was an accident.”

  “It was an accident. But Father wouldn’t have been over there at all if he hadn’t found out that Jake Hollinger had seduced our sister.”

  “I see,” Tom said. “And I can understand it must have been a shock when Lincoln brought it up again. How did you handle it?”

  “We made allowances for his condition because Marie begged us to. But in my opinion, Lincoln was always mentally unbalanced. What kind of man follows another man around with a camera, hoping to take pictures and use them to humiliate others? He took pictures of his own wife with Jake. Can you imagine such a despicable thing?”

  “Did he show you the pictures of Marie and Jake when he came over here recently?”

  Winter shook her head. “No, we were spared that experience. Marie told us about them, as if it would make us feel better to know we weren’t the only ones he tormented. She said she had confiscated those and destroyed them, and she promised yet again to destroy the pictures of Autumn. Despite her failure in the past, we had no choice but to trust her to do that. But now you’ve seen them, and God only knows who else. Our trust was once again sadly misplaced.”

  Listening to her, Tom realized he had waded into a swamp of bad memories and festering grief and inflicted still more pain on this sad trio of aging sisters.

  That didn’t stop him from adding Winter Jones to his list of suspects.

  “Do you have a gun in the house?” he asked.

  Winter drew herself up, shoulders back, and gave him the glare of a disappointed and disapproving teacher. “No, Thomas. Look around, if you don’t believe me. Search high and low, but you will not find a firearm anywhere inside this house. Now I would appreciate it if you would leave and let us try to deal with the damage you’ve done.”

  Tom held her gaze for a long moment, and in her eyes he saw no fear, no uncertainty, only the rock-hard defiance of a guard who would never let him breach their walls again.

  Chapter Forty

  Back in her office, Rachel struggled to focus on her paperwork, but she angled her chair toward the window so she wouldn’t miss Tom’s cruiser when it passed on the street. She had to talk to him face to face. A quick phone conversation while he was busy elsewhere wouldn’t do.

  How likely was it that Mrs. Turner’s story about the Kellys, Jake Hollinger, and the Joneses had any bearing on the recent murders? Not very. The twisted relationship among those people had existed for decades before anyone ever heard the corporate name of Packard, and they’d never gone after each other with guns. Jake Hollinger had continued to live next door to both the Kellys and the Jones sisters, his presence tolerated if not welcomed. All that personal turmoil was a sideshow, stirred to life again in a sick man’s mind by the fight over the resort development.

  Rachel told herself that the Kellys and Tavia Richardson had been murdered because of their positions regarding the resort development.

  Why, then, did she feel such urgency about talking to Tom, repeating what Mrs. Turner had told her? Why couldn’t she reason away the sick knot in her stomach, the dread that something terrible lurked just ahead, around a blind corner?

  When a brown Sheriff’s Department car came into view, she jumped up to get a better look. Brandon sat in the passenger seat up front, but the car didn’t have SHERIFF printed above the department’s seal on the door. She couldn’t see who was driving, but through the tinted window she thought she saw a couple of people in the back seat. Where was Tom? Why wasn’t Brandon still with him?

  She returned to her chair, working for thirty seconds at a time between glances out the window. Tom’s aunt called to report that her husband had fetched Simon from school and the boy would be waiting, safe and sound, for Rachel to pick him up on her way home. One enormous weight was lifted, at least temporarily.

  Another hour passed before she saw Tom drive by. She stripped off her white coat and pulled on her jacket. The walk to Sheriff’s Department headquarters a few blocks up the street would give her time to compose her thoughts and Tom time to check in with Dennis Murray, his chief deputy.

  She didn’t see Lawrence Archer until she pushed open the front door of the animal hospital. Striding through the parking lot at a brisk clip, he raised a hand in greeting when Rachel stepped outside.

  She kept going. “I’m on my way somewhere
. I don’t have time to talk.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” he said, falling in beside her.

  She wanted to swat him away like a pesky insect. “I’m not looking for company.”

  Without acknowledging her statement, he kept pace with her as she crossed the two-lane Main Street. She continued past small shops toward the courthouse, an ornate relic of an earlier time that loomed over the downtown area from its own little hilltop. The Sheriff’s Department and the jail were tacked onto the rear of the courthouse.

  Rachel tried to pretend Archer wasn’t at her side. What the hell did he want? Was he ever going to tell her?

  At last he said, “I called your friend Mrs. McKendrick and invited her to sit down with me and talk, just the two of us face to face.”

  “I’m sure she was overjoyed to hear from you,” Rachel said.

  “I tried to tell her how sorry I am about the damage to her stable, and assure her that Packard had nothing to do with it and doesn’t condone criminal acts. She hung up on me.”

  “And you’re telling me about it why, exactly?”

  “I was hoping you could persuade her to meet with me.”

  Rachel stopped and faced him. She let a couple of women pass them on the sidewalk and waited until they were out of earshot. “What does it take to get through to you? Joanna will never sell you her property. If the county tries to take it against her will, she’ll fight them every inch of the way. She’ll tie it up in court so long that you’ll grow old and gray waiting to get your construction crew onto that land.”

  Archer held up both hands, not in surrender but in an effort to stop the words spilling out of her. “I’ve got a new proposal for her,” he said. “It’ll let her keep some of her land and continue her horse breeding operation, but—”

  “Joanna wants to keep all of her land. She’s funny that way.”

  He sighed and, hands on hips, bowed his head for a moment as if summoning patience to deal with Rachel’s stubbornness.

  She started walking again, faster now. Another couple of blocks and she’d be with Tom.